But they can be accounted for by chaos theory, which is another matter altogether.
The other is chaos theory, which explains how a tiny disturbance can cascade into a large effect.
As history has repeatedly shown, the course of international politics is a notable exemplar of chaos theory.
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Bob, who you may know is the host of On The Media (pbs), and the author of the prescient Chaos Theory, has a new book out.
Economics is prone to conditions that call to mind chaos theory: Given time and a sequence of interacting elements, two seemingly similar situations can lead to very different outcomes.
The verdict: While it looks like he's gunning for the world, he's more likely borrowing from chaos theory, throwing dollars at the ceiling, waiting to see which ones stick.
For a more recent, if similarly calamitous, manifestation of the power of chaos theory, consider how different the world would be today had not a devout, soft-spoken Saudi Arabian engineer inherited a significant fortune from his estranged father.
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He had been working in the fashionable mathematical field of chaos theory an explanation in search of a problem when he came across a suitable problem in the form of mountains of data accumulated by various ocean and atmospheric scientists of his acquaintance.
Much theoretical work has been done to understand and model such changes, but the lesson I draw from chaos theory is that recognizing such changes in hindsight may be simple, but predicting them in advance is and will continue to be extremely difficult.
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This crisis begins, in classic chaos-theory fashion, with a trivial event along the 100-mile railroad track that moves most coal out of the Powder River Basin.
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The narrative he builds is one that compels us to become more comfortable with math and statistics, one that suggests we should take advantage of machines where possible, and one in which we cannot lose the human element guiding the analysis if we want to avoid catastrophic chaos-theory driven failures to which machines are susceptible.
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An anthropocentric humanism finds expression in this novel in the very sensual pleasures of life and in the theory of chaos, pictured as a waterwheel with an irregular spin that creates a butterfly-like pattern which is impossible to predict but beautiful to behold.
Others believe that America has interests abroad, but that it lacks the means to promote them: Russian instability, Chinese human wrongs and Bosnian chaos are all intractable, this theory goes.
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One theory is that, in the chaos of the forest fire and its aftermath, the drives have simply been mislaid.
According to Piet Swiegers, manager of the nearby Klein-Aus Vista lodge, the most likely theory is that they were German and South African military horses abandoned in the chaos of the First World War.
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