Every year the World Bank publishes its Development Indicators data, which we analyze in order to measure and track the resilience (fragility) and complexity of countries, macro regions and of the world as a system. The goal is to produce strategic systemic information for governments and government agencies especially in the context of management of disasters,…
Each year the World Bank publishes its Development Indicators data, which we analyze in order to measure and track the resilience and complexity of countries, macro regions and of the world as a system. The goal is to extract strategic and systemic information which may be useful to governments and government agencies especially in the…
In highly complex contexts, or when one runs out of arguments in a debate, it is customary to resort to elaborate conspiratory theories. Theories are constructed based on a set of data points. When many data points are available, one can construct many theories. The problem is that all these theories will agree in the…
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…
