I’m happy with the way things worked out yesterday, March 8th, at the UCLA Complexity Science Conference with my paper: The Subprime Crisis: A Human Complex Systems Phenomenon.

Of course, trying to squeeze the whole crisis into an hour (1 ¼ with John Bragin’s express permission), it turned out I had much too much material. I don’t think personally that slide shows have enough meat to show that they can get circulated without their author fleshing them up. This is why I’m not communicating as of yet what I had to say but I’ll be working in the coming days on a full-fledged text which will be posted here (watch this space!).

Thanks to the organizers: John Bragin and Dwight Read (UCLA) and Doug White (UCI – in absentia). Thanks to the other speakers. From J. Steven Lansing (University of Arizona), I learned that human genes need not be aggressively competitive but can diffuse harmoniously according to the “neutral model.” From Michalis Faloutsos (University of California Riverside) I learned that graph theory allows you to track down kids saving money on records by sharing them on the web. Finally I learned form William I. Newman (UCLA) that Lewis Fry Richardson (1881 – 1953) was a pioneer in the study of fractals; I got also from William’s presentation an encouraging confirmation that discrete dynamic systems are the way to go when modeling human phenomena. Thanks to all!