VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Twindividuality

3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics

Schinckus, Christophe. Introduction to Econophysics. Contemporary Physics. 54/1, 2013. A University of Leicester researcher joins two main approaches in this field which finds affinities across the span from condensed matter to finance and commerce. In regard “agent-based modeling” and “statistical econophysics” avail mutual insights into the dynamic commonalities between universe and human.

Agent-based model is complementary to a strictly statistical perspective of econophysics: on the one hand, a statistical approach gives us a lot of quantatitive information about macro-regularities observed in real complex economic systems by contributing to an increasing awareness of statistical properties such as power tails of distributions, temporal scaling of volatility, fractality of time, etc. On the other hand, agent-based modeling provides micro-foundations for the statistical regularities that emerge at the macro-level of the socio-economic systems. (21)

Schlapfer, Markus, et al. The Hidden Universality of Movement in Cities. arXiv:2002.06070. In their analytical studies, SFI, MIT, and ETH Zurich researchers including Geoffrey West report coming upon what seems to be a widely evident mathematical pattern which appears to orient and constrain all manner of urban movements. Our interest then extends to such a finding itself whence “universal, recurrent laws” seem exist at all on their independent own.

The interaction of all mobile species with their environment hinges on movement patterns: the places they visit and how often they go there. For urban areas the dynamic and diverse movement of people affects every aspect of social interactions, disease spreading, infrastructure, productivity, innovation and technology. However, the laws that govern the spatio-temporal structure of movement in cities, and various population flows to specific locations have remained elusive. Here we show that behind the apparent complexity, a simple universal scaling relation drives the flow of individuals to any location based on frequency of visitation and distance travelled. We demonstrate that population flows obey this theoretical prediction from Europe and America to Asia and Africa. (Abstract excerpt)

Schweitzer, Frank and Dirk Helbing, eds. Economic Dynamics from the Physics Point of View. Physica A. 287/2, 2000. A special issue to convey that statistical physics which studies the “non-linear interactions of a large number of elements” can equally apply to and describe social activities such as markets and politics. As another version of a Complex Adaptive System, the same scaling and power laws are present everywhere.

Sen, Parongama and Bikas Chakrabarti. Sociophysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. University of Calcutta and Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics scholars achieve a broad introduction to this widely removed integration whence human activities can be joined with and explained by deep principles such as phase transitions, criticality, and fractal percolations. Typical chapters are Opinion Formation in a Society, Of Flocks, Flows and Transports, and Social Phenomena on Complex Networks.

This book discusses the study and analysis of the physical aspects of social systems and models, inspired by the analogy with familiar models of physical systems and possible applications of statistical physics tools. Unlike the traditional analysis of the physics of macroscopic many-body or condensed matter systems, which is now an established and mature subject, the upsurge in the physical analysis and modelling of social systems, which are clearly many-body dynamical systems, is a recent phenomenon. Though the major developments in sociophysics have taken place only recently, the earliest attempts of proposing "Social Physics" as a discipline are more than one and a half centuries old. Various developments in the mainstream physics of condensed matter systems have inspired and induced the recent growth of sociophysical analysis and models.

Sharma, Kiran, et al. A Complex Network Analysis of Ethnic Conflicts and Human Rights Violations. Nature Scientific Reports. 7/8283, 2017. A seven person team from the School of Computational and Integrative Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and TCS Research, New Delhi, quantify how even such seemingly chaotic, violent, awful events can yet be found to manifestly exhibit common mathematical forms.

News reports in media contain records of a wide range of socio-economic and political events in time. Using a publicly available, large digital database of news records, and aggregating them over time, we study the network of ethnic conflicts and human rights violations. Complex network analyses of the events and the involved actors provide important insights on the engaging actors, groups, establishments and sometimes nations, pointing at their long range effect over space and time. We find power law decays in distributions of actor mentions, co-actor mentions and degrees and dominance of influential actors and groups. Most influential actors or groups form a giant connected component which grows in time, and is expected to encompass all actors globally in the long run. We demonstrate how targeted removal of actors may help stop spreading unruly events. We study the cause-effect relation between types of events, and our quantitative analysis confirm that ethnic conflicts lead to human rights violations, while it does not support the converse. (Abstract)

Sharma, Kiran, et al. Financial Fluctuations Anchored to Economic Fundamentals: A Mesoscopic Network Approach. Nature Scientific Reports. 7/8055, 2017. Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Indian Institute of Management computational scientists offer a sophisticated example of how much complexity theories are being found to be equally ingrained in commercial markets as everywhere else. See also A Complex Network Analysis of Ethnic Conflicts and Human Rights Violations by Kiran Sharma, et al in the same journal (7/8283, 2017) for still another hyper-domain.

We demonstrate the existence of an empirical linkage between nominal financial networks and the underlying economic fundamentals, across countries. We construct the nominal return correlation networks from daily data to encapsulate sector-level dynamics and infer the relative importance of the sectors in the nominal network through measures of centrality and clustering algorithms. Eigenvector centrality robustly identifies the backbone of the minimum spanning tree defined on the return networks as well as the primary cluster in the multidimensional scaling map. We show that the sectors that are relatively large in size, defined with three metrics, viz., market capitalization, revenue and number of employees, constitute the core of the return networks, whereas the periphery is mostly populated by relatively smaller sectors. Therefore, sector-level nominal return dynamics are anchored to the real size effect, which ultimately shapes the optimal portfolios for risk management. Our results are reasonably robust across 27 countries of varying degrees of prosperity and across periods of market turbulence (2008–09) as well as periods of relative calmness (2012–13 and 2015–16) (Abstract)

Stanley, Eugene, et al. Quantifying Fluctuations in Economic Systems by Adapting Methods of Statistical Physics. Physica A. 287/2, 2000. Independent dynamic principles are active from matter to markets which further describes a correlative reality where the same phenomena recurs at every instance. Stanley is a founder of the new field of “econophysics,” which now has a dedicated section in this journal.

Recently, it has come to be appreciated that many such systems which consist of a large number of interacting subunits obey universal laws that are independent of the microscopic details. The finding, in physical systems, of universal properties that do not depend on the specific form of the interactions gives rise to the intriguing hypothesis that universal laws or results may also be present in economic and social systems. (340)

Stock, Gregory. Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Although heavy on technology, a proficient survey of a planetary metabolism and its evolving brain.

Strano, Emanuele, et al. The Scaling Structure of the Global Road Network. Royal Society Open Science. October, 2017. As a regnant humankinder proceeds to recognize and measure her/his nascent self, Harvard, MIT, University of North Carolina, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and École Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne researchers avail new capacities of Google Earth surveys to discern metabolic anatomy and physiology circulation systems.

Because of increasing global urbanization and its immediate consequences, including changes in patterns of food demand, circulation and land use, the next century will witness a major increase in the extent of paved roads built worldwide. To model the effects of this increase, it is crucial to understand whether possible self-organized patterns are inherent in the global road network structure. Here, we use the largest updated database comprising all major roads on the Earth, together with global urban and cropland inventories, to suggest that road length distributions within croplands are indistinguishable from urban ones. Such similarity extends to road length distributions within urban or agricultural domains of a given area. Scaling regimes suggest that simple and universal mechanisms regulate urban and cropland road expansion at the global scale. As such, our findings bear implications for global road infrastructure growth based on land-use change and for planning policies sustaining urban expansions. (Abstract excerpt)

Tachet, Remi, et al. Scaling Law of Urban Ride Sharing. Nature Scientific Reports. 7/42868, 2017. MIT, Senseable City Lab informatics, scientists, along with the Cornell University’s Steven Strogatz, find that this hyperactive service yet can be found to manifest common mathematical regularities. If their intrinsic, formative presence can be discerned and availed it could much improve its public use.

Sharing rides could drastically improve the efficiency of car and taxi transportation. Unleashing such potential, however, requires understanding how urban parameters affect the fraction of individual trips that can be shared, a quantity that we call shareability. Using data on millions of taxi trips in New York City, San Francisco, Singapore, and Vienna, we compute the shareability curves for each city, and find that a natural rescaling collapses them onto a single, universal curve. We explain this scaling law theoretically with a simple model that predicts the potential for ride sharing in any city, using a few basic urban quantities and no adjustable parameters. Accurate extrapolations of this type will help planners, transportation companies, and society at large to shape a sustainable path for urban growth. (Abstract)

Taylor, Mark. Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Along the way to his novel rethinking of theology via complex adaptive systems science, they are adroitly employed, some 4 years too early to catch the wave, to get a better handle on financial frenzies. The last chapter does engage deism with a timeline from original Monistic (present, immanent) to Dualistic (absent, transcendent) to current Complex (neither absent or present, transcendent or immanent), but alas without any hope for a Divine bailout.

Life in all its complexity remains a confidence game in which the abiding challenge is not to find redemption but to learn to live without it. (13) When understood as complex adaptive systems, webs and networks are self-reflexive structures. That is to say, individual agents and systems – be they social, political, religious, or economic – are interrelated in such a way that neither can exist without the other. (284) In the final analysis, the problem is not to find redemption from a world that often seems dark but to learn to live without redemption in a world where the interplay of light and darkness creates infinite shades of difference, which are inescapably disruptive, overwhelming beautiful, and infinitely complex. (331)

Tirico, Michele, et al. Morphogenesis of Street Networks: A Reaction-Diffusion System for Self-Organized Cities. arXiv:2111.03544. Normandy University complexity scholars provide a latest explanation based on Alan Turing’s mathematical programs, as they become verified everywhere so it seems, of how even active urban topologies can similarly be found to take on a metabolic, super-organism-like essence. Some 75 years later, might such an advent of a dynamic global knowledge ever mitigate and save us.

Urban morphogenesis is the process of formation of its elements and the specialization of its suburbs. Street networks are the structural part of the system. Understand their formation reveals crucial information about urban transformation and dynamics behind its functioning. In this work we focus on the morphogenesis of street networks and we study it through a spatial network generator model. This latter is composed by three layers (a reaction-diffusion layer, a dynamic vector field and a spatial network) surrounded by an environment. The emerging network feeds back to its morphogenetic elements, driving the model to an unexpected behaviour. (Abstract)

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