This book presents the fundamental theory for non-standard diffusion problems in movement ecology. Lévy processes and anomalous diffusion have shown to be both powerful and useful tools for qualitatively and quantitatively describing a wide variety of spatial population ecological phenomena and dynamics, such as invasion fronts and search strategies.Adopting a self-contained, textbook-style approach, the authors provide the elements of statistical physics and stochastic processes o...

The competitiveness of firms, regions and countries greatly depends on the generation, dissemination and application of new knowledge. Modern innovation research is challenged by the need to incorporate knowledge generation and dissemination processes into the analysis so as to disentangle the complexity of these dynamic processes. With innovation, however, strong uncertainty, nonlinearities and actor heterogeneity become central factors that are at odds with traditional modeling technique...

Today, our cities are an embodiment of the complex, historical evolution of knowledge, desires and technology. Our planned and designed activities co-evolve with our aspirations, mediated by the existing technologies and social structures. The city represents the accretion and accumulation of successive layers of collective activity, structuring and being structured by other, increasingly distant cities, reaching now right around the globe.This historical and structural development...

This book offers a detailed investigation of breakdowns in traffic and transportation networks. It shows empirically that transitions from free flow to so-called synchronized flow, initiated by local disturbances at network bottlenecks, display a nucleation-type behavior: while small disturbances in free flow decay, larger ones grow further and lead to breakdowns at the bottlenecks. Further, it discusses in detail the significance of this nucleation effect for traffic and transportation th...

This book introduces and studies a number of stochastic models of subsistence, communication, social evolution and political transition that will allow the reader to grasp the role of uncertainty as a fundamental property of our irreversible world. At the same time, it aims to bring about a more interdisciplinary and quantitative approach across very diverse fields of research in the humanities and social sciences.Through the examples treated in this work – including anthropology, ...

Experimental Econophysics describes the method of controlled human experiments, which is developed by physicists to study some problems in economics or finance, namely, stylized facts, fluctuation phenomena, herd behavior, contrarian behavior,hedge behavior, cooperation, business cycles, partial information, risk management, and stock prediction. Experimental econophysics together with empirical econophysics are two branches of the field of econophysics. The latter one has ...

This monograph demonstrates the interplay between Shannon information and semantic information in cognition. It shows that Shannon’s information acts as driving force for the formation of semantic information; and vice versa, namely, that semantic information participates in the formation of Shannonian information. The authors show that in cognition, Shannonian and semantic information are interrelated as two aspects of a cognitive process termed as information adaptation. In the ...

Topics of complex system physics and their interdisciplinary applications to different problems in seismology, biology, economy, sociology, energy and nanotechnology are covered in this new work from renowned experts in their fields. In particular, contributed papers contain original results on network science, earthquake dynamics, econophysics, sociophysics, nanoscience and biological physics. Most of the papers use interdisciplinary approaches based on statistical physics, quantum physic...

This book presents a new approach that can be applied to complex, integrated individual and social human processes. It provides an alternative means of addressing complexity, better suited for its purpose than and effectively complementing traditional strategies involving isolation and separation assumptions.Network-oriented modeling allows high-level cognitive, affective and social models in the form of (cyclic) graphs to be constructed, which can be automatically transformed into...

This book, edited and authored by a closely collaborating network of social scientists and psychologists, recasts typical research topics in these fields into the language of nonlinear, dynamic and complex systems. The aim is to provide scientists with different backgrounds - physics, applied mathematics and computer sciences - with the opportunity to apply the tools of their trade to an altogether new range of possible applications. At the same time, this book will serve as a first refere...

This book presents a perspective of network analysis as a tool to find and quantify significant structures in the interaction patterns between different types of entities. Moreover, network analysis provides the basic means to relate these structures to properties of the entities. It has proven itself to be useful for the analysis of biological and social networks, but also for networks describing complex systems in economy, psychology, geography, and various other fields. Today, network a...

The concept of temporal networks is an extension of complex networks as a modeling framework to include information on when interactions between nodes happen.Many studies of the last decade examine how the static network structure affect dynamic systems on the network. In this traditional approach the temporal aspects are pre-encoded in the dynamic system model.Temporal-network methods, on the other hand, lift the temporal information from the level of system dynamics to the ...