Download or read book Complexity Science and World Affairs written by Walter C. Clemens Jr. and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applies complexity science to the study of international politics. Why did some countries transition peacefully from communist rule to political freedom and market economies, while others did not? Why did the United States enjoy a brief moment as the sole remaining superpower, and then lose power and influence across the board? What are the prospects for China, the main challenger to American hegemony? In Complexity Science and World Affairs, Walter C. Clemens Jr. demonstrates how the basic concepts of complexity science can broaden and deepen the insights gained by other approaches to the study of world affairs. He argues that societal fitness—the ability of a social system to cope with complex challenges and opportunities—hinges heavily on the values and way of life of each society, and serves to explain why some societies gain and others lose. Applying theory to several rich case studies, including political developments across post–Soviet Eurasia and the United States, Clemens shows that complexity science offers a powerful set of tools for advancing the study of international relations, comparative government, and, more broadly, the social sciences. “Clemens has written an outstanding book—the culmination of a half?century’s experience in and analysis of world affairs [It is] bound to interest not only political and other social scientists but all thoughtful persons concerned with understanding and perhaps improving the human condition.” — from the Foreword by Stuart A. Kauffman “This breakthrough book provides a new, promising general paradigm exploring and explaining the complexity of world politics. For scholars and analysts pushing the boundaries of our field, this is a must-read volume.” — Jacek Kugler, Claremont Graduate University “Complexity can be overwhelming and complexity science can be daunting, and, yet, in Walter Clemens’s skilled hands both become accessible, understandable, and useful tools for both scholars and practitioners. Once again, Clemens has shown that sophisticated academic theorizing only benefits from clarity, elegance, and wit. The book is ideal for graduate and undergraduate students as a supplementary text in international relations or comparative politics.” — Alexander Motyl, Rutgers University–Newark “Clemens offers a fresh, even startling, paradigm and process for analyzing the seemingly unpredictable relations within and among human societies. With impressive clarity he proposes that ‘the capacity to cope with complexity’ has become a key determinant of success in our intricately interrelated world. Careful study of this capacity in specific contexts can lead to revealing analyses in comparative politics and international relations. A provocative and stimulating treatise!” — S. Frederick Starr, Johns Hopkins University “Walt Clemens’s provocative new book can be appreciated at several levels: as an analytical framework in international relations—complexity science—that offers a compelling alternative to realism and neoliberalism; as an incisive critique of the ‘fitness’ of the supposedly most developed societies to deal with our complex world; and as a humanistic value-set that provides better standards for assessing governments than do GDP, trade levels, or military spending. Clemens skillfully integrates theory and practice to explore US ‘hyperpower,’ the two Koreas, China, and other states from new angles, and with consistent objectivity. IR specialists should find this book exciting, while IR and international studies students will be challenged by the new paradigm it presents.” — Mel Gurtov, Portland State University “Clemens proposes a powerful new way of looking at international relations and politics, and offers a productive method for assessing the fitness of societies in the early twenty-first century.” — Guntis Šmidchens, University of Washington, Seattle “You don’t have to be a political scientist to wonder why some states succeed and others do not, why some societies flourish while others suffer stagnation and conflict. Employing the relatively new tool of complexity science, Walter Clemens evaluates the ‘fitness’ of states and societies, i.e. their ability to cope with complex challenges and opportunities. He does so in a way that is erudite—how many studies quote Walt Whitman and Karl Marx in the same chapter?—yet clear and accessible. Clemens challenges both existing political science paradigms and policy perspectives. This is a stimulating, rich volume that can be read and re-read with profit and appreciation for its breadth and depth and most of all for its insistence that we see the world, and the states in it, in all their complexity.” — Ronald H. Linden, University of Pittsburgh

Download or read book Complex Science for a Complex World written by Pascal Perez and published by ANU E Press. This book was released on 2006-08-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is well known that human activities are endangering the stability and sustainability of many fragile ecosystems. This title looks at the science that addresses the frontiers of interactions between human behavior and environmental responses.

Download or read book Simplexity written by Alain Berthoz and published by Odile Jacob. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Simplexity, as I understand it, is the range of solutions living organisms have found, despite the complexity of natural processes, to enable the brain to prepare an action and plan for the consequences of it. These solutions are simplifying principles that enable the processing of information or situations, by taking into account past experience and anticipating the future. They are neither caricatures, shortcuts, or summaries. They are new ways of asking questions, sometimes at the cost of occasional detours, in order to achieve faster, more elegant, more effective actions.” A. B. As Alain Berthoz demonstrates in this profoundly original book, simplicity is never easy; it requires suppressing, selecting, connecting, thinking, in order to then act in the best way possible. And what if we, in turn, are inspired by the living world to process the complexity that surrounds us? Alain Berthoz is professor at the Collège de France where he is co-director of the Laboratoire de physiologie de la perception et de l’action. [Laboratory for the physiology of perception and action]. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and is the author of Le Sens du mouvement [The Brain's Sense of Movement] and La Décision [Emotion and Reason].

Download or read book Images Of A Complex World The Art And Poetry Of Chaos With Cd rom written by Robin S Chapman and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the poems written by winner of the Posner Poetry Award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers in 2005, this coffee-table book will delight and inform general readers curious about ideas of chaos, fractals, and nonlinear complex systems. Developed out of ten years of interdisciplinary seminars in chaos and complex systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it features multiple ways of knowing: Robin Chapman's poems of everyday experience of change in a complex world, associated metaphorically with Julien Clinton Sprott's full-color computer art generated from billions of versions of only three simple equations for strange attractors, Julia sets, and iterated function systems; his definitions of 39 key terms; a mathematical appendix; and even a multiple-choice quiz to test understanding. Accompanied by a CD-ROM of the poet reading 13 poems and 1,000 images of chaos art from which slide shows can be generated and 100 high-resolution posters created, the book has a foreword by Cliff Pickover, author of A Passion for Mathematics.

Download or read book In the Bubble written by John Thackara and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006-02-17 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to design a world in which we rely less on stuff, and more on people. We're filling up the world with technology and devices, but we've lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World. These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no small matter if "tech" ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives. Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the end it will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances that we're unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and how? In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now—not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it, "the schlock of the new" but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can't. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology—ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles—above all, lightness—inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.

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 Simple Rules written by Donald Norman Sull and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outlines an approach to high-performance problem solving and decision making that draws on insights from survival guides, pop culture, and other sources.

Download or read book Making Things Work written by Yaneer Bar-Yam and published by Knowledge Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The science of complexity has revolutionized our understanding of everything from the brain to the economy to the weather. This book shows how it can change the way we approach our most persistent social problems. It introduces key concepts like emergence, self-organization and networks, and uses them to propose novel solutions to problems that affect us all. Suitable for anyone struggling to cope with complex challenges. Written by Yaneer Bar-Yam the leading expert in the use of complexity science in solving real world problems in healthcare, education, military, engineering, ethnic violence and terrorism.

Download or read book International Negotiation in a Complex World written by Brigid Starkey and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The process of negotiation, standing as it does between war and peace in many parts of the globe, has never been a more vital process to understand than in today's rapidly changing international system. Students of negotiation must first understand key IR concepts as they try to incorporate the dynamics of the many anomalous actors that regularly interact with conventional state agents in the diplomatic arena. This hands-on text provides an essential introduction to this high-stakes realm, exploring the impact of complex multilateralism on traditional negotiation concepts such as bargaining, issue salience, and strategic choice. Using an easy-to-understand board game analogy as a framework for studying negotiation episodes, the authors include a rich array of real-world cases and examples—now updated with the results of the Paris climate change agreement—to illustrate key themes, including the intensity of crisis situations for negotiators, the role of culture in communication, and the impact of domestic-level politics on international negotiations. Providing tools for analyzing why negotiations succeed or fail, this innovative text also presents effective exercises and learning approaches that enable students to understand the complexities of negotiation by engaging in the diplomatic process themselves.

Download or read book Negotiating a Complex World written by Brigid Starkey and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2005-02-10 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A third edition of this book is now available. Negotiating a Complex World introduces undergraduate students of international relations to the high stakes world of international negotiation. The book uses the analogy of a board game as an organizing technique and includes many real-world cases and examples to illustrate important concepts and relationships. The authors highlight the intensity of crisis situations for negotiators, the role of culture in communication, and the impact of domestic-level politics on international negotiations. The book provides students with the tools they need to analyze why some negotiations are ultimately successful, while others end in failure. This innovative text also provides exercises and learning approaches to enable students to understand the complexity of negotiation by engaging in aspects of the diplomatic process themselves.

Download or read book History Big History Metahistory written by David C. Krakauer and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a "science of history"? Must historians be scientists? What is "history" anyway? Celebrated researchers and historians--including Pulitzer-Prize winner John Lewis Gaddis and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann--debate these complex questions in this thoughtful collection of essays.

Download or read book Crisis Management in a Complex World written by Dawn R. Gilpin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-31 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's managers, business owners, and public relations practitioners grapple daily with a fundamental question about contemporary crisis management: to what extent is it possible to control events and stakeholder responses to them, in order to contain escalating crises or safeguard an organization's reputation? The authors meet the question head-on, departing from other crisis management texts, and arguing that a complexity-based approach is superior to the standard simplification model of organizational learning.

Download or read book Hypernetworks In The Science Of Complex Systems written by Jeffrey Johnson and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2013-11-29 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern world is complex beyond human understanding and control. The science of complex systems aims to find new ways of thinking about the many interconnected networks of interaction that defy traditional approaches. Thus far, research into networks has largely been restricted to pairwise relationships represented by links between two nodes. This volume marks a major extension of networks to multidimensional hypernetworks for modeling multi-element relationships, such as companies making up the stock market, the neighborhoods forming a city, people making up committees, divisions making up companies, computers making up the internet, men and machines making up armies, or robots working as teams.This volume makes an important contribution to the science of complex systems by: (i) extending network theory to include dynamic relationships between many elements; (ii) providing a mathematical theory able to integrate multilevel dynamics in a coherent way; (iii) providing a new methodological approach to analyze complex systems; and (iv) illustrating the theory with practical examples in the design, management and control of complex systems taken from many areas of application.

Download or read book Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World written by M. Verweij and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-08-31 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World is a powerful and original statement on why well-intended attempts to alleviate pressing social ills too often derail, and how effective, efficient and broadly acceptable solutions to social problems can be found.

Download or read book Sociology and Complexity Science written by Brian Castellani and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-10-03 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By now, most academics have heard something about the new science of complexity. In a manner reminiscent of Einstein and the last hundred years of physics, complexity science has captured the public imagination. ® One can go to Amazon. com and purchase books on complexification (Casti 1994), emergence (Holland 1998), small worlds (Barabási 2003), the web of life (Capra 1996), fuzzy thinking (Kosko 1993), global c- plexity (Urry 2003) and the business of long-tails (Anderson 2006). Even television has incorporated the topics of complexity science. Crime shows ® ® such as 24 or CSI typically feature investigators using the latest advances in computational modeling to “simulate scenarios” or “data mine” all p- sible suspects—all of which is done before the crime takes place. The ® World Wide Web is another example. A simple search on Google. Com using the phrase “complexity science” gets close to a million hits! C- plexity science is ubiquitous. What most scholars do not realize, however, is the remarkable role sociologists are playing in this new science. C- sider the following examples. 0. 1 Sociologists in Complexity Science The first example comes from the new science of networks (Barabási 2003). By now, most readers are familiar with the phenomena known as six-degrees of separation—the idea that, because most large networks are comprised of a significant number of non-random weak-ties, the nodes (e. g. , people, companies, etc.

Download or read book An Introduction to Complex Systems written by Joe Tranquillo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-13 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interdisciplinary field of complex systems theory. By the end of the book, readers will be able to understand terminology that is used in complex systems and how they are related to one another; see the patterns of complex systems in practical examples; map current topics, in a variety of fields, to complexity theory; and be able to read more advanced literature in the field. The book begins with basic systems concepts and moves on to how these simple rules can lead to complex behavior. The author then introduces non-linear systems, followed by pattern formation, and networks and information flow in systems. Later chapters cover the thermodynamics of complex systems, dynamical patterns that arise in networks, and how game theory can serve as a framework for decision making. The text is interspersed with both philosophical and quantitative arguments, and each chapter ends with questions and prompts that help readers make more connections. “The text provides a useful overview of complex systems, with enough detail to allow a reader unfamiliar with the topic to understand the basics. The book stands out for its comprehensiveness and approachability. It will be particularly useful as a text for introductory physics courses. Tranquillo’s strength is in delivering a vast amount of information in a succinct manner.... A reader can find information quickly and efficiently—that is, in my opinion, the book’s greatest value.” (Stefani Crabtree, Physics Today)

Download or read book Aspects of Complexity written by Terry Cooke-Davies and published by Project Management Institute. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complexity in projects may be one of those things that are difficult to define, but easy to recognize when encountered. Or maybe not so easy. This collection of analyses deals with complexity in a way that will appeal to both academics and practitioners. It arises from a series of four academic-business roundtables sponsored by the Project Management Institute in the U.S., Australia, Malta, and Brazil. Researchers will appreciate the academic rigor of the content and practitioners will appreciate the generally reader-friendly style and tone. The opening chapter offers that elusive definition and provides the foundation for common understanding. The next four chapters compose the theoretical portion of the book, establishing the underpinning concepts related to systems thinking, systems engineering, chaos or complexity theory, and behavioral and cognitive aspects. The remainder of the book is more practice-oriented. It is a serious attempt to pull together what is currently known and understood about the topic, to help practitioners and their managers improve future practice, and to guide research into answering those questions that will best help to improve understanding of the topic.