Complexity Digest's profile

A main characteristic of social media is that its diverse content, copiously generated by both standard outlets and general users, constantly competes for the scarce attention of large audiences. Out of this flood of information some topics manage to get enough attention to become the most popular ones and thus to be prominently displayed as trends. Equally important, some of these trends persist long enough so as to shape part of the social agenda. How this happens is the focus of this paper. Long trend dynamics in social mediaWang C and Huberman BAEPJ Data Science 2012, 1:2 (18 May...

(yesterday)

Complexity Digest wrote a new blog post titled Positive words carry less information than negative words

We show that the frequency of word use is not only determined by the word length [1] and the average information content [2], but also by its emotional content. We have analyzed three established lexica of affective word usage in English, German, and Spanish, to verify that these lexica have a neutral, unbiased, emotional content. Taking into account the frequency of word usage, we find that words with a positive emotional content are more frequently used. Positive words carry less information than negative wordsGarcia D, Garas A and Schweitzer FEPJ Data Science 2012, 1:3 (18 May 2012)...

(yesterday)

Complexity Digest wrote a new blog post titled Effects of time window size and placement on the structure of an aggregated communication network

Complex networks are often constructed by aggregating empirical data over time, such that a link represents the existence of interactions between the endpoint nodes and the link weight represents the intensity of such interactions within the aggregation time window. The resulting networks are then often considered static. More often than not, the aggregation time window is dictated by the availability of data, and the effects of its length on the resulting networks are rarely considered. Here, we address this question by studying the structural features of networks emerging from aggregating...

(yesterday)

About:

Complexity Digest has been successfully networking the complexity community since fall of 1999. It is edited by Dr. Carlos Gershenson, and published by the Instituto de Investigaciones en Matematicas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (IIMAS) and the Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad (C3) of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), the most prestigious university in Latin America and hispanic countries.

Its founding editor was Dr Gottfried Mayer, a member of the complexity community since his residence at the Santa Fe Institute in its early days. He deceased victim of cancer on January, 2009. Until then, the sponsor of ComDig was Dean LeBaron, trustee of SFI and investment commentator. ComDig was created by Gottfried and Dean, and we try to follow their original ideas.

Contributors are welcome to send submissions to editorcomdig.unam.mx.

ComDig hopes to be of use to all of the growing number of complexity organizations and supported by them.

ComDig has been distributed by weekly email to a list of people who request copies free of charge. ComDig iss also available through RSS (Real Simple Syndication).

Copies will be made available to organizations who may wish to repost ComDig to their own mailing lists. Some may customize the appearance of the content provided to them.

Readership should range from academics in almost every field to business people who want to know how to use the concepts. From students in search of knowledge to journalists looking for items from this rich field of activity. All are encouraged so long as it is of use to them.

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