Holding a Program in One's Head. August 2007 A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will. That's particularly valuable at the start of a project, because initially the most important thing is to be able to change what you're doing. Not just to solve the problem in a different way, but to change the problem you're solving. Your code is your understanding of the problem you're exploring. It's not easy to get a program into your head.
Even the best programmers don't always have the whole program they're working on loaded into their heads. Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization, a Co. Www.necsi.edu New England Complex Systems Institute 238 Main Street Suite 319, Cambridge, MA 02142 Phone: 617-547-4100 Fax: 617-661-7711 Cite as: Y. Bar-Yam, Complexity rising: From human beings to human civilization, a complexity profile, Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS UNESCO Publishers, Oxford, UK, 2002); also NECSI Report 1997-12-01 (1997). Download PDF Since time immemorial humans have complained that life is becoming more complex, but it is only now that we have a hope to analyze formally and verify this lament. This article analyzes the human social environment using the "complexity profile," a mathematical tool for characterizing the collective behavior of a system.
How often have we been told by various philosophers and universalistic religions about unseen connections between human beings and the collective identity of humanity? Human civilization continues to face internal and environmental challenges. We, each of us, are parts of a greater whole. Does Corruption Produce Unsafe Drivers? We follow 822 applicants through the process of obtaining a driver%u2019s license in New Delhi, India. To understand how the bureaucracy responds to individual and social needs, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: bonus, lesson, and comparison groups. Participants in the bonus group were offered a financial reward if they could obtain their license fast; participants in the lesson group were offered free driving lessons.
To gauge driving skills, we performed a surprise driving test after participants had obtained their licenses. Several interesting facts regarding corruption emerge. First, the bureaucracy responds to individual needs. Those who want their license faster (e.g. the bonus group), get it 40% faster and at a 20% higher rate. Self-organization - Wikipedia, the free en. Self-organization occurs in a variety of physical, chemical, biological, robotic, social and cognitive systems. Common examples include crystallization, the emergence of convection patterns in a liquid heated from below, chemical oscillators, swarming in groups of animals, and the way neural networks learn to recognize complex patterns.
Overview[edit] The most robust and unambiguous examples[1] of self-organizing systems are from the physics of non-equilibrium processes. Self-organization is also relevant in chemistry, where it has often been taken as being synonymous with self-assembly. The concept of self-organization is central to the description of biological systems, from the subcellular to the ecosystem level.
Self-organization usually relies on three basic ingredients:[3] Strong dynamical non-linearity, often though not necessarily involving positive and negative feedbackBalance of exploitation and explorationMultiple interactions Principles of self-organization[edit] Examples[edit] Participatory Culture Foundation - Free, O. The Power Of Personal Organization, Orderliness, Cleanliness, Ge.
Participatory organization. A participatory organization is an organization which is built based on people participation rather than their contract obligations. Most current organizations are contract-based. Contracts define a functional structure that holds such an organization together by imposing mutual obligations on people.
For example, an employee of a typical organization is obliged to perform a certain function in exchange for some previously agreed compensation. Once established the contract relationship is quite rigid and inflexible. A breach of contract implies severe penalties in most cases. Contracts facilitate organizational planning and often shifts risks from one party to another. Participatory organization is an alternative to the contract model. A nice property of evolutionary participatory model is its ability to scale well with the number of participants. The concept of participatory organization was popularized recently by Tim O'Reilly under the name "the Architecture of Participation.
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