Since Autumn 2019, Collaborate and NPC have been working as learning and evaluation partners to Save the Children’s Early Learning Communities. Our partnership combines Collaborate’s system change knowledge with NPC’s evaluation expertise to develop practice in the emerging field of systems change evaluation.
The Early Learning Communities (ELC) programme aims to make a sustainable difference to the lives of children in four places (Bettws, Feltham, Margate and Sheffield) through a multi-sectoral, multi-agency approach. The programme seeks to better align and connect local activities to identify how to improve the performance of local systems to achieve better early years childhood development outcomes.It also aims to share learning about what is most effective in creating systems change. Since 2018, the ELCs have been bringing together local partners and stakeholders, listening to families, building relationships and collaboratively developing theories of change and local strategies. More recently, they’ve started to test new ways of working, both in terms of direct interventions with children and families, and helping partners work together. Crucially, the work done by the ELCs helped their local systems mobilise effectively in response to the pandemic, enabling them to provide the necessary support for the families in their area.
Evaluating systemic change is difficult for various reasons…
I’ll be honest, I’ve been somewhat wary of platformdesigntoolkit at first; there seemed to be something accelerationist to me (an uninformed opinion, I’ll leave it at that!) – this seems genuinely interesting and I would love to see it analysed in Viable Systems model terms!
What are the organizational elements that connect the organizations above — and many more?
This essay is the first of a series that explores the potential to build a software ecosystem to support an emergent common model of organizing based on small unit, shared services and dynamic contracting. This essay was written by Simone Cicero (Boundaryless) with contributions from Bryan Peters (Sobol.io), Rob Solomon (cone.network), Sascha Kellert (rekursive.org) and Emanuele Quintarelli (Boundaryless).
Have you ever read something, say a novel, a poem, or a quote, and to your surprise you discovered a completely different meaning? It’s a strange experience, and one I’ve been having daily. For example, I once thought I understood the American filmmaker George Lucas when he said:
I was waiting at the crosswalk. Across the street was a building of windows. Behind me was a future building of windows, yet another downtown residential tower under construction. I could see a multitude of reflections of the building behind me in the windows of the building across from me. Then, in a flash, I was bewildered as it seemed that the building I was looking at, or its windows, or something strange inside of it, began to, it seemed, undulate or vibrate or wiggle. Was the building falling? Shaking? Were we having an earthquake that I somehow couldn’t feel, but only see? Was some magic afoot? My confusion ended in a moment as I realized I was seeing a construction elevator ascending in those reflections across the street, it’s image flashing first in one set of window panes, then another, as it rose. The moment of disorientation had lasted but a second, and now, on the other side of perplexity, I’d created comprehension. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t, at least intuitively, comprehend reflections in glass surfaces, but certainly there was that time. I think of my own infant daughter who would sometimes seem startled by her own reflection in the mirrors of our home. That construction elevator, reflected in dozens of windows, had likewise startled me before, as the mind does, I made sense of the nonsense. But, of course, all those reflections were not nonsense and there is no guarantee that what I’d constructed as comprehension had anything to do with reality. I mean, it might seen ludicrous, but it’s quite possible that the entirety of what we perceive is simply a mosaic of infinite reflections, that we each, individually, assemble into “sense.” Scientists assure us that we can never really know what we are “seeing,” the inadequacy of our senses limit what we can really know about the universe, and “comprehension,” as we know it, isn’t a way toward greater truth, but rather a way out of bewilderment. Martin Luther, the original Protestant, wrote, “Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going it the true knowledge.” When I think of human history, or at least the tiny sliver that I know about, I see a species constantly seeking to overcome its bewilderment, to create sense from the nonsense, to comprehend the incompressible. I also see a species constantly trading one perplexity for another, understanding (or thinking we understand) one thing only to find something beyond it that we don’t understand. We delude ourselves when we believe that we are coming somehow closer to a universal and final understanding. Confusion, bewilderment, perplexity, not knowing: that is the true nature of life. It’s easy to see this in young children who have been entrusted with the freedom to play, children who are not being constantly instructed on how they ought to overcome their bewilderment, but rather left to pursue “true knowledge” on their own. Children move from bewilderment to bewilderment. Sometimes it startles or alarms them. Sometimes it intrigues them, peaking their curiosity. Sometimes children approach their bewilderment with caution, taking their slow, deliberate time, while at other times they throw themselves into it. As adults we too often see their bewilderment as something we must fix, so we tell them how, or show them why, or hurry their process with tips and hints that point them in the “right” direction. When we do that, I wonder if we aren’t robbing them of their true knowledge, which is, their bewilderment. We tend to cast bewilderment in a negative light, as something to be avoided. I’m thinking now of a loved one suffering from dementia. This is a woman who, in her prime, was an intellectual giant, a person gifted in the art of creating sense from nonsense. But it’s not the bewilderment that disturbs her. No, it’s rather that dementia has taken away her ability to construct comprehension the way she once did with such panache. That is, to me, the real tragedy of dementia, not the bewilderment, but the inability to move beyond it. As I watched that construction elevator’s many reflections, each slightly different than the other, create the illusion of movement up the side of the building across the street, I found myself trying to return to that initial moment of bewilderment, to again see what I’d originally seen. I couldn’t do it, of course, but I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now. There was, for me, a moment of sheer delight in my bewilderment, when the world suddenly didn’t make sense to me, when reality gave me a glimpse into its true nature which is to be fully, joyfully, and completely incomprehensible. We are the sense makers, each of us, all of us. We are windows that reflect according to our own, unique angle and perspective, each possessing true, but incomplete knowledge. Tom Hunter sang, “Build it up and knock it down, and build it up again. Knock it down and build it up and knock it down again.” It’s song that goes around and around, infinitely, reflecting the true knowledge that every preschooler knows. From bewilderment we construct comprehension, but being incomplete it cannot lasts, and then we do it again.
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Published Online:1 Dec 1967https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.14.4.B141
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—Editorial by C. West Churchman, University of California, Berkeley
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Soft Systems Networking Meet Up
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Our second online networking meeting for researchers exploring all notions of SOFT SYSTEMS in their academic or industrial research practice
About this event
After a highly stimulating and cross disciplinary introductory meeting, we invite past participants and new attendees to join the second meetup. There will be opportunities for more in depth sharing of our research process; successes, struggles and ideas-in-progress. Further details will follow.
What science can do for democracy: a complexity science approach
Don Ross
Patricia Palacios
Karoline Wiesner
2020, Humanities and Social Science Communications
El Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad (C3) es un espacio de encuentro en la UNAM donde buscamos reunir a los científicos, artistas, humanistas y técnicos de Facultades, Escuelas, Centros e Institutos para colaborar y enfrentar, con un enfoque integrador, desafíos transdisciplinarios de relevancia nacional aprovechando la sinergia resultante de la interacción entre diferentes áreas del conocimiento.
Con la creación del C3, la UNAM busca apoyarse en su enorme capital científico y técnico para integrar, el rigor y el espíritu inquisitivo que caracterizan a la investigación científica, a la búsqueda de soluciones para los complejos desafíos que enfrenta el país.
Misión
Estamos comprometidos con la sociedad para la solución de problemas complejos a través de proyectos trans-disciplinarios, de la formación de recursos humanos y del desarrollo de conocimiento en las ciencias de la complejidad.
Visión
Ser un centro académico adaptable que promueve la sinergia en la generación y gestión de proyectos con enfoque sistémico que impacta en el avance de las ciencias de la complejidad y en la comprensión, prevención de problemas sociales y ambientales. Ser un espacio de encuentro que integra capital intelectual para investigar y solucionar problemas complejos, de relevancia social, de forma flexible, pertinente y adaptativa.
Downward causation is the controversial idea that `higher’ levels of organization can causally influence behaviour at `lower’ levels of organization. Here I propose that we can gain traction on downward causation by being operational and examining how adaptive systems identify regularities in evolutionary or learning time and use these regularities to guide behaviour. I suggest that in many adaptive systems components collectively compute their macroscopic worlds through coarse-graining. I further suggest we move from simple feedback to downward causation when components tune behaviour in response to estimates of collectively computed macroscopic properties. I introduce a weak and strong notion of downward causation and discuss the role the strong form plays in the origins of new organizational levels. I illustrate these points with examples from the study of biological and social systems and deep neural networks.This article is part of the themed issue ‘Reconceptualizing the origins of life’. Publication: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, vol. 375, issue 2109, p. 20160338 Pub Date: November 2017 DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2016.0338 Bibcode: 2017RSPTA.37560338F
∗I am grateful to Prof. Silvana Bettelli Biolchini, who disclosed to me the beauty of science and introduced me to fractals, chaos and dynamical systems when I was a student at the high school. I would like to dedicate her these notes, hoping that she will enjoy reading them, remembering those pioneer times in which we had to wait a whole day to get the first fractal image on a computer monitor. campus.unibo.itSave to LibraryCreate AlertCiteLaunch Research FeedShare This Paper
Heinz von Foerster’s Demons The Emergence of Second-Order Systems Theory
Bruce Clarke 2009, Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (Duke).65 Views14 Pages1 File ▾Constructivism,Cybernetics,Systems Theory,Niklas Luhmann,Second-Order Cybernetics …more ▾Show more ▾“Heinz von Foerster’s Demons: The Emergence of Second-Order Systems Theory” examines some of the prehistory of neocybernetics by reading von Foerster’s key 1959 paper on self-organization through the hindsight of his early-1970s work that launched second-order cybernetics proper. Not one but two Maxell’s Demons bind thermodynamic to informatic self-organization in the 1959 paper, and his own creation, the Man with the Bowler Hat, links that earlier paper with “On Constructing a Reality” of 1973, by way of contrasting the singularity of metaphysical solipsism with the multiplicities of epistemological constructivism. Not only does it take multiple Demons to conceptualize negentropy in informational systems; it also takes the co-construction of at least two operationally-closed observers to produce a reality: “reality appears as a consistent reference frame for at least two observers.” The concluding section of the essay unfolds this powerful statement from the 1959 paper as a prefiguration of the neocybernetic concept of reentry, by which the systems/environment dyad recurs upon and ramifies within the system itself. In Luhmann’s theory, the dyad of mutually closed psychic and social systems is capable of interpenetration and meaningful resonance just because they share this same paradigmatic operation, becoming “two observers” that construct out of their coupled autonomies the world as a reference frame for psychic and social realities.
I aim to show that models, classification or generating functions, invariances and datasets are algorithmically equivalent concepts once properly defined, and provide some concrete examples of them. I then show that a) neural networks (NNs) of different kinds can be seen to implement models, b) that perturbations of inputs and nodes in NNs trained to optimally implement simple models propagate strongly, c) that there is a framework in which recurrent, deep and shallow networks can be seen to fall into a descriptive power hierarchy in agreement with notions from the theory of recursive functions. The motivation for these definitions and following analysis lies in the context of cognitive neuroscience, and in particular in Ruffini (2016), where the concept of model is used extensively, as is the concept of algorithmic complexity.
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