organization:santa fe institute

The Typewriter’s Love of the Desert - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/the-typewriters-love-of-the-desert

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Reflections on Sam Shepard’s time at the Santa Fe Institute Sam Shepard in the 1970s.sam-shepard.comI was first introduced to Sam by our mutual friend Valerie Plame Wilson. Sam had played Valerie’s father in the cinematic adaptation of her book, Fair Game. On the phone inviting Sam to SFI his first question to me was whether there would be sufficient desk space for a typewriter. I assured him that this would not be a problem. We met a few month later in Santa Fe and discussed our favorite pens and notebooks. I have a weakness for large fountain pens. Sam noted that they leak and favored ball pens and pencils which he kept in his pocket to record thoughts impromptu on scraps of paper in diners. His favorite diner in Santa Fe was Harry’s Roadhouse, where he would sit at the bar and make his (...)

The Kekulé Problem - Issue 47: Consciousness
http://54.197.248.184/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem

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Cormac McCarthy is best known to the world as a writer of novels. These include Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. At the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) he is a research colleague and thought of in complementary terms. An aficionado on subjects ranging from the history of mathematics, philosophical arguments relating to the status of quantum mechanics as a causal theory, comparative evidence bearing on non-human intelligence, and the nature of the conscious and unconscious mind. At SFI we have been searching for the expression of these scientific interests in his novels and we maintain a furtive tally of their covert manifestations and demonstrations in his prose. Over the last two decades Cormac and I have been discussing the puzzles and paradoxes (...)

The Kekulé Problem - Issue 47: Consciousness
▻http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem

http://static.nautil.us/12152_e6e31529675d0ef99d777d729c423382.jpg

Cormac McCarthy is best known to the world as a writer of novels. These include Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. At the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) he is a research colleague and thought of in complementary terms. An aficionado on subjects ranging from the history of mathematics, philosophical arguments relating to the status of quantum mechanics as a causal theory, comparative evidence bearing on non-human intelligence, and the nature of the conscious and unconscious mind. At SFI we have been searching for the expression of these scientific interests in his novels and we maintain a furtive tally of their covert manifestations and demonstrations in his prose. Over the last two decades Cormac and I have been discussing the puzzles and paradoxes (...)

Maps + algorithms to bring infrastructure and services to urban slums worldwide

This year, Stamen has been working with the Santa Fe Institute and UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design for Slum Dwellers International to create Open Reblock, a public interface for their innovative research to develop better planning and development tools for informal settlements. The result is a publicly available tool at ▻http://openreblock.org. It takes maps of existing buildings and roads or paths and uses a sophisticated algorithm to create a map showing how city infrastructure and services can be brought to informal settlements with the least disruption for existing communities and their residents.

Informal settlements are part of cities worldwide, and they’re growing rapidly. Some demographers estimate that virtually all of the population growth on the planet in this century will effectively be absorbed by informal settlements. A single city “block” in informal settlements can have hundreds of residences, most without direct street access. It’s difficult to provide services, roads, water, and sewage, in these situations. One reason often cited for either doing nothing or for the demolition and redevelopment of these settlements is their lack of easy access for infrastructure and services. Open Reblock provides an alternative — a way forward for integrating services in existing informal settlements, respecting these communities, while helping them gain access to essential services. It does this by generating maps to connect as many parcels as possible — up to all of the parcels — in a block to roads and utilities.

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via ▻http://content.stamen.com/open_data_essential_infrastructure

#map #osm

Home - Complex Systems Lab
▻http://complex.upf.edu

The ICREA-Complex Systems Lab, lead by Ricard Solé, is part of the Biology Department of Universitat Pompeu Fabra/PRBB and member of the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva. We are an interdisciplinary team exploring the evolution of complex systems, both natural and artificial, searching for their common laws of organization. We do both theoretical and experimental work, closely working in collaboration with the Santa Fe Institute. We study the origins and evolution of complex systems and the boundaries of such complexity (and how to break them) using methods from statistical physics, synthetic/systems biology and network theory.

#complex

Five Short Stories About the Life and Times of Ideas - Issue 23: Dominoes
▻http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/five-short-stories-about-the-life-and-times-of-ideas

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In the following five short chapters, David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist, and president elect of the Santa Fe Institute, haven of complex systems research, examines five facets of chain reactions, each typifying how ideas spread through science and culture. Together they tell a story of how the ideas that define humanity arise, when and why they die or are abandoned, the surprising possibilities for continued evolution, and our responsibility to nurture thought that might enlighten our future.Part I: Chain ReactionsBecause the actor always moves among and in relation to other acting beings, he is never merely “a doer” but always and at the same time a sufferer. To do and to suffer are like opposite sides of the same coin, and the story that an act starts is composed of its (...)

Technology should be used to create social mobility – not to spy on citizens | Technology | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/10/nsa-gchq-technology-create-social-mobility-spy-on-citizens

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Une approche de la surveillance par l’économie politique.
Par Cory Doctorow

Spying, especially domestic spying, is an aspect of what the Santa Fe Institute economist Samuel Bowles calls guard labour: work that is done to stabilise property relationships, especially the property belonging to the rich.

The amount a state needs to expend on guard labour is a function of how much legitimacy the state holds in its population’s reckoning. A state whose population mainly views the system as fair needs to do less coercion to attain stability. People who believe that they are well-served by the status quo will not work to upset it. States whose populations view the system as illegitimate need to spend more on guard labour.

There’s an implied max/min problem here: the intersection of a curve representing the amount of wealth you need to spend on guards to maintain stability in the presence of a widening rich/poor gap and the amount you can save on guards by creating social mobility through education, health, and social welfare is the point at which you should stop paying for cops and start paying for hospitals and schools.

This implies that productivity gains in guard labour will make wider wealth gaps sustainable. When coercion gets cheaper, the point at which it makes “economic sense” to allow social mobility moves further along the curve. The evidence for this is in the thing mass surveillance does best, which is not catching terrorists, but disrupting legitimate political opposition, from Occupy to the RCMP’s classification of “anti-petroleum” activists as a threat to national security.

Why spy? Because it’s cheaper than playing fair . Our networks have given the edge to the elites, and unless we seize the means of information, we are headed for a long age of IT-powered feudalism, where property is the exclusive domain of the super-rich, where your surveillance-supercharged Internet of Things treats you as a tenan