Surprise, Recipes for Surprise, and Social Influence

Preparing for Financial Surprise

This essay shows how Todd LaPorte’s work on reliability-seeking organizations contains insights for how we might understand the financial crisis of 2008–2009. In particular, the financial system was not perceived and described as critical infrastructure, there was a regulatory overemphasis on routine operational practices at the entity level, and there was insufficient countercyclical leadershi...

Surprise 'social status' finding in rape study.

Searching for Surprise

Inspired by the notion of surprise for unconventional discovery in computational creativity, we introduce a general search algorithm we name surprise search. Surprise search is grounded in the divergent search paradigm and is fabricated within the principles of metaheuristic (evolutionary) search. The algorithm mimics the self-surprise cognitive process of creativity and equips computational cr...

Maximizing Surprise

Constantin Carathéodory MAA 1936 I'll be glad if I have succeeded in impressing the idea that it is not only pleasant to read at times the works of the old mathematical authors, but this may occasionally be of use for the actual advancement of science.

Palm surprise

As our lists of well-monitored species worldwide show increasing numbers of those in decline and under threat, it is a treat for researchers to learn of the discovery of a new species — even more so when it is large, showy and appears to be quite distinct from its nearest known relatives. That was the news last month when researchers reported a new species of palm in Madagascar. It was so disti...