A number of Global X-Network members collaborated with Yoshiki Yamagata from X-Center Tokyo (FoXc-J) to write, edit and publish a Springer Book title “Urban Resilience”
The book is on urban resilience – how to design and operate cities that can withstand major threats such as natural disasters and economic downturns and how to recover from them. It is a collection of latest research results from two separate but collaborating research groups, namely, researchers in urban design and those on general resilience theory. The book systematically deals with the core aspects of urban resilience: systems, management issues and populations.
The taxonomy can be broken down into threats, systems, resilience cycles and recovery types in the context of urban resilience. It starts with a discussion of systems resilience models, focusing on the central idea that resilience is a moving average of costs (a set of trajectories in a two-player game paradigm). The second section explores management issues, including planning, operating and emergency response in cities with specific examples such as land-use planning and carbon-neutral scenarios for urban planning. The next section focuses on urban dwellers and specific people-related issues in the context of resilience. Agent-based simulation of behavior and perception-based resilience, as well as brand crisis management are representative examples of the topics discussed. A further section examines systems like public utilities – including managing power supplies, cyber-security issues and models for pandemics. It concludes with a discussion of the future challenges and risks facing complex systems, for example in resilient power grids, making it essential reading for a wide range of researchers and policymakers.
The X-Press publishes it’s first book “Confronting Complexity” by John L. Casti, Roger D. Jones, Michael J. Pennock
Ms. Dipl.-Ing. Josephine Yilan Liu is a founding partner of URBAN FUTURE Global Conference (UFGC) – the world’s largest meeting point for City Changers and the biggest event focusing entirely on how to make cities more sustainable. Her role has been to focus on initiating futuristic thinking, as well as to develop visionary ideas and collaborations increasing change in existing industry practice, and to identify and invent new opportunity for growth.
Josephine studied Environmental Design in Beijing, China, and took a master course in Graz, Austria majoring in Architecture and Project Management. She has been living in Austria since 2008.
As an urban planner and architect, Josephine works diligently to promote a holistic and integrated ‘design thinking’ approach (as an alternative to analytical thinking) in the practice of sustainable urban development. She connects and leverages knowledge, resources and capital to realize innovative, sustainable and resilient urban solutions, in order to solve pressing social and environmental issues.
By planning, implementing and show-casing the approach of using design thinking to solve problems across industries, she hopes to create positive social impact at scale with technology, and provoke positive social cycles instead of resistance or fear in our ever more connected and rapidly changing environment.
Turku Complex Systems Institute (TCSI)founded by Markku Wilenius
Is Focused on:
- Developing methods and frameworks to tackle complex future challenges in systems way
- Working together with trans-disciplinary teams at universities, companies and organizations across the globe, TCSI insights will hopefully lead to new interesting questions while moving us closer to developing solutions to some of the most pressing issues we face.
- The Institute is hosted at the University of Turku but, from the outset, will be highly internationalized, with foreseeable activities in Finland, Canada, US and worldwide.
Moti Shabtai, President
As president of Qognify, Moti Shabtai brings vast experience to this role as he has been involved in the physical security industry for over 20 years. Moti has been with Qognify since its inception as NICE Systems Physical Security Business Unit and has been instrumental in laying the foundation for its evolution into its current form. At NICE Systems, he led R&D, Product Management, and Marketing and Business Development operations for the complete product line and oversaw sales and operations in the Americas. Moti has been involved in dozens of high profile projects worldwide. He graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B. SC. T.E.EE from Tel Aviv University and Summa Cum Laude with an MBA from Ben Gurion University in Israel. http://www.qognify.com
Keynote Speaker at the April 2016 Global X-Network Conference
by Sergio Miranda-da-Cruz ‘MdC Institute of Advanced Studies’
April 2016 Global X-Network Conference Presentation
Presented at the Annual Global X-Network Conference April 12-13 2016
As Chief Urban Designer for the City of New York, Alexandros Washburn understands one key thing about designing successful cities: it doesn’t work until it works for the pedestrian.
White Paper by Dr. Leena Ilmola presented at CESUN conference June 2014
Presented at the Global X-Network Annual Conference in Vienna April 2014
Presented at the Global X-Network Annual Conference in Vienna April 2014
Presented at the Global X-Network Annual Conference in Vienna April 2014
Presented at the Global X-Network Annual Conference in Vienna April 2014
Suppose
- You could predict which incumbent presidents would win or lose re-election?
- You could predict which genres of pop stars would next rule the airwaves and movie screens?
- You could predict the ups and downs of the economy?
- You could identify the peaks in popularity for major sports, like baseball and basket¬ball?
- You could predict the next big thing in fashion?
- You could predict when a country would be peaceful and when it would be beset with labor strikes, protest demonstrations and war?
- How much would this ability be worth to companies, governments, cultural leaders and every person affected by such events?
Conventional Error
It is no accident that “futurists” of all types (including economists and political analysts) fail at prediction. They get excited at major peaks in society and predict all kinds of wonderful things at the very moment a downturn is imminent. Then they get cynical at major bottoms in society and predict doom and gloom when in fact an upturn is just around the corner. As a result,
- Investors take risks at major tops and pull in their horns at major bottoms-just when they should be doing the opposite.
- Armies are bloated and girded for battle when no wars occur and find themselves dilapidated and unprepared when wars break out-just when they should be doing the opposite.
- Governments spend too much money in boom times and have no money to spend in bad times-just when they should be doing the opposite. Clearly the failure of futurists to anticipate change, indeed their long record of pre¬dicting pretty much the opposite of what actually occurs, has immense social and personal costs.
The problem with almost all social prediction is that it is based upon the extrapolation of present trends into the future. It always fails. Why? Because trends change. There has never been a useful approach to anticipating changes in social trends-until now.
All that is wrong with social prediction today is due to one simple error: the pre¬sumption that “events” cause social moods and trends. This assumption, in fact, like the predictions it produces, is exactly backward.
The Solution
Most people think that the outcome of elections causes the mood of the country to change. The opposite is true: The mood of the country determines the outcome of elections.
Most people think that a plethora of happy popular music on the charts makes the public happy and that a plethora of depressing popular music on the charts makes the public depressed. The opposite is true: A happy public pushes happy songs up the charts, and a depressed public pushes depressing songs up the charts.
Most people think that a productive economy makes people optimistic and that an unproductive economy makes people pessimistic. The opposite is true: Optimistic people make a productive economy, and pessimistic people make an unproductive one. Most people think that peace makes people content and tolerant while wars make people angry, fearful and patriotic. The opposite is true: Content and tolerant people make peace, while angry, fearful and patriotic people make war.
It sounds so simple, yet no one in the social sciences has made this case-until now. Mood Matters tells the story of why human events happen the way they do and not some other way, showing how it is the collective mood of a population, its social mood, that biases the events that we can expect to see. If you want to understand how information flows from the individual human impulse to herd together in groups to the overall social mood in a population that gives rise to events, read this book!
(Adapted from private correspondence with Robert Prechter)
We live in a world more complex and larger in scale than our forbearers could have ever imagined. Our technology-dependent society has become a dizzying, interconnected web as unstable as a house of cards…
All it may take to send civilization crashing back to a preindustrial level is a nudge from what theorists like John L. Casti call an “X-Event” (short for “extreme event”), a rare and surprising event that yields extreme consequences. When the X-Event hits, finance, communication, and travel will halt. The flow of food, electricity, medicine, and clean water will cease. What will you do?
In X-EVENTS: The Collapse of Everything (William Morrow; June 12, 2012), renowned complexity scientist, John L. Casti, shows how our world has become impossibly intricate. Technology is advancing at an exponential rate and so too is our reliance on that technology in every aspect of our lives. Yet it is a rule of both mathematics and human nature that higher and higher levels of complexity make a system correspondingly more fragile and vulnerable to sudden, spectacular collapse.
Fascinating and chilling, X-EVENTS is a provocative tour of the catastrophic outlier scenarios that could send us back to the horse-and-buggy era in a flash: global financial “black swans”; the world-wide crash of the internet; the end of oil; nuclear winter; “nano-plagues”; robot uprisings; electromagnetic-pulse bombs; pandemic viruses; and many more.
X-EVENTS is a provocative and terrifying wake-up call to all of us who think our complex society can continue growing without consequence. It’s no wonder the book was one of the hottest books at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair, selling at auction in Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Russia, Portugal, Brazil, and more.
About the Author
JOHN L. CASTI, Ph.D., is Co-founder of The X-Center, a Vienna-based research institute focusing on human-caused extreme events and how to anticipate them. Previously, he was a Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, where he headed an initiative for the study of Extreme Events in Human Society. He worked for many years at the Santa Fe Institute and the RAND Corporation, as well as serving on the faculties of Princeton, the University of Arizona, and New York University. Formerly editor of the journal Complexity, Casti received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Southern California. He lives in Vienna, Austria.
TESTIMONIALS
“I am an assiduous reader of John Casti’s books. He is a real scientific intellectual.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan
“Casti provides thought-provoking speculation on the future of civilization.”
—Kirkus Reviews
About the Book
X-EVENTS: The Collapse of Everything
By John L. Casti
William Morrow Hardcover
Publication Date: June 12, 2012
Price: $26.99; 336 Pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062088284
E-book ISBN: 9780062088307
Xevents book from website – PDF Download
This book serves as the final report of the Game Changers project lead by John Casti and coordinated by Leena Ilmola. The project was established towards the end of 2009 as a part of the Extreme Events in Human Society initiative at IIASA, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Laxenburg, Austria).
White Paper: The Space of Uncertainty – PDF Download
HowtheWorldWorks – PDF Download
Game changer project – PDF Download