Development around road interchanges can be a double-edged sword where controlled growth brings dividends, while uncontrolled growth creates headaches for motorists, land owners and local officials. Continue reading
This blog is continued from Thinking Systems #9
This is a good place to stop for a while and read William Wimsatt’s (2007) book Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: piecewise approximations to reality. Wimsatt’s goal in writing that book was to provide a guide to bounded rationalism and heuristics for a messy world. The book draws on a wide range of sources including Andreas Wagner and one of my favourite books, Daniel Dennett’s (1995) “Darwin’s dangerous idea: evolution and the meanings of life. Dennett pointed out anyone that takes a consequentialist view whilst living in the middle of a system can only ever have partial knowledge. Continue reading
This blog is continued from Thinking Systems #8
At present, working either with a restricted set of values or when we claim to be totally value free (impossible in practice), we plan remediation programmes as “predict-act” schemes and then fail to deliver the goods. It’s very much like the myth of the field of dreams: “build it and they will come…” but often they don’t! [Remember the important roles of chance, necessity and 2nd order interactions.] Continue reading
Groundwater and rock are intensively exploited in the world. Given the population density and environmental pressures, quarry lateral extension may be limited. Hence the only solution for the rock operators is to excavate deeper as long as the deposit structure makes it possible. Consequently the water table of the geological formation exploited might be reached when the quarry is deepened. A dewatering system is therefore installed so the quarry activities can continue, possibly impacting the nearby water catchments. Continue reading
This and the next few blogs on the topic of our dealings with ecosystems are longer than usual and are probably only for ecologists and environmental managers. They get complicated in places so to quote my favourite blogger (Roger Cicala) “Warning; these are Geek Level 3 blogs”. To many ecologists these will be controversial. Continue reading
By Dr Tomas Holderness & Dr Etienne Turpin
The early June release of the PetaJakarta.org White Paper marked the end of the first phase of the ground breaking research program. Continue reading
I first came across the idea of distributed infrastructure systems when we began planning the CSIRO Australia Energy Flagship in 2001-2. The full flowering of these innovations has taken more than a decade to come to fruition and, even now, for reasons I shall discuss, not all aspects of the concept have been implemented in energy networks around the world. Nevertheless, despite impediments, the basic concept is emerging rapidly. Continue reading
In a series of books and papers Andreas Wagner has explored the basis of the robustness of living organisms: his discoveries have been breaking new ground. In books like Robustness and evolvability of living systems (2005), and The arrival of the fittest (2015), he has shown how living organisms depend for their survival on genetic and metabolic networks which possess modularity and distributed robustness. Continue reading
By Associate Professor Rodney Clarke
All major approaches used to analyse tweets (statistical and machine learning) proceed from the segmentation and classification of lexical items (words). An alternative approach involving computer-based grammars is rarely used because they do not scale well to the dimensions necessary for the analysis of PetaJakarta tweet traffic. All current approaches are syntactic and asemantic. They are incapable of addressing questions concerning how citizens are actually using social media platforms during emergencies because they are incapable of explaining how language is structured for use. Continue reading
By Research Fellow Nagesh Shukla
Diabetes is spreading all around the world as an unprecedented epidemic. According to a report from International Diabetes Federation, in 2011, 366 million people had diabetes and by 2030 this will have risen to 552 million (8.3% compared to 9.9% of the adult population, respectively). Continue reading
