ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

Hardly a week passes by that we do not read articles in the newspapers, or hear on news broadcasts, the word "Gross Domestic Product" [GDP] when the subject is economic growth or comparison of living standards among countries. While statistics can be enlightening, statistics can also lie if you are not really clear about what GDP means and how it is calculated. Here is an article abstracted from my weekly newsletter for www.valuengine.com , which attempts to illustrate what is, and what is NOT GDP and some of the problems associated with any attempt to compare GDP across countries. A nation is like a corporation. Its production, income, and expenditure can be measured according to accounting principles, and a figure arrived at, that hopefully gives some information on the 'well-being' of the nation/corporation. This is the subject of National Accounts, and Gross Domestic Product is one of the measures in National Accounts. GDP measures the size of the U.S. Economy, ...

The Logistic Map on the left, is derived from the Logistic Equation which was first introduced by Pierre Francois Verhulst to model the growth of populations. Briefly it states that a future population will depend on the rate of growth of the existing population, which itself is a function of the existing population. This equation thus describes how resources determine the rate of growth of a population of living creatures, and the changes in this rate of growth through time. The equation is: Where, t=current time, and r=rate of growth of population and Xt the current Population is represented by a value from 0 to 1, X t+1= rXt(1-Xt) . ** Notice how the bigger Xt is, then the smaller will be 1-Xt and therefore the smaller will be rXt(1-Xt). This deceptively simple equation can give rise to many situations depending on the value of r. Therein lies its beauty. Most importantly this equation illustrates one of the main tenets of Chaos Theory that small initial differences can cause big un...

ATTENTION! INTELLECTUALS You can take a Personality Test and get the result like I did below. Just click on the links. My Personality Test Result INTJ - "Mastermind". Introverted intellectual with a preference for finding certainty. A builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models. 2.1% of total population. Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI) This wonderful image above, from Richard Seel of New Paradigm Organization Consulting http://www.new-paradigm.co.uk gives a clear insight into the nature of Emergence. Emergence is a property that occurs in most Complex Systems, from stock markets, to Cities, Ant Colonies, Chemical Reactions, Hurricanes and even to Computer generated Cellular Automata. Kevin Mihata describes Emergence as " the process by which patterns or global-level structures arise from interactive local-level processes. This "structure" or "pattern" cannot be understood or predicted from the behavior or prop...