Search News & Events
Search Site
Thursday Complexity Post - Job Loss and Life Expectancy
Mar 25 2010
Research suggests layoffs can have adverse health effects, both short term and long term. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Job Loss and Life Expectancy
Mar 25 2010
Research suggests layoffs can have adverse health effects, both short term and long term. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - A City of Complexity
Mar 11 2010
"A place of healing, since tuberculosis sufferers started coming over a century ago. A spiritual mini-mecca for a godless age. A sumptuous adobe haven for a few super rich. A land of hope for thousands of illegal immigrants. A hothouse of talent and IQ, with an extraordinary concentration of PhDs, and more artist than any other American city its size."
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Bats Die, Insects Live
Feb 18 2010
An emerging contagious disease called White Nose Syndrome (WNS) is killing hundreds of thousands of bats a year in the Northeastern United States, and scientists worry that some species could become extinct in coming decades.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Bundle Up and Believe
Feb 11 2010
Can climate change skeptics get a warm glow from waste-deep snow? .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Natural Networks
Jan 28 2010
What living organism can solve complex network engineering problems despite having no brain?
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Mapping the Republic of Letters
Jan 21 2010
In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and America, a network of scholars, scientists, theologians and literary figures who exchanged ideas across decades and national boundaries formed the basis of an intellectual community known as the Republic of Letters. Now humanities scholars are collaborating with technology specialists and "cyberscholars" to reach a deeper understanding of that metaphysical republic.
.
more >>
Small Steps, Local Help in Disasters and Redevelopment
Jan 19 2010
New York Times story by Henry Fountain tells how entrepreneurs, nonprofits and local people build and rebuild better from the bottom up..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Pacific Gyre
Jan 14 2010
Inspired by scientific exploration of the Great Garbage Patch in theNorth Pacific Gyre, artist Anna Helper has created extraordinary huge, haunting and disturbing translucent structures from plastic waste from a local salvage yard. Her woven cloud-like mass, called The Gyre, was displayed at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Cellular rogues and enablers
Dec 31 2009
Biological cells may react to their environments somewhat akin to the way children are influenced by their neighborhoods and schools, an increasing number of scientists believe. Cell biologist Mina Bissell believes a key element in the formation of cancer is not just what happens within a cell, but the interactions of cells and all the tissue surrounding them. With certain environmental changes, cancer cells that might have remained harmless can flourish. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Obesity and a Hormone Symphony
Dec 23 2009
The hormones that govern metabolism and other vital bodily functions act like “individual musicians playing together in a philharmonic orchestra producing the most melodic, beautiful symphonies,” an endocrinologist says. Understanding the complex interplay has already led to a new diabetes therapy, and may eventually help curtail obesity.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Nano Rocks
Dec 19 2009
What began with an American Chemical Society contest has blossomed into joyous song and dance production teamwork that celebrates science with the sort of sophisticated silliness that sticks in the memory.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Music, Art and Complexity
Dec 10 2009
If you missed the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra recent concert at Carnegie Hall, you can repair that loss here.
.
more >>
Power of Social Networks
Dec 3 2009
Two scholars, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, discuss new research and new insights in their book Connected. .
more >>
The Power of Positive Deviants
Nov 29 2009
PD is the substance of a Boston Globe story by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow.
more >>
Scientists study regional infant mortality decline
Nov 27 2009
Dane County Wisconsin has vastly reduced infant mortality among African Americans. How can the success be distilled and diffused? The New York Times story by Erik Eckholm explores the why and the how..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Ancient Brands, Modern Logos
Nov 13 2009
Commercial brands began some 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia when traders needed some assurance of the value and origins of oils, wines and other products, an anthropologist believes. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Ancient Brands, Modern Logos
Nov 13 2009
Commercial brands began some 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia when traders needed some assurance of the value and origins of oils, wines and other products, an anthropologist believes.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Silver Spoons
Nov 5 2009
Material wealth is easily passed from one generation to the next, and societies that place high value on material goods have the highest income inequalities, according to a team of anthropologists, statisticians and economists. The team also found that the "silver spoon effect"-the benefit bestowed on the offspring of wealthy parents-was well established in some of the world's most ancient economies.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Fewer boys
Oct 29 2009
Men aren't an endangered species yet, but scientists are puzzled by a decline in the number of boy babies born in recent decades.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Brain at Work
Oct 15 2009
The brain is a social organ, workplaces are social systems, and scientific research is producing more understanding of why employees who feel isolated, unrewarded, unfairly treated or oppressively controlled can't fully engaged in their work. Leaders and managers who value high performance can learn how to address the social brain in productive ways that avoid neurological sabotage.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Social Networks
Oct 8 2009
Bacterial and viral illnesses spread in human communities. But what about physical fitness, happiness, sadness and habits such as smoking, drinking and eating too much?
.
more >>
Epigenetics: A New View of Heredity
Sep 29 2009
We may carry the indelible influence of our ancestors, and our great grandchildren may be marked by the way we live now. Watch NOVA, "The Ghost in Your Genes.".
more >>
Liberating Structures webinar
Sep 24 2009
Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless present a free 90-minute webinar on Liberating Structures: New Patterns of Interaction for Organizations. Thursday, September 24, 2009 1-2:30pm eastern. Register at ULiveandLearn..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Cities and Brains
Sep 10 2009
Dense interconnectedness is critical to the evolution and growth of both brains and cities, according to a new research by scientists at Rensselaer ploytechnic Institute..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Antibiotic Resistance in your Gut
Sep 3 2009
Researchers have discovered previously unknown genes for antibiotic resistance lurking in the human gut.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - PBS News Hour Features Billings Clinic
Aug 13 2009
The PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer has featured the Billings Clinic as an example of how high quality health care can be provided at relatively low cost.
.
more >>
Billings Clinic Featured on PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer
Aug 12 2009
Billings Clinic is hailed as an example of high quality medical care provided at relatively low cost..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Partnership Perfected by Practice
Aug 7 2009
The ancient partnership of horse and rider that has inspired warriors, artists and poets, has been something of a mystery to science.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Unexpected Whirlwinds Ravage
Jul 30 2009
The similar dynamics of tsunamis and earthquakes and ruptures in manmade system such as economies and electric power grids may have profound implications for future planners and policy makers.
.
more >>
Brian Goodwin, theoretical biologist and complexity scholar, dies at 78
Jul 28 2009
An innovative scholar who discerned patterns in nature and culture, Dr. Goodwin was a founder of the Santa Fe Institute and a Plexus Institute science advisor. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Anxious You May Sweat But Others Will Empathize
Jul 24 2009
Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived." Helen Keller, American author and educator, who was blind and deaf..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Cheetahs
Jul 10 2009
The cheetah has an asymmetrical gait, observes Penny Hudson, and when it gallops "it does different things with either side of its body."
.
more >>
Mind and Machine: Virtual Partner Interaction
Jun 23 2009
Dr. J.A. Scott Kelso and colleagues have created a groundbreaking hybrid system that lets scientists explore humans and machines interacting in real time. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Stories of Scientists
Jun 18 2009
People devoted to breakthrough discoveries in science often have wisdom and mystery of equal depth and complexity in their own lives. At the recent World Science Festival in New York, two Nobel Laureates and two neurobiologists were among those who distilled their personal stories for a rapt audience.
.
more >>
Atul Gawande remembers Jerry Sternin and calls on Positive Deviant doctors to save the soul of medicine.
Jun 15 2009
Dr. Gawande, a surgeon and author, celebrates the work of his friend, Jerry Sternin. Read his address to graduating medical students and his view on care and cost. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Neuroscience of time
Jun 11 2009
The American physicist John Archibald Wheeler observed that time is what prevents everything from happening at once. Researchers are now beginning to suspect that impaired time perception is important in a wide range of psychological ills.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Scientists Probe the Mysteries of Scaling
Jun 4 2009
What does the borough of Manhattan have in common with a mouse? As Steven Srogatz explains it, they are “variations on a single structural theme.”
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Crowdsourcing
May 28 2009
After the disputed election of President Mwai Kibaki in December 2007, violence and looting swept the normally stable country of Kenya, killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands. News from conventional sources was temporarily unavailable. In the midst of the chaos, a small group of tech savvy young Africans created a real-time reporting system that has since been used for relief efforts in other crises and natural disasters.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Baltimore and Bangladesh
May 14 2009
The United States ranks second out of 177 countries in per capita income—behind Luxembourg—but 34th in the survival of infants to age one. The United States spends $5.2 billion a day on healthcare, more than any other nation in the world, yet ranks 24th among the world’s 30 most affluent nations for life expectancy.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Diversity helps birds solve problems
May 7 2009
People in groups have been shown to solve problems faster than individuals. Now researchers have found the same is true of house sparrows, and for birds too, diversity is key.
.
more >>
Networks Helped Identify Flu Virus
May 4 2009
A natiowide network of disease surveillance units in Mexico found signs of new virus spreading among humans..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - World Water Safety
Apr 23 2009
Hundreds of millions of people face increased risk of disease and extreme poverty because they lack access to clean water and basic sanitation, a United Nations report warns.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Clostridium difficile a growing threat
Apr 16 2009
Clostridium difficile, a contagious and potentially deadly pathogen, isn’t just increasingly resistant to antibiotics. It’s often triggered by antibiotic treatment.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Love, Art, Neuroscience
Apr 9 2009
The tragic twelfth century love story of Heloise and Peter Abelard is still irresistibly intriguing. She was a brilliant young student, and he was a famous philosopher and theologian nearly twice her age. They fell in love, had a child and married in secret. Her enraged family had him castrated. They retreated to separate monasteries, and years later continued their love in letters.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Space Junk
Mar 26 2009
How dangerous could a bit of litter the size of a corn kernel be? In outer space, very. A minuscule fleck of paint traveling at orbital speed can smash the windshield of a space satellite. And NASA mathematicians say something as small as a grain of sand can have an impact equivalent to the power of a bowling ball moving at 100 miles per hour.
.
more >>
PD MRSA Story on CBS News
Mar 23 2009
CBS news reports how healthcare workers at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia collaborated to prevent transmission of MRSA. .
more >>
Positive Deviance Found to Help Fight Drug-Resistant Infections
Mar 23 2009
CDC Analysis Finds a Unique Social and Behavior Intervention called Positive Deviance Helps Reduce MRSA Rates Up To 62% in Study Hospitals.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Money Madness is No Oxymoron
Mar 19 2009
The very thought or mention of money activates some ancient emotional areas of our brains, some scientists believe..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Pigs, People and MRSA
Mar 13 2009
When a family physician in a small town in Indiana started seeing scores of patients with MRSA infections, he began to wonder whether nearby hog farms were incubating and spreading the disease.
.
more >>
MRSA in American pigs?
Mar 12 2009
Nicholas Kristof says it seems so..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Renewing Habitats
Mar 5 2009
Willie Smits’s passionate desire to save orangutans from extinction led to an unceasing campaign to transform the scorched earth of Borneo into a new natural habitat—one plot of land and one tree at a time.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Tweeting
Feb 26 2009
Dr. Craig Roberts, a surgeon at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit wanted people to know that a tumor can be removed from a kidney without a radical nephrectomy..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Ethics, Ecosystems and Elk
Feb 19 2009
Is human kindness endangering the future of the magnificent elk?
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Locusts in transformation
Feb 12 2009
The brain chemical serotonin triggers one of nature’s most astounding transformations, which happens when solitary placid desert locusts converge into terrifying plant-devouring swarms, scientists have found.
.
more >>
Observing the Human Brain at Work
Feb 9 2009
New insights about how brain regions interact and new observational tools have been developed by Emmanuelle Tognoli and J.A. Scott Kelso, scientists at Florida Atlantic University .
more >>
Hospital in Colombia fights hospital-acquired infections with Positive Deviance
Jan 29 2009
The El Tunal Hospital Epidemiological Newsletter, now available in English, tells the story. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Marine Relationships Matter
Jan 29 2009
Leaders can’t lead without followers, but their mutual needs may be even more complex than that. Interactions among leaders and followers can strengthen the skills of both.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Colds & Flu
Jan 22 2009
While colds and flu are far more common in winter, we’ve been told for years that cold weather doesn’t make us sick. Now researchers have discovered that cold contributes to the spread of the influenza virus, which does.
.
more >>
Hoping for an Epiphany? Let Your Mind Wander
Jan 15 2009
Neuroscientists say intuitive insights often arrive as a surprise.
more >>
Think You're Rational About Money? Some Economists Think You're Nuts
Jan 15 2009
Financial foibles seem unrelated to intellect..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Small Acts Raise Survival Odds
Jan 15 2009
One could hardly watch film of United Airways Flight 1549 ditching in the Hudson River without feeling visceral terror and exceptional gratitude for a pilot with the incredible skill to avoid populous city streets and land safely on water.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - End of Life Care
Jan 8 2009
The medical care people receive near the end of their lives may be more related to their addresses than their preferences, according to The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which documents surprising regional differences in the cost and quality of managing chronic and serious illness.
.
more >>
Community Healthcare Discussion on End of Life Issues
Dec 30 2008
The New Administration asked, some answered. To listen to this call click here:
.more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Giving
Dec 25 2008
Ancient Romans exchanged twigs from sacred groves around the time of the winter solstice, and northern Europeans celebrated fertility with yuletide gifts of wheat products, such as breads and alcohol. The Roman Emperor Caligula is said to have demanded New Years presents and then publicly ridiculed those he disdained, and ungrateful potentates have been known to punish those whose generosity left them dissatisfied.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Fractals for Kids
Dec 18 2008
The unclassifiable genius Benoit Mandelbrot recalls having a youthful fascination with things that were rough—things that were irregular, variable, and fragmented, that lacked the perfect shapes of Euclidean geometry.
.
more >>
NY Times Year in Ideas 2008 Cites Positive Deviance, Jerry and Monique Sternin and Plexus
Dec 14 2008
The Sternins, pioneers of Positive Deviance, and the Plexus Institute initiative using PD to fight MRSA in hospitals, is featured in The York Times Magazine year in ideas issue. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Cellular Altruism
Dec 12 2008
Do individual organisms, even at the cellular level, sacrifice their own advantage to give an evolutionary edge to their species? Gad Shaulsky has always been both skeptical and deeply curious about the paradox of altruism in biological species.
.
more >>
Jerry Sternin, Innovator and Positive Deviance Pioneer, Died December 11
Dec 12 2008
Jerry Sternin "evoked our better angels." .
more >>
Economics Needs a Scientific Revolution
Dec 9 2008
French physicist and economist Jean-Philippe Bouchaud says free markets are wild markets, and classical economics does't explain them. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Behavioral Economics
Dec 4 2008
Have you ever driven miles out of the way to get cheaper gas? Economized on groceries then impulsively bought bargain priced gourmet cat food in such bulk your cat won’t live long enough to eat it? Have you used your $100 a month gym membership for a workout then undone that all that virtue with a $10 pizza purchase on the way home?
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Ancient herb, new use
Nov 13 2008
A drug extracted from the root of the astragalus plant, which has been used in Chinese medicine for centuries, has helped immune cells fight HIV and may also slow the aging process.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Cumulative Advantage
Nov 6 2008
The Nineteenth Century mathematician Henri Poincare wrote that his path-breaking insight into non-Euclidian geometry came to him in a flash as he boarded a bus.
.
more >>
The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics
Oct 28 2008
Author and former quant jock Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains when statistics are dangerous. .
more >>
Notes on the Plexus Summit 2008
Oct 23 2008
Marcus Thygeson, MD, reflects on degeneracy, redundancy, metastability and other matters..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Economic Turbulence
Oct 23 2008
The cataclysmic failures of American financial institutions may trigger world wide repercussions with chain reactions never before even imagined, two leading scholars say. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Circadian clock and memory
Oct 16 2008
If you’re having trouble remembering things, your circadian clock may be out of order. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Buchanan on financial markets
Oct 2 2008
Facing financial crisis and an unprecedented $700 billion taxpayer bailing out of Wall Street, public officials, financiers, and ordinary citizens are struggling to make sense of the mess and figure out what to do. But even the best and the brightest can’t agree on what will happen next.
more >>
Why Don't We Understand the Future of Our Economy?
Oct 1 2008
Physicist Mark Buchanan says computer models could uncover the internal dynamics of financial markets. .
more >>
Interested in Culture Change? Exciting New Opportunities Exist
Sep 29 2008
Plexus Institute Seeks Consultants Experienced in Positive Deviance and other self-organizing processes for work in healthcare and educational settings..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Pleistocene Park
Sep 25 2008
When elephants, zebras, giraffes and other large vegetarian animals are removed from an environment, plant matter increases, insect populations zoom, and so do the numbers of lizards and beetles and other bug-eating creatures.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Hospital discharge communications
Sep 18 2008
A new study finds that 78 per cent of patients discharged from hospital emergency rooms are unclear about some element of their condition or treatment, and more than one third don’t fully understand how to take care of themselves at home.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Super-human intelligence
Sep 11 2008
Could computers become so powerful that a new emergent super-intelligence could vastly outshine and outperform mere humans?
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Healing Relationships
Sep 4 2008
Healing relationships between doctors and patients have certain underlying structures that may also be common to healing relationship in general, a recent study suggests.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Neuroscience technology
Aug 28 2008
The interface of human brains and computers, electronic cognitive enhancement and neuroscience technology enabling mind controlled machinery and telepathic communication are no longer the exclusive domain of science fiction writers.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - African fractals
Aug 21 2008
When he came across an article abut the relationship between housing patterns and women’s autonomy in Tanzania, Ron Eglash was intrigued.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Those Big Little Things
Aug 14 2008
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Microbes, maggots and superbugs
Aug 7 2008
Think of the people you know who are here today because their lives, or the lives of their forebears, were saved by antibiotics. Imagine how different their families and communities would be without them. Then envision a future where once-vanquished diseases triumph over medical effort.
.
more >>
Where Nursing and Complexity Science Intersect
Aug 1 2008
Surprising insights emerge in the pages of On the Edge: Nursing in the Age of Complexity, the first book to view nonlinearity and self-organization in nursing and healthcare. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Creativity at the Edge
Jul 31 2008
Mark Bent is a former diplomat and Texas oilman whose experiences in impoverished villages and settlements in Africa led him to research inexpensive artificial light. He founded SunNight Solar, a company that developed a solar powered flashlight. Then he teamed with InnoCentive, a company that connects challenges and solutions and improved the product.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Worms may help health
Jul 10 2008
The humble hookworm may hold some clues to the workings of the human immune system. In fact, some of the parasites we’ve learned to loathe may play a key role in human health.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Do languages have a common ancestor?
Jul 3 2008
The modern English, Finnish and Turkish languages may not be much alike, but some scholars believe their linguistic ancestors may have a great deal in common.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Empowered Workers Perform Best
Jun 26 2008
People who feel powerful perform better on cognitive tasks than people who feel unimportant, new research suggests.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Living Computers
May 22 2008
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.
.
more >>
emerging, Spring, 2008
May 20 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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Can memory be too good?
May 16 2008
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Stuart Kauffman's new book
May 8 2008
“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.”.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Legacy of Edward Lorenz
Apr 24 2008
When Edward Lorenz accidentally discovered the “Butterfly Effect”, he knew he had hit upon something profound.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - John Wheeler's legacy
Apr 17 2008
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.
.
more >>
Edward N. Lorenz, Father of Chaos Theory, Dies at 90
Apr 16 2008
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.” .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Addiction to calories
Mar 27 2008
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Predators, Prey and Flying Cats
Mar 20 2008
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Tech Savvy New Workers
Mar 13 2008
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Weaker Work Ties
Feb 28 2008
Americans don’t have as many friends at work as they did decades ago, recent research suggests.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Microbes in the Sky
Feb 21 2008
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Ages of Love
Feb 14 2008
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.
.
more >>
A Big Welcome to Plexus Institute's New Website!
Feb 13 2008
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..
more >>
The Practice of Medicine is in the Interactions: A Day with Robert A. Lindberg, MD
Feb 13 2008
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. .
more >>
Which Nursing Home Would You Put Your Mother In?
Feb 13 2008
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Doing and Learning
Feb 7 2008
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.”
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Can you Vote Your Conscience
Jan 24 2008
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Election Cascades
Jan 11 2008
Network dynamics and a social phenomenon known as “cumulative advantage” influence electoral victories more than rational choice, some social scientists believe.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Cumulative Advantage May Influence Individual Votes
Jan 10 2008
Network dynamics and a social phenomenon known as "cumulative advantage" influence electoral victories more than rational choice, some social scientists believe.
.
more >>
More We Than Me-How the Fight Against MRSA Led to a New Way of Collaborating at Albert Einstein Medical Center
Jan 8 2008
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. .
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - MRSA in Pigs
Jan 3 2008
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - What Compels Creatures to Navigate Perilious Journeys En Masse?
Dec 13 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Doing Good and Doing Well
Dec 6 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Cybernetics
Nov 29 2007
Cybernetics quite emphatically differs from robotics, and it is not about freezing dead people. That has to do with cryogenics. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Simple rules of swarms
Nov 22 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - For want of wolves
Nov 18 2007
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - The Promise of Systems Biology
Nov 15 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Infastrstructures interrelated
Oct 25 2007
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..
more >>
JAMA Reports More Deadly MRSA Infections: Prevention Research Shows Promising Results
Oct 17 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - A Pox on Parties?
Oct 11 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Jazz and Medical Communication
Sep 13 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Starfish & Spider
Sep 6 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Bacterial Networks
Aug 31 2007
The social behavior of bacterial cells and the networks they form may hold keys to fighting deadly diseases and producing cleaner fuels.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Odes to Code
Aug 16 2007
Poets have always excelled in seeing the secret, the sublime and the subliminal, but how do they do with science?
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Readers Converse Online
Aug 9 2007
Tim Spalding thinks learning and knowledge are conversation, and his concept is nuanced by technical savvy and classical scholarship.
.
more >>
"Do What You Can, With What You Have, Where You Are" - A Quest to Eliminate MRSA
Aug 1 2007
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Gowns, Gloves and Culture Change
Jul 27 2007
The VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System (VAPHS) has reduced hospital infections and saved money in the process, a New York Times story reports today.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Deeper Learning Bob Lindberg
Jul 12 2007
A patient seeing Dr. Robert A. Lindberg for the first time gets an unusual introduction to his medical practice. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Genes Interact in Networks
Jul 5 2007
Scientists learning more about the human genetic blueprint have discovered they know less than they thought, and much of what they thought needs revision..
more >>
When the Task is Accomplished, Can We Say We Did It Ourselves? A Quest to Eliminate MRSA at the Veterans Administrations' Hospitals in Pittsburgh
Jul 2 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Swarm Intelligence
Jun 28 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Shadows
Jun 21 2007
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?
.
more >>
Positive Deviance, Culture Change & Success Against MRSA
Jun 18 2007
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..
more >>
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.
Jun 15 2007
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Melodious Duets
Jun 14 2007
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Forgetting
Jun 7 2007
Our ability to forget may be just as important as our ability to remember. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Romantic Love
Jun 2 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Lightning sparks hurricanes
May 24 2007
Severe lightning in the Ethiopian highlands gives birth to the most devastating Atlantic hurricanes, new research suggests.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Queen Bees
May 17 2007
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.".
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Mind and emergence
May 10 2007
Why are family reunions and holiday gatherings so often prone to free-floating angst, irrational episodes and inexplicable outbursts?
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Your Kids and Your Aging Ears
Apr 26 2007
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Ancient Amphitheater's
Apr 5 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Keep Your Bucket Full
Mar 29 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Brain Architecture Supports Subjective Experience
Mar 22 2007
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? .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Bad Bugs Hit the Wall and Bite the Dust
Mar 15 2007
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Small Changes Impact Ecology
Mar 8 2007
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Honey bees dying
Feb 22 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Ethical Eco-Gold
Feb 15 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Microbe Challanges
Feb 8 2007
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.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Scientists and Theologians Unite for Environment
Jan 25 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Melting Arctic imperils tropical isles
Jan 18 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Appreciative Inquiry
Jan 11 2007
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - DMan Programme
Jan 4 2007
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Season's Greetings
Dec 21 2006
The mistletoe that gives permission for stolen Christmas kisses has a botanical and cultural past rich in mystery, paradox and lusty ceremonies.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Constraints & Innovations
Dec 14 2006
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - The Humanity of Animals
Dec 7 2006
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..
more >>
emerging, Winter, 2006 Edition - The MRSA Issue
Dec 1 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Complex Ecosystems
Nov 30 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Avoid Infectious Fashion
Nov 22 2006
Decorated designer scrubs maybe in vogue among health care fashionistas, but infection control experts say no hospital garb should be worn outside of work.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Symbolic Dancing of Bees
Nov 9 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Networks, Technology & Trust
Nov 2 2006
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Bacterial Conversations
Oct 27 2006
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Mirror Neurons
Oct 12 2006
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.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - The Mysterious Monarch
Oct 5 2006
Few living creatures can match the extraordinary flight and navigational abilities of the Monarch butterfly.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Clean Hands
Sep 28 2006
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Creataceous Pines Grown in Pots
Sep 21 2006
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Network Analysis Finds Hidden Patterns
Sep 7 2006
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Strong Networks Foster Health
Aug 31 2006
For decades, medical practitioners have noted that impoverished Latino patients are often healthier than Caucasian and African-American patients with similar incomes and education.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - The Latino Paradox
Aug 31 2006
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Coffee Brews Regeneration in Rwanda
Aug 17 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Finely Crafted Discourse
Aug 10 2006
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.".
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Taarof, the fine art of social subterfuge
Aug 10 2006
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Baby Boomers Face Unprecedented Uncertainty
Aug 3 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Positive Deviance Aids Battle Against Microbes
Jul 26 2006
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.
.
more >>
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
Jul 20 2006
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Your Computer Can Serve Science While You Sleep-Distributed Computing Brings Dramatic Research Results
Jul 6 2006
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Skill, Chance and Success: Baseball Knowledge Plays Well in Other Fields
Jun 29 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Neuroplasticity and Management
Jun 22 2006
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.
.
more >>
Trust is the Lubricant of Organizational Life
Jun 15 2006
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Expanding Chinese Desert
Jun 8 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Dolphins Mysterious Consciousness in the Deep
May 18 2006
"When you tell a story about a dolphin" Hardy Jones says, "you are really telling a story about the whole ocean.".
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Jane Jacobs, Champion of Cities
Apr 28 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Relentless stress breeds chronic illnesses among Katrina evacuees
Apr 20 2006
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Mayor fights urban ills creatively
Apr 13 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - When Eric Grohe Paints Murals
Apr 6 2006
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..
more >>
emerging, April - August 2006 Edition
Apr 1 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Hybrid cars
Mar 31 2006
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.
.
more >>
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.
Mar 30 2006
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Self-serve auto salvage: It's not your father's junkyard
Mar 23 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Uncertainty and Doubt Rougher than Risk
Mar 9 2006
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Art Anticipates Science and a Physicist Tells Why
Feb 16 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - New Nanotechnology Food Research - If It Glows Don't Eat It
Feb 2 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Global Warming May Be Killing Frogs
Jan 24 2006
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. .
more >>
Plexus Institute, with support of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, is working to fight deadly antibiotic resistant infections in healthcare facilities
Jan 20 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Good Vibrations Keep Us Balanced
Jan 19 2006
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Warmer Seas and Wilder Storms
Jan 12 2006
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - The Odd and Majestic Wondrously Interwoven in Tapestry of Life
Jan 5 2006
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. .
more >>
emerging, January, February, March, 2006 Edition
Jan 1 2006
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Schrodinger's Cat
Dec 29 2005
"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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Wassail! And Holiday Cheer
Dec 22 2005
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Life at the edge of the sea
Dec 15 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - What is a Stakeholder?
Dec 8 2005
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."
.
more >>
emerging, September, October, November 2005 Edition
Dec 5 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Ancient Ice Holds Past and Future Secrets
Dec 1 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Pixel Power
Nov 23 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Synchrony Prevails
Nov 17 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - What You See Isn't Always What You Just Saw
Nov 3 2005
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - The legacy of Rosa Parks
Oct 27 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - From Peanuts to Petroleum and Back
Oct 6 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Ripe Oaths May Illuminate Brain Architecture
Sep 29 2005
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Where Chaos Means Order and Fractals Aren't Mean
Sep 22 2005
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..
more >>
emerging, July - August 2005 Edition
Sep 6 2005
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. .
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Malcolm Gladwell on 'Moral Hazard'
Sep 1 2005
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Home on the Range, Pleistocene Stylens
Aug 25 2005
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.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - What Will Happen If the Web Starts to Think
Jul 28 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Richard Feynman's Art Advanced Physics
Jul 21 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Oceans Hold Clues to Our Past, Lessons for Our Future
Jul 14 2005
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Piecemeal Solutions or Collective Commitment
Jul 7 2005
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - The Things We Feel May Not Be Real
Jun 30 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Connections Vital in Societies, Hearts and Brains
Jun 16 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - "Jazz" in Chinese Economy
Jun 9 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Bacteria that resists antibiotics
May 26 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - A Paradox: Communication is the Issue and the Answer
May 19 2005
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Positive Deviants
May 12 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Uninsured in America
Apr 21 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Physicist John Wheeler
Apr 14 2005
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. .
more >>
emerging, April - May 2005 Edition
Apr 1 2005
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..
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Wikipedia
Mar 24 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Health Leadership
Mar 10 2005
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.
.
more >>
Thursday Complexity Post - Nanotechnology
Feb 24 2005
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.
.
more >>
emerging, January - March 2005 Edition
Jan 5 2005
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.
.
more >>
emerging, August, September, October 2004 Edition
Oct 31 2004
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. .
more >>
emerging, -January-February 2002
Jan 1 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. .
more >>
Mathematical Modeling, Computer Simulations Aid Healthcare, Study Says
Jun 30 1905
Thomas R. Clancy has a new book Complex Healthcare Systems and Information Technology, .
more >>
Neurotechnology and Synthetic Telepathy
Jun 30 1905
This is your brain on computers.
more >>
