Leadership and Management Consultant, Public Health

It sounds paradoxical, but today it appears that we understand more about the universe than our society. We have created systems that have outgrown our capacity to genuinely understand and control them. Just think about the ongoing financial crisis. But recent advancements in the study of complex systems are able to offer new insights into the workings of many real-world systems.

 

Via Complexity Digest

Before he became America's first de facto science adviser and before he helped lay the foundation for the National Science Foundation, Vannevar Bush was a professor of Electrical Engineering and, eventually, dean of Engineering and vice president at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In those capacities, he came in contact with some of the nation's best and brightest minds in their formative years. But after two decades in such a rarified academic environment, Bush had become disenchanted by the increasing specialization of undergraduate curricula in science and engineering in America. He felt that education in these fields placed too much emphasis on information transferral from teacher to student and too little on deep understanding and intellectual synthesis by the student. Bush was among the first to anticipate that massive amounts of information would someday be universally and readily available to all, such that our ability to communicate knowledge through classes would become far less important than our ability to inspire students to do something creative, and valuable, with it.

 

Solving Complex Problems
K. V. Hodges

Science 30 November 2012:
Vol. 338 no. 6111 pp. 1164-1165
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1215228

Via Complexity Digest