Only ten midges needed to make a swarm

See on Scoop.it – Bounded Rationality and Beyond

High-speed cameras reveal when insects become self-organizing. 

To most people, a cloud of midges is an annoyance. To Nicholas Ouellette it is the key to a mysterious animal behaviour — the swarm.

Ouellette, who works on complex systems at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and his colleague James Puckett, have found that swarms of these insects become self-organizing when their numbers reach just ten individuals.

Their paper, published on 13 August in Journal of the Royal Society Interface1, is part of a small but growing area of research producing data from real swarms to inform models of this behaviour.

Ouellette and Puckett set up laboratory colonies of Chironomus riparius midges, which live for only a few days after reaching adulthood and tend to fly only at dawn or dusk.

“A lot of people will say a swarm is just a whole bunch of insects,” says Ouellette. “I would like to say a swarm is somehow collective and self-organizing.”

See on nature.com

Inflation or deflation… Why gold could soar either way

See on Scoop.it – Gold and What Moves it.

From Jeff Clark, Senior Precious Metals Analyst, Casey Research:

Some of you may be aware that investment guru Harry Dent has publicly stated that gold will fall to $250-$400. He specifically predicted:

Around $700/ounce is a certainty in gold by 2015 to 2016, and $250 is a possibility well down the line by 2020–2023.

His forecast is largely based on his belief that deflation will prevail.

Governments are fighting deflation. If government stimulus fails, we will have deflation, not inflation.

And he claims that gold bugs are wrong about gold’s future price because they don’t understand how markets work.

Central bank stimulus has created a whole new set of financial asset bubbles that will have to burst. That is its consequences, not rising inflation that most gold bugs (who do understand the financial and debt crisis) warn about.

As a gold analyst who has spent every day of the last seven-plus years watching this market, I can’t let this pass. I’m sure gold will not fall to $700, much less $250-$400—not in real terms (who knows if the U.S. dollar will even exist in 2020?… Or maybe there will be new dollars with several zeros cut off).

Hal’s insight:

Click through for the rest.

See on thecrux.com

The Role of the Youth in a Participatory Democracy: A Summary of Seminar Proceedings – Afesis Corplan

See on Scoop.it – real utopias

Afesis-corplan: non-governmental organisation committed to the practice and promotion of democracy in local government and community-driven development through sustainable settlements

See on afesis.org.za

Misbehaving- The Making of Behavioural Economics – how to: academy

See on Scoop.it – Bounded Rationality and Beyond

This talk for the How To Academy coincides with the publication of Richard Thaler’s new book on behavioural economics. Richard Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals. Traditional economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Whether buying an alarm clock, selling football tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave. Dismissed at first by economists as an amusing sideshow, the study of human miscalculations and their effects on markets now drives efforts to make better decisions in our lives, our businesses, and our governments. Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behaviour, Thaler will enlighten us about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world, revealing how behavioural economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything.

See on howtoacademy.com

Q & A With Richard Thaler On What It Really Means To Be A “Nudge”

See on Scoop.it – Bounded Rationality and Beyond

Nudge is one of the most important and influential books on behavioral science and public policy I’ve ever read. Co-authored by economist Richard Thaler and lawyer Cass Sunstein, the book lays out the rationale for adopting policies designed to make it more likely that people will act in their own best interests rather than, say, spend money they shouldn’t spend or eat food they shouldn’t consume. In the book, Thaler and Sunstein discuss how recent advances in behavioral science should inform our attitudes towards rational decision making. Specifically, these behavioral science findings show that people don’t always make rational decisions, raising questions about when or whether outsiders—like governments or employers–should step in to help people avoid making bad choices.

But has enthusiasm for the book led people to see nudges where they don’t exist? That was the question I posed in a recent post, where I argued that it was wrong to call a well-designed traffic light a nudge: “Not all good design, even good design that influences behavior, is a nudge,” I wrote. “A well-designed prison cell is more likely to deter prisoners from trying to escape than a poorly designed one. But that does not make it a nudge.”

See on forbes.com

Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions

See on Scoop.it – Bounded Rationality and Beyond

Paul Offit likes to tell a story about how his wife, pediatrician Bonnie Offit, was about to give a child a vaccination when the kid was struck by a seizure. Had she given the injection a minute sooner, Paul Offit says, it would surely have appeared as though the vaccine had caused the seizure and probably no study in the world would have convinced the parent otherwise. (The Offits have such studies at the ready — Paul is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and author of“Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All.”) Indeed, famous anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy has said her son’s autism and seizures are linked to “so many shots” because vaccinations preceded his symptoms.

But, as Offit’s story suggests, the fact that a child became sick after a vaccine is not strong evidence that the immunization was to blame. Psychologists have a name for the cognitive bias that makes us prone to assigning a causal relationship to two events simply because they happened one after the other: the “illusion of causality.” A study recently published in the British Journal of Psychology investigates how this illusion influences the way we process new information. Its finding: Causal illusions don’t just cement erroneous ideas in the mind; they can also prevent new information from correcting them.

 

See on fivethirtyeight.com

Computational Anthropology Reveals How the Most Important People in History Vary by Culture

See on Scoop.it – Social Foraging

Data mining Wikipedia people reveals some surprising differences in the way eastern and western cultures identify important figures in history, say computational anthropologists.

The study of differences between cultures has been revolutionized by the internet and the behavior of individuals online. Indeed, this phenomenon is behind the birth of the new science of computational anthropology.

One particularly fruitful window into the souls of different cultures is Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia with over 31 million articles in 285 different languages. One important category consists of articles about significant people. And not just anyone can appear. Wikipedia has specific criteria that notable people must meet to merit inclusion.

So an interesting question is how the most important people vary from one language version of Wikipedia to another. Clearly, these differences must arise from the cultural forces that determine notability (or notoriety) in different parts of the world.

Today, Peter Gloor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a few pals say they have calculated the  most significant people in four different language versions of Wikipedia—English, German, Chinese and Japanese. And they say important differences emerge, not just in the names that appear, but in the broader make-up of the lists.

See on technologyreview.com