The Fragmented Orchestra is a distributed musical instrument which combines live audio streams from geographically disparate sites, and granulates each according to the spike timings of an artificial spiking neural network. This paper introduces the work, outlining its historical context, technical architecture, neuronal model and network infrastructure, making specific reference to modes of in...

Centralized markets reduce the costs of search for buyers and sellers. More importantly, their ‘thickness’ increases the chance of of order execution at competitive prices. In spite of the incentives to consolidate, some markets, securities markets being the most notable, have fragmented into multiple trading venues. We argue in this paper that fragmentation is an unavoidable feature of any cen...

The species-area relationship (SAR) gives a quantitative description of the increasing number of species in a community with increasing area of habitat. In conservation, SARs have been used to predict the number of extinctions when the area of habitat is reduced. Such predictions are most needed for landscapes rather than for individual habitat fragments, but SAR-based predictions of extinction...

Recent studies of the formation of collaborative networks typically identify patterns of cohesive social structures and their benefits for economic performance. Using systematic quantitative evidence on 3,700 corporate foundings and about 8,900 members of the corporate elite in late tsarist Russia (c.1869-1900), our study departs from, and thereby extends this previous research in two important...

Every member of Society, from the moment he is born, has a vested interest in disability. Those who escape it early in life achieve it by old age which, in itself, is a social and physical handicap. Yet the man-in-the-street or woman on the Clapham omnibus has no constructive ideas, nor indeed thoughts, on the matter. A letter on disability published in the national press evokes no response. Ye...