I am truly an embodied mind, a socio-biological concert of self

In my Individual and Society course I typically spend the first couple weeks (amongst other things) grounding our understanding of human symbolic interaction in a wider scientific frame, by examining the scientific 'wonder' of how life emerged and how human beings came into existence--or, at least, our best current ideas on how things happened.  From my perspective, it is hard to understand social interaction without an appreciation of its connection to our biological and environmental existence and the larger and smaller eco-complex systems in which we operate.

Anyway, to prepare for these lectures I often read general summaries of the latest developments in science, which give me useful ways to frame a lot of material in a quick way that focuses on the bigger picture.  In preparation, one of my favorite books is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.

One of the chapters that always gets me is on the emergence of life (Ch19) and its discussion of the incredible complex and self-organizing dance done by the mind-numbingly wide number and variety of living organisms that come together to make up the human body.  I so easily forget that, as human beings, we are actually a collection of millions of smaller living and nonliving forms, from amino acids and proteins to mitochondria and bacteria and so forth.

Reading this material also reminds me that our conscious, brain-based cognition--that thing that calls itself I--has a certain astigmatism.  Living daily life engaged in symbolic interaction, we forget that this thing we call our self (this self-reflexive, conscious I) is actually a small part of a very complex system that is comprised of millions of living organisms which, when combined in the right way, allow us to exist as a symbol making complex living system.  In other words, i forget that a person, as a distinct form of structural organization, as a distinct type of living being, emerges out of, in part, a collection of smaller living beings.   

I am truly an embodied mind, a socio-biological concert of self.

50 Years of Information Technology

 I recently ran across an excellent online historical overview of the last 50 years of information technology that I think is very well done.  It was put together by Jacinda Frost.  Check it out!


OnlineITDegree: 50 Years of Information Technology.

Proceedings of the Complexity in Health Group

The Center for Complexity in Health announces today the launching of their new white-paper outlet, the Proceedings of the Complexity in Health Group. 

The PCCH is an annual publication designed both to showcase and provide a publication outlet for some of the main avenues of research being conducted in the Complexity in Health Group, Robert S. Morrison Health and Science Building, Kent State University at Ashtabula.  These areas include medical professionalism, community health, allostatic load, school systems, medical learning environments and case-based modeling—all explored from a complexity science perspective. 

The studies published in the PCHG are generally comprehensive, in-depth explorations of a topic, meant to provide a wider and more complete empirical and theoretical backdrop for the specific studies that scholars involved in the Complexity in Health Group (CHG) regularly publish in various disciplinary journals.  Such an outlet as the PCHG is useful given the conventions (e.g., page constraints and narrowness of focus) typical of most research periodicals, which make it very difficult to publish relatively complete statements on a topic in complex systems terms.  While PCHG studies augment, acknowledge and cite CHG work published in other venues, each PCHG study is an original, distinct manuscript.  Finally, PCHG studies are peer-reviewed.  Prior to publication each study is sent to colleagues for review and criticism to ensure the highest quality of published proceedings possible. 

PCCH and all of its studies are the copyright © property of the Complexity in Health Group, Kent State University at Ashtabula.  Manuscripts published in the PCHG should be cited appropriately, as in the following example:

Castellani, B., Rajaram, R., Buckwalter, JG., Ball, M., and Hafferty, F. 2012. “Place and Health as Complex Systems: A Case Study and Empirical Test.” Proceedings of the Complexity in Health Group, Kent State University at Ashtabula, 1(1):1-35.

Our first publication is an in-depth exploration of several key issues in complexity science and its intersection with the study of community health--CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD. First, how does one determine the empirical utility of defining a community as a complex system?  What unique insights emerge that could not otherwise be obtained?  Second, how does one conduct a litmus test of one’s definition of a community as a complex system in a systematic manner—something currently not done in the complexity science literature?  Third, how does one use the methods and techniques of complexity science to conduct such a litmus test, in combination with conventional methods such as statistics, qualitative method and historical analysis?  In our study we address all three questions, as pertains to a case study on the link between sprawl and community-level health in a Midwestern county (Summit County, Ohio) in the United States and the 20 communities of which it comprised.

Definitional Test of Complex Systems

Back in the spring and summer of 2010 I posted a series of discussions about the need for complexity scientists to do a better job of comprehensively testing the empirical utility of their definitions--see, for example, one of the posting by clicking here.  My main argument was that:

1. Most complexity science today explores only specific aspects of complex systems, such as emergence or network properties.
2. While only specific aspects are explored, these same scientists assume the full definition upon which they rely to be true in terms of their topic of study, but without empirical test.
3. The testing I recommend is not about determining if a topic is a complex system, which is useless as most things are complex systems.  Instead, testing should focus on the empirical and theoretical utility of the definition used.  In other words, does the definition yield new insights that could not otherwise have been obtained?
4.  The testing I recommend should also link complexity method with definition.  In other words, scientists need to explore how complexity methods (in particular, computational modeling, case-based modeling, qualitative method, etc) help to determine/demonstrate the empirical utility of defining a topic as a complex system.


At the end of my series of posts I argued that some sort of formal test was necessary that scholars could use to conduct such as test.   Well, a year and a half later, here is our Definitional Test of Complex Systems.


The Definitional Test of Complex Systems:

The DTCS is our attempt at an exhaustive tool for determining the extent to which a complex system's definition fits a topic.  The DTCS is not, however, a standardized instrument.  As such, we have not normed or validated it.  Instead, it is a conceptual tool meant to move scholars toward empirically-driven, synthetic definitions of complex systems.  To do so, the DTCS walks scholars through a nine-question, four-step process of review, method, analysis, and results---see Table 2 above. 

The DTCS does not seek to determine if a particular case fits a definition; instead, it seeks to determine if a definition fits a particular case.  The challenge in the current literature is not whether places are complex systems; as it would be hard to prove them otherwise.  Instead, the question is: how do we define the complexity of a topic?  And, does such a definition yield new insights?  Given this focus, Question 9 of the DTCS functions as its negative test, focusing on three related issues: the degree to which a definition (a) is being forced or incorrectly used; (b) is not a real empirical improvement over conventional theory or method; or (c) leads to incorrect results or to ideas already known by another name.  Scholars can modify or further validate the DTCS to examine its further utility.  Let us briefly review the steps of the DTCS:

STEP 1: To answer the DTCS's initial five questions, researchers must comb through their topic's literature to determine if and how it has been theorized as a complex system.  If such a literature does exist, the goal is to organize the chosen definition of a complex system into its set of key characteristics: self-organizing, path dependent, nonlinear, agent-based, etc.  For example, if our review of the community health science literature, we identified nine characteristics.  If no such literature exists, or if the researchers choose to examine a different definition, they must explain how and why they chose their particular definition and its set of characteristics, including addressing epistemological issues related to translating or transporting the definition from one field to another. 

STEP 2: Next, to answer the DTCS's sixth question, researchers must decide how they will define and measure a definition and its key characteristics.  For example, does the literature conceptualize nonlinearity in metaphorical or literal terms?  And, if measured literally, how will nonlinearity be operationalized?  Once these decisions are made, researchers must decide which methods to use.  As we have already highlighted, choosing a method is no easy task.  So, scientists (particularly those in the social sciences) are faced with a major challenge: the DTCS requires them to test the validity of their definitions of a complex system, but such testing necessitate them to use new methods, which many are not equipped to use.  It is because of this challenge that, for the current project, we employed the SACS Toolkit, which we discuss next.  First, however, we need to address the final two steps of the DTCS.

STEP 3: Once questions 1 through 6 have been answered, the next step is to actually conduct the test.  The goal here is to evaluate the empirical validity of each of a definition's characteristics, along with the definition as a whole.  In other words, along with determining the validity of each characteristic, it must be determined if the characteristics fit together.  Having made that point, we recognize that not all complexity theories (particularly metaphorical ones) seek to provide comprehensive definitions; opting instead to outline the conditions and challenges. Nonetheless, regardless of the definition used, its criteria need to be met.

STEP 4: Finally, with the analysis complete, researchers need to make their final assessment: in terms of the negative test found in question 9 and the null hypothesis of the DTCS, to what extent, and in what ways is (or is not) the chosen definition, along with its list of characteristics, empirically valid and theoretically valuable?

Place and Health as Complex Systems: A Case Study and Empirical Test

Back in the spring and summer of 2010 I posted a series of discussions about the need for complexity scientists to do a better job of comprehensively testing the empirical utility of their definitions--see, for example, one of the posting by clicking here.  My main argument was that:

1. Most complexity science today explores only specific aspects of complex systems, such as emergence or network properties.
2. While only specific aspects are explored, these same scientists assume the full definition upon which they rely to be true in terms of their topic of study, but without empirical test.
3. The testing I recommend is not about determining if a topic is a complex system, which is useless as most things are complex systems.  Instead, testing should focus on the empirical and theoretical utility of the definition used.  In other words, does the definition yield new insights that could not otherwise have been obtained?
4.  The testing I recommend should also link complexity method with definition.  In other words, scientists need to explore how complexity methods (in particular, computational modeling, case-based modeling, qualitative method, etc) help to determine/demonstrate the empirical utility of defining a topic as a complex system.


At the end of my series of posts I noted that my colleagues and I were working on an article to address this issue, as pertains to the study of community health and school systems.

Well, a year and a half later, our study on community health is done--CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD IT.  Here is the abstract:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract: Over the last decade, scholars have developed a complexities of place (COP) approach to the study of place and health. According to COP, the problem with conventional research is that it lacks effective theories and methods to model the complexities of communities and so forth, given that places exhibit nine essential "complex system" characteristics: they are (1) causally complex, (2)  self-organizing and emergent, (3) nodes within a larger network, (4) dynamic and evolving, (5) nonlinear, (6) historical, (7) open-ended with fuzzy boundaries, (8) critically conflicted and negotiated, and (9) agent-based.While promising, the problem with the COP approach, however, is that its definition remains systematically untested and its recommended complexity methods (e.g., network analysis, agent-based modeling) remain underused.  The current article, which is based on a previous abbreviated study and its ”sprawl and community-level health” database, tests the empirical utility of the COP approach. In our abbreviated study, we only tested characteristics 4 and 9. The current article conducts an exhaustive test of all nine characteristics and suggested complexity methods. 

Method: To conduct our test we made two important advances: First, we developed and applied the Definitional Test of Complex Systems (DTCS) to a case study on sprawl—a ”complex systems” problem—to examine, in litmus test fashion, the empirical validity of the COP’s 9-characteristic definition. Second, we used the SACS Toolkit, a case-based modeling technique for studying complex system that employs a variety of complexity methods. For our case study we examined a network of 20 communities (located in Summit County, Ohio USA) negatively impacted by sprawl. Our database was partitioned from the Summit 2010: Quality of Life Project. 

Results: Overall, the DTCS found the COP’s 9-characteristic definition to be empirically valid. The employment of the SACS Toolkit supports also the empirical novelty and utility of complexity methods. Nonetheless, minor issues remain, such as a need to define health and health care in complex systems terms.
 
Conclusions: The COP approach seems to hold real empirical promise as a useful way to address many of the challenges that conventional public health research seems unable to solve; in particular, modeling the complex evolution and dynamics of places and addressing the causal interplay between compositional and contextual factors and their impact on community-level health outcomes.

Steven Pinker versus Complexity Part II

In a previous post--click here to see--I discussed Pinker's new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined in terms of the interest it holds for a complexity scientists working in the social sciences.

The main issue I concentrated on was his argument that, not only has violence decreased over the longue durée of human history and, more specifically, the last 20 years of globalization-induced history, but that this decrease is scale-free, from attitudes on spanking children to wars. I took issue with this argument, pointing out that it is probably much more scale-dependent and context-sensitive than he makes the argument to be.  (Again, remember, in the spirit of Foucault's approach to polemics, the point of my posting on Pinker's book is to think from a complexity perspective to see if it fosters new ideas, not to tear down the work of someone else.)

I spent the next few days thinking, and I have another issue regarding this notion of violence being relatively scale-free that I wanted to address: the fact that Pinker's argument is variable-based--a perspective that case-based complexity scientists such as Charles Ragin and David Byrne, amongst others, seek to avoid. (To read more about their views, see their latest edited book, The Sage Handbook of Case-Based Methods.)

Byrne's work, for example, specifically focuses on the intersection of complexity science and case-based method.  The premise upon which his work is based, while simple enough, is ground-breaking: in the social sciences, cases are the methodological equivalent of complex systems; or, alternatively, complex systems are cases and therefore should be studied as such.  With this premise, Byrne adds to the complexity science literature an entirely new approach to modeling complex systems, alongside the current repertoire of agent (rule-based) modeling, dynamical (equation-based) modeling, statistical (variable-based) modeling, network (relational) modeling, and qualitative (meaning-based) method.

If you think about it, complex systems cannot be studied as a collection of variables.  How, for example, do you study the adjacency or proximity (dissimilarity) matrix of a set of variables?  Systems are made up of agents and structures and environmental forces (top-down, bottom-up, and any other direction you want to consider) which, together, are best conceptualized as cases: configurations of variables that, together, form a self-organizing emergent whole that is more than the sum of its parts, and is nonlinear, dynamic, path (context) dependent and evolving across time/space.  Ragin goes even further: stop thinking of variables as variables; they are sets.  Violence, for example, is not a variable.  Violence is a set--fuzzy or crisp--into which cases represent degrees of membership.  For example, thinking of Pinker's study, "war in the 1800s in Europe" is a case, along with another case such as "war in China in the 1800s."  Both cases could be placed in the set "macro-level violence through war."  Membership in the case could, at least initially, be defined in terms of basic rates, as Pinker uses, or converted into boolean or fuzzy set membership.
But the key point here is that they are different: they are each a case, a different, context-dependent case, which one will explore, in terms of their respective configurations, to find similarities and differences; and it is this comparative approach that will draw out the context-dependent causal similarities and differences amongst these cases.   For example, in relation to Pinker's work, one may find that violence has gone down in both cases, but the reasons for the decrease in violence is different, based on differences in configuration.

Why is something like this important?  Consider policy recommendations.  Insensitivity to configurational differences, context and, ultimately complexity is the failure of much policy--see, for example, Applying Social Science by Byrne.

Following this argument, violence, as a complex system, reconfigured at multiple levels of scale, can be defined as a set, comprised of multiple sub-sets, each representing a type and scale of violence, from the macro to the micro.  Each set is comprised of cases, which are configurations, which take into consideration context and difference.  Such an approach allows one to talk about violence in a much more sophisticated way.  For example, one could show how violence is increasing and decreasing, for example over time; contradictory trends.  The macro-level violence of war in Europe during the 20th century is not the same thing as the macro-level violence of war in China or Africa or South America or between hunter and gathering tribes or war amongst smaller empires.  They constitute different cases, different forms of macro-level violence.  Studying violence this way allows us to ask much more specific questions: which forms of government or social organization in which particular contexts, for example, lead to less war?  Which forms of government or social organization in which particular contexts lead to less micro-level, face-to-face violence?  And, so forth.

complexity art "Two Duche Bags; Or, Toast This"

This is a painting i recently completed called Two Douche-bags; Or, Toast This!  It is a comedic homage to jerks everywhere who, by definition, think they are more incredible then they actually are.  It is also a good example of my exploring complexity through assemblage, as it is the same set of integrated images of my nephew and brother-in-law on both side, except the one on the right was inverted and developed to become something different.

Eames Documentary

I am a huge fan of the work of Charles and Ray Eames and have been waiting for their complexity science, postmodern equivalent.  Anyway, my wife sent me this link to a new documentary on them.  It looks great:http://www.midcenturia.com/2011/10/eames-architect-and-painter-film.html

Steven Pinker Versus Complexity

The evolutionary psychologist, Steven Pinker has published a new book: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. I came across a review of the book in the Dec/Jan 2012 edition (Volume 18, Issue 4) of Book Forum, which, by the way, I thoroughly enjoy. It is a great periodical. CLICK HERE TO SEE THE REVIEW

I decided to quickly blog on the book because, given that this is a blog about complexity, I think Pinker’s book presents an interesting idea that works along with my previous posting about Andrew Wilson's website on complexity and psychology.

In a very ridiculous nutshell, Pinker's basic argument is that humans have progressed to a place of less violence, thanks in large measure to cultural and social forces impinging upon the better half of our evolved nature; "the better angles of our nature," as Lincoln famously stated.

Pinker's study has two historical foci: (1) the longue durée of human history and, more specifically, (2) the last 20 years of globalization-induced history.

Such a provocative thesis often requires careful review and critique. So, it is not a matter of Pinker simply being right or wrong. (As a side note, "Pinker, Right or Wrong?" seems to be the nature of most debates I have seen on the book, with little thinking in the grey area of, "hey, just how well does the model fit?")

As a complexity scientist, I am primarily interested in his notion that the world-wide decrease in violence has a scale-free character to it. Pinker argues that, from macro-level wars to micro-level views on spanking children, the world has become a less violent place both over the longue durée of human history and, more specifically, over the last 20 years of globalization-induced history.

I think further exploration of this argument is a great dissertation or study for a complexity scholar in history, anthropology, epidemiology or applied statistics to examine.

A note on method: Pinker is clear that his focus is physical violence, not violence as a metaphor for political, cultural or economic oppression. Violence as physical violence. His method of analysis is rather simplistic: rates (ratios expressed over time), computed as a basic prevalence--people harmed by violence divided by the total population. There are lots of epidemiological issues that emerge when one thinks of this approach, but we will confine ourselves to just two:

One of the immediate issues that emerges is that, as the world gets larger, large-scale violent events such as wars, by definition, decrease in their rate of harm. If there are several billion people on the planet and a world war emerges where several million people are killed, this comes across as not as bad as the Roman empire killing people in a much smaller world. Is it true, then, that, at a macro-level scale, we live in a less violent world? What, for example, if we used a network analysis approach and looked at degrees of separation. Even in a world of several billion people, are humans less separated from violence than they were 2 thousand years ago? Also, is there, perhaps, some sort of tipping point here, where the world, past a certain population threshold, becomes too large at the macro-level for people to inflict an increasing rate of violence?

And, as another issue, what about regional scale--here I am thinking of path dependency issues in terms of different complex socio-political systems bounded by particular geographies? Should one's focus be broken down into regions? For example, if one just studied Europe, would Pinker's thesis hold--particularly in terms of his argument that smart governments, not too corrupt and reasonably democratic lead to less violence? Or, is it that, at smaller levels of scale, more democratic government leads to less daily violence in the criminal justice system, people-to-people interactions, discriminatory violence, etc. But, at larger scales, particularly country to country, violence through war has not decreased? It is true that over the last 20 years macro-level violence has decreased. But, I am just not sure what to make of that phenomenon. Anyway, these are the sorts of questions that emerged in my head as I worked through Pinker's ideas.

Bottom line: I think Pinker has an interesting thesis, but I think a lot more work needs to be done before it is embraced. In particular, I think his topic is far too complex to be analyzed in terms of simple rates. It needs to be grasped in complex systems terms and truly examined for its scale-free character and regional context. My initial response is that Pinker's findings are more scale-dependent and context-sensitive than they initially seem. But, without conducting a study, it is nothing more than a conjecture on my part.

Psychology & Complexity Science Website

I recently came across this website via one of the Santa Fe listserves to which I belong. It is called: Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists A brave attempt to think out loud about theories of psychology until we get some

Here is how Andrew Wilson, one of the team of psychologists running this blog, explains their focus:

He studies "the perceptual control of action, with a special interest in learning. I had the good fortune to be turned onto the work of James Gibson, the dynamical systems approach and embodied cognition during my PhD at Indiana University. This non-representational, non-computational, radical embodied cognitive science is at odds with the dominant cognitive neuroscience approach, but provides an over-arching theoretical framework that I believe psychology is otherwise missing. My plan for my activity here is to review the theoretical and empirical basis for this approach, to organise my thoughts as I develop my research programme."

---------------------------
I just think this website is great! While my doctorate is in medical sociology, my masters is in clinical psychology, and my early research was in addiction. I love this website because it is pushing hard to move psychology in the direction of systems and complexity. For example, the idea that cognition is restricted to the brain (along with basic notions of a computational or representational mind) or that our embodied mind (which also has emotions, don't forget those things as well, along with intuitions, meaning making, immune system intelligence, etc) is not an emergent phenomenon, developmentally and bio-psychologically progressed through our symbolic interactions with our sociological and ecological systems, is (pun intended) mind-numbing. Just a little plug for symbolic interaction (going all the way back to Mead, Blumer, etc, etc) and neo-pragmatism (a good example is Rorty): these scholars, while not getting it always entirely right, have been pushing these ideas since the turn of the previous century and, in mass, for the past several decades!

anyway, check out the website.

Complexity, Professionalism, and the Hidden Curriculum

Just got back from the The Association for Medical Education in Europe Conference. AMEE "is a worldwide organisation with members in 90 countries on five continents. Members include educators, researchers, administrators, curriculum developers, assessors and students in medicine and the healthcare professions."

We did a pre-conference workshop on complexity method as applied to the topics of medical professionalism and the hidden curriculum. It went very well. My co-conspirators in presenting were:

1) Jim Price (Institute of Postgraduate Medicine, Brighton & Sussex Medical School, UK)
2) Susan Lieff (Centre for Faculty Development, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Canada)
3) Frederic Hafferty (Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA)
4) John Castellani (Johns Hopkins University, USA)

We also had two student presentations using social networks to analyze medical education:


O B Nikolaus*, R Hofer, W Pawlina, B Castellani, P K Hafferty, F W Hafferty. “Social networks and academic help seeking among first year medical students.” The Association for Medical Education in Europe Annual Conference, Vienna Austria 2011.

Ryan E Hofer, O Brant Nikolaus, Wojciech Pawlina, Brian Castellani, Philip K Hafferty, Frederic Hafferty. “Peer-to-peer assessments of professionalism: A time dependent social network perspective.” The Association for Medical Education in Europe Annual Conference, Vienna Austria 2011

Overall, a very successful conference.

Kent State University at Ashtabula Commerical

Check it out! i am in a commercial for our campus, Kent State University at Ashtabula. Very Cool! And for those in Northeastern Ohio, consider attending our campus.

CLICK HERE to see the commercial on YouTube

Eighth International Conference on Complex Systems

This coming weekend i am going to the Eighth International Conference on Complex Systems in Boston. My colleagues Jürgen and Christina Klüver have put together a session on complex social systems.

Our session is Monday June 27th Evening Parallel Session 1/ Chair: Christina Kluever
Workshop: Mathematical Aspects of Social and Cognitive Complexity

Jürgen Klüver: Meaning, Information, and the Understanding of Ambiguity

Brian Castellani and Rajeev Rajaram: Social Complexity Theory: A Mathematical Outline

Dwight Read: Cultural Kinship as a Computational System: From Bottom-Up to Top-down Forms of Social Organization

Robert Reynolds and Yousof Gawasmeh: Evolving Heterogeneous Social Fabrics for the Solution of Real valued Optimization Problems Using Cultural Algorithms

Christina Stoica-Kluever: Solving problems of project management with a Self Enforcing Network (SEN)



Here is a program guide Wiki, complete with the list of presenters and abstracts of their presentations. CLICK HERE TO SEE THE PROGRAM

Eighth International Conference on Complex Systems

This coming weekend i am going to the Eighth International Conference on Complex Systems in Boston. My colleagues Jürgen and Christina Klüver have put together a session on complex social systems. I will say more in my next post. Here i just wanted to advertise the conference. It has some amazing people attending.



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday June 13, 2011

World Scientific Leaders to Gather in Boston for Conference on the Complex World Around Us

Cambridge, MA --- The Eighth International Conference on Complex Systems, hosted by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), is coming to Boston June 26-July 1. ICCS 2011 is expected to bring together more than 400 researchers from around the world. They will be presenting more than 300 papers on topics ranging from food (Cuisines as Complex Networks) to dealing with destructive cults.

CNN Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer David Bohrman, inventor of the Magic Wall and other CNN data visualization techniques, will give the opening conference reception presentation Sunday evening, June 26.

“Papers such as those presented at this conference provide a logical approach that helps policymakers predict results in fields ranging from healthcare to Middle East unrest to crowd control,” says Yaneer Bar-Yam, NECSI President. “The approach is a useful and much needed aid to decision-making.”

Among the many noteworthy presentations:

The Herbert A. Simon Award will be presented to banquet speaker Thomas Schelling, author of “Micromotives and Macrobehavior,” Nobel Laureate and Emeritus Professor of the University of Maryland and Harvard University.

"Model Error, Convexity and Skewness" is the topic of New York University Polytechnic Institute Distinguished Professor Nassim Taleb, best known as the author of "The Black Swan."

David Gondek of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson’s Research Center and a major force behind the new Jeopardy champion, Watson, will talk on machine intelligence algorithms.

Professor Jerome Kagan, Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, at Harvard University, is one of the world's leading psychologists. He discovered behaviors in infants that predict behaviors later in life.

Princeton University Professor John Hopfield, one of the world’s foremost authorities on neural networks, will be presenting "Animal Behavior and Emergent Computational Dynamics," a paper describing how animal brains employ collective neuron behavior to achieve ‘thinking.’

Dr. Stephen Wolfram, distinguished scientist, inventor and business leader. Dr. Wolfram founded his own complexity science research organization and is the author of "A New Kind of Science," which advocates for computational systems to explain complexity in nature.

Tel Aviv University’s Professor Eshel Ben Jacob will speak about how bacteria collectively solve problems by forming a kind of multicellular brain, and will show movies of the bacteria solving optimization problems that cannot be solved by modern computers.

Professor Kunihiko Kaneko of Tokyo University will speak about the principles behind the evolution of multiple levels of biological organization: molecules, cells, organisms, and ecosystems.

The Santa Fe Institute's Distinguished Professor and former President Geoffrey West’s presentation, “The Complexity, Simplicity, and Unity of Living Systems from Cells to Cities: Towards a Quantitative, Unifying Framework of Biological and Social Structure, Organization and Dynamics," describes in mathematical terms how cities and other large social structures are merely 'large organisms', and the implications for growth, development, and potential collapse.

MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory's Professor Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, DARPA Internet Grand Challenge winner and serial entrepreneur, will be presenting "How Social Networks Shape Human Behavior."

Boston University Professor of Physics, Chemistry and Bioengineering Eugene Stanley is a pioneer in interdisciplinary science and econophysics. His paper, "Economic Fluctuations and Statistical Physics: Quantifying Extremely Rare Events with Applications to the Present World Crisis," explores financial crises as extensions of normal events and not outliers.

The New England Complex Systems Institute is based in Cambridge, MA. A pioneer in the field of complex systems science, NECSI addresses questions previously considered to be outside of the realm of scientific inquiry. Its research draws on foundations from mathematics, physics, and computer science to solve pressing problems in such areas as economics, healthcare, education, military conflict, ethnic violence, and international development. Its goal is to expand the boundaries of knowledge and to solve problems of science and society.

The conference runs from June 26 to July 1. Details and registration (including press registration) are at www.necsi.edu.

Wall Eye Gallery presents Pedaling Art (20 May 6:00pm to 11:00pm)

TRICYCLE by Brian Castellani


For local 'clevelandites,' come see one of my latest assemblages (a sneak peek of part of it shown above) at the Wall Eye Gallery (details above) dealing with my love of bicycles! It should be a great show!

sorry for taking so long to post

Hi Folks! Cowboy Bri here! Sorry it has been a while since i last posted anything worth reading or viewing, but complexity ideas, as you know, do not come easy. The past four months I have been working on a series of painting and photo assemblages as well as working with my friend and colleague, Rajeev Rajaram, on a mathematical outline of the SACS Toolkit--our case-based, methodological framework for modeling complex systems. This summer I plan on posting extensively on the SACS Toolkit and on my latest round of art. Hope you find them interesting!

The Margaret t-shirt series

CLICK HERE TO SEE OUR MARGARET SERIES T-SHIRTS

My wife, Maggie--who is a member of the art and science factory team--is known by friends and family for her humorous turn of a phrase or otherwise funny quips. A common response made by others to her is, "You have to put that on a t-shirt!" So we did. Or, at least, we are now starting to do so.



Our first t-shirt is "the stupidity is killing me," which is our laugh-out-loud reaction to the increasing inability of people to come together to discuss, address or solve even the simplists of problems; or, alternatively, the failure of people to act in a civilized, caring manner. Is it asking too much?
CLICK HERE TO SEE OUR MARGARET SERIES T-SHIRTS


.

I recently ran across some very interesting art work by James Moss, who describes himself as an "Artist/Educator - integrating science and spirit through the interconnected phenomena of emergent complexity, self-organization, self-similarity, and consciousness, to reveal a larger unifying fractal paradigm underlying individual and cosmic evolution."

What I like about his work is his attempt to transfer the pictoral representation of mathematical dynamical systems--fractals, etc--onto the canvas, rather than simply generating them via computer. Paint always has the element of time involved, because it simply takes time to paint, and so the images always come across richer and more interesting--at least that is my bias.

To check out his work, go to his blog, Metamorphoptics

Complexity Theory, Managerial Science and the Problems of Definitions

This post continues my discussion about the challenges associated with how one goes about testing the validity and utility of the particular definition of a complex social system one uses.

I ran across an excellent article in the journal Educational Management, Administration and Leadership by Keith Morrison, titled Complexity Theory, School Leadership and Management: Questions for Theory and Practice [2010, 38(3):374-393]. Morrison has written extensively about the utility of complexity science for the field of education, primarily in terms of leadership issues.

What makes the article so good is that it rigorously deconstructs how the management literature fails to effectively distinguish between the metaphorical versus prescriptive versus descriptive use of the term complex system. Too often (and I personally think almost always) scholars in the management and leadership literature (particularly in the field of education) write about a phenonomena such as autopoiesis as if they can move back and forth between their various uses of the term. For example, in the same argument they will treat autopoeisis as something that is real, something you can cause to happen, or just a really cool way to see things. Or, one finds these scholars saying such things as "Principals needs to teach their faculty to think of their schools as complex, self-organizing systems, because schools are alive and autopoietic, so that they can create a nonlinear learning environment." What does such a sentence mean? Can a school be alive? Can you create a nonlinear working environment? What would such an environment be--one where lots of work leads to little change; or little work leads to sudden great change?

The above sentence is the type of conflated intellectual sloppiness that Morrison addresses in his article. I hihgly recommend reading it.

making definitions of complexity clear

This post continues my discussion about (1) the need for researchers to be clear about the definition of complexity they use and (2) to make sure that they test or demonstrate that the system they are studying actually meets the criteria of their definition.

As I have said in previous postings, I am not advocating a strict realist definition of complexity, such that the definitions researchers use and then test have to reveal the fundamental reality of the object they are studying as complex. One can use complexity as a metaphor (as in the case of postmodern complexity), as a proactive concept (as in the case of the leadership literature) or as a empirically useful way of describing something (as in the case of the natural and artificial sciences). What I am saying, however, is that one's definition should be rigorously applied.

My second and related point is that we need rigor in our definitions to bring together the otherwise disparate areas of study in complexity science. Synthesis in complexity science will not come through the construction of a singular definition. Instead, synthesis will come from researchers empirically, proactively, or metaphorically demonstrating that the definitions they use form a gestalt--a whole that is greater than its parts. And, it should be clear to readers and fellow researchers how the components of one's definition go together.

As a final point, researchers need to be careful that they do not move in and out of empirical to proactive to metaphor in their definitions. To me, this type of intellectual slippage is one of the major ways that scholars in the social sciences and humanities get into trouble with their usage of complexity science.

For example, a scholar will empirically demonstrate how a particular system of study is self-organizing. With this success, the scholar will proceed to make a whole bunch of additional definitional assumptions that the proof of self-organization means the system is also agent-based, network-like in structure, and nonlinear (one of the most misused mathematical terms by social scientists and humanities scholars). The term nonlinear, for example, is almost always used in a metaphorical way by social scientists and humanities scholars, to suggest that a social system is messy, not easily managed or controlled or not easily understood via statistical method. In actuality, nonlinear means that the system or, more specifically, the equation or equations used to understand a system are such that their output is not directly proportional to their input. In other words, when the term 'nonlinear' is used in a realist sense, it means that the system being studied and the factors of which it is comprised cannot be written as a linear combination. Furthermore, as a system, these equations are therefore usually impossible to solve, except through computational methods that provide proximate solutions; and the problems are often unstable, that is chaotic, operating near chaos, etc. So, if the researcher has empirically demonstrated that a system is self-organizing but uses the term nonlinear in a metaphorical manner (which may be close to its correct usage but not quite), then the researcher is really causing definitional confusion through a lack of rigor and clarity. For such a researcher to proceed to response to critics (who are rightfully confused) by arguing that the lack of clarity in his or her work is a function of studying complexity--when it is really a failure in the usage of some of the components in her or his definition--is to perpetuate rather than solve the problem they are working so hard to address.

Defining and Test Complex Social Systems

As regular readers of this blog know, I am currently working on a community health study with my colleague, Galen Buckwalter, wherein we are testing to see if the complex system definition used by current researchers has any degree of cohesion and if this definition, in its totality, applies to the typical community of study. I am also working on a study of public school systems with my brother, John Castellani, who is at Johns Hopkins, to see if and how best a public school system can be conceptualized as a complex social system.

In my literature review, I came across the following article. In the 2010, Volume 70Issue 10 edition of Social Science and Medicine, Keshavarz, Nutbeam, Rowling and Khavarpour published their empirical article, “Schools as Social Complex Adaptive Systems: A New Way to Understand the Challenges of Introducing the Health Promoting Schools Concept."

The article fits with my recent discussions about definitions because the goal of the article is to determine the “relevance and usefulness of the concept of ‘complex adaptive systems’ as an approach to better understanding ways in which health promoting school interventions could be introduced and sustained” (p. 1468).

To arrive at their definition of a complex social system, they reviewed the literature. For them, a complex social system—which they call social complex adaptive system—is comprised of a key set of characteristics, which they list on page 1468 of the article. I will not review these characteristics here. Suffice to say, they did what I have been talking about: they outlined a definition and proceeded to use empirical data to determine if their system of study (a school system) meets the criteria of their definition. They used two data sources: public school reports and qualitative interviews.

Using this data, they went through each component of their definition to see if it provided them an empirically relevant and useful way of thinking about their educational system of study. Related, their ultimate goal was to see if the utility of each component lent itself to an improved way of understanding how health promotion programs should be implemented. In other words, if schools can be adequately framed as complex systems, then what does each component of their definition add to their understanding of how health promotion should be effectively accomplished.

In addition to their attempt to empirically examine the utility of their definition, toward the end of their article they outline many of the issues I have been discussing lately. On pages 1472-1473, they state:

"Utilising complex adaptive theory to guide enquiry into a discrete phenomenon (such as a health promoting school) is a challenging task, in part due to the complexity of the theory itself, and in part because of the continuing uncertainty on a clear definition of complex adaptive systems (Rickles et al., 2007; Wallis, 2008). While there has been a recognition of complexity, and steady increase in the use of complexity theory in the study of health care and public health interventions (Keshavarz, Huges, & Khavarpour, 2005; Resnicow & Page, 2008; Shiell et al., 2008) there has been relatively little critical analysis of the concept, and no single and clear account of the components of complex adaptive systems theory and how these components relate to each other (Dooley, 1997; Rickles et al., 2007; Wallis, 2008). Furthermore, as Chu et al. (2003) argue there are few experimental studies that test complexity theories, and there exists even less research into practice informed by the insights that might be provided by complexity science. Correspondingly, application of a complex adaptive systems framework to a social system requires considerable caution, but suggests the need for continued exploration."

-----------------
What makes the article by Keshavarz, Nutbeam, Rowling and Khavarpour even more important to read is that it was followed by a Commentary by Tamsin Haggis, who provided her own very sympathetic yet useful and critical reading of their article. In turn, the first authors were allowed to published their response to Haggis' critique.

Rather than make a case for which argument I think wins out in the end, I recommend others go read the articles and decide for themselves. Actually, I think both sides have some important points to make, and it is not really a matter of who wins, but how their arguments work together to help make some important advances.

Complexity Art at the SF MOMA

Over the past year I have been making an argument for the emergence of a movement i call, for the lack of a better term, complexity art.  This movement is not a singularity and the artists working in or near or along side its central ideas are by no means confined to it.  Nonetheless, the term, for me, points to something taking place in the current globalized art world.

Having said that, I recently wrote a brief description for one of the artists (Damon Soule) that i see involved in this work, who recently had a book signing at the San Francisco MOMA.  The reviewer of their work kindly mentioned my notion of complexity art.  CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE

SACS Toolkit and Baltimore County School System

My brother and I are at the International Sociological Association, presenting our paper on the SACS Toolkit and its application to the study of Baltimore County Public Schools as a complex system. The conference is in Goteborg, Sweden with the RC51 (Sociocybernetics) gang. If you want a copy of our paper, go to my Center for Complexity in Health Website. It will be uploaded by Thursday, the 15th.

Tack

How Should Complex Systems Be Tested?

This post extends a conversation I began on 19 May 2010, titled testing the validity of complex systems. This is the fifth post on this topic since then.

The argument I am making is that researchers need to do some sort of complete (holistic) test of their topic, to: (1) make sure that the definition of a complex system they are using applies; and(2) make sure that their topic fits this definition.

The question I want to address here is how should such holistic testing be done?

Again, this will take a bit of blogging, but it seems to me that testing can be thought of at two basic levels.

1. Deep/Thorough Testing: The first and most rigorous level would require one or more studies devoted to a sort of deep or thorough testing to determine if one's definition of a complex system applies to a give topic and, related, if that topic can be validly and reliably called a complex system.

This first type of testing is the focus of the community health science study I am doing with my colleague, Galen Buckwlater. For the last couple years, researchers have been explicitly or implicitly treating communities and their health as if these things are complex social systems. Our research question is: is such an assumption valid and reliable? In other words, can one assume that the commonly used definition of a complex system applies to the study of communities and their health and, conversely, can communities and their health be called a complex system?

To conduct this type of test, we did the following. (A) First, we reviewed the literature to determine what the common definition of a complex system is that researchers use. (B) Next, we found a case study that represented the average community researchers typically study and collected data on it. (C) Then, we took each descriptor from the common definition of health and ran a series of tests. For example, a commonly held assumption is that communities are self-organizing. To determine if this is true, we examined if the conception of self-organizing used by these researchers to determine exactly what they mean by this concept. Then, we empirically tested this concept of self-organization to see if our community actually engaged in this behavior. In total, we ran ten individual testsn on the commonly used definition of complex system used in the community health science literature. It was a tremendous amount of work. And, in the process we used a wide arsenal of techniques, including hierarchical regression, curvilinear regression, correlation, k-means cluter analysis, the self-organizing map neural net algorithm, network analysis, qualitative case-based comparative method and computational (agent-based) modeling.

One can think of this first type of testing as helping a field along by increasing the rigor of its concepts and its knowledge of the type of complex system it it studying.


2. Shallow/Preliminary Testing. The second type of testing is what we might expect all researchers to do before and during the process of modeling a particular topic as a complex system. In this case, one would begin by explicitly outlining the particular definition of a complex system one is using. Then, one would conduct some type of preliminary tests to determine if one's topic is, indeed, a complex system.

The testing in this second case is likewise rigorous but it is more background work. Also, it is something that takes place before and during the model building process. The quality of one's results is something that is reported in the methods section of a study.

I have used this type of testing in a couple studies we have done. The first one was my research with Fred Hafferty on medical professionalism and the second was the book on sociology and complexity science that I wrote with Fred as well. In both instances we articulated the definition of a complex system we were using and tested to see if our topic fit it reasonably well.

This second type of testing involves the development of what we call a meta-model, and it is one of the first steps in the SACS Toolkit modeling process--this is the new method Fred and I developed for studying complex systems. SACS stands for sociology and complexity science. For more about our method, see our BOOK

Developing a meta-model (a model of one's model) allows researchers to determine, right from the beginning, if their definition of a complex system is rigorous and if their topic is (empirically speaking) a complex system. In addition to the development of a meta-model, the SACS Toolkit has a total of nine built-in procedures that researchers are expected to use to explore their definition and topic in complex systems terms. My brother John and I are writing a paper on how the SACS Toolkit does this and will be presenting it this summer in Sweden at the International Sociological Association Meetings. I should be done with the paper in the next couple weeks and will post it on here. I also plan to blog more about the SACS Toolkit so that readers can get a better sense of the method.

Complexity Definitions Need to Best Tested as a Whole

This post extends a conversation I began on 19 May 2010, titled testing the validity of complex systems. This is the fourth post on this topic since then.

Okay, I am getting a bit closer to what I am trying to say about testing. When I say definitions needs to be empirically grounded and tested I mean that the entire definition, as a whole, needs to be empirically grounded and tested. To date, most empirical inquiry in the complexity sciences focuses on parts of the complexity science definition. Researchers study networks or they study dynamics or they study emergence, autopoiesis, self-organization (a.k.a swarm behavior) and so forth. Two things are held as true in these studies. First, that the things being studied are actually complex systems. Second, that the part of the complexity science definition the researcher is studying naturally integrates into the larger complex systems scheme of things. My questions is, how do you know both of these things are true about the topic one is studying?

One way I think researchers can be sure is to do a complete (holistic) test of their topic, (1) to make sure that the definition of a complex system they are using applies and (2) to make sure that their topic fits this definition. For example, if researchers assume that a complex system is self-organizing, emergent, comprised of a large network of interacting agents and open-ended, then these researchers should have a series of tests to validate if this definition (in its entirety) applies to the topic they are studying. Alternatively, such a complete set of tests makes sure that the topic these researchers are studying is actually a complex system, or at least the type of complex system they seek to study.

Operationalizing metaphor

This post extends a conversation I began on 19 May 2010, titled testing the validity of complex systems.


I my last two posts I've argued that one should have a way to determine empirically if the topic one is studying is actually a complex system. Related, I've argued that the definitions complexity scientists use to identify a topic as a complex system should likewise be empirically grounded and tested. In this post, I want to comment further why I think doing such things is important.

Two words: operationalizing metaphor. I have read far too many articles and books in the last couple years that are little more than undisciplined, metaphorical labyrinths verging on the same sort of nonsense that took place at the high point of the postmodern movement in the 1990s. I've read articles talking about turning one's business firm or one's educational system into a self-organizing, emergent, agent-based network in order to optimize profits or learning, as if one could make a social system self-organize. Is that not contradictory? How does one make a system self-organize, given that a self-organizing system is one where there is no guiding external force controlling the systems's organization? Or, how about pushing one's business to the edge of chaos in order to profit from its nonlinear dynamics? What does something like this mean? Do these writers really understand what nonlinear (which, last I looked is a mathematical term) means? Related, what is nonlinear management? Or, how about talking about any and all social change as if they were the product of tipping points? When I hear such discussions I am reminded of the first time I heard a politician talk about "deconstructing" some political process to get to the bottom of things. Worse, when I hear such complexity science nonsense, I fear the next Sokal Hoax. Remember how the physicist, Alan Sokal, submitted his completely nonsensical postmodern text to the periodical, Social Text, and got it accepted, only to reveal later that the entire text was garbage. Sokal's hoax was done with complete seriousness. He was not trying to say that postmodernism was useless. Instead, he felt that postmodernism had some important things to offer, but only by increasing its rigor. I'm not saying that some of the complexity science literature has reached this point. But, it is close. If complexity science is going to make important inroads into mainstreet science, many of its new practitioners need to be more empirically rigorous and discerning in the definitions they use and the topics they call complex systems.

Is what you are studying a complex system?

This post extends a conversation I began on 19 May 2010, titled testing the validity of complex systems.

My basic argument is that we simply too often assume that any topic we are studying is a complex system simply because we say so--regardless of the definition we are using.

Now I know that the definition of a complex system is encyclopedic, such that many definitions exist. And, of course, I am not arguing for a single standard by which all topics should be judged worthy of being called a complex system.

But, I am arguing that, regardless of the definition researchers use, they should have some way of testing their topic to see if and how it acts like a complex system.

For example, pretend one assumes that complex systems have the following characteristcs: they are self-organizing, emergent, operating near chaos, and agent-based. Definition in hand, one then goes out to study a local community, a formal organization or some social network. Before one begins, however, shouldn't there be some set of preliminary tests done; some sort of way to determine if what one is studying is actually self-organizing, emergent, etc? Related, what would one look for to determine if such characteristics exist? What tests would one use? What methods would be relevant to conduct these tests? And, what if one finds that one or more of these characteristics is lacking, or only exists in a modified form? What then?

Again, I am not saying that one test or definition fits all. But, I am saying that the definitions complexity scientst use to identify, model and study various topics as complex systems should have a bit more empirical rior. These definitions should be tested and held up to empirical validity and reliability. One should be able to talk intelligently about what one means when one is calling something a complex system.

testing the validity of complex systems

I could be wrong here, and I am not entirely sure about the argument I am making, but it seems to me that much of the work being done in complexity science has yet to reach a point where topics are tested to see if and how they function as complex systems. There is lots of work on the network structure and dynamics of various systems; there is lots of agent-based modeling, and some of this work has gotten along enough to do both agent-based modeling and network analysis. Then there are various forays into emergence, self-organization, autopoiesis, swarm behavior, dynamics, chaos, evolution, and measurments of complexity. But, there is yet to be any sort of criteria set by which researchers can go out and determine if and how some topic of study is and acts like a complex system.

I am not setting up a straw person here. I know our field is very new; in fact, in some ways there is no complexity science; there are, instead, the complexity sciences. I know there are multiple definitions of what a complex system is; and i know we work in a broad range of fields, making any sort of singular statement both impossible and, at least from my perspective, unncessary. we can accept that complexity is an encyclopedic term and leave it at that.

So, for sake of discussion, let's just focus on the social sciences. In the social sciences, there does not seem to be much research actually applying the full force of complexity science to the study of a topic. Researchers do not seem to often take a topic, apply some criteria or empirical tests to see if it functions like a complex system, and then proceed on to examine the topic in complex systems terms.
Instead, it just seems that most topics are assumed to be complex systems, and some aspect of them is studied, say their network structure or the role agent-based interaction plays in their emergence.

My colleague, Galen Buckwalter and I are working on a paper now that does just the sort of thing we are talking about. Our work is in community health science. We are trying to take a topic and say, "okay, we think this community can be studied as a complex system; we think it acts like a complex system, and we have all these methodological tools that we can use to explore the empirical validity of our conjectures, so, let's proceed, in litmus test fashion, to determine if and how our community acts like a complex system."

Why do we think this is important? Well, I guess I will need to blog on it a bit, but for now I think the main answer is that, without some type of empirical and methodological rigor established (start with a, then move to b, etc), it becomes impossible to pull together the arsenal of tools, theories and concepts complexity scientists have created over the last three decades to get the most out of studying any given topic in the social sciences in complex systems terms. That is all for now, but i will try to say more and say it better.

Michelangelo and Complexity Part 2

Okay, so a few of my personal art critics asked me to push the painting you see above a bit further. To see the older version, click here The argument was that I needed to develop the network more, to make it stand out. I think it was a very good recommendation and I like this version of the painting much better. So, here is it.

Homage to Michelangelo and Complexity

Michelangelo and Da Vinci's work are a major source of inspiration for my artistic and scientific work in complexity. Their Renaissance attitude is, in many ways, what complexity science, with its multi-disciplinarity and systems perspective is all about.

In the painting I have posted here I had a very specific goal. I wanted to do a painting in the manner of Michelangelo: a painting that focused on the human body and that celebrated the mathematical and scientific dimensions of art. However, I wanted to create a painting that fit with my own 20th century attitudes.

So, the first step was to determine how I wanted to approach the body. I stayed away from the over-muscular work of Michelangelo, opting instead for a more realistic portrait. I also wanted to have the person pose in a somewhat more humble and less grandiose manner--something that honored the dignity of humans but without going overboard. In the complex, global society in which we live, humility and a recognition of one's deep interconnectedness to the world, at least for me, is an important ethical position. I wanted to reflect that in the painting.

The second step was to incorporate a Zen Buddhist perspective into the painting. For me, the symbolism I primarily focused on revolves around the sky, clouds, and the circle, which have a lot to do with systems thinking, holism, interconnectedness, meditation and bodhichitta.

The final step was to incorporate some of the latest developments in complexity science and mathematics, namely networks and fractals. Math and science were an important part of Renaissance painting, and they are likewise important in my own work. In a fractal-like manner, there are levels of scale in the painting: there are large circles, which suggest a larger network that cannot be entirely seen; then there is the specific network structure surrounding the figure.

So far, reaction to the painting has been mixed. That is understandable because I struggled with the painting myself. I would like to continue exploring this type of painting, working next with more than one person or playing off of different poses that Michelangelo used in his own work.

Complexity in Health Group

It has been a while since my last post. My research colleagues and I have been busy creating a new research center for studying health and health care via the tools of complexity science. It is called, appropriately enough, the Complexity in Health Group. Much thanks to Michael Ball and Kenny Carvalho for their incredible viking work.

CHECK OUT THE SITE: cch.ashtabula.kent.edu

HERE IS A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THE CENTER'S MISSION STATEMENT AND AREAS OF RESEARCH

The Complexity in Health Group (CHG) promotes the application of complexity science to the study of health and health care through a cross-disciplinary program of teaching, training and research. The CHG’s application of complexity science includes complex systems thinking, computational modeling, network analysis, data mining, and qualitative and historical approaches to complexity. The CHG is specifically committed to collaborating with health care centers and practitioners in Ashtabula County, Ohio; and to students and faculty at Kent State University. The CHG is affiliated with the Robert S. Morrison Health and Science Building, Kent State University at Ashtabula. Other affiliations we are working on include Kent State University’s College of Public Health and the Kent-Summa Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.

The Group will have several foci:

• Becoming a leading international research center in the application of complexity science to the study of health and health care;
• Generating revenue for our campus through extramural funding;
• Fostering interdisciplinary research with faculty at the Ashtabula campus, as well as Kent State University and other universities;
• Developing our undergraduate student population’s skills in science, technology and mathematics in application to health and health care, particularly public health;
• Developing collaborative research relations with local health agencies and businesses to promote the public health of Ashtabula County.

The current topics of the CHG are:

• Studying how communities, as complex systems, impact residential health, particularly in disadvantaged communities;
• Developing new tools for measuring and teaching medical students, residents, and clinical faculty about the challenges of medical professionalism in today’s complex health care system, both nationally and globally;
• Using network analysis to research how medical learning environments shape nurses and physicians;
• Studying how public educational systems impact the health and wellbeing of children.
• Developing the SACS Toolkit, a new method for studying health and health care from a complexity science perspective.

Westside Market, Cleveland Ohio, Complexity Photo

Balcony View of the Westside Market, Cleveland Ohio, 1971 & 2010



This photomontage highlights how Cleveland’s past is part of our present moment and how, in many ways, our city’s past remains alive for us, if we only take a moment to look. The focus of this montage is one of Cleveland’s most important landmarks, the Westside Market. Located at the corner of West 25th Street and Lorain Avenue, Cleveland’s Westside Market has been in business since 1840.

TO PURCHACE A COPY OF THIS PHOTO, "CLICK HERE"

Description of the Photomontage
The photos in this montage were taken at two different points in time. The black and white photos were taken circa 1970, courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library. The color photographs were taken in 2010 by the artist.

Some things stay the same: Much of the Westside Market, despite the many years, remains the same: fans on walls, posters, light fixtures, etc. What is odd about these remains is that, while some are very important, others continue for no apparent reason. It is as if somebody forgot about them or nobody ever thought to take them down. In the far left side of the picture, for example, is a really old fan. Why is it there? Does it still work? It begs the question about how history comes to us; perhaps, sometimes, as remains or leftovers from the past; things people forgot about or were too busy to clean up. Funny! Then there are those things that remain because of the important value they hold: the architecture, style of the booths, etc. Perhaps the best example is the old steer’s head on the butcher’s booth in the lower left side of the picture—it is still there, some 40 years later.

And then things change: History is not just the study of the past; it is also the study of how things have changed. Much has changed at the Westside Market over the last 40 years. For example, looking at the montage, it appears that the only booth from the 1970s that is still operating today is Fernengels—see the middle right side of the photograph. Other changes can be found in the montage as well: clothing styles, eyewear, hats, the types of produce sold in the booths, etc. If one had enough time, a rather interesting anthropology of Cleveland’s culture could be constructed from this montage.

Similarities and differences aside, the people in these photographs all seem to be enjoying the same thing: the food! Food is such an important part of our lives, and places like the Westside Market struggle to keep the “open-market” approach going—not an easy task in a world full of suburban-based, giant-sized, high-convenience food stores. It is great to see the Market still thriving after all these years! Long live the traditions of Cleveland.

The Increasing Complexities of Professionalism

My colleague, Fred Hafferty, and I have been working for the past five years to articulate a grounded theoretical frame for understanding medical professionalism, primarily by applying the tools of complexity science. Our work, to date, has been mixed methods--historical, qualitative, numerical, networks.

We finally published a somewhat comprehensive overview of what we mean when we say "medical professionalism is a complex system."

Click here for a summary of our article "The Increasing Complexities of Medical Professionalism"
The article is our second major statement on professionalism from a complexity science perspective.
The first, published in 2006, can be found here:
"The Complexities of Professionalism: A Preliminary Investigation?

There is still lots of work to do and, in part, many of our ideas are tentative and somewhat vague. But, we at least have a reasonably solid grasp of the point we are trying to make.

The article was published in the February 2010 Edition of Academic Medicine, which is a special edition for the Flexner Centenary. (Click here to learn more about Flexner)

Dad/Son Inside/Outside Summer/Winter

Here is another assemblage photomontage. The photos are by my nephew, Kevin Rusnak, and by me.

21st Century Dinner Party—Cathy’s House

The following photo is part of my new series of work.
In what follows, I provide a series of powerpoint slides that explain what is going on in this photo. Just click on the slide to enlarge and read it.

Slide 1


Slide 2


Slide 3


Slide 4


Slide 5


Slide 6


Slide 7


Slide 8


Slide 9