Related papers: Decoding the International System
Globalization processes interweave economic structures at a worldwide scale, trade playing a central role as one of the elemental channels of interaction among countries. Despite the significance of such phenomena, measuring economic…
Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
A system-of-systems (SoS) is a large information processing system formed by the integration of autonomous computer systems (called constituent systems, CS), physical machines and humans for the purpose of providing new synergistic services…
We develop a discrete-event modeling framework that captures the progression of geophysical systems toward catastrophic failure through sequences of distinct damage events. By representing system evolution as a succession of temporally…
Taking the absolute value of consecutive differences of a cyclicly ordered list of integers constitutes a simple dynamical system. For lists of lenght a power of two the process will terminate in all zeros, but examples with arbitarily long…
The decision process requires information about the present state of the system, but in economy acquiring data and processing them is an expensive and time consuming process. Therefore the state of the system is measured and announced at…
Modern societies face the challenge that the time scale of opinion formation is continuously accelerating in contrast to the time scale of political decision making. With the latter remaining of the order of the election cycle we examine…
The well-defined but intricate course of time evolution exhibited by many naturally occurring phenomena suggests some source of dynamic order sustaining it. In spite of its obviousness as a problem, it has remained absent from the…
We introduce logical synchrony, a framework that allows distributed computing to be coordinated as tightly as in synchronous systems without the distribution of a global clock or any reference to universal time. We develop a model of events…
We study the synchronization of a linear array of globally coupled identical logistic maps. We consider a time-delayed coupling that takes into account the finite velocity of propagation of the interactions. We find globally synchronized…
One can study communications by using Shannon's (1948) mathematical theory of communication. In social communications, however, the channels are not "fixed", but themselves subject to change. Communication systems change by communicating…
The so called "globalization" process (i.e. the inexorable integration of markets, currencies, nation-states, technologies and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole) has a behavior exactly equivalent to a system that…
It is found that Lorenz systems can be unidirectionally coupled such that the chaos expands from the drive system. This is true if the response system is not chaotic, but admits a global attractor, an equilibrium or a cycle. The extension…
The spread of the time arrows from the environment to an observed subsystem is followed within a harmonic model. A similarity is pointed out between irreversibility and a phase with spontaneously broken symmetry. The causal structure of…
Despite considerable scholarly attention on the institutional and normative aspects of development cooperation, its longitudinal dynamics unfolding at the global level have rarely been investigated. Focusing on aid, we examine the evolving…
The recent financial crisis has sharply revealed that current understanding of the global financial system is more than limited. In the recovery plan the confidence in the underlying theory is crucial. To address the problem we propose the…
One 'problem' with the 21st century world, particularly the economic and business worlds, is the phenomenal and increasing number of interconnections between economic agents (consumers, firms, banks, markets, national economies). This…
The major study by Bordo and Helbing (2003) analyses the business cycle in Western economies 1881-2001. They examine four distinct periods in economic history, and conclude that there is a secular trend towards greater synchronisation for…
We investigate the question, "how does time flow?" and show that time may change by inversions as well. We discuss its implications to a simple class of linear systems. Instead of introducing any unphysical behaviour, inversions can lead to…