Probably everyone has at least once have been stuck in the traffic jam. But most probably not everyone had thought about the possible relationship between the complexity science and traffic. For quite a long time it was thought that traffic jams can be caused by noticeable events on the road - car crashes, road works and etc. But in the recent decades number of cars in the streets grew rapidly and it was noticed that sometimes traffic jams form without any obvious reasons. In this text we present a simple traffic model by Nagel and Schreckenberg [1], which predicts traffic jams occurring due to small errors made by drivers themselves.

It appears that socio-economical regularities may be understood not only by using physical or mathematical intuition or even by using the ideas from social sciences. It appears that even philologists may have something to say about our socio-economical. For example the tendency to willingness to save money for the future may be dependent on if our mother-tongue is futureless or not (do we say "It rain tomorrow" or "It will rain tomorrow"? e.g., German may be seen as a futureless language, while Lithuanian and English have strongly differing future tense). Below you will find two videos - one made by eBay Deals, which provides a broad outlook, and another recorded by TED, in which K. Chen presents his research, - which present this kind of research in more detail.

In this talk, published on ted.com website, Philip Evans discusses the current developments of contemporary business models and gives some insights into how the Big data will influence the future business.

It appears that our "Baltic sister" Estonia also has some econophycists. The main area of research of the Estonian econophysicists are the kinetic exchange models, while there are also some works related to the multifractility of the time series. From a pedagogical point of view the situation is similar to what we have in Lithuania - there is no formal education, but some seminars are red. Feel free to deeper familiarize yourself with econophysics in Estonia by reading an article by M. Patriarca et al. [1].

References

• M. Patriarca, E. Heinsalu, R. Kitt, J. Kalda. Econophysics studies in Estonia. Science and Culture 76: 374-379 (2010). arXiv: 1006.3708 [q-fin.GN].

People are exceptionally rational, no other species are able to complete the tasks people are able to. But the people are also appear to be unique in a sense that they tend to make mistakes. Same silly mistakes over and over again. Is this error-proness a consequence of the rationality? Would presumably less rational beings do the same mistakes? Laurie Santos (and her team) have conducted a series of experiments on the capuchin monkeys and have seen how the irrationality is also present in the monkey economics or "monkeynomics" for short. We invite you to listen her talk.

This talk was given at TED event and is available on ted.com.