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The Semantic Link Network is a general semantic model for modeling the structure and the evolution of complex systems. Various semantic links play different roles in rendering the semantics of complex system. One of the basic semantic links represents cause-effect relation, which plays an important role in representation and understanding. This paper verifies the role of the Semantic Link Network in representing the core of text by investigating the contribution of cause-effect link to representing the core of scientific papers. Research carries out with the following steps: (1) Two propositions on the contribution of cause-effect link in rendering the core of paper are proposed and verified through a statistical survey, which shows that the sentences on cause-effect links cover about 65% of key words within each paper on average. (2) An algorithm based on syntactic patterns is designed for automatically extracting cause-effect link from scientific papers, which recalls about 70% of manually annotated cause-effect links on average, indicating that the result adapts to the scale of data sets. (3) The effects of cause-effect link on four schemes of incorporating cause-effect link into the existing instances of the Semantic Link Network for enhancing the summarization of scientific papers are investigated. The experiments show that the quality of the summaries is significantly improved, which verifies the role of semantic links. The significance of this research lies in two aspects: (1) it verifies that the Semantic Link Network connects the important concepts to render the core of text; and, (2) it provides an evidence for realizing content services such as summarization, recommendation and question answering based on the Semantic Link Network, and it can inspire relevant research on content computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes issue with Stehr and Grundmann's argument in this journal that sociology's poor record of contribution to practical knowledge results from sociologists' misguided attachment to the idea that social phenomena are peculiarly complex, and so peculiarly resistant to efforts at practical knowledge formation. Stehr and Grundmann develop their thesis by contrasting sociology to economics, claiming the latter's superior methods and disciplinary cultures enable it to contribute more successfully to solving practical problems. We argue that Stehr and Grundmann's comparison of the relative success of economics and sociology as policy sciences underestimates the extent to which the complexity argument has been destructive of economics' capacity to contribute practical knowledge, and overestimates the importance of disciplinary methods and cultures in explaining the use of economics in policy making. Further, we argue that the 'complexity argument' can contribute to better policy making, by virtue of its capacity to highlight the dangers of simplistic or fundamentalist solutions to social problems with complex causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists often model social processes as interactions among variables. We review an alternative approach that models social life as interactions among adaptive agents who influence one another in response to the influence they receive. These agent-based models (ABMs) show how simple and predictable local interactions can generate familiar but enigmatic global patterns, such as the diffusion of information, emergence of norms, coordination of conventions, or participation in collective action. Emergent social patterns can also appear unexpectedly and then just as dramatically transform or disappear, as happens in revolutions, market crashes, fads, and feeding frenzies. ABMs provide theoretical leverage where the global patterns of interest are more than the aggregation of individual attributes, but at the same time, the emergent pattern cannot be understood without a bottom up dynamical model of the microfoundations at the relational level. We begin with a brief historical sketch of the shift from “factors” to “actors” in computational sociology that shows how agent-based modeling differs fundamentally from earlier sociological uses of computer simulation. We then review recent contributions focused on the emergence of social structure and social order out of local interaction. Although sociology has lagged behind other social sciences in appreciating this new methodology, a distinctive sociological contribution is evident in the papers we review. First, theoretical interest focuses on dynamic social networks that shape and are shaped by agent interaction. Second, ABMs are used to perform virtual experiments that test macrosociological theories by manipulating structural factors like network topology, social stratification, or spatial mobility. We conclude our review with a series of recommendations for realizing the rich sociological potential of this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been, in the last decades, a bunch of different authors claiming the convenience of describing the most basic elements of current societies as fluids. As a consequence of this proposal, it began the construction of a theoretical model of social fluidity that still needs more accuracy and development. This paper, which is just the first half of a propaedeutic work, trays to build the necessary grounds for the empirical implementation of afore mentioned theoretical model. We start by reviewing the main concepts used by the so called "Theories of Complexity" in modelling complex processes in other scientific fields. Then we point out the limits that may be found in using these theories when modelling the specific complexity of current social fluidity. Finally we discuss how such concepts should be modified and developed in order to be useful in the context of a theory of social fluidity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper will try to explain the difficulty based on the polisemic nature of the notion of complex systems and its broadly used in diverse disciplines such as: Physics, Biology, Sociology, Economics, and Social Psychology, and Clinic Psychology, due to the indetermination and the difficulty for its terminological use for the evaluation of social organizations, and other type of systems or webs, like natural systems, or animal, because this objects, are of different nature because of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complexity in nature has been broadly found not only in physical and biological systems but also in social and economic systems. Although many studies have examined complex systems and helped us understand real-world complexity, the investigation to the legal complexity has not been thoroughly investigated. Here we introduce a novel approach to studying complex legal systems using complex network approaches. On the basis of the bipartite relations among Constitution articles and Court decisions, we built a complex legal network and found the system shows the heterogeneous structure as generally observed in many complex social systems. By treating legal networks as unique political regimes, we examine whether structural properties of the systems have been influenced as the society changes, or not. On one hand, there is a core structure in all legal networks regardless of any social circumstances. On the other hand, with relative comparison among different regimes’ networks, we could identify characteristic structural properties that reveal their identity. Our analysis would contribute to provide a better understanding of legal complexity and practical guidelines for use in various legal and social applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the application of the physics of complexity in contemporary social science. It examines various overlaps and interplays between the analysis of physical and social worlds. Physicists and mathematicians seeking to analyze especially the mathematics of networks are turning to the sociology of social networks. Sociological and more general social science analysis of global processes increasingly deploy the physics and mathematics of complex, non-linear adaptive systems. Various social analysts of modernity and globalization implicitly use "complexity" concepts and ideas even where their usage is not articulated to be explicitly taken. The author does not signify the complexity sciences, but attempts to outline some characteristics of "complex rationality" relevant to the analysis of global relationships. Complexity provides various concepts and theories essential for analyzing such interacting disorderliness and the associated systems interact dissipatively with their environment.