• Rational Irrationality - The real reason that capitalism is so crash prone by John Cassidy - The New Yorker - October 6, 2009
• Steven Strogatz on sync - TED Talk - See also Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks.

Networks of coupled dynamical systems have been used to model ... and many other self-organizing systems. Ordinarily, the connection topology is assumed to be either completely regular or completely random. But many biological, technological and social networks lie somewhere between these two extremes. Here we explore simple models of networks that can be tuned through this middle ground: regular networks 'rewired' to introduce increasing amounts of disorder. We find that these systems can be highly clustered, like regular lattices, yet have small characteristic path lengths, like random graphs. We call them 'small-world' networks, by analogy with the small-world phenomenon (popularly 6 degrees of separation. The neural network of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the power grid of the western United States, and the collaboration graph of film actors are shown to be small-world networks.

Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Alva Noe, author of the book Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, in which he challenges the assumptions underlying neuroscientific studies of consciousness.

1. created mathematical models of data coming from mobile devices and an algorithm that analyzed this data from his sample of 100 students and could predict what each would do next. ..he has been working with much larger mobile data sets from up to 250 million people in Europe, Asia, and Africa to help telecom companies ..understand their customers and .. create a model of contagion dissemination. 2. past two years in Kenya. The majority of the mobile phone user market lives in developing countries and is under-served, a condition which motivated MIT to start EPROM, Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles, to make sure computer science students in Africa learn how to program mobile phones. ..describes 2 .. projects... – one in which mobile text messaging has been used for hospital blood supply management across the country and a second in which an SMS bulletin board was created allowing low-end mobile handsets to access web content similar to craigslist."