The Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Köln gave recently a series of lectures in the context of its excellent afropolis exhibition. I had the opportunity to attend one of them: “Envisaging New Urban Futures for Kinshasa” presented by Prof. Filip de Boeck. It turned out to be somehow connected to the paper I wrote few months ago advocating a nomadic approach to the appropriation of space.

Kinshasa is growing organically and informally. The ownership of many of its habitations is contested between the owners of the land and the residents. According to prof. Filip de Boeck, conflicts are so frequent that many inhabitants move constantly from one habitation to another, avoiding any investment in their temporary locations. The living conditions are bad and unacceptable, but it would be misleading to apply too rapidly traditional concepts of home and ownership. A semi-nomadic lifestyle has its pros and cons and not having a permanent home is not necessary a synonym of promiscuity. It offers more flexibility; it forces a dialogue that can also lead to the emergence of neighbourhood networks.  Kinshasa is dreaming of a modern and pre-planned city, a little like Dubai, called “La cité du fleuve”. Would it not be more suitable to encourage instead an organic development of the city that would address the needs of its inhabitants?

“Envisaging New Urban Futures for Kinshasa”
Lecture by Prof. Dr. Filip de Boeck, Leuven
Organized in co-operation with the Cologne African Studies Centre (CASC) at the University of Cologne
This lecture addresses the tensions between life as lived on the ground by millions of urban residents in Kinshasa and the official attempts which are currently being launched by the Congolese government to create a new -but exclusionist- urban environment. In order to illustrate this tension two concrete cases are introduced: a first case focuses on current modes of ‘informal’ urban expansion and random occupation of space in the city. The second case deals with the development of a new urban project, the ‘Cité du Fleuve’, which fully illustrates the official vision of Kinshasa’s urban future.

Schelling’s segregation model for an open city: emergence of physical frontiers from a socio-spatial dynamics

By Laetitia Gauvin, Jean-Pierre Nadal and Jean Vannimenus

Segregation happens even if personal preferences to live closer to a community are small. In the 70s Schelling introduced a multi-agent model to describe the segregation dynamics that may occur with individuals having only weak preferences for ‘similar’ neighbours. Here we present a model where people move to a new town, which can be more or less attractive, and how they spread in the city. With a varying vacancy density, the leads to a variety of “phases” whose main characteristics are the interfaces between clusters of agents of different types (segregations). These interfaces may under certain condition partially or completely isolate groups from each other, leading to different phases of segregation. Here you can see what theses phases look like. Depending on the value of some parameters, the neighbourhoods are more or less clustered and dense, leading in some very specific circumstances to physical buffers between them.

Model of urban segregation

http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.3758

It is thus possible to model mathematically how different cultures and social classes cohabitate in a same environment. Will a multicultural environment be one day conceived at the urbanistic level thanks to complex systems theory?

Wikipedia and Linguistic Networks

(“Generating Linguistic Networks Based on Large Corpora of Linguistic Data”)

By Alexander Mehler

With the rise of the web, linguistic networks such as Wikipedia reach a size, structure and complexity that have been widely unknown so far. These networks induce a further level of information structuring above the level of textual aggregates and their constituents. For example, Wikipedia allows the classification of its pages into categories that are defined dynamically by the community. Alexander Mehler analysed these categories and showed some evidences of interesting properties. For example, that pages belonging to a same category can have characteristic text structures recognizable without the need to understand the meaning of the texts. In the same way, the structure that forms Wikipedia in different languages seems characteristic as well. Just by looking at the relations between the categories, one might have a clue of their language, without having to look at the texts! These methods are not accurate enough to be predictive, but they can increase the accuracy of semantic analysis. Findings like these uncover structures of our knowledge that were until now unknown or hypothetical.

Social influence model of language competition

By Wojciech Borkowski and Andrzej Nowak

Many languages that existed not long ago have either died, or are listed as endangered. Researchers concentrate on developing models that can reproduce the empirical distribution of language sizes. Social impact may be responsible for many phenomena known from the study of languages, such as the puzzling correlations between grammar features across different languages.

Poster: language competition model

So, the disappearance of cultures and languages might be no more than the consequence of a game of influence?

A Mathematical Approach to the Study of the United States Code.

By Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito

The United States Code is a document containing over 22 million words that represents a large and important source of Federal statutory law. Scholars and policy advocates often discuss the direction and magnitude of changes in various aspects of the Code. Does it get more complex with time? Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito formalized mathematically the notions behind this question, and demonstrated by the analysis of the system that the Code has grown from 2008 to 2010 in its amount of structure, interdependence, and language.

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1254777/

Could one day legal texts be analysed scientifically in terms of logic and efficiency?

Simulating opinion dynamics in heterogeneous communication systems

By Walter Quattrociocchi, Rosaria Conte, and Elena Lodi

In this video, Rosaria Conte describes opinion dynamics by means of multi-agent based simulations. Agents (i.e. people) are exposed to different sources of information varying both the contents and the perceived reliability of the messages spread. Agents’ internal opinion is updated either by accessing one of the information sources, namely media and experts, or by exchanging information with one another. They are also endowed with cognitive mechanisms to accept, reject or partially consider the acquired information. The study evaluates the impact that reliable sources and peer-to-peer communication can have on the quality of information.

Simulating Opinion Dynamics in Heterogeneous Communication Systems from Assystcomplexity on Vimeo.

At the third minute of the video, Rosaria Conte starts attacking the Italian media manipulated by Berlusconi. Behind the rather tedious title, this presentation is a fantastic example of political engagement through science, which doesn’t undermine at all the scientific value of the research.

Opinion dynamics

By Anthony Woolcock

Many societies exhibit cultural fragmentation. This is despite individuals trying to reach agreement with those they meet. In the model of Axelrod, individuals that are more similar are more likely to interact (homophily). The mechanism where people become more similar after interaction is termed social influence. Axelrod’s model is interesting because for different parameter choices the opinions of all the individuals will either become all the same (consensus), or frozen fragmented state. A phase transition is observed between these two types of frozen state.

Complex systems theory: opinion dynamics

Bounded confidence model: addressed information maintain diversity of opinion

By Krzysztof Malarz and Krzysztof Kulakowski

Models have already been developed to optimize the frequency of let’s say political advertising on tv in order to get the maximum effect on a public’s opinion (see the Zaller mass opinion model). But they didn’t take into account interpersonal communication, which becomes more and more decisive with the advance of online social media. Krzysztof Malarz and Krzysztof Kulakowski developed a model taking this into account. Their model suggests that individually addressed messages maintain diversity of opinion. See the full paper here.

Model for diversity of opinion

If you are also interested in subjective cartography, I recommend these strange maps.

“A number of groups and some individuals were given a large piece of a grid map to create their unique interpretation of the neighbourhood.”

I like the idea to put a group of people in front of a map and to ask them to enrich it. The exercise is easy to understand, relatively easy to do, but offers still plenty of space for creativity and expression. This makes it ideal for community projects. I also like the decision to assemble the maps on a giant grid; it makes you realize the many different ways a single area can be perceived by its inhabitants. These techniques could be used in conjunction with the subjective maps workshop manual that I wrote few months ago, at the occasion of a research in the Finsbury Park area.

Regarding the exhibition itself, I found it very informative but was surprised that it didn’t exhibit examples of contemporary digital mapping. A lot has been made recently in digital cartography, which is as subjective as its ancestors. By not mentioning them, the exhibition might give the impression that subjectivity in cartography belong to the past, which is far from being true.

New and shiny buildings are the ones that attract most of the attention in Hong Kong. But older buildings are also remarkable. The new towns in the Hong Kong New Territories (such as Fo Tan and Sha Tin) and some residential lots in Hong Kong Island and Kowloon are worthwhile a visit. They are usually from the 70s and look all more or less the same: apartment towers, multiple levels of public spaces for pedestrians, a park and a playground, a shopping mall, parking and roads at the ground level. I have seen similar examples in Western cities but most of them become urbanistic nightmares. The model seems to work much better here, maybe because of the habits of its people.

Shopping in Tai Po

Very early in the morning, the parks get invaded by old people practicing their tai chi and sometimes playing music. Then you see students getting to schools and parents to their offices. Later in the day, the public spaces get used by a mix of people: elderly, mothers living at home, workers getting a break, teenagers. In the evening, people do sport in the parks, play football, jog or simply chat. The shopping malls attract the younger crowd, not necessary to shop, also to hang around or have an afternoon snack with their friends. The towns and residential lots are always lively and feel very safe. I’m sure they also have their urbanistic problems and that life is far from being perfect here. Maybe the liveliness in public spaces is nothing but a consequence of the very small flats that families can only afford here in Hong Kong. It remains that the social cohesion and the coexistence between generations really transform the space.

One of the many small gardens between apartment buildings

Playgrounds all look the same in Hong Kong, but are always very well maintained.

The community buildings feature typically a series of local facilities: kindergartens, dry cleaners, second hand shops and so forth.

Older generations seem to play an essential role in this equilibrium; they are the ones who have the most time and incentives to appropriate the public space. Far from being inactive people without any function in society, their everyday activities seem to help maintaining a neighbourhood that is useful to the whole community.  I wonder if there are others reasons why these residential lots and planned towns work somehow better than in other parts of the world.

Volunteers and employees from the Expo received some training and can say key sentences in English. English is manifestly new for them and the very young employees at the entrance of the Expo were quite shy when reciting the sentences. But they were very happy to help westerners. They did much more than simply following the instructions of their trainings. It was true hospitality. Great job guys!

The queues were the most playful and most instructive part. They look at first like a nightmare; some queues can be 4 hours long with a temperature above 30 degrees. Chinese people don’t respect queues; they push constantly one another and try to get in front of you. But as unbelievable as it seems, the system works. You need to fight for your position every minute, every turn in the line is a battlefield, and you should not show any pity for old women who are by the way the worst pushers. If you follow these instructions, you will stay at a fair position in the queue. Everyone does the same. What I realised though is that the mood is playful; people are excited until the end of the queue, which would not be the case in a disciplined queue of westerners. People speak a lot and fighting for your position helps you not being bored in the very long queues. They were some fights between women at some occasions, but the crowd was very quick at separating them and laughing at them. The limit between playfulness and angriness was very subtle but strongly reinforced by the crowd. Not that I would like to be in such a queue if there was a fire or an accident, but in normal conditions, it works pretty well and is the occasion to meet verbally, or at least physically Chinese people.

Chinese people were also very well informed on the most interesting pavilions. There was no improvisation here and everyone knew exactly where he wanted to go. The weapon of mass destruction however was the fake passport that people could buy on the site. It became for most visitors the main objective of the Expo: collect the stamps of all pavilions to get their passports complete. The only opportunity left for a quieter expo was late in the evening, between 7 and 10pm, when queues are getting smaller and faster, but not for all pavilions.

Overall, I had a good time and could still manage to see around 30 pavilions in 2 days.

Mozart: a talent detected in his early childhood

I attended few weeks ago a seminar organised by the Philosophy and Management association in Brussels. It was all about talent, and how the way artists work and manage their career can be a source of inspiration for talent management within business organisations. Pierre-Michel Menger, French philosopher and research director for the CNRS, presented some of his researches in the sociology of work and art. The expertise of Pierre-Michel Menger in both fields led him to very interesting observations.

He first discerned two types of work:

• the ‘labour’: an effort, constraint with a predictable outcome
• the work as a discovery of yourself, the masterpiece of your life. Success in this type of work is more a derivative, not a predefined goal. It is unpredictable.

The later work is influenced by philosophies from the 19th century emphasising the infinite depth of consciousness and the infinite possibilities opened to us. Because of it’s unpredictability, it is a type of work that involves a lot of risks. The prestige and satisfaction you get from the realisation of a masterpiece is immense, but the risk to fail is in equal proportions. Artists are facing this risk in a hyper competitive environment. Differences in revenues between artists is huge, the small number of successful artists take most of the resources, leaving a small portion of revenues to the vast majority. If you look at just the financial situation of an artist, choosing such a career might look like a bad evaluation of the risks. But it doesn’t take into account the non-monetary value of a potential huge gratification, a relative autonomy and the diversity of the tasks involved in the job.

What influences the likelihood to become a successful artist (at least in the narrow sense of social recognition and monetary compensation) is not clear. There is something about artists that cannot be measured, cannot be put in an equation. It is not enough to make studies, work hard and accumulate experiences. You need to have ‘talent’. The same applies to business. Sure, you can find people able to perform a task by looking at their past experiences and by using rational criteria. But how can you detect the collaborators who will go far beyond, surprise you and develop considerably within the company. How can you make sure to invest more in these people and less in the others? McKinsey invented a marketing term to describe the 10% of your employees who will bring the most to the company: ‘talents’. Talent management is controversial and relates to the many meanings of the word ‘talent’.  Pierre-Michel Menger proposes to define talents as people you cannot isolate using predefined criteria or reading their CV. It helps to stick to this definition and to not take into account all the other meanings and judgements that the word ‘talent’ implies. He argues that the only way to detect talents is to compare them between each others. This is why competitions and awards in the art world are so frequent. The jury don’t know themselves what they are looking for, and the outcome is unpredictable.  It is after comparing the contestants that they can see who has a little something more, a higher potential. This is also why I think you start to see more and more contests and game-like workshops in business (hack day for developers, unconferences, Dragon’s Den kind of internal events), to detect talents you could not screen using a formal HR equation.

I think that this approach raises many ethical dilemma.

• On one hand, I want people to judge me on rational criteria that I can understand and act on. It is a system that protects all of us against arbitrary decisions and favouritism. On the other hand, I also want to be judged for who I am and for my talents, independently of any predefined list of criteria.
• Whatever your boss says, it is reassuring to know that he doesn’t judge you but only your work and your performances. With the concept of ‘talent’, suddenly your boss wants to know what you do in your spare time and wants you to reveal yourself, so that he can detect the ‘talent’. It is a much more personal relation. It surely benefits some people, but not necessary everyone. The opposite leads to the same problem but the other way around. You might have a quality that you know could help your career, but an employer looking only at short term figures and performances might not realise it.
• Is it right to invest more in the 10% of ‘talents’ in your company instead of using that money to raise the general level of expertise of the team? To use an example from Pierre-Michel Menger, if a talented researcher wins an award for a paper he wrote, his reputation will get a boost which will convert probably to a higher salary. But the paper he wrote is most likely based on data that ‘average’ workers collected. Is is fair? On the other hand, if there is no incentive for researchers to excel and be noticed, people will stagnate and become demotivated.
• Even small differences between people of the same level in a specific field, like music composition, can generate disproportionate inequalities. If more is invested to a young ‘talent’ who is a little better than the other children of his class, he will quickly gain more experiences and have more chances to explore his talent. He will then have a reputation, which will encourage people who don’t have time or the knowledge in music composition to hire him instead of someone else, which will give him even more experience, and so on. The ‘talented’ person might truly be exceptional, but was it because of his initial tiny competitive advantage or because of the investment from the community? Does it make a difference? Maybe humans are like bees and need an arbitrary hierarchy for their society to work. (Simply accepting this image of the bees is way too sympathetic with established power though.)
• As it has been pointed during the workshop, talent belongs to the category of work that is unpredictable and can be asserted for sure only a posteriori. Is it legitimate to try detecting talents beforehand? This argument is interesting but theoretical.  Of course, people will always try to detect talents, it happens since the beginning of humanity. And even if it is an inexact science, it probably lead to better results for the community than not trying to support its future ‘talents’. Even if it is not always fair for people.

How to resolve the dilemma depends on your vision of society. If you believe that there is a real opportunity for people from all backgrounds to display their talents, then selecting talents by comparing people between each other on non measurable criteria is legitimate. If on the other hand, you perceive the world as being a constant exploitation of the masses by few people in power, every privilege not based on measurable merit is a potential discrimination. Both extremes are false, the world needs both talented artists and hard workers. I personally believe that the key to resolve the dilemma is to offer multiple ways to succeed, in many different ways, with the help of many different groups of people. Diversity lowers the probability of generating systematic discriminations and enables many understandings of what talent means.

If you are preparing an award or competition in your organisation, you need to understand why you the feel the need to do so. If it is at least partially to detect talents, I hope that the points above will help you design the process in accordance to your values and goals. Don’t simply replicate what has already been done, enable participants to show their talents from a difference angle, the winners might not be the ones you expected.