"The questions this report seeks to answer are how an organization that manages public funds for research and extension could sustain organizational innovations over extended periods, and how it could learn and adapt to maximize its impact on the agricultural innovation system. Previous studies found that human resources, organizational cultures and governance structures are three of the most important factors influencing institutional change and innovative capabilities. Despite their importance, these factors have been largely neglected in the literature on agricultural research and extension policies. This document analyzes what role these factors played in the Mexican experience"

"A complex system is a system composed of many interacting parts, often called agents, which displays collective behavior that does not follow trivially from the behaviors of the individual parts. Examples include condensed matter systems, ecosystems, stock markets and economies, biological evolution, and indeed the whole of human society. Substantial progress has been made in the quantitative understanding of complex systems, particularly since the 1980s, using a combination of basic theory, much of it derived from physics, and computer simulation. The subject is a broad one, drawing on techniques and ideas from a wide range of areas. Here I give a survey of the main themes and methods of complex systems science and an annotated bibliography of resources, ranging from classic papers to recent books and reviews."

"In my next several blog posts I want to talk about scaling, especially about the very recent controversies surrounding claims of power-law scaling of particular phenomena [...] All this is going to require some forays into the wild and unruly land of statistics and data analysis. My goal in the next series of posts is to make sense of the following quite important papers in complex systems, which, taken together, form a kind of mini-course on scaling. Understanding ideas from these papers is essential in one’s education as a complex-systems scientist or informed “consumer” of this field."

Review: "The book is a tour around the paradigms used by scientists in Complex Systems. While normal science is about using and re-using the paradigms without much creativity or true aportation to knowledge or understanding, the situation is worse in complex systems, since, as an emerging area it has multiple (competing?) paradigms, to the point that it is not possible to define a "complex system" in a form that encompases all the paradigms. The book certainly does not solve this problem, yet the author acknowledges the difficulty present in saying what a complex system is.
Complex systems is not an area of research but a community of researchers united by their interests.
The book is then a compilation of the "how to" and the believes for each paradigm, several of them carry very little science and have left the idea of "refutation" burried under piles of meaningless papers. Not surprissingly, some authors claim that complex systems is a postmodern science. Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems. And truly, the complex systems of Bar-Yam are only possible after we have buried reason and have accepted that science has nothing to do with truth.
Too much for me, not a book I recommend to my students.

"Abstract. Although classical economic theory is based on the concept of stable equilibrium, real economic systems appear to be always out of equilibrium. Indeed, they share many of the dynamical features of other complex systems, e.g., ecological food-webs. We focus on the relation between increasing complexity of the economic network and its stability with respect to small perturbations in the dynamical variables associated with the constituent nodes. Inherent delays and multiple time-scales suggest that economic systems will be more likely to exhibit instabilities as their complexity is increased even though the speed at which transactions are conducted has increased many-fold through technological developments. Analogous to the birth of nonlinear dynamics from Poincare’s work on the question of whether the solar system is stable, we suggest that similar theoretical developments may arise from efforts by econophysicists to understand the mechanisms by which instabilities arise in the economy."

Series: New Economic Windows
Faggini, Marisa; Lux, Thomas (Eds.)
2009, XIV, 170 p.
Hardcover, ISBN 978-88-470-1082-6

Scoones, I., Leach, M., Smith, A., Stagl, S., Stirling, A. and Thompson, J.
(2007) Dynamic Systems and the Challenge of Sustainability, STEPS Working Paper 1,
Brighton: STEPS Centre

S.3.3. "This section considers the incorporation of risk preferences and personality traits into the decision-making of the agents. This topic does not appear to be a well developed area of agent-based models in agriculture. There are a few papers that have modelled risk in their agents, thus these equations could be used to construct agents with different levels of
riskiness."

"We introduce a mechanism for generating power law distributions, referred to as highly optimized tolerance (HOT), which is motivated by biological organisms and advanced engineering technologies. Our focus is on systems which are optimized, either through natural selection or engineering design, to provide robust performance despite uncertain environments. We suggest that power laws in these systems are due to tradeos between yield, cost of resources, and tolerance to risks. These tradeos lead to highly optimized designs that allow for occasional large events. We investigate the mechanism in the context of percolation and sand pile models in order emphasize the sharp contrasts between HOT and self organized criticality (SOC), which has been widely suggested as the origin for power laws in complex systems. Like SOC, HOT produces power laws. However, compared to SOC, HOT states exist for densities which are higher than the critical density, and the power laws are not restricted to special values of the density.
The characteristic features of HOT systems include: (1) high eciency, performance, and robustness to designed-for uncertainties, (2) hypersensitivity to design aws and unanticipated perturbations, (3) nongeneric, specialized, structured congurations, and (4) power laws. The rst three of these are in contrast to the traditional hallmarks of criticality, and are obtained by simply adding the element of design to percolation and sand pile models, which completely changes their characteristics."

Score. Much of the material that Bryan presented to us two weeks ago.

"The dynamic network of relationships among corporations underlies cascading economic failures including the current economic crisis, and can be inferred from correlations in market value fluctuations. We analyze the time dependence of the network of correlations to reveal the changing relationships among the financial, technology, and basic materials sectors with rising and falling markets and resource constraints. The financial sector links otherwise weakly coupled economic sectors, particularly during economic declines. Such links increase economic risk and the extent of cascading failures. Our results suggest that firewalls between financial services for different sectors would reduce systemic risk without hampering economic growth."

"..the first text describing the modern unified study of complex systems. It is designed for upper-undergraduate/beginning graduate-level students, and covers a wide range of applications in a wide array of disciplines."