Complexes

Enrique Peña Nieto obtained the majority of votes on July 1st. However, there is huge evidence of electoral crimes committed by his party (paying people for votes, conditioning public services for votes, use of public resources for campaigns, etc.) and an obvious excess of campaign spending limits. The Electoral Federal Court has to announce a result on the election by September 6th, with a large sector of the population demanding new elections, which would imply an interim president.

Ultra-large scale (ULS) systems are becoming pervasive. They are inherently complex, which makes their design and control a challenge for traditional methods. Here we propose the design and analysis of ULS systems using measures of complexity, emergence, self-organization, and homeostasis based on information theory. We evaluate the proposal with a ULS computing system provided with genetic adaptation mechanisms. We show the evolution of the system with stable and also changing workload, using different fitness functions. When the adaptive plan forces the system to converge to a predefined performance level, the nodes may result in highly unstable configurations, that correspond to a high variance in time of the measured complexity. Conversely, if the adaptive plan is less "aggressive", the system may be more stable, but the optimal performance may not be achieved. Measuring the Complexity of Ultra-Large-Scale Evolutionary Systems, Michele Amoretti, Carlos Gershenson. Subm...

CALL FOR PAPERS Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling Special Issue on Multidisciplinary Applications of Complex  Networks Modeling, Simulation, Visualization & Analysis Complex Network methods for Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) have a widespread prevalence across literature spanning several disciplines from Biology and Social Sciences to Communication Networks. These network models are primarily developed using interaction data of various components or agents in a CAS. Subsequently analysis of these networks is performed using various network tools. This inaugural special issue of Springer Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling (CASM) comprises of papers in the domain of complex networks modeling, simulation, visualization and analysis. Deadline for submissions: 1st October 2012 http://www.casmodeling.com/ http://www.casmodeling.com/sites/10349/pdf/H9012_DF_CASM_CFP_Global_A4.pdf

In recent days, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) the presidential candidate from the Mexican left parties gave a jump in the polls (at least those which are not obviously biased). This was mainly because of the self-organized movement "#YoSoy132", initiated by students and now followed by thousands of people in all the country, mainly rejecting the imposition of a candidate by the media (Enrique Peña Nieto, EPN from PRI) and by the circles of power (even expresident Vicente Fox from PAN called to vote for him, obviously causing outrage in his party. The thing is that if AMLO wins, most probably he'll end un in jail). Seeing the support for AMLO grow, the other two main parties (PRI and PAN) started a similar strategy to that of 2006, discrediting AMLO with a "dirty war". A few days ago each party released a TV spot where they forged in one case a conversation and in another an AMLO speech (video in Spanish here ). What can you expect from political parties...

The presidential elections in Mexico next July 1st are heating up the political landscape. It has always been a tradition that most media support some candidate, in this case Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN) from PRI, who is ahead in their questionable polls. However, the information spreading on social networks is something they still cannot control. On Friday, May 11th, EPN went to the Universidad Iberoamericana, one of the most recognized private universities in the country, where the students demonstrated their rejection towards him. Of course, none of this was seen in most media, one newspaper even Photoshopping their frontpage picture : However, with half the students filming every moment with their smartphones, the real deal spread like wildfire on social networks and youtube . One of the claims to EPN was a police operation in the town of Atenco in the outskirts of Mexico City, while EPN was governor of the State of Mexico. State and federal police arrested dozens of people, r...

I've been meaning to start posting about the upcoming presidential elections to be held in Mexico on July 1st. The current government of Felipe Caledrón (who began his presidency in 2006 amidst proofs of fraud ) has been characterized by a stagnation of the economy and a war declared against (most of) the drug cartels, leading to at least 60,000 people killed so far. Only in Ciudad Juárez, we had ten times the murder rate than in Baghdad during the recent U.S. occupation. Last year, a complaint was filed at the International Court in The Hague against Felipe Calderón and others , accusing them of crimes against humanity. The perspective is not positive for Calderón, since he cannot go abroad like other ex-presidents, and most probably his party (PAN) will lose the presidency, given the failures of the two previous presidents: Calderón and Vicente Fox (2000-2006). The candidates: Josefina Vázquez Mota  "JVM" (PAN), former minister of education and leader of her part...

Concepts used in the scientific study of complex systems have become so widespread that their use and abuse has led to ambiguity and confusion in their meaning. In this paper we use information theory to provide abstract and concise measures of complexity, emergence, self-organization, and homeostasis. The purpose is to clarify the meaning of these concepts with the aid of the proposed formal measures. In a simplified version of the measures (focussing on the information produced by a system), emergence becomes the opposite of self-organization, while complexity represents their balance. We use computational experiments on random Boolean networks and elementary cellular automata to illustrate our measures at multiple scales. Gershenson, C. & N. Fernández (2012). Complexity and Information: Measuring Emergence, Self-organization, and Homeostasis at Multiple Scales. C3 Report 2012.03.  http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2026