Postdoctoral Scientist: Rural Social and Trade Networks
This is a unique position where you will reconstruct the trade and communication networks of rural South India from various large empirical data sets and make it available to the greater scientific community. Real time understanding of the social and trade network topologies and dynamics will be used to design interventions that can significantly impact the dynamics of the network as part of an ambitious large scale social experiment to bring about poverty alleviation.
The key requirements are large imagination, a strong desire to work for social change, the ability to work efficiently with large datasets in MATLAB and C and the ability to design cool GUIs that will facilitate public access to the data.
This position does carry publication potential. However the primary goal is to create understanding that can result in fast productive interventions that positively impact the standard of living.
Please submit a cover letter outlining why this interests you along with your CV to kamalesh@mmfl.in
Showing posts with label nonlinear dynamics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nonlinear dynamics. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Madura is looking for a postdoctoral scientist
Madura is looking for a scientist who will do cool things that haven't been done before. Here's the ad:
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Where is this blog leading? Who’s your audience?
Yesterday someone I know very well (no names will be named) asked me ‘What’s the purpose of your blog? Who do you want as your audience?’ So I said ‘What! Can you give me a break? This blog is only a couple days old’. ‘It’s just not evident to me what this is leading up to,’ unnamed person persisted. I won’t tell you what I said then, but grudgingly I’ll admit those are good questions. So here are the answers.
My posts will encompass the following range of topics:
1) Explanations of different concepts underlying networks in nature, and network principles in general, and how they relate to the issue of poverty. These will be a little didactic but are concepts that will help in understanding other posts. Initially there will be more of these but over time that ratio will change in favour of the categories below.
2)Discussions of different approaches to tackling poverty and their successes and shortcomings.
3)Discussion of a network based approach to solving the problem of poverty using a for-profit enterprise model which will include empirical data and network models.
4)An update on the practical approaches and outcomes at Madura Microfinance where we will use network understanding to drive socioeconomic change.
The audience I envision are people with an interest in the issue of poverty who 1) work in companies, government, non profits and other organizations who are curious about what science may have to offer as an approach on the frontlines 2) are scientists in the areas of nonlinear dynamics, condensed matter physics and other related fields who are interested in taking on research that can have immediate practical relevance.
My posts will encompass the following range of topics:
1) Explanations of different concepts underlying networks in nature, and network principles in general, and how they relate to the issue of poverty. These will be a little didactic but are concepts that will help in understanding other posts. Initially there will be more of these but over time that ratio will change in favour of the categories below.
2)Discussions of different approaches to tackling poverty and their successes and shortcomings.
3)Discussion of a network based approach to solving the problem of poverty using a for-profit enterprise model which will include empirical data and network models.
4)An update on the practical approaches and outcomes at Madura Microfinance where we will use network understanding to drive socioeconomic change.
The audience I envision are people with an interest in the issue of poverty who 1) work in companies, government, non profits and other organizations who are curious about what science may have to offer as an approach on the frontlines 2) are scientists in the areas of nonlinear dynamics, condensed matter physics and other related fields who are interested in taking on research that can have immediate practical relevance.
How Nature Works by Per Bak: A recommended read on power laws
I have previously posted on the heavy-tailed or power law nature of income distributions where income and number of people with that income has a power relationship. (See Who cares about the average income!)
To get a feel for how much of Nature can be described by a power law and what could be behind this, here is a good book to start with: How Nature Works by Per Bak. Per Bak (now no more) was a physicist who developed a model that he called ‘self-organized criticality’ that produces power law outcomes. However, it is not the only model of dynamical systems that produces power laws. Consequently he did get quite a bit of criticism for stretching to claim that this (his model) is how nature works. Nonetheless it is an interesting read.
As a general principle though, models of systems that produce power laws (like the one developed by Per Bak) are ones that are dynamic or in motion, and by their very nature are able to explain the coexistence of the few very large events (the accumulation of billions among a small number of individuals) and the large number of very small events (a huge number of people who have not acquired much money at all). This is a fundamental shift in thinking relative to the prevailing notion that the existence of billionaires (or rare events) is ‘anomalous’. Indeed billionaires appear to be a natural outcome of a dynamical system of money flow.
To get a feel for how much of Nature can be described by a power law and what could be behind this, here is a good book to start with: How Nature Works by Per Bak. Per Bak (now no more) was a physicist who developed a model that he called ‘self-organized criticality’ that produces power law outcomes. However, it is not the only model of dynamical systems that produces power laws. Consequently he did get quite a bit of criticism for stretching to claim that this (his model) is how nature works. Nonetheless it is an interesting read. As a general principle though, models of systems that produce power laws (like the one developed by Per Bak) are ones that are dynamic or in motion, and by their very nature are able to explain the coexistence of the few very large events (the accumulation of billions among a small number of individuals) and the large number of very small events (a huge number of people who have not acquired much money at all). This is a fundamental shift in thinking relative to the prevailing notion that the existence of billionaires (or rare events) is ‘anomalous’. Indeed billionaires appear to be a natural outcome of a dynamical system of money flow.
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