Non-Linear System Social Dynamics & Simulations

Anti-System Politics. Alternative Normative Attractors in Chaotic Political Systems:The Case of the Front National

by Nicolas Baygert

Master’s thesis

The development of dynamic system reasoning

by Robert Boutilier

1992. with Chandler, M.J. Human Development, 35: 121-137.

This article concerns abilities that allow young persons to grasp essential features of open or 'engentropic' systems... more This article concerns abilities that allow young persons to grasp essential features of open or 'engentropic' systems and relates these abilities to success and failure on measures of concrete and formal operational throught. Attention is focused first on the ability of 96 subjects between the ages of 8 and 18 to comprehend the feedback and emergent features characteristic of dynamic systems and, second, on the relations between these developing competencies and the emergence of formal thought. The conclusion reached from an examination of these illustrative data is that the abilities necessary to understand key properties of dynamic systems are distinct from but develop in parallel with those congitive structures made familiar by Piaget.

Examined the responses of 96 Ss (aged 8-18 yrs) to tasks devised to assess the related dynamic system operations referred to as circular connectivity, dynamic recycling, systemic analysis, and systemic synthesis. Results yielded a familiar picture of orderly age-graded advances in the acquisition of the 4 systemic operations. Findings also support the hypothesis that formal operations mastery and dynamic system reasoning undergo parallel development.

The dynamic structure of social capital: How interpersonal connections create communitywide benefits

by Richard Dudley

The Effects of the Minimum Wage in the Labor Market: A Complex Perspective

by Andres Marroquin

Andrés Marroquín. Mercatus Center Working Paper (2004). With Holly Ann Potter.

We built a competitive labor market from the bottom-up (a computer simulation) and our results conform the theoretical... more We built a competitive labor market from the bottom-up (a computer simulation) and our results conform the theoretical agreements and offers evidence for increasing minimum wage elasticity, especially in the case of subjects defined as immigrants and teenagers.

Reading in the Future: Literacy and the Time of the Internet

by David R Cole

Abstract: David R. Cole’s “Reading in the Future: Literacy and
the Time of the Internet” locates the literacies... more Abstract: David R. Cole’s “Reading in the Future: Literacy and
the Time of the Internet” locates the literacies of the internet
– itself read as “the end game of western technology” or the
Machina Mundi, the Great Chain of the World that has a centre
that is everywhere and a circumference that is nowhere – in a
contradictory space. But Cole also self-consciously locates his
own writing at a moment in time when the initial technological
hype of the internet is subsiding in the face of the boredom of
informational overload and the internet is emerging as both an
“unlimited realm of resource” and the site of a brand of “western
nihilism containing a sense of relativism, collapse of meaning
and cultural schizo-cynicism”. Remarkably, in the course of his
argument, Coles does not appropriate the internet, does not
simplify it according to his own vision of its potential or
mission – but allows it to remain a place of cultural
schizophrenia, to be navigated only by means of the corresponding learning, acceptance, and practice of “schizo literacy”.

(Not so) Distant Mirrors: a complex macro-comparison of polities and political, economic and religious systems in the crisis of the 14th century

by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

Paper for the International Conference "THE ANGEVIN DYNASTY (14TH CENTURY)" in Targoviste (Romania), October 21st-23rd 2011.
Slides here: http://oeaw.academia.edu/JohannesPreiserKapeller/Talks/58247/_Not_so_Distant_Mirrors_a_complex_macro-comparison_of_polities_and_political_economic_and_religious_systems_in_the_crisis_of_the_14th_century

In the “calamitous” 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman called it in her classic „A Distant Mirror“ (1978) , the medieval... more In the “calamitous” 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman called it in her classic „A Distant Mirror“ (1978) , the medieval world entered a period of severe crisis in demography, economy, politics and religion. This crisis took hold in all regions, ranging from China in the East to England in the West. Even before the catastrophic pandemic of the Black Death (1346-1352), deteriorating climatic conditions had ended the period of demographic and economic expansion that began in the 10th century.
The local and regional impacts and consequences of these general potentially crisis-laden conditions may have differed; outcomes ranged from actual societal collapse to the emergence of powerful new polities – while Byzantium´s power dwindled away, Hungary entered a period of strong rulership and external power in the reign of Louis I of Anjou (1342-1382), for instance. But these conditions provide a framework for global perspective on this period and allow us to use the 14th century-crisis as a field of “natural experiments of history”, as Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson have called them ; accordingly, we analyse how similar crisis phenomena influenced the development of societies with different (or similar) traditions, religions, institutions, geographies or ecologies.
In order to be able to capture the local variations and complexities, we adopt concepts and tools provided by the field of complexity science. Mono-causal or linear explanations are inadequate for the analysis and the description of crisis, transformation or collapse of pre-modern polities. Within this framework, complex systems are understood as large networks of individual components, whose interactions at the microscopic level produce “complex” changing patterns of behaviour of the whole system on the macroscopic level. In the last decades, historians and social scientists who became interested in complexity theory tried to use its concepts and terminology for the conceptualisation and description of phenomena in their own fields, but often only in a “metaphoric” way. Less frequently, though, historians have tried to make use of the mathematical foundations of complexity theory or of quantitative tools provided by this field. Recent scholarship has implemented some of these tools especially for the construction of macro-models of socio-economic development. While these studies help us construct analytical tools for the macro-level of our own research, they run the same risk as earlier scholarship of neglecting complex variations at the local and regional levels.
Therefore, we combine complexity theory with the analytical framework of „systems theory“ developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann in order to capture the interveawements between politics, economy and religion within a polity and with the political, economic and ecological environment. In addition, we employ the methods and tools of network analysis, which allow us to capture, analyse and model linkages and cause-effect correlations in society, economy, politics and religion on the macro- and micro-level down to groups and individuals.
Overall, as a complement to earlier studies our analytical
approach shall allow us to capture the “diversité véritable” of our period without losing track of essential commonalities (the “strange parallels”, as Victor Liebermann has called them in his remarkable study on Southeast Asia in Global Context, 2009 ) of this “first world crisis” across all cultures and societies. The scientic value of this approach will be demonstrated for some specific cases.

Friendship Dynamics: Modelling Social Relationships through a Fuzzy Agent-Based Simulation

by Mauricio Salgado

Published in Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society, Volume 2011 (2011)

Social relationships such as friendship and partner choice are ruled by the proximity principle, which states that the... more Social relationships such as friendship and partner choice are ruled by the proximity principle, which states that the more similar two individuals are, the more likely they will become friends. However, proximity, similarity, and friendship are concepts with blurred edges and imprecise grades of membership. This study shows how to simulate these friendship dynamics in an agent-based model that applies fuzzy sets theory to implement agent attributes, rules, and social relationships, explaining the process in detail. Although in principle it may be thought that the use of fuzzy sets theory makes agent-based modelling more elaborated, in practice it saves the modeller from taking some arbitrary decisions on how to use crisp values for representing properties that are inherently fuzzy. The consequences of applying fuzzy sets and operations to define a fuzzy friendship relationship are compared with a simpler implementation, with crisp values. By integrating agent computational models and fuzzy set theory, this paper provides useful insights into scholars and practitioners to tackle the uncertainty inherent to social relationships in a systematic way.

Complex Adaptive Systems and the Threshold Effect: Towards a General Tool for Studying Dynamic Phenomena Across Diverse Domains

by Ted Carmichael

This is my submitted dissertation, for a PhD in Information Technology awarded in May of 2010.
Dissertation advisor: Mirsad Hadzikadic
Dissertation committee: Moutaz Khouja, Zbigniew Ras, Joseph Whitmeyer, and Xintao Wu.

Most interesting phenomena in natural and social systems include transitions and oscillations among their various... more Most interesting phenomena in natural and social systems include transitions and oscillations among their various phases.  A new phase begins when the system reaches a threshold that marks a qualitative change in system characteristics.  These threshold effects are found all around us.  In economics, this could be movement from a bull market to a bear market; in sociology, it could be the spread of political dissent, culminating in rebellion; in biology, the immune response to infection or disease as the body moves from sickness to health.  Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) has proven to be a powerful framework for exploring these and other related phenomena.  Our hypothesis is that by modeling differing complex systems we can use the known causes and mechanisms in one domain to gain insight into the controlling properties of similar effects in another domain.  To that end, we have created a general CAS model; one that is flexible enough so that it can be individually tailored and mapped to phenomena in various domains, yet retains sufficient commonality across applications to facilitate a deeper, cross-disciplinary understanding of these phenomena.  In this work, we focus on the threshold effect.  We show that the general model successfully replicates key features of a CAS.  And we demonstrate its general applicability by adapting the model to three domains: cancer cells and the immune response; political dissent in a polity; and a marine ecosystem.

A Computer Simulation Laboratory for Social Theories

by Mirsad Hadzikadic

Co-authored with: Joseph M. Whitmeyer; Ted Carmichael; Chris Eichelberger; Moutaz Khouja; Amar Saric; and Min Sun. Published in the Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligence Agent Technology, Sydney, Australia, December 2008

We present an agent-based model that allows the user to employ different social theories to try to explain and predict... more We present an agent-based model that allows the user to employ different social theories to try to explain and predict social changes. The model is set in the context of an armed insurgency in a developing country. We demonstrate the capabilities of the model by showing how it simulates a news report-based scenario under different theories and combinations of theories.

Continuing the Revolution

by Christopher Beekman

Beekman, Christopher S. and William W. Baden. 2005. Continuing the Revolution. In Nonlinear Models for Archaeology and Anthropology: Continuing the Revolution, edited by Christopher S. Beekman and William W. Baden, pp. 1-12. Ashgate Press, Aldershot, U.K.