Complexity Of Conditions Research Articles

Uncertainty in the Early Phase of a Municipal Building Refurbishment Project—A Case Study in Finland

Municipal building refurbishment projects are carried out under conditions of high uncertainty and complexity, which often result in unsatisfying outcomes. In this research, a case study approach is used to provide a holistic presentation of the sources of uncertainties in the early phase of a municipal school refurbishment project in Finland. The study also explores how these sources are treated in the case project. It is considered that the uncertainty in the case study originated from three key sources: from the project due to the characteristics of existing buildings; from the organization due to the separately operating municipal units; from the municipal environment due to the municipal policy, and decision-making process. This study shows that more emphasis should be laid on the sources of uncertainty in the early phases of a municipal building refurbishment project for reaching proper decisions. In addition, the study presents suggestions for improving the municipal process.

Stimulus complexity and chunk tightness interact to impede perceptual restructuring during problem solving

The mutual influence of stimulus complexity and chunk tightness on perceptual restructuring was examined using a chunk decomposition task (CDT). Participants attempted to remove components of Chinese characters in order to produce new, valid characters. Participants had their electroencephalogram recorded while completing a CDT in conditions of low or high stimulus complexity, crossed with two levels of chunk tightness. Tight chunks overlapped spatially whereas loose chunks did not. Both increasing chunk tightness and increasing stimulus complexity impaired performance (lower accuracy, longer reaction times), and these factors interacted such that highly complex, tight chunks produced the worst performance. These factors also had interacting effects on the late positive complex (LPC). The LPC amplitude was reduced by increasing chunk tightness, but this effect was attenuated for highly complex stimuli. These results suggest that though chunk tightness and stimulus complexity impair performance in the CDT, they have dissociable neural underpinnings.

Environmental regulation, governance, and policy instruments, 20 years after the stick, carrot, and sermon typology

ABSTRACT In 1998, Evert Vedung posited a typology of policy instruments making governing akin to a conversation with a donkey: regulatory (sticks), economic (carrots) and information-based (sermons) instruments. Kathryn Harrison later applied this typology to pollution control in her popular ‘Talking with the Donkey’ piece. Though command-and-control instruments were central up until the late 1990s, growing global interest in ‘New Environmental Policy Instruments’ (NEPI) led to a disinterest in regulatory mechanisms and an increase in attention to information-based and economic instruments. Are governments using regulation as a policy instrument now more than before or are they choosing policy mixes? In this paper, I examine the state of the art regarding regulation as an environmental policy instrument by exploring whether the apparent shift to NEPI did reduce interest in environmental regulation as a policy instrument. I find that policy experiments with models of policy instruments led to increased interest in policy instrument mixes. Evidence from a systematic review of JEPP scholarship and a broader scholarly review of the literature on environmental policy instruments over the past 20 years focused on drinking water and solid waste governance suggest that policy mixes might work best when faced with conditions of uncertainty and governance complexity.

Strategy: military planning under conditions of uncertainty, complexity and risk

Background Challenges posed by uncertainty, complexity and risk are explored in relation to military strategy. Method Clausewitz’s theory of war provides a lens through which to examine historical developments in strategy and their accompanying responses to uncertainty, complexity and risk. Results Uncertainty, complexity and risk remain challenges to the formulation of strategy across changing political and technological contexts. Discussion Possible parallels with complex urban-planning projects are considered.

Reproducibility of Surface Wind and Tracer Transport Simulations over Complex Terrain Using 5-, 3-, and 1-km-Grid Models

AbstractThe reproducibility of surface wind and tracer transport simulations from high-resolution weather and transport models was studied over complex terrain in wintertime in Japan. The horizontal grid spacing was varied (5-, 3-, and 1-km grids), and radioactive cesium (Cs-137) from the Fukushima nuclear power plant was used as a tracer. Fukushima has complex terrain, such as mountains and valleys. The model results were validated by observations collected from the national networks of the automated meteorological data acquisition system and the hourly air pollution sampling system. The reproducibility depended on the model resolution, topographic complexity, and synoptic weather conditions. Higher model resolution led to higher reproducibility of surface winds, especially in mountainous areas when the Siberian winter monsoon was disturbed. In contrast, the model improvement was negligible or nonexistent over plain/coastal areas when the synoptic field was steady. The statistical scores of the tracer transport simulations often deteriorated as a result of small errors in the plume locations. However, the higher-resolution models advantageously performed better transport simulations in the mountainous areas because of the lower numerical diffusion and higher reproducibility of the mass flux. The reproducibility of the tracer distribution in the valley of the Fukushima mountainous region was dramatically improved with increasing model resolution. In the range of mesoscale model resolutions (commonly 1–10 km), it was concluded that a higher-resolution model is definitely recommended for tracer transport simulations over mountainous terrain.

Relationship between Organizational Climate and Innovation Capability in New Technology-Based Firms

Successfully developing a new product, service, or production process for commercial purposes involves complex and dynamic changes, and therefore requires an organizational climate that fosters innovation. In this sense, the means by which knowledge is created and exploited in the firm constitute its key competence and the source of its innovation capabilities. The research objective was to establish the relationship between organizational climate and innovation capability. The sample consisted of 102 Colombian new technology-based firms. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and PLSpredict were used for the statistical analysis. The results indicate that the organizational climate positively and directly influences the innovation capability (organizational ambidexterity, exploration, and exploitation). The findings obtained will help firms, especially those that require a lot of knowledge and carry out their activities in dynamic environments, to understand how organizational climate influences innovation capability, which is understood through the dimensions of exploration, exploitation, and organizational ambidexterity. This will provide new technology-based firms with a higher capacity to adapt to the conditions of uncertainty and complexity of the environment.

No action without talk? UN peacekeeping, discourse, and institutional self-legitimation

AbstractIn this article, I argue that much of the discourse observable within the UN constitutes neither unnecessary and unproductive ‘talk’ nor efforts to convince outside audiences of its legitimacy, but actually a form of institutional self-legitimation that is key to its ability to function. Using the case of the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), I show that because the organisation has a multifaceted organisational identity, it faces situations where it is forced to choose between multiple but equally appropriate courses of action, and it uses self-legitimation alongside other mechanisms to overcome these tensions. I specify three sets of circumstances in which this occurs, showing how DPKO uses discourse that simplifies and exceptionalises in a bid to reconcile or downplay these contradictions and reassert a cohesive and legitimate organisational identity internally. This simplification and exceptionalisation in turn serve an enabling function, allowing DPKO to continue operating in conditions of complexity by decreasing risk aversion and instilling a deep sense of professional loyalty in staff. At the same time, such discursive processes are costly and may entrench inefficient practices, rendering the effects of self-legitimising discourse paradoxical: they may enable action, but they reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of that action.

From the Law of Corporations to the Law of Corporate

For several decades, jurists have invested significant efforts in developing the law in general and private law, in particular, in terms of pluralist conception. However, the conceptualization of corporate law and governance in terms of pluralist notions rarely exists. The lack of a comprehensive pluralist theory of corporate law appears puzzling. This Essay intends to fill this void by providing a novel pluralist theory of corporate governance regimes. This account is based on social systems theory and the framework of complexity that is rooted in the natural sciences and was since spread to social science disciplines. I argue that under conditions of complexity, the ecosystem of corporate governance regimes has to incorporate the influence of participants’ heterogeneity and firm-specific power relations on outcomes and performance. This argument has profound implications for redesigning several legal doctrines, such as fiduciary duties of controlling shareholders, regulation of related party transactions, the company objective, and officers’ duty of care. Our study rejects the “one size fits all” regulation approach and supports the view that good governance design is not universal but rather depends on firm-specific characteristics. Accordingly, this Essay calls for establishing internal and external corporate governance regimes following firm-specific views.

Under construction: ventral and lateral frontal lobe contributions to value-based decision-making and learning.

Even apparently simple choices, like selecting a dessert in a pastry shop, involve options characterized by multiple motivationally relevant attributes. Neuroeconomic research suggests that the human brain may track the subjective value of such options, allowing disparate reward-predictive information to be compared in a common currency. However, the brain mechanisms involved in identifying value-predictive features and combining these to assess the value of each decision option remain unclear. Here, we review recent evidence from studies of multi-attribute decision-making in people with focal frontal lobe damage and in healthy people undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. This work suggests that ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex are important for forming value judgments under conditions of complexity. We discuss studies supporting the involvement of these regions in selecting among and evaluating option attributes during value judgment and decision-making and when learning from reward feedback. These findings are consistent with roles for these regions in guiding value construction. They argue for a more nuanced understanding of how ventral and lateral prefrontal cortex contribute to discovering and recognizing value, processes that are required under the complex conditions typical of many everyday decisions.

A condition-independent framework for the classification of error-related brain activity.

The cognitive processing and detection of errors is important in the adaptation of the behavioral and learning processes. This brain activity is often reflected as distinct patterns of event-related potentials (ERPs) that can be employed in the detection and interpretation of the cerebral responses to erroneous stimuli. However, high-accuracy cross-condition classification is challenging due to the significant variations of the error-related ERP components (ErrPs) between complexity conditions, thus hindering the development of error recognition systems. In this study, we employed support vector machines (SVM) classification methods, based on waveform characteristics of ErrPs from different time windows, to detect correct and incorrect responses in an audio identification task with two conditions of different complexity. Since the performance of the classifiers usually depends on the salience of the features employed, a combination of the sequential forward floating feature selection (SFFS) and sequential forward feature selection (SFS) methods was implemented to detect condition-independent and condition-specific feature subsets. Our framework achieved high accuracy using a small subset of the available features both for cross- and within-condition classification, hence supporting the notion that machine learning techniques can detect hidden patterns of ErrP-based features, irrespective of task complexity while additionally elucidating complexity-related error processing variations. Graphical abstract A schematic of the proposed approach. (a) EEG recordings in an auditory experiment in two conditions of different complexity. (b) Characteristic event related activity feature extraction. (c) Selection of feature vector subsets for easy and hard conditions corresponding to correct (Class1) and incorrect (Class2) responses. (d) Performance for individual and cross-condition classification.

The Response to the Pandemic: A Hayekian View

Socioeconomic systems should be understood as "complex" phenomena that cannot effectively be controlled or managed through central planning. In general, markets and other decentralised governance mechanisms that rely on competition and signalling better facilitate learning and adaptation in conditions of complexity. Pandemics are also complex systems that often interact in unpredictable ways with socioeconomic processes. Decentralised governance may not be able to coordinate an effective pandemic response due to high transaction costs, but the complexity of the interactions between socioeconomic processes and the COVID-19 means that policymakers may lack the knowledge to discern which interventions will address its health and economic dimensions at a tolerable cost. Expectations for public responses to the pandemic should therefore be modest and recognise that to a large extent, the complexity of the policy challenge means that successful responses may owe as much to accident as to design. That government action, however clumsy, may be necessary in "emergency situations" does not mean that such action should continue to substitute for markets when the emergency has passed. Conversely, the difficulties that governments face in responding to the coronavirus could be multiplied if attempts to plan economic activity became the norm in the post-pandemic age.

Умный город как сложная адаптивная система

As complexity of our political, social and economic environment increases, cities begin to experience new pressures, which makes the transformation from a conventional to a smart city urgent. It also requires re-thinking of what the key elements of the Smart City concept are. The paper does just that, and it provides an updated definition of Smart City. Further, it analyses problems experienced by urban conurbations caused by complexity of the Internet-based global economy and describes a practical solution – to design cities as complex adaptive systems capable of delivering services to citizens and visitors under conditions of complexity. The authors advocate an evolutionary transformation methodology that ensures a minimum of disruptions to city services. The concurrent design of multi-agent real-time schedulers for services and Smart City Ontology, described in this paper, enables the transformation to be carried out by several design teams, each, if necessary, at a different geographical location.

Research of Prognostic Abilities of Local Model of Controlled Process for Traffic Forecasting

The problem of traffic forecasting is analyzed. It is shown that the characteristic feature of transport flows is their non-stationarity. Prognostication of traffic by synthesis of local model of controlled process (LMCP) is proposed and the forecasting method is presented. The advantages of LMCP are the simplicity of mathematical apparatus and the possibility of organizing control in conditions of complexity, uncertainty and non-stationarity of the controlled process. The active accumulation of information about the controlled process in the process of LMCP synthesizing allows to reduce the problem of forecasting with known input and output and unknown external influences to the problem of forecasting with known input and output and absence of external influences, regardless of their number. Therefore, the offered method allows real time traffic forecasting, without the need for preliminary accumulation, processing and analysis of large amounts of data. The obtained results can be used to solution of practical problems arising in traffic control, in particular, to increase the throughput of highways, to reduce congestions and accelerate transport flows.

The Pluralist Foundations of Corporate Law and Governance

For the past several decades, jurists have invested significant efforts in developing the law in general, and private law, in particular, in terms of pluralism. However, the conceptualization of corporate law and governance according to pluralist principles rarely exists. This Article is the first in the legal literature to address this deficiency by providing a unique pluralist theory of corporate governance regimes, based on social systems thinking and the framework of complexity that is rooted in the natural sciences and has since spread to social disciplines, as well. The complexity framework perceives organizations as a subset of social systems that represent a sophisticated web of interconnectivity between human beings and their environment. Organizations are made of interactive, adaptive agents, groups, and departments, that communicate with one another through feedback mechanisms. The features of such exchanges, and their normative implications, may significantly differ between numerous companies that operate in various industries. Accordingly, the complexity framework provides theoretical grounds for skepticism about any policies or structures that are applicable to all times and all contexts. Therefore, rather than perceiving corporate governance as being identically applicable to all corporations, the law must meet the challenge of complexity by designing contextual governance arrangements, following a firm-specific perspective. I believe that the versatility of companies’ characteristics indicates that a “one-size-fits-all” approach should be avoided, and a contextual approach should be embraced when crafting tailor-made law. Furthermore, I argue that in conditions of complexity, corporate governance eco-systems should be designed with a firm-specific perspective that incorporates the effect of the corporation participants’ heterogeneity, the heterogeneity of its internal power relations, and the heterogeneity of industries on their performance. These novel arguments have profound implications for redesigning fundamental legal doctrines—such as fiduciary duties of controlling shareholders; regulation of related party transactions; the company objective; and officers’ duty of care in different legal systems.

Planiranje promena - metodološki okvir za integraciju cirkularnosti u nastavne planove i programe Arhitektonskog fakulteta i građene sredine, TU Delft

This paper introduces a methodological framework to integrate circularity in architectural curricula and the building blocks that led to its conceptualisation. The first block (Part A) examines how complexity has affected learning and architectural education, in particular. The paper departs from the notion that knowledge produces further uncertainty in conditions of critical complexity. Moreover, the highest levels of complexity require the least scientific of approaches. It then examines the main challenges resulting from this shift: one is that learning identifies with individuals' ability to make informed decisions and is now conceptualised as actionable knowledge. Second to that, education should opt for a pedagogy that can support learning through decision making. Architectural education, in particular, should be able to foster a new type of professionalism, where individuals assume accountability for their design decisions that extends beyond the aesthetic realm. But what can drive curricula to become more responsive to the current environmental, social, and political realities? The second block (Part B) looks into the issue of circularity. It examines its relevance to architectural education for its potential to function both as an operational scheme as well as a value system. Furthermore, being a concept in the making, circularity can benefit from academic research but can also support a pedagogy that focuses on helping students learn how to learn. The proposed methodological framework (Part C) builds on these two blocks and on the faculty's research on circularity to develop a scheme of what constitutes content for teaching circularity, how the goals for integrating it into the curricula can be formulated, and what type of pedagogy is suited to support the integration.

Развитие креативности школьников

The article discusses the problem of meaningful differentiation of creativity. Depending on the scope of functioning, two types of creativity are distinguished: subject and social. Subject creativity operates in the context of subject activity, social – in communication. They differ not only in content, complexity and functioning conditions, but also in the dynamics of age development. The author presents the results of an experimental study of creativity in students of primary, middle and senior school age of 248 people in total. It has been established that in all age groups, subject creativity in its development is ahead of social creativity. This is due to the features of the existing education system that is focused on the formation of not social, but subject thinking. Both types of creativity are characterized by uneven age development. However, the change in the pace of age-related development of subject and social creativity is not synchronous.

Task Complexity And Students’ Narrative Writing

This article is a theoretical review writing. It explores some studies on the effects of task complexity on written narrative production under different task complexity conditions by EFL learners at different proficiency levels. Task complexity was manipulated along Robinson’s (2001b) proposed task complexity dimension of Here-and-Now (simple) vs. There-and-Then (complex) in. Accordingly, three specific measures of the written narratives were targeted, i.e. complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF). The results of some experts’ research indicated that with respect to complexity and accuracy, the effects of both task complexity and language proficiency were found significant. More complexity and accuracy were found in the complex task with high-proficiency learners. However, no significant effect of task complexity and language proficiency on fluency was found. The pedagogical implications are discussed with reference to the influence of task complexity and language proficiency on text quality.

INGO affiliate’s dual legitimacy in institutional environments with multiple dimensions for social welfare practice: The case of an INGO in Taiwan and its affiliate in Kyrgyzstan

The dual legitimacy of an international non‐governmental organisation (INGO) affiliate is critical to the INGO’s sustainable development, but few studies are found in the extant literature. Based on Kostova and Zaheer’s theoretical concept elaborating on organisational legitimacy under conditions of complexity, we conducted this study through the extended case method and used the grounded theory approach to examine the case study of the child organisation (CO) in Taiwan and its affiliate in Kyrgyzstan (CKO). Utilising an integrated framework elaborating on the INGO affiliate’s dual legitimacy (IADL), we examined the impact generated from the institutional environments in a multidimensional construct at the macro‐, meso‐, and microlevels. This study also explored the complexity of and interactions with the institutional environment that INGO affiliates might encounter. The findings of this study could serve as a guideline for INGO workers, policy makers and academicians.Key Practitioner Message: • The first article applying the institutional theory and theory of organisational legitimacy on checking dual legitimacy of INGO affiliates through the case study of CO and CKO; • We examined the impact generating from the institutional environments with a multidimensional construct at the macro‐, meso‐, and microlevels through an integrated framework of INGO legitimacy from the perspective of the dual legitimacy that INGO affiliates face; • The findings of this study could be the resources of guideline for INGO workers, policy makers and academicians.

Reliability of a functional magnetic resonance imaging task of emotional conflict in healthy participants.

Task‐based functional neuroimaging methods are increasingly being used to identify biomarkers of treatment response in psychiatric disorders. To facilitate meaningful interpretation of neural correlates of tasks and their potential changes with treatment over time, understanding the reliability of the blood‐oxygen‐level dependent (BOLD) signal of such tasks is essential. We assessed test–retest reliability of an emotional conflict task in healthy participants collected as part of the Canadian Biomarker Integration Network in Depression. Data for 36 participants, scanned at three time points (weeks 0, 2, and 8) were analyzed, and intra‐class correlation coefficients (ICC) were used to quantify reliability. We observed moderate reliability (median ICC values between 0.5 and 0.6), within occipital, parietal, and temporal regions, specifically for conditions of lower cognitive complexity, that is, face, congruent or incongruent trials. For these conditions, activation was also observed within frontal and sub‐cortical regions, however, their reliability was poor (median ICC < 0.2). Clinically relevant prognostic markers based on task‐based fMRI require high predictive accuracy at an individual level. For this to be achieved, reliability of BOLD responses needs to be high. We have shown that reliability of the BOLD response to an emotional conflict task in healthy individuals is moderate. Implications of these findings to further inform studies of treatment effects and biomarker discovery are discussed.

Cognition of complexity and trade-offs in a wildfire-prone social-ecological system

Wildfire risk is a defining environmental challenge throughout much of the American West, as well as in other regions where complex social and ecological dynamics defy simple policy or management solutions. In such settings, diverse forms of land use, livelihoods, and accompanying values provide the conditions for trade-offs (e.g. between protecting homes from uncontrollable fires and restoring low-severity fire to ecosystems as a natural disturbance process). Addressing wildfire risk requires grappling with these trade-offs at multiple levels—given the need for action by individuals as well as by large and diverse stakeholder groups—and under conditions of considerable complexity. We evaluated how individual and collective perception of trade-offs varies as a function of complexity through analysis of the cognitive maps—representations of perceived causal relationships among factors that structure an individual’s understanding of a system—of 111 stakeholders in the Eastern Cascades Ecoregion of central Oregon. Bayesian statistical analysis revealed a strong tendency against perception of trade-offs in individual maps, but not in a collective map that resulted from the aggregation of all individual cognitive maps. Furthermore, we found that lags (the number of factors that mediated the effect of an action on multiple valued outcomes) limited perception of trade-offs. Each additional intervening factor decreased the likelihood of a trade-off by approximately 52% in individual cognitive maps and by 10% in the collective cognitive map. However, the heterogeneity of these factors increased the likelihood of perception of trade-offs, particularly among individual cognitive maps, for which each unit increase of the Shannon diversity index translated into a 20-fold increase in the likelihood of perception of trade-offs. Taken together, these results suggest that features of complexity have distinct effects on individual—and collective-level perception of trade-offs. We discuss implications for wildfire risk decision-making in central Oregon and in other complex wildfire-prone social-ecological systems.