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"Do What You Can, With What You Have, Where You Are" - A Quest to Eliminate MRSA

This story is about the use of Positive Deviance played in efforts by the staff the VA hospital in Pittsburgh to eliminate MRSA transmissions. MRSA is a virulent pathogen that cannot be killed by most commonly used antibiotics. Many authorities recognize tht the fight against MRSA is more of a behavioral and cultural challenge than it is a technical and medical problem. .
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emerging, April - August 2006 Edition

Dr. Diane Pittman's life work has been to bring health and healing to the Ojibway Indian community at theLeech Lake eservation.Complexity principles are giving her new ideas on how to move forward..
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emerging, August, September, October 2004 Edition

This issue of emerging explores ipositive deviance, a new approach to social and behavioral change pioneered by Jerry and Monique Sternin. The process was created by the Sternins in their work in developing countries on such intractable issues as childhood malnutrtion in Vietnam, neonatal mortablity in the mountainous regions of Pakistan, and female genital cutting in Egypt. The issue also includes reviews of two books, Weaving Complexity and Business and The Wisdom of Crowds. .
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emerging, January, February, March, 2006 Edition

Read about Eric Grohe whose larger-than-life murals are an extraordinary blend of history, investigative reporting, soaring talent and emotional impact. His art has brought about human connection and community transformation in many places. You'll also find new resources to learn about chaos, and you'll also learn about a provocative new book, and meet members of the Plexus community. .
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emerging, -January-Feberuary 2002

In this inaugural issue of the Plexus Institute newsletter emerging, one of the world's greatest scientists talks about his new view on complexity science. Edward O. Wilson said complexity science is the future. In 1998, he had called the new science promising but not sufficiently suppoted by empirical data. He said he changed his view because of information that had not been known just three years earlier, particularly information that emerged from the study of ecosystems, social insects and cellular dynamics. .
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emerging, September, October, November 2005 Edition

Dr. Michael Bleich, an experienced healthcare administrator and complexity practitioner, is associate dean of clinical and community affairs at the Kansas University School of Nursing and executive director of KU Health Partners, Inc., a joint non-profit corporation operated by the KU School of Nursing and Allied Health. Read about his personal and professional journey in the latest issue of emerging. Thomas Clancy, vice president of professional services at Mercy Hospital, Iowa City, IA, reviews Deep Simplicity, Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity by JohnGribbin. Read about new members, Plexus Fractals and more. .
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emerging, Spring, 2008

Read about the ancient and modern beauty of collaborative art, complexity in nursing education, and what "emergence" really means. The Omnivore's Dilemma is reviewed..
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emerging, Winter, 2006 Edition - The MRSA Issue

Every year, two million patients acquire infections while being treated in US hospitals, and a growing number of the infection-causing microbes are resistant to antibiotics. In this special issue read about MRSA, the cause of 126,000 hospitalizations and thousands of deaths every year, and what a pioneering group of hospitals is doing, using the social change process Positive Deviance, to prevent the spread of MRSA..
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emerging, April - May 2005 Edition

The April-May of emerging contains some enlightening stories. Read on... A new book called Multitude, by the Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, authors of the the best-seller Empire, is reviewed by Plexus member Carver Tate. this work examines the role of networks in societies and the political strucutres that govern them. A story by Plexus staffer takes a look at recent research from Johns Hopkins that looks at profound stress and the impact on physiologic variability, health and disease. Commentary is provided by Plexus Science Advisors Pat Rush and Bob Lindberg. News on Plexus members, upcoming events and more..
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emerging, January - March 2005 Edition

The January-March 2005 edition of emerging contains some enlightening stories. Read on... Getting the best treatment for stroke victims requires developing networks of professionals who can make fast, accurate diagnoses and tap into fast efficient channels of communication and transportation. Saint Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, has one of the best and most innovative stroke treatment centers in the world. While the team at Saint Luke's works for physical health, psychologist Dr. Norbert Wetzel and family therapist Hinda Winawer, founders of the Center for Family, Community and social Justice in Princeton, New Jersey, are reaching beyond the physical and biophysical to promote healing with in families and communities. .
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emerging, July - August 2005 Edition

The July-August issue of emerging contains some enlightening stories. Read on... How can a lotus flower change our industrial story? What can we learn from the use of tools among orangutans? Organizational consultant Gary Merrill, and his niece, Michelle Merrill, a biological anthropologist, find awe-inspiring economic and technological inspiration as well as beauty when they look at biological systems. When Dr. Larry Liebovitch studied how sodium, potassium and chloride ions move through cell membranes, he realized he was seeing fractals. Then he realized he could apply Benoit Mandelbrot's mathematical concepts to even more complex ideas in biology and other disciplines. He finds common elements in a universe of networks. Marine scientist and author Ellen Prager has an urgent message about preserving and protecting one of the most beautiful, mysterious and least explored places on the planet-the ocean. Professor and author Jeffrey Goldstein reviews Dr. Alwyn Scott's new massively researched and intellectually challenging volume, The Encyclopedia of Nonlinear Science. .
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A Big Welcome to Plexus Institute's New Website!

We’ve been working hard to make the site easier to use, to give you more opportunities to connect with other people in the Plexus community, and to provide easier access to information about complexity science..
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Alchemy, a Washington, DC consulting firm led by Sharon Benjamin, has developed a complexity-oriented business model for a nation-wide initiative on electronic health records.

Alchemy, a consulting practice based in the Washington, DC area, and two other firms, have developed proposals to help design an innovative business model for a new organization charged with modernizing the nation's healthcare system through information technology. The proposals were submitted June 12 to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The idea is to transform an outdated fragmented system of paper and ink records and allow doctors, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacists and insurers to use interoperable systems capable of sharing vital patient health information while at the same time protecting patient confidentiality and assuring accuracy. Alchemy's submission proposed creation of business model based on complexity science principles..
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Edward N. Lorenz, Father of Chaos Theory, Dies at 90

Edward N. Lorenz, mathematician and meteorologist, who set out to predict weather and instead discovered a principle underlying chaos theory, died Wednesday of cancer at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 90. He may be best known for the Butterfly Effect, which describes sensitivity to initial position—the idea that disturbing a dynamic system such as weather with something as delicate as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can trigger a chain of events leading to a violent storm in a distant part of the world. A committee that awarded Lorenz the Kyoto Prize for basic sciences in 1991 said Lorenz’s work established a principle that “profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.” .
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Gowns, Gloves and Culture Change Help Battle Dangerous Pathogens

The Veterans Health Administration Pittsburgh Health System (VAPHS) has reduced hospital infections and saved money in the process, a New York Times story reports today. The story, by Kevin Sack, reports that the infections of MRSA, methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, one of the most virulent drug resistant pathogens, has plunged 78 percent in the facility's 40-bed surgical unit since 2001. The story also quotes Dr. Rajiv Jain, the hospital's chief of staff, as saying that the infection control program costs about $500,000 a year, and the reduction in the number of infected patients has produced a net saving of nearly $900,000..
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JAMA Reports More Deadly MRSA Infections: Prevention Research Shows Promising Results

The October 17, 2007 issue of JAMA includes a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that shows US rates of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections in healthcare settings are much higher then previously estimated. According to the article, almost 19,000 deaths are associated with invasive MRSA infections. .
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More We Than Me-How the Fight Against MRSA Led to a New Way of Collaborating at Albert Einstein Medical Center

Hundreds of people at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia have joined SMASH, the organization-wide effort to fight Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA). Using Positive Deviance, an innovative social change process, a broad cross section of employees have worked together to forge new solutions, new relationships and some very encouraging results in declining infection rates. . .
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Plexus Institute, with support of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, is working to fight deadly antibiotic resistant infections in healthcare facilities

Plexus Institute has received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to support a new initiative to save lives and protect patients by preventing Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) infections in healthcare facilities. Hospital-associated infections have been a problem in the United States for over 30 years. According to the CDC, in hospitals alone, hospital-associated infections account for an estimated 2 million infections, 90,000 deaths and $4.5 billion in excess healthcare costs annually. Many of those infections are resistant to antibiotics; MRSA is the most common cause of these infections. Plexus now a nationwide network of partner hospitals working on an initiative to use positive deviance, a behavioral change process, to halt the spread of MRSA infections..
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Positive Deviance, Culture Change & Success Against MRSA

VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System (VAPHS) is making notable progress in reducing the transmission of deadly healthcare associated infections, specifically Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus or MRSA. Using the social and behavioral change process Positive Deviance, the facility has engaged the innovativeness and energy of hundreds of hospital staff members and patients to uncover and create practices to prevent transmission of MRSA and to spread these practices to their colleagues..
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The Practice of Medicine is in the Interactions: A Day with Robert A. Lindberg, MD

Author Arvind Singhal writes about his day with Dr. Robert A.Lindberg, who guides his internal medicine practice with complexity science principles. Dr. Lindberg, who is listed in The Best Doctors in America and Guide to America's Top Physicians, uses insights about complexity science when he thinks about biology, nature, and the rythms of life, as well as heatlh and illness. It also influences his thinking about the doctor-patient relationship, and the relationships among individuals in the medical commmunity. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - A Paradox: Communication is the Issue and the Answer

Dr. Anthony Cusano, an attending physician at the department of nephrology at Waterbury Hospital in Waterbury, CT, became fascinated with the concept of Positive Deviance after Jerry and Monique Sternin, PD pioneers, conducted grand rounds at the hopsital. Dr. Cusano decided to apply it to the intractable problem of medical reconciliation. Dr. Cusano, who is also an assistant clinical professor at Yale University School of Medicine, had worked on reconciliation issues for years as a member of the hospital’s pharmacy and therapeutics committee. A survey of patients recently discharged from Waterbury showed 60 percent were not taking medications properly. A PD approach changed that..
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Thursday Complexity Post - A Pox on Parties?

Have you ever been to a chickenpox party? Some adults think deliberately exposing young children to common childhood diseases helps build stronger immune systems and is safer than giving them vaccines. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Addiction to calories

When you want that chocolate chip cookie dough ice-cream blizzard instead of the diet soda, your brain’s neural circuitry may be partly to blame. New research suggests that calories by themselves are addictive. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ages of Love

Research from 72 countries suggests people tend to have a U shaped life cycle, with middle aged misery and happiness during youth and old age, according to two prominent economists. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ancient Amphitheater's

The voices and music of performers on the open-air stage at the ancient Greek theater of Asklepios of Epidaurus rise with nearly magical clarity even to people sitting in the back rows nearly 200 feet away. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ancient Ice Holds Past and Future Secrets

Ancient ice drilled from the Antarctic ice sheet may hold secrets about the atmosphere in ages past and offer some clues about the future. Researchers who analyzed tiny air bubbles compressed in the ice have been able to determine that the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher now than they have been at any time in the last 650,000 years. Concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen 200 times faster in the last 50 years than at any time in the known history of climate. The rtise in methane concentrations has also been dramatic. The ice studies show that while climate has fluctuated in the past, human activity and the burning of fossil fuels has accelerated the concentration of greenhouse gases far more than any changes that resulted from natural climate cycles. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Appreciative Inquiry

Newark Beth Israel Medical Center has 80,000 emergency visits a year and more than 60 percent of its patients are admitted through the emergency department. So this urban 673-bed teaching hospital, an affiliate of the Saint Barnabas Health Care System, was an ideal place to pilot a strengths based approach to the improvement of "hand-offs"-the movement of a patient from one part of the hospital to another..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Art Anticipates Science and a Physicist Tells Why

Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionist known for his collossal canvasas richly layered with swirls and streaks of pattern and color, was creating fractals long bedfore anyone knew the term. Physicist Richard P. Taylor, who is also an artist, has spent years analyzing Pollock's work and concluded Pollock's dynamic painting process was similar to the way patterns in nature evcolve..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Avoid Infectious Fashion

Decorated designer scrubs maybe in vogue among health care fashionistas, but infection control experts say no hospital garb should be worn outside of work. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Baby Boomers Face Unprecedented Uncertainty

The 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 face risks and uncertainties tht never confronted earlier generations. Americans save less, live longer, and are more likely to outlive their material resources..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Bacteria that resists antibiotics

More than 70 per cent of all healthcare-related infections are caused by bacteria that have become resistant to one or more previously effective antibiotics. Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA is one of the fastest growing known pathogens. The US has the world's second highest rate of MRSA infections, which are serious for medically vulnerable people and which have twice the mortality of infections that can be treated with methicillin. Dr. Jon Lloyd, Pittsburgh MRSA Prevention Coordinator, VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, describes how positive deviance may help combat this formidable microbial adversary. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Bacterial Conversations

Scientists used to think that bacterial cells led tedious lives devoted only to reproducing themselves. Microbiologist Bonnie Bassler changed all that with new discoveries about how bacteria communicate. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Bacterial Networks

The social behavior of bacterial cells and the networks they form may hold keys to fighting deadly diseases and producing cleaner fuels. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Bad Bugs Hit the Wall and Bite the Dust

In the battle of mankind against microbes, scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a highly sophisticated way to deliver an unambiguously primitive death to bad bugs-poke them full of holes..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Brain Architecture Supports Subjective Experience

How does the infinitely complex system of interacting networks with 100 billion neurons and 60 trillion synapses in the human brain allow us to think, feel, remember and develop social emotions and moral perspectives? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Can memory be too good?

When Oscar Wilde said memory is the diary we all carry within us, he probably hadn’t imagined anyone like Jill Price, a 42-year-old California woman who remembers nearly every detail of every day of her life since she as eight years old. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Can you Vote Your Conscience

There certainly are rational reasons to vote, and three professors, Aaron Edlin, Andrew Gelman and Noah Kaplan, analyze them in a Rationality and Society essay complete with charts and equations. If individuals have social preferences and are concerned about the welfare of others, they say, it is rational for them to go to the polls even in very large elections where the probability of casting a decisive vote is minuscule. In addition to the positive feelings of an enhanced sense of civic responsibility, the authors cite research suggesting voters consider themselves members of large affinity groups whose well-being they can influence at the ballot box. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Clean Hands

The 17th Century metaphysical poet might not have been at all surprised that modern 21st Century science so firmly endorses his perception. Viewed under a microscope, Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus on human skin is an alarming sight. And it is only one of many visually ugly and potentially deadly microbes that we all carry on our unwashed hands. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Coffee Brews Regeneration in Rwanda

From its legendary origins in Sub Saharan Africa to its vital role in the evolution of community and commerce in Europe and America, coffee consumption has accompanied dramatic social change. Now coffee cultivation is bringing new hope and reconciliation to war-ravaged Rwanda..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Complex Ecosystems

The "Great Dying" of 251 million years ago, believed to be the most cataclysmic event in the earth's history, wiped out 95 percent living things in the ocean and most species on land. Scientists now think this extraordinary mass extinction may have been quickly followed by an explosion of complexity in marine life and a dramatic shift to complex interrelated ecosystems..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Connections Vital in Societies, Hearts and Brains

Scientists studying the networked configuration of synapses in the human brain are generating a new perspective that is informing social scientists in their views about the present structure of society and the potential for future changes. Multitude, a new book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is reviewed by Plexus member Carver Tate. Researchers at Johns Hopkins recently studied patients with no history of coronary or coronary artery disease who suffered heart failure after sudden, severe emotional stress. Plexus Science Advisors Pat Rush and Bob Lindberg, both physicians who have woven complexity into their clinical practices, take a look at what that means for doctors, patients and all of us. Read these stories and more in the April/May issue of the Plexus Institute newsletter emerging. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Constraints & Innovations

In Cambodia, one out of every 380 people is a war amputee. In Afghanistan, thousands of men, women and children have lost legs because of the exploding landmines that still litter the country after nearly three decades of war, and Taliban courts have ordered amputation of hands and feet as punishment. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Creataceous Pines Grown in Pots

The Greater Blue Mountain Area of Australia is a vast expanse of wilderness famous as a home to unique and ancient plants and animals. But scientists still were amazed by the discovery in 1994 of a tree thought to be extinct for millions of years. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Cumulative Advantage

Do you think you have a good feel for next blockbuster movie, hit song, must-have technical gadget or the next wildly popular political candidate? Think again. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Cumulative Advantage May Influence Individual Votes

Network dynamics and a social phenomenon known as "cumulative advantage" influence electoral victories more than rational choice, some social scientists believe. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Cybernetics

Cybernetics quite emphatically differs from robotics, and it is not about freezing dead people. That has to do with cryogenics. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Deeper Learning Bob Lindberg

A patient seeing Dr. Robert A. Lindberg for the first time gets an unusual introduction to his medical practice. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - DMan Programme

The Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom is internationally known for its work on complexity theory and organisations. It is also distinguished in that it offers professional research degree programmes in which the candidates' work is their research. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Doing and Learning

The existence and expansion of networks, Jay Cross suggests, changes the way we view the world. “Reality” he writes, “emerges from the interaction of complex adaptive systems.” .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Doing Good and Doing Well

Educational, economic, and environmental innovators, as well as organizations working to support human rights, reduce poverty and promote health are among the 45 winners of the 2008 Fast Company Social Capitalist Award. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Dolphins Mysterious Consciousness in the Deep

"When you tell a story about a dolphin" Hardy Jones says, "you are really telling a story about the whole ocean.".
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Thursday Complexity Post - Election Cascades

Network dynamics and a social phenomenon known as “cumulative advantage” influence electoral victories more than rational choice, some social scientists believe. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Empowered Workers Perform Best

People who feel powerful perform better on cognitive tasks than people who feel unimportant, new research suggests. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ethical Eco-Gold

Say that band you wear on your ring finger to symbolize an endless circle of love contains an ounce of gold. To get that ounce, miners dig, haul and heap an average of 30 tons of rock. Those tons of rock, along with two or three times as many tons of excavated earth, create artificial mountains, which are then lined with irrigation hoses that apply millions of gallons of cyanide to separate out the precious metal. Environmentally devastating open pit gold mines remain toxic for years, contaminating surrounding land and groundwater. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Expanding Chinese Desert

More than a quarter of China's land area is covered with desert, and sands are steadily encroaching on village and cities, threatening crop production, transportation and human health and forcing thousands of people to flee their homes..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Finely Crafted Discourse

In an ancient culture where poetry is revered and people have resisted centuries of oppression, artfully selected words and phrases come with invisible webs of mysteriously moored strings. An August 6 New York Times story by Michael Slackman describes the Iranian social principle of taarof, a complex interactive ritual of manners, pretense, and polite expectations. Americans accustomed to short declarative sentences and no frill facts might consider it lying. But taarof is a time-honored element of Iranian communication that linguists and diplomats say Americans need to learn. The persianmirror.com, a site devoted to Persian culture and community explains, "Taarof has deep roots in the Iranian tradition of treating your guests better than your own family, and being gracious hosts. Taarof is a verbal dance between an offerer and an acceptor until one of them agrees. It is a cultural phenomenon that consists of refusing something even though you might want it, out of politeness. On the giving end, it is offering something...to be polite…but not really wanting to give it away.".
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Thursday Complexity Post - For want of wolves

The wolves were gone, so the elk and antelope grazed safety on young cottonwoods, aspen and willow trees, killing them before they could mature. When the trees and shrubs that control stream erosion were gone, entire ecosystems were disturbed. Beaver dams declined, food webs broke down, and a chain of disruptions rippled through other plant and animal species that included birds, fish and insects. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Forgetting

Our ability to forget may be just as important as our ability to remember. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - From Peanuts to Petroleum and Back

When Rudolph Diesel invented the diesel engine in 1900, he designed it to run on peanut oil. By the time he died in 1913, an emerging petroleum industry was changing the direction of engines and fuels. Faced with today's rising oil prices and environmental concerns, a growing number of motorists are retrofitting their modern diesel powered cars to run on vegetable oil. "Greasecar" enthusiasts insist they don't mind riding around in vehicles that smell like onion rings and French fries. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Genes Interact in Networks

Scientists learning more about the human genetic blueprint have discovered they know less than they thought, and much of what they thought needs revision..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Global Warming May Be Killing Frogs

Nearly a third of the world's known species of amphibians are threatened with extinction, and at least 112 species have disappeared since 1980. Scientists think global warming, which has fostered the growth of a fungas fatal to frogs, may be to blame. The findings also raise new about how wawrming may change the dynamics of disease. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Good Vibrations Keep Us Balanced

We spend considerable effort and money to muffle and minimize sounds in our noisy world. Dr. James J. Collins, professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, has found ways to take advantage of it. His research shows the same principle-stochastic resonance--is at work in climate change, the ability of marine creatures to catch their prey, and the ability of people to keep their balance. The practical application is that vibrating innersoles help the old and ill keep their balance, preventing dangerous falls. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Gowns, Gloves and Culture Change

The VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System (VAPHS) has reduced hospital infections and saved money in the process, a New York Times story reports today. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Health Leadership

Graduate education for health care leaders needs to focus on the complex nature of health care organizations, two leading scholars say. Dr. Henry Mintzberg, an internationally known management scholar, and Dr. Sholom Glouberman, a philosopher who has worked in health care policy and research in Canada and the United Kingdom, will lead the International Program in Health Leadership, which will be offered by the faculties of medicine and management at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. The program, which starts in November 2005, is designed to give 40 students from all over the world deep understanding of the complex field of health along with a sophisticated knowledge of the art of management. Students will learn skills to make the best of existing conditions as well as to effect change in face of challenging economic, social an political realities. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Home on the Range, Pleistocene Stylens

Human population is declining in some parts of the Great Plains of the US, and that may create opportunities for revitalizing the land, a group of prominent scientists believes. A dozen conservationists and ecologists from 10 universities and institution have proposed a plan to introduce lions, camels, cheetahs, wild horses and elephants to the area in phases and under controlled circumstances. Ancestors of these creatures inhabited these lands in Pleistocene times, these scientists say, and their depletion by eons of human hunters has been ecologically detrimental. In the absence of large predators that stomp the ground and keep small animals on the run, pesky weeds and vermin tend to take over the landscape. Other experiments have shown dangerous animals can coexist with humans, the scientists say. And as Josh Donlon, a Cornell graduate student and lead author of the paper asserts, "re-wilding" is preferable to a future of rats and dandelions.
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Thursday Complexity Post - Honey bees dying

Honey bees, with their complex social order and their amazing architectural achievements, have inspired admiration, poetry and scientific inquiry ever since we humans discovered the sweet taste of honey. This year honey bees are dying in droves and scientists are not sure why. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Hybrid cars

Some 800 million automobiles are in active use around the world today, and auto industry experts predict that number will grow to 3.25 billion by 2045 as India and China become more industrialized. That's an enormous opportunity for automakers and a breathtaking threat to the environment. Some industry executives are trying to mass market cleaner, less gas-hungry vehicles, and Toyota executives would like to make the internal combustion engine obsolete. Individual decisions and public policies can help promote the success of more environmentally friendly vehicles. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Infastrstructures interrelated

Hundreds of thousands of California residents went without power in the wake of the devastating fires that swept the state this week. But wildfires aren't the only threats to the power grid. Sporadic failures traced to power surges darkened downtown San Francisco in July, and a year earlier more than 200 airline flights were diverted, delayed or canceled because of an 80 minute power outage at a radar facility that handles flights in and out of Southern California..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Jane Jacobs, Champion of Cities

New ideas, Jane Jacobs wrote, must use old buildings. It's not just a matter of keeping grace and charm of earlier times. She explained that thriving cities need buildings of varying age and condition, including some rundown structures that can nurture the enterprise of entrepreneurs and innovators unable to afford the expense of new construction gleaming with modern amenities..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Jazz and Medical Communication

Paul Haidet, a physician, former disc jockey and amateur jazz historian who has studied doctor-patient communication, marvels at the parallels between jazz and medicine. Gary Onady, a physician and jazz trumpeter who composes and arranges music, uses musical metaphor to describe patient-clinician interactions. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - John Wheeler's legacy

John Archibald Wheeler, a visionary in physics, science and philosophy, and a legendary teacher, was as imaginative with metaphor as he was with mathematics. He may be best known for coining the phrase “black hole” to describe what happens when a star collapses, creating space where mass is so densely compacted that nothing—not even light—can escape its gravitational force. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Keep Your Bucket Full

Revelers in their cups may forget responsibilities, and people traveling by hot air balloon can view the world giddily from a suspended basket. But the old oaken bucket elicits reassuring notions of strength and reliability. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Knowledge in One Field Leads to Innovation in Others: Engineering know-how improved audio equipment, physics of sound led to a better car

Amar Bose is founder of the Bose Corporation, known for its high quality audio equipment. Once a professor who taught network theory at MIT, he applied engineering knowledge to the improvement of sound equipment and the physics of sound to a better car ride. In each case knowledge from one field led to unprecedented innovation in another. Business theorists call that knowledge bridging. A study by Wharton Management Professor David Hsu and Kwanghui Lim, a professor at the National University of Singapore, suggests knowledge bridging can help companies make better products faster and earn more money in the process. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Legacy of Edward Lorenz

When Edward Lorenz accidentally discovered the “Butterfly Effect”, he knew he had hit upon something profound. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Life at the edge of the sea

The Venetians built an empire based on centuries of reconciliation with the sea, allowing the Adriatic to overfill the elaborate network of canals and periodically wash through the city. The Dutch have spent centuries resisting the sea with ingenious systems of seawalls, dikes, reinforced dunes and drainage canals. Today, both these urban lowlands face increasing challenges from rising sea levels, sinking land and more violent storms. The concepts of resistance and reconciliation still inform the engineers and planners trying to tame the impact of sea's inevitable encroachment. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Lightning sparks hurricanes

Severe lightning in the Ethiopian highlands gives birth to the most devastating Atlantic hurricanes, new research suggests. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Living Computers

Ordinary e coli bacteria can cause a great deal of trouble when it’s on your spinach. But scientists have discovered how to make e coli do math, opening the way to potentially extraordinary advances in storing and manipulating data. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Malcolm Gladwell on 'Moral Hazard'

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best selling books Blink and The Tipping Point, writes about the findings of two Harvard researchers, medical anthropologist Susan Starr Sered and physician and Plexus member Rushika Fernandopulle, who interviewed 120 Americans who lack access to medical care. Their book. Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity, chronicles the hidden costs of being without medical insurance-the cascading social, economic and human devastation that accumulates when untreated illnesses get worse. Gladwell looks at their findings and analyses the concept of "moral hazard", an idea he says has dominated the economists who influence American health care..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Mayor fights urban ills creatively

When Antanas Mockus was first elected mayor of Bogota in 1995, traffic in the streets of Colombia's capital city was chaotic, lawless and lethal. So Mockus had 1,500 stars painted on the spots where pedestrians had been killed. Then he hired 420 mimes to direct the flow and make fun of the reckless and heedless..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Melodious Duets

To the poet Shelley, the sounds of the skylark were "profuse strains of unpremeditated art," that held intimations of heavenly things unseen. Recent research shows that what may be ethereal to the human ear is very serious business to birds..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Melting Arctic imperils tropical isles

Arctic explorers once led expeditions on dogsled. Today many such adventurers paddle kayaks instead, and the change has vast implications. Diminishing Arctic ice may herald the inundation of distant tropical Pacific islands and low-lying coastal cities worldwide. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Microbe Challanges

Scientists are discovering wild, unpredictable behavior in invisible microbial communities where organisms collaborate, compete, communicate, and pirate each others' strategies for coping with adversity. While no evidence exists to suggest single-cell consciousness, bacteria and viruses can adapt to environmental challenges with astonishing speed and resourcefulness.
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Thursday Complexity Post - Microbes in the Sky

Microbes have been founding arctic ice, in the water cores of nuclear reactors, and in volcanic undersea vents where the searing water temperature exceeds the boiling point. Now some scientists think the water in clouds should be viewed as a microbial habitat. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Mind and emergence

Why are family reunions and holiday gatherings so often prone to free-floating angst, irrational episodes and inexplicable outbursts? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Mirror Neurons

Neuroscientists are discovering the biological basis of how exquisitely connected we humans all are to each other. If you wince when you see someone in pain, yawn when your companion yawns, or smile in response to a smile, your mirror neurons are working. Some scientists believe mirror neurons will prove as important to psychology as DNA has been to biology. David Dobbs, in an article A Revealing Reflection, that appeared in the April/May issue of the Scientific American Mind, suggests mirror neurons may be nothing less than a prime driver of human progress.
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Thursday Complexity Post - MRSA in Pigs

Researchers in Canada and Europe have found Methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in pigs and the farmers who care for them, and Michael Pollan suggests that discovery is emblematic of the fact that we ask too much of our pigs. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology, the use of tiny particles equivalent in size to one millionth of a millimeter, is the stuff of futuristic fiction and an emerging science expected to have profound impact in medicine, communications, the military and consumer products. It is surprising to learn that the medieval artisans who put minute quantities of gold and silver in molten glass to create the luminous colors that still glow from the windows of Europe's cathedrals may have been the earliest, if inadvertant, nanotechnologists. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Network Analysis Finds Hidden Patterns

Soccer has no time-outs so quick and smart responses to the dynamics on the field are more important during a game than coaching from the sidelines. So when the University of Maryland Terrapins slumped to lackluster performance after six years of tournament showings, Coach Sasho Cirovski began looking beyond athletic prowess and traditional instruction. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Networks, Technology & Trust

The 80 million member networking website MySpace, instant messaging, e-mail and creations of computing that include YouTube signify an increasingly networked world in which friends and strangers have disembodied social encounters in public. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Neuroplasticity and Management

Explorations of the endlessly complex interacting networks and chemicals inside the mysterious gelatinous gray material between our ears suggest tantalizing clues to help managers do their jobs better. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - New Nanotechnology Food Research - If It Glows Don't Eat It

Scientists using nanotechnology and bioluminescence have come up with a spray that can instantly identify a wide range of pathogens in food and drink. The detection system makes use of a luminescent protein molecule that has been modified so it attaches itself to targeted bacterium. If the sprayed food contains any of several pathogens such as Salmonella or e-coli, it will glow..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Oceans Hold Clues to Our Past, Lessons for Our Future

Modern understandings of some of amazing marine creatures shed light on the intricate interrelationships of organisms that life in the sea. The Portuguese Man of War, for instance, a gelatinous cousin of the jellyfish, isn't one creature. It is a floating colony of individual organisms fulfilling separate tasks that create a community-a community that functions as a unit. Dr. Ellen Prager, a marine scientist and experienced diver, describes extraordinary creatures and other wonders and mysteries in her new book The Oceans. Her comprehensive exploration of the ocean, from its beginnings billions of years ago to its present-day vital importance to human life on the planet, take the reader on a whirlwind voyage through history, geology chemistry, biology, and some modern-day practices that imperil the health and bounty of the sea. The author's sense of infinite time, space and the majesty of continual change and adaptation infuse her fact-filled pages with a feeling of awe wonder..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Odes to Code

Poets have always excelled in seeing the secret, the sublime and the subliminal, but how do they do with science? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Physicist John Wheeler

John Wheeler, viewed by many scholars as one of America's most innovative physicists, used his understanding of Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics to predict the existence of "space-time foam". He also coined the phrase "black hole" to discuss what happens when a star collapses, and to describe a region of space-time from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Science and the Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity, a new book edited by John D. Barrow and others, is reviewed in Nature, and Wheeler's own words are captured in a 2003 radio interview with Paul Davies, a physicist and author who wrote the first chapter of the book. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Piecemeal Solutions or Collective Commitment

African leaders see science, technology and education as key element in the fight against devastating African poverty. They also think solutions need to factor in the needs of local communities and environments, and that a strengthened educational system is crucial to train the scientists and engineers to confront the challenges of disease, hunger, soil depletion, contaminated water and ecological damage. While economists agree on the tragic consequences of African poverty, views differ on how to alleviate it. Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time, calls for collective commitment and a global network of cooperation. William Easterly, author of The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, advocates piecemeal solutions with measurable accountability and local feedback..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Pixel Power

Alex Tew is a 21-year-old college student who found an innovative way to earn money for his education. He created www.milliondollarhomepage.com, divided the screen into 10,000 small squares of 100 pixels each, and is selling the pixels for $1 each, with a minimum order of 100.Buyers can put their logos or advertising messages in the space they buy and visitors to the page can link to those websites. Pixels are tiny dots of light and color that are the smallest units in a visual image on the computer screen. Tew has already made more than $600,000 and started a trend that has surprised skeptical advertising executives. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Positive Deviance Aids Battle Against Microbes

Jerry Sternin explained the concept of Positive Deviance to audiences at the Said Business School in Oxford, England, recently, and his message may have had special resonance with people who worry about burgeoning infections rates in British hospitals. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Positive Deviants

How do you bridge the gap between what is and what could be? Jerry Sternin, who pioneered social applications of Positive Deviance, describes some creative pathways to that bridge in "Your Company's Secret Change Agent," a Harvard Busiess Review article he wrote with consultant and author Richard Tanner Pascale. Are some people in the organization doing things differently and better? Learn from them. When managers try to impose change designed by outside experts, they are apt to face resistance and rejection. When indigenous successes of "positive deviants" are brought into the mainstream, helpful changes are enthusiastically embraced. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Predators, Prey and Flying Cats

In the early 1950s, the World Health Organization saved people in Borneo from malaria and presented them instead with the threat of plague and typhus..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Queen Bees

The queen honeybee has the worst job in the hive, muses May R. Berenbaum, a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois. "At least the foragers get out for fresh air and some scenery.".
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Thursday Complexity Post - Readers Converse Online

Tim Spalding thinks learning and knowledge are conversation, and his concept is nuanced by technical savvy and classical scholarship. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Relentless stress breeds chronic illnesses among Katrina evacuees

A new public health study shows 34 percent of children displaced by Hurricane Katrina suffer from such conditions as asthma, anxeity and behavior problems. Adults fared no better. Nearly half of their parents and guardians reported chronic illnesses, and 37 percent said their own health was poor. More than half of the mothers and female guardians scored "very low" on a mental health screening exam. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Richard Feynman's Art Advanced Physics

The renowned quantum physicist Richard P. Feynman, the late Nobel laureate who mentored many young theoreticians, advanced knowledge in his field through art as well as physics and mathematics. His ability to create simple diagrams representing the actions and interactions of subatomic particles gave physicists a new tool that helped them streamline unmanageable algebraic calculations and think about research problems in a new way. His visualized ideas are explained and celebrated in Drawing Physics Apart, a new book by David Kaiser, a physicist and historian at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They are also commemorated and depicted on a US postage stamp honoring American scientists. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ripe Oaths May Illuminate Brain Architecture

When people let loose with the obscene, the profane and the venomously insulting, the "executive center" of the brain is ablaze with neural activity, scientists say. Dr. David Silbersweig, director of neuropsychiatry and neuroimaging at the Weil Medical College of Cornell University and colleagues measured cerebral blood flow of Tourette's patients when they were experiencing episodes of coprolalia, the pathological and uncontrollable urge to curse. Their findings, which produce new insight into how different domains of the brain communicate, are described in a New York Times story by Natalie Angier. Read about other researchers, including psychology professor Timothy B. Jay, author of Cursing in America, and Geoffrey Hughes, author of Swearing, who studied the subject of cussing from social, cultural and philosophical viewpoints..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Romantic Love

Scientists are finding that romantic love is quite distinct from sexual desire. Neurologically, it's more akin to the drives for food, drink, warmth, and the craving for certain drugs. When love strikes, the huge chemical cocktail that constitutes our body is set in motion, and neuroscientists are beginning to find what goes on in our brains as a result. And don't be surprised in romantic misery makes you crave chocolate-the reason lies in chemistry. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Schrodinger's Cat

"Cat state" to a physicist means being in two diametrically opposed conditions at once--up and down, here and there, or black and white. The famed Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger probed this puzzle 70 years ago with a mental model of a cat that was, in theory, simultaneously dead and alive. The recent feat of scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Bolder, Colorado, who put some beryllium atoms in a state where they were spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time, has inspired scientists to explore newer experiments that illustrate the exploits of "quantum trickery," and to try and figure out what they mean for the future of quantum mechanics. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Scientists and Theologians Unite for Environment

Eric Chivian and Richard Cizik have differing views on how the earth was formed and the origin of human life. But they agree that unprecedented human effort is needed to protect all the living things on the planet and all the fragile ecosystems that support them. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Season's Greetings

The mistletoe that gives permission for stolen Christmas kisses has a botanical and cultural past rich in mystery, paradox and lusty ceremonies. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Self-serve auto salvage: It's not your father's junkyard

California's new campaign to get pollution-belching junkers off the road is adding to a growing busines: auto salvage yards where customers who bring their own tools pay a small fee to pry usable parts from wrecked and ruined vehicles. Californians who turn in their high-emission jalopies get $1,000..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Shadows

When we see a shadow of our images, wonders Bill Nye the Science Guy, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars, or are we seeing the time on earth observed from Mars now? When is now? When was then? And what is a shadow? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Simple rules of swarms

No matter how closely one examines an army ant, Iain Couzin observes, there is no way to guess that when 1.5 million of them get together they can use their bodies to build bridges and then dismantle them when their travels are finished. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Skill, Chance and Success: Baseball Knowledge Plays Well in Other Fields

Wade Boggs, a former major league third baseman who won five batting titles was nicknamed "Chicken Man" because he ate chicken before every game. Famed Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto kept a wad of gum on the top of his hat. Slugging centerfielder Ken Griffey Jr. got rid of a Mercedes because he failed to get hits whenever he drove it to games. Pitcher Turk Wendell chewed licorice and brushed his teeth between innings..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Small Changes Impact Ecology

In the tiny village of Bitinga in eastern Niger, every man, women and child is engaged in a struggle to alter the earth. They are planting bushes to try and halt the advance of a huge sand dune more than 300 feet high that stretches for a mile and a quarter and threatens to bury their community and a new school..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Starfish & Spider

It would be easy to miss the metaphysical connection between Napster, the pioneer of electronic file sharing, and the Apache Indians of the American West. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Strong Networks Foster Health

For decades, medical practitioners have noted that impoverished Latino patients are often healthier than Caucasian and African-American patients with similar incomes and education. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Stuart Kauffman's new book

“A couple in love waling along the banks of the Seine, are in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion.”.
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Thursday Complexity Post - Swarm Intelligence

Ants have sophisticated divisions of labor within their colonies and contrary to popular myth they have no rigid roles of worker, warrior, or nurturer. In fact, there is no one in charge. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Symbolic Dancing of Bees

It's not only humans who derive symbolic meaning from dance. Honeybees use dance to tell each other about flowers and nectar and the best places to find them..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Synchrony Prevails

Mathematician Steven Strogatz calls synchronization "one of the most pervasive drives in the universe." It extends from the subatomic to he cosmic, and impels animate and inanimate systems. That's why bridges, fireflies, humans hearts and human feet have more in common than might be apparent at first glance. The Millennium Bridge, an elegant walkway over the Thames River connecting two parts of London, is a surprising case in point. An alarming wobble began when pedestrians, resonating with subtle movements of the bridge, synchronized their steps and inadvertently amplified the bridge's swaying. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Taarof, the fine art of social subterfuge

Thursday Complexity Post - Tech Savvy New Workers

After the Department of Defense blocked troop access to 13 popular web sites, including YouTube and MySpace, senior officers were aghast to discover their junior colleagues were using Facebook, which had escaped the ban, to organize their squadrons..
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Humanity of Animals

Scientists are finding more and more animals that have characteristics once thought to be exclusively human. And it's not only dolphins and great apes, the animals whose social natures have already been well documented..
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Latino Paradox

Medical practitioners have noticed for decades that Latino patients are often healthier than Caucasian and African-American patients with similar education and incomes. The phenomenon is called the Latino Paradox, and it defies the well-documented connection between poverty and poor health. Researchers are trying to learn what the Latino population is doing right, and attention is focusing increasingly on such factors as diet, belief systems and strong social support networks. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - The legacy of Rosa Parks

By refusing to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus to a white man in 1955, Rosa Parks launched a civil rights awareness that would change America's conscience. Her single act had consequences that cascaded far beyond the time and place in which it happened. It was a simple act that was anything but simple for Mrs. Parks. It was difficult and dangerous for her, and the culmination of successive iterations of ideals she had pursued for years as she worked for voter registration, school desegregation, youth education, and the programs of her church and community. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Mysterious Monarch

Few living creatures can match the extraordinary flight and navigational abilities of the Monarch butterfly. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Odd and Majestic Wondrously Interwoven in Tapestry of Life

Theologians celebrate the "will to wonder" and evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson finds wonder in the diverse, fascinating and strange organisms that makeup the tapestry of live. She tells of the Elysia Chlorotica, an animal that looks and acts like a leaf, and a wasp that lays its eggs inside the body of a caterpillar. She marvels at patterns that give predictability to divergent facts, and is delighted to be a product of evolution, the same proces that gave us dynasaurs, bread molds and exotic animals. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Promise of Systems Biology

Systems biology research may lead the way to greater understanding of health and disease and raise the potential for specially targeted medical treatments tailored to individual needs. Ancient healers knew illnesses rarely arose from a single cause and that context was vital. Advanced mathematical models now validate that view. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Spazdaq or the Bow Jones? Genius will Emerge. Rite-Solutions CEO James R. Lavoie wants employees to play games at work.

CEO James R.Lavoie wants employees at Rite-Solutions, an information technology firm, to invest fantasy money in the Mutual Fun. It's an intellectual opinion game designed to tap the collective mind and find creative ideas in unexpected places. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Things We Feel May Not Be Real

Can trust be artificially induced? Swiss and Americans scientists think it can. A team of researchers led by Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich investigated whether oxytocin, a chemically produced naturally in the brain, can influence behavior when externally administered. In an experimental money game, volunteers who inhaled a nasal spray containing a synthetic form of oxytocin trusted a banker to take control their money far more often than volunteers who breathed in a placebo. Forty-five percent of the chemically-influenced volunteer investors parted with all of their cash, compared with only 21 per cent of the investors in the placebo group. These findings may be helpful in treating mental disorders, and there is potential for abuse. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Uncertainty and Doubt Rougher than Risk

Two leading business authorities say today's managers have a tougher time with the amorphous woes of uncertainty and doubt than their earlier counterparts had as they spent their careers facing risk. Nitin Nohria, a professor at the Harvard Business School, and Thomas Stgewart, editor of the Harvard Business Review, discuss uncertainty and doubt in a provocative piece in the HBR. It is one of 20 essays in the HBR List of Breakthrough Ideas for 2006. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Uninsured in America

Obesity and rotten teeth identify a growing number of Americans with membership in an emerging social caste of the ill, infirm and and marginally employed, authors of a new book believe. Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity, by Susan Sered and Plexus member Rushika Fernandopulle, tells how untreated medical problems escalate into adversities that cascade through all areas of life and across generations. America is undergoing a fundamental shift from class to caste, the authors say, and our new "untouchables" are the uninsured who are fated to become and remain sick. Further, they warn, because health insurance is linked to employment, only the very rich are immune from a poential slide into the new low caste. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Warmer Seas and Wilder Storms

Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Kerry Emanual has discovered statistical evidence that the intensity of hurricanes is related to ocean surface termperature. Years ago he predicted a one degree C increase in tropical ocean temperature would produce a 5 percent increase in wind speed during hurricanes. In fact,warming one half a degree C has brought a 10 percent increase in wind speed..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Wassail! And Holiday Cheer

Wassailing, a Medieval version of networking, involved groups of people sharing holiday good will and huge vessels of fermented drink. The custom evolved from post-Christmas festivals in early rural England to encourage a good apple crop to Christmas carroling in the 17th Century. Holiday food has evolved, too. Humble Pie is something we eat today, figuratively, when we're embarrassed. You might not want to know what was in the real meal, which was served as a treat for servants and peasants. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Weaker Work Ties

Americans don’t have as many friends at work as they did decades ago, recent research suggests. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - What Compels Creatures to Navigate Perilious Journeys En Masse?

Millions of Monarch butterflies come together every fall over a 50-mile-wide valley in Texas to make their way to the mountains of central Mexico. The astonishing sight is part of an arduous nonlinear journey from Canada and North America in which creatures that weigh little more than an ounce defy the dangers of storms, high winds, predatory birds, and hostile habitats. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - What is a Stakeholder?

Deputy US Secretary of State Robert Zoellick set off an international scramble among linguists and diplomats when he urged China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in the world ecnomic community. What is a stakeholder? The Chinese language has no real equivalent for the English word. The US State Department suggested a Chinese phrase meaning "participants with related interests." Chinese scholars came up with an assortment of possibilities, including "participants with related benefits and drawbacks." Whatever the fine points, the Chinese Ambassador to the US Zhou Wenzhong decided the meaning should be positive. Asked how the US sees China, he replied, "We are a stakeholder." .
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Thursday Complexity Post - What Will Happen If the Web Starts to Think

Kevin Kelly, the editor at large of Wired Magazine, the author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Economic and Social Systems, thinks that historians 1,000 years from now will look back at our time as a pivotal era, a time when a major change took place in civilization. Already, Kelly writes in Wired Magazine, we are seeing powerful social changes growing from masses of interconnected humans interacting in unpredictable ways. Kelly envisions the Web as a giant operating system for a planet-sized computer, and he points out that some computer geniuses think the first real artificial intelligence will emerge from the Web. The massive computer the Web operates already has electronic complexity rivaling the human brain, and unlike the brain, it is every-expanding and doubling its capacity every few years. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - What You See Isn't Always What You Just Saw

What you see isn't always what you saw. The ambiguous and illusive Necker Cube, discovered nearly 175 years ago by a Swiss crystallographer named Albert Louis Necker, shows how our brains can suddenly switch viewpoints so that images seem to jump back and forth. And that's just one example of the optical illusions that challenge our ability to see, interpret and comprehend..
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Thursday Complexity Post - When Eric Grohe Paints Murals

When artist Eric Grohe looks at a blotched concrete wall beside an unkempt gravel parking lot, he doesn't see urban decay. He sees an opportunity to archive a community's collective memory and enliven its future promise. Grohe creates larger-than-life murals that celebrate the history, the heroes, the joys, sorrows and daily routines of people and places. His art starts with stories. He researches all sorts of public records and "interviews everyone in sight." And all those human dramas become part of the images that can transform a community. In Bucyrus Ohio, for example, Grohe turned an ugly wall into a dramatic entrance to the city and a parking lot became a welcoming space for public and private gatherings. The current issue of emerging, the newsletter of the Plexus Institute, tells how Grohe does his work, and what inspires his art..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Where Chaos Means Order and Fractals Aren't Mean

Conversationally, chaos implies disorder and randomness. In science, chaos means a highly ordered system of nonlinear mathematical equations. In this sense, chaos is the opposite of disorder, and has no element of chance. Larry Liebovitch, interim director at the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University, makes advanced mathematically based concepts accessible in his book, Fractals and Chaos Simplified for Life Sciences, in articles, and in new tutorials about chaos, fractals and scaling that are available on Society for Chaos Theory website..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Wikipedia

Four years ago a wealthy options trader named Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales decided to create a massive, free, on-line, community-built encyclopedia with an unprecedented assortment of knowledge that would be available to every person on the planet. An army of dedicated volunteers has created just that--a collection of some 1.3 million articles in ten languages at www.wikipedia.org It's a collaborative, self-organizing revolution in research. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Your Computer Can Serve Science While You Sleep-Distributed Computing Brings Dramatic Research Results

Hundreds of thousands a of people all over the world are donating spare computer time for massive research in such areas as climate change, investigations of the origins of life and a search for the gravitational waves that Albert Einstein predicted would ripple through the cosmos distorting time and space.The process is called distributed computing. Scientists take a large research problem and break it down into small components. The smaller projects are then distributed to computers belonging to individuals and businesses that have volunteered their machines for computational time. This resource allows researchers to work through daunting amounts of data faster than ever before. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Your Kids and Your Aging Ears

The Struldbrugs who lived in Jonathan Swift's fanciful island of Luggnagg, were immortal but not perpetually young. They entered their everlasting dotage forgetting the names of people and things. And because the Luggnagg language of Balnibarbi was in constant flux, successive generations of Struldbrugs couldn't communicate with each other, and none of them could communicate with their mortal neighbors..
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Thursday Complexity Post- "Jazz" in Chinese Economy

The burgeoning Chinese economy, its exponential growth, and its unexpected developments, are analyzed by scholars and business leaders in a conference sponsored by the Wharton China Business Forum of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. These experts say the Chinese economy operates 'liker a jazz combo', with furious improvising, swirling sound and disorienting rhythm. .
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Trust is the Lubricant of Organizational Life

Read about how Henri Lipmanowicz thinks about leadership and complexity science. His approach to leadership and his understanding of life in organizations are illuminated by memorable stories from his successful career at Merck and his work as with Plexus Institute, where he serves as Chair of the Board. The author of this story, the first in a new series of Plexus publications called Deeper Learning, is the distinguished communications scholar Arvind Singhal, PhD, Professor and Presidential Research Scholar in the School of Communication Studies, Ohio University. .
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When the Task is Accomplished, Can We Say We Did It Ourselves? A Quest to Eliminate MRSA at the Veterans Administrations' Hospitals in Pittsburgh

This story is about the quest at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System (VAPHS) to eliminate the transmission of deadly healthcare associated infections, specifically Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus or MRSA. Using the social and behavioral change process Positive Deviance, the facility was able to engage the innovativeness and energy of hundreds of hospital staff members to uncover and create practices to prevent transmission of MRSA and to spread these practices to their colleagues. .
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Where Nursing and Complexity Science Intersect

Why does complexity science resonate with practicing nurses as well as those who teach and do research? What do complexity science principles imply for the future of the nursing profession, the largest and most diverse segment of the US healthcare workforce? A new book, On the Edge: Nursing in the Age of Complexity, released this month, explores these and many other questions. .
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Which Nursing Home Would You Put Your Mother In?

Author Arvind Singhal converses with complexity scholars Reuben McDaniel and Ruth Anderson about how complexity inspired management principles impact the quality of patient care as well as the bottom line in nursing homes. .
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