Thursday, August 6, 2015

The episodic century


"the last 50 years of the previous century. Why? We live in an age of rapid-fire change because over the past 200 years the comparatively straightforward Industrial Revolution has morphed into an era of nonlinear change punctuated with tipping points. The machinery of the current century is a collection of interconnected complex, rather than smooth-running, systems. Gradual and linear change no longer happens. Instead, ‘‘progress’’ moves in bursts—fits-and-starts marked by waves of unimaginable flashes, sparks, booms, bubbles, shocks, extremes, bombs, and leaps. Half probabilistic and half nonlinear deterministic, the twenty-first century is defined by intersecting long-tailed distributions, rather than independent and isolated Normal distributions. Episodic phenomena behave erratically and have no average or expected values."

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