Complexity Digest 2000.43 November-05-2000 Archive: www.comdig.org, European Mirror: www.comdig.de Asian Mirror: http://www.phil.pku.edu.cn/resguide/comdig/ (Chinese GB-Code) "I think the next century will be the century of complexity." Stephen Hawking 1. UCSD Scientists Awarded $3-Million 'Biocomplexity' Grant, UCSD News Release 2. U.S. Proposes Changes In Electricity Marketing In California, NYTimes 3. Measures Of Temporal Pattern Complexity, J. New Music Research 4. Taking A Look Into The Black Box Of Complex Physiological Systems, Ieee Trans. Biomed. Eng 5. How To Measure Oxidative DNA Damage In Nutritional Studies, Am.J. Clin. Nutrition 6. Complexity Of Activities And Personality, Social Psychology Quarterly 7. Insect Immune Systems Targets Heat Shock Protein, Wistar Institute/Science Daily 8. Worldwide Transfer Of Microorganism Facilitated By Ballast Water, National Sea Grant College/Science Daily 9. Abnormal Pain Memory Helps To Explain Fibromyalgia, Am. Coll. Rheumatology/Science Daily 10. Study Shows Way To Grow New Blood Vessels In The Heart, Ohio State Univ/Science Daily 11. Transplanted Human Stem Cells Develop Into Broad Range Of Tissues, Children's Hosp.Phil./Science Daily 12. Fundamental Decision-Making Unit Of Cells, UCSF/Science Daily 13. From Minority Games To Real Markets, arXiv 14. Further Steps Through The Marriage Problem, Author Response 15.Links & Snippets 15.1 Presidential Politics: Constrained By Complexity?, Science 15.2 Of Rice And Men, Science 15.3 New Site Suggests Anasazi Exodus, Science 15.4 Telomere States And Cell Fates, Nature 15.5 Self-Organizing Biochemical Cycles, PNAS 15.6 Neurobiologyhydrodynamic Stimuli And The Fish Lateral Line, Nature 15.7 Bertelsmann, Napster Make Peace, Agree On Music-Sharing Service, WSJ 15.8 As Publishers Perish, Libraries Feel The Pain, NYTimes 1. UCSD Scientists Awarded $3-Million 'Biocomplexity' Grant, UCSD News Release Last year the US National Science foundation launched a new program on 'Biocomplexity'. Now one of the awards goes to Herbert Levine to study one of the classic biological self-organization examples of complex systems, the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum (short: "Dicty"). Like the fruitfly Drosophila and the nematode worm C.elegans, it is also one of the classic biological model organisms. It has inspired StarLogo simulations and its genome is currently analyzed by an international research collaboration. The UCSD lead team is going to take an integrated approach: "In the biocomplexity award to UCSD, physicists, biologists and computational scientists from the two universities will attempt to connect the underlying genetic information about Dictyostelium to its morphology and multicellular organization. This should provide the scientists with a greater understanding of one of the central problems of modern biology: How to form an integrated picture of an organism that connects genetic information to its behavioral responses. "Dictyostelium provides the simplest example of cellular biology mechanisms that go on everywhere," said Herbert Levine, a professor of physics at UCSD who heads the research collaboration. "Its motion and its response to cell signals is characteristic of the way your cells move, but Dictyostelium does it in a much more simple way and in a way you can investigate with genetics. In our investigations of the organism, we will try to bring a level of precision that will enable us to bridge the gap between genomics and multicellular organization."" (бн) "Levine said Dictyostelium was chosen by the scientists because it's the simplest organism in which to study the complex phenomena they hope to investigate, such as the cell's response to external signals that coordinate multicellular development. "Dictyostelium has a solitary lifestyle in which each individual cell is on its own," he added. "But the organisms also go through a developmental cycle in which they cooperate when food becomes scarce-sending each other signals, aggregating together and forming rudimentary multicellular organisms, one of which is a slug that can crawl around looking for a better environment. In the course of this transformation, the organism develops, in the simplest possible form, many of the fundamental mechanisms that work in all molecular biological systems-chemical signaling, cell differentiation in response to external signals. Besides being simple, everything takes place on the time scale of a day and you can genetically engineer all sorts of variations of the individual cells." The UCSD scientists hope to first acquire a large base of genetic knowledge relevant to the development of Dictyostelium, then carry out a new generation of experiments focusing on the cell response to external signals that coordinate multicellular development. Finally, they plan to use computational simulations to tie the genetic with the developmental and behavioral information in a coordinated way." UCSD Scientists Awarded $3-Million 'Biocomplexity' Grant, UCSD News 10/31/00 Biocomplexity Blooms In Nsf's Research Garden, Science The Dictyostelium Virtual Library , World Wide Web Virtual Library, Biosciences Dictyostelium Discoideum Genome Project , Uni Koeln Spiral Waves And Streaming In Slime Mold, John Dallon Workshop On Pattern Formation And Morphogenesis: Model Systems, September 14-18, 1998 2. U.S. Proposes Changes In Electricity Marketing In California, NYTimes For a plain old physicist (not an "econo-physicist") it is sometimes hard to comprehend the intricate rules and laws of market economy. In ComDig 2000.30.1 we have discussed our na?ve opinion about the situation of the electricity market in California that led to high prices and threat of rolling power outages. This seemed to be odd since -from all we have learned about the workings of a market- high prices automatically will lead to a increased supply because more expensive means of production become profitable. In this NYTimes article we find a simple solution to the puzzle: "Currently, utilities can buy and sell power only through the California Power Exchange, a state-run electricity marketplace. The commission has proposed eliminating that requirement so utilities can shop around for long-term electricity contracts, a move most analysts welcomed. (That) "is like going to a car lot and being able to buy only one or two models." Having a state controlled/planned market could explain both the high prices and the short supply: If a producer would offer electricity to the Californian market at a competitive price but would not be admitted by the California Power Exchange that would lead to further increase in price and reduction in supply. Within that restricted "state market" constraint one might also understand the logic of: "(бн) consumer demand for power outstripped supply. As a result, the commission warned, California officials will have to find ways to build more power plants and transmission lines." The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission suggested to lower the price cap for electricity from a quarter per kilowatt hour to 15 cents. (For a comparison: both in neighboring Nevada as well as in Finland electricity prices are well below that cap.) Here "price cap" is defined as the price above which a power supplier has to "explain the reasons for their bid."(sic!). The article does not include a list of acceptable reasons, but from a limited understanding of markets, reasons like: "we want to make top dollars." or "we want to maximize our profits." should be perfectly acceptable. These reasons seem to have been drivers of innovation in the past. There are certainly technical arguments why not everyone with a power generator in the backyard can be allowed to feed electricity into the power grid anytime prices are high enough to make that profitable. But it seems that rules could be developed that focus on protecting the stability of the power grid while extending the range of competitive power suppliers. U.S. Proposes Changes In Electricity Marketing In California, Neela Banerjee, NYTimes,11/2/00 California Electrical System Is On The Verge Of Failure, NYTimes Electric Utility Statistical Database Electricity Prices, Energy Market Authority Finland 3. Measures Of Temporal Pattern Complexity, J. New Music Research In this study, three measures of temporal pattern complexity were compared with regard to their perceptual validity. The first measure, based on the work of Tanguiane (1993), uses the idea that a temporal pattern can be described in terms of (elaborations of) more simple patterns, which occur simultaneously at different levels. The second measure is based on the complexity measure for finite sequences proposed by Lempel and Ziv (1976), which is related to the number of steps in a self-delimiting production process by which such a sequence is presumed to be generated. The third measure, newly developed here, is rooted in the tehoretical framework of rhythm perception of Povel and Essens (1985). it takes into account the ease of coding a temporal pattern and the complexity of the segments resulting from this coding. The perceptual validity of the three measures was evaluated in an experiment in which subjects judged the complexity of 35 temporal patterns. Correlations between the three measures and the collected complexity judgments indicated that the third measure is a much beter predictor of temporal pattern complexity than the other two measures. This is probably due to the fact that this measure, unlike the other two, is -- Huajie Liu, huajie2000@263.net http://www.phil.pku.edu.cn/resguide/comdig/ http://www.phil.pku.edu.cn/personal/huajie/