This paper examines how web design firms in the emergent new media industry probe and experiment with possible forms and sources of value giving shape to the new economy. Focussing on the collaborative engineering of cross-disciplinary web-design project teams, we examine how websites emerge as...

A recent spate of writings has argued that in a fundamental sense, science is reaching limits. The basic claims of this work is twofold. First, it is argued that for many areas of inquiry, notably physics, chemistry, and biology, science has provided an essentially accurate view of nature. The...

We demonstrate the existence of a phase transition in combinatorial optimization problems. For many of these problems, as local search algorithms are parallelized, the quality of solutions first improves and then sharply degrades to no better than random search. This transition can be...

The evolution of a finite population at linkage equilibrium is described in terms of the dynamics of phenotype distribution cumulants. This provides a powerful method for describing evolutionary transients and we elucidate the relationship between the cumulant dynamics and the diffusion...

We discuss the influence of various mechanisms of information contagion on the dynamics of choices in social networks of decision makers. We show that both polling and contagion processes often end up in herding behaviour, with most agents taking uniformly either one view or the other, even in...

We explore the dynamics of a model of two-party competition under spatial voting. the parties are allowed to {\it incrementally} adapt their platforms by following the voting gradient imposed by the preferences of the electorate and platform of the opposition. The emphasis in this model is on...

Current techniques of DNA analysis enable the scoring of hundreds of electrophoretic bands using a small amount of DNA from an individual. The sample size in pilot experiments is typically orders of magnitude smaller then the number of bands contained in a molecular profile. Nevertheless, it is...

A simple differential equation system describes the dynamics of a renewable resource coupled by a Cobb-Douglas production function to the capital invested in resource harvesting. This system can model fisheries which operate under open access. Significant resource depletion is shown to follow...

We present exact results for two complementary measures of spatial structure generated by 1D spin systems with finite-range interactions. The first, excess entropy, measures the apparent spatial memory stored in configurations. The second, statistical complexity, measures the amount of memory...

Under what conditions can class divisions characterized by high levels of inequality be designated evolutionary universals, using Talcott Parsons's term to refer to social arrangements which have emerged independently and persisted in a wide variety of environments? To explore this question, I...