Welcome to the site of Ranking, Repair and Feedback!

I decided to write a non-fiction book with the title and subtitle RANKING – The reality, illusion and manipulation of objectivity.  The book discusses the Hows and Whys of our love and fear of making ranks and being ranked through many real life examples to be viewed from three different angles (reality, illusion and manipulation) of objectivity. Ranking converts scientific theories to everyday’s experience by raising and answering such question as:

  • Are college ranking lists objective?
  • How to rank and rate states based on their fragility, corruption or even happiness?
  • How to find the most relevant web pages?
  • How to rank employees?

Life and society is really complex, consequently our message is not so simple such as ”Ranking is good!” or ”Ranking is bad!”. Since we permanently rank ourselves and others and are also being ranked, the message is twofold: how to prepare the possible most objective ranking and how to accept that ranking does  not necessarily reflects our real values and achievements. The reader will understand our difficulties to navigate between objective and subjective and gets help to identify and modify her place in real and virtual communities by combining our human intelligence with computational techniques.

Feedback: How to Destroy or Save the World?

I am working on the book to be published by Springer

The use of feedback control in technology goes back at least to the Hellenistic period when a water clock was constructed. Feedback was the central concept of Norbert Wiener’s half-forgotten Cybernetics. Positive feedback, on the one hand, catalyzes growth; on the other hand, it may amplify minor initial differences leading to such dramatic catastrophes as epileptic seizures, massive earthquakes and tsunamis, climate catastrophes, and social unrest. Conversely, negative feedback is known to have stabilizing effects. There is a narrow border between destruction and prosperity: to ensure reasonable growth but avoid existential risk, we must find the fine-tuned balance between positive and negative feedback. The book offers an exciting non-technical intellectual journey around applying feedback control to the emergence and management of crises from dynamical diseases to natural and social disasters.

Unlocking ‘Feedback’: How Small Actions Can Shape Our World’s Destiny”

In a world where every action, no matter how small, holds the potential to create ripples of change, I find myself at the helm of a new journey as the co-editor of this page. Join me as we uncover the pages of ‘Feedback,’ a book that unravels the complexities of saving or endangering our world.
My name is Regina Révay and I am helping Péter in his new book. I am a biomedical engineer student at BUTE (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) and I give you a taste of his upcoming book.

So far in the previous books, Ranking and Repair you can read about various topics. Ranking is a book that explores the concept of ranking, its implications, and its manipulation through real-life examples. It provides insights into how to create objective rankings while acknowledging the complexities of ranking in both real and virtual communities, helping readers navigate the interplay between objectivity and subjectivity. Repair on the other hand is about embracing both complex systems theory and social psychology, in one book, which presents a fresh approach to resource management, covering material possessions and human connections. Offering guidance to various generations, the book navigates the ‘replace or repair’ dilemma, empowering readers to mend personal relationships, adapt to change, and contribute to a mending world, while exploring the journey from a disposable culture to one focused on repair.

Now the new book, titled FEEDBACK – How to Destroy or Save the World? is about our impact in the world. The reader can learn it through historical and current examples from Norbert Wiener’s Dream to the Canadian wildfires in 2023. If you want to know what is feedback and feedback control now this is your time. You can get to know these:

  • feedback and feedback control
  • negative and positive feedback
  • feedback through technology, biological systems or climate change
  • increasing return, stock market crashes, hyperinflation

    So why would I recommend it? Because this book guides the reader through a complex topic through well-illustrated examples from a new perspective.