Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations
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http://www.ted.com Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities -- that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city's population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate.
Kommentare
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This is soooo awesome! I'm a recent graduate in physics and I sooooo want to study this topic :o
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I think my favorite idea out of this talk was his observation that societies must accelerate their speed of innovation to avoid impending collapse. That is a scary truth but it is not do or die.
That is, it seems possible for societies to reach sufficient happiness, wealth, and population size before the crash, but only if they are able to innovate faster than the challenges they face. If they are not able, then they will either never reach optimality; rarely advancing beyond a point, or they may die away altogether. -
how find this math formul?
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Won't doubling the size of the organism require 1.5 times the energy for metabolism? I think he made a 'silly mistake' there.
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The same basic content in a six page article. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf
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The only problem is cost of electricity goes up in the city. There should be a savings in scale.
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It seems to me that maybe the reason we don't see animals bigger than the blue whale is that this scaling property has its limits. That would suggest that cities stop scaling sub linearly beyond a certain size.
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All the comments below keep 'fanboying/fangirling' over this talk, while conveniently ignoring one of the most salient and worrying points, that is the need for ever faster cycles of innovation, so that we dun reach our carrying capacity. So can we start discussing this pressing problem now ??? How on earth do we cope with ever increasing amounts of waste (domestic etc.) and demands for resources as cities get bigger ?!
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Great TED talk! Fascinating stuff. I came hear after seeing West on Through the Wormhole.
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Haha, the example of what they wanted a city to look like was Melbourne.
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I am not sure if it is a scientific talk. I believe he is just trying to spread an idea. There are a real variety of TED talks that are not scientific, or at least not completely scientific, but they all spread ideas.
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This IS a scientific talk. I do NOT consider the underlying math to be simple. This is (advanced) statistical physics, and that is the context in which you should see this talk/video if you DO have a scientific background. There are several good scientific messages in this video, one of which being that VERY complex simulations of huge and interconnected systems CAN yield very simple properties. Kind of like how a random walk performed by N_A particles will always give you predictable diffusion.
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The fact that a viewer of this video may think that the talk is "too simplistic" should be excellent feedback for the creator of this TEDtalk. This implies that Geoffrey West is causing regular people (Tom, you may be a scientist, I don't know) to take an interest in the topic of his TEDtalk, the initial goal. The more people who are aware of and interested in solving the same problems he is trying to solve, the faster and better they can be solved.
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if this kind of talk is what it takes to get people interested enough in science to have the patience to listen to real scientific talks, then I'm all for it. And I think scientists should learn from this as well.
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you are the asshole!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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At 3:05 I could think of only one thing: this guy would make an excelent action figure.
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so the more wealth I have the better I am for the economy.
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Cities are meant to grow faster, taller and wider. But efficient and sustainable growth can only be achieved with the commitment of people, governments and policymakers altogether. Duh yes