Quotes About Systems

Here in Rome, "men live for something else beside money and systems, the voice of noble sentiment is understood." She had found in Italy "a sphere much more natural to me than what the old puritans or the modern bankers have made" in America, the now stagnant and degraded "new" world.

How is it that those systems in nature we call complex and adaptive—brains, insect colonies, the immune system, cells, the global economy, biological evolution—produce such complex and adaptive behavior from underlying, simple rules?

idea models—models that are simple enough to study via mathematics or computers but that nonetheless capture fundamental properties of natural complex systems.

There's a name for systems like this that include humans: human-in-the-loop systems.

We can learn to make better decisions about the downstream effects of technology so that we don't cause unintentional harm inside complex social systems.

Theology is ultimately political. The way human communities deify the transcendent and determine the categories of good and evil have more to do with the power dynamics of the social systems which create the theologies than with the spontaneous revelation of truth from another quarter

Focus, too, on understanding the operating model, planning and performance evaluation systems, and talent management systems, because they often powerfully influence how you can most effectively have an impact.

They become overly fixated on wringing insights out of data that just aren't there, or setting up entirely new information systems, rather than focusing on the information at their disposal and what it really suggests about strategic priorities.

Revelation imaginatively reveals the nature of any and all systems that oppose the ways of God in the world, especially as revealed in Christ the Lamb who was slaughtered. Those systems are not limited to particular future powers but are found in all places and times.

most software- or systems-development projects start out without a context diagram, blissfully unaware that they need one.

Systems thinking, complexity theory, and developmental evaluation together offer an interpretive framework for engaging in sense making. As a complexity-sensitive, developmental

The similarity of architecture in organized, complex systems suggests that they all share universal requirements. They are designed to be "efficient, adaptive, evolvable, and robust.

Marc Kirschner and his Berkeley colleague John Gerhart.20 They wondered whether modern creatures have cellular and developmental mechanisms with the characteristic of what is called evolvability. That is, do they have the ability to generate heritable phenotypic variation? And is the characteristic of evolvability itself under selection pressure? That is, will biological systems that produce more phenotypic variations that can be passed on to their offspring be more

Theory is relevant to you because it shows you a new, simpler, and more elegant side of computers, which we normally consider to be complicated machines. The best computer designs and applications are conceived with elegance in mind. A theoretical course can heighten your aesthetic sense and help you build more beautiful systems.

Software design as taught today is terribly incomplete. It talks only about what systems should do. It doesn't address the converse—things systems should not do. They should not crash, hang, lose data, violate privacy, lose money, destroy your company, or kill your customers.

Release is the beginning of the software's true life; everything before that release is gestation. Either systems grow over time, adapting to their changing environment, or they decay until their costs outweigh their benefits and then die.

Too many production systems are like Schrodinger's cat—locked inside a box, with no way to observe its actual state.

Integration points are the number-one killer of systems. Every single one of those feeds presents a stability risk.

True utility computing centers are on the horizon, but right now, the only real ones are a pale approximation of this vision. In the world that the other 99.9% of us inhabit, production systems are deployed to some relatively fixed set of resources. Applications

Clarifying trading and risk management systems until they can translate to computer code.

They cannot see that our sociological assumption is that such systems must not be allowed to exist, no matter the real or perceived benefits. They are continuing to attempt to fix what we consider unfixable and have abandoned.

De todos los sistemas económicos y sociales el capitalismo es, sin duda, el más natural. Eso ya basta para indicar que es el peor.

Praxis is about applying one's knowledge to challenge oppressive systems and unequal traditions. It is related to the well-known phrase "the personal is political" espoused by many advocates of the second-wave women's movement.

The conventional explanation is that Raphael, Mendel, and Bach were always creative, only their reputation changed with the vagaries of social recognition. But the systems model recognizes the fact that creativity cannot be separated from its recognition. Mendel was not creative during his years of relative obscurity because his experimental findings were not that important until a group of British geneticists, at the end of the nineteenth century, recognized their implications for evolution.