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Resilience.org aims to support building community resilience in a world of multiple emerging challenges: the decline of cheap energy, the depletion of critical resources like water, complex environmental crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, and the social and economic issues which are linked to these. We like to think of the site as a community library with space to read and think, but also as a vibrant café in which to meet people, discuss ideas and projects, and pick up and share tips on how to build the resilience of your community, your household, or yourself.

At AS IF Center, we are rebuilding these cross-disciplinary connections while keeping a balance between the two cultures. As artists, it's important that we do more than just serve science, and that we can follow our own creative paths.  And as scientists, it's important we maintain accuracy and critical thinking when conducting, and communicating about, science.

Forum for the Future is a non-profit organisation working globally with business and government to create a sustainable future. We have 15 years' experience inspiring new thinking, building creative partnerships and developing practical innovations to change our world. We aim to transform the critical systems that we all depend on, such as food, energy and finance, to make them fit for the challenges of the 21st century.

Digital transformation is a multi-disciplinary topic-perhaps one of the most complex and confusing of our time. The purpose of this film is to make digital transformation easier to understand and start a conversation about what kind of digital future we actually want. Is the future complicated and inevitable, or can each of us create the future they envision? Technology is a curse and a blessing, but this depends on each of us thinking about the future in a constructive but critical way. 

Two threads run through the story of how I came to develop the field of system dynamics. First, everything I have ever done has converged on system dynamics. Second, at many critical moments, when opportunity knocked, I was willing to walk through the open door to what was on the other side.

The problem is that we use these powers in historically/culturally path dependent ways so the tensions become more acute. The rationalism of the nation-state as a system-hierarchy is good when talking to other states (treaty writing as per Kyoto or the Treaty of Rome), or when universal rules are needed (eg tax collection) but bad at the particular (eg helping troubled families). Passion-populism is critical for mobilisation but can also be corrosive as it fails to offer any real solutions (see UKIP et al). Creative-civic power is good at adapting resources, institutions, and policies to particular needs or ambitions but it is bad at universal welfare and justice. It can also be just as failure prone as passion politics and hierarchy (it's hard and complex to confront particular, local and personal challenges).

While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Traditionally, such highbrow nonsense has come couched in big words and fancy rhetoric, but more and more we see it presented instead in the guise of big data and fancy algorithms - and these quantitative, statistical, and computational forms of bullshit are those that we will be addressing in the present course.