Material for thought

Policy making in UK is currently making the headlines because of its very aggressive spending cuts program. I’m not going to speak about politics here, but about scientific models that should play a pivotal role in the design of any successful policies. The role that science could play in policy making is most often overshadowed by political dogmas. I believe that many important questions of society would be better addressed if data and predictive models were more widely used. Here are four examples from the ECCS 2010 conference in Lisbon.

Applications of complex systems theory in policy making

“Intervention and Policy Making in Complex Socio-Economic and Technical Systems”

I was in Lisbon few months ago to attend the European Conference on Complex Systems. A demo of the study on verticality was displayed at the event, which gave me the opportunity to present my philosophical observations to a scientific crowd. It was extremely valuable to attend the various talks and to learn about the latest studies being made in the field of complex systems theory:

I had the opportunity while I was in Berlin to attend a talk at the Deutsche Guggenheim about the recent researches made in neuroscience to understand how much control a given film has upon viewers’ brain activity. The talk was given by Professor Uri Hasson (Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University) and film director Amos Gitai (Israel). It was organized by the Association of Neuroesthetics in collaboration with the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and the Institut für Raumexperimente (Studio Olafur Eliasson).

I read about world fairs and utopias while I was curating the Dreams of Progress exhibition last year. A utopia, or a heterotopia such as the world expo, always features inconsistencies or misconceptions. If not, the utopia could be achieved and it would not be a utopia anymore. However, never the inconsistencies of today’s world appeared to me clearer than on the Shanghai World Expo.