Download or read book Signals and Boundaries written by John H. Holland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-07-13 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overarching framework for comparing and steering complex adaptive systems is developed through understanding the mechanisms that generate their intricate signal/boundary hierarchies.

Download or read book Complex Adaptive Systems written by John H. Miller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-28 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the first clear, comprehensive, and accessible account of complex adaptive social systems, by two of the field's leading authorities. Such systems--whether political parties, stock markets, or ant colonies--present some of the most intriguing theoretical and practical challenges confronting the social sciences. Engagingly written, and balancing technical detail with intuitive explanations, Complex Adaptive Systems focuses on the key tools and ideas that have emerged in the field since the mid-1990s, as well as the techniques needed to investigate such systems. It provides a detailed introduction to concepts such as emergence, self-organized criticality, automata, networks, diversity, adaptation, and feedback. It also demonstrates how complex adaptive systems can be explored using methods ranging from mathematics to computational models of adaptive agents. John Miller and Scott Page show how to combine ideas from economics, political science, biology, physics, and computer science to illuminate topics in organization, adaptation, decentralization, and robustness. They also demonstrate how the usual extremes used in modeling can be fruitfully transcended.

Download or read book An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms written by Melanie Mitchell and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998-03-02 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genetic algorithms have been used in science and engineering as adaptive algorithms for solving practical problems and as computational models of natural evolutionary systems. This brief, accessible introduction describes some of the most interesting research in the field and also enables readers to implement and experiment with genetic algorithms on their own. It focuses in depth on a small set of important and interesting topics—particularly in machine learning, scientific modeling, and artificial life—and reviews a broad span of research, including the work of Mitchell and her colleagues. The descriptions of applications and modeling projects stretch beyond the strict boundaries of computer science to include dynamical systems theory, game theory, molecular biology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and population genetics, underscoring the exciting "general purpose" nature of genetic algorithms as search methods that can be employed across disciplines. An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms is accessible to students and researchers in any scientific discipline. It includes many thought and computer exercises that build on and reinforce the reader's understanding of the text. The first chapter introduces genetic algorithms and their terminology and describes two provocative applications in detail. The second and third chapters look at the use of genetic algorithms in machine learning (computer programs, data analysis and prediction, neural networks) and in scientific models (interactions among learning, evolution, and culture; sexual selection; ecosystems; evolutionary activity). Several approaches to the theory of genetic algorithms are discussed in depth in the fourth chapter. The fifth chapter takes up implementation, and the last chapter poses some currently unanswered questions and surveys prospects for the future of evolutionary computation.

Download or read book Adaptive Software Development written by James A. Highsmith and published by Dorset House Publishing Company, Incorporated. This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: - support an adaptive culture or mindset, in which change and uncertainty are assumed to be the natural state--not a false expectation of order- introduce frameworks to guide the iterative process of managing change- institute collaboration, the interaction of people on three levels: interpersonal, cultural, and structural- add rigor and discipline to the RAD approach, making it scalable to the uncertainty and complexity of real-life undertakings

Download or read book Crossing the Quality Chasm written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2001-07-19 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Second in a series of publications from the Institute of Medicine's Quality of Health Care in America project Today's health care providers have more research findings and more technology available to them than ever before. Yet recent reports have raised serious doubts about the quality of health care in America. Crossing the Quality Chasm makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap. This book recommends a sweeping redesign of the American health care system and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others. In this comprehensive volume the committee offers: A set of performance expectations for the 21st century health care system. A set of 10 new rules to guide patient-clinician relationships. A suggested organizing framework to better align the incentives inherent in payment and accountability with improvements in quality. Key steps to promote evidence-based practice and strengthen clinical information systems. Analyzing health care organizations as complex systems, Crossing the Quality Chasm also documents the causes of the quality gap, identifies current practices that impede quality care, and explores how systems approaches can be used to implement change.

Download or read book Principles of Systems Science written by George E. Mobus and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering text provides a comprehensive introduction to systems structure, function, and modeling as applied in all fields of science and engineering. Systems understanding is increasingly recognized as a key to a more holistic education and greater problem solving skills, and is also reflected in the trend toward interdisciplinary approaches to research on complex phenomena. While the concepts and components of systems science will continue to be distributed throughout the various disciplines, undergraduate degree programs in systems science are also being developed, including at the authors’ own institutions. However, the subject is approached, systems science as a basis for understanding the components and drivers of phenomena at all scales should be viewed with the same importance as a traditional liberal arts education. Principles of Systems Science contains many graphs, illustrations, side bars, examples, and problems to enhance understanding. From basic principles of organization, complexity, abstract representations, and behavior (dynamics) to deeper aspects such as the relations between information, knowledge, computation, and system control, to higher order aspects such as auto-organization, emergence and evolution, the book provides an integrated perspective on the comprehensive nature of systems. It ends with practical aspects such as systems analysis, computer modeling, and systems engineering that demonstrate how the knowledge of systems can be used to solve problems in the real world. Each chapter is broken into parts beginning with qualitative descriptions that stand alone for students who have taken intermediate algebra. The second part presents quantitative descriptions that are based on pre-calculus and advanced algebra, providing a more formal treatment for students who have the necessary mathematical background. Numerous examples of systems from every realm of life, including the physical and biological sciences, humanities, social sciences, engineering, pre-med and pre-law, are based on the fundamental systems concepts of boundaries, components as subsystems, processes as flows of materials, energy, and messages, work accomplished, functions performed, hierarchical structures, and more. Understanding these basics enables further understanding both of how systems endure and how they may become increasingly complex and exhibit new properties or characteristics. Serves as a textbook for teaching systems fundamentals in any discipline or for use in an introductory course in systems science degree programs Addresses a wide range of audiences with different levels of mathematical sophistication Includes open-ended questions in special boxes intended to stimulate integrated thinking and class discussion Describes numerous examples of systems in science and society Captures the trend towards interdisciplinary research and problem solving

Download or read book Emotion Theory The Routledge Comprehensive Guide written by Andrea Scarantino and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 1011 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotion Theory: The Routledge Comprehensive Guide is the first interdisciplinary reference resource which authoritatively takes stock of the progress made both in the philosophy of emotions and in affective science from Ancient Greece to today. A two-volume landmark publication, it provides an overview of emotion theory unrivaled in terms of its comprehensiveness, accessibility and systematicity. Comprising 62 chapters by 101 leading emotion theorists in philosophy, classics, psychology, biology, psychiatry, neuroscience and sociology, the collection is organized as follows: Volume I: Part I: History of Emotion Theory (10 chapters) Part II: Contemporary Theories of Emotions (10 chapters) Part III: The Elements of Emotion Theory (7 chapters) Volume II: Part IV: Nature and Functions of 35 Specific Emotions (22 chapters) Part V: Challenges Facing Emotion Theory (13 chapters) Special Elicitors of Emotions Emotions and Their Relations to Other Elements of Mental Architecture Emotions in Children, Animals and Groups Normative Aspects of Emotions Most of the major themes of contemporary emotion theory are covered in their historical, philosophical, and scientific dimensions. This collection will be essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, political science, and history for decades to come.

Download or read book Robust Adaptive Control written by Petros Ioannou and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presented in a tutorial style, this comprehensive treatment unifies, simplifies, and explains most of the techniques for designing and analyzing adaptive control systems. Numerous examples clarify procedures and methods. 1995 edition.

Download or read book A Complexity Approach to Sustainability written by Angela Espinosa and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2011 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major challenge of our times is to understand and manage the increasing complexity of socio-economic reality. This has immediate relevance for sustainable development. The impact of recent contributions from systems and complexity sciences in addressing this issue has not filtered down into effective practice ? notably, there remain problems caused by the legacy of competing paradigms and the application of their associated methodologies. This book argues the urgency for the application of analytical tools that embody the principles of complexity management. The authors describe a theoretical framework based on complexity science with a focus on organisational and second order cybernetics, one that presents a powerful new insight into the concept of sustainability. The book also describes actual applications of the ideas in the area of organisational, societal and environmental management, and reflects upon the impact of such an approach on current practice.

Download or read book What Is a Complex System written by James Ladyman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-05 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear, concise introduction to the quickly growing field of complexity science that explains its conceptual and mathematical foundations What is a complex system? Although "complexity science" is used to understand phenomena as diverse as the behavior of honeybees, the economic markets, the human brain, and the climate, there is no agreement about its foundations. In this introduction for students, academics, and general readers, philosopher of science James Ladyman and physicist Karoline Wiesner develop an account of complexity that brings the different concepts and mathematical measures applied to complex systems into a single framework. They introduce the different features of complex systems, discuss different conceptions of complexity, and develop their own account. They explain why complexity science is so important in today's world.

Download or read book Resilience Thinking written by Brian Walker and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-06-22 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system that must be maintained or enhanced in order to achieve sustainability. It explains why greater efficiency by itself cannot solve resource problems and offers a constructive alternative that opens up options rather than closing them down. In Resilience Thinking, scientist Brian Walker and science writer David Salt present an accessible introduction to the emerging paradigm of resilience. The book arose out of appeals from colleagues in science and industry for a plainly written account of what resilience is all about and how a resilience approach differs from current practices. Rather than complicated theory, the book offers a conceptual overview along with five case studies of resilience thinking in the real world. It is an engaging and important work for anyone interested in managing risk in a complex world.

Download or read book Emergency Management Threats and Hazards written by Michael Prasad and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2024-09-04 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emergency Management Threats and Hazards: Water is a resource guidebook, which bridges the work of the emergency management practitioners and academic researchers, specifically for water-related incidents. Practitioners typically follow a disaster phase cycle of preparedness/protection/prevention, response, recovery, and mitigation – all of which have distinct actions and missions to reduce or eliminate adverse impacts from both threats and hazards. Academics will find the connections to allied fields such as meteorology, hydrology, homeland security, healthcare, and more. The book examines many of the distinct differences and variances within the specific scope of water-related incidents, crises, emergencies, and disasters. It provides examples and practical strategies for protection/prevention, response, recovery, and mitigation against adverse impacts to people, property, and organizations. It is also organized in the same construct used by emergency management practitioners (incident command system elements, disaster cycle phases, etc.), which will help align the academic world of emergency management education to both the practice and the training in the emergency management field. Takes a global view on threats and hazards, as well as their solutions. Provides a single repository of the majority of water-related incidents and provides a "how to" guide for resilience. Identifies cascading impacts and provides checklists for resolutions. Includes numerous case studies organized by threat and hazard. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Download or read book Creating Adaptive Policies written by Darren Swanson and published by IDRC. This book was released on 2009-09-04 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title describes the concept of adaptive policymaking and presents seven tools for developing such policies. Based on hundreds of interviews with people impacted by policy and research of over a dozen policy case studies, this book serves as a pragmatic guide for policymakers by elaborating on these seven tools.

Download or read book Learner Oriented Teaching and Assessment in Youth Sport written by Cláudio Farias and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-18 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides sport educators with a comprehensive, learner-centred instructional toolkit to empower children and young people in collaborative, independent learning of sport and games (SGs). The book is unique in bringing together the various pedagogical dimensions inherent to the teaching-learning process of SGs: the instructional system (teaching strategies), the social system (interactional climate), the task system (learning tasks and activities), and the assessment (for learning) system. It also shows how to effectively involve learners as active agents in promoting more democratic learning environments and equitable interactions between sportspersons. Written by a team of experts with extensive experience of using student-centred approaches as teachers, youth coaches, teacher educators, researchers, and theorists, the book introduces key concepts and evidence-based examples of best practice, with practical instructional strategies, learning tasks, and activities included in every chapter. As the chapters of the book unfold, they teach the reader how to create game-based tasks that are suited to different learner skill levels, how to align tasks, learning goals and learner needs, and feel empowered to engage young people in creativity development activities. Covering key themes in contemporary sport pedagogy from the constraints-led approach and appropriateness to learner-designed games and the use of technology, this is essential reading for all trainee and in-service physical education teachers and sports coaches working with children or young people.

Download or read book An Introduction to Self adaptive Systems written by Danny Weyns and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-10-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise and practical introduction to the foundations and engineering principles of self-adaptation Though it has recently gained significant momentum, the topic of self-adaptation remains largely under-addressed in academic and technical literature. This book changes that. Using a systematic and holistic approach, An Introduction to Self-adaptive Systems: A Contemporary Software Engineering Perspective provides readers with an accessible set of basic principles, engineering foundations, and applications of self-adaptation in software-intensive systems. It places self-adaptation in the context of techniques like uncertainty management, feedback control, online reasoning, and machine learning while acknowledging the growing consensus in the software engineering community that self-adaptation will be a crucial enabling feature in tackling the challenges of new, emerging, and future systems. The author combines cutting-edge technical research with basic principles and real-world insights to create a practical and strategically effective guide to self-adaptation. He includes features such as: An analysis of the foundational engineering principles and applications of self-adaptation in different domains, including the Internet-of-Things, cloud computing, and cyber-physical systems End-of-chapter exercises at four different levels of complexity and difficulty An accompanying author-hosted website with slides, selected exercises and solutions, models, and code Perfect for researchers, students, teachers, industry leaders, and practitioners in fields that directly or peripherally involve software engineering, as well as those in academia involved in a class on self-adaptivity, this book belongs on the shelves of anyone with an interest in the future of software and its engineering.

Download or read book Coaching the Team at Work 2 written by David Clutterbuck and published by Nicholas Brealey. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This book is a must for anyone involved in organizational coaching' Adrian Moorhouse, Managing Director, Lane4 & Olympic Gold Medallist Coaching the Team at Work, 4e is the result of research over 20 years with practising team coaches and with major corporations around the world. It recognises that in a complex and constantly evolving business and social environment, teams can only keep up if they adapt frequently. But to adapt, they must have clarity about their internal and external systems and how these contribute to or undermine performance. There are multiple aspects of team function that underpins performance - and each influences and is influenced by the others. This revised edition explores the six most significant aspects: * Purpose and motivation * Systems and processes relating to external stakeholders * Relationships, especially within the team * Systems and processes relating to internal functions (such as quality and decision-making) * Learning (how the team adapts to keep up with the pace of change) * Leadership (how the functions of leadership are exercised within the team) When these aspects are aligned, a team can perform at its best; but when any one or more of the aspects is malfunctioning, the result is underperformance. This book helps team coaches develop their skills to support teams in understanding these complex dynamics and, as a result, in developing more effective ways of working together.

Download or read book Prevention Practice in Primary Care written by Sherri Sheinfeld Gorin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-03 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid the ongoing changes in how health care is administered and financed, prevention-oriented care is a critical and cost-effective method for improving population health through primary care. As the key figure in promoting patients' health and prevention of disease, the primary care provider can play a major role in patient engagement, self-management, and behavior change. Prevention Practice in Primary Care systematically explores state-of-the-art practical approaches to effective prevention in primary care. Guided by theory and evidence, the book reviews approaches to risk factor identification and modification for the major causes of mortality in adulthood, including cancer, stroke, and cardiovascular disease. Topical coverage in this book includes: · the practical applications of genomics and proteomics to personalizing prevention · transformative approaches to practice change, including the patient-centered medical home, academic detailing, and practice facilitation · Engaging self-management and behavior change using counseling tools (goal setting, assessing the stage of change, motivational interviewing, and the five A's) Prevention Practice in Primary Care is a vital, practical guidebook for the implementation of evidence-based prevention to improve patient health. Brief, simple summaries and innovative content make it book a valuable reference for busy practitioners and students alike.