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”

“Geographical segregation exists whenever the proportions of population rates of two or more populations are not homogenous throughout a defined space”. It is the norm in most of our cities: wealthy vicinities, china towns, Italian and Turkish districts are examples of non-uniform spread of populations. Laetitia Gauvin explained at the ECCS 2010 conference in Lisbon why it happens and presented some interesting variants of the phenomenon. I have edited the authors’ introduction in order to make it more accessible. I think there is much more here than technical jargon, with many social and philosophical implications.

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

What is the resource that most companies are desperate to get their share of: oil, food, human power? Well, did you ever think of our own minds? Our minds are solicited nowadays by tons of information per day. We cannot pay attention to all of them. Consumer products, politics, activists and media want desperately to get their “mindshare”, and I don’t even speak about the attention sought by our friends and family. Mindshare is a limited and highly valued resource, its negotiation is the object of a new economy, the Mind Economy. But if you are let’s say a teenager, fan of Justin Bieber, and want to become influential, how can you compete and get a bit of the public’s mindshare?

Complex Systems Theory can help us better understand some of the mechanisms that shape our cultures and languages. Here are three academic examples from the ECCS 2010 conference in Lisbon.

Wikipedia and Linguistic Networks

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

By Alexander Mehler