Last week, on 26th and 27th of January, Lithuanian Society of Young Researchers held a conference "Interdisciplinarity: How to Make it Work". During the conference presenters, which included both scientists and officers of varying institutions, from all over the world and Lithuania have shared with the attendees their success stories and provided ideological grounds for the discussions on the interdisciplinarity.

For me the most important part was the aforementioned ideological background. Working in the context of Physics of Risk it is important for us to see where do we actually stand. Are we still in physics or maybe we have moved to the other domains (e.g., economics, financial mathematics or maybe even into the brand new independent field econophysics?). So in this text I will attempt to share and develop some interesting thoughts heard during the conference.

The convergence of economies is an interesting topic to countries, which are significantly behind the leading countries in terms of economic efficiency and standard of living. It should not be a great surprise that the politicians of such developing countries name the economical catch up as their primary political goal. Understanding the essence of political debates on this topic and their interpretation i the media is very challenging topic as economic globalization, or integration, is very complex process. Though the basic understanding of what is known to economists about the economic convergence might be obtained by checking freely available source such as Wikipedia.

Our interest in this topic stems from the widely seen and heard, even among specialists (economists scientists, financial analytics and journalists), misunderstanding of the mechanics behind the observed economical convergence. These some times even principal errors causes society-wide mistrust in countries economical evolution and economical perspectives. We would like to illustrate known laws using certain examples and briefly analyze economic convergence of our region. We hope that interactive tools provided in the text will enable You to experiment with data and find the answers to your questions.

Full text is (was?) available on V. Gontis home page »

In the next Physica A issue (will be made available in February, 2012) our article [1] will be published. The article is on the agent-based reasoning for the stochastic models. Basically this article incorporates knowledge obtained while working on the simple models provided on Physics of Risk:

In the past few year European econophysicists shared a rumors on the upcoming flagship project, which should innovate not only econophysics, but also economic and other social sciences. Finally it has started and Lithuanian scientists have joined it! We, scientists of VU ITPA, are also among them.

More information can be found on the official project home page futurict.eu.

Physics of Risk meets new year with some significant improvements.

Firstly all of the texts on models were converted from page to post format. This small improvement will enable flexible handling of main topics. Now such models as Kirman's unidirectional model will appear in all relevant topics covered by Physics of Risk - in the given case you'll see the model under both agent-based modeling and business processes main topics. Some general models will find their place under the new "General models" topic.