Extreme Events in Nature and Society (The Frontiers Collection)
Language: English
Pages: 357
ISBN: 3540814973
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Significant, and usually unwelcome, surprises, such as floods, financial crisis, epileptic seizures, or material rupture, are the topics of Extreme Events in Nature and Society. The book, authored by foremost experts in these fields, reveals unifying and distinguishing features of extreme events, including problems of understanding and modelling their origin, spatial and temporal extension, and potential impact. The chapters converge towards the difficult problem of anticipation: forecasting the event and proposing measures to moderate or prevent it. Extreme Events in Nature and Society will interest not only specialists, but also the general reader eager to learn how the multifaceted field of extreme events can be viewed as a coherent whole.
Xevent should interest us at least as much as the “How?” if we want to get closer to the prediction, and to the anticipation of Xevents. It is less suspicious to affirm such an idea today now that bifurcations and attractors were introduced into scientific jargon (see Feigenbaum et al. [30]). The equilibrium following Xevents makes us aware of the variety of ways in which the physical substratum of everything is preserved through infinite processes. However – and this goes back to the major
Xevent, but that does not mean that we could literally make it. Even induced seizures are not exactly like the ones experienced by individuals who go through real seizures. Low-scale earthquakes (caused by experiments and tests that researchers conduct) are by their nature on a different scale and quality than the ones that people experience on the Islands of Japan, in California, in China, or in Turkey. It is therefore of particular interest to take a closer look at the various factors involved
weather as a state of the atmosphere. Both temperature and precipitation are observables that may be used to study its dynamics. Evidently, extreme precipitation is not strongly correlated to extreme temperatures, so it is unclear whether we can say that the atmosphere is in an extreme state when it is exceptionally hot. Many examples could be a combination of both types. As said before, humans often recognise Xevents as bringing some potential damage. Hence, there are clear physical effects that
1]. Assume that we know the last observation xN with an uncertainty (measurement error, computer precision, finite representation of real numbers) of . Then the optimal way to use the knowledge of an infinite past sequence of observations cannot be better than applying the map itself to the last observation, hence we compute x ˆN +1 = 1−2x2N . The uncertainty of the present state xN translates into the uncertainty of our prediction, which for this particular system is twice as large on average [3].
foreign capital inflow: implications for the future of the US economy and its stock market, Physica A, 332, 412–440 (2004) 58. Sornette, D. and W.-X. Zhou, Predictability of large future changes in complex systems, Int. J. Forecasting, in press (2004) (http://arXiv.org/abs/condmat/0304601) 59. Johnson, N.F., P. Jefferies and P. Ming Hui, Financial Market Complexity (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, UK, 2003) 60. Andersen, J.V. and D. Sornette, A mechanism for pockets of predictability in complex