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Nearly all surviving balances in nature are stable equilibria. They're not fragile at all. If you perturb them, it just re-stabilizes at a new equilibrium point. e.g. If you tilt the bowl in the wiki picture, the ball doesn't fall off the top of the bowl like in the first picture or roll away like in the third picture.. It just settles in at a different spot on the bottom of the bowl in the second picture, now-tilted slightly.

Bullshit.

That's a myth dreamt up by people more concerned with mathematics and engineering to pay attention to how organic systems actually function.

Let us put aside for the moment that this reasoning applies to highly simplified models of ecosystems, and not ecosystems themselves. This adds a whole epistemic layer to the problem: we don't really know shit about what would actually happen given a perturbation; we barely know this for many models and for actual ecosystems you can forget about it.

But then - even model ecosystems are seldom if ever in equilibrium, and the classical stability-based equilibrium analysis may have been cutting edge in 1974 when Robert May published his seminal book, but plenty of problems with this approach have been found since then. There are a plethora of other concepts that have been developed in order to tackle its short comings, for example resilience (how quickly the system returns to equilibrium). All these concepts should always be taken with a pinch of salt; its not obvious they are relevant or even desirable goals in ecosystem management.

To speak of one particularly relevant metric to this particular issue, there are huge parameter ranges in many models in which oscillatory behavior is present. In his 2012 book, Kevin McCann argues we should focus more on whether the eigenvalues are complex (i.e. prone to decaying or sustained oscillations) than on whether their real parts are negative (the classical stability criterion). If dynamics are oscillatory and I perturb a population down, it will overshoot its original value (possibly perturbing other populations) and will also return back down (making the population spend more time in low numbers and increasing extinction risk).

Another critical concept is that of fragility proper; as opposed to the dynamical concepts, fragility is a measure of functional response to the perturbation as opposed to the dynamics of the perturbation. Just because there is a stable equilibrium for some variable doesn't mean perturbing will have no cost in terms of other critical variables. For this see Nassim Taleb's 2012 book Antifragile.

Importantly I would point out the complete disconnect between your statements and empirical observations of ecosystems. We have many studies suggesting that empirically measured ecosystems may be extremely fragile to particular types of perturbations; for example see Solé & Montoya 2001 which identify keystone species by food web degree (number of tropic neighbors) and demonstrate fragility of total biodiversity to extinction of such keystone species. Another example is Montoya et al 2009 where a different identification of the weak spot based on inverse Jacobian / indirect interaction analysis is found. There is also work by Jane Memmott and her colleagues in identifying fragility not only particular species extinctions but also particular habitat loss. One doesn't need sophisticated analysis, however, to see ecosystems collapsing at a rapid rate not only at present but in many historical situations; indeed ecological fragility is quite possible one of the drivers of mass extinctions (present and past).

Finally, I would add that I would be the first to point out the short comings of all of these methods. The burden of proof, however, is on those engaging on sys

Did anybody else smell something funky when reading the assertion that Cities are more environmentally friendly than the countryside? The first article linked seemed to talk only about lower emissions resulting from more efficient per capita household energy consumption and transportation costs. I wonder what would happen if we account for all the other goods the urbanite consumes, the emissions for their transportation, etc. After all Industry plays the bigger role in pollution. And that is not even to mention that pollution is not a one-dimensional variable, but a highly complex concept involved intense non-linearities. As we have seen above - again we see shit is more complicated than we gave it credit.

What really made me sick about the article (which you see everywhere these days) is the assertion that since the population will grow to the size of 9 billion people "we must accommodate this growth". Yay! Lets grow the human population until we reach the very boundary of the planet's capacity so that random fluctuations can result in major catastrophes and risk life on the planet for the whole human race!

Its not like I think country side dwellers are saints - I am sure they consume and pollute more than they did a few hundred years ago - its just I recon that the null hypothesis should be "low concentrations of human population are less polluting the high concentrations". Don't mistake this for an argument for everyone going to the countryside - I argue for limiting population growth. The ecosystems we live in are highly non-linear and this means we can be facing extreme fluctuations as the result of relatively small events. This is an argument for environmental conservatism - and the argument made well by Nassim Taleb in his new book is that when dealing with complex systems fraught with non-linearities which evolved over long time we should assume anything we do effects the system adversely, and the opposite assertion is the one that needs proving.

I can see the Irony you refer to and its a good point. But unfortunately the situation is not so simple because technology is frequently far easier to use for destruction then creation. Certain systems have fragilities which could be lethal under errors; For example, regardless of the intention of the implementation of biotechnology - Ecologies can exhibit unexpected response to randomness. Bringing fragility into the picture as some very Clever People have Noted would force us to review our risk management system completely.

Centralize technological decision making and each Human Error will be magnified (as with financial network that is centralized and is fragile to the collapse of one or two big institutions). Decentralize technological decision making and you have the danger of agents acting for their own benefit to burden society with the Risks of their enterprises (as with people administering antibiotics too quickly - something that statistically benefits them and endangers the population). If there was ever a time to start bringing the concepts of Antifragility and Subsidiarity Principle into socioeconomic, techno/scientific and political discourse.... its Now.

There's always been a long tail in the demand curve, and it always will.
What we need are useful recommendations that guide us from the head to the hidden treasures located along the tail area.

Also, I find very disappointing that none (Wharton, Anderson, etc.) uses the Long Tail model proposed by Kalevi Kilkki ( http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1832/1716 ). This model has a better formal definition of the Head, Mid and Tail parts of the curve (not based neither on absolute nor on %), based on how to split the (log) x-axis.

[shameless plug] I did a PhD named "Music Recommendation and Discovery in the Long Tail" http://www.iua.upf.es/~ocelma/PhD/index.html
So, I also did some boring analyses about the Long Tail in the music (recommendation) domain.

The 10,000th patent covers a technology that allows a device to associate data with objects placed on its surface, and is likely eventually to become part of the Surface table PC.

http://mtg.upf.es/reactable/

Oh yeah...someone already invented a table that associates data with objects placed on it.

I doubt many scientist would see any competition between the two, it's like comparing mathematics with dance.

Oh, like this?

This reminds me of a (very cool) audio/visual project called reactable. Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReacTable

You too can build your own Surface: reacTable, Wikipedia article.

The ReacTable has been used recently by Bjork at the Coachella festival.

There are lots of good videos linked from the BoingBoing article including one of Robert Moog interacting with a ReactTable.

The software is available so if you want one have a crack at building your own.

As best as I can tell the only innovation that Microsoft has added to their interactive table is the wireless interface support (Bluetooth etc). All the shape and "domino" tags recognition have been done before. It would be interesting to see how many of the developers of other interactive tables have been involved with this project.

Other interactive tables can be found here.
http://mtg.upf.es/reactable/?related
http://www.tangibletable.de/
http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/ambiente/english/pro jekte/projekte/ineractable.html
http://www.jamespatten.com/audiopad/
http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/2005/01 /10/space-and-place-a-list-fo-interactive-tables/

The ReacTable has been used recently by Bjork at the Coachella festival.

There are lots of good videos linked from the BoingBoing article including one of Robert Moog interacting with a ReactTable.

The software is available so if you want one have a crack at building your own.

As best as I can tell the only innovation that Microsoft has added to their interactive table is the wireless interface support (Bluetooth etc). All the shape and "domino" tags recognition have been done before. It would be interesting to see how many of the developers of other interactive tables have been involved with this project.

Other interactive tables can be found here.
http://mtg.upf.es/reactable/?related
http://www.tangibletable.de/
http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/ambiente/english/pro jekte/projekte/ineractable.html
http://www.jamespatten.com/audiopad/
http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/2005/01 /10/space-and-place-a-list-fo-interactive-tables/

The ReacTable has been used recently by Bjork at the Coachella festival.

There are lots of good videos linked from the BoingBoing article including one of Robert Moog interacting with a ReactTable.

The software is available so if you want one have a crack at building your own.

As best as I can tell the only innovation that Microsoft has added to their interactive table is the wireless interface support (Bluetooth etc). All the shape and "domino" tags recognition have been done before. It would be interesting to see how many of the developers of other interactive tables have been involved with this project.

Other interactive tables can be found here.
http://mtg.upf.es/reactable/?related
http://www.tangibletable.de/
http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/ambiente/english/pro jekte/projekte/ineractable.html
http://www.jamespatten.com/audiopad/
http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/2005/01 /10/space-and-place-a-list-fo-interactive-tables/

Vocaloid has been covered on Slashdot before. It is one of the many impressive projects to have at least in part come out of the Music Technology Group at Institut Universitari de L'Audiovisual in Barcelona.

This is one of many impressive Music Technology groups in the world who is kind enough to provide us with open source software such as CLAM. Similarly there are some groups out there doing interesting things. Needless to say, I could link all day...

I am a graduate student in this field

Vocaloid has been covered on Slashdot before. It is one of the many impressive projects to have at least in part come out of the Music Technology Group at Institut Universitari de L'Audiovisual in Barcelona.

This is one of many impressive Music Technology groups in the world who is kind enough to provide us with open source software such as CLAM. Similarly there are some groups out there doing interesting things. Needless to say, I could link all day...

I am a graduate student in this field

Vocaloid has been covered on Slashdot before. It is one of the many impressive projects to have at least in part come out of the Music Technology Group at Institut Universitari de L'Audiovisual in Barcelona.

This is one of many impressive Music Technology groups in the world who is kind enough to provide us with open source software such as CLAM. Similarly there are some groups out there doing interesting things. Needless to say, I could link all day...

I am a graduate student in this field

Sorry man, you are amazingly disconnected with the computer music scene. Although many of are enjoying macosx now, most of us know and like unix.

Perhaps its while we are using pure-data, or STK or maybe CLAM or by chance audacity

Linking is getting old, but being surronded by computer music, I promise you WE USE LINUX.

Kind Regards,
Rob

in-depth technical presentations and demonstrations of many cutting edge Linux audio and MIDI applications.

(The domains are only shown in-line when they're part of the comments, not stories).

• With a high resolution display, you can barely see the pixel or two gap between the underscores. It just looks like one big long link.
• To find out what each link is for I need to mouse-over each one individually. But Slashdot doesn't even make of the TITLE attribute of A tags, so I need to look at some cryptic URL in the status bar to figure out where it will take me!
• The Related Links section is automatically generated from the links within a submission. But it's now rendered useless since it contains link titles such as 'many' and 'cutting'.

There are lies, damn lies, statistics and the over application of Mark Twain's complaint.

Unfortunately, since things have been so bleak professionally lately due to all the 'help' received by US programmers it may be left for someone else somewhere else to complete this work.