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Human Complex Systems
My French blog was started on February 28th, my English blog, a few days later, on March 3rd, both of this year. By mid-July, the French blog had an average readership of 40 per day, among whom about 20 new readers; by now, 4 months later, the average readership is 160 (over the past 30…
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Gold fish
I just had an odd vision. It happens on Judgment Day and I am shocked at the questions being asked from me: “How many gold fish in your care died of neglect? How many babies did you leave crying in the dark? Who were they? How many daisies did you trample?” I say “I feel…
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The network comprises a subset of the words (the “content words”) of a particular natural language
Thought as word dynamics. II. Architecture (4)
In Indo-European languages there are two types of words. Every speaker has a very strong intuitive feeling of this. We have no difficulty when defining the meaning – or offering a definition – of words of the first type: “a rose is a flower that has many petals,…
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How wars get started
When in 1975 I became a student at Cambridge University my parents visited me there. It was actually their first stay in England. My mother was enchanted with the country. I wanted to know why and she explained that houses were “normal”, people behaved “normally”, everything in England was so essentially “normal”. I pressed her…
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A talking subject experiences the dynamics of speech generation as emotional or “affective”
Thought as word dynamics. I. General principles. (3)
A thoroughly “physical” account of the objective dynamics of speech performance will be provided later. In the meantime I’m indicating here that as far as talking subjects are concerned, their subjective experience of the dynamics of speech performance is – from the initiation of a speech act…
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Logic and semantics in Woody Allen’s “The UFO Menace”
We read in Woody Allen’s “The UFO Menace” (*) that:
“Professor Leon Speciman postulates a civilization in outer space that is more advanced than ours by approximately fifteen minutes. This, he feels gives them a great advantage over us, since they needn’t rush to get to appointments.”
With due respect to the Nobel…
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The network in question is stored in the human brain
Thought as word dynamics. I. General principles. (2)
It is undeniable that speech acts are produced from within a talking subject, as they are uttered through the mouth. This however does not necessarily imply that the network mentioned in Speech acts are generated as the outcome of a dynamics operating on a network, along…
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Why, like cats, we have nine lives
Back in 2000 I devoted a paper to some implications of the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics proposed in 1957 by Hugh Everett III in his Princeton thesis entitled “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics”. At the time I had no notion of anybody else in philosophy interested in these issues. The article was…
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Speech acts are generated as the outcome of a dynamics operating on a network
Thought as word dynamics. I. General principles (1)
The general hypothesis is that “speech acts are generated as the outcome of a dynamics operating on a network”; it is specific as far as it states that the data, the “words,” summoned in the generation of speech acts are structured as a network. It is also…
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Stock prices and the shape of randomness
I remember an illustration in an article by Heinz von Foerster in the 1960s. In the first picture, a set of tiny cubes were represented, piled up in a random manner. The reader was told that these were steel cubes magnetized on one of their sides. The second picture showed what had happened after the…
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Thought as Word Dynamics
On two occasions already on my French blog, I’ve written an article in a serialized format, posting each part whenever it was ready then creating a link to a copy of the whole text when it had reached a final form. In both instances has the process taken about two months (Les tâches et…
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The subprime crisis and the future of securitization
…Echanges is a financial journal published monthly by DFCG, the French association of financial officers and auditors. I was asked by Jean-François Casanova who will be the editor of a special issue devoted to securitization to contribute a piece on securitization in the light of the subprime crisis. Here it is, in an English translation.
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What may happen to you because you live in LA
A couple of weeks ago we had a lazy summer Sunday much unlike our habitual boogie boarding or being on the lookout for some new budding talent of the LA pictorial underground: we acted in a video clip for My Ruin.
We had attended the concert in East Hollywood on July 17th; I didn’t mind…
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The ABS and Uncle Sam
Mr. Paul Schulten is asking me the following:
“It is true that delinquencies and losses in residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS) are strongly correlated with home price appreciation (HPA) or in the current environment home price depreciation (HPD).
As we enter a period of possible decline in home prices these losses accumulate first to… -
The credit crunch’s cogwheels
Collective human phenomena are as a rule tricky to analyze and consequently tough understanding and explaining. The reason is learning. Even if at its core a process remains simple, people learn: they observe how things work and they adapt. Adaptation in its turn modifies the process and initiates an endless dynamics of change. Such feedback…
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Old-style publishing a paper
Now when you want to publish an article, you write it, you put it on your website and within days hundreds if not thousands of people have read it. Sometimes someone will approach you and ask if they can publish it in the old-fashioned way, in a journal, and you’ll say “Why not?” In the…
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The un-American solution to the subprime mess
Among the remedies mentioned for the subprime crisis, I haven’t seen listed the system I went through when getting a mortgage in England back in those days. Here is how it worked: the first step would be for you to open an account with a building society; then you would start saving, sending a check…
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Since we can’t fix the subprime mess can we at least make sure it doesn’t happen again?
One of the greatest American traditions is for families to get together at Christmas and watch with ever-renewed delight Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Recent events in the financial world, and in the mortgage business in particular, suggest that the movie should be introduced with this important disclaimer: “WARNING: The movie you’re about to…
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Woody Allen’s “Death Knocks”
In Death Knocks, Woody Allen provides a new treatment to a classical theme: a man seeing himself on a final mission succeeds in buying time from the ineluctability of death by challenging a personified death to a game that he wins, gaining so a temporary reprieve. The allegory reminds us that life amounts in every…
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Toons in contemporary LA underground iconography
Since Roy Lichtenstein made a lasting impression on the fine arts’ scene by turning individual frames of comic strips – or at least a likeness of them – into paintings, expanding to their new scale the standard pointilliste techniques for representing shading on newspaper-quality paper, a point of transit has been established between the exclusive…