The covid-19 has accentuated the fragmentation of the European Union. In a moment of political fragility we have performed a resilience rating analysis of the union as a whole as well as of the individual countries and specific macro regions. The idea is to perform a preliminary and simple assessment of how each country could…
March 27-th, 2020. The coronavirus has been with us for a few weeks now. The amount of information, speculation, fake news, statistics, extrapolations and more or less credible and sinister and conspiratory theories, is overwhelming. It is easy to have an impression, it is more difficult to have an opinion. It is very easy to…
A recent blog by CISCO speaks of how QCM – Quantitative Complexity Management – is used in anomaly detection in highly complex systems and contexts. In particular, it speaks of QCM as being able to detect the existence of an anomaly without having seen it before. Such capability goes beyond Machine Learning in that QCM…
Prologue from “Governing a Liquid Society – How to Save Democracy From Itself” In the past the Earth was populated by numerous civilizations. The Greeks, the Incas, or the Romans are just a few egregious examples. Because the temporal and spatial correlation between those civilizations was often non-existent, or very limited, if one happened…
Wikipedia: “In data mining, anomaly detection (also outlier detection) is the identification of rare items, events or observations which raise suspicions by differing significantly from the majority of the data. Typically the anomalous items will translate to some kind of problem such as bank fraud, a structural defect, medical problems or errors in a text.…
The laws of systemantics are said to be pseudo-science. Fair enough. A few of these laws are listed below. They apply to highly complex systems. Think of these laws and then think of the EU, the Euro or, most recently, Ryanair. Le Chatelier’s Principle: Complex systems tend to oppose their own proper function. As systems grow…
Remember the recent British Airways IT meltdown? Problems with power supply are believed to have caused the crisis. Note the word “believed”. According to the mentioned source, when the power came back online, it did so in an uncontrolled manner, damaging the IT system and initiating a sequence of events that plunged the system…
Every dynamical system possesses a characteristic value of complexity which reflects how information is organized and how it flows within its structure. Like most things in life, complexity is limited. In fact, there is an upper bound on complexity that a given system may attain and sustain with a given structure. This ‘physiological’ limit…
Frank Drake devised an equation to express the hypothetical number of observable civilizations in our galaxy: N = Rs nh fl fi fc L where N is the number of civilizations in our galaxy, expressed as the product of six factors: Rs is the rate of star formation, nh is the number of habitable worlds…
In a 2015 United Nations Trade and Development Conference report “Trade Slowdown” one reads: ‘As of 2014 the trends in international trade were largely driven by the sluggish economic growth and the persisting economic and political turmoil in various part of the world. From 2011 to 2014 world trade grew at a rate of less…
