Seminar - Memento: Time Travel for the Web

Wednesday, February 24, 2010 - 12:15 p.m. Medium Conference Room

 Memento: Time Travel for the Web

Herbert Van de Sompel, Digital Library Research & Prototyping, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Read More

SFI Professor Sam Bowles Featured in the Santa Fe Reporter

Born Poor ? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it.

Bowles heads the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute, which is home to dozens of big brains imported from all over the world. If he’s right, those troubling job numbers are only the start of New Mexico’s problems. Indeed, if Bowles is right, the state needs to completely rethink the way it does economic development.

Read More

Public Lecture - The Decline of Classic Maya Civilization: A Systems Perspective

Wednesday, February 24, 2010 • 7:30 PM • James A. Little Theater, New Mexico School for the Deaf

The decline and abandonment of many key cities in the Southern Maya Lowlands around A.D. 800 has long attracted scholarly and public attention. While archaeologists now understand – contrary to previous thought – that Maya civilization did not collapse at this time, as a number of Maya cities continued to thrive up until the 16th century Spanish Conquest, the causes of the relatively rapid demise of cities such as Tikal, Palenque, and Copan remain of great interest. New archaeological, epigraphic, and environmental information have enabled archaeologists to form better models that provide more systemic perspectives on this decline than ever before. Sabloff examines the new data and models and discusses their potential relevance to problems facing the world today.

Read More

"Dialing for Answers Where Web Can’t Reach"

There is a new service helping people in Uganda, who don’t have access to computers, find answers to their questions. Question Box was started and has been successful. Workers use their cell phones to call the Question Box call center to ask a question for locals. The call center then gives them the answer. The worker is then given free minutes for their cell phone usage. SFI Omidyar Fellow Nathan Eagle has been doing research on cellphones and development in Africa. Eagle also runs a cellphone-based business in Kenya. Eagle states, “We can’t sit in our offices in America and decide what is useful to people and what is meaningful in their lives. The services only add value if they are open-ended.”

Read More

"How to Measure What We Don't Know"

In their study, James Crutchfield, SFI External Professor and Physics Professor at the University of California at Davis, and graduate students Christopher Ellison and John Mahoney, developed the analogy of scientists as cryptologists who are trying to glean hidden information from Nature. As they explain, “Nature speaks for herself only through the data she willingly gives up.”

Read More