Economic rating agencies can make and break economies. What can be done about it?

Numerous tabletop, card and role-playing game projects are launched on crowd-funding platform Kickstarter each week. Some of these projects do well, while others fail to muster support. Recently we have noticed interesting project by Dan Ariely, whose TED talk we have shared earlier, and Irrational Ventures named "Irrational Card Game." This game, as a tabletop game, might not be the most interesting, but it is certainly interesting as a tool to bring social science to the masses. First of all, cards in this game are filled with information about social experiments and their outcomes. Also neat feature of this game is that by supporting it, you support actual scientific research.

Read more on Kickstarter »

A brief video from "It's Okay to Be Smart" about the complexity of weather forecasts.

In 1987 Per Bak, Chao Tang and Kurt Wiesenfeld proposed a simple cellular automaton, sandpile model, which exhibits critical behavior [1, 2, 3]. In this critical behavior state small perturbations acting upon the system may cause huge consequences or go completely unnoticed. The impact of these consequences seems to follow power-law distribution.

In this text we will briefly discuss how the model works and present interactive applet. We would like to draw your attention to a previous article in which described earthquake model.

Campaigns for 2016 US presidential election have already started and some vloggers are looking into interesting ways candidates may gain upper hand.