Six Sources of Collapse

Front cover 
 copyright page 
 title page 
 Preface
 Acknowledgements
 Introduction
 What is a collapse?
 Shades of Hitchcock, and other tales
 What might tomorrow bring?
 What this book aims to do
 Predicting Unpredictable Events
 Like a thief in the night?
 Chance and regularity
 A quick statistics primer
 Normal regularity: the good, the bad, and the miraculous
 Abnormal regularity: extreme value statistics
 Getting things right with heavy-tailed distributions
 The dangers from getting your probabilities wrong
 Group Behavior: Crowds, Herds, and Video Games
 Fire! Birds, boids, and bicyclesThe Monte Carlo world
 Models with probabilities
 People, properties, and political systems
 Connections to other chapters
 Evolution and Collapse: Game Playing in a Changing World
 My New Hampshire
 Strategies and games
 Iterated and evolutionary game playing
 Modeling the evolution of species and cultures
 Implications for understanding collapse
 Instability, Oscillation, and Feedback
 Sharing an electric blanket and other challenges
 Primer on differential equations
 Stable and unstable equilibrium points and related concepts. The dynamics of interacting populationsStructural collapses and related processes
 The science of trying to maintain control
 The Chernobyl disaster
 Nonlinearity: Invitation to Chaos and Catastrophe
 The elephant's toenail
 Local linearity
 Bifurcations, tipping points, and catastrophes
 Hysteresis: where there may be no simple turning back
 Chaos: beginning with a butterfly
 It's All About Networks
 How's your networking?
 Network fundamentals
 Important variations in network macrostructure
 Unexpected network crashes
 Interactive dynamics across networks. Spreading processes through networksA surprising game on a network
 Networks in an evolutionary context
 Putting It All Together: Looking at Collapse Phenomena in ``6-D''
 A quick review
 The utility of multiple perspectives in understanding the risk of collapse
 Where to go from here: the modern field of complexity theory
 References
 Index
 About the Author.