000 04688nam a22005295i 4500
001 978-3-642-29000-8
003 DE-He213
005 20140220083314.0
007 cr nn 008mamaa
008 120608s2012 gw | s |||| 0|eng d
020 _a9783642290008
_9978-3-642-29000-8
024 7 _a10.1007/978-3-642-29000-8
_2doi
050 4 _aQC1-999
072 7 _aJHBC
_2bicssc
072 7 _aPSAF
_2bicssc
072 7 _aSCI064000
_2bisacsh
082 0 4 _a621
_223
100 1 _aBall, Philip.
_eauthor.
245 1 0 _aWhy Society is a Complex Matter
_h[electronic resource] :
_bMeeting Twenty-first Century Challenges with a New Kind of Science /
_cby Philip Ball.
250 _a1.
264 1 _aBerlin, Heidelberg :
_bSpringer Berlin Heidelberg :
_bImprint: Springer,
_c2012.
300 _a80p. 35 illus. in color.
_bonline resource.
336 _atext
_btxt
_2rdacontent
337 _acomputer
_bc
_2rdamedia
338 _aonline resource
_bcr
_2rdacarrier
347 _atext file
_bPDF
_2rda
505 0 _aSociety: a Complex Problem --   On the Road: Predicting traffic --  Every Move You Make: Patterns of crowd movement -- Making Your Mind Up: Norms and decisions --   Broken Windows: The spread and control of crime -- The Social Web: Networks and their failures.-   Spreading It Around: Mobility, disease and epidemics -- After the Crash: Economic and financial systems --   Love Thy Neighbour: How to foster cooperation -- Living Cities: Urban development as a complex system -- The Transformation of War: Modelling modern conflict -- Towards a Living Earth Simulator: The FuturICT Project.
520 _aSociety is complicated. But this book argues that this does not place it beyond the reach of a science that can help to explain and perhaps even to predict social behaviour. As a system made up of many interacting agents – people, groups, institutions and governments, as well as physical and technological structures such as roads and computer networks – society can be regarded as a complex system. In recent years, scientists have made great progress in understanding how such complex systems operate, ranging from animal populations to earthquakes and weather. These systems show behaviours that cannot be predicted or intuited by focusing on the individual components, but which emerge spontaneously as a consequence of their interactions: they are said to be ‘self-organized’. Attempts to direct or manage such emergent properties generally reveal that ‘top-down’ approaches, which try to dictate a particular outcome, are ineffectual, and that what is needed instead is a ‘bottom-up’ approach that aims to guide self-organization towards desirable states. This book shows how some of these ideas from the science of complexity can be applied to the study and management of social phenomena, including traffic flow, economic markets, opinion formation and the growth and structure of cities. Building on these successes, the book argues that the complex-systems view of the social sciences has now matured sufficiently for it to be possible, desirable and perhaps essential to attempt a grander objective: to integrate these efforts into a unified scheme for studying, understanding and ultimately predicting what happens in the world we have made. Such a scheme would require the mobilization and collaboration of many different research communities, and would allow society and its interactions with the physical environment to be explored through realistic models and large-scale data collection and analysis. It should enable us to find new and effective solutions to major global problems such as conflict, disease, financial instability, environmental despoliation and poverty, while avoiding unintended policy consequences. It could give us the foresight to anticipate and ameliorate crises, and to begin tackling some of the most intractable problems of the twenty-first century.
650 0 _aPhysics.
650 0 _aSocial sciences
_xData processing.
650 0 _aEngineering.
650 0 _aEconomics.
650 0 _aSocial sciences
_xMethodology.
650 1 4 _aPhysics.
650 2 4 _aSocio- and Econophysics, Population and Evolutionary Models.
650 2 4 _aMethodology of the Social Sciences.
650 2 4 _aComplexity.
650 2 4 _aComputer Appl. in Social and Behavioral Sciences.
650 2 4 _aEconomic Systems.
650 2 4 _aCommunication Studies.
710 2 _aSpringerLink (Online service)
773 0 _tSpringer eBooks
776 0 8 _iPrinted edition:
_z9783642289996
856 4 0 _uhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29000-8
912 _aZDB-2-PHA
999 _c102936
_d102936