"When a handful of people thrive while whole industries implode and millions suffer, it is clear that something is wrong with our economy. The wealth of the few is disconnected from the misery of the many. In Civilizing the Economy, Marvin Brown traces the origin of this economics of dissociation to early capitalism, showing how this is illustrated in Adam Smith's denial of the central role of slavery in wealth creation. In place of the Smithian economics of property, Brown proposes that we turn to the original meaning of economics as household management. He presents a new framework for the global economy that reframes its purpose as the making of provisions instead of the accumulation of property. This bold new vision establishes the civic sphere as the platform for organizing an inclusive economy and as a way to move toward a more just and sustainable world."

To be clear, I'd like to think (pretty much) all this will come true. But respectful mention of Kurzweil (!) is not exactly a sign of a properly calibrated bullshit meter.

Judging from the table of contents (which is unfair), a weird mix of reviewing truly elementary concepts and some actually interesting stuff. (And yes, I know who Bonacich is.)

"In this paper we use the Birkhoff–von Neumann decomposition of the diffusion kernel to compute a polytopal measure of graph complexity. We decompose the diffusion kernel into a series of weighted Birkhoff combinations and compute the entropy associated with the weighting proportions (polytopal complexity). The maximum entropy Birkhoff combination can be expressed in terms of matrix permanents. This allows us to introduce a phase-transition principle that links our definition of polytopal complexity to the heat flowing through the network at a given diffusion time. The result is an efficiently computed complexity measure, which we refer to as flow complexity. Moreover, the flow complexity measure allows us to analyze graphs and networks in terms of the thermodynamic depth. We compare our method with three alternative methods described in the literature (Estrada's heterogeneity index, the Laplacian energy, and the von Neumann entropy). Our study is based on 217 protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks including histidine kinases from several species of bacteria. We find a correlation between structural complexity and phylogeny (more evolved species have statistically more complex PPIs). Although our methods outperform the alternatives, we find similarities with Estrada's heterogeneity index in terms of network size independence and predictive power."

Based on his previous (pre-crash) _New Financial Order_, this will be Utopian in the worst sense.

"Disentangling the effects of selection and influence is one of social science's greatest unsolved puzzles: Do people befriend others who are similar to them, or do they become more similar to their friends over time? Recent advances in stochastic actor-based modeling, combined with self-reported data on a popular online social network site, allow us to address this question with a greater degree of precision than has heretofore been possible. Using data on the Facebook activity of a cohort of college students over 4 years, we find that students who share certain tastes in music and in movies, but not in books, are significantly likely to befriend one another. Meanwhile, we find little evidence for the diffusion of tastes among Facebook friends—except for tastes in classical/jazz music. These findings shed light on the mechanisms responsible for observed network homogeneity; provide a statistically rigorous assessment of the coevolution of cultural tastes and social relationships; and suggest important qualifications to our understanding of both homophily and contagion as generic social processes."

It will be interested to see how they argue this isn't confounded six ways from Sunday.

"The effects of homophily and social influence suggest that both network structure and node attribute information can inform the tasks of link prediction and node attribute inference. However, the algorithmic question of how to efficiently incorporate these two sources of information remains largely unanswered. In this paper, we propose a Social-Attribute Network (SAN) model that gracefully integrates node attributes with network structure to predict network links and infer node attributes. We adapt several leading unsupervised link prediction algorithms to the SAN model and demonstrate performance improvement for each algorithm. We also generalize these algorithms to infer node attributes via the SAN model and show that we can further improve link prediction accuracy by first inferring attributes for nodes with missing attributes. We evaluate these algorithms on a novel Google+ network dataset and achieve state- of-the-art performance, thus demonstrating that the SAN model effectively integrates network structure and node attribute data."

"The recent financial crisis was an accident, a “perfect storm” fueled by an unforeseeable confluence of events that unfortunately combined to bring down the global financial systems. And policy makers? They did everything they could, given their limited authority. It was all a terrible, unavoidable accident. Or at least this is the story told and retold by a chorus of luminaries that includes Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, and Alan Greenspan.

In Guardians of Finance, economists James Barth, Gerard Caprio, and Ross Levine argue that the financial meltdown of 2007 to 2009 was no accident; it was negligent homicide. They show that senior regulatory officials around the world knew or should have known that their policies were destabilizing the global financial system, had years to process the evidence that risks were rising, had the authority to change their policies--and yet chose not to act until the crisis had fully emerged.

The current system, the authors write, is simply not designed to make policy choices on behalf of the public. It is virtually impossible for the public and its elected officials to obtain informed and impartial assessment of financial regulation and to hold regulators accountable. Barth, Caprio, and Levine propose a reform to counter this systemic failure: the establishment of a “Sentinel” to provide an informed, expert, and independent assessment of financial regulation. Its sole power would be to demand information and to evaluate it from the perspective of the public--rather than that of the financial industry, the regulators, or politicians."

--- I quite fail to see how this would solve the problem.

"Large scale complex networks in natural, social, and technological systems generically exhibit an overabundance of rich information. Extracting essential and meaningful structural features from network data is one of the most challenging tasks in network theory. In this context, a variety of methods and concepts have been proposed, including centrality statistics, motif identification, community detection algorithms, hierarchical models, and backbone-extraction methods. Typically these classification schemes rely on external and often arbitrary parameters, such as centrality thresholds. However, parameter-dependent classifications are often problematic, since the resulting classifications of network elements depend sensitively on the parameter, and it is also unknown whether typical networks permit the classification of elements without external intervention. Here we introduce the concept of link salience, a parameter-free approach for classifying network elements based on a consensus estimate of all nodes. We show that a wide range of empirical networks exhibit a natural, network-implicit, and robust classification of links into two qualitatively distinct groups. We show that despite significant differences in the networks' tologogy and statistical features, their salient skeletons exhibit universal topological and statistical features. In addition to a parameter- free method for network reduction, link salience points the way towards a better understanding of universal, hidden features in real world networks that are masked by their complexity."

"new interpretation of Spinoza’s iconoclastic philosophy, Hasana Sharp draws on his uncompromising naturalism to rethink human agency, ethics, and political practice. Sharp uses Spinoza to outline a practical wisdom of “renaturalization,” showing how ideas, actions, and institutions are never merely products of human intention or design, but outcomes of the complex relationships among natural forces beyond our control. This lack of a metaphysical or moral division between humanity and the rest of nature, Sharp contends, can provide the basis for an ethical and political practice free from the tendency to view ourselves as either gods or beasts." --- Umm, how is viewing Spinoza as a thorough-going naturalist at all _new_, let alone something which forces us to invoke feminist theory and (God, or Nature, save us) Marxism?

TBSAAFT, but if they have experiments where perceptual tasks interfere with motor ones and vice versa, they've pretty much nailed a common bottleneck.  Whether that's anatomically localized is interesting to know, but there's no reason a unified bottleneck couldn't be anatomically distributed.  Conversely, without such an experiment, all they'd have is some localization of _two separate_ bottlenecks in anatomically close parts of the brain.  So fMRI seems strictly irrelevant to whether there's a unified bottleneck.

"We combine the replica approach of statistical physics with a variational technique to make it applicable for the analysis of machine learning algorithms on real data. The method is applied to Gaussian process models and their relative, the support vector machine. We discuss the quality of our theoretical results in comparison to experiments. As a key result, we apply our theory on real world benchmark data and show its potential for practical applications by deriving approximate expressions for data averaged performance measures which hold for general data distributions and allow us to optimize the performance of the learning algorithm."

!!!  (After all, "supervenes on" just means "is a function of".)

I am deeply suspicious, from the abstract.

Is this a joke?

"We introduce a broad class of analytically solvable processes on networks. In the special case, they reduce to random walk and consensus process, the two most basic processes on networks. Our class differs from previous models of interactions (such as the stochastic Ising model, cellular automata, infinite particle systems, and the voter model) in several ways, the two most important being (i) the model is analytically solvable even when the dynamical equation for each node may be different and the network may have an arbitrary finite graph and influence structure and (ii) when local dynamics is described by the same evolution equation, the model is decomposable, with the equilibrium behavior of the system expressed as an explicit function of network topology and node dynamics."

I am going to presume that there is something more to this than "hey! we can make the coupling weights of a linear system into a matrix", but from the abstract I can't tell what that is.

"We tend to see history and evolution springing from separate roots, one grounded in the human world and the other in the natural world. Human beings have, however, become probably the most powerful species shaping evolution today, and human-caused evolution in other species has probably been the most important force shaping human history. This book introduces readers to evolutionary history, a new field that unites history and biology to create a fuller understanding of the past than either can produce on its own. Evolutionary history can stimulate surprising new hypotheses for any field of history and evolutionary biology. How many art historians would have guessed that sculpture encouraged the evolution of tuskless elephants? How many biologists would have predicted that human poverty would accelerate animal evolution? How many military historians would have suspected that plant evolution would convert a counter-insurgency strategy into a rebel subsidy? ..."

I will give this a fair shot, but the abstract is not promising at all.  A great fit to the one-factor model is, after all, precisely what you should expect if there are really an immense number of factors, but your measurement procedures are all crap and depend on random subsets of them.  (Perhaps I need to turn http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html into a proper paper after all.)

Judging from the abstract, Yet Another Rediscovery of the Yule-Simon Mechanism.

"We introduce an information theoretic measure of statistical structure, called 'binding information', for sets of random variables, and compare it with several previously proposed measures including excess entropy, Bialek et al.'s predictive information, and the multi-information. We derive some of the properties of the binding information, particularly in relation to the multi-information, and show that, for finite sets of binary random variables, the processes which maximises binding information are the 'parity' processes. Finally we discuss some of the implications this has for the use of the binding information as a measure of complexity."

Preprint. Walrasian model with "self-fulfilling waves of optimism and pessimism", through information asymmetries and imperfect communication. (In other words: adding another shock term.)  I am dubious as to its relevance.

Errr --- isn't this all standard information-geometry stuff? But Sethna and Machta are people who usually know what they're talking about...

"This paper addresses the statistical significance of structures in random data: Given a set of vectors and a measure of mutual similarity, how likely does a subset of these vectors form a cluster with enhanced similarity among its elements? The computation of this cluster p-value for randomly distributed vectors is mapped onto a well-defined problem of statistical mechanics. We solve this problem analytically, establishing a connection between the physics of quenched disorder and multiple testing statistics in clustering and related problems. In an application to gene expression data, we find a remarkable link between the statistical significance of a cluster and the functional relationships between its genes"

"Current research on the origin of life aims at finding the simplest entity that can undergo spontaneous Darwinian evolution toward increasing replication efficiency. Here I consider some of the models of self-replicating molecular systems, and I show that they exhibit a distinct feature, namely, an infinity of stationary states forming a continuous curve; i.e., they are only marginally stable. I show that, in marginally stable chemical systems, thermodynamic fluctuations induce a drift directed toward increasing replication efficiency. This drift represents a form of evolution, taking place slowly, cooperatively, in macroscopic volumes of water."

This sounds an _awful lot_ like Lee & Wasserman in arxiv:0811.0121.  Also: no actual time.

"The entropy of an ergodic source is the limit of properly rescaled 1-block entropies of sources obtained applying successive non-sequential recursive pairs substitutions. In this paper we prove that the cross entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence can be obtained in a similar way." --- The first two authors were among those responsible for the awful "Language Trees and Zipping" paper (cond-mat/0108530), hence my second tag.

???? How is a VLMC not a source by definition? I can't tell what on earth they're doing from their abstract...

The abstract makes this sound closely akin to good old-fashioned Lloyd-Pagels thermodynamic depth.

I don't see how what they are promising could possibly be true in the generality which they also promise, but "to be shot after a fair trial".

" we need to take a new tack, moving away from reliance on centralized, top-down approaches—the treaties and accords that have proved disappointingly ineffective thus far—and towards a more flexible, multi-level approach. Based in the principles of adaptive governance—which are designed to produce programs that adapt quickly and easily to new information and experimental results—such an approach would encourage diversity and innovation in the search for solutions, while at the same time pointedly recasting the problem as one in which every culture and community around the world has an inherent interest."

"n the first part of this article we will formulate postulates, which must be satisfied by a reasonable concept of emergence. The postulates will articulate conditions of adequacy for an appropriate explication of the concept of emergence. These conditions of adequacy are based primarily upon the philosophical and scientific history of the concept of emergence, in which the intended role of the concept is expressed. In the second part we will discuss and evaluate some candidates for the concept of emergence in light of these conditions of adequacy."

"The world is complex, but acknowledging its complexity requires an appreciation for the many roles context plays in shaping natural phenomena.... deference to reductive explanations founded on simple universal laws, linear causal models, and predict-and-act strategies fails to accommodate the kinds of knowledge that many contemporary sciences [provide] about the world. ... new understanding that represents the rich, variegated, interdependent fabric of many levels and kinds of explanation that ... ground effective prediction and action. ... draws from diverse fields including psychiatry, social insect biology, and studies of climate change to defend ... a theory of scientific practices that makes sense of how [sciences] represent multi-level, multi-component, dynamic structures ... must revise how we conceptualize the world, how we investigate the world, and how we act in the world. ... the very idea of what should count as legitimate science itself should change."

"all institutions are syncretic, ... composed of an indeterminate number of features, which are decomposable and recombinable in unpredictable ways. ... action within institutions is always potentially creative, ... draw[ing] on [many] cultural and institutional resources to create novel combinations. [This is] creative syncretism. ... existing accounts of institutional change, which are rooted in structuralism, produce excess complexity and render the most important sources and results of change invisible. ... we need [to explain] how people live institutional rules. We find that grounding in John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of habit. ... a field guide to creative syncretism. It uses an experiential approach to provide novel insights on three problems that have occupied institutionalist research: periodization in American political development, convergence among advanced capitalist democracies, and institutional change in developing countries."

"We propose a broad generalization of standard choice-theoretic welfare economics that encompasses a wide variety of nonstandard behavioral models. Our approach exploits the coherent aspects of choice that those positive models typically attempt to capture. It replaces the standard revealed preference relation with an unambiguous choice relation: roughly, x is (strictly) unambiguously chosen over y (written xP*y) iff y is never chosen when x is available. Under weak assumptions, P* is acyclic and therefore suitable for welfare analysis; it is also the most discerning welfare criterion that never overrules choice. The resulting framework generates natural counterparts for the standard tools of applied welfare economics and is easily applied in the context of specific behavioral theories, with novel implications. Though not universally discerning, it lends itself to principled refinements."

I am no great friend of patents, but already from the abstract I am suspicious. With the knapsack problem, everyone understands from the beginning what the goal is, what counts as a solution, and the range of all possible solutions. Technological discovery is NOT LIKE THIS AT ALL. I suspect we are back at "assume a can-opener/complete set of markets", which was fine for Arrow and Debreu doing moral philosophy, but not to be taken seriously. Still: the first tag applies.

From the abstract, they seem to be inviting all kinds of false discoveries. We'll see...

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this just Amari (1967)?

Sounds suspiciously like they're rediscovering the connection between random walks and stable distributions.

If it were anyone but Dante...

Not clear from their abstract if they realize that statisticians _have_ been looking at networks.

Oh sweet heaven no: "We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We examine the empirical relationship between the occurrence of interstate conflicts and the degree of relatedness between countries, showing that populations that are genetically closer are more prone to go to war with each other, even after controlling for a wide set of measures of geographic distance and other factors that affect conflict, including measures of trade and democracy."

"The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology however its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to result from ubiquitous imperatives in energy transduction.
From a thermodynamic point of view, organisms are transduction mechanisms that distribute an influx of energy down along the steepest gradients to the ecosystem's diverse repositories of chemical energy, i.e., populations of species. Transduction machineries, i.e. ecosystems assembled from numerous species, may emerge and evolve toward high efficiency on large areas that hold more matter than small ones. This results in the well-known logistic-like relationship between the area and the number of species."

I'm kinda dubious from the abstract.

Of course, given the provenance one _does_ have to worry about the quality of the data analysis...

Someone from the Mercatus Center argues against regulation. In other news, cooks prepare food.

The abstract makes me go "ummm...." Is he seriously suggesting that Jensen's inequality would break if physics were different?

"first comprehensive account of the evolutionary origins of art and storytelling. ... explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to stories we love. Art is a specifically human adaptation ... offers tangible advantages for human survival, ... derives from play, itself an adaptation widespread among more intelligent animals. More particularly, our fondness for storytelling has sharpened social cognition, encouraged cooperation, and fostered creativity. ... examines Homer’s Odyssey and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! ... What triggers our emotional engagement with these works? What patterns facilitate our responses? The need to hold an audience’s attention, Boyd underscores, is the fundamental problem facing all storytellers. Enduring artists arrive at solutions that appeal to cognitive universals". - Someone at Harvard UP really likes the "evol psych of literature" genre.

"Flesch integrates evolutionary psychology into literary studies, creating a new theory of fiction in which form and content flawlessly intermesh. Fiction, Flesch contends, gives us our most powerful way of making sense of the social world. Comeuppance begins with an exploration of the appeal of gossip and ends with an account of how we can think about characters and care about them as much as about persons we know to be real. We praise a storyteller who contrives a happy or at least an appropriate ending, and fault the writer who refuses us one. Flesch uses Darwinian theory to show how fiction satisfies our desire to see the good vindicated and the wicked get their comeuppance." --- This would seem to have so many obvious counterexamples that I want to read the book just to watch the train-wreck.

Predation pressure from snakes as the explanation for primate vision, and for human pointing (to focus shared attention) and even language. Curious to see how she explains the fact that _other_ primates, also preyed upon by snakes, do not point or speak.

Soon to be a book from Princeton. On first scan, it doesn't look wrong, exactly, so much as a completely ad hoc parametric form, with no reason to think it will generally be adequate, or evades the fundamental problem that observed correlations do not reflect underlying economic linkages (i.e., regression isn't causal inference). But Engle has a prize and I don't. To be shot after a fair trial.

(The published version has infinitely better typography, but $$$: http://dx.doi.org/10.1198/073500102288618487)

I am dubious.

Huh???

"We obtain an index of the complexity of a random sequence by allowing the role of the measure in classical probability theory to be played by a function we call the generating mechanism. Typically, this generating mechanism will be a finite automata. We generate a set of biased sequences by applying a finite state automata with a specified number, $m$, of states to the set of all binary sequences. Thus we can index the complexity of our random sequence by the number of states of the automata. We detail optimal algorithms to predict sequences generated in this way."

Website on a 1983 book (Verso) supposedly giving a statistical mechanics of capitalist economies, with a semi-Marxist/radical political economy flavor. Dodgy-sounding but interesting enough to flag.
--- The download link given here is dead, but the book seems to be on Scribd; haven't read it.

"increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness"