University of California Multi-Campus Complexity Events 2008-2009
From InterSciWiki
2008 Calendar 2009 Calendar printable (two saturday 3.5 hour conferences with lunch provided to be scheduled)
[edit] COURSE CREDITS- Grad and Undergrad
- UCI fall:SOC SCI 240A (fall 72100) grad and undergrad 1.33 credits per quarter. Instructor Douglas R. White, drwhite@uci.edu
- UCLA fall: Anthro M193/Hum CS M193P (both undergrad) and Anthro 294 (grad). Journal Club, Human Complex Systems Seminar. 1 unit. Instructor: Dwight Read, dread@anthro.ucla.edu and Course Coordinator: John Bragin, jbragin@ucla.edu
- UCSD fall:ANTH 203 "Four-Campus Video conference" seminar (undergrads may also take for credit) Instructor: Geoff Braswell anthro, gbraswel@weber.ucsd.edu
[edit] MEETING PLACES
- UCI fall: AIRB 3030 UCI, WINTER AIRB 1030, Spring AIRB 3030 UCI (Anteater I&R Bld)
- UCLA f-w-s 285 Powell Library
- UCSD f-w-s UCSD 260 Galbraith Hall
[edit] Calit2 Videoconference Friday June 24 2008
6-8 PM. Tom Levy (Anthropology, UCSD), Maurizio Seracini (Director, CISA3 Archaeology), Falko Kuester (Calit2 Professor of Visualization and Virtual Reality) In Search of Solomon, Gabriel and Internet Archaeology: Using Engineering and Scientific Methods to Explore the Past Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, UCSD
[edit] Unscheduled speakers
- Michael König, ETH Zurich (Oct 10, 24th, Jan 9 or later)
[edit] BSCS Thursday October 9 Vijay Vazirani
The first talk of this year's Behavioral, Social and Computer Sciences Seminar Series originates from the Calit2 Auditorium in Atkinson Hall at UCSD, sponsored by Calit2, from 1pm-2:30pm:
- Vijay Vazirani, College of Computing, Georgia Tech, Nash Bargaining Via Flexible Budget Markets
The talk will be webcast live at http://calit2.net/webcast [Windows Media and broadband connection required]
The BSCS seminar website for this series is at http://bscs3.calit2.net which has info on the talks scheduled for Nov and Dec as well, and both will be webcast.
[edit] HSC Videoconference Friday October 10 2008 Brian Skyrms
Brian Skyrms, UCI IMBS, Distinguished Professor, Depts. of Logic, Philosophy of Science, & Economics "Signals: Common Knowledge, the Cooperative Principle, and Adaptive Dynamics"
rtsp://media.nacs.uci.edu:554/ITC/SocialScience/White/2008_10_10_ASC.rm copy and paste for the streaming video (disable your VPN)
Background reading: Evolutionary Dynamics of Lewis Signaling Games: Signaling Systems vs. Partial Pooling - May 2008 version - Simon Huttegger, Brian Skyrms, Rory Smead, Kevin Zollman
Learning To Signal - Article in press
[edit] HSC Videoconference Friday October 24 2008 Douglas White
Wikipedia:Douglas R. White (Anthropology, UCI; Chair, Social Dynamics and Complexity group in IMBS at UCI; External faculty, Santa Fe Institute), Kinship Computing and Complexity: Cohesion, Class and Community powerpoint Discussant Dwight Read's Commentary here.
rtsp://media.nacs.uci.edu:554/ITC/SocialScience/White/2008_10_24_ASC.rm copy and paste for the streaming video (disable your VPN)
Abstract: P-systems are models of the empirical elementary relations of marriage and parentage in kinship networks that, to capture the general principles and empirical diversity of human kinship, use the formal representation of graphs embedded within the nodes of other graphs. These include marriage nodes that encapsulate couples and the nuclear families that arise from them, and the easily demarcatable units of structural endogamy created by marital relinking. The connections between the nodes at the outer level in a P-system are especially useful in the analysis of marriage and descent, while at inner level we can describe how individuals are embedded in the kinship structure. Sociological and ethnographic examples illustrate the role of structural cohesion in causes and consequences of social class, ethnicities, religious groups, stayers versus migrants, endo-clans, factions, regions of exchange, and community formation and the network dynamics of kinship formations.
Background reading: As shown in White and Johansen's (2006) ethnographic case study, P-system network formalisms capture not only nomographic conceptual distinctions, as between Lévi-Strauss (1949) in the theory of marriage alliance, Murdock (1949) in the extensionist theory of kinship, or Bourdieu (1977) and Harrison White (2008) in the theory of embedded social practices, but also the contrastive ideographic perspectives of different kin systems. Painstakingly concrete but formalized mathematically, P-systems, notably P-graphs and Tipp-graphs, provide a means to study how discrete changes occur over time in the elements and relational patterns of kinship systems. P-systems synthesize key elements of many different theoretical approaches, including those of complex systems, rather than endorsing favored theories. This talk presents examples of the network analyses of empirical kinship networks and what they can show us in terms of general social theory.
Within the field of kinship computing, P-systems (Harary and White 2001) incorporate and generalize the P-graph kinship network analysis of White and Jorion (1992) which traces back to a number of Parisian precursors (Weil, Guilbaud, ...). Kinship computing has contributed a wide range of substantive contributions that are reviewed here. White and Houseman (
Bourdieu P. 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. // Harary F, and White D. 2001 P-Systems: A Structural Model for Kinship Studies. Connections // Lévi-Strauss C. 1949 Elementary Structures of Kinship. // Murdock G. 1949 Social Structure. // White D. and Houseman 2002 The Navigability of Strong Ties: Small Worlds, Tie Strength and Network Topology Complexity // White D. and Johansen 2006. Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems. // White D. and Jorion 1992. Representing and Analyzing Kinship: A network approach. Current Anthropology // White H. 2008 (2nd Edition) Identity and Control: How Social Formations Occur.
[edit] HSC Videoconference Friday November 7 2008 Alicia Juarrero
Humanities series 1:30-3:00 PST; UCLA Powell 285; UCSD 260 Galbraith Hall; UCI 3030 AIRB (Anteater Instructional and Research Building) - MAPS
This talk originates from Prince George's Community College in Maryland.
Alicia Juarrero: "Dynamics in Action, Intentional Behavior as a Complex System: Dynamical systems account of mental causation" powerpoint
rtsp://media.nacs.uci.edu:554/ITC/SocialScience/White/2008_11_07_ASC.rm copy and paste for the streaming video (disable your VPN)
There was some debate about the need for far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures after the talk, followed by emails, resulting in consultation on Cosma Shalizi for clarifications of both topics: Equilibrium and dissipative structures.
What is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory" -- the branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action, and between voluntary and involuntary behavior -- has been unable to account for the difference.
Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation -- one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be proof-like -- underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions -- as historical narrative, not inference -- follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility.
Her book, Dynamics In Action, presents a complexity view of action theory, an area of philosophy of psychology. Dynamics In Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System EMERGENCE 2(2): 24–57 summarizes the book and Complex Dynamical Systems and the Problem of Identity is a paper from 2002 EMERGENCE 4(1/2): 94–104.
A review of the book from The Journal of American Psychology: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1423388
The book is available as a non-printable download from MIT for members of CogNet, that is if your institution has a subscription: http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/view?isbn=0262100819
UCSD will be the co-ordinating campus for UCLA and UCI and will make the video recording -- although the talk is not originating from a UC campus. The video recording will be transferred by Jeff Fisher at UCI, who will post to our website url.
[edit] BSCS Videoconference Wednesday November 12 2008 James Fowler
Behavioral, social and computer science lecture series
- 1:00 - 2:30 pm - Location: Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, UCSD Live Webcast
- James Fowler, UC San Diego Associate Professor, Political Science
- A Model of Genetic Variation in Human Social Networks
Abstract, Bio, paper, and BSCS series
[edit] HSC Videoconference Friday November 21 2008 Todd Presner
Humanities series 1:30-3:00 PST; UCLA Powell 285; UCSD 260 Galbraith Hall; UCI 3030 AIRB (Anteater Instructional and Research Building) - MAPS
Todd Presner, Assoc. Prof. UCLA, Germanic Languages, Jewish Studies, and Comparative Literature. Faculty Chair, UCLA Center for Digital Humanities.
“HyperCities: Building A New Learning Environment" I'll mainly be speaking from a live website, which students can access: http://www.hypercities.com. Viewers may register and use their logins to view the sites on the web in join the hypercities groups that are public.
Abstract
Built out of and on top of real cities, HyperCities (http://www.hypercities.com) is a collaborative learning platform that augments the space and time of the physical world with the information web and renders the experience of the World Wide Web geographic and temporal. A HyperCity is a real city overlaid with its geo-temporal information, ranging from its architectural and urban history to family genealogies and the stories of the people and diverse communities who live and lived there. Our first HyperCities are Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Lima, Ollantaytambo, Rome, and Tel Aviv, with many more in the works. As a platform that reaches deeply into archival collections and aggregates digital content, HyperCities not only transforms how information is produced, stored, retrieved, shared, repurposed, and experienced but also transforms how human beings interact with information and one another in space and time.
Awarded one of the first "digital media and learning" prizes by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC in 2008 (http://hub.dmlcompetition.net), HyperCities is an unprecedented collaboration between universities, community partners, and cultural institutions to develop innovative teaching tools, technologies, and partnerships in the burgeoning field of digital cultural mapping. HyperCities represents the culmination of over ten years of work in establishing best-practices, technological prototypes, and award-winning geo-historical content for these cities. Born out of Web 2.0 technologies (particularly, the Google Maps API and social networking) , HyperCities represents a new educational environment that links generations and knowledge communities, mobilizing an array of technologies (from GPS-enabled cell phones to GIS mapping tools and geo-temporal databases) to pioneer a truly participatory, open-ended learning ecology in which digital information is connected with the physical world. HyperCities is a collaborative learning platform in which users "browse" cities by drilling down through time, make new discoveries as they move through space, and animate the ever-growing repositories of cultural memory.
Todd Presner is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the Founder and Principal Investigator of the HyperCities project. Dr Presner is the author of two books: Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) and Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London: Routledge Curzon, 2007). He teaches classes on modern Germany and intellectual history, including the cultural and urban history of Berlin, the Holocaust in literature and film, as well as classes on media studies and digital humanities. Dr Presner received the 2006 Copenhaver Teaching with Technology Award at UCLA. In 2008, he won a MacArthur "Digital Media and Learning" award for the HyperCities project. He is also the co-Principal Investigator of UCLA's new Keck Program in Digital Cultural Mapping. Personal Website: http://www.germanic.ucla.edu/faculty/presner.
Recent press on 'Hypermedia Berlin':
- flash film on Hypermedia Berlinin the Spring, 2006 issue of VECTORS: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular
- The book as landscape hypermedia Hypermedia Berlin represents an extraordinary achievement in accessible urban representation. Great cities like Berlin are densely layered and almost inconceivably complex palimpsests. Attempts to represent that historically-layered complexity have, for generations (since the rise of urban research), foundered on the rock of the printed page.
Peer Response by: Philip Ethington, University of Southern California, 9.14.05: http://forwardretreat.wordpress.com/2006/08/28/hypermedia-berlin-mapping-time-coring-urban-space/
[edit] HSC Videoconference Friday January 9 2009 Donald Saari
Donald Saari, Administrator, Institute Mathematical Behavioral Sciences; UCI Distinguished Professor: Departments of Economics and Mathematics
Complexity -- seemingly everywhere!
ABSTRACT: Almost all disciplines involve complex interactions at many scales. This ranges from how what people do in their everyday life affects communities and how that affects the state, to addiction where we know what drugs and chemicals cause different pleasure and avoidance but we have yet to discover how to coordinate all of this into a system to prevent addiction, to organizations where the intent is for the parts to contribute to define a whole, and even to nano technology where while behavior at the nano and other scales affects macro behavior, we have yet to understand how. I don't have answers for these questions, but I do know what goes wrong with how we normally try to handle multi scale systems. That is the content of my expository talk.
[edit] HSC Videoconference Friday January 23 2009 TBA
[edit] HSC Videoconference Friday Febuary 6 2009 TBA
[edit] HSC Videoconference Friday Febuary 20 2009 TBA
[edit] HSC Videoconference Friday March 6 2009 James Fowler
James Fowler The genetic basis of human social networks
Social networks exhibit strikingly systematic patterns across a wide range of human contexts. While genetic variation accounts for a significant portion of the variation in many complex social behaviors, the heritability of egocentric social network attributes is unknown. Here we show that three of these attributes (in-degree, transitivity, and centrality) are heritable. We then develop a "mirror network" method to test extant network models and show that none accounts for observed genetic variation in human social networks. We propose an alternative "Attract and Introduce" model with two simple forms of heterogeneity that generates significant heritability as well as other important network features. We show that the model is well suited to real social networks in humans. These results suggest that natural selection may have played a role in the evolution of social networks. They also suggest that modeling intrinsic variation in network attributes may be important for understanding the way genes affect human behaviors and the way these behaviors spread from person to person.
See: 2008. A Model of Genetic Variation in Human Social Networks James H. Fowler, Christopher T. Dawes, Nicholas A. Christakis
