Proteomic study of the synapse has generated an extensive list of molecular components, revealing one of the most complex functional systems currently known to cell biology. While fundamental to neural information processing, behaviour and disease, the molecular organisation of the synapse and its relation to higher-level function has yet to be clearly understood. Neurotransmitter receptor comp...

1. Examples and properties of Complex Adaptive Systems The most complex systems known to us, e.g., living systems, brains, ecologies and human societies, seem to share certain common properties. All these systems are highly nonequilibrium systems, exchanging energy/materials/information with their environment. Within a certain range of environments they are quite robust, and exhibit complex sta...

Sanderson et al’s realist review of strategic purchasing identifies insights from two strands of theory: the economics of organisation and inter-organisational relationships. Our findings from a programme of research conducted by the RESYST (Resilient and Responsive Health Systems) consortium in seven countries echo these results, and add to them the crucial area of org...

The self-organising map (SOM) is finding more and more applications in a wide range of fields, such as clustering, pattern recognition and visualisation. It has also been employed in knowledge management and information retrieval. We propose an alternative to existing 2-dimensional SOM based methods for document analysis. The method, termed Adaptive Topological Tree Structure (ATTS), generates ...

Adaptive hypermedia is a new direction of research within the area of adaptive and user model-based interfaces. Adaptive hypermedia (AH) systems build a model of the individual user and apply it for adaptation to that user, for example, to adapt the content of a hypermedia page to the user's knowledge and goals, or to suggest the most relevant links to follow. AH systems are now used in several...

While by all standards the macroeconomic system is qualified to be a complex adaptive system, mainstream macroeconomics is not capable of demonstrating this feature. Recent applications of agent-based modeling to macroeconomics define a new research direction, which demonstrates how the macroeconomic system can be modeled and studied as a complex adaptive system. This paper shall review the dev...

The broad goal of adaptive techniques is to acquire knowledge dynamically about the search space and to use this knowledge to bias the evolutionary process. The effectiveness of any adaptive technique is therefore determined by the biases being used. In this paper we identify four key biases introduced by adaptive recombination operators and analyse the relationship between these biases. We use...

Six runs were submitted for the Adaptive Filtering track, four on the adaptive filtering task (ok11af??), and two on the routing task (msPUM?). The adaptive filtering system has been somewhat modified from the one used for TREC–10, largely for efficiency and flexibility reasons; the basic filtering algorithms remain similar to those used in recent TRECs. For the routing task, a completely new s...

We propose the Adaptive Leadership Framework for Chronic Illness as a novel framework for conceptualizing, studying, and providing care. This framework is an application of the Adaptive Leadership Framework developed by Heifetz and colleagues for business. Our framework views health care as a complex adaptive system and addresses the intersection at which people with chronic illness interface w...

The object-oriented modeling has been largely adopted in industry in the last years. Several systems built 4 or 5 years ago may need an adaptive maintenance process in order to better satisfy market and customer needs. In this paper1, a model for effort estimation/prediction of the adaptive maintenance is presented. A selection of metrics for effort estimation has been applied to the general mo...