Health::Tension

The proposition is that an organism is to be considered 'in a condition of proper health' if it is in a yet to be more narrowly defined state of equilibrium.

One of the most crucial underlying parameters is 'tension' within a tensegrity model.

Then, basically, the description of the perceivable/measurable world may be reduced to physical terms that should grasp anything relevant to the issue at hand (there is even plenty room for the 'spiritual' or the (nonsensical) 'supernatural' if one tends to share the assumption of dark energy).

Health::Posture

The hypothesis to be pursued:

Posture is the entity that - within the observable realm - influences health the most.

Health::Progress

In no way does evaluation of progress - technological that (almost) exclusively is - into account whether 'health' is affected (the assurance that there is no 'negative' impact is brought forward in any case and is thus redundant).

If one follows KEVIN KELLY, quote: " Technology as a whole system, or what I call the technium, seems to be a dominant force in the culture. Indeed at times it seems to be the only force — the only lasting force — in culture.", it is even worse.

Body::Mind

Following up on fragmentation as a factor of conditions of 'ill-health', I hypothesize that industrialized medicine, presumably as a means to boost profits, encourages their 'objects' to learn that self-observation is useless.

Psychologists

Two men are in a hot-air balloon. They drift into a dense cloud bank and are stuck there for hours. Finally as they emerge they look around at the ground below in hopes of figuring out their location.

They see a man in a garden and shout down to him.

"Hello down there! Can you tell us where we are?"

"The man below replies, "You're in a hot-air balloon."

The first man looks at his partner and comments, "Just our luck, a psychologist."

The partner asks, "Why do you say he's a psychologist?"

The first man answers, "Well, what he said was obviously true, but it didn't help at all."

seen at

Fragmentation

Fragmentation of life (both in space and time) that is not compensated for (if at all possible) is closely connected to ill-health.

The term 'cause' is avoided at will, as it considered too simplistic to interpret complex networks of events in a fashion heavily dependent on cause-consequence 'relations'.

Health::Wording

At the time being, this is more questions than answers.

What exactly do 'illness' and 'ill health' imply?
What is the etymology and what differences across languages do exist?

Health::Approach

The term may not be applied to a single organism, as the current entry in Wikipedia (as of 08/07/07) suggests, quote: "Health is the level of functional and/or metabolic efficiency of an organism at both the micro(cellular) and macro(social) level. In the medical field, health is commonly defined as an organism's ability to efficiently respond to challenges (stressors) and effectively restore and sustain a "state of balance," known as homeostasis."

Thus, health, at a top level, may be circumscribed as "A state of equilibrium".

Whilst this introduces terms yet undefined, it more emphasizes that 'health' can not be defined on an individual level but as a characteristic of a whole system.

Health::Definition

Polling

"Do you think Iraq is or is not involved in a civil war at this time?"

Err ... ?§#&!!

But there was an outcome:

42% -"Yes"
56% -"No"

From an ABC poll.

And yes, it is in the questionaire.

TiddlyWiki

Great. Now how to integrate it with blogger.xml ?!

Fei-Yue Wang

Having stumbled across an apparently innocent article on 'social computing' (link), I soon realized that one of the authors (Fei-Yue Wang, Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of Arizona) also published on “Artificial Intelligence for Homeland Security” (link, with Hsinchun Chen, also University of Arizona)

What else (among other stuff that fits well)?

Application of a Decomposed Support Vector Machine Algorithm in Pedestrian Detection from a Moving Vehicle by Hong Qiao, Fei-Yue Wang, and Xianbin Cao (link to IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI-2005))

Fast Pedestrian Detection Using Color Information by Yan Wu Xu, X.B. Cao, Hong Qiao, Fei-Yue Wang (ISI-2006)
Covering Based Granular Computing for Conflict Analysis by William Zhu, Fei-Yue Wang (ISI-2006; Surveillance, Bioterrorism, and Emergency Response)
A Multiclass Classifier to Detect Pedestrians and Acquire Their Moving Styles by D. Chen, Xianbin Cao, Hong Qiao, Fei-Yue Wang (ISI-2006)

Tiananmen, Kent State, Baghdad - all automatic.

It is worth noting that the person in focus is said to have been involved in the Chinese government's long-term technology planning.

The question to be further investigated is how the US government gives input (via funding) to developing means of suppresion of democracy to have them employed in China to gain empirical evidence on the least immersive but still promising methodology.

Followup needed.