I'VE BEEN READING SOME REALLY INTERESTING BOOKS. A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar was decent. I'm not sure that it should have been a bestseller. It is the biography of Nobel laureate John Nash, who developed a novel theory of competetive games and applied it to economics. He then succumbed to schizophrenia and dropped out of research and mathematics for over 20 years before recovering and accepting the prize. The reason I mention it is because it has some fairly thorough descriptions of game theory within. I next read Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop. This one was really good. It deals with the study of very complex systems... like the economy. Can you see where I'm going here? The book also discusses articifial life and artificial intelligence. It basically shows how interesting behaviors emerge from very simple rules in different environments. This can be simple rules for predators and pery in an ecosystem, economic agents in a marketplace, birds in a flock, lots of stuff. Steven Wolfram's A New Kind of Science is based on his research about this stuff. You might have seen that one the shelves. It was over 1000 pages and weighed over 10 pounds. After checking out these two titles and a paper by economist Brian Arthur about market share and random consumer choice I think I might actually want to read that Wolfram monster. It's really interesting stuff. Here's one case in which I have seen certain behaviors emerge from situations with simple rules:

Teaching high school. Complexity theory has made some generalizations that top-down control of complex systems doesn't seem to be as effective as bottom-up emergent control. Think about it: federal administrations hand down "No Child Left Behind" edicts and school districts must respond. They respond by clamping down on the material taught, the teaching methods, the assessment of the learners, and even by clamping down on the people who are doing the teaching. There are success stories from this method. In fact it is the normal method for educating students. The state provides funding to the town, the town funds the school department, the department funds the schools,a nd the school funds the teachers who teach the students. Top-down. Now let's think about this from a bottom-up stand point. A student ("the bottom") has needs. They need to learn to read, they need to learn to care form themselves, they need whatever. If the right person is put in a position to help them get what they need, the educational experience can become a meaningful one. If the educator is allowed to adjust to the needs of the learner and to give them what they need, then the experience is effective. My last post about the CCCS attempted to state this viewpoint. I'm not sure if I did, but I wanted to hit it again. It's good practice for me to attempt to prove a point in writing because I'm supposed to be doing this in school.