#heterogeneity

Such homogenous supremacy. Such heterogeneous bedazzlement.

What united these problems, Rittel said, was first that the actual problem was always indeterminate. It was hard to tell, in other words, if you had diagnosed the problem correctly, because if you dug deeper — why does this problem occur? — you could always find a more fundamental cause than the one you were addressing. These problems also didn’t have true or false answers, only better or worse solutions. They were not, indeed, like math problems. There was no definitive test of a solution, no proof. More effort might not always lead to something better. There were other ways these problems were not like math. They had intrinsically high stakes, wrote Rittel and a colleague, Melvin M. Webber, when they published Rittel’s talk as a paper. Any solution implemented would leave “traces” that couldn’t be undone. “One cannot build a freeway to see how it works, and then easily correct it after unsatisfactory performance,” they wrote. “Large public works are effectively irreversible, and the consequences they generate have long half-lives.” The designer had no “right to be wrong,” because these problems mattered. Human lives, or the quality of human lives, were on the line. Rittel called them “wicked problems.” They were “wicked” not because they were unethical or evil, but because they were malignant and incorrigible and hard. There did exist simple problems that didn’t rise to this level. But “now that [the] relatively easy problems have been dealt with,” the problems worth designers’ time were the wickedest ones. The hardest problems of heterogeneous social life called for designers’ exclusive focus and concentration. For Rittel, design problems’ wickedness meant that they could never be subject to a single process of resolution. There could be no one “method.” Textbooks tended to break down, say, engineering work into “phases”: “gather information,” “synthesize information and wait for the creative leap,” et cetera. But for wicked problems, Rittel wrote, “this type of scheme does not work.” Understanding the problem required understanding its context. It wasn’t possible to gather full information before starting to formulate solutions. Nothing was linear or consistent; designers didn’t, couldn’t, think that way. If there was any describing the design process, it was as an argument. Design was a multiplicity of critical voices batting a problem around unknown terrain until it formed itself, or not, into some kind of resolution.

Extracellular matrix sensing regulates intratumoral heterogeneity of autophagic flux - Research

Single-Cell Sequencing Unravels Pancreatic Cancer: Novel Technologies Reveal Novel Aspects of Cellular Heterogeneity and Inform Therapeutic Strategies - Research

Single-cell analysis reveals HPV-induced keratinocyte heterogeneity in cervical cancer

studying abroad for the first time made me reflect on globalism, which describes how interconnected the world has become through ideology, money, and economic services; this in turn allows information, culture, and influence to spread rapidly across borders.