Download or read book Thinking in Complexity written by Klaus Mainzer and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complexity and nonlinearity are prominent features in the evolution of matter, life, and human society. Even our mind seems to be governed by the nonlinear dynamics of the complex networks in our brain. This book considers complex systems in the physical and biological sciences, cognitive and computer sciences, social and economic sciences, and philosophy and history of science. An in terdisciplinary methodology is introduced to explain the emergence of order in nature and mind and in the econ omy and society by common principles. These methods are sometimes said to foreshadow the new sciences of complexity characterizing the scientific deve10pment of the 21 st century. The book critically an alyzes the successes and limits of this approach, its sys tematic foundations, and its historical and philosophical background. An epilogue discusses new standards of eth ical behavior which are demanded by the complex prob lems of nature and mind, economy and society.
Download or read book Measures of Complexity written by Vladimir Vovk and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together historical notes, reviews of research developments, fresh ideas on how to make VC (Vapnik–Chervonenkis) guarantees tighter, and new technical contributions in the areas of machine learning, statistical inference, classification, algorithmic statistics, and pattern recognition. The contributors are leading scientists in domains such as statistics, mathematics, and theoretical computer science, and the book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in these domains.
Download or read book Dealing with Complexity written by Robert L. Flood and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contents 11. 2. 2. Four Main Areas of Dispute 247 11. 2. 3. Summary . . . 248 11. 3. Making Sense of the Issues . . 248 11. 3. 1. Introduction . . . . 248 11. 3. 2. The Scientific Approach 248 11. 3. 3. Science and Matters of Society . 249 11. 3. 4. Summary . 251 11. 4. Tying It All Together . . . . 251 11. 4. 1. Introduction . . . . 251 11. 4. 2. A Unifying Framework 251 11. 4. 3. Critical Systems Thinking 253 11. 4. 4. Summary 254 11. 5. Conclusion 254 Questions . . . 255 REFERENCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Chapter One SYSTEMS Origin and Evolution, Terms and Concepts 1. 1. INTRODUCTION We start this book with Theme A (see Figure P. I in the Preface), which aims to develop an essential and fundamental understanding of systems science. So, what is systems science? When asked to explain what systems science is all about, many systems scientists are confronted with a rather daunting task. The discipline tends to be presented and understood in a fragmented way and very few people hold an overview understanding of the subject matter, while also having sufficient in-depth competence in many and broad-ranging subject areas where the ideas are used. Indeed, it was precisely this difficulty that identified the need for a comprehensive well-documented account such as is presented here in Dealing with Complexity.
Download or read book New Thinking in Complexity for the Social Sciences and Humanities written by Ton Jörg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The underlying idea and motive for the book is that the notion of complexity may humanize the social sciences, may conceive the complex human being as more human, and turn reality as assumed in our doing social science into a more complex, that is a richer reality for all. The main focus of this book is on new thinking in complexity, with complexity to be taken as derived from the Latin word complexus: ‘that which is interwoven.’ The trans-disciplinary approach advocated here will be trans-disciplinary in two ways: firstly, by going beyond the separate disciplines within the fields of both natural sciences and social sciences, and, secondly, by going beyond the separate cultures of the natural sciences and of the social sciences and humanities.
Download or read book Why Simple Wins written by Lisa Bodell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-13 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine what you could do with the time you spend writing emails every day. Complexity is killing companies' ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is fast becoming the competitive advantage of our time. Why Simple Wins helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today's corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm. By learning how to eliminate redundancies, communicate with clarity, and make simplification a habit, individuals and companies can begin to recognize which activities are time-sucks and which create lasting value. Lisa Bodell's simplification method has several unique principles: Simplification is a skill that's available to us all, yet very few leaders use it. Simplification is the right thing to do--for our customers, for our company, and for each other. Operating with simplification as our core business model will make it easier to be respectful of each other's time. Simplification drives culture, and culture in turn drives employee engagement, customer relations, and overall productivity. This book is inspired by Bodell's passion for eliminating barriers to innovation and productivity. In it, she explains why change and innovation are so hard to achieve--and it's not what you might expect. The reality is this: we spend our days drowning in mundane tasks like meetings, emails, and reports. These are often self-created complexities that prevent us from getting to the meaningful work that truly matters. Using simple stories and techniques, Why Simple Wins shows that by using simplicity as an operating principle, we can eliminate the busy work that puts a chokehold on us every day, and instead spend time on the work that we value.
Download or read book Diversity and Complexity written by Scott E. Page and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to the role of diversity in complex adaptive systems. A complex system--such as an economy or a tropical ecosystem--consists of interacting adaptive entities that produce dynamic patterns and structures. Diversity plays a different role in a complex system than it does in an equilibrium system, where it often merely produces variation around the mean for performance measures. In complex adaptive systems, diversity makes fundamental contributions to system performance. Scott Page gives a concise primer on how diversity happens, how it is maintained, and how it affects complex systems. He explains how diversity underpins system level robustness, allowing for multiple responses to external shocks and internal adaptations; how it provides the seeds for large events by creating outliers that fuel tipping points; and how it drives novelty and innovation. Page looks at the different kinds of diversity--variations within and across types, and distinct community compositions and interaction structures--and covers the evolution of diversity within complex systems and the factors that determine the amount of maintained diversity within a system. Provides a concise and accessible introduction Shows how diversity underpins robustness and fuels tipping points Covers all types of diversity The essential primer on diversity in complex adaptive systems
Download or read book Complexity and the Human Experience written by Paul A. Youngman and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions of values, ontologies, ethics, aesthetics, discourse, origins, language, literature, and meaning do not lend themselves readily, or traditionally, to equations, probabilities, and models. However, with the increased adoption of natural science tools in economics, anthropology, and political science-to name only a few social scientific fie
Download or read book Thinking in Complexity written by Klaus Mainzer and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-09-07 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition also treats smart materials and artificial life. A new chapter on information and computational dynamics takes up many recent discussions in the community.
Download or read book Complexity written by Roger Lewin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Put together one of the world's best science writers with one of the universe's most fascinating subjects and you are bound to produce a wonderful book. . . . The subject of complexity is vital and controversial. This book is important and beautifully done."—Stephen Jay Gould "[Complexity] is that curious mix of complication and organization that we find throughout the natural and human worlds: the workings of a cell, the structure of the brain, the behavior of the stock market, the shifts of political power. . . . It is time science . . . thinks about meaning as well as counting information. . . . This is the core of the complexity manifesto. Read it, think about it . . . but don't ignore it."—Ian Stewart, Nature This second edition has been brought up to date with an essay entitled "On the Edge in the Business World" and an interview with John Holland, author of Emergence: From Chaos to Order.
Download or read book Computability and Complexity written by Neil D. Jones and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computability and complexity theory should be of central concern to practitioners as well as theorists. Unfortunately, however, the field is known for its impenetrability. Neil Jones's goal as an educator and author is to build a bridge between computability and complexity theory and other areas of computer science, especially programming. In a shift away from the Turing machine- and G�del number-oriented classical approaches, Jones uses concepts familiar from programming languages to make computability and complexity more accessible to computer scientists and more applicable to practical programming problems. According to Jones, the fields of computability and complexity theory, as well as programming languages and semantics, have a great deal to offer each other. Computability and complexity theory have a breadth, depth, and generality not often seen in programming languages. The programming language community, meanwhile, has a firm grasp of algorithm design, presentation, and implementation. In addition, programming languages sometimes provide computational models that are more realistic in certain crucial aspects than traditional models. New results in the book include a proof that constant time factors do matter for its programming-oriented model of computation. (In contrast, Turing machines have a counterintuitive "constant speedup" property: that almost any program can be made to run faster, by any amount. Its proof involves techniques irrelevant to practice.) Further results include simple characterizations in programming terms of the central complexity classes PTIME and LOGSPACE, and a new approach to complete problems for NLOGSPACE, PTIME, NPTIME, and PSPACE, uniformly based on Boolean programs. Foundations of Computing series
Download or read book Text Complexity written by Douglas Fisher and published by Corwin Press. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a big difference between assigning complex texts and teaching complex texts No matter what discipline you teach, learn how to use complexity as a dynamic, powerful tool for sliding the right text in front of your students’ at just the right time. Updates to this new edition include How-to’s for measuring countable features of any written work A rubric for analyzing the complexity of both literary and informational texts Classroom scenarios that show the difference between a healthy struggle and frustration The authors’ latest thinking on teacher modeling, close reading, scaffolded small group reading, and independent reading
Download or read book Simply Complexity written by Neil Johnson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new branch of science which will reveal how to avoid the rush hour, overcome cancer, and find the perfect date What do traffic jams, stock market crashes, and wars have in common? They are all explained using complexity, an unsolved puzzle that many researchers believe is the key to predicting - and ultimately solving - everything from terrorist attacks and pandemic viruses right down to rush hour traffic congestion. Complexity is considered by many to be the single most important scientific development since general relativity and promises to make sense of no less than the very heart of the Universe. Using it, scientists can find order emerging from seemingly random interactions of all kinds, from something as simple as flipping coins through to more challenging problems such as predicting shopping habits, the patterns in modern jazz, and the growth of cancer tumours.
Download or read book Stories Matter written by Dana L. Fox and published by National Council of Teachers of English (Ncte). This book was released on 2003 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The controversial issue of cultural authenticity in children's literature resurfaces continually, always eliciting strong emotions and a wide range of perspectives. This collection explores the complexity of this issue by highlighting important historical events, current debates, and new questions and critiques. Articles in the collection are grouped under five different parts. Under Part I, The Sociopolitical Contexts of Cultural Authenticity, are the following articles: (1) "The Complexity of Cultural Authenticity in Children's Literature: Why the Debates Really Matter" (Kathy G. Short and Dana L. Fox); and (2) "Reframing the Debate about Cultural Authenticity" (Rudine Sims Bishop). Under Part II, The Perspectives of Authors, Illustrators, and Editors on Cultural Authenticity, are these articles: (3) "Who Can Tell My Story?" (Jacqueline Woodson); (4) "'Around My Table' Is Not Always Enough" (W. Nikola-Lisa); (5) "Authentic Enough: Am I? Are You? Interpreting Culture for Children's Literature" (Susan Guevara); (6) "The Candle and the Mirror: One Author's Journey as an Outsider" (Judi Moreillon); (7) "A Mess of Stories" (Marc Aronson); (8) "To Stingo with Love: An Author's Perspective on Writing Outside One's Culture" (Kathryn Lasky); and (9) "Multiculturalism Is Not Halloween" (Thelma Seto). Under Part III, Political Correctness and Cultural Authenticity, are these articles: (10) Beyond Political Correctness" (Hazel Rochman); (11) "The Complexity of Debates about Multicultural Literature and Cultural Authenticity" (Violet J. Harris); (12) "'Authenticity, ' or the Lesson of Little Tree" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.); and (13) "Multicultural Literature and the Politics of Reaction" (Joel Taxel). Under Part IV, The Perspectives of Educators on Cultural Authenticity, are these articles: (14) "Can We Fly across Cultural Gaps on the Wings of Imagination? Ethnicity, Experience, and Cultural Authenticity" (Mingshui Cai); (15) "Accuracy and Authenticity in American Indian Children's Literature: The Social Responsibility of Authors and Illustrators" (Elizabeth Noll); (16) "Accuracy Is Not Enough: The Role of Cultural Values in the Authenticity of Picture Books" (Weimin Mo and Wenju Shen); (17) "Artistic Triumph or Multicultural Failure? Multiple Perspectives on a 'Multicultural' Award-Winning Book" (Laura B. Smolkin and Joseph H. Suina); (18) "Images of West Africa in Children's Books: Replacing Old Stereotypes with New Ones?" (Vivian Yenika-Agbaw); and (19) "Use of Spanish in Latino Children's Literature in English: What Makes for Cultural Authenticity? (Rosalinda B. Barrera and Ruth E. Quiroa). Under Part V, Connecting Cultural Authenticity to the Classroom, are these articles: (20) "Multiple Definitions of Multicultural Literature: Is the Debate Really Just 'Ivory Tower' Bickering?" (Mingshui Cai); (21) "The Trivialization and Misuse of Multicultural Literature: Issues of Representation and Communication" (Zhihui Fang; Danling Fu; Linda Leonard Lamme); and (22) "'I'm Not from Pakistan': Multicultural Literature and the Problem of Representation" (Curt Dudley-Marling). (NKA).
Download or read book Complexity and Real Computation written by Lenore Blum and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classical theory of computation has its origins in the work of Goedel, Turing, Church, and Kleene and has been an extraordinarily successful framework for theoretical computer science. The thesis of this book, however, is that it provides an inadequate foundation for modern scientific computation where most of the algorithms are real number algorithms. The goal of this book is to develop a formal theory of computation which integrates major themes of the classical theory and which is more directly applicable to problems in mathematics, numerical analysis, and scientific computing. Along the way, the authors consider such fundamental problems as: * Is the Mandelbrot set decidable? * For simple quadratic maps, is the Julia set a halting set? * What is the real complexity of Newton's method? * Is there an algorithm for deciding the knapsack problem in a ploynomial number of steps? * Is the Hilbert Nullstellensatz intractable? * Is the problem of locating a real zero of a degree four polynomial intractable? * Is linear programming tractable over the reals? The book is divided into three parts: The first part provides an extensive introduction and then proves the fundamental NP-completeness theorems of Cook-Karp and their extensions to more general number fields as the real and complex numbers. The later parts of the book develop a formal theory of computation which integrates major themes of the classical theory and which is more directly applicable to problems in mathematics, numerical analysis, and scientific computing.
Download or read book Complexity and the Arrow of Time written by Charles H. Lineweaver and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-08 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a wide range of experts, this work presents cosmological, biological and philosophical perspectives on complexity in our universe.
Download or read book Complexity written by M. Mitchell Waldrop and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post). In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell—and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. This book is their story—the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the twenty-first century. “Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner . . . [Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” —The New York Times Book Review “Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” —Medium “[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Coping with Complexity written by H.W. Gottinger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book I develop a theory of complexity for economics and manage ment sciences. This book is addressed to the mathematically or analytically oriented economist, psychologist or management scientist. It could also be of interest to engineers, computer scientists, biologists, physicists and ecologists who have a constant desire to go beyond the bounds of their respective disciplines. The unifying theme is: we live in a complex world, but how can we cope with complexity? If the book has made the reader curious, and if he looks at modelling, problem recognition and problem solving within his field of competence in a more "complex" way, it will have achieved its goal. The starting point is the recognition that complexity is a well-defined concept in mathematics (e.g. in topological dynamics), computer science, information theory and artificial intelligence. But it is a rather diffuse concept in other fields, sometimes it has only descriptive value or even worse, it is only used in a colloquial sense. The systematic investigation of complexity phenomena has reached a mature status within computer science. Indices of computer size, capacity and performance root ultimately in John von Neumann's paradigmatic model of a machine, though other 1 roots point to McCulloch and Pitts, not to forget Alan Turing. Offsprings of this development include: -complexity of formal systems and recursiveness; -cellular automata and the theory of self-reproducing machines; -theory of program or computational complexity; -theory of sequential machines; -problem solving, cognitive science, pattern recognition and decision processes.
