As an old Chinese proverb says, "visiting monks give better sermons." European soccer clubs also believe this, and have always been seeking for foreign players to boost competitiveness. However, due to the reason of protectionism, there were restrictions that each club was only allowed to field...

Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly non-linear out-of-equilibrium systems subjected to exogenous...