cut—from those in the realm of disease outbreak detection or malfunction monitoring in
other types of dynamic systems (such as car engines). Even within a well-specified
human ecosystem—a village or a household—it is difficult to determine precisely ex ante
a set of ‘outputs’ to be expected from a given set of inputs: adaptive and agile systems
such as human groups will produce ‘anomalies’ provided the model forecasting expected
behaviours or outputs is excessively stringent.