“They examine the difference between one-off projects focused on “quantum leaps”—the Space Shuttle or the Space Launch System, say—versus repeatable platforms—containerized shipping, auto manufacturing, and SpaceX’s vehicles. Notably, they insist this isn’t a public-private distinction. Rather, the researchers are focused on organizational principles that lend themselves to successfully delivering transformative projects at scale.”
“Planners behind projects that attempt to achieve a massive gain in a single leap, they posit, enmesh themselves in psychological patterns that lead to failure. They delude themselves in thinking the actual costs of the project will be much less than expected, because if the real costs were known, the projects would never be attempted.”
“Ansar and Flyvberg argue that NASA’s choices reflect a belief in a world that is linear and controlled, where experts have access to the knowledge and tools they need to deal with future risks. SpaceX’s paradigm, instead, sees the world as a dynamic, adaptive system, where responding to a changing future requires flexibility.”
If you understand anything about play you will understand that children’s play is the mechanism by which we become human (Battram, Eastbourne play conference 201x).
If you have any interest in the development of humans, you owe it to yourself to download the free PDFs in the right hand margin.
THIS is not woo-woo anymore than Lovelock or Margulis were woowoo.
Maturana would approve of their attempts to describe a self-producing planetary cognition: once you accept the Santiago theory of cognition, it is merely a small, sensible, step to describe the easily observable planetary self-regulation and self-production as cognitive.
I do so wish that academics read outside their own fields more often. Read some Humberto!
Whenever I have spoken of ‘complex adaptive system’, CAS, in the past, never had I ever articulated this distinction:
“This is the conceptually unified and richly transdisciplinary foundation for the new economic paradigm that we describe in part II of our article[i]. We make a crucial distinction between two meanings of the key term “complex adaptive system”: The first meaning is a complex system that is adaptive as a system(CAS1). The second meaning is a complex system composed of agents following their respective adaptive strategies (CAS2). The key insight of MLS theory is that CAS2 systems do not robustly self-organize into CAS1 systems. Special conditions are required: namely, the whole system must be the unit of selection. Otherwise, lower-level selection forces take over, in the same way that cancers destroy the functional organization of multicellular organisms.“
Wow, thinking back, I understood this, but only tacitly. The context of my peregrinations had to serve to indicate whether I was wibbling on CAS2 or CAS1.
PPS: POSSIBLE PRAXIS INSIGHT… What is the unit/chunk/module/holon/VS(or nonVS) that is being selected? Are you sure?
Cash-strapped Sri Lanka cancels school exams over paper shortage
Official sources said the move could effectively hold up tests for about two-thirds of the country’s 4.5 million students.
Education authorities said exams were postponed indefinitely due to an acute paper shortage as Sri Lanka contends with its worst financial crisis since independence in 1948 [File: Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters]
Published On 19 Mar 202219 Mar 2022
Sri Lanka has cancelled exams for millions of school students in the Western Province as the country ran out of printing paper with Colombo short on dollars to finance imports, according to officials.
Education authorities said the term tests, scheduled a week from Monday, were postponed indefinitely due to an acute paper shortage as Sri Lanka contends with its worst financial crisis since independence in 1948.
“School principals cannot hold the tests as printers are unable to secure foreign exchange to import necessary paper and ink,” the Department of Education of the Western Province, home to nearly six million people, said.
Term tests for classes 9, 10 and 11 are part of a continuous assessment process to decide if students are promoted to the next grade at the end of the year.
A debilitating economic crisis brought on by a shortage of foreign exchange reserves to finance essential imports has seen the country run low on food, fuel and pharmaceuticals.
IMF bailout
The cash-strapped South Asian nation of 22 million announced this week that it will seek an IMF bailout to resolve its worsening foreign debt crisis and shore up external reserves.
The International Monetary Fund on Friday confirmed it was considering President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s surprise Wednesday request to discuss a bailout.
The island nation secured a $1bn credit line from India to buy urgently needed food and medicine, officials said, after Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa’s visit to New Delhi.
About $6.9bn of Colombo’s debt needs to be serviced this year but its foreign currency reserves stood at about $2.3bn at the end of February.
Long queues have formed across the country for groceries and oil with the government instituting rolling electricity blackouts and rationing of milk powder, sugar, lentils and rice.Sign up for Al JazeeraWeekly Newsletter
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Sri Lanka earlier this year asked China, one of its main creditors, to help put off debt payments but there has been no official response yet from Beijing.
I write to you today in the hope that you will radically re-structure your company before it starts a class war in which you will almost certainly lose the lion’s share of your wealth, your moral conscience, your place in history as innovators instead of oppressors, and you and your family’s physical safety. To be clear, this isn’t a threat—I am a pacifist who never condones violence including war, but I’m also a DNA relative of Marie Antoinette and understand what happens to elites who forget about the masses — so this is a plea to do the right thing before more people, yourselves included, inevitably get hurt by the raging masses who you are making homeless by the millions. Brian, Joe, Nathan; you started Airbnb with the best of intentions. You couldn’t afford to make rent on your San Francisco apartment, so you bought some air mattresses and served breakfast to your guests. Brilliant. But things have changed since then. Now you control an $80 billion company that has devoured millions of housing units, evicted countless families, and turned their homes into full-time clerkless hotels, with a promise in your IPO documents to fight democracies in court for as long as you can afford to do so.
Bored Waitrose weasels with gran stand about as a geography student plants a tiny teeny baby tree that will be a teeny tiny snack tonight for some nearby deer, who are licking their lips as they watch from the bushes
.
“Scientists have debated whether tree planting should be used as a way of combatting carbon emissions, but Mr Waters said there was an urgent need to try new initiatives and the benefits of tree planting go beyond capturing carbon.
“He said: “We are in a climate emergency and that word emergency is really important. We can’t wait for a perfect solution and we have got to try stuff and we’ve got to do it fast.
“”We know trees help deal with flooding, they help your well-being, there’s very good evidence that being around trees reduces your stress and your blood pressure. There’s evidence to show that areas with lots of trees have a lower crime rate.”
“Lee Waters said Wales “cannot wait for the perfect solution” to combat climate change.”
A man standing in a field pausing to recall some more half-read and totally misunderstood bollocks from a spad briefing he fell asleep during.
“There’s evidence to show that areas with lots of trees have a lower crime rate.” Cretinous logic. Maybe he’s right. There’s very little car theft in the Amazon rainforests, very little burglary.
What the idiot doesn’t know is that baby trees are net producers of carbon until they get to their twenties; then they get a job and settle down or something, and make less nasty carbon than they sequester.
FFS
For Forest’s Sake
If you actually care about the planet and yours or other people’s kiddies, this science bloke tells you exactly why it’s a counterproductive crock of shite
Climate change: Free tree offered to every Welsh household Published6 December 2021 Every household in Wales will be offered a free tree to plant in an effort to help tackle climate change.
People will have a choice of native species to plant in their gardens or have added to woodland on their behalf.
About 1.3 million trees will be made available by the Welsh government, in a scheme which will cost £2m.
Deputy climate change minister Lee Waters said the scheme could help, but there still needed to be a greater increase in planting trees.
“To meet our climate change targets, we have to plant 86 million trees by the end of this decade,” he said.
Every household in Wales will be offered a free tree to plant at home or in a woodland “That’s an increase every year of 15-fold. So it’s a hell of a challenge, as well as a climate emergency.”
Scientists have debated whether tree planting should be used as a way of combatting carbon emissions, but Mr Waters said there was an urgent need to try new initiatives and the benefits of tree planting go beyond capturing carbon.
He said: “We are in a climate emergency and that word emergency is really important. We can’t wait for a perfect solution and we have got to try stuff and we’ve got to do it fast.
“We know trees help deal with flooding, they help your well-being, there’s very good evidence that being around trees reduces your stress and your blood pressure. There’s evidence to show that areas with lots of trees have a lower crime rate.”
Lee Waters said Wales “cannot wait for the perfect solution” to combat climate change.
Jerry Langford, of Coed Cadw – the Woodland Trust in Wales – said he was confident people would succeed in nurturing trees in their gardens.
“Trees are tough actually,” he said, “you’ve got to treat them pretty badly to kill a tree. So just a bit of tender loving care and it will be fine.
“They need a supply of water and they need to need to make sure they don’t get swamped by competing vegetation.”
The trees will be available from five hubs from March, with a further 20 in the autumn of 2022.
Coed Cadw will plant the trees which people opt not to have in their gardens.
for Ben Taylor and Rory Heap. Rory, it’s a completely inaccessible photo of an article about women in the workplace and confidence and be the best you you can never be you go girl etceteraah…
Let’s see if Bill Gateses’s MagicEye can read that ..
The ancients believed that they had angered the gods when there was a natural disaster.
Managers believe that they have angered the shareholders when things outside of their control occur. They call them ‘failure’ and search for a chain of causation, a process that is essentially entrail reading.
This is the best statement on the need for Bullshit Detector since Postman and Weingartner wrote Teaching As A Subversive Activity, the whole text of which is around on the web, and is a must read.
BTW, I hate videos. Just give me the feckin’ words and the odd diagram. But there’s always an exception to every rule.
you need to understand the original meaning of the term in its original context, not just the way it’s now used in everyday conversation.
2
you know when you are protecting yourself, or when you are just bunking off from dealing with something that actually is your concern. So be honest with yourself.
As the girl receded farther along the walkway, I wondered how far she would go. As a boy, we often roamed just beyond the limits that our parents had imposed. When I was this girl’s age, we were expected to stay on our street, but often stepped just beyond that limit, hearts pounding. That’s where the adventure was and it called us despite our parents’ admonitions. For instance, there was a new house being constructed one street over. How could we resist the lure of a partially constructed house? Today, it would be called an “attractive nuisance,” but as a kid, these unfenced sites were impromptu playgrounds. The best places always seemed to be just beyond the limits.
There is a point where the greenbelt walkway turns. Would the girl take the corner? If she did, she would have been out of sight. When she got to there, however, she stopped, waited for the dog to relieve itself, then started heading back. It was at this moment that her father emerged. He stepped cautiously from the door, craning to look along the walkway, peering toward his daughter. Then suddenly he hopped back out of sight, obviously not wanting her to see him.
Now click the link to understand what’s going on here…
arthur~battram… 