This work provides a careful selection of extended contributions presented at the 2014 ECCS conference and its satellite meetings, reflecting the scope and diversity of both fundamental and applied research areas in the field. The ECCS meeting, held under the patronage of the Complex Systems Society, is an annual event that has become the leading European conference devoted to complexity science. It presents cutting-edge research and offers a unique opportunity to study novel scientific approaches in a multitude of application areas. ECCS'14, the eleventh annual event, took place in Lucca, Italy. It gathered some 650 scholars representing a wide range of topics related to complex systems research, with emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches. The editors are leading specialists in the area.The book is of great interest to scientists, researchers and graduate students in complexity, complex systems and networks.
The world economy in which we are living poses challenges that lead to a realization that 'more of the same' will be difficult to sustain. This provides an illustration that, in order to create new or modified knowledge practices, strengthen customer relationships and thus positively influence customer satisfaction, organizations must be flexible in configuring (combining) knowledge and knowledge structures in a way that is appropriate for delivering value to the customer. It must simultaneously develop effective strategies for updating the knowledge of its staff members necessary for underpinning the creation and delivery of appropriate knowledge services. Thus, unlearning (forgetting) becomes a critical means for organizational success. The ECKM community of scholars has already initiated dialogue that links its particular strengths to innovation issues. This conference aims to further that dialogue by attracting leading edge work that leverages the ECKM community's in-depth understanding of learning and unlearning to better understand knowledge management. Our aim is to stimulate breakthrough research streams linking learning, unlearning and knowledge management. How can organizations tailor, use, and extend techniques and tools from knowledge management for improving their business practices and processes? Building upon existing work on knowledge management (KM) and organizational learning, the conference will promote interdisciplinary approaches from computer science and information systems, business, management and organization science as well as cognitive science. Emphasis will be put on systematic learning from experience, KM tools and KM success factors. A special interest belongs to knowledge management initiatives which are lightweight (i.e., do not place considerable additional burden on users and KM experts), allow an incremental adoption (i.e., do not require large up-front investment before any return of investment is at least visible), and are flexible regarding frequent changes in experts and topics. Continuing the success of the ECKM conference series since 2000, the 2015 conference will provide an international communication forum bringing together academia and industry for discussing the progress made and addressing the challenges faced by continuous learning in knowledge-intensive organizations.
'Fascinating...In essence, the number and quality of our friendships may have a bigger influence on our happiness, health and mortality risk than anything else in life save for giving up smoking' Guardian, Book of the Day Friends matter to us, and they matter more than we think. The single most surprising fact to emerge out of the medical literature over the last decade or so has been that the number and quality of the friendships we have has a bigger influence on our happiness, health and even mortality risk than anything else except giving up smoking. Robin Dunbar is the world-renowned psychologist and author who famously discovered Dunbar's number: how our capacity for friendship is limited to around 150 people. In Friends, he looks at friendship in the round, at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, or at the complex of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible - and just how complicated the business of making and keeping friends actually is. Mixing insights from scientific research with first person experiences and culture, Friends explores and integrates knowledge from disciplines ranging from psychology and anthropology to neuroscience and genetics in a single magical weave that allows us to peer into the incredible complexity of the social world in which we are all so deeply embedded. Working at the coalface of the subject at both research and personal levels, Robin Dunbar has written the definitive book on how and why we are friends.
This book covers different, current research directions in the context of variational methods for non-linear geometric data. Each chapter is authored by leading experts in the respective discipline and provides an introduction, an overview and a description of the current state of the art. Non-linear geometric data arises in various applications in science and engineering. Examples of nonlinear data spaces are diverse and include, for instance, nonlinear spaces of matrices, spaces of curves, shapes as well as manifolds of probability measures. Applications can be found in biology, medicine, product engineering, geography and computer vision for instance. Variational methods on the other hand have evolved to being amongst the most powerful tools for applied mathematics. They involve techniques from various branches of mathematics such as statistics, modeling, optimization, numerical mathematics and analysis. The vast majority of research on variational methods, however, is focused on data in linear spaces. Variational methods for non-linear data is currently an emerging research topic. As a result, and since such methods involve various branches of mathematics, there is a plethora of different, recent approaches dealing with different aspects of variational methods for nonlinear geometric data. Research results are rather scattered and appear in journals of different mathematical communities. The main purpose of the book is to account for that by providing, for the first time, a comprehensive collection of different research directions and existing approaches in this context. It is organized in a way that leading researchers from the different fields provide an introductory overview of recent research directions in their respective discipline. As such, the book is a unique reference work for both newcomers in the field of variational methods for non-linear geometric data, as well as for established experts that aim at to exploit new research directions or collaborations. Chapter 9 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351765633, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. In the 21st century, Norway, Denmark and Sweden remain the icons of fair societies, with high economic productivity and quality of life. But they are also an enigma in a cultural-evolutionary sense: though by no means following the same socio-economic formula, they are all cases of a "non-hubristic", socially sustainable modernity that puzzles outside observers. Using Nordic welfare states as its laboratory, Sustainable Modernity combines evolutionary and socio-cultural perspectives to illuminate the mainsprings of what the authors call the "well-being society". The main contention is that the Nordic uniqueness is not merely the outcome of one particular set of historical institutional or political arrangements, or sheer historical luck; rather, the high welfare creation inherent in the Nordic model has been predicated on a long and durable tradition of social cooperation, which has interacted with global competitive forces. Hence the socially sustainable Nordic modernity should be approached as an integrated and tightly orchestrated ecosystem based on a complex interplay of cooperative and competitive strategies within and across several domains: normative-cultural, socio-political and redistributive. The key question is: Can the Nordic countries uphold the balance of competition and cooperation and reproduce their resilience in the age of globalization, cultural collisions, the digital economy, the fragmentation of the work/life division, and often intrusive EU regulation? With contributors providing insights from the humanities, the social sciences and evolutionary science, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, sociology, history, institutional economics, Nordic studies and human evolution studies.
This book discusses several recent theoretic advancements in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary integration in the field of evolution. While exploring novel views, the text maintains a close link with one of the most broadly held views on evolution, namely that of “Darwinian evolution.” This work puts forth a new point of view which allows researchers to define in detail the concept of evolution. To create this conceptual definition, the text applies a stringent object-based focus. With this focus, the editor has been able to develop an object-based pattern of evolution at the smallest scale. Subsequently, this smallest scale pattern is used as an innovative basis for generalizations. These generalizations create links between biological Darwinism and generalized Darwinism. The object-based approach that was used to suggest innovations in the field of Darwinian evolution also allowed for contributions to other topics, such as major evolutionary transitions theory, the definition of life and the relationships between evolution, self-organization and thermodynamics. Together, the chapters of this book and the multidisciplinary reflections and comments of various specialists on these chapters offer an exciting palette of innovative ideas.
The science of networks represented a substantial change in the way we see natural and technological phenomena. Now we have a better understanding that networks are, in most cases, networks of networks or multi-layered networks. This book provides a summary of the research done during one of the largest and most multidisciplinary projects in network science and complex systems (Multiplex). The science of complex networks originated from the empirical evidence that most of the structures of systems such as the internet, sets of protein interactions, and collaboration between people, share (at least qualitatively) common structural properties. This book examines how properties of networks that interact with other networks can change dramatically. The authors show that, dependent on the properties of links that interconnect two or more networks, we may derive different conclusions about the function and the possible vulnerabilities of the overall system of networks. This book presents a series of novel theoretical results together with their applications, providing a comprehensive overview of the field.
Over the past years, businesses have had to tackle the issues caused by numerous forces from political, technological and societal environment. The changes in the global market and increasing uncertainty require us to focus on disruptive innovations and to investigate this phenomenon from different perspectives. The benefits of innovations are related to lower costs, improved efficiency, reduced risk, and better response to the customers’ needs due to new products, services or processes. On the other hand, new business models expose various risks, such as cyber risks, operational risks, regulatory risks, and others. Therefore, we believe that the entrepreneurial behavior and global mindset of decision-makers significantly contribute to the development of innovations, which benefit by closing the prevailing gap between developed and developing countries. Thus, this Special Issue contributes to closing the research gap in the literature by providing a platform for a scientific debate on innovation, internationalization and entrepreneurship, which would facilitate improving the resilience of businesses to future disruptions. Order Your Print Copy
This book uses new ideas and language for understanding how self-organization and complexity trend toward increased efficiency. Different measures for efficiency from multiple disciplines are used to probe the ones that provide the most insight. One major goal is to seek a common framework to trace the increase of efficiency as a measure of the level of organization and evolutionary stage of a complex system. The chapters come from a satellite meeting hosted at the Conference on Complex Systems, in Cancun, 2017. The contributions will be peer-reviewed and contributors from outside the conference will be invited to submit chapters to ensure full coverage of the topics. This text will appeal to students and researchers working on complex systems and efficiency.
