TAKEPLACE: THE DISPIRITING SIDE OF MODERN BIOLOGY BY PAUL R. EHRLICH

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

THE DISPIRITING SIDE OF MODERN BIOLOGY BY PAUL R. EHRLICH

For a scholar who traffics in some of the more dispiriting elements of modern biology, ecology and demographics, Paul R. Ehrlich is a remarkably funny guy. His caption for this picture? "A living Neanderthal" contemplating the skull (a replica) of an extinct one. Maybe his humor is a coping mechanism for the parlous state of the planet; maybe it's the result of more than 50 years as a Stanford University researcher, professor and author. LATIMES

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TakePlace was made with you in mind It's about ideas and innovation, creative perspectives, and solutions. We're advocates for change, because change needs friends. We explore complex systems, adaptive agents, modeling, simulation, artificial life, and complex (information, biological, and social) networks. We especially focus on the Web as a complex information network in which we leave abundant traces of our social and semantic activities: what we do, what we are interested in, whom we talk to, what knowledge we acquire and contribute. Our research spans from modeling the dynamic processes that occur on the Web (how information networks grow and evolve, how individual and collective traffic patterns emerge, how attention bursts are generated and shaped by social and search tools) to designing tools that mine the Web to build better search, navigation, management, and recommendation tools (where ‘better’ means more intelligent, autonomous, robust, personalized, contextual, scalable, adaptive, and so on).