[OPE-L] Conference reminder: Probabilistic Political Economy -- "Laws of Chaos" in the 21st Century

From: Ian Wright (wrighti@ACM.ORG)
Date: Thu Nov 15 2007 - 13:12:57 EST


Please circulate: apologies for cross-posting
=============================================

Conference: Probabilistic Political Economy -- "Laws of Chaos" in the
21st Century

Conference website: www.probabilisticpoliticaleconomy.net
Call for papers: http://iwright.googlepages.com/cfp

Publicity for the conference has generated a very encouraging level of
interest, and abstracts of proposed papers are being submitted at a
steady rate.

We hope very much that you too will be able to take part in our
celebration of Farjoun and Machover's work, which looks set to be a
stimulating encounter between marxian political economy and econophysics
that will enrich both perspectives.

Please send an abstract of your proposal as soon as possible to the
Kingston University abstract submissions page

     http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/conferences/apply/index.shtml

remembering to select "Probabilistic Political Economy Conference, July
2008" from the drop-down menu at the start of section 2.

Note that a recently-discovered glitch in the abstract submission page
has prompted us to put back the deadline to Monday, November 26 (with
acceptances to be issued by Monday, December 17).

News section
========================

Review article on Econophysics
----------------------------

One of our invited speakers, Professor Victor Yakovenko, has a review
article ("Econophysics, Statistical Mechanics Approach to") for the
Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science, to be published by
Springer, which is obtainable here:

     http://arxiv.org/pdf/0709.3662

Professor Yakovenko's home page is
http://www2.physics.umd.edu/~yakovenk/


Statistical Mechanics of Money
------------------------------

Professor Yakovenko's work in this area has been implemented as a
simulation in Mathematica 6.0 by Ian Wright and published in The Wolfram
Demonstrations Project. It is available at:

     http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/StatisticalMechanicsOfMoney/

Anyone with a web browser can get a good idea of the model. And anyone
with the freely available Mathematica Reader can play around with it.
Those with Mathematica 6.0 can get the source code, and develop it
further.


Social Architecture model
-------------------------------

Ian Wright has also published Mathematica 6.0 source code implementing
his social "architecture of capitalism" simulation described in Wright
(2005)*.

The Mathematica code is available at:

     http://65.254.51.50/wright/socialArchitectureModel.nb

Even without a copy of Mathematica you can get an idea of the simulation
in PDF form:

     http://65.254.51.50/wright/socialArchitectureModel.pdf

Ian writes: "The source code is quite concise, very portable, and also
automatically visualizes the important distributions. I am hoping that
interested students might take the source code, play around with it, and
develop it further."

* Wright, I. (2005) "The social architecture of capitalism". Physica A:
Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 346, pp. 589-622.

Submitting previously-published work
----------------------------------

We have been asked about our attitude to proposals to present work that
has already been published.

Our view is that review of existing contributions inspired by "Laws of
Chaos" is indeed a appropriate part of the conference.

However we strongly feel that pointing out new directions for
probabilistic political economy is at least as important.

Therefore, while we welcome proposals relating to existing published
papers, we would prefer where possible for such proposals to be
accompanied by ones relating to new work (which may of course be
work-in-progress).

With best wishes,

The Organising Committee

Julian Wells, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Kingston University, UK.
Eric Sheppard, Professor of Economic Geography, University of Minnesota,
USA.
Ian Wright, Research Student, Open University, UK.


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