martes, 29 de junio de 2010

Witriciy: Making life simpler



A 60-watt bulb illuminates for the future of wireless power

"Wireless" isn't exactly a new concept to computing. Network connectivity, USB devices and even displays had their cords cut in recent years. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took the final steps towards cutting the last tether of the laptop user: the power cord.

Transmitting power wirelessly is traditionally limited to line-of-sight methods such as microwave or laser, which have a "significant negative effect" on anyone or anything unfortunate enough to be caught in the middle.

Playfully dubbed "WiTricity" by the team, the researchers were able to power a sixty-watt lightbulb from seven feet away using the principle of magnetically coupled resonance. The basic concept is similar to existing electromagnetic inductive chargers, but does not suffer the massive drop in efficiency when distance is increased.

read the rest of the article on: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=7632



sábado, 26 de junio de 2010

John Maeda on the simple life (TED)

John Maeda from the MIT Media laboratory lives between the Graphical Design and the Computer Science, a place that can be complicated. But to make life easier he explores the Simplicity and its great power to change our point of view of the world.





John Maeda is a Japanese-American graphic designer,computer scientist, university professor, and author. His work in design and technology explores the area where the two fields merge. He is the current President of the Rhode Island School of Design. At RISD, Maeda seeks to champion the necessary role that artists and designers play in the 21st century creative economy.

viernes, 25 de junio de 2010

George Whitesides: Toward a science of simplicity TED

Simplicity is well known, but ¿what is exactly? In this funny and philosophical exposition George Whitesides give us a very interesting answer.






George M. Whitesides is an American chemistand professorof chemistry at Harvard University. He is best known for his work in the areas of NMR spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly, soft lithography,microfabrication, microfluidics, and nanotechnology. Whitesides is also known for his "outline system" for writing scientific papers. As of August 2009, he has the highest Hirsch index rating of all living chemists.

jueves, 24 de junio de 2010

Murray Gell-Mann NOBEL PRIZE

Our trip in Complex Adaptive Systems starts with the person who makes this dream possible. A man who understand from physics knowledge to the world the power of the multidisciplinary action, specially, he understood how nature is so successful. He was the first person in name the Complex Adaptive Systems. The Winner of the Nobel Prize: Murray Gell Mann.

Nobel Prize in Physics


“The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: /- - -/ one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics ...”

(Excerpt from the will of Alfred Nobel)

Physics was the prize area which Alfred Nobel mentioned first in his will. At that time, in the end of the nineteenth century, many people viewed physics as the foremost of the sciences, and perhaps Nobel saw it this way as well. His own research was also closely tied to physics.


Murray Gell-Mann

Born: 15 September 1929, New York, NY, USA

Affiliation at the time of the award: California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, USA

Prize motivation: "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions"

Field: Particle physics

Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann is one of today's most prominent scientists. He is currently Distinguished Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute as well as the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, where he joined the faculty in 1955. In 1969 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He is the author of The Quark and the Jaguar, published in 1994, in which his ideas on simplicity and complexity are presented to a general readership.

Among his contributions to Physics was the "eightfold way" scheme that brought order out of the chaos created by the discovery of some 100 kinds of particles in collisions involving atomic nuclei. Gell-Mann subsequently found that all of those particles, including the neutron and proton, are composed of fundamental building blocks that he named "quarks," with very unusual properties. That idea has since been fully confirmed by experiment. The quarks are permanently confined by forces coming from the exchange of "gluons." He and others later constructed the quantum field theory of quarks and gluons, called "quantum chromodynamics," which seems to account for all the nuclear particles and their strong interactions.

Professor Gell-Mann was a director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation from 1979–2002 and is a board member of the Wildlife Conservation Society. From 1974 to 1988, he was a Citizen Regent of the Smithsonian Institution. He belongs to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations; he is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. He was on the U.S. President's Science Advisory Committee from 1969 to 1972 and the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology from 1994 to 2001.

In 1988 Professor Gell-Mann was listed on the United Nations Environmental Program's Roll of Honor for Environmental Achievement (The Global 500). He also shared the 1989 Ettore Majorana "Science for Peace" prize. Earlier, he was given the Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Research Corporation Award, and the John J. Carty Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2005 Gell-Mann was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal. He has received honorary degrees from many universities, including Yale, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Cambridge, and Oxford. In 1994 the University of Florida awarded him an honorary degree in Environmental Studies.

Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann.
Copyright © Louis Fabian Bachrach

Gell-Mann's interests extend to historical linguistics, archeology, natural history, the psychology of creative thinking, and other subjects connected with biological and cultural evolution and with learning. Much of his recent research at the Santa Fe Institute has focused on the theory of complex adaptive systems, which brings many of those topics together. Currently Professor Gell-Mann is spearheading the Evolution of Human Languages Program at the Santa Fe Institute. Another focus of his work relates to simplicity, complexity, regularity, and randomness. He is also concerned with how knowledge and understanding are to be extracted from the welter of "information" that can now be transmitted and stored as a result of the digital revolution. Professor Gell-Mann lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and he teaches from time to time at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Different CAS Definitions

Complex adaptive systems are special cases of complex systems. They are complex in that they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements (and so a part ofnetwork science) and adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience. The term complex adaptive systems (CAS) was coined at the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute (SFI), by John H. Holland, Murray Gell-Mann and others.

Overview

Complex Adaptive System

The term complex adaptive systems, or complexity science, is often used to describe the loosely organized academic field that has grown up around the study of such systems. Complexity science is not a single theory— it encompasses more than one theoretical framework and is highly interdisciplinary, seeking the answers to some fundamental questions about living, adaptable, changeable systems.

Examples of complex adaptive systems include the stock market, social insect and ant colonies, the biosphere and theecosystem, the brain and the immune system, the cell and the developing embryo, manufacturing businesses and any human social group-based endeavour in a cultural and social system such as political parties or communities. There are close relationships between the field of CAS and artificial life. In both areas the principles of emergence and self-organization are very important.

The ideas and models of CAS are essentially evolutionary, grounded in modern biological views on adaptation andevolution. The theory of complex adaptive systems bridges developments of systems theory with the ideas of generalized Darwinism, which suggests that Darwinian principles of evolution can explain a range of complex material phenomena, from cosmic to social objects.


Definitions

A CAS is a complex, self-similar collection of interacting adaptive agents. The study of CAS focuses on complex, emergent and macroscopic properties of the system. Various definitions have been offered by different researchers:

A Complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a dynamic network of many agents (which may represent cells, species, individuals, firms, nations) acting in parallel, constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing. The control of a CAS tends to be highly dispersed and decentralized. If there is to be any coherent behavior in the system, it has to arise from competition and cooperation among the agents themselves. The overall behavior of the system is the result of a huge number of decisions made every moment by many individual agents.
A CAS behaves/evolves according to three key principles: order is emergent as opposed to predetermined (c.f. Neural Networks), the system's history is irreversible, and the system's future is often unpredictable. The basic building blocks of the CAS are agents. Agents scan their environment and develop schema representing interpretive and action rules. These schema are subject to change and evolution.
  • Other definitions
Macroscopic collections of simple (and typically nonlinear) interacting units that are endowed with the ability to evolve and adapt to a changing environment.


General properties

What distinguishes a CAS from a pure multi-agent system (MAS) is the focus on top-level properties and features like self-similarity, complexity, emergence and self-organization. A MAS is simply defined as a system composed of multiple interacting agents. In CASs, the agents as well as the system are adaptive: the system is self-similar. A CAS is a complex, self-similar collectivity of interacting adaptive agents. Complex Adaptive Systems are characterised by a high degree of adaptive capacity, giving them resilience in the face ofperturbation.

Other important properties are adaptation (or homeostasis), communication, cooperation, specialization, spatial and temporal organization, and of course reproduction. They can be found on all levels: cells specialize, adapt and reproduce themselves just like larger organisms do. Communication and cooperation take place on all levels, from the agent to the system level. The forces driving co-operation between agents in such a system can be analysed with game theory. Many of the issues of complexity science and new tools for the analysis of complexity are being developed within network science.

Business Dictionary Definition


Entity
consisting of many diverse and autonomous components orparts (called agents) which are interrelated, interdependent, linked through many (dense) interconnections, and behave as a unified whole in learning from experience and in adjusting (not just reacting) to changes in the environment. Each individual agent of a CAS is itself a CAS: a tree, for example, is a CAS within a larger CAS (a forest) which is a CAS in a still larger CAS (an ecosystem). Similarly a member of a group is just one CAS in a chain of several progressively encompassing a community, a society, and a nation. Each agent maintains itself in an environment which it createsthrough its interactions with other agents. Every CAS is more than the sum of its constituting agents and its behavior and propertiescannot be predicted from the behaviors and properties of the agents. CAS are characterized by diffused (distributed) and not centralized control and, unlike rigid (mechanistic) systems, theychange in response to the feedback received from their environment to survive and thrive in new situations. In inanimate world many phenomenon behave as CAS, such as fashion trends,stock markets, traffic jams.


 
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