Warren Weaver, writing about the function that science should have in mankind’s developing future, ideas and ideals, proposed to classify scientific problems into ‘problems of simplicity’, ‘problems of disorganised complexity’, and ‘problems of organised complexity’ — the huge complementary class to which all biological, human, and social problems belong. Problems of simplicity have few components and variables and have been extensively addressed in the last 400 years. Problems of disorganised complexity have a huge number of individually erratic components and variables, but possess collective regularities that can be analysed by resourcing to stochastic methods. Yet, problems of organised complexity do not yield easily to classical or statistical treatment since interrelations among phenomenon elements change during its evolution alongside commonly used state variables, affecting behaviour and outcome. Moreover, organisation, the focal point in this complementary class, is still an elusive concept despite the gigantic efforts undertaken since a century ago to tame it. This paper addresses the description, representation and study of phenomena in the ‘problems of organised complexity’ class. Grounded on relational mathematical constructs, a theoretical framework providing operational definitions and schemes for formally modelling organisations and interaction of organisations is introduced. This framework extends the general systems’ concept and provides a novel perspective for addressing organised complexity phenomena as a collection of interacting organisations.

Background: In South Africa, a relatively small number of children and adolescents belong to sports clubs, and adolescent participation in organised sport has steadily declined, especially in recent years. Participation levels in organised sport has decreased during late childhood and, more increasingly, as adolescents grow older. Aim: Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the participation of secondary school learners aged 14 to 16 years in organised sport. Methods: The study was a quantitative and descriptive, cross-sectional design. The study sample was 329 conveniently sampled secondary school learners, males, and females, aged 14 to 16 years from three state schools in Cape Town, Western Cape Province. A researcher-generated, self-administered questionnaire on organised sport participation was developed, piloted, and validated among 44 learners of similar background, who did not participate in the main study. The statistical software, SPSS version 27, was used to capture and analyse the research data. The level of statistical significance for the study was set at p < 0.05. Results: A total of 66.9% of participants in the study sample participated in organised sport. Low but significant correlations were reported between gender and participation in organised sport (r = 0.22; p < 0.001), gender and friend participation in organised sport (r = 0.24; p < 0.001), participants participation and sibling participation in organised sport (r = 0.23; p < 0.001), participants participation and friend participation in organised sport (r = 0.36; p < 0.001), and between participant participation and parental participation in organised sport (r = 0.17; p = 0.003). Conclusion: Adolescent participation in organised sport was lower in the present circumstances compared to participation in the past three years. Adolescent males had higher participation levels in organised sport compared to adolescent females. There is an urgent need for solutions to counteract the low levels of adolescent participation in organised sport, especially in adolescent females.

I review previous attempts, including recent ones, to introduce technical aspects of digital information and computation into the discussion of ethics. I survey some limitations and advantages of these attempts to produce guiding principles at different scales. In particular, I briefly introduce and discuss questions, approaches, challenges, and limitations based on, or related to, simulation, information theory, integrated information, computer simulation, intractability, algorithmic complexity, and measures of computational organisation and sophistication. I discuss and propose a set of features that ethical frameworks must possess in order to be considered well-grounded, both in theoretical and methodological terms. I will show that while global ethical frameworks that are uncomputable are desirable because they provide non-teleological direction and open-ended meaning, constrained versions should be able to provide guidelines at more local and immediate time scales. In connection to the ethics of artificial intelligence, one point that must be underscored about computational approaches is that (General) AI should only embrace an ethical framework that we humans are willing to adopt. I think that such a framework is possible, taking the form of a general and universal (in the sense of computation) framework built from first computational principles.