Sunday, January 20, 2008

On the health of complex systems

Somewhat related to my "nature of wellness" post is the general question of what is health.

I've known Dorron Levy since November of 1994, and for almost the whole time he's devoted his career to figuring out how to tell whether a system is healthy, with the goal of enabling early detection, which allows solving a problem before its consequences spread, becoming more costly and eventually becoming urgent.

His work that's been published is about computer-based systems, but the underlying theoretical work is quite generalized, and I expect it'll lead to sophisticated early detection of human health problems. He's started a blog, SystemHealth.blogspot.com, to lay out his thinking in easy-to-digest chapters. If you're at all interested in how things work, you might enjoy reading it.

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