There are a lot of extraordinarily smart people and every now and then one (me) gets the chance to listen to them speak. Such was the case this week at the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems here in Boston. Though I couldn't attend the whole thing, I did have the opportunity to dip in for some very interesting presentations. And Jeff Stamps and I even got plenary time for our talk, Are Organizations Networks? (Contest: Guess what we think?)
I've already blogged Science Editor Barbara Jasny's inside look at publishing in this esteemed journal. Though I missed it, attendees, including my hubby, raved about Phil Zimbardo's flashy presentation on The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, his new book. Dr. Zimbardo explains the material he presented at the conference:
The Lucifer Effect tells, for the first time, the full story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, a now-classic study I conducted in 1971. In that study, normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison, yet the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days.
Two presentations that I wandered into without knowing what I was doing turned out to be very interesting: Raffaele Calabretta is a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council...and a novelist. Dr. Calabretta's novel, The Movie of Emotions (Il Film Delle Emozioni) uses a variety of forms -- diary, files, a film script -- strung together as tidbits in which the main character struggles with his desire to be happy while exploring concepts of complexity. Tall-order writing, awaiting an American publisher, at which point I will be an early one to render an opinion on how successfully he has carried it off. Great idea in the spirit of experimental literature.
Later, in search of an outlet, I took a seat in the back of the room at a plenary session, where the guy at the front first got my attention because he looked a bit like someone I know then caused me to stop typing when I heard him say "tensegrity," key word of our beloved mentor, Bucky Fuller, and geodesic, and even Fuller. Dr. Don Ingber's talk, Principles of Bio-inspired Engineering, included his pulling out a tensegrity toy. He's got a whole lab at Boston's Children's Hospital where they study cell development and regulation that includes Bucky's principles, which is what he talked about (I think):
We introduced the concept that living cells stabilize their internal cytoskeleton, and control their shape and mechanics, using the architectural system first described by Buckminster Fuller known as "tensegrity."
This post is getting long and I haven't even tackled the remarks of the banquet speaker, Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes (US Army, Retired), which provoked the taking of some six pages of notes. Big challenges ahead, folks, including environmental collapse, population explosion, and terrorism, and he put it to the complexity scientists at the meeting to get to work on them--fast. It was a soundless room until the questions began. I hope to have the time to relay what he said but, assuming I won't given the very near-term challenges I have (read deadlines), keep an eye out for the chance to hear him.
