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"Put together one of the world's best science writers with one of the universe's most fascinating subjects and you are bound to produce a wonderful book. . . . The subject of complexity is vital and controversial. This book is important and beautifully done."—Stephen Jay Gould"[Complexity] is that curious mix of complication and organization that we find throughout the natural and human worlds: the workings of a cell, the structure of the brain, the behavior of the stock market, the shifts...
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It is generally recognized that life is becoming more complex. This article analyzes the human social environment using the "complexity profile," a mathematical tool for characterizing the collective behavior of a system. The analysis is used to justify the qualitative observation that complexity of existence has increased and is increasing. The increase in complexity is directly related to sweeping changes in the structure and dynamics of human civilization—the increasing interdependence of...
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In a rented convent in Santa Fe, a revolution has been brewing. The activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics such as Murray Gell-Mann and Kenneth Arrow, and pony-tailed graduate students, mathematicians, and computer scientists down from Los Alamos. They've formed an iconoclastic think tank called the Santa Fe Institute, and their radical idea is to create a new science called complexity. These mavericks from academe share a deep impatience with the...
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Process" approaches to economic and social development appear to be more flexible and offer greater prospects of success than traditional "project" methods. Development as Process addresses the questions raised by the different natures of the two approaches. The authors examine development projects through experience in water resources development in India and in organizational learning by a Bangladeshi NGO. Inter-agency contexts are examined in the setting of an aquaculture project in...
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International assistance programmes for developing countries are in urgent need of revision. Continuous testing and verification is required if development activity is to cope effectively with the uncertainty and complexity of the development process. This examines the alternatives and offers an approach which focuses on strategic planning, administrative procedures that facilitate innovation, responsiveness and experimentation, and on decision-making processes that join learning with...
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The experience accumulated in the wake of more than two decades of sustained effort to promote growth and change in the low-income countries presents a rich field for scholarly inquiry and new insights into the development process. The success and failures of such projects, the new skills and attitudes they impart, and the internal tensions they sometimes generate obviously have an important bearing on the next stages of a county's development effort. Yet little has become known about these...
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Traditions of research on diffusion; Culture, norms, and diffusion; The adoption process; Characteristics of the innovation; Adopter categories; Innovators as deviants: in step with a different drummer; Opinion leaders and the flow of ideas; The role of the change agent and the consequences of innovation; Predicting innovativeness; Toward a theory of the diffusion and adoption of innovations.
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If development means good change, questions arise about what is good, and what sorts of change matter. Answers can be personally defined and redefined. The changing words, meanings and concepts of development discourse both reflect and influence what is done. The realities of the powerful tend to dominate. Drawing on experience with participatory approaches and methods which enable poor and marginalized people to express their realities, responsible well-being is proposed as a central...
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The conventional wisdom of planning software engineering projects, using the widely cited "waterfall model" is not the only useful software development process model. In fact, the "waterfall model" may be unrealistic, and dangerous to the primary objectives of any software project.The alternative model, which I choose to call "evolutionary delivery" is not widely taught or practiced yet. But there is already more than a decade of practical experience in using it. In various forms. It is...
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Drawing from the intellectual origins of experiential learning in the works of John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, and Jean Piaget, this comprehensive and systematic book describes the process of experiential learning. The author proposes a model of the underlying structures of the learning process based on research in psychology, philosophy, and physiology, and bases its typology of individual learning styles and corresponding structures of knowledge in different academic disciplines and careers on...
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The U.S. Army has adopted the After Action Review AAR as its primary method of providing feedback after unit collective training exercises. The AAR is an interactive discussion in which unit members decide what happened, why it happened, and how to improve or sustain collective performance in future exercises. other services and organizations outside the military are also beginning to employ the AAR as a feedback tool. This report describes the twenty-five year history of AAR research and...
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An optimistic assessment of the prospects for a new international order - acting as a counter-blast to global pessimism. The text explains how the international system operates, the pressures it faces and the changes it must undergo, and offers concrete ideas to re-frame international relations, foreign aid and humanitarian intervention, without using jargon or simplistic judgements.
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The old adage “if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail” can also apply to language. If our language is linear and static, we will tend to view and interact with our world as if it were linear and static. Taking a complex, dynamic, and circular world and linearizing it into a set of snapshots may make things seem simpler, but we may totally misread the very reality we were seeking to understand. Making such inappropriate simplifications “is like putting on...
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Recent advances in the study of complexity have given scientists profound new insights into how natural innovation occurs and how its power can be exploited. Now two pioneers in the field, Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen, provide leaders in business and government with a guide to complexity that will help them make effective decisions in a world of rapid change. Building on evolutionary biology, computer science, and social design, Axelrod and Cohen have constructed a unique framework...
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A classic, important study in the anthropology of development, grounded in the author's own work within USAID, and analysis of the organizational and institutional pressures that constrain and shape development agency employees' cognition and action.
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