Complexes

Why people should vote for Obama ? Well, better the other way around: the only reason I can think of for people not voting for him is racism. A few months ago, I went to a doctor. He had been a pilot in WWII, made his way up the hard way, complained about the American youth. When I told that I hoped that Obama would be the next U.S. president, he was amazed: "What have black people done for this country?!". I was puzzled and amazed. I won't attempt to answer his question here (Michael Jackson?). He continued: "we need someone like McCain, to protect us from the Russians." One could think that the age of the doctor would explain his anti-Russian sentiment, but actually it is quite generalized, after almost 20 years of the end of the cold war. On the one hand, Russians have better things to do than to "threaten" the USA. On the other hand, there are much more dangers for the U.S. citizens coming from within, starting with incompetent leaders and ending ...

The Sigma Profile: A Formal Tool to Study Organization and its Evolution at Multiple Scales Abstract : The σ profile is presented as a tool to analyze the organization of systems at different scales, and how this organization changes in time. Describing structures at different scales as goal-oriented agents, one can define σ ("satisfaction") as the degree to which the goals of each agent at each scale have been met. σ reflects the organization degree at that scale. The σ profile of a system shows the satisfaction at different scales, with the possibility to study their dependencies and evolution. It can also be used to extend game theoretic models. A general tendency on the evolution of complexity and cooperation naturally follows from the σ profile. Experiments on a virtual ecosystem are used as illustration. [ Full paper ]