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Author Archives: antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor
Two articles on polycentric control – John Flach (2023
Link: https://blogs.wright.edu/learn/johnflach/2023/06/29/a-polycentric-control-story/
Link: https://blogs.wright.edu/learn/johnflach/2023/06/18/polycentric-control-and-requisite-variety/
Neil Theise – new book on complexity – podcast interviews etc
https://www.neiltheiseofficial.com/media
Transformations Conference 2023
https://www.transformationscommunity.org/2023-conference/overview
Sydney, Australia + Prague, Czechia | Wed July, 12th – Fri July, 14th
Online | Tue July, 11th – Fri July, 14th
Portland, Maine, USA | Mon July, 17th – Wed July, 19th
Connect with inspiring transdisciplinary scholars, practitioners and creatives working on transformations towards regenerative and just futures. We favour short presentations, long conversations, and practical workshops.
Systems, Volume 11, Issue 6 (June 2023) – 51 articles
Your regular reminder that MDPI has sometimes been listed as a ‘borderline predatory’ publisher. I’m not equipped to make definitive judgements on that, but a scan of these titles does not, to me, suggest a hugely coherent and relevant body of work…
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/11/6
Cover Story (view full-size image): China’s response to COVID-19 is worth learning and discussing. We summarize the characteristics and process of emergency resource allocation (ERA) in public health emergencies by analyzing the situation in China. Firstly, we identified intelligent technologies that affect ERA based on China’s relevant research in recent years. Then, we constructed an intelligent ERA mechanism from the following four aspects: medical intelligence, management intelligence, decision-making intelligence, and supervision intelligence. Further, we evaluated the impact of intelligent technologies on ERA and ranked their criticality. Finally, we provide direction and suggestions for further research on the application of intelligent technology in ERA. View this paper
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/11/6
Context Changes Everything – How Constraints Create Coherence – Juarrero (2023) – free book
link https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545662/context-changes-everything/
https://watermark.silverchair.com/book_9780262374774.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAApQwggKQBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKBMIICfQIBADCCAnYGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMhOmNjeoB5CdRLwBvAgEQgIICRwFwQt2_hrOP3xwC9TK_JoJ4exZ841ZXM3hq2pFeLy0UaEYo3B0AteUfIDwtgu_papsOqHTgzrt-0KVWbcaJaPxGOsRB9Cuo4wb04xBt_7YvuSJLnlEuYB6cUA3dRxnUbvWuLWjv2uXlGbAal2UsQZSduUX7JNDWNm8psu2hgjEK5URlVe9haKcJas-8d7W6P-3T7XlaA01pEdxT5fEOl1UxLcOjR42bDS0wecO1KwPTpQaku8SLbP2sFFmrra1W7L-zev14QMjSPbRlZ5WOL_5avM7Nkl3va9I7zPKcChLevRA6KnOORKgEWxBHSzqcCVcpx47BdUJ_VzAF_9YdbEMY_YqoIrANiiiKJ_rtXmBSJ99vcFMW8ygMCq0_365vY2bhJXIDzwXDUViRAdEjdSDmkXNtkeietdMe9igyKoWHE8qW8wbfBHl9th-cpfT9V1RMJFsrPhkuoyHmB8Y0UEfzK63yfiWOR87e4UF0Uoakb02QARSyFMcROJfRlXv_BRJm8zXwz55lwsGrjghibonYG1IA1kHXLtcbcmWw8-arBMRIFem7KRyJFJkpAXov2sFDYplYVhqSlOesZk4tiQw2l808KlbOL5j8EwFrhyuGp-9WuDCvrjX9fJveFDpWzb_Z1MoFCMzNkSVoykOaXf1UpoBWB0_Ddcw8JLt7Lzp8m_Z8AzqDE6ECRTnM4XYG5oTsfiowvlhRwQz2ppTiE3fOfGEtsATub5CE6T9zbJLthwj86twsXL10b5fTOsuncSIGIxhesOI
The 9th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Perspective in IS development (STPIS’23) – submission deadline 4 August 2023, conference 27-28 October 2023, University of Portsmouth, UK
Please consider submitting by 4th August 2023 for:
The 9th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Perspective in IS development (STPIS’23). This year, STPIS will take place at the University of Portsmouth, UK. You can click here to submit your paper.
Important dates:
- Initial submission deadline: 4th August 2023Author notification : 15th September 2023Registration deadline: To be announcedCamera ready deadline: 1st October 2023Conference dates: 27-28 October 2023
All deadlines are 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (AoE) (UTC -12).
Dead rats, dopamine, performance metrics, and peacock tails: proxy failure is an inherent risk in goal-oriented systems – John, Caldwell, McCoy and Braganza (2023)
Paper (sadly paywalled):
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/dead-rats-dopamine-performance-metrics-and-peacock-tails-proxy-failure-is-an-inherent-risk-in-goaloriented-systems/89408A43F6D14BFD368FE5225A573032
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. For example, when standardized test scores in education become targets, teachers may start ‘teaching to the test’, leading to breakdown of the relationship between the measure–test performance–and the underlying goal–quality education. Similar phenomena have been named and described across a broad range of contexts, such as economics, academia, machine-learning, and ecology. Yet it remains unclear whether these phenomena bear only superficial similarities, or if they derive from some fundamental unifying mechanism. Here, we propose such a unifying mechanism, which we label proxy failure. We first review illustrative examples and their labels, such as the ‘Cobra effect’, ‘Goodhart’s law’, and ‘Campbell’s law’. Second, we identify central prerequisites and constraints of proxy failure, noting that it is often only a partial failure or divergence. We argue that whenever incentivization or selection is based on an imperfect proxy measure of the underlying goal, a pressure arises which tends to make the proxy a worse approximation of the goal. Third, we develop this perspective for three concrete contexts, namely neuroscience, economics and ecology, highlighting similarities and differences. Fourth, we outline consequences of proxy failure, suggesting it is key to understanding the structure and evolution of goal-oriented systems. Our account draws on a broad range of disciplines, but we can only scratch the surface within each. We thus hope the present account elicits a collaborative enterprise, entailing both critical discussion as well as extensions in contexts we have missed.
Images from tweet thread (linked above)
MAKING SENSE OF MANAGING & DECISION-MAKING & COMPLEXITY – John Mortimer, Impro Consulting
https://www.improconsult.co.uk/service-design-systems-thinking-blog/systemic-design-framework-complex
David Chapman comment on Walter Pitts
link at https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1672763417948745728
The piece he’s commenting on is in Nautlius, ‘the man who tried to redeem the world with logic’, by Amanda Gefter – I’m sure I can’t find it here but (once again demonstrating that search for syscoi.com is rubbish), I can’t find it.
CLIMATE FEEDBACK LOOPS PROJECT – Alliance of World Scientists, Oregon State University
https://scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu/climate_feedbacks
Nonequilibrium thermodynamics of the asymmetric Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model – Aguilera, Igarashi and Simazaki (2023)
Nature Communications volume 14, Article number: 3685 (2023) Cite this article
paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39107-y
Our new paper with Masanao Igarashi and
about the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of large, disordered networks (the asymmetric SK model) was just published in Nature Communications 😀 https://nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39107-y… Thread about the main ideas of the paper 
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Brain circuits are generally asymmetrically connected, displaying reentrant connectivity and generating self-exciting activity. Perhaps one of the first to study it was Cajal’s student and cybernetic pioneer Lorente de Nó
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Lorente de Nó participated in the first Cybernetics meetings hosted by Norbert Wiener, who in the first chapter of his seminar book realizes that such asymmetric structures must be governed by the physics of nonequilibrium, irreversible processes
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A classic example of an irreversible process is a cup breaking. A movie of a cup breaking feels perfectly natural, but watching the same movie backward is strongly unintuitive. This is because of the emergence of an arrow of time of the entropy dissipated by the cup shattering
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Neural and other networks can display a similar process. Networks in equilibrium (A) have attractors that organize the activity of the network, but behaviour is reversible. Networks out of equilibrium (B) can display interesting irreversible phenomena, like oscillations and chaos
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Thermodynamically, out-of-equilibrium dynamics must dissipate entropy to the environment to sustain such irreversible activity. Thus, entropy production is a measure of the emergence of such dynamical dissipative structures
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Explode on Impact – Toby Lowe on Medium
TL:DR — It is impossible for organisations to “demonstrate their impact” if they work in complex environments. Asking them to do so requires them to create a fantasy version of the story of their work. This corruption of data makes doing genuine change work harder because it is difficult to learn and adapt from corrupted data.
Article:
https://toby-89881.medium.com/explode-on-impact-cba283b908cb
Three jobs, UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affaris – Systems Researcher/Practitioner, deadline 17 July 2023
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Apply before 11:55 pm on Monday 17th July 2023
Details
Reference number
296085
Salary
£37,295 – £44,724
National: £37,295 – £41,425, London: £40,262 – £44,724. For details of our pay on appointment policy, please see below under the heading ‘Salary’.
A Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 27%
Job grade
Senior Executive Officer
Contract type
Permanent
Business area
DEFRA – CSA – Chief Scientific Adviser – Government Science & Engineering
Type of role
Analytical
Working pattern
Flexible working, Full-time, Job share, Part-time
Number of jobs available
3
Contents
Location
Bristol, London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, York
About the job
Job summary
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is the UK government department responsible for improving and protecting the environment, growing the economy, sustain thriving rural communities and support our food, farming, and fishing industries.
The government has set ambitious commitments through the Environment Act, the Net-zero strategy, the food strategy, and the Plan for Water. These commitments will interact with our food system, land-use system, resource and waste flows, rural economies and communities and natural environment. To deliver these commitments our policies need to be coherent with the real-world systems that they affect, and systemic insights are essential for ensuring policy coherence.
Applied systems analysis is in high demand in Defra and we have three exciting opportunities to develop systemic insights in cross cutting and complex areas. You will join the Defra Systems Research Programme (SRP) which was established in 2019 to embed systems research principles in Defra’s policy, evidence, and research activities.
CONTINUES IN SOURCE:
https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/index.cgi?SID=cGFnZWNsYXNzPUpvYnMmc2VhcmNocGFnZT0xJnBhZ2VhY3Rpb249dmlld3ZhY2J5am9ibGlzdCZzZWFyY2hzb3J0PW9wZW5pbmcmdXNlcnNlYXJjaGNvbnRleHQ9Mzk5NjU5NTgmam9ibGlzdF92aWV3X3ZhYz0xODYzMTQ3Jm93bmVyPTUwNzAwMDAmb3duZXJ0eXBlPWZhaXImcmVxc2lnPTE2ODczNTcyMTAtNTlmZTQzNmQ1NzYwNjY0OTY3ZmJiNWRiMjI4ZTVhMTEyN2I3YmM1MA==
British-Serbian AI veteran George Rzevski honoured with OU workshop – AI and complexity A Workshop in Honour of Emeritus Professor George Rzevski 10:00 – 16:00 21 June 2023 Systems Seminar Room, Walton Hall
An unusual source and nisam znala ko George Rzevski – who I invited to speak at SCiO many years ago – was Serbian.
More and more founding figures of Artificial Intelligence are making tsunami-scale waves with headlines of imminent doom. Our community can boast one such innovator who is celebrating his 90th year with an open invitation to hear him speak on how our lives will change.
Pdf:
Click to access AI_Complexity_Workshop-K.pdf
A Workshop in Honour of Emeritus Professor George Rzevski
10:00 – 16:00
Wednesday 21st June 2023
Systems Seminar Room, Walton Hall
For half a century George Rzevski has made many original contribuons to Arficial Intelligence, Complexity Science and Design. What sets George apart from many other researchers in these fields is successful praccal applicaons in areas such as dynamic scheduling of taxis, a fleet of oil tankers, and private jet aircra. George has published widely on his work. His latest book, The Future is Digital: How Complexity and AI will Shape Our Lives and Work, will be published this year by Springer.
09:30 – 10:00 Welcome
10:00 – 11:00 George Rzevski – How Complexity and AI will Shape our Life and Work
11:00 – 11:30 Coffee
11:30 – 13:00 Phil Picton – Deep Learning – What’s New? Soria Psoma – Biosensors for Intelligent Healthcare Systems Vikram Goolaup – Spintronics Neuromorphic Systems Miguel Valdez – AI, Complexity and Starship robots Marian Petre – to be announced Viktoriya Pyeshkova – to be announced Jeff Johnson – AI, Complexity and Designing the Future
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch Break
14:00 – 15:30 Serhan Cosar – Machine Vision and Robocs Alistair Wyllis – to be announced Claudia Eckert – The Data Challenge in Complex Engineering System Design Jon Hall – to be announced Lucia Rapano – to be announced Ihor Sobianin – Harvesng Energy for Bio-implants Anthony Lucas-Smith – to be announced
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee and Discussion: Is Arficial intelligence a subfield of Complexity Science? Everyone is welcome to attend, and everyone is invited to give a 5-minute presentation on their ideas. The more controversial the better !
jeff.johnson@open.ac.uk 12-June-2023
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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