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Author : Raffaela Baechler Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG Page : 176 pages File Size : 34,3 MB Release : 2016-07-11 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines ISBN : 3110348969
Complexity of grammatical structure has become a center of interest in recent typological and dialectological research. The contributions of the present volume discuss structural complexity from the perspective of language variation and change. Particular attention is paid to the hypothesis that languages and varieties spoken by small, isolated communities tend to display greater complexity than others.
John Tyler Bonner makes a new attack on an old problem: the question of how progressive increase in the size and complexity of animals and plants has occurred. "How is it," he inquires, "that an egg turns into an elaborate adult? How is it that a bacterium, given many millions of years, could have evolved into an elephant?" The author argues that we can understand this progression in terms of natural selection, but that in order to do so we must consider the role of development--or more precisely the role of life cycles--in evolutionary change. In a lively writing style that will be familiar to readers of his work The Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton, 1980), Bonner addresses a general audience interested in biology, as well as specialists in all areas of evolutionary biology. What is novel in the approach used here is the comparison of complexity inside the organism (especially cell differentiation) with the complexity outside (that is, within an ecological community). Matters of size at both these levels are closely related to complexity. The book shows how an understanding of the grand course of evolution can come from combining our knowledge of genetics, development, ecology, and even behavior.
We present results in three areas of Computational Complexity Theory: (1) Complexity of Counting, (2) Decision Tree Complexity, and (3) Space Complexity.
Author : David G. Green Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media Page : 217 pages File Size : 47,6 MB Release : 2006-02-17 Category : Science ISBN : 1402042876
Interactions matter. To understand the distributions of plants and animals in a landscape you need to understand how they interact with each other, and with their environment. The resulting networks of interactions make ecosystems highly complex. Recent research on complexity and artificial life provides many new insights about patterns and processes in landscapes and ecosystems. This book provides the first overview of that work for general readers. It covers such topics as connectivity, criticality, feedback, and networks, as well as their impact on the stability and predictability of ecosystem dynamics. With over 60 years of research experience of both ecology and complexity, the authors are uniquely qualified to provide a new perspective on traditional ecology. They argue that understanding ecological complexity is crucial in today’s globalized and interconnected world. Successful management of the world's ecosystems needs to combine models of ecosystem complexity with biodiversity, environmental, geographic and socioeconomic information.
Language complexity has recently attracted considerable attention from linguists of many different persuasions. This volume a thematic selection of papers from the conference Approaches to Complexity in Language, held in Helsinki, August 2005 is the first collection of articles devoted to the topic. The sixteen chapters of the volume approach the notion of language complexity from a variety of perspectives. The papers are divided into three thematic sections that reflect the central themes of the book: Typology and theory, Contact and change, Creoles and pidgins. The book is mainly intended for typologists, historical linguists, contact linguists and creolists, as well as all linguists interested in language complexity in general. As the first collective volume on a very topical theme, the book is expected to be of lasting interest to the linguistic community.
The Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia of the National Academy of Sciences address scientific topics of broad and current interest, cutting across the boundaries of traditional disciplines. Each year, four or five such colloquia are scheduled, typically two days in length and international in scope. Colloquia are organized by a member of the Academy, often with the assistance of an organizing committee, and feature presentations by leading scientists in the field and discussions with a hundred or more researchers with an interest in the topic. Colloquia presentations are recorded and posted on the National Academy of Sciences Sackler colloquia website and published on CD-ROM. These Colloquia are made possible by a generous gift from Mrs. Jill Sackler, in memory of her husband, Arthur M. Sackler.
The world around us is a complex web of relationships connecting people, companies, countries, cells, or species into a system that provides the context for our daily existence. Given this complexity, it is hard to imagine any interesting problem that can be solved in isolation, i.e. without taking into consideration the adequate representation of both system constituent components and their mutual influences. Under such circumstances, it is imperative that our policies at all levels (local, state, country, the world), intended to regulate such systems, take into consideration this richness of both relevant system elements and relationships among them. Events get even more complicated when we are faced with natural and social systems that include transitions and oscillations among their various phases. A new phase begins when the system reaches a threshold that marks the point of no return. These threshold effects are found all around us. In economics, this could be movement from a bull market to a bear market; in sociology, it could be the spread of political dissent, culminating in rebellion; in biology, the immune response to infection or disease as the body moves from sickness to health; in ecology, it could be an unchecked growth of species due to the removal of a top-level predator in the system; in healthcare, it could be an uneven access to services due to the poorly devised policy regulating health insurance policies. Companies, societies, markets, or humans rarely stay in a stable, predictable state for long. Randomness, power laws, and human behavior ensure that the future is both unknown and challenging. How do events unfold? When do they take hold? Why do some initial events cause an avalanche while others do not? What characterizes these events? What are the thresholds that differentiate a sea change from insignificant variation? And, most importantly, what can we do at the policy level to promote activities that will bring about positive, long-term, and sustainable changes in the system of interest? Many methods and techniques have been developed to deal with the complexity of systems, including systems dynamics, fractals, chaos theory, science of networks, and complexity theory. They provide a powerful set of tools to model and/or simulate phenomena that are characterized by their scale-free and/or small-world network structure, sensitivity to initial conditions, power-law distributions, adaptability, self-organization, feedback loops, and emergent properties. However, applying such tools on any real-world problem will require the mastery of intricacies of both public policy and a wide variety of discipline-specific expertise, working together to uncover principles that both transcend and complement disciplinary contributions. Consequently, the Journal of Policy and Complex Systems focuses on providing the platform where policy makers, experts in relevant disciplines, and modelers will come together to offer scientifically valid and societally appropriate solutions to the most challenging problems facing the world today.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Author : National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Publisher : National Academies Press Page : 317 pages File Size : 44,37 MB Release : 2020-05-14 Category : Social Science ISBN : 0309671035
Social isolation and loneliness are serious yet underappreciated public health risks that affect a significant portion of the older adult population. Approximately one-quarter of community-dwelling Americans aged 65 and older are considered to be socially isolated, and a significant proportion of adults in the United States report feeling lonely. People who are 50 years of age or older are more likely to experience many of the risk factors that can cause or exacerbate social isolation or loneliness, such as living alone, the loss of family or friends, chronic illness, and sensory impairments. Over a life course, social isolation and loneliness may be episodic or chronic, depending upon an individual's circumstances and perceptions. A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that social isolation presents a major risk for premature mortality, comparable to other risk factors such as high blood pressure, smoking, or obesity. As older adults are particularly high-volume and high-frequency users of the health care system, there is an opportunity for health care professionals to identify, prevent, and mitigate the adverse health impacts of social isolation and loneliness in older adults. Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults summarizes the evidence base and explores how social isolation and loneliness affect health and quality of life in adults aged 50 and older, particularly among low income, underserved, and vulnerable populations. This report makes recommendations specifically for clinical settings of health care to identify those who suffer the resultant negative health impacts of social isolation and loneliness and target interventions to improve their social conditions. Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults considers clinical tools and methodologies, better education and training for the health care workforce, and dissemination and implementation that will be important for translating research into practice, especially as the evidence base for effective interventions continues to flourish.