NEWSLETTER BFI 20110111

NEWSLETTER BANDUNG FE INSTITUTE (BFI)
January 11th 2011



CONTENTS:
01. Message from the Administration
02. BFI is now available in Facebook and Twitter!

-----------------------------------------

01. Message from the Administration

Dear friends, colleagues, competitors,
We have begun a new year 2011 after finishing great times we have in the year 2010. We have given our efforts to see the complexity of social life in the past year as it has been celebrated by our publications in the institute’s working papers, books, and scientific articles published in journals elsewhere. We are very grateful for a lot of occasions in which we can now more and more close to the implementation of research in Indonesia. As we know, that good science must be useful. And it is the task of any scientific research to make all the nature of complexity we found empirically simple enough for people to gain insights from it. For the simplicity out of the complexity of our social life will give humanity an important opportunity to handle the social system with more care, yet effective for the purpose of denouncing injustice as giving welfare for all people.

Last year has been a great one for our research has touched society as innovation for betterment in many occasions. We thank the Republic of Indonesia Research and Technology Ministry for awarding three of our research findings as some from the 102 representative innovations throughout the country: generative music, the social complexity disc, and the Indonesian cartograms. All of these have been enrichment to the previous innovations that are now brought to business implementation: the physics of batik, as presented by the our fellows in acroBatik for this.

From the researches in 2010 we have seen a lot of scientific development on ethnic cultures in Indonesian Archipelago. There have been a great passion to deal with thousands of cultural objects of data as it has been collected by our fellows in Indonesian Archipelago Cultural Initiatives (IACI) in the open-digital library of Indonesian Culture: http://www.budaya-indonesia.org/. We are very delightful for the growing data within it, as more data will become a fuel for us for more on our endeavors for more creative innovations as to human understanding about the cultural diversity. Indonesia to cultural evolutionary research is a place more like Galapagos to Darwinian biological evolutionary works. Our works on the ethnoclustering maps by incorporating the works on phylomemetic tree – as proxy to the memetic model of human cultural evolution – has been improved more and more.

All of those works have made us to face the challenging life of the new world order on the capitalistic appreciation to cultural objects and it’s security. We are delightful to join the workshops brought regarding to this by our friends in the government: the ministry of foreign affairs and the ministry of culture and tourism of Republic Indonesia. The unity of Indonesian people gives positive impact for the restoration of our heterogeneity of cultures in this largest archipelagic nation on the planet. The security of Indonesian ethnic diversity has challenged the perspective on the intellectual property rights as being traditionally brought by the World Intellectual Property Rights Organization (WIPO). We are delightful for existence of the open-mindedness on this challenge from WIPO as well as friends in the United Nations on Education and Culture Organization (UNESCO) on this issue. We ask all of us, as citizens of the world, for support to the betterment of Indonesian cultural security in our introducing the Nusantara Cultural Heritage State License (NCHSL) on Indonesian cultural objects. The traditional culture of Indonesia cannot be handle with traditional views on intellectual property rights!

Friends, colleagues, competitors,
However, some tasks regarding to the complexity our social and economic life should also be more and more invigorated. As the higher gini index of Indonesia now should show us that the inequality of our social life in the country is not a good thing. It is an inevitable fact, that the free market ideology has induced growing hardhsip across the archipelago. We cannot close our eyes on the growing poverty issue in Indonesia. The traditional economists that are now becoming (or supporting) policy-makers on social and economic issues in Indonesia should be strengthened with the works in the institute on social complexity, evolutionary economics, econophysics, and all. This is not without saying that the political aspects and justice are out of the hands of complexity sciences. The works in the institute regarding to “legal physics”, computational political sciences, and all must also altogether in the sense of interdisciplinary researches should also being brought.

Public policies for social, economic, and political life in Indonesia should be sharpened by the complexity sciences, a thing that has been a mission of the institute since her establishment eight years ago. It happens too often the wrong and far projections and risk analyses in any structural changes in prices, inflation regarding to policies on fiscal, monetary, and macroeconomic issues in the country, makes pessimisms have become inherent in realistic view on the future of the nation. It should have been a good moment now, complexity sciences showed action for the more optimism about our future.

I cherished the efforts held by colleagues in INVASA, our friends Billy Franata, Rolan Dahlan, Vande Leonardo, and Rendra Suroso for their day-night working hours building such enormous data backbone from the basic elements of Indonesian social living: villages. The incoming year should be the year full with celebration of more of our understanding

Friends, colleagues, competitors,
The scientific endeavors on social system have shown a great enrichment from physics to social, economic, political, and legal studies. The dynamicity of social phenomena has witness the sharp and harmonious interdisciplinary sport between physics and social sciences. However, horizon of our scientific spectacles has seen that the social system does not change in dynamics, but also in the evolutionary sense. Structural changes of social life have been captured so well with statistical, computational, analytical and numerical physics, yet the cultural changes within can only be captured evolutionarily. A good thing is that the interdisciplinary approaches are now available for us to dig in further since biology and physics have been involved in a quite deep interplay much better than both with social sciences, in general.

Today social sciences may be indebted to the comprehensiveness of physical sciences, yet the sciences of tomorrow lie in the biological and life sciences. The trend of evolutionary approaches in wide ranges of social studies confirms. The researches in the institute exploring memetic analysis in Indonesian traditional cultures, economy, and complex political studies are signature of the institute on this domain. The landscape of creativity and innovation lies in the evolution of the diversities existing in Indonesian fabrics, folklores, traditional music, ancient and traditional architectures, and more waiting for further comprehensive understanding on today economy, politics, and global cultures.

Friends and colleagues,
Let us just embrace the new year as the incoming year full of excitement of our social and humanity betterment. May the research year 2011 is the year on which milestones of beautiful works of scientific research are marked in the institute as also elsewhere! God bless us and those expect development and improvement from sciences!


Hokky Situngkir
President of Bandung Fe Institute


02. BFI is now available in Facebook and Twitter!
You can now be able to access and instantly receive any updates of research by joining/liking the institute's official Facebook page at:

URL: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bandung-Fe-Institute/119717711380033

Feel free to receive interesting research results from status updates as super-short summary from research finding conducted in the institute. For your mobile convenience, you might also want to join the institute official's twitter updates by following:

http://twitter.com/bandungfe

You can also post any of your interest or comment at the page above.
Feel free to follow us, and let us make it our better place and social living.



-----

BFI Administration
Bandung Fe Institute
Jl. Sarimadu 99
Sarijadi Blok 25
Bandung 40164
JAWA BARAT
INDONESIA
ph./fax: +62 22 2011016
mail: bfi@bandungfe.net
http://www.bandungfe.net/