streaming video F05#1: rtsp://media.nacs.uci.edu:554/ITC/SocialScience/White/Anthro-093005.rm

2005 Friday 1:30-3:00 - F05#1 Sept 30 Doug White "Civilizations as dynamic networks: Cities, hinterlands, populations, industries, trade and conflict" - preliminary report on an eBook and Plenary talk/powerpoint and PDF for the European Conference on Complex Systems Paris, 14-18 November 2005 - and: authorship, response and author response in the Structure and Dynamics eJournal

2005 Friday 2:00-3:30 - F05#2 Oct 14 Chris Chase-Dunn "Rise, fall and upward sweeps: the emergence of a global state" powerpoint pdf Sweeps - and a report on successful Human Social Dynamics funding from the National Science Foundation (- see NSF proposal and project materials)

2005 Friday 1:30-3:00 - F05#3 Oct 28 Dwight Read The Evolution of Cultural Kinship: A non-Darwinian Odyssey

2005 Friday 1:30-3:00 - F05#4 Nov 4 Darren Schreiber "Humans are by nature political animals: New evidence and arguments" powerpoint

2006 Friday Jan 13 1:30-3:20 - VideoConference W06#1 (UCI source: meeting in 120 Social Science Tower, please attend for discussions!)
JIN Xiaoyi; DU Haifeng; and LI Shuzhuo (Director of Population and Development Research Institute, Xi'an) - Xi'an Jiaotong University/Stanford Morrison Institute of Population and Resource Studies - "Network Study of Rural-Urban Migration in China" powerpoints in pdf
Preceded by a Workshop, Thursday Jan 12 SSPA 2112 12:00-2:45. "Rural-urban Migration in China: Some Findings and Social Subgroup Detection" powerpoints in pdf
Faculty and Graduate students from Asian Studies, Social Sciences, and other Campuses invited to both sessions. Printable Poster

streaming video W06#2: rtsp://media.nacs.uci.edu:554/ITC/SocialScience/White/2006_02_03_ASC.rm or just click here

2006 Friday Feb 3 1:00-3:00 - VidCon W06#2 (UCSD source: meeting in Galbraith Hall, Room 260, followed by the Graduate Students Archaeology Network, which will host a reception following the lecture in Geoff Braswell's Lab in the Chemistry Research Building)
Henry Wright (Anthropology, Michigan), "Recent Research on Mesopotamian State Emergence" very large powerpoint so download before opening

streaming video W06#3: rtsp://media.nacs.uci.edu:554/ITC/SocialScience/White/2006_02_10_ASC.rm or just click here

2006 Friday Feb 10 1:30-3:00 - VidCon W06#3 (UCR source: Olmsted room A139)
Michalis Faloutsos, UCR Computer Science "The Internet Is Like A Jellyfish" Abstract: Several novel concepts and tools have revolutionized our understanding of the Internet topology. Most of the existing efforts attempt to develop accurate analytical models. In this work, our goal is to develop an effective conceptual model: a model that can be easily drawn by hand, while at the same time, it captures significant macroscopic properties. We build the foundation for our model with two thrusts: a) we identify new topological properties, and b) we provide metrics to quantify the topological importance of a node. We propose the jellyfish as a model for the inter-domain Internet topology. We show that our model captures and represents the most significant topological properties. Furthermore, we observe that the jellyfish has lasting value: it describes the topology for more than six years.
ppt pdf with live links (evolving) Jellyfish: A Conceptual Model for the AS Internet Topology 2004 coauthored paper related idea from drw

2006 Friday Feb 24 1:30-3:00 - VidCon W06#4 (UCLA source: Powell Library Rm 285; UCI participation in 120 Social Science Tower, UCSD in 260 Galbraith Hall; UCR in A139 Olmsted)
Adam Kuper, Conceptualising Society (Editor, for the European Association of Social Anthropologists), and author of Culture: The Anthropologists' Account, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, The Social Science Encyclopedia (with Jessica Kuper), and other works on peoples of southern Africa. Kuper is former editor of Current Anthropology, professor of anthropology at Brunel University, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Member of the Academia Europaea.
"Endogamy, adultery and homosexuality: an ethnographic perspective on the Bloomsbury Group." Abstract: Working on kinship in historical perspective in a complex, stratified modern society I have been driven to what were, for me, unexpected conclusions. Structural approaches are notoriously unsuited to the study of change, neglectful of agency, and ill-fitted to the analysis of choices. I was therefore committed to think rather in terms of ego-centred networks, personal strategies of marriage and residence, and the individualistic exploitation of family connections. To my surprise, however, I discovered high levels of endogamy and localisation of kinship networks in 19th and early 20th century England. These were not in remote villages but in the urban heart of the country. There was even a recurrent structure? I call it, with all due reservations, a system of clan endogamy - which might endure for several generations. I shall be giving an example of a somewhat bizarre transformation of this structure that characterised the Bloomsbury Group, a modernist movement of writers and artists in the early 20th century. Their endogamy was extreme, though it took novel and even shocking forms.

powerpoint and pdf

Announcement for Posting: March 10

2006 Friday Mar 10 1:30-3:00 - VidCon W06#5 (source: Powell Library Rm 285, UCLA)
Mike Agar, "Telling It Like It (Subjunctively) Is: Organizational Complexity, Linguistic Anthropology, and Narrative" Right click and save to download powerpoint
Abstract: Everyone talks about narrative, but few plunge into the details. Recently, I've been drawn into discussions of narrative among those interested in organizational complexity. The problem is, how do I connect the ideas of "narrative" and "story" from linguistic anthropology with the writings and interests of those who speak of "complex organization?" To put it another way, if I lifted the lid off the ideal "complex organization," could I say anything about what the talking that goes on inside of it would look like?

To set the stage, I'll first consider interest in "complexity theory" on the part of organizations as a response to increasingly frequent unpredictable change with unknown consequences. One recommended strategy foregrounds noticing and "sense-making" on the part of those involved in the organizational practices that are directly affected. "Narrative" and "story" are pointers to such events. But what do "narrative" and "story" mean? As an example we'll play with popular stock guru Peter Lynch's idea of the "story" of a stock. That play will lead directly into Ochs and Capps' recent book on the "Living Narrative." I will shamelessly (mis)use their narrative dimensions of tellership, tellability, embeddedness, linearity, and moral stance to help see the many different shapes that "narrative" and "story" can take, and then show some examples from the fields of discourse analysis, conversational analysis, pragmatics, etc. (basically the linguistics of how people actually talk). The examples will suggest a more precise description and evaluation of, and perhaps even training for, the kind of talk that a "complex organization" should enable and make good use of.

This talk is part of a larger project on the relation between ethnography, language, complexity and agent-based models. It builds on an article in press in Emergence and Complex Organizations.

Announcement for Posting: March 30

Thursday Mar 30 10:00-1:00 Rm. 2112 Social Science Plaza A (Video Recorded for 2 streamed talks and discussions) - UCI Human Sciences and Complexity 3rd Conference, followed by lunch at Chakra
Theme: Simulation
Art Griffin, UCLA, and Charles Stanish, UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Director "A simulation model of Lake Titicaca Basin settlement patterns circa 2500 BC - AD 1000" see also Modeling Ancient Settlement Systems (Oriental Institute, U Chicago)
Paul Jorion, Anthropology - UCLA affiliate faculty "Adam Smith's 'Invisible hand' revisited: A simulation" Summary Abstract: Agent-Based Simulations are often highly stylized representations of the circumstances they aim at emulating. We've tried instead to replicate to a high degree of complexity, the operation of the New York Stock Exchange, being fully aware that some of the detail in verisimilitude has no impact on price formation and trading volumes involved.
will save David Kronenfeld "Simulating flock formation" for a later date

Announcement for Posting: April 7

2006 Friday April 7 1:00-3:00 - VidCon S06#1
Steven Bankes (Evolving Logic Inc, Rand Pardee School, UCLA Human Complex Systems), "Computational Exploration in Long Term Policy Analysis for Social and Organizational Complex Systems." pdf- abstract and references powerpoint for talk

Announcement for Posting: April 21

2006 Friday April 21 1:30-3:00 - VidCon S06#2
Tsutomu (Tom) Nakano, Kwansei Gakuin University and External Affiliated Faculty, Center on Organizational Innovation, Columbia University, and Doug White (IMBS, UCI) Powerpoint pdf
"Networks-Affect-Pricing Theory in Modern Production Industry: Three Network Studies of the Giant Industrial District of Tokyo" Abstract: We analyze six questions about production-chain markets that emerge from three empirical studies of trade relationships among over 8,000 firms in a large-scale industrial district in Tokyo. Are they Small-World? Scale-free? Hierarchical? Etc. Analyzing predictive cohesion structures and substructures in the network we find support for network-affects-pricing theory that differs from H. White's model. Supplier-buyer relations are hierarchical (a directed acyclic graph), with no exchange cycles that would promote price equilibrium. We find linked network configurations likely to affect pricing. Multi-connectivity is a critical seeding mechanism where quasi-optimal exchange pricing can be achieved. But a core of elite firms was also detected that organizes status differences among firms and serves to institutionalize role structures in the production markets. In addition, structural advantages in pricing accrue to core firms because suppliers upstream in the hierarchy operate through a preponderance of multiple-supplier triads, which enforces competition among suppliers and transmits pricing benefits to elite firms downstream. Elites exert power over the hierarchy from the top down, share elite suppliers with other elite end-producers, and can dominate price-setting from the top.

Announcement for Posting: May 5 talk

2006 Friday May 5 1:30-3:00 - VidCon S06#3
Jean Ensminger - Anthropology, Cal Tech. "The Co-Evolution of Pro-Social Norms and the Market"
Abstract: Social norms instruct much of human social interaction in all societies and they often flavor profound differences across cultures. But where do norms come from, and more interestingly, how and why do they change over time and what impact do they have on economic performance? Ensminger will discuss these topics in light of case study material from several decades of research with a nomadic cattle herding population in East Africa. She will also present experimental economic research from a collaborative project with over a dozen fellow anthropologists working in hunting and gathering, horticultural, herding, and industrial societies. Data from controlled experiments around the world help us flesh out the processes involved in the co-evolution of market institutions with social norms that govern cooperation, fairness, and trust.

Announcement for Posting: May 19 talk

2006 Friday June 2 UCI Conference S06#5 (Video Recorded)

Paul Goldstein (Anthro/Archaeology, UCSD), "Agency and Heterarchic Complexity in the Andean Diaspora"
Formative Discussion on creation of new Intercampus and Campus Academic Programs: the June 15th proposal

Back cover quotes: Andean Diaspora - The Tiwanaku Colonies and the Origins of South American Empire 'integrates an enormous body of field data and critical archaeological theory to present a powerful and original interpretation of the great Tiwanaku empire and its diasporic communities.' '...generates fresh perspectives on the evolutionary nature of ancient states.'

Announcement for Posting: June 22 talk

Thursday June 22 S06#6 Post-Quarter UCI-UCR Special Conference (Video Recorded)

Doug White, Laurent Tambayong, and Steve Doubleday (IMBS, UCI); with Natasa Kejzar (Soc Sci, U Ljubljana), Ben Lind (Sociology, UCI), Ben Jester (Social Networks, UCI), "Cityrise and Cityquake: The Five Alternations Between Global Economy and Regional Economies in Eurasia in the Last Millennium; and Definitive Evidence of Macro Civilizational Dynamics"
Abstract: Studies of macrosocial system dynamics over the past two years have suggested large scale 'cityquakes' that radically altered the shape of urban city distributions worldwide, especially in Eurasia, alternating between more global economies and more regionalized economies. We present the first definitive evidence and explanation for what these cityquakes entail and argue that we are on the cusp between a continuation of the dynamics of the past, which if continued would entail globalization, and a precipitous and early collapse into divisive regional economies, a transition which is preceded by interregional wars and the breakdown of interregional trade. a pdf for the ppt (some data later program and data)

2005-2006 Videoconferences and Quarterly conference dates (http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/center/videocon.htm) fall

Other Internal and External Speakers nominated for invitation 2006-forward - in no particular order
Robert Garfias - Anthropology - Irvine - recipient of Japan's Rising Sun Award - presentation on "Asian Music Traditions in Transition: My Observations of a Half Century."
Claudio Cioffi-Revilla - Political Science - George Mason - author of The Scientific Measurement of International Conflict: Handbook of Datasets on Crises and Wars, 1495-1988 ; Politics and Uncertainty: Theory, Models and Applications
Daniel McFadden - Economics - UC Berkeley - Nobelist, recent work on Hot Money and Cold Comfort: Global Capital Movement and Financial Crises in Emerging Economies,
The Browser War - Econometric Analysis of Markov Perfect Equilibrium in Markets with Network Effects, with Mark Jenkins, Paul Liu and Rosa Matzkin. See The Econometrics Library Software Archive
Alfred Crosby - History - University of Texas at Austin - author of Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 ; The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 ; Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology through History ; The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250-1600 ; America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918
Douglass North - Economics -Washington University in St. Louis - nobelist and author of Understanding the Process of Economic Change ; Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)
Brian Arthur - Economics and Complexity - World Question Center - author of Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Economics, Cognition, and Society) ; The Economy As an Evolving Complex System II
W. Arthur De Vany - Economics and Complexity - Emeritus, UCI - author of Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry (Contemporary Politicaleconomy)
Kenneth Pomeranz - History - UC Irvine - author of The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy ; The World That Trade Created: Culture, Society and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present
Marcus Feldman - Demography, Migration, Biology - Stanford - author of Cultural Transmission and Evolution
Charles Stanish - Archaeology - Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA - author of Ancient Titicaca: The Evolution of Complex Society in Southern Peru and Northern Bolivia
Tim Kohler - Archaeology - U Washington - author of Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies: Agent-Based Modeling of Social and Spatial Processes (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Proceedings)
Paul Krugman - Economics - Princeton - author of The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century ; Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations ; The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science ; Geography and Trade ; Pop Internationalism ; Development, Geography, and Economic Theory
Peter Bearman - Network and Historical Socology - Columbia - author of Doormen (Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries)

Dates for 2006-2007, Fridays 1:30-3, and 10-1:00 for end-of-quarter conferences

What IS the HSC?
Speaker index (2006-07 sequential): Jeff Brantingham Jessica Flack James Fowler Daniel McFadden Colin F. Camerer Doug Wallace Natasa Przulj Peter Gourevitch Cosma Shalizi Jared Diamond Halbert White Karim Chalak Brian Arthur Bai-lian Larry Li Martin Doyle Robert Garfias Marcus Feldman Mark Handcock (all speakers 2005-present)

Announcement for Posting: Oct 6'06 talk
UCI SST122 UCLA 285 Powell Library UCSD 260 Galbraith Hall UCR A139 Olmsted Hall
October 6 2006 Friday 1:30-3:00 - Jeff Brantingham, Archaeology, UCLA: "Foraging Behavior of Contemporary Criminals" pdf for the talk Monthly auto theft hot spots in Los Angeles (LAPD jurisdiction) January to August 2003
Simulation Modeling of Crime
Abstract: Crime mapping forms a key feature of current approaches to understanding offender behavior and is a tool used increasingly by police departments and policy makers for strategic crime prevention. However, despite the availability of sophisticated digital mapping and analysis tools there is a substantial gap in our understanding of how low-level behaviors of offenders lead to aggregate crime patterns such as crime hot spots. Agent-based modeling offers a potential avenue for developing a quantitative understanding of crime hot spot formation built from the bottom-up around offender behavior. Agent-based models are not only more consistent with the scale of decisions that offenders actually take, but they also open the door to the development of custom statistics that are designed to answer specific behavioral questions less tractable in general statistical models. However, there is also concern that agent-based simulations can lead to erroneous results either because of poor model design or errors in model implementation that go undetected. A solution to this problem is to design simulations around well-studied analytical models where the model behavior can be tested against sound analytical expectations. Only following such testing should simulation models be extended into areas that cannot be treated analytically and, only subsequent to this, into applied contexts.

Announcement for Posting: Oct 13'06 talk

UCI SST122 UCLA 285 Powell Library UCSD 260 Galbraith Hall UCR A139 Olmsted Hall
October 13 2006 Friday 1:30-3:00 from SFI Jessica Flack: The Role of Robustness Mechanisms in the Evolution of Social Complexity. Interactive Seminar -- Santa Fe Institute.
Abstract: All organisms interact with their environment, and in doing so shape it, modifying resource availability. Termed niche construction, this process has been studied primarily at the ecological level with an emphasis on the consequences of construction across generations. I will discuss the behavioral process of construction within a single generation, identifying the role a robustness mechanism--conflict management--plays in promoting interactions that build social resource networks or social niches in animal social organizations. The talk will be structured around two general issues: robustness and niche construction in evolutionary theory and consequences of robustness and niche construction for social complexity.

Jessica Flack received her PhD in the Neuroscience and Animal Behavior Program at Emory in 2003, and took her BA in Anthropology from Cornell in 1996. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Her primary research interest is evolutionary principles of construction governing the emergence of form. Research topics include robustness and innovation in evolutionary systems, information processing in social organizations, social niche construction, evolution of conflict management mechanisms across biological systems, drivers of socio-cognitive complexity, encoding and decoding problems in signaling systems, and index-to-symbol transitions in the evolution of communication.

Announcement for Posting: Oct 27'06 talk

UCI SST122 UCLA 285 Powell Library UCSD 260 Galbraith Hall UCR A139 Olmsted Hall
October 27 2006 Friday 1:30-3:00 from UCSD James Fowler, Political Science, UCSD, "Supreme Court Networks of Precedents" powerpoint

Abstract: We construct the complete network of 28,951 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court from 1792 to 2005. Data from this network demonstrates quantitatively the evolution of the norm of stare decisis in the 19th Century and a significant deviation from this norm by the activist Warren court. We further describe a method for creating authority scores using the network data to identify the most important Court precedents. This method yields rankings that conform closely to evaluations by legal experts, and even predicts which cases they will identify as important in the future. An analysis of these scores over time allows us to test several hypotheses about the rise and fall of precedent. We show that reversed cases tend to be much more important than other decisions, and the cases that overrule them quickly become and remain even more important as the reversed decisions decline. We also show that the Court is careful to ground overruling decisions in past precedent, and the care it exercises is increasing in the importance of the decision that is overruled. Finally, authority scores corroborate qualitative assessments of which issues and cases the Court prioritizes and how these change over time.

Watch the January 2006 Marschak Memorial Lecture by Daniel McFadden
"The New Science of Pleasure: Consumer Behavior and the Measurement of Well-Being"

Announcement for Posting: Nov 3'06 talk

ANDERSON KORN HALL UCLA; UCI SST122; UCSD 260 Galbraith Hall; UCR A139 Olmsted Hall
November 3 2006 Friday 1:00-3:00 from UCLA Colin F. Camerer, (Axline Professor of Business Economics, CalTech;
"Behavioral Economics and Neuroeconomics"
Marschak Colloquium talk, Cosponsored by the UCLA Department of Economics and the UCLA Anderson Behavioral Decision Making Group, with participation by the 4-UC campus Videoseminar in Human Sciences and Complexity.

Abstract. Neuroeconomics seeks to ground economic theory in detailed neural mechanisms which are expressed mathematically and make behavioral predictions. One finding is that simple kinds of economizing for life-and-death decisions (food, sex and safety) do occur in the brain as rational theories assume. Another set of findings appears to support the neural basis of constructs posited in behavioral economics, such as a preference for immediacy and nonlinear weighting of small and large probabilities. A third direction shows how understanding neural circuitry permits predictions and causal experiments which show state-dependence of revealed preference- except that states are biological and neural variables.

Bio. Colin Camerer is the Rea and Lela Axline Professor of Business Economics at the California Institute of Technology, where he teaches both cognitive psychology and economics. Professor Camerer earned a BA degree in quantitative studies from Johns Hopkins in 1977, and an MBA in finance (1979) and a Ph.D. in decision theory (1981, at the age of 22) from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Before coming to Caltech in 1994, he held positions at the Kellogg, Wharton, and University of Chicago business schools. He was elected a member of the the Econometric Society (1999) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001) and is past president of the Economic Science Association and the Society for Neuroeconomics.
Camerer's research applies psychological principles to economic decisions, in an effort to "reunify" these social sciences. Unlike psychology, however, behavioral economics poses precise mathematical models of how limits and emotions work, and uses these models to make bold predictions about behavior both in the laboratory and in field data. Camerer's research has spanned many domains including: speculative price bubbles in experimental asset markets, labor supply of cab drivers, mathematical models of how limits on rationality and self-interest explain behavior in strategic games, collaborating with anthropologists doing bargaining experiments in small-scale societies, and scanning brains while people make economic decisions. He is the author of Behavioral Game Theory (2003), coauthor of Foundations of Human Sociality (2004), and coeditor of Advances in Behavioral Economics (2004).

(November 10 is veteran's holiday and not possible for our video personnel)

UCI SST122 UCLA 285 Powell Library UCSD 260 Galbraith Hall UCR A139 Olmsted Hall
December 1 2006 Friday there is a Marshack talk by a Political Scientist

Announcement for Posting: Dec 8'06 talks

December 8 10:00-1:00- UCI Soc Sci Tower 220A end of quarter conference, followed by lunch at Chakra
This UCI complexity conference at uci will focus on biological complexity and evolution
10:00 Discussion of the Proposed UCI add-on to the UCLA Minor in Human Social Complexity
10:20-11:20 Doug Wallace - MAMMAG "Molecular Anthropology: Application of Analysis of Mitochondrial Variation toward Understanding the Origins of Humans and Their Culture" (See MitoMap).
11:35-12:30 + discussion Natasa Przulj - "Protein-Protein Interaction Networks: Issues, Models, and Comparisons."

Abstract: One of the fundamental problems in computational biology is understanding the inner workings of a cell. Most cellular processes are carried out by protein-protein interactions (PPIs). Thus, analyzing and modeling of large PPI networks is an integral part of this process. Analogous to biological sequence comparison, comparing cellular networks is an important problem that could provide insight into biological understanding and therapeutics. The full-scale comparison of two arbitrary networks is computationally intractable, because it contains the subgraph isomorphism problem, which is NP-complete. Thus, heuristic measures must be developed for network comparison.
We devise a highly constraining network comparison metric based on local structural properties that are a direct generalization of the degree distribution. We use this new metric to demonstrate that geometric random graphs better model PPI networks than do Erdos-Renyi, random scale-free, or Barabasi-Albert scale-free networks. Our new systematic measure of a network's local structure imposes a large number of similarity constraints on networks being compared. In particular, we generalize the degree distribution, which measures the number of nodes ``touching'' k edges, into graphlet degree distributions measuring the number of nodes ``touching'' k graphlets, where graphlets are small connected non-isomorphic induced subgraphs of a large network. Clearly, the degree distribution is the first one in the spectrum of graphlet degree distributions, since an edge is the only 2-node graphlet. We design a network ``agreement'' measure as a number in [0,1] that encompasses the 73 graphlet degree distributions of 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-node graphlets. This measure is easily extendible to a greater number of constraints (i.e., graphlets) and the extensions are limited only by the available CPU.

Natasa Przulj is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at UC Irvine. Her research involves developing new tools for analyzing and modeling of complex networks in cellular biology. She spent two years in industry working for Hughes Aircraft, IBM, and Westech Information Systems (subsidiary of BC Hydro, Vancouver, Canada). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto working in the lab of Prof. Jeff Wrana. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 2005 under the supervision of Prof. Derek Corneil and Prof. Igor Jurisica. She received her M.Sc. from the same department in 2000 and her B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computing Science from Simon Fraser University, BC, Canada in 1997 after starting at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Belgrade in Former Yugoslavia.

Announcement for Posting: Jan 12'07 talk

UCI SST122 UCLA 285 Powell Library UCSD 260 Galbraith Hall UCR A139 Olmsted Hall
January 12 2007 Friday 1:30-3:00 from CMU Cosma Shalizi, CMU, "statistical methods for complex systems" cancelled because of family obligations.

See: "Methods and Techniques of Complex Systems Science: An Overview", chapter 1 (pp. 33-114) in Thomas S. Deisboeck and J. Yasha Kresh (eds.), Complex Systems Science in Biomedicine (NY: Springer, 2006) = nlin.AO/0307015. A summary of the tools people should use to study complex systems, covering statistical learning and data-mining, time series analysis, cellular automata, agent-based models, evaluation techniques and simulation, information theory and complexity measures

Abstract. I will be analyzing structural patterning in the attributes of artifacts called Megathrua crenulata (Giant Keyhole Limpet) shell ornaments. The ornaments were recovered from ten burials (providing a 10% sample size and excellent spatial coverage of a cemetery that was nearly completely excavated by David Banks Rogers between April 10 and June 28, 1926) in a mainland coastal Chumash site (SBa-72 south) that was occupied from approximately A.D. 900 to 1150. The impetus for the analysis is to find a way to explore further Chester King's comment that "the size of the shell determines the size of the callus ring in the center of the shell" (King 1990:125), which in turn determines the economic value of the shell as well as the exchange value, social context and use of the finished ornament.

Two primary techniques, chipping and grinding, were used to reduce and shape the shell area surrounding the callus ring. Grinding requires a greater input of time and energy and results in a more nicely shaped and presumably a more valuable finished product. Also, larger shells have more material that can be removed, which suggests a selection bias for larger shells in ornament types, such as rings, that require a maximum removal of material to make a usable ornament. The two main hypotheses being tested in this analysis are (1) that the energetics of manufacture strongly relates to the selection of shell size and (2) that emic size categories (categories recognized and selected for by the makers and users of these ornaments) provide structure for the data. A third hypothesis being tested is that there is a strong temporal component to the callus ring size class and ornament type dependencies that relates to the presence of already established temporal diagnostic forms, specifically Olivella split punched and cupped beads, that were found within, or in close proximity to, a subset of the ten burials in the sample. I will provide photographs of the different types of Megathura ornaments and Olivella beads as part of my presentation.

My analytical method is based on determining structure through representing the artifact data with Galois lattices. Galois lattices are dually ordered algebraic structures that provide a very robust and elegant conceptual framework for exploring structural patterning in archaeological data. The Galois lattice has a formally defined structure that incorporates set-theoretic principles such as set union and overlap in conjunction with other mathematical concepts that include least upper bound (supremum) and greatest lower bound (infimum), which are used to assemble a partially ordered set (the lattice). A Galois lattice is most often visualized in terms of a diagram (often called a Hasse diagram) consisting of nodes (lattice elements) and lines connecting the nodes.

Each lattice node in this analysis is associated with one or more shell ornaments from a burial and/or one shell ornament type. The nodes of the computer generated lattice diagrams in my talk will be labeled accordingly. A specific property of Galois lattices known as the Luxenburger basis (Luxenburger 1991) will be used to uncover sets of absolute and partial (true most but not all of the time) implications or dependencies (also known as “association rules”) between size classes of the siphon hole or callus ring of Megathrua crenulata (Giant Keyhole Limpet) ornaments and specific types (e.g. wing-shaped rectangular) of these ornaments The detailed structure in the data determined through using Galois lattices would not be revealed by any of the multivariate methods used by archaeologists such as principal components analysis and correspondence analysis. I will discuss the methodology employed in the analysis in a step-by-step manner, along with providing needed information about Galois lattices and the Luxenburger basis.

References

King, Chester D. 1990 Evolution of Chumash Society. A Comparative Study of Artifacts Used for Social System Maintenance in the Santa Barbara Channel Region before A.D. 1804 Garland Publishing, Inc. New York.

Luxenburger, Michael 1991 Implications Partielles Dans Un Contexte. Math. Inf. Sci. hum. 29(113): 35-55.

Bio. Michael Merrill is a professional archaeologist with an M.A. in Anthropology, California State University, Los Angeles, 2005 and a B.S. in Mathematics, UCLA, 1989. He will be starting a Ph.D. program in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University in Fall 2007. Research at ASU under the guidance of Drs. Marco Janssen and Marty Anderies will include working as a Research Assistant on the project "Long-term Coupled Socioecological Change in the American southwest and northern Mexico" involving model-based analysis of archaeological data and the development of formal models of the long-term dynamics of ancient societies in the American southwest. Research to date has centered on developing and applying quantitative methods to study site organization in southern California prehistoric sites. He has recently added to the scope of his research by developing and applying new mathematical methods to mortuary analysis and artifact classification. This research would never have taken place without the teaching and encouragement of Dr. Chester King (Topanga Anthropological Consultants) and Dr. Dwight Read (UCLA).

For previous uses of Galois Lattices in Social Science see Using Galois Lattices to Represent Network Data Sociological Methodology 1993 (23):127-146