High and volatile global food prices have led to food riots and played a critical role in triggering the Arab Spring revolutions in recent years. The severe drought in the US in the summer of 2012 led to a new increase in food prices. Through the fall, they remained at a threshold above which...

Why do a market's prices move up or down? Claims about causes are made without actual information, and accepted or dismissed based upon poor or non-existent evidence. Here we investigate the price movements that ended with Apple stock closing at \$500.00 on January 18, 2013. There is a ready...

During the last two years, Europe has been facing a debt crisis, and Greece has been at its center. In response to the crisis, drastic actions have been taken, including the halving of Greek debt. Policy makers acted because interest rates for sovereign debt increased dramatically. High interest...

We present a non-naive version of the Precautionary (PP) that allows us to avoid paranoia and paralysis by confining precaution to specific domains and problems. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge...

Conversion of corn to ethanol in the US since 2005 has been a major cause of global food price increases during that time and has been shown to be ineffective in achieving US energy independence and reducing environmental impact. We make three key statements to enhance understanding and...

In a market system, regulations are designed to prevent or rectify market failures that inhibit fair exchange, such as monopoly or transactions with hidden costs. Because regulations reduce profits to those possessing unfair advantage, these advantaged corporations (whether individuals,...

In recent years, understanding the structure and function of complex networks has become the foundation for explaining many different real- world complex social, information, biological and technological phenomena. Techniques from statistical physics have been successfully applied to the...

In recent years, understanding the structure and function of complex networks has become the foundation for explaining many different real- world complex biological, technological and informal social phenomena. Techniques from statistical physics have been successfully applied to the analysis of...

We derive a sum rule that constrains the scale based decomposition of the trajectories of finite systems of particles. The sum rule reflects a tradeoff between the finer and larger scale collective degrees of freedom. For short duration trajectories, where acceleration is irrelevant, the sum...

The study of complex systems can be viewed generally as an effort to understand the relationships between properties of systems when viewed on different scales. Viewing a system on different scales involves distinguishing details of behavior and understanding how the details give rise to...