Using sugars and tea as their food, the ‘little brewers’, which consist of yeasts and bacteria symbiotic relationship, formed a squishy cellulosic mat called SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeasts).
Look around us. You see buildings, roads, cars, motorcycles, people with spectacles and colourful lenses, planes flying up in the air, high-speed trains zooming around, and many to be listed.
Just look over your shoulder to the person sitting next to you, and you may notice blue-eyes staring back at you. As we look around we may notice the variation among the people around us either with black, brown, blue or even green eyes. Additionally, there are other striking variation in other features as well. Some people may have curly or straight, wavy, thick or thin hair. Some with fair, tanned or dark skinned. There are a lot of possible feature varieties.
Wouldn’t it be great if food plastic packaging able to change colour to warn us about the freshness of the food? How about a smart protective equipment that can change colour as indicator to over exposure to bacteria and viruses that are commonly present in the hospital?
Operational complexity enhanced performance in Malaysia Electrical and Electronics (E&E) Manufacturing industry. The finding surprised a group of researchers from USM and UTM initially. However, when looking through the lenses of complexity science, an organization behaved based on complex adaptive system (CAS). An organization (consists of people like you and me) when faced with CHANGE would somehow adapt through self-learning, organize, experiment and exploration. ‘Edge of chaos’ (complexity) occurs when there is a change or disruption to the normal routine in operation. According to the CAS, performance is optimum at the ‘edge of chaos’. But, as complexity increases in tandem with performance, it will reach a threshold and turn ugly like an inverse U shape graph.
