\u3ci\u3eDemocracy\u27s Discontent\u3c/i\u3e in a Complex World: Can Avalanches, Sandpiles, and Finches Optimize Michael Sandel\u27s Civic Republican Community?

In Democracy\u27s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Michael Sandel looks about him and finds a vast and complex world governed by impersonal institutions and structures, in which discontented, anxious, and frustrated individuals are losing control over the forces that govern their lives, and in which the moral fabric of community is unraveling. His solution is to revitalize the civic strand of freedom found in republican politics and thus equip individuals to govern themselves. Sandel wonders how civic republicanism can exist in today\u27s world. Historically, republicanism has found a home in small, bounded places, which were largely self-sufficient and inhabited by people whose living conditions, education, and commonality enabled them to deliberate about public concerns. His structural answer is to disperse sovereignty both upwards and downwards of the modem nation state into a multiplicity of political communities and social institutions. His normative answer is to infuse substantive moral discourse back into public political debate

Is U.S. health care an appropriate system? A strategic perspective from systems science

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Context</p> <p>Systems science provides organizational principles supported by biologic findings that can be applied to any organization; any incongruence indicates an incomplete or an already failing system. U.S. health care is commonly referred to as a system that consumes an ever- increasing percentage of the gross domestic product and delivers seemingly diminishing value.</p> <p>Objective</p> <p>To perform a comparative study of U.S. health care with the principles of systems science and, if feasible, propose solutions.</p> <p>Design</p> <p>General systems theory provides the theoretical foundation for this observational research.</p> <p>Main Outcome Measures</p> <p>A degree of compliance of U.S. health care with systems principles and its space-time functional location within the dynamic systems model.</p> <p>Results of comparative analysis</p> <p>U.S. health care is an incomplete system further threatened by the fact that it functions in the zone of chaos within the dynamic systems model.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Complying with systems science principles and the congruence of pertinent cycles, U.S. health care would likely dramatically improve its value creation for all of society as well as its resiliency and long-term sustainability.</p> <p>Immediate corrective steps could be taken: Prioritize and incentivize <it>health </it>over <it>care</it>; restore fiscal soundness by combining health and life insurance for the benefit of the insured and the payer; rebalance horizontal/providers and vertical/government hierarchies.</p

Perspectives on Regulating Systemic Risk

This book chapter, which synthesizes several of the author’s articles, attempts to provide useful perspectives on regulating systemic risk. First, it argues that systemic shocks are inevitable. Accordingly, regulation should be designed not only to try to reduce those shocks but also to protect the financial system against their unavoidable impact. This could be done, the chapter explains, by applying chaos theory to help stabilize the financial system. The chapter then focuses on trying to prevent excessive corporate risk-taking, which is one of the leading triggers of systemic shocks and widely regarded to have been a principal cause of the financial crisis. It begins by inquiring why so few managers have been prosecuted for the excessive corporate risk-taking that led to the financial crisis. Targeting managers in their personal capacity would be a greater deterrent to excessive risk-taking than fallbacks such as imposing firm-level liability. The chapter finds, however, a host of reasons why managerial prosecution is not — and is unlikely to become — a credible deterrent. Finally, the chapter examines how else excessive risk-taking could be regulated, including by mandating a public governance duty and narrowing limited liability protection for owner-managers of shadow-banking firms

Chaos Engineering for Microservices

Chaos engineering is a relatively new concept that is growing in popularity as it helps companies to be more resilient in the face of unexpected networking or software failure. The idea behind chaos engineering is that if you can create controlled failures, you can discover where your system is weak and then fix those weaknesses before something happens to your production environment. This research has been done on microservices, which are small pieces of code that perform specific tasks on behalf of a larger application. Microservices are often hosted on different servers and run by different teams, so they are much more fragile than monolithic applications. Microservices also tend to be written in different languages, which makes them more difficult to understand and test for bugs. The goal of this study was to determine whether microservices can be made more resilient through chaos engineering or not; specifically, if it is possible to find out what kinds of failures occur most often and how long they take to resolve

The chaotic nature of healthcare information systems: The need for transdisciplinary collaboration

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.This paper demonstrates one of the challenges of the healthcare information systems development, namely the chaotic nature of healthcare systems. Although the reliable evidence demonstrating the positive effects of health information systems on safety and quality remains inconclusive (a growing body of research revealing the unintended consequences and potentially error producing effects of health information systems’ implementation. Different arguments from the literature concerning the chaotic nature of healthcare, including but not limited to the nature of patients and disease have been presented. The requirements of new ways of systems design and the need for transdisciplinary dynamic teams within the requirements engineering phase as a start has been discussed. These arguments have been investigated in the context of an exploratory case addressing one of the advanced oncology centres in the US. This paper concludes that there is an important need to rethink healthcare information systems development method, which has to be in a dynamic ongoing manner for some major issues

Perspectives on Regulating Systemic Risk

This book chapter, which synthesizes several of the author’s articles, attempts to provide useful perspectives on regulating systemic risk. First, it argues that systemic shocks are inevitable. Accordingly, regulation should be designed not only to try to reduce those shocks but also to protect the financial system against their unavoidable impact. This could be done, the chapter explains, by applying chaos theory to help stabilize the financial system. The chapter then focuses on trying to prevent excessive corporate risk-taking, which is one of the leading triggers of systemic shocks and widely regarded to have been a principal cause of the financial crisis. It begins by inquiring why so few managers have been prosecuted for the excessive corporate risk-taking that led to the financial crisis. Targeting managers in their personal capacity would be a greater deterrent to excessive risk-taking than fallbacks such as imposing firm-level liability. The chapter finds, however, a host of reasons why managerial prosecution is not — and is unlikely to become — a credible deterrent. Finally, the chapter examines how else excessive risk-taking could be regulated, including by mandating a public governance duty and narrowing limited liability protection for owner-managers of shadow-banking firms

Chaos Theory: The Essential for Military Applications

I take great pleasure in presenting a remarkable addition to our Newport Papers series. While Major Glenn E. James, the author, received support and assistance from sources within his own service, the U.S. Air Force, the final research and the paper itself are the products of his term in the Advanced Research Program at the Naval War College. This paper typifies the quality of work and capabilities of our students from all the services here at the College. It is an excellent example of the benefits we derive from the close collaboration between our academic and research departments.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/usnwc-newport-papers/1009/thumbnail.jp

Data exploration systems for databases

Data exploration systems apply machine learning techniques, multivariate statistical methods, information theory, and database theory to databases to identify significant relationships among the data and summarize information. The result of applying data exploration systems should be a better understanding of the structure of the data and a perspective of the data enabling an analyst to form hypotheses for interpreting the data. This paper argues that data exploration systems need a minimum amount of domain knowledge to guide both the statistical strategy and the interpretation of the resulting patterns discovered by these systems