I’d love your recommendations on a person or institute we should link with.We’re on the hunt for a systems person. A complexity nerd, if you will. Ideally a PhD who would relish the opportunity to follow along some of our complex systems work in real time and mine it for insights relevant to their research. Who should we be speaking with?
The complex systems we’re working with include global oxygen supplies and vaccine data, but we don’t need health specialists per se, the important thing is complexity and global systems. We’re working across India, Philippines, and parts of Africa including Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania.We’ll have more fidelity soon on some of the themes a PhD might want to follow (e.g behaviour change, or data capture, in complex systems)For a flavour of this brilliant work:
Link to full event listingAbstract: Modeling the dynamics of political ideology can help us understand societal issues like polarization, which affect the evolution of many systems of power. This talk will go over our modeling framework, which utilizes a network-free system of determining political influence and a local-attraction, distal-repulsion dynamic for reaction to perceived content. Our approach allows for the incorporation of intergroup bias such that messages from trusted in-group sources enjoy greater leeway than out-group ones. We are able to extrapolate these nonlinear microscopic dynamics to macroscopic population distributions by tying them to inputs from systematically biased, probabilistic environments. The framework we put forward can reproduce both real-world political distributions and experimentally observed dynamics, and—importantly—is amenable to further refinement as more data becomes available.
Date and time: Friday 14th October & 21st October 2022, 10.00am – 1.00pm AEDT (registration from 9.45am)
Venue: Via Zoom. Details will be emailed to registrants just prior to the workshop start time
Facilitator: Professor Raymond Ison
Register online by: 12 October 2022. Spaces limited to 25 participants.
Fees (GST inclusive): Members $260, Organisational member staff $375, Non-members $425, Student member $125*, Student non-member $210* * Students must send proof of their full-time student status to
Searching for a Good RegulatorDoes a system have its own purpose, irrespective of what anyone says its purpose is? This a Stafford Beer thing, coined as a description of the parts department of Jaguar, which Stafford claimed was there to keep his car off the road. The Purpose of a System is What it Does: POSIWID.This stance gives most people cognitive indigestion. People have purposes, systems are supposed to do peoples’ bidding. Except we know that is not what happens.
I am writing this post after a short break. My topic for the post is “reality”. I have always been fascinated with the idea of ontology in philosophy. It is loosely described as the study of existence or reality and it comes under metaphysics in philosophy. I have written about it many times before and it seems that there are always more and more nuances regarding it. I have come to see myself as a cybernetician, so today’s post is about reality for a cybernetician.
Another philosophical term that is thrown around a lot is epistemology, or the study of knowledge. I see ontology intertwined with epistemology. As a cybernetician, I see the existence of circularity between the two. Ontology, the study of reality, has a circular relationship with epistemology, the study of knowledge. Why is this the case? As a cybernetician, I am of the view that reality is…
Vol. 5 No. 1 (2022): Creative Writing by and for Systemic Practitioners
Systemic practitioners have much to say about the intricate activities of their working relationships. Every breath or intonation is a decision, infused with ethical, cultural, aesthetic and practical considerations. These papers show different forms of storytelling to engage readers in learning about the lives and practice of others and in reflexivity about their own practice.
I like eg ‘Eppur si muove’ https://bit.ly/3BLbBw7 and
‘the evening star IS the morning star’ https://bit.ly/3qGh2Gc
In this LinkedIn post, I also commented ‘Obviously I should have used ‘flocking’ and ‘that obesity map’ too :-)’
John Siegrist said ‘Does the butterfly effect count? I believe Lorentz used to talk about chaos in weather forecasting? And of course there’s the Tulip Bulb Mania.’
Steve Whitla pointed out ‘
The Watt centrifugal governor – exemplifies how in a well-designed system going out of control is also the means of bringing itself back into control. I’ve used this quite a bit since I saw Stafford Beer draw one on a whiteboard to make the point … thermostats are a commoner example but they’re static – watching little globes spinning wildly round and round is more visceral. He added – watch from 35:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6orMfmorg‘
” We cannot ask if a #model corresponds to #reality because we have no independent test of what reality is. All we can ask is whether the #predictions of the model are confirmed by #observation ” — Stephen Hawking
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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