In an October 13 SFI public lecture, Harvard's Yochai Benkler questions the centuries-old practice of managing people through rewards and punishment and reviews successful institutions that succeed through cooperation. Watch the video here.
Recent advances in biology, linguistics, and computer modeling, along with new archeological finds, prompted SFI to host a September meeting that took a fresh, transdisciplinary look at the peopling of the Americas.
On August 18 in Santa Fe, SFI External Professor Tim Buchman, Emory University School of Medicine, explained how paying closer attention to the electrocardiogram's signal might shed new light on the complex adaptive system that is human health.
Dennis Meadows, who has spent decades studying Earth's capacity
to endure human population growth and extractive economies, says we've
run out of time to turn around our global version of the Titanic...
May 19 through May 21, 2010 in Portland Oregon. The course is an intensive, immersive tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals.
Born Poor ? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it.
Bowles heads the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute, which is home to dozens of big brains imported from all over the world. If he’s right, those troubling job numbers are only the start of New Mexico’s problems. Indeed, if Bowles is right, the state needs to completely rethink the way it does economic development.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010 • 7:30 PM • James A. Little Theater, New Mexico School for the Deaf
The decline and abandonment of many key cities in the Southern Maya Lowlands around A.D. 800 has long attracted scholarly and public attention. While archaeologists now understand – contrary to previous thought – that Maya civilization did not collapse at this time, as a number of Maya cities continued to thrive up until the 16th century Spanish Conquest, the causes of the relatively rapid demise of cities such as Tikal, Palenque, and Copan remain of great interest. New archaeological, epigraphic, and environmental information have enabled archaeologists to form better models that provide more systemic perspectives on this decline than ever before. Sabloff examines the new data and models and discusses their potential relevance to problems facing the world today.