If one would start speaking about the dragon kings and black swans, many people would think that the one is talking about the fairy tales. But these terms are used then speaking about the events in the financial markets! Black swans are rare, but observable in the nature. Dragon kings are only observed in the fairy tales. So we would be amused if we would see the black swan with our own eyes, yet if we would see the dragon king we would be completely shocked. In nature these kinds of event are extremely rare and improbable, while in the financial markets we see these kind of events frequently enough. Below you can find a talk by Didier Sornette (taken from ted.com, some of the related info is available from blog.ted.com), who talks about these kind of events, their impact and possibilities to predict.

One and half year ago world media exclaimed - finance is controlled by a single super-corporation (e.g., read article in Lithuanian or English)! Evidently this conclusion is somewhat far fetched, yet it does capture one of the essential points of the underlying scientific research. The research actually shows that a comparatively small number of corporations control almost everything. Now you can listen to the one of the related researchers speaking about this discovery and hear him explain that does this actually mean.

On the BBC Lab UK website you can take the Big Risk Test, which will help you understand your attitude to risk and why it is as it is.

Take the test » (edit: no longer available)

The summer of 2013 will be a very interesting one for us. In June we will participate in four conferences, in Lithuania and abroad, and present five reports (4 talks and 1 poster) on the most recent research done by us. During July and August we will have two students-trainees, who will participate in the project "Promotion of Student Scientific Activities" from the Research Council of Lithuania. The training will be held on the topics of "Economic convergence as thermodynamic appreciation of real currency exchange rate" (supervisor dr. (HP) Vygintas Gontis; student-trainee Kęstutis Acus) and "Controling complex stochastic systems" (supervisor Aleksejus Kononovicius; student-trainee Ignas Kazakevičius).

Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction [1] is a chemical reaction, or more precisely a reaction family, known for exhibiting temporal and spatial oscillations.

This reaction is one of the classical examples of the natural non-linear oscillations. Another prominent example is the previously analyzed prey-predator interactions in the ecosystem. Interestingly enough despite being of a very different nature both of these example can be modeled using Lotka-Volterra equations.

In this text we will also consider certai cellular automaton, which replicates the spatial oscillations seen in some of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions.