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Archive for the ‘Networks’ Category

“Copying nature’s ideas allows people to harness the power of evolution to come up with clever products. Now a group of researchers has taken this idea a step further by using an entire living organism—a slime mould—to solve a complex problem. In this case, the challenge was to design an efficient rail network for the [...]

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In the few weeks following the Haiti earthquake, much of our work at ALNAP has focused on getting key operational lessons from previous earthquakes into the hands and minds of operational agency staff, and briefing media representatives on a variety of issues related to the relief and recovery work. 
As the initial signs of some kind of [...]

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There is a visible and growing interest in complexity science among social media specialists. This interest is highlighting  once again some longstanding flaws in the information approaches of aid agencies.
In a recent interview, Arthur L. Jue, co-author of ‘Social Media at Work‘ has suggested that both social media and Open Space Technology share a common basis in the ideas of [...]

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Andrew Haldane, Executive Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England gave a speech earlier this year which focused on the idea of the global financial system as a complex adaptive system.
In his speech, Haldane focuses on applying the lessons from other network disciplines – such as ecology, epidemiology, biology and engineering – to the [...]

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The Obama presidential campaign owed its victory not to a single charismatic candidate, but to the efforts of a disciplined and motivated organisation whose influences go back to landmark civil rights movements. Many of the principles were consistent with the emerging ideas of ‘complex adaptive leadership’.
A recent MIT lecture featured Marshall Ganz, veteran of the 1960s [...]

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“…One of the great mysteries of large distributed systems – from communities and organisations to brains and ecosystems – is how globally coherent activity can emerge in the absence of centralized authority or control… in many systems, usually those that have developed or evolved naturally, the source of control is far from clear.
Nevertheless, the intuitive [...]

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