Abstracts

"The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World"

This talk reviews an influential conceptualization of prediction that was created by the 'father' of cybernetics, the US mathematician Norbert Wiener in the 1940s-60s. Although the interest in the cultural and political histories of cybernetics is growing, the notion of scientific prediction, which is central to cybernetic control, is insufficiently examined. However, this talk proposes that prediction is not a mere technical cog in the epistemology of the future, but a complex concept. It discusses Norbert Wiener's epistemology of cybernetic prediction, arguing that the cybernetic culture of prediction emphasizes the role of uncertainty and does not replace materiality with information. Wiener's writings on cybernetic prediction, therefore, contain useful lessons for the future oriented practices in the broad fields of contemporary science, governance and politics.

Free download of "The Power of Systems" from Cornell University Press.

"Sketches of Another Future: Cybernetics in Britain 1940-2000"

My topic is the history of cybernetics, this strange science that grew up in the 1940s and 50s, reached an apogee in the 1960s- not coincidentally, the time of the counterculture- then disappeared into obscurity and which, more recently, has been making quite a comeback in the humanities and social sciences. I describe why cybernetics interests me now, and gesture towards its political potential, which is much argued about.

"Better Mind-the Robot: the Cybernetics of Robotics"

Cybernetics, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence are intimately related and interdependent. Developments in AI and robotics are very rapid and are accelerating. The possibility of robots overtaking humans in capability is very real. Some very grand claims have been made about robots AI and our future. This talk describes and compares human evolution with robot development. The cases of humanoid robots and driverless cars are briefly covered. The case of robot vision is addressed with a brief look at my own research in this field. In some fields the capability of technology far exceeds that of humans, in some aspects the technology has many years to go before it reaches that of humans. Developments in control theory and communications seemed to have solved the challenges of robot capability exceeding that of humans, whilst the current capabilities of computation in software and hardware still lag far behind, but are catching up fast. The technologies are exciting but will be disruptive.

"Systems Practice: How to Act in Situations of Uncertainty and Complexity in a Climate-Change World"

This talk shows how to do systems thinking and translate that thinking into praxis (theory informed practical action). It may be of interest to those managing or governing in situations of complexity and uncertainty across all domains of professional and personal life. The development of capabilities to think and act systemically is an urgent priority. Humans are now a force of nature, affecting whole-earth dynamics including the earth's climate - we live in an Anthropocene or Capitalocene and are confronted by the emergence of a 'post-truth', 'big data' world. What we have developed, organisationally and institutionally, seems very fragile. An imperative exists to recover whatever systemic sensibilities we still retain, to foster systems literacy and to invest in systems thinking in practice capability. This will be needed in future at personal, group, community, regional, national and international levels, all at the same time.

"Radically Constructing Ethics"

Cybernetics is notable for its recognition of ethical considerations within epistemological processes. Our claims to knowledge are intertwined with the purposes that we pursue and with our relationships with others and the world. In this paper I locate this argument within ethical discourse itself, applying the formulations of radical constructivism given by cyberneticians such as Ernst von Glasersfeld, Ranulph Glanville and Heinz von Foerster to the epistemological questions that arise within meta-ethics, such as between ethical realism and subjectivism. In doing so I differentiate cybernetics from seemingly similar positions where responsibility is taken as an ultimate value (e.g. existentialism) or where ethical norms are formulated through society and culture. In this way, cybernetics may help formulate ethical considerations nested within ethical discourse itself.

"Making Systems Ethical: The Ethical Regulator Theorem"

The need for cybernetics to embody ethical values has been recognized and discussed by many cyberneticians, and could be referred to in the context of cybernetics as "The Ethics Problem". But to this day, second-order cybernetics has no formal repeatable process for designing systems that behave ethically, relying instead on the ad hoc skills of an ethically-motivated designer of a system to somehow specify a system that is hopefully ethical, which is not a satisfactory solution to a problem that so desperately needs to be solved. But what if it were possible to specify a cybernetic system that can be used to make other systems ethical? Could that solve the ethics problem?

"Producing Desirable Social Systems"

Social systems emerge from individual interactions, but these interactions may be the outcome of poorly or well-structured organisational processes. An effective organisation increases its actors flexibility to deal with constraint and their capacity for effective action. The focus of this contribution is on requirements to produce desirable social systems as an outcome of building up their complexity. I understand desirability in the ethical domain, and construct ethics in terms of producing non-pathological identities and structures, striving for fair relationships by sensing and correcting imbalances of variety in self-organising situations and assuring a maximum of social cohesion compatible with the most extensive political and economic freedom open to all. The question arises as to whether it might be possible to intervene at the points of intersection among organisational actors and between them an agents in their environment to produce the desirable relationships proposed above. What kind of contexts are necessary to influence the structural couplings which partially determine the selves' engagement in social life. In this contribution my concern is examining this ethical possibility in the context of organisational life.

"Be Careful What You Wish For: The Internet of Unintended Consequences"

This talk will look for gaps in our thinking about new technologies through which unintended consequences might emerge. New technologies do not arrive into a vacuum, but are deployed into a social and legacy context where many other factors determine how they are used and whether they are successful. Few of us are able to build complex enough mental models to successfully imagine more than a few strands of the future. Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex and New York Times science editor Waldemar Kaempffert's 1950 imagining of life in 2000 -provide historical examples; the Internet's gradual metamorphosis from open platform for sharing information to highly centralized surveillance platform, and the impact of mobile phones on apparently unrelated industries provide current ones.

"Cybernetics and the Control of Complex Human Systems"

Early cybernetics made profound contributions to the control of physical systems. For social systems there is a continuum of analytic techniques from 'soft' systems theory with its verbal and diagrammatic models to 'hard' complex systems theory with its mathematical and computational models. Models all along this spectrum can be useful in solving practical problems, e.g. simplistic models can have more traction politically than sophisticated models that policy makers cannot understand. This talk will investigate how early cybernetic ideas apply to the management of modern complex human systems, and what new ideas have evolved in the science of complex systems to take cybernetics forward.

Speakers' biographies

	Dr Egle Rindzeviciute is a political sociologist researching in governance, and the global history of cybernetics. She is the author of: The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World. In the book she examines how East-West scientists contributed to the development of global governance during the Cold War, and the highly influential think tank, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis established by the Soviet Union and the US. She is completing: "The Cybernetic Prediction: Orchestrating the Future", in Futures, Oxford University Press. She has studied and worked in Lithuania, Russia, Hungary, France, Sweden and the UK.
	Andrew Pickering is a leading figure in science and technology studies. He was based for many years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (once the home of Heinz von Foerster's Biological Computer Lab). In 2007 he moved back to England and joined the University of Exeter where he is now Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Philosophy. He has PhDs in particle physics and science studies, and his books include Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science and, most recently, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future.
	Martin Smith recently retired as Professor of Robotics at Middlesex University. He has held posts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, the Open University, the University of Central England, and the University of East London. He has been Chairman then President of the Cybernetics Society since 1999. He has been supervising robotics projects since 1989. While supervising PhD research in robot vision he and his students built a number of robots that attracted the attention of the media. He has appeared hundreds of times on television including as a judge on Robot Wars, Scrapheap Challenge, Mechannibals, Mutant Machines with appearances on Blue Peter, Tomorrow's World and many other TV and radio programmes. He has appeared many times on Sky News. He served as Chairman of the IEE (Institution of Electrical Engineers) London Region, an expert witness for Old Bailey trials. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Kybernetes, former Member of Council of the IEE, Chairman of the Engineering Council London Regional Organisation representing London's 7,200 Registered Engineers. He is a Fellow of the Cybernetics Society, the Institute of Physics, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Astronomical Society, and formerly the Royal Institution. He is a Freeman of the City of London.
	Ray Ison is Professor of Systems at the Open University, Director of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics, Chair of Trustees of the American Society of Cybernetics, Former President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, Vice President of the International Federation for Systems Research and member of the UKSS. Ray manages and presents the post-graduate program in Systems Thinking in Practice. He is former Head of the Systems Department of 25 academic staff. He has co-authored or co-edited four books including: Agronomy of grassland systems, Agricultural extension and rural development: breaking out of knowledge transfer traditions, and Systems Practice: How to Act in a Climate Change World.
	Dr Ben Sweeting is Course Leader for the undergraduate course in architecture at the University of Brighton. He studied architecture at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge and the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His PhD was co-supervised by the late Prof. Ranulph Glanville (DSc in Cybernetics and Fellow of the Cybernetics Society). Ben's research interests include the contemporary resurgence of cybernetics and systems thinking amongst designers. As Mellon Researcher at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, he has carried out research into the collaborations between Gordon Pask (past President of the Cybernetics Society) and architect Cedric Price. He has received the Heinz von Foerster Award from the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) and has guest edited special issues of the journals Kybernetes and Constructivist Foundations.
	Mick Ashby is a Trustee of the American Society for Cybernetics, he studied he studied Computer and Microprocessor Systems at the University of Essex, where he researched into logics for reasoning with uncertainty. He started working for ITT Knowledge-Based Systems Group, developing an AI language for writing expert systems for automating tasks, such as configuring large switching systems and planning the layout of telephone exchanges. He transferred to Alcatel Software Research Center, in Stuttgart, Germany. As project manager, he coordinated research into requirements and solutions for performing extension of broadband software systems. For the last 30 years he has been doing research and development in Germany. He designed and maintains the Ross Ashby Archive www.rossashby.info. He has been researching into the cybernetics of ethics.
	Raul Espejo is President of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics and Director of Syncho Research, UK. He is an academician of the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences and Past Professor of Systems and Cybernetics at the University of Lincoln. His research is in organisational cybernetics and systems. His most recent book, with Alfonso Reyes, is Organizational Systems: Managing Complexity with the Viable System Model. He Has published over a 100 papers in journal and books. From 1971 to 1973 he was operations director of the CYBERSYN project- the project of the Chilean Government for the management of the industrial economy, under the scientific direction of Professor Stafford Beer.
	Wendy M. Grossman is a technology journalist and author of: Remembering the Future: Interviews from Personal Computer World, Net.Wars, From Anarchy to Power: The Net Comes of Age, The Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet, The Daily Telegraph Small Business Guide to Computer Networking, and Why Statues Weep- The Best of the "Skeptic. She has written for: Scientific American, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, New Scientist, Wired, Internet Today, and The Inquirer. She sits on the executive committee of the Association of British Science Writers, the Advisory Councils of the Open Rights Group and Privacy International. She was elected Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
	Jeffrey Johnson is Professor of Complexity and Design at the Open University. His design and engineering research includes machine vision, team robotics, autonomous intelligent systems, and self-organising computational systems to support multilevel policy. His main research interest is how systems thinking can support policy at all levels from the microlevel of individuals and neighbourhoods, to the upper mesolevel of national government, to the macrolevel including international conflict, trade, migration, climate change, and so on. In summary, his research asks how can we better design the future of complex socio-technical systems?

Meeting of the Council of the Cybernetics Society on Saturday 14th July 2018 at 2.00pm followed by the AGM (c.3.15pm)

Agendas and minutes. The Meeting will be held at MayDay Rooms, 88 Fleet St. EC4Y 1DH.

XIIth Metaphorum Conference 2018: "Re-designing Freedom"

To be held 2nd of November until 4th November 2018 in Dusseldorf, Germany.

The organisers write: We will explore again Stafford Beer's cybernetic theories to "design freedom" in organisations, communities, regions and nations. We are inviting examples of radical and innovative organisational and societal transformation based on non-hierarchical, adaptive, self organising structures.

Further details and Invitation.

UK can lead the way on ethical AI, says Lords Committee

House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence "AI in the UK: ready, willing and able?" published 16 April 2018. Download report and evidence.

Invitation to CSDMO 2018 (ICCCI 2018) Bristol UK

Piotr Jedrzejowicz and Dariusz Barbucha write: It is our great pleasure to invite you to submit a paper to Special Session on Cooperative Strategies for Decision Making and Optimization (CSDMO 2018) organized within the 10th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence (ICCCI 2018) in Bristol, UK, 5-7 September 2018. Deadline 1st April 2018.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: computational intelligence, cooperative strategies for optimization, collective decision making, evolutionary and co-evolutionary algorithms and their applications, swarm intelligence, adaptive methods for decision making and optimization, distributed optimization, agent-based modeling and problem solving, multi-agent optimization techniques and their applications, and applications of intelligent techniques for decision making and optimization problems.

Conference website. Flyer.

Systems Thinking in Operational Research

Angela Espinosa, Giles Hindle and Gerald Midgley (from the Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull) are organizing a systems thinking stream at the Operational Research Society Conference on 11-13 September 2018 in Lancaster, UK.

Dr Espinosa writes.

Quantum computing: Untangling the hype

Royal Institution 7.00pm to 8.30pm, Tuesday 13 March 2018

Further details. Tickets required.

The Cybersyn Project and Social Design for a Fairer Society

Dr. Raul Espejo, former Operations Director of Project Cybersyn, will open a debate about designing fairer societies.

Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971-1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende which aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project featured innovative technology for it's time and embodied notions of organisational cybernetics in industrial management.

Where: Embassy of Chile (37-41 Old Queen Street, SW1H 9JA). When: 6.00 pm Tuesday 30th January 2018. To attend please RSVP by email to the Embassy.

In 2016, Chile participated at the London Design Biennale with the installation "The Counterculture Room" - designed by FabLab Santiago - where the story of the Cybersyn experience was told. Flyer.

Cybernetic Serendipity Reimagined, AISB Convention Liverpool University 4th-6th April 2018

Joseph Corneli writes: We take the 50th Anniversary of the famous Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, curated by Jasia Reichardt at the London's Institute for Contemporary Arts, as our inspiration for a one-day workshop "Cybernetic Serendipity Reimagined".

In recent years, anticipation of AI systems with increasingly unpredictable behaviour leads us to reconsider the role that serendipity may play in a computational context.

Serendipity has been addressed in a variety of adjacent fields such as recommender systems, machine ethics, information retrieval, information science, planning and computational creativity.

With this symposium, we want to encourage a mutually beneficial exchange between these and other disciplines beyond computing.

This symposium is part of the AISB 2018 convention. Website.

Bill Seaman: Towards A Dynamic Heterarchical Ecology Of Conversations

Heinz von Foerster Lecture '17 University of Vienna Monday 13th November 2017.

From the Abstract: "...potentially essential to the development of new forms of computation, circular causal relations, as well as human interaction and Understanding Understanding".

Flyer. Website.

CRAASH on Cybernetics and Society 20016-17

"We intersperse smaller, reading group sessions with public lectures. Doing so gives us an opportunity to engage with speakers' work ahead of time and will help support a more robust and lively discussion with our invited guests. Themes will include Systems Science and Industrial Management; Histories of Modern Risk; Cybernetics and Design Thinking; Rethinking Cold War Science; Historicising the Information Age; and Cybernetics and the Psychology of Happiness."

CRASSH was established at the University of Cambridge in 2001 and is now one of the world's largest interdisciplinary research institutions.

Cybernetics Society AGM & Council Meeting Saturday 8 July '17 88 Fleet St

Meeting of the Council of the Cybernetics Society on Saturday 8th July 2017 at 2.00pm followed by the AGM (c.3.15pm) at the MAYDAY ROOMS: 88 Fleet Street, London, EC4Y 1DH. Agendas.

"Human Simulation" and Cybernetic, Algorithmic, Systemic Theatre Symposium

Frascati Theatre, Amsterdam 16th-17th June, 2017.

Symposium Flyer "Human Simulation" on Facebook. Symposium on Facebook.

Call for Papers: Global Nuclear Order annual conference, September 2017

Sarah Hodel of the Centre for Science & Security Studies (CSSS), Department of War Studies, King's College, London writes: The British International Studies Association (BISA) and the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy (CISD) are currently accepting proposals for papers and panels that investigate conceptual, empirical and/or policy aspects of continuity and change in global or regional nuclear order for the Fifth Annual Conference of the BISA Global Nuclear Order Working Group, 21-22 September 2017 in London, UK.

Submissions from postgraduate students, non-academics and those working in other disciplines are particularly welcome. Abstracts of no more than 200 words are due by Friday 14 July 2017.

Leaflet. Working Group website.

Paul Pangaro "Designing Our World - Cybernetics as Conversation for Action" University of Vienna 20th June 19:00

The Heinz von Foerster Lecture '17 will be held in room 41 main building of the University, 1010 Wien. Leaflet.

Paul Pangaro writes: To "design our world" has been the goal of every human generation since the first conversations for design occurred "between mind and hand" at the dawn of our species.

This goal has enticed generations of cyberneticians from Heinz von Foerster, to Gordon Pask, Stafford Beer, Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, to Ranulph Glanville, at the least. They showed how the processes and epistemology of cybernetics impelled "actions for designing" that are ethical as well as effective. Their work charts a course toward a methodology of design practice that is grounded in formalisms of variety and feedback, language and conversation, intention with action.

From their foundations, this lecture expounds cybernetics as design - that is, learning by constructing together. This comprises design as conversation and design for conversation - that is, cybernetics as conversation for action.

11th International Metaphorum Conference: "Healing Organisations" 1st-3rd November, 2017 - Liverpool, UK

Mark Johnson writes: This year's conference makes an explicit connection between health, healthcare organisations and healing in organisations more generally. Present at this year's conference will be key representatives from the international Healthcare sector, alongside keynote addresses by leading figures who have focused on systems interventions in healthcare and public services.

"Healing Organisations" is an opportunity to make connections between Systems Theories like the Viable System Model and the practical problems of today's institutions.

The conference website contains details of the call for papers and conference speakers. The conference will combine paper presentations with open workshops where connections can be made between practitioners from health and other sectors and specialists in management cybernetics and systems theoretical interventions.

Flyer.

Italian Systems Society Call for Seventh National Conference on Systems Science Milan 16-17 November 2017

Deadline August 31st 2017. Flyer with further details.

The Opening Lecture will be by Giuseppe Longo "Importance of negative results in science: The difficult interplay between theory, modeling and simulation". The meeting will be held at Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917-2010) Centenary Conference 2017
Radical Constructivism: Past, Present And Future

The Conference is for Ernst von Glaserfeld's 100th birthday at Innsbruck University Austria, 20-22 April 2017.

More details.

The University of Illinois Archives announces grant for a searchable Cybernetics archive

The award will enable digitizing archival records related to the pioneering work of U of I Electrical Engineering Professor Heinz von Foerster and his fellow cyberneticians W. Ross Ashby (also a former U of I Electrical Engineering faculty member), Warren S. McCulloch, and Norbert Wiener. More.

Sociedad Espanola de Sistemas Generales: Call for 2nd Congress June 29-July 2, 2017

Themes will be Problems and Perspectives in Current Systems Theory and Cybernetics and an application of the Systemic Approach to the discovery of Cervantes' "Place of La Mancha" as a search for the Value of Knowledge.

The Conference will be held at Villanueva de los Infantes, Campo de Montiel, Spain. Further details.

Ben Sweeting on Pask and Joan Littlewood's Fun Palace Project

Dr Sweeting's talk video. Ben applies Cybernetics to his field of Archtecture and Design at the University of Brighton. The talk is in the context of a celebration of the work of Cedric Price with whom Pask first applied Cybernetics to Architecture for this unimplemented but influential project.

Thanks to Dr. Bernard Scott who reminds us of reminiscences on Pask from Cedric Price, Joan Littlewood and Sir Peter Cook. Joan Littlewood and Sir Peter Cook on Wikipedia.

9th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence - Technologies and Applications (ICCCI 2017) in Nicosia, Cyprus, 27-29 September 2017

Piotr Jedrzejowicz and Dariusz Barbucha CSDMO 2017 Special Session Chairs invite submissions by the extended deadline of 15th April on Cooperative Strategies for Decision Making and Optimization.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: computational intelligence, cooperative strategies for optimization, collective decision making, evolutionary and co-evolutionary algorithms and their applications, swarm intelligence, adaptive methods for decision making and optimization, distributed optimization, agent-based modeling and problem solving, multi-agent optimization techniques and their applications, and applications of intelligent techniques for decision making and optimization problems.

Further Special Session details. Conference website.

WikiLeaks Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools

From the Press Release: "By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware".

Documents.

Discussion on Reddit Netsec.

"Cybernetics and Sculpture" an in-conversation with Roy Ascott
Wednesday, 8 March 6pm Henry Moore Institute, Leeds

Corinne Painter writes: Roy Ascott (b. 1934) is the UK's foremost cybernetic artist, having worked with cybernetic ideas since 1961. In an extraordinary career spanning six decades, Roy has maintained his belief in cybernetic theory and its continuing relevance to contemporary life. It also informed his revolutionary 'Groundcourse', an art foundation course that incorporated cybernetics, behaviourism and play. Roy has been at the vanguard of art using technology during his career, but this use of technology is not the defining feature of his practice. Rather, it is his sustained interest in the field of human communication that led him to explore the potential of new technologies. Technology, Roy argues, is the product of desire; it is there to fulfil a human drive.

In this conversation with Kate Sloan, Roy will discuss his early work in relation to the living, communicative and biological identity of early cybernetics, concentrating on his education and early years, pursuing the interrelationships between cybernetics, biology and sculptural form. It will also cover the position of cybernetics in the increasingly systematised art practices of the 1960s, while focusing on evolutionary moments in Roy's own practice.

Further information and to book a place. Exhibition closes 23 April 2017.

Second-Order Cybernetics as a Fundamental Revolution in Science

Review paper by Prof Stuart Umpleby with Open Peer Commentaries from vol.11 No.3 2016 Constructivist Foundations.

In this issue, dedicated to the late Ranulph Glanville, Louis H. Kauffman discusses "Cybernetics, Reflexivity and Second-Order Science".

Recent Books on Cybernetics by Author's Country of Origin

Books from 2000 and later compiled by Elise Hughes and Prof. Stuart Umpleby of The George Washington University.

Download in .docx format.

Heinz von Foerster talks in 1975 about Complex Systems and Aartje Hulstein

Albert Muller writes: Today is the 105th anniversary of Heinz von Foerster's birthday. We invite you to commemorate Heinz by listening to one of his lectures from 1975 provided by Portland State Library as an audio document.

You will be able to enjoy Heinz explaining his ideas in a most entertaining, inspiring and precise way.

[Heinz introduces his fundamental Ethical Imperative of Cybernetics: "Always act to increase choice".]

However, our celebration is overshadowed by the message that Aartje Hulstein passed away two days ago. Aartje (born in the Netherlands on 1.11.1950 and died in Southsea, UK, on 11.11.2016), the widow of Ranulph Glanville, was not only a close friend and supporter of the Heinz von Foerster Society, she has been present at a large number of cybernetics-, systems-, and constructivism-conferences. She (together with Claudia Westermann) contributed large parts of the book "Trojan Horses. A Rattle Bag from the Cybernetics: Art, Design, Mathematics - A Meta-Disciplinary Conversation post-conference workshop", ed. by Ranulph Glanville et al. edition echoraum, Vienna 2012.

In her professional life, Aartje acted as a most successful physical therapist with disabled children in England, permanently implementing second order cybernetics methods and ideas in her field while always observing the individuality of the child. We lost one of the most dearest and loveable persons in our field. We will always keep her in our memories.

IEEE International Conference on INnovations in Intelligent SysTems and Applications -INISTA 2017

Piotr Jedrzejowicz, Tulay Yildirim and Ireneusz Czarnowski, INISTA 2017 General Chairs, write: We cordially invite you to submit papers to 2017 IEEE International Conference on INnovations in Intelligent SysTems and Applications(INISTA 2017), 3-5 July 2017 in Gdynia, Poland.

The topics of interest cover the entire spectrum of the multi-disciplinary fields of intelligent systems and related applications.

The conference proceedings will be available on IEEE Xplore and submitted to be indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection databases. The authors of selected best papers will be invited to extend their contributions for special issues.

Further details.

Ranulph Glanville and How to Live the Cybernetics of Unknowing

This is a festschrift issue of Cybernetics and Human Knowing focusing on the work of Ranulph Glanville, cybernetician, design researcher, theorist, educator and multi-platform artist/designer/performer.

From Amazon.

Cybathlon 2016 - The World's First Bionic Olympics

M.J.R. van de Wijnckel writes: On October 8th, the world's first Bionic Olympics for athletes with disabilities was organized by ETH Zurich in Switzerland, Cybathlon 2016:

Founded and directed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Robert Riener, the event received full media coverage by Swiss tv SRF embedded in a larger SRF Special on "Man & Machine".

Official press release.

"The Human Story of Cybernetics" short course at Warwick University

Professor Colin Williams' ten weekly one hour lectures are free and open to everyone including non-students, and run each Thursday from 13th October to 8th December 2016 at 4pm.

Flyer. Directions for visitors.

Saturday Symposium at Salieri, London Saturday 22nd October 2-4pm.

Our Secretary reminds us the members' meal and discussion will be held at Salieri opposite the Savoy. Please email or phone +44(0)20 8560 2176 to confirm if you wish to attend.

WOSC 2017: Science with and for Society - Contributions of Cybernetics and Systems

Preparations are underway for the World Organisation Of Systems and Cybernetics to be held at Sapienza, University of Rome on 25th-27th of January 2017. Members attending are encouraged to write a brief report for our web site.

Further details. Letter from the Director-General of WOSC Professor Raul Espejo.

7th WCSA Conference: Call for "GOVERNING TURBULENCE"

The World Complexity Science Academy announces meeting to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 5th and 6th January 2017.

Submission dates and Further details.

Spencer-Brown

We are sorry to report the death of the mathematician George Spencer-Brown whose extradordinary work "Laws of Form" was geatly admired by cyberneticians and many others. Louis Kauffman tells us his long term friend Graham Ellesbury writes that he died peacefully on 25th August 2016 in Market Lavington Care Home and will be buried at Brookwood cemetery in unconsecrated ground, near Charles Bradlaugh, one of his heroes.

Louis Kauffman's draft paper on "Laws of Form - An Exploration in Mathematics and Foundations".

Randy Dible writes: The funeral of Professor George Spencer-Brown will take place on Thursday September 29th at 3.00 at Brookwood Cemetery, Brookwood, Woking, Surrey GU24 0BL. Directions.

Call to submit to Systems -Special Issue "Systems Approaches and Tools for Managing Complexity"

Dr Nam Nguyen writes: Systems (ISSN 2079-8954) is currently running a Special Issue entitled "Systems Approaches and Tools for Managing Complexity". Dr. Nam Nguyen and Dr. Constantin Malik, both of the Malik Institute, St. Gallen (Switzerland), Dr. Thanh V. Nguyen of the Ministry of Public Security, Hanoi (Vietnam) and Mr. Tuan Ha, of the University of Adelaide Business School, Adelaide (Australia), are serving as Guest Editors for this issue.

Systems is fully open access. Deadline 30th January 2017.Further details.

Eigenbehavior: Call for July 2017 Special issue of Constructivist Foundations

Submissions invited. Further details.

Constructivist Foundations "publishes original scholarly work in all areas of constructivist approaches, especially radical constructivism, enaction and enactive cognitive science, second order cybernetics, biology of cognition and the theory of autopoietic systems, non-dualizing philosophy, neurophenomenology and first-person research, among others".

Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics by Thomas Rid

Profile reads: "Thomas Rid's revelatory history of cybernetics pulls together disparate threads in the history of technology, from the invention of radar and pilotless flying bombs in World War Two to today's age of CCTV, cryptocurrencies and Oculus Rift, to make plain that our current anxieties about privacy and security will be emphatically at the crux of the new digital future that we have been steadily, sometimes inadvertently, creating for ourselves. Rise of the Machines makes a singular and significant contribution to the advancement of our clearer understanding of that future - and of the past that has generated it." To be published 29th August 2016, Thomas Rid is Professor of Security Studies at King's College London.

Reviewing the book in New Scientist Bruce Sterling writes:"Cybernetic feedback was Darwin-scale high concept, an intellectual gift that would keep on giving."

Seymour Papert

Professor Seymour Papert died aged 88 at his home in Blue Hill, Maine, on July 31, 2016. His pioneering work in AI led to the development of Logo, the floor turtle and the One Laptop Per Child project. He pointed out the ease with which young children can take up writing using Word Processors. He developed an approach to Robotics with Lego.

MIT Media Lab remember him.

Cybernetics Society Symposium Saturday 22nd October 2016 at 2pm in London

Meeting at Salieri Restaurant in the Strand, London (opposite The Savoy). New comers welcome. Contact our Secretary Dr David Dewhurst.

Metaphorum Conference 2016: Governance and Complexity

The theme is Innovative research and applications of the Viability Theory - Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) - to be held on 5-7th October at Leeds Beckett University with the Centre for Governance Leadership and Global Responsibility and the Hull University Centre of Systems Studies.

Further details.

Contact Dr Pedro Pablo Cardoso ( p.p.cardoso-castro@leedsbeckett.ac.uk ). Call close now 25th August 2016.

Our President Martin Smith writes:"The Metaphorum Group is a community of researchers and practitioners interested in the preservation, promotion and development of Stafford Beer's Legacy in Management Cybernetics - the field founded by him. Stafford Beer pioneered the application of cybernetics to the understanding of all complex dynamic systems. After years in industry pioneering Operational Research he wrote a number of books including: "Management and Cybernetics", "Decision and Control" and "Brain of the Firm". He was invited by the Prime Minister of Chile, Dr Salvadore Allende, to apply this approach to Government in Chile. Beer's theories have been developed and they are believed to be increasingly relevant to governments and the governance of organisations of all kinds wishing to develop resilience and the capability to adapt to the challenges of social, environmental and economic changes."

Cybernetics Society AGM & Council Meeting Saturday 9th July 2016

The meetings will be held from 2-5pm at the Mayday Rooms, 88 Fleet St, London EC4Y 1DH.

Isaacson and Kauffman: Recursive Distinctioning

Recursive Distinctioning (RD) is the study of those systems that use symbolic alphabetic language that can describe the neighborhood of a locus (in a network) occupied by a given icon or letter or element of language. An icon representing the distinctions between the original icon and its neighbors is formed and replaces the original icon. This process continues recursively. RD processes encompass a very wide class of recursive processes in this context of language, geometry and logic. These elements are fundamental to cybernetics and cross the boundaries between what is traditionally called first and second order cybernetics. This is particularly the case when the observer of the RD system is taken to be a serious aspect of that system. Then the elementary and automatic distinctions within the system are integrated with the higher order discriminations of the observer. The very simplest RD processes have dialectical properties, exhibit counting and they exhibit patterns of self-replication. Thus one has in the first RD a microcosm of cybernetics and perhaps, a microcosm of the world.

Joel Isaacson is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and Principal Investigator of IMI Corporation and Louis H. Kauffman is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, recipient of the Warren McCulloch Award (1993), the Norbert Wiener Medal of the American Society for Cybernetics (2014) and, most recently, the Bertalanffy prize for oustanding work in complexity thinking (2016).

Joel Isaacson writes: Dr Bernd Schmeikal has recently suggested a fundamental structure of the universe relation between RD and Minkowski spacetime.

Special Issue of Journal of Space Philosophy on Recursive Distinctioning.

IBM invite you to program their five qubit Quantum Computer

Register for tutorial and subsequent access to get "hands on" experience.

Ranulph Glanville Architecture | Art | Cybernetics | Design London and the 1960-ies

Dr. Albert Muller President of the Heinz von Foerster Society writes: In the second half of the 1960ies the late cybernetician and the president of the ASC Ranulph Glanville studied architecture at the Architectural Association, London. The exhibition presents a selection of Glanville`s works and designs of this period.

Time: 19.5.2016 - 13.6.2016 Place: Echoraum, Sechshauserstrasse 66, A-1150 Vienna, Austria Opening Hours: MO-FR: 18:00-20:00, SA-SO: 15.00-18:00.

The exhibition will be opened with a lecture by designer Michael Hohl (Dessau) and an introduction by historian Albert Muller (Vienna). Edition echraum will launch a book about the exhibition. On the last day architect Stephen Gage (London) will talk about "The Sixties and the Seventies (and Ranulph)". Sociologist Dirk Baecker will talk about Composition in Media Space (in German).

Detailed program. Download Flyer .pdf

Designing Freedom: Stafford Beer's 1973 Massey Lecture

From the CBC website:"Distinguished cyberneticist Stafford Beer states the case for a new science of systems theory and cybernetics. His essays examine such issues as "The Real Threat to All We Hold Most Dear", "The Discarded Tools of Modern Man", "A Liberty Machine in Prototype", "Science in the Service of Man", "The Future That Can Be Demanded Now", "The Free Man in a Cybernetic World". Designing Freedom ponders the possibilities of liberty in a cybernetic world."

The six talks about 30mins each.

Call for "Governing Business Systems: Theories and Challenges for Systems Thinking in Practice"

The 4th Business Systems Laboratory International Symposium will be held in Vilnius (Lithuania) at the Mykolas Romeris University on August 24-26, 2016. The focus is on epistemological, theoretical, methodological, technical and practical contributions. This multidisciplinary perspective includes: management, economics, engineering and sociology.

Further details. Closing date for submissions 15th March 2016.

Monat and Gannon: Using Systems Thinking to Analyze ISIS

From their abstract Jamie P. Monat and Thomas F. Gannon write "In this paper, we apply Systems Thinking tools (including the Iceberg Model, causal loop diagrams, stock-and-flow diagrams, and dynamic modeling) to analyze ISIS's beliefs, goals, needs, and appeal, and to suggest new strategies for dealing with ISIS. We conclude that a Systems Thinking analysis leads to approaches that are very different from typical linear thinking solutions, such as "bomb them back to the Stone Age", and suggest alternative approaches for dealing with ISIS." From American Journal of Systems Science 2015, 4(2): 36-49.

Download .pdf. There is a discussion here at LinkedIn.

Journal of Sociocybernetics: Special Issue 13th Conference of Sociocybernetics

Fabio Giglietto writes: Vol 13, No 2 (2015). Special Issue 13th Conference of Sociocybernetics (part I) contains a first group of three papers selected from best contributions presented during our 2015 Zaragoza conference. We expect the second part to be out before Vienna ISA Forum.

Minsky dies aged 88

From the New York Times: "Marvin Minsky, who combined a scientist's thirst for knowledge with a philosopher's quest for truth as a pioneering explorer of artificial intelligence, work that helped inspire the creation of the personal computer and the Internet, died on Sunday night in Boston." More.

Marvin Minsky was greatly admired by many of our members and his influence on AI research cannot be over estimated.

Quantum Cybernetics

This is a paper from Girolami, Schmidt and Adesso of the Clarendon Lab at Oxford and School of Mathematical Sciences at Nottingham. They seek to apply Ashby's ideas on regulation to understand quantum self-regulation better. A most exciting development for our field. They note how Ashby's Law of Requiste Variety "state driving" approach resembles information processing in quantum teleportation, remote state preparation, and quantum state merging.

Paper in .pdf format from arXivTowards Quantum Cybernetics.

Brief overview from grant giver FQXi, the Foundational Questions Institute.

Reclaim AI- Back-To-The-Humans?

Cybersalon will be hosting a debate titled "Reclaim AI-Back-To-The-Humans?" on Tuesday 10th November at 6.30pm LBI Digitas, 146 Brick Lane, London E1 6RU.

It will be chaired by Wendy Grossman (neuroscience researcher and author of Net Wars and other books). Panel members will be Dr Satinder Gill (Editor of the journal Artificial Intelligence in Society), Sha Xin-Wei (AI researcher at Stanford and Harvard), Bill Thompson (Technology writer and broadcaster for the BBC) and Martin Smith (President of The Cybernetics Society, Prof of Robotics and Robot Wars judge!).

Cybersalon was set up by Eva Pascoe the creator of Cyberia the internet cafe chain. Further details.

Cybernetics: A General Theory that Includes Command and Control

Distinguished cybernetician and past president of the American Cybernetics Society Stuart Umpleby gave this review paper comparing themes and concerns in the developement of Cybernetics from the early 1940s to the present in America and Europe (given to the 20th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium Annapolis, 2015).

Managing Complexity with the Viable Systems Model 11th-13th November 2015

Metaphorum and the Centre of Systems Studies at Hull University Business School hosts the conference on Stafford Beer's VSM: Theory, Applications and Innovative Research. Speakers include Prof Mike Jackson, Prof Alfredo Moscardini, Dr Allenna Leonard, Dr Paul Stokes, Dr Angela Espinosa and Dr Jon Walker.

Conference details.

Contact Dr Angela Espinosa or Dr Leonie Solomons.

Cybernetics Society Symposuim at the Photographers' Gallery Cafe 12 Sept 2-c.4pm 2015

Our Secretary Dr David Dewhurst writes: The Cafe of the Photographers' Gallery is rated as one of the best places to meet in London. It is in the SE quadrant of the junction of Oxford St. and Regent St. I have guessed at numbers in my booking so it would help if you tell me if you're coming. Email David.

RC51:The Futures We Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World

The 3rd International Socialogical Association Forum on Sciocybernetics will be held from 10-14 July 2016 in Vienna, Austria. The call for papers is open and deadline for submitting your abstract is 30 September 2015 24:00 GMT.

The 2015 Ranulph Glanville Memorial Lecture

Video of Michael Lissack, President of the American Society for Cybernetics, at the 59th ISSS Conference held in Berlin in August 2015.

Encoding/decoding and ambiguity are his themes with remarks on Climate Change and how we might avoid the "Chasm of Dissonance".

Eyewar - Cybernetics and Project Cybersyn

A Documentary from Root and Thorn taking a military perspective on the history of cybernetics and including an account of our Honorary Fellow Stafford Beer's work for Allende in Chile from 1971 to 1973 .

Recalling the pre-2015 UK election Yougov poll we find it is standards people want maintained and improved. Beer attempted this by gathering real-time statistics of performance or big data as we say today. America's fear of Russian communism in South America seemed to prevent this from becoming the standard approach to governance. Calls for greater transparency in governance from all sides should prompt a re-evaluation by Governments and Business of Beer's "fix it now", democratic, expert finding Viable System Model of management cybernetics.

AGM & Council Meeting Tuesday 21st July 2015 6pm at 88 Fleet St EC4Y 1DH

The Meeting Rooms are just under half a mile east along the road from Kings' College's Strand site. 88 Fleet St. is opposite Goldman Sachs, to the left of the set back forecourt to St. Brides - nearest station Blackfriars.

Council and AGM agenda and minutes of last year's Council and Annual General meetings.

Mutual Redundancies and Triple Contingencies among Perspectives on Horizons of Meaning

Members and others may appreciate this recent presentation by Professor Loet Leydesdorff from the conference of International Society for Information Studies, Vienna, 3-7 June 2014

Professor Leysdorf is emeritus at University of Amsterdam School of Communication Research; Honorary at University of Sussex and visits Zhejiang, Beijing and Birkbeck.Recent citations.

36th International Conference on Information Systems Architecture and Technology

September 20-22, 2015 Karapacz, Poland. The paper submission deadline is extended to June 15, 2015.

Keynote lecture "Some insights from Big Data Research projects" by Prof. Peter Nielsen (Aalborg University).

Further details.

FreeTrust: Voluntary Trusted Identities, Privacy and Safety in Cyberspace

Jim Whitescarver is a blockchain revolutionary he writes: Identity is the new money. The internet has been transforming society empowering individual expression and complete connectivity in a realm where close to the sum total of the knowledge of humanity is at everyone's fingertips empowered by intelligent systems that have becomes the slaves of humanity. While old institutions are fading and business has become an accounting of eyeballs the transformations continue in each phase of the internet, from websites and email, to the development of user communities connected by social networks capitalizing on the personal information of the participants. Identity has become the new money where valuation of an enterprise has become a multiple of size of the user community.

FreeTrust Project Current State.

GLC actors, artificial chemical connectomes, topological issues and knots

Cybernetician and mathematician Lou Kauffman and Romanian mathematician Marius Buliga write: Based on graphic lambda calculus (GLC), we propose a program for a new model of asynchronous distributed computing, inspired from Hewitt Actor Model, as well as several investigation paths, concerning how one may graft lambda calculus and knot diagrammatics.Based on graphic lambda calculus, we propose a program for a new model of asynchronous distributed computing, inspired from Hewitt Actor Model, as well as several investigation paths, concerning how one may graft lambda calculus and knot diagrammatics.

Download from arVix.

Further explanation.

Can the Intellectual Processes in Science Also Be Simulated? The Anticipation and Visualization of Possible Future States

Cybernetician Loet Leydesdorff writes: Socio-cognitive action reproduces and changes both social and cognitive structures. The analytical distinction between these dimensions of structure provides us with richer models of scientific development... Simulations of these [incursive and hyper-incursive] equations enable us to visualize the couplings among the historical i.e. recursive-progression of social structures along trajectories, the evolutionary i.e. hyper-incursive development of systems of expectations at the regime level, and the incursive instantiations of expectations in actions, organizations, and texts.

This intriguing thesis is demonstrated by analogy with transformations to the colouring of Van Gogh's "Langlois Bridge at Arles".

Download from arVix.

"Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt" Michael M. Lewis, Norton 2014

Ern Reynolds writes: Ostensibly the book is a detective story, about tracking down an unfair advantage (front-running) that arose in the U.S. stock market.But really it is an example-rich textbook about several severe unintended consequences. They arose when the governance of an important very large complex system got too rule-based rather than principle-based. I've read several other financial writer Michael Lewis books without having this realization. But this one dealt with the personalities behind sub-optimizing computer code to gain milliseconds of execution speed. Such a plot sounds dull, but it turned out to be a cornucopia of amazing cybernetic examples from start to finish.

Domain Name Hijack

Regular visitors may have noticed our recent loss of service. Pending any further investigation we can say our Domain Name was offered for sale by some third party. Once identity checks and the Society's claims were confirmed the Domain Name was restored. Wikipedia on Domain hijacking. We are sorry for any inconvenience.

2nd IEEE International Conference on Cybernetics, Gdynia, Poland, 24-26 June 2015 CYBCONF 2015 - Call for Special Sessions

A Special Session will consist of a group of papers, required to meet the same standards as CYBCONF 2015 papers. The person proposing a Special Session also takes responsibility for it, gathering papers from a range of research expertise around the world.

More details.

Call for proposals: 13th International Conference of Sociocybernetics

The theme "Sociocybernetics Facing Turbulent Times: Media, Politics and Societies" will be discussed in Zaragoza, Spain, June 29-July 3, 2015.

Topics can include media and political issues:

• Political movements, and new forms of social organization
• Media, protests and political action
• Privacy, control and surveillance
• News production, circulation and consumption
• Culture clash and systemic change

• Technology and citizen science
• Reflexivity and digital technologies
• Computational social science and Big Data
• Cybercultur@ and knowledge communities

Further details.

The Global Brain and the Future Information Society Vienna June 3- 7 2015: 2nd Call for Papers

Further details from Francis Heylighen of the Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group, Free University of Brussels.

Systems and Cybernetics in Organisation (SCiO) Open Meeting BT Centre London 26th January

Four sessions of general interest regarding systems practice will be given- this will include 'craft' and active sessions, as well as introductions to theory.

• Steve Morlidge - systems and performance management
• George Rzevski - managing complexity in organisations
• Richard Selwyn - public sector commissioning - systems thinking and systems leadership under the radar
• Chris Potts - how market ecosystems demand outside-in enterprise architecture

Further Details.

SCiO will be holding an Open Day at Manchester Business School on April 20 2015.

Ranulph Glanville President of the American Society for Cybernetics

The American Society for Cybernetics announces the untimely passing of president Ranulph Glanville six months prior to his 70th birthday on June 13, 2015.

Incoming ASC president Michael Lissack writes.

Albert Muller of the Heinz von Foerster Society writes in German "In memoriam Ranulph Glanville (1946-2014)".

The Chrome browser will translate.

Call for papers: The Global Brain and the Future Information Society

Global Brain is a track at IS4IS 2015 Summit Vienna.

Prof. Francis Heylighen, Director of the Global Brain Institute writes:The Global Brain can be defined as the self-organizing network formed by all people on this planet together with the information and communication technologies that connect and support them. As the Internet becomes faster, smarter, and more encompassing, it increasingly links its users into a single information processing system, which functions like a nervous system for the planet Earth.

The intelligence of this system is collective and distributed: it is not localized in any particular individual, organization or computer system. It rather emerges from the interactions between all its components- a property characteristic of a complex adaptive system. Such a distributed intelligence may be able to tackle current and emerging global problems that have eluded more traditional approaches. Yet, at the same time it will create technological and social challenges that are still difficult to imagine, transforming our society in all aspects.

Invitation to IEEE conference CYBCONF 2015, Gdynia, Poland

Profs Piotr Jedrzejowicz and Ngoc Thanh Nguyen write: We sincerely invite you to submit a paper to CYBCONF 2015. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings, available on IEEE Xplore and submitted to be indexed/abstracted in CPCi (ISI conferences and part of Web of Science) and Engineering Index. The authors of selected best papers will be invited post conference to extend their contributions for special issues of prestigious journals such as IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics.

More details.

Project CYBERSYN: Chile & the Socialist Internet

6th December 2014 2pm- 5pm and 7pm-10pm C1.18 (The Pavilion), University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street, W1W 6UW London.

The event is led by Raul Espejo Former Operational Director of Project CYBERSYN. Currently he is Director-General of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics, Director of Syncho Ltd, and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Santiago.

Building on the insights of Norbert Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics, Stafford's vision entailed a radical experiment in grass-roots networking.

More at Cybersalon.

Shape the future of the Web!

Sir Tim Berners-Lee says "The future of the Web depends on ordinary people discussing it, taking responsibility for it and challenging those who seek to control the Web for their own purposes. The first step is to answer one simple question: what kind of Web do we want?"

More at webwewant.org

Festschrift for Ranulph Glanville

Lou Kauffman and Soren Brier write:"Ranulph Glanville is about to retire from his work for the Cybernetics & Human Knowing journal. He is soon writing his last column to no.2: 2015. He will also retire from great parts of his enormous fan of work for associations such as the ASC, conferences and other journals. We therefore thought we would commemorate his gigantic work with a festschrift commenting on the significance of what he has done...".

Further information in the 28/10/14 CYBCOM post from Soren Brier.

Dr Bernard Scott "Beyond Dogma: Heinz von Foerster's Responsibilities of Competence" Heinz von Foerster Lecture '14 in Vienna

Monday, 10th November 2014, 19:00 University Wien.

Our distinguished fellow Dr Scott will discuss two kinds of pathological belief system "individualism" and the "dogmas of collectives". He proposes education for cybernetic enlightenment.Flyer.

There will be anniversary celebrations "Heinz von Foerster's Birthday Party" on Thursday, 13th November 2014, 20:00 echoraum, Sechshauser Strasse 66, 1150 Wien.

Further details email Albert Mueller.

Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century: Plans commence for follow-up to successful conference

From the Conference Newsletter: The success of the conference has led to discussion of a second conference at the University of Melbourne, 13-15 July 2016. At present, we are confirming conference sponsors, themes and special events. For further details or to participate in the early preparations, e-mail.

In coming months transcripts of key talks from the conference will be provided on the 21st Century Wiener web site. Peer reviewed papers have been included in the IEEEXplore database.

"The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again)" Doug Hill reflects on Wiener in The Atlantic.

"The Planning Machine: Project Cybersyn and the origins of the Big Data nation" from The New Yorker Evgeny Morozov reviews Stafford Beer's interpretation of Wiener and Ashby for real-time Management.

The Cybernetics Society October Symposium is postponed till Saturday November 22nd 2014 at 2pm.

The meeting will be held as before at Wine and Mousaka, Haven Green, Ealing Broadway, W5 2NY (120m right out of Ealing Broadway station, terminus of District and Central lines). Possible topics have been suggested on Robotics and Cybernetic perspectives on the financial crisis but discussion is usually open.

A decision on further locations (e.g. back to Salieri's) will be made following the first meeting and in the light of member comments and suggestions.

Later discussion lunches/symposia are scheduled for Saturday 12th January and Saturday 4th April 2015, all starting at 2pm. Offers to organise additional scientific meetings/talks are welcome.

Call for papers: IMA Conference on Mathematics of Robotics 9-11 September 2015

The conference will be held at St Anne's College Oxford and organized by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. Topics suggested include:

• Topology. Kinematics. Algebraic topology of configuration spaces of robot mechanisms. Topological aspects of path planning and sensor networks. Differential topology and singularity theory of robot mechanism and moduli spaces.
• Algebraic Geometry. Varieties generated by linkages and constraints. Geometry of stiffness and inertia matrices. Rigid-body motions. Computational approaches to algebraic geometry.
• Dynamical Systems and Control. Dynamics of robots and mechanisms. Simulation of multi-body systems, e.g. swarm robots. Geometric control of robots. Optimal control and other optimisation problems.
• Combinatorial and Stochastic Methods. Rigidity of structures. Path planning algorithms. Modular robots.
• Statistics. Stochastic control. Localisation. Navigation with uncertainty. Statistical learning theory.
• Cognitive Robotics. Mathematical aspects of Artificial Intelligence, Developmental Robotics and other Neuroscience based approaches.

Further details.

AGM & Council Meeting Tuesday 22 July 2014 6pm at Mayday Rooms 88 Fleet St

David Dewhurst writes: Please note the changed location for this year. The Mayday Rooms are just under half a mile east along the road from Kings' College's Strand site. 88 Fleet St. is opposite Goldman Sachs, to the left of the set back forecourt to St. Brides - nearest station Blackfriars.

Council and AGM agendas and minutes of last year's Council and Annual General meetings.

ASC conference 2014 "Living in Cybernetics" Washington DC 3 to 9 August

2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the American Society for Cybernetics incorporated in Washington DC on the 6th August 1964.

The theme is "Living in Cybernetics". The main event (4th to 8th August inclusive) will celebrate "ASC cybernetics in the present" through paper presentations themed using Stuart Umpleby's "Several Traditions of cybernetics" (4th and 5th August); "ASC cybernetics in the past" through addresses from many past presidents and other long term members (August 6th) developing our timeline; and "ASC cybernetics in the future" through workshops developing (re-)views of how cybernetics and education may come together to help make a better world (August 7th and 8th). We intend to generate a publicly available web resource from the "ASC cybernetics in the future sessions". Papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of Kybernetes. The reports back from the past presidents and others will be published in Cybernetics and Human Knowing.

For more details including the pre and post-conference meetings, tourism and arts events around Washington fees etc please visit to find more information, apply to join us, to submit a paper abstract for consideration, or just to express interest.

The conference will be held shortly after the 2014 conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (also at The School of Business at George Washington University). There are discounts for those attending both.

The AISB 2014 Convention (AISB-50)

The AISB, the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, is holding a convention celebrating 50 years of the AISB from the 1st to the 4th April 2014, at Goldsmiths, University of London, SE14 6NW.

The AISB 2014 Convention (AISB-50) will commemorate both fifty years since the founding of the AISB and sixty years since the death of Alan Turing, founding father of both Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. The convention will include a set of co-located symposia hosting events that include talks, posters, panels, discussions, demonstrations, and outreach sessions. See the AISB-50 Website .

EMCSR 2014: Civilisation at the Crossroads - Response and Responsibility of the Systems Sciences
Vienna, 22-25 April 2014

European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research features keynotes by Mario Bunge, John Collier, and Markus Schwaninger with themes of Sustainability & Development, Emergence & Design, and Complexity & Strategy. The close for the call is February 28th and there is more information here.

System Dynamics Society "Good Governance in a Complex World" Delft, Netherlands July 20-July 24, 2014

This 32nd International Conference aims to address the role of models in governance in the public and private sectors, typically involving a diversity of domains, disciplines, organizations, stakeholders, policies, and goals.

Call for papers closes March 18th.

Further details.

IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference San Jose, California October 10th-13th 2014

IEEE GHTC focuses on advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. This 4th annual cross-discipline conference provides the perfect venue for those interested in humanitarian projects to join their peers in Silicon Valley, a community famed for leading-edge technological innovations, world-class researchers, and technology investors. The conference attracts a global audience of educators, engineers, scientist, practitioners, educators, philanthropists, corporations, foundations, NGO's and others interested in applying technology to develop effective solutions for the challenges facing the world's underserved populations.

Abstract submissions by March 13th.

Further details.

Deductive and Mathematical Cognition: Implications for Philosophy

The Deductive and Mathematical Cognition Philosophy Conference will be held at the University of Bristol on 7th and 8th April 2014.

The conference aims to investigate the implications of recent empirical developments in the study of deductive and mathematical cognition for established questions in the philosophy of mathematics and logic.

The conference will spend one day focussing on each field, the first day (April 7th) on Mathematical Cognition and Philosophy of Mathematics and the second (April 8th) on Deductive Cognition and Philosophy of Logic.

Further details.

International Workshop on Movement and Computing: Call for papers

To be held in Ircam-Centre Pompidou, Paris, France on June 16-17 2014. Call closes 15th February 2014. MOCO will bring together people working in interdisciplinary intersections of Human Computer Interaction, Computer Graphics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Affective Computing, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience.

Further details.

IEEE 2014 Conference on Norbert Wiener in 21st Century

The call for papers ends January 31, 2014. Conference runs 24-26 June 2014, Boston, MA, USA. Confirmed keynote speakers include Dr Mary Catherine Bateson, David A Mindell, Andrew Pickering, Rudolf Seising and Bruce Schneier.

Further details with much background material.

"Second Order Cybernetics Then and Now"

The 2013 Heinz von Foerster Lecture will be given by Stuart Umpleby professor of management at George Washington University at the University of Vienna on Monday 18th November 2013, 19.00 Lecture Room 13.

Prof Umplelby writes: When Heinz von Foerster coined the term "second order cybernetics", his goal was to include the observer in the domain of science. This was a fundamental change in the conception of science, and Heinz encountered stiff opposition. One consequence of including the observer would be to extend cybernetics (and science) into the domain of ethics. Scientists had previously sought to be objective. Including the observer made science a subjective enterprise. This suggestion was strongly resisted by Heinz's colleagues in the UIUC College of Engineering and elsewhere in the U.S. academic community....Several conceptions of second order science have now been formulated. If we use the correspondence principle (i.e., every new theory should reduce to the old theory to which it corresponds for those cases in which the old theory is known to hold), we can say that two dimensions have been added to the conception of science: a) amount of attention paid to the observer, and b) the amount of effect of a theory on the phenomenon described.

Further Information.

Martin is back in Robotics at Middlesex University

Prof. Martin Smith, President of the Cybernetics Society, has rejoined academia after seven years working in government. He is now Professor of Robotics at Middlesex University London. He also recently joined the Editorial Boards of three journals, which now include: The International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, The International Journal of Applied Systemic Studies, The International Journal of General Systems, The International Journal of Social Robotics, and Kybernetes the International Journal of Cybernetics, Systems and Management Sciences. He became a Director of WOSC - the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics, earlier this year.

OLKC 2014 Theme: "Circuits of Knowledge" Oslo 22-24 April 2014

The organisers write:"With the proposed theme "Circuits of knowledge" we hope the conference contributions may be inspired to further develop the organizational learning, knowledge and innovation literature through conceptual and empirical contributions. The metaphor is meant to open up explorations of how knowledge and organizational learning may be said to move or revolve around, in, and through circuits. Familiar concepts may be learning cycles and -loops, and the recursiveness of practice."

Further details.

Dr Bernard Scott awarded 2013 McCulloch Medal

Our Council Member Dr B.C.E. Scott has been given the McCulloch Medal by the American Society of Cybernetics at their recent conference in Bolton University "for outstanding and profound lifelong contributions to nurturing cybernetics through the development of both cybernetically based praxis in education, and major theories concerning learning and the learnable". Full Citation.

Joint recipients were The Heinz von Foerster Society, "for an extensive, prolonged, deep and successful commitment to the furtherance of the work of Heinz von Foerster and other cyberneticians concerned with second-order cybernetics and related approaches and understandings". Full Citation.

Report of the American Society for Cybernetics Conference, 2013, University of Bolton, UK, July 30th - August 1st

The premise of the conference was not to listen to known answers, but to become involved in developing new questions. Dr Bernard Scott reports.

ASC President Dr Ranulph Glanville talks about his Theory of Objects (You Tube video).

First Global Conference on Research Integration and Implementation:
Linking networks, taking stock, planning for the future

The conference will be held in Canberra, Australia 8-11 September 2013.

• understanding problems as systems
• combining knowledge from various disciplines and practice areas
• dealing with unknowns to reduce risk, unpleasant surprises and adverse unintended consequences
• helping research teams collaborate more effectively
• implementing evidence in improved policy and practice.

Further details.

Online participation.

Forthcoming Society Symposia

Discussion lunches/symposia will be held at Salieri's on the Strand from 2pm on 14th September 2013, 4th Jan and 12th April 2014. Please confirm attendance with an email to our Secretary. Non-members who wish to attend should contact our Secretary.

Council Meeting and AGM 23rd July

The Council Meeting and AGM was held on Tuesday 23rd July from 6:00 pm to approximately 9:00 pm in King's College, Building Q Room SW1.14, East Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 2LS. Access is either via the Somerset House courtyard or the King's College main entrance both in the Strand. The room is booked from 5:30.See location of building Q.

Minutes of the meetings.

Doug Engelbart

From CYBCOM Randall Whitaker writes:"I'm sad to learn that Doug Engelbart has died, though I knew he'd been in frail health for some time.

"There are very, very few individuals to whom I've accorded unabashed admiration (i.e. 'personal hero' status). Doug was one of them.

"In spring 1991 I organized a study tour for Swedish IT and telecommunications professionals focusing on computer-mediated collaboration and collaborative technologies. A group of 25 - 30, subdivided into roving teams, visited a variety of R&D centers across North America. The centerpiece of the tour was a 3-day mini-conference at a resort in Tucson, for which we deliberately scheduled a single featured guest - Doug Engelbart. I had pushed for this based on my claim that research efforts at CERN (i.e. Tim Berners-Lee and company ...) held the promise of bringing Engelbart's ideas to widespread fruition.

"In his demonstrations (using some of his innovative equipment dating back decades) and two days of casual conversations, Engelbart showed us more of the future than we had garnered from all the other research visits combined. Even now - more than two decades later - I don't think I've ever seen anyone surf so much data so quickly and so effectively as this already-aged man did with his chord keyboard and antiquated electromechanical mouse. Even now the Web has yet to widely exploit the full extent of the hypertextual features he and his SRI colleagues built into their early NLS / AUGMENT systems.

"The cursory references to Engelbart as the originator of the mouse don't do justice to the full range of his (and his colleagues') insights, innovations, and vision. The SRI research wasn't just the seminal source for our current human-computer interaction modalities - it was also the primary inspiration for the Web as well as the everyday utility of the 'Net in general.

"This is why I jumped out of my poolside seat and walked over to greet him when he arrived at the Tucson resort. I introduced myself, shook his hand, and simply / earnestly said, "On behalf of more people than you may know - thank you!"

"Doug Engelbart was not only a significant visionary - he was by far the most generous and gracious visionary I've ever encountered.

"If you've never seen the 1968 presentation at which Engelbart and his SRI colleagues demonstrated the technological products of their research into augmenting human intelligence, I heartily recommend you do so. I don't know of any other single recorded event at which so much of so much significance was unveiled.

"I've long made this video mandatory viewing for students and colleagues - if for no other reason to illustrate that everything they began engaging as the Web circa 1993 had been demonstrated a quarter century earlier. Recognition of this protracted latency is both disconcerting and humbling."

Stanford University offers access to the 1968 presentation video (via selected clips, or the entire 100 minute event).

The 20th Annual International Deming Research Seminar New York City 3-4 March 2014: Call For Papers

The 20th Annual International Deming Research Seminar will bring together people from around the world, and from a variety of specialties, to enhance, extend, and illustrate Dr. Deming's theories.

Further details.

Papers must be original work. Abstracts of 200 words or less should be sent by October 7, 2013 to wedresearch@fordham.edu.

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science PhD Scholarship applications 2013

The Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (BCSSS), Vienna, offers a scholarship for the support of work in systems science leading to a PhD-degree at an Austrian university.

Further details.

Alex Andrew

Professor Raul Espejo, Director-General World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics writes: "I'm sad to inform you that Dr. Alex Andrew, that as you know was Director-General of WOSC until September 2011, passed away on the 31st of May, 2013. He was a distinguished scientist, who made significant contributions to Cybernetics."

Alex wrote an autobiographical piece for the International Journal of General Systems in February 2011. He will be greatly missed.

Alex Andrew's Cybernetics Society profile.

Our president Prof. Martin Smith attended Alex's funeral and reception at his home representing the Cybernetics Society and WOSC, as Raul Espejo (Director General of WOSC) and Brian Rudall (former Editor in Chief of Kybernetes) were both out of the country at the time.

Eulogy delivered by Dr. G. K. Wallace, Senior Lecturer (retired) at Reading Crematorium, All Hallows Road, Monday June 10th 2013.

SCiO courses: Viable System Model (VSM) Beginners (6th July) and Dynamics (3rd August)

Jane Searles writes: SCiO's introductory courses on the Viable System Model (VSM) by Patrick Hoverstadt of Fractal Consulting are running again this summer. These are open to all, at a cost of £20 for members and £50 for non-members, with a discounted rate of £20 for OU students on TU811 and TU812.

A Beginners Workshop in Modelling using the VSM Milton Keynes, Saturday 6th July: more information.

Organisational Dynamics - VSM Intermediate Milton Keynes, Saturday 3rd August: more information.

To book your place for either or both, please contact Roger Duck.

Saturday 13 April Cybernetics Society Symposium

Long lunch 2-4pm this Saturday at Salerii, 376 Strand, London, WC2R 0LQ. Email David to be sure of a place please.

The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside
Exhibition 26th April 2013 to the 1st July 2013 Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

The exhibition and conference project emerges from the context of cultural and scientific debates about the Anthropocene to investigate basic questions of the "age of man", as well as negotiating the historical relation between ecology and cybernetics. The exhibition project departs from a particular moment in time: California of the 1960s and 70s. California was not only a centre of the counterculture with its global impact on music and other cultural productions, but also a laboratory fusing diverse mind-sets and ideologies which influenced the current "ecological paradigm" and "systems thinking".

Using materials from cultural history and artistic works, the exhibition will critically explore the application of ecological-systemic concepts to society, politics, and aesthetics. The transformation of romantic and technophile ideas from the realm of counterculture and cybernetics led to concepts of the system and self-management in network capitalism that have a global impact today.

The Haus der Kulturen der Welt is an interdisciplinary space for international contemporary arts and a forum for current developments and discourse in Berlin. Throughout the years, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt has ensured the development of a strong network of intercultural co-operations with institutions and actors of the cultural and artistic fields, offering them optimal conditions of presentation.

Further information.

American Society of Cybernetics 2013 conference, "Acting, Learning, Understanding)" Bolton UK 30 July to 1 August 2013

Dr Ranulph Glanville writes: The main conference is 30 July to 1 August (3 days), inclusive. It is preceded by a 2 day pre-conference and followed by a 2 day post-conference (which are free).

The conference is hosted by the Institute for Educational Cybernetics, University of Bolton, UK.

Further details.

Conference flyer.

Difference That Makes a Difference 8-10 April 2013

This is an interdisciplinary workshop on Information: Space, Time, and Identity supported by Open University Department of Communication and Systems and the MK Gallery.

Further information.

FuturICT

FuturICT will build a Living Earth Platform, a simulation, visualization and participation platform to support decision-making of policy-makers, business people and citizens.

The proposal intends to unify hundreds of the best scientists in Europe in a 10 year 1 billion EUR program to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to.

More.

The Society's Autumn Symposium to be held at Salieri 13th October 2012

The meeting was postponed from 29th September but arrangements are as usual starting at 2pm. Please email our secretary Dr David Dewhurst if you would like to attend.

Location and details of Salieri Restaurant.

Cybernetics Society AGM & Council Meeting Tuesday 24th July 2012 6.30pm King's College, Strand

Our Secretary writes: Non Council members are welcome to attend the initial Council meeting. All in room S0.03 (formerly GFSB5). Do contact me about anything which is unclear, or additional agenda proposals. The next Conference is scheduled for September 2013. Please send proposals for papers to myself initially.

Agenda and Minutes of last Council and AGM meeting.

GLOGIFT 2012 Twelfth Global Conference on Flexible Systems Management

University of Vienna, Austria July 30 - August 1, 2012. Flexibility and agility are major themes see Call for papers.

Further details

"The Cybernetics of Self-Organisation, Learning and Evolution" Papers 1960-1972 by Gordon Pask selected and introduced by Bernard Scott.

Pask's learned papers are notoriously hard to get. There are 15 papers here from for the early years including two previously unpublshed: "Some mechanical Concepts of Goals, Individuals, Consciousness and Symbolic Evolution" and "Essays on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Control". Neither is trivial both are long substantial papers like the others in this fine collection. In his forward Karl H. Mueller calls Pask "The Hidden Grand Master of Cybernetics" this says it all. You will not find system analysis done like this anywhere else. Dip in before you get started, you may need a pad and pencil, but you will be intrigued and above all stimulated with this fresh new take starting 52 years ago.

If you need reassurance look at some of the more familiar questions discussed here like McCulloch's Redundancty of Potential Command (condition for self-organisation) and von Foerster's development of it. Tucked away in "Man as a System that Needs to Learn", page 280, is a discussion of this which Pask claimed motivated his production of Conversation Theory and the later Interactions of Actors Theory.

The P-Individual and its medium the M-Individual reach full flower by the end of the collection accompanied by sundry "good ideas" waiting for further development. Type I and Type II analogies, extensive discussions of the nature of "goal" and his L⁰, L¹ and L^* languages come to mind. Particularly striking, in his "Comments on the Cybernetics of Ethical, Sociological, Psychological Systems", are four types of Law appled by arbitrators, each new type dependent on the existence of the preceeding type.

Papers selected:

1. The Natural History of Networks
2. The Cybernetics of Evolutionary Processes and of Self Organizing Systems
3. Learning Machines
4. The Use of Analogy and Parable in Cybernetics with Emphasis Upon Analogies for Learning and Creativity
5. Comments on the Cybernetics of Ethical, Sociological and Psychological Systems
6. Man as a System that Needs to Learn
7. A Cybernetic Model for some Types of Learning and Mentation
8. Models for Social Systems and for Their Languages
9. Some Mechanical Concepts of Goals, Individuals, Consciousness and Symbolic Evolution
10. Cognitive Systems
11. The Meaning of Cybernetics in the Behavioural Sciences
12. Essays on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Control
13. Interaction between Indviduals: its Stability and Style
14. Anti- Hodmanship: A Report on the State and Prospects of CAI
15. A Fresh Look at Cognition and the Individual

There is much treasure in Scott's collection and as Pask's most sustained collaborator he is to be congratulated on his choices and his guide to the material.

"Gordon Pask: The Cybernetics of Self-Organisation, Learning and Evolution Papers 1960-1972" Selected and Introduced by Dr Bernard Scott pp 648 Edition Echoraum (2011).

An Ecology of Ideas: ASC and BIG at Asilomar, California, 9-13 July 2012

The American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) and Bateson Idea Group (BIG) come together to hold a conference on the relations among ideas as seen from multiple perspectives. We come from many disciplines but have common roots including cybernetics, circularity, reflexivity, language, culture and systems. For many of us these roots are enmeshed with biology, information, pattern, design, art, aesthetics, ethics and more.

Further details.

Cybernetic Revolutionaries- Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile by Eden Medina
MIT Press ISBN-13:978-0-262-01649-0

Prof Raul Espejo, who was Operational Director of Project Cybersyn, reviews the book.

From the publishers: A history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics.

This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.

Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century
Boston March 2014

IEEE write: During his life Dr Norbert Wiener influenced mathematics, philosophy, science, technology, ethics, biology, prosthetics, education, manufacturing and other fields. Cyberspace is named after his multidisciplinary approach, "cybernetics". He was an early practitioner of diversity and social inclusion, and an advocate of social responsibility in the development of technology. This conference will look at his ideas and the influence they have today.

It is part of a renewed interest in Dr Wiener's work, an interest that is being reflected in research, writing and practice, and in both old and new media.

Further details.

Call for participation ISSS San Jose 2012
Service Systems, Natural Systems
San Jose, California USA, July 15-20

The systems sciences provide a platform of concepts and language that enables communities of interest to transcend disciplinary boundaries towards developing new knowledge and perspectives. The ISSS 2012 theme of Service Systems, Natural Systems draws attention to complex issues in today's world, where dialogue amongst the learned may lead to better futures.

Further Details.

The Cybernetic State

Video of Javier Livas talking at Manchester Business School about modelling the State and Law with Stafford Beer's Viable System Model.

His book "The Cybernetic State" can be obtained on request from the author (javierlivas@mac.com) in .pdf form.

Call for Abstracts, Papers & Workshops, 8th. HSSS National & International Conference
Systems Approach to Strategic Management
Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia. 5 - 7 July, 2012, Thessaloniki, Greece

The organisers invite:

• Academics: Communicate your research results with colleagues around the world.
• Consultants: Present the power of systems thinking, modeling and simulation in your applied, client-oriented work.
• Practitioners: Show modeling and simulation at work in your organizations.
• Graduate students: Share your developing research in a constructive environment.
• Undergraduate students: Have a good experience within a challenging and professional environment.

Further details.

Call for papers, 11th International Conference of Sociocybernetics
Complexity and Social Action: Interaction and Multiple Systems
2- 6 of July, Algarve University, Faro, Portugal

Recent events throughout the globe have put into perspective the need for new theory settings, new approaches and new insights into the current social dynamics that many consider on a verge of rupture. Financial crises, social uprisings, forced governmental collapses, and increasing inequalities within several spheres of the social world are some of the events that necessarily put collective and individual social action into new perspectives.

It is no longer possible to think of social phenomena in a disconnected way, since their foundations and limits are not clear. The understanding of social action and interaction, as cause and consequence of social phenomenon, depends on the capacity to consider and analyze all possibilities in action systems, their diversity and relations integrating micro, macro and meso perspectives. It is therefore, imperative for the sociocybernetic approach to address such a challenge.

The study of the interaction between multiple systems can be a useful and sound new way of thinking, especially if it follows a transdisciplinary approach. From the variety of subjects relevant in this respect, the next RC51 2012 Conference in Faro, will emphasize the following:

1. Decision Making and Action: Decision making is a highly complex embodied process resulting from the concerted action of a diverse set of interconnected systems that allow for the development of social action under the uncertainty that the future holds. Under this theme, we intend to explore the complexity of the intra-systemic and inter-systemic pathways framing decision-making and subsequent social action.
2. Violence: Violence is an interconnected system, socially and culturally produced and reproduced, and therefore embedded in individuals, institutions and states. The production of violence is a phenomenon with deep interconnections between the social, cultural, biological, emotional and symbolic systems. The discussion between the articulation of the individual system (composed of responses/actions/reactions/interactions), and the social and cultural system which provide the actor with the symbolic, and many times, unconscious tolls of actions and interactions, is crucial to advance the production of knowledge in this area.
3. Social Movements: The new social movements, now emerging in many countries, with different levels of economic development, combine a variety of new dimensions that exceed previously sociologically knowledge. The sociological analysis of these movements' actions requires, primarily, an intersystem approach of the complexity of all its dimensions, and secondly, two other dimensions of the social actors' selves: the relationship between themselves and the relationship that each social actor wants to have with old and new groups, organizations and institutions.

Papers are welcomed which address these issues. Beyond that other papers addressing conceptual and theoretical issues in sociocybernetics or reporting relevant empirical findings are also welcomed.

Further details

11 PhD Scholarships in the Hull University Business School

The Centre for Systems Studies, based in the Business School at the University of Hull (UK), has a strong international reputation for its cutting edge work on the theory, methodology and practice of systems thinking. The Business School is currently advertising 11 PhD scholarships: 7 paid for by the University, and 4 paid for by the Business School itself

We would like to strongly encourage people with exciting research ideas in the broad field of systems thinking to apply for these scholarships. While there will be applicants across all the research interests of the Business School, and the scholarships are allocated on merit, the Centre for Systems Studies has always previously been able to put forward several strong candidates, and we hope to be able to do so again this year.

Please click on the links below for details of the two types of scholarship. Applicants need to apply for both a PhD place and a scholarship by 2 March 2012, with a view to starting a full-time PhD in September 2012.

HUBS scholarships

University scholarships

Kybernetes Call for Editor

Emerald is seeking to recruit an engaged and enthusiastic Editor or Editors to develop the journal. The journal Editor/s will be responsible for the following:

• Managing the journal's double blind peer review process with the assistance of the Editorial Advisory Board
• Selecting and maintaining a pool of competent reviewers
• Delivering appropriate content for ten journal issues per volume to an agreed schedule
• Upholding and developing editorial standards on the journal, through the good management of the peer review process
• Engaging the Editorial Advisory Board in the work of the journal
• Developing and maintaining a network of contacts to act as advocates for the journal or sources of content as appropriate
• Attending conferences or similar events to promote the journal and generate submissions
• Working with the journal Publisher (at Emerald) to achieve agreed development objectives for the journal and to raise its international profile and standing

The journal Editor receives an honorarium in lieu of his/her work on the journal. Additional budget is also made available to the Editor to part-fund attendance at conferences or other events of relevance to the journal.

Qualifications and requirements of candidates

Some of the key qualities sought for the position of Editor are:

• An established record of scholarship in the field of cybernetics, systems or management science
• A high level of ability/achievement in mathematics and its use in the fields covered by the journal
• Managerial skills to oversee the editorial cycle and to meet deadlines
• The ability to inspire an active Editorial Advisory Board
• Energy, enthusiasm and networking skills to promote the journal and to encourage submissions
• A willingness to chase reviewers when necessary and to demand the highest standards in review and revision
• A willingness to develop the journal in line with the changing nature of the subject area, to ensure the journal continues to publish the best, most relevant and cutting-edge research in the field
• Previous editorial experience, such as Editor, Guest Editor or Editorial Advisory Board Member on an academic journal
• Experience of using online submission and peer review systems such as ScholarOne Manuscripts is desirable

Kybernetes will be taking advantage of the ScholarOne Manuscripts online submission and review system. The new editorial team will receive full training and support.

Next steps

Interested individuals are invited to submit a CV and a proposal outlining how they would seek to develop the journal over the course of their editorship. Proposals from individuals and small teams of 2-3 candidates will be considered. It is anticipated that the new Editor will assume responsibility for the journal in June 2012.

Your application should include a covering letter describing:

• your goals and plans for the content of Kybernetes. This may include an assessment of the current strengths, weaknesses, or gaps that you plan to address
• previous editorial experience
• attendance at cybernetics, systems and management science conferences during the last five years
• a clear description of the structure of the editorial team and responsibilities, where it is a team application; support, if any, offered by your institution
• A current CV

Applications and any queries for this position should be submitted by 1 March 2012, by e-mail, to:

Ruth Glasspool, Publisher, rglasspool@emeraldinsight.com, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

The Cybernetic State at Manchester Business School: Seminar and book by Javier Livas

Trevor E. Hilder writes: Cybernetics takes a surprising hard look into the State and the Law and explains their co-evolution within an increasingly complex, dynamic, viable system that places Law, Politics and Economics under one roof.

Javier Livas is a Mexican human rights lawyer and businessman who recently stood as a PAN Party candidate for the presidency of Mexico.

The seminar will take place at Manchester Business School between 3:00 pm and 5:00 pm in room 1.34.1 (West) on Thursday 2nd February.

Free download of Livas' The Cybernetic State: The Unity of Economics, Law and Politics" (pp142).

Cybernetics Society Spring Symposium to be held at Salieri 14th April 2012

Arrangements as usual starting at 2pm. Please email our secretary Dr David Dewhurst if you would like to attend.

Location and details of Salieri Restaurant.

"Signal processing and inference for the physical sciences" at the Royal Society

This is a two day Royal Society Discussion Meeting to be held on 26th-27th March 2012.

The organisers, Dr Nick Jones and Dr Thomas Maccarone, say "Speakers cover applications across astrophysics, biological physics, geophysics and earth sciences and meet those from applied mathematics, computer science, engineering and statistics. We aim to open the world of new methods for data analysis to the physical scientist and accelerate the integration of data analysts into physical science".

Admission is free and tickets should be booked in advance.

"A Systems View of Economics- Tools for Thought"

Dr David Dewhurst, secretary of The Cybernetics Society, will give this talk at Tent City University on Wednesday 14th December 2011 in St Paul's Churchyard, ECM4 8AD from 3pm to 4pm.

Forthcoming: EMCSR Vienna April 10-13 2012, ASC Monterey California July 9-13 2012

President of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) Dr Ranulph Glanville writes: The EMCSR (European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research) conference series was founded in 1972. At the last meeting in 2010, Robert Trappl, who had chaired it since its beginning, retired. The new chair, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, who directs the Bertalanffy Archive in Vienna, has just published the outline program for next spring's conference.

There are changes in how the conference will be run. For instance, round table discussions are welcome. There will be a pre and post doc colloquium. There are new symposia and symposium chairs. And the process for submission and publication is different, with extended abstracts for proposals, and papers written in final form after the conference, for publication.

Please note the symposia (look under programme >> symposia). Apart from symposium E, chaired by Karl Mueller and myself, there are other symposia that cover a wide range of different approaches and areas.

I invite you all to have a look at the programme and, if you find the conference interesting, exciting and/or relevant, to make arrangements to be there. Check out the web site. Vienna is lovely in mid-April.

At the same time, let me advise you of the American Society for Cybernetics' conference, 9 to 13 July, at Asilomar State Park Conference Centre, California, to be held in conjunction with the Bateson Idea Group. This promises to be a richly interesting event, and will remind us that there many sources of today's cybernetics, and many ways forward. This conference is in the week before the ISSS conference at San Jose: we are planing a special, reduced rate for those attending both. The conference web site will be launched in the new year, and will be accessible through the ASC home page.

A new book by a Member of Council of the Society

Bernard Scott "Explorations in Second-Order Cybernetics: Reflections on Cybernetics,Psychology and Education"

Dr Scott worked for ten years with Gordon Pask and practised in schools, psychology, technology and higher education. He says cybernetics "transformed my way of being in the world".

Ranulph Glanvile, president of the American Cybernetics Society, writes:"...It presents his retelling of work he did with Pask, and work he has done since. His own solo work demonstrates how significant a contributor he was to Pask and how his [Scott's] understandings have their own value, which is sometimes, but only sometimes, placed in the service of Pask.... It is a wonderful collection. Each paper is a gem, showing the mind of an exceptionally decent and gifted academic behaving - and thinking - with fairness and flair. I hope that each reader will enjoy, and benefit from it, as much as I have."

Further information and ordering.

Nicholas Shaxson's "Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World"

Sequester Offshore Funds? Shaxson estimates around 25% of Gross World Product (GWP- around $41 trillion) or $10 trillion is held in secret Offshore bank accounts owned by banks, multinational companies, kleptocrats, terrorists, drug traffickers and ordinary individuals. Client confidentiality protects from tax authority investigation. This is the undiscussed component of the current and any future economic crisis.

International Authorities might, at the very least, agree improved performance reporting for governments and enterprises of all kinds as recommended by International Auditors in Global Capital Markets and the Global Economy at their 2006 Paris Global Public Policy Symposium.

The confidence of tax-payers and investors can only be maintained with real-time web based reporting particularly given the current crisis. The cybernetics is plain and simple: systems that are not properly instrumented will go out of control.

"Treasure Islands" by Nicholas Shaxon Bodley Head 2011. Shaxson on You Tube.

Prof Raul Espejo appointed Director-General of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC)

Congratulations to Professor Espejo whose fame as Operational Director of the CYBERSYN Project has made him a leading authority on the cybernetics of Government. Our thankful appreciation goes to his distinguished predecesor Dr Alex Andrew. More.

Cybernetics Society Winter Symposium to be held at Salieri 7th January 2012

Arrangements as before starting around 2pm with an email to our secretary Dr David Dewhurst if you would like to attend.

Cybernetics Society Symposium 2011 24th September

The Symposium will be held on Saturday 24th September starting at 2pm in Salieri Restaurant on Strand, London (opposite The Savoy). Our Secretary writes: "While it should be possible to accommodate members who don't notify the Secretary in advance we anticipate smoother running if you do. Individual bills are typically close to £30"

Click here to notify the Secretary.

Cybernetics Society 2011 AGM

The 2011 Annual General Meeting of our Society will be held in room K0.17 (South Range 4) from 6:00 to 9:00 at King's College, London on Wednesday 27th July.

Ideas of objectivity: International Interdisciplinary Workshop 2011

• Organism-niche unity
• Humanness in human living
• Unitary epistemology

With Humberto Maturana (Escuela Matriztica de Santiago, Chile) and Christoph Reinfandt (University of Tarbingen, November 7th-11th, 2011.

Application deadline: July 15th, 2011.

The international interdisciplinary workshop is part of this year's "Unseld Lecture at the Forum Scientiarum of Tarbingen University- initiated and sponsored by the Udo Keller Foundation Forum Humanum". We invite graduate students and junior scientists from across a broad interdisciplinary field including all social and cultural studies as well as natural sciences to apply for this international workshop on "Ideas of Objectivity".

Further details.

Cybernetics Society 2011 Conference

No theme has yet been decided and suggestions or proposals for both short and long papers are invited to the Secretary. The Conference is usually held on the second Saturday of September.

5th International Heinz von Foerster Congress 10th to 13th November 2011.

Gerhard Grueller and Karl H. Mueller write: Again, the University of Vienna will be the venue of discussions on the efforts as well as the effects of Heinz von Foerster's work and life.

It is only one of the special aims of this year's conference to celebrate von Foerster's 100th birthday. As to celebrating his work, we deem it appropriate to start with implications of Heinz von Foerster's early works, as represented by his early quantum-physical interpretation of memory and by his seminal work on self-organizing systems in the early 1960ies. Accordingly, this tear's conference moves along two quite different and- nevertheless- related tracks.

• Emergent Quantum Mechanics (primarily targeted audience: physicists); convened by Gerhard Grossing
• Emergence and self organisation in the worlds of society and nature (primarily targeted audience: specialists in sciences and humanities, and a general audience); convened by Albert Mueller

There is a conference web-site online (to be updated permanently throughout the next months)

The conference will take place at the main building of the University of Vienna from 10th to 13th November 2011. There will be special seminars before and after the conference, and a series of documentary films on topics related to cybernetics to be seen at a Viennese cinema.

Registration is possible from now onwards.  There is no registration or entrance fee.

The 5th International Heinz von Foerster Conference is sponsored by the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research, the City of Vienna, and Blaha nna, Austrian Institute for Nonlinear Studies in cooperation with the American Society for Cybernetics.

ISSS Conference at HUBS July 17-22 2011

Dr. Angela Espinoza writes: Hull University Business School is organising this year the 55th Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, joining with KSS2011 International Symposium for Knowledge and Systems Sciences. The theme is "All together now: working across disciplines: People, principles and practice". Hull University Business School, Hull, UK. From July 17-22, 2011.

More information.

Contact Angela with your abstracts if you would like to join a Special Interest Group on Organisational Cybernetics.

Jerome (Jerry) Lettvin

Dr. Alex Andrew writes: "Jerry Lettvin died on Saturday 23rd April. He leaves his wife Maggie (who has indicated she would like to be left in peace at present) and sons David and Jonathan and daughter Ruth. I got the sad news in a phone call from Brad Howland who was also a member of the research group around Warren McCulloch."

Jerry's Memorial Page and Blog. Boston Globe obituary.

American Cybernetics Society 2011 Conference: "Listening"

ASC president Dr. Ranulph Glanville writes: We regard listening as the key act that turns talking into conversation. However, we use these words metaphorically, and not just literally: we do not mean to concentrate on the aural senses, but on the idea that it is the recipient who gives meaning to what they hear. This is how they release the potential in a statement made by another into conversation, whether the conversation is in words, acts, gestures, or indeed any other medium of communication. This can lead to the development of understanding of the other so important in human relations (perhaps specially in fields such as psycho-therapy, management, education and music).

Our conference is organised around informal and generous conversations in small groups, but has space for formal paper presentations and performances. We are also inviting experiential workshops. The conference itself will be held in Richmond, Indiana, USA, and begins in the evening of 10 August and runs to the evening of 13 August 2001. There is a sliding scale of charges. For those attending, there are free add-on events before and after.

Please visit the conference web site.

Note: applicants for the conference need to fill in a statement of interest (no more than a paragraph). Click on register in the middle of the text.

Early registration by 10th May entities you to the Early Bird registration fee.

A sense of last year's conference can be found here.

Conference flyer.

Infowar or Cyberwar?

From The Register:The Anonymous group of hacktivists and Wikileaks infowar

"The hacktivist collective Anonymous, operating under the banner Operation:Payback, has continued to mount various types of hacking attacks including DDoS strikes- supplemented by the use of illegal botnets- against targets assessed as being anti-Wikileaks..."

Sir Maurice Wilkes

The father of British computing died peacefully around 7am on Monday 29th November aged 97. BBC News writes. The Register, biting the hand that feeds IT, reports Wilkes reaches EOL. Obituaries from Guardian, Independent, Telegraph and British Computer Society.

In 2004 Sir Maurice gave his "Progress in Computers" to the Cambridge Computer Lab. The clarity of his views are a model for us all.

Benoit Mandelbrot

Benoit Mandelbrot inventor of fractal geometry died on 14th October. There is a fascinating and detailed biographical video interview at web of stories. Arthur C. Clarke said the Mandelbrot set was the most extraordinary discovery in the history of mathematics. The Society adopted his set for it's logo in 2001.

Telegraph obituary.

Cybernetics of Cybernetics-a competition

The American Society for Cybernetics is delighted to announce a competition (open to all, prize fund up to US$ 1500) to propose cybernetic ways in which a Society for cybernetics might be organised and behave. This follows a suggestion from Margaret Mead, the founding mother of cybernetics summarised below. Submissions should be received by noon, GMT, on 31 January 2011. Full details.

"We welcome your interest and your suggestions!" writes Ranulph Glanville President, ASC.

Ernst von Glasersfeld on Radical Constructivism

Ernst von Glasersfeld concisely discusses Radical Constructivism in his after dinner speech at the ASC 2010 Summer Conference: Cybernetics: Art, Design, Mathemetics- a MetaDisciplinary Conversation. A video impression of the conference was made by Lev Ledit with Judy Lombardi.

Gregory Bateson Documentary

This film was made by Bateson's daughter Nora and is to be shown at film festivals.

Trailer and website (Quicktime).

World Organisation of Cybernetics and Systems (WOSC) 2011 Nanjing September 15 to 18, 2011

The 15^th WOSC International Congress on Cybernetics and Systems will be held jointly with IEEE International Conference on Grey Systems and Intelligent Services.

Alex Andrew (Director-General of WOSC) writes: Nanjing (formerly Nanking) is the capital of the Jiangsu Province and one of the Four Great Ancient Capitals of China, with a wealth of cultural and natural sites. Further details and here.

Systems and Cybernetics in Organisations (SCiO) Events for 2010-2011

SCiO is focused primarily on systems practice and practitioners rather than on pure theory and on systems practice as applied to issues of organisation. The forthcoming program of Professional Development and Open meetings will be held in Manchester at the Business School, London and at the Open University in Milton Keynes. Further details.

Topics include:

• Systems from Scratch - Penny Marrington
• The application of the VSM in Local Authority Development Control Services - Catherine Wynn
• Craft Skills Workshop - Recursive Structures and Logic - Patrick Hoverstadt
• Perceptual Control Theory and its Application to Organisations - Warren Mansell
• Modelling Multi-Methodology & Multi-Agency Working - Patrick Hoverstadt
• OMM - a powerful Organisational Maturity tool - Dave Mettam & Jane Searles
• Craft Skills Workshop - Developing Transparency & Trust - Aidan Ward
• Taming Organisational Complexity - Stephen Brewis

SCiO Autumn 2010 Newsetter (.pdf).

Reform of Banking IT vital for better regulation

From The Economist July 22nd 2010: The software used by Banks appears to be an ad hoc fragile mix of patches with no robust design philosophy. One "dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur" is reported as saying he hates programmers as they only cause trouble. No doubt screams of horror from experts can and should cause trouble for incompetent banking executives whose ignorance of actual performance seems to have produced a world recession.

Full story.

Annual General Meeting

The Society's 2010 AGM will be held on Tuesday 27th July. The times are as usual: Council Meeting 6:00 for 6:30 and AGM at 7:15 in Room GFSB 3 (Ground Floor Strand Building Room 3 ) at King's College, Strand, London. Please note the change from the usual room.

Venter Institute produces first living cell with synthetic DNA

"For nearly 15 years Ham Smith, Clyde Hutchison and the rest of our team have been working toward this publication today -- the successful completion of our work to construct a bacterial cell that is fully controlled by a synthetic genome," said J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., founder and president, JCVI and senior author on the paper.

Full text of press release.

Richard Gregory FRS

Richard Gregory, a friend of cybernetics, died on 17 May 2010 at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, having suffered a stroke a few days earlier.There is a charming long autobiographical interview at webofstories.com (formerly peoplesarchive.com).

Times obituary.

Lovelock changes his mind mind on Global Warming?

Quoted by Bert Rutan in slide 84 of his An Engineer's Critique of Global Warming "Science":

Dr. James Lovelock in March 2010: At London's Science Museum Dr Lovelock said: "If we hadn't appeared on the earth, it would be due to go through another ice age... greenhouse gases that have warmed the planet are likely to prevent a big freeze... .We're just fiddling around. It is worth thinking that what we are doing in creating all these carbon emissions, far from being something frightful, is stopping the onset of a new ice age...we can look at our part as holding that up...I hate all this business about feeling guilty about what we're doing... . We're not guilty, we never intended to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, it's just something we did."

He compared today's climate change controversy to the "wildly inaccurate" early work on aerosol gases and their alleged role in depletion of the ozone layer: "Quite often, observations done by hand are accurate but all the theoretical stuff in between tends to be very dodgy and I think they are seeing this with climate change... .We haven't learned the lessons of the ozone-hole debate. It's important to know just how much you have got to be careful"

"I think you have to accept that the skeptics have kept us sane... . They have been a breath of fresh air. They have kept us from regarding the science of climate change as a religion. It has gone too far that way. There is a role for skeptics in science. They shouldn't be brushed aside. It is clear that the 'angel side' wasn't without sin".

Andrew Pickering: "The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future"

From the publishers: Cybernetics - roughly, the study of systems - is often thought of as a grim science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present. "The Cybernetic Brain" explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the '60s counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics' impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. Thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.

"The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future" by John Andrew Pickering ISBN 978-0226667898 Chicago University Press 2010 536 pages £35.50.

Vanilla Beer and Dr. Roger Harnden review at Amazon (UK).

Cybernetics: Art, Design, Mathematics.[Text needs editing] A Meta-Disciplinary Conversation (C:ADM2010)

The event will be held in New York at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media & Performance Arts Center in the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy from the evening of July 30 2010 to late afternoon on August 2 2010 with surrounding events on July 29 and 30, and August 3 to 5. Further details. Flyer.

Three recent books

Think before you Think

This first is a most important collection of papers and unpublished writings of Stafford Beer edited by David Whittaker (author of "Stafford Beer: a personal memoir"). Contents include "The Laws of Anarchy", "The Will of the People", Beer's own reflections on his famous Viable System Model, extracts from the unfinished autobiography from which the collection takes its title and a selection of Beer's poetry and paintings. Simply put this is required reading for cyberneticians. The general reader is well supported with the editor's Appendix C "Cybernetics in a Nutshell". "Think before you Think: Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing" Edited by David Whittaker, Foreword by Brian Eno. ISBN 9780954519469 Wavestone Press 2009 384 pages £20.00.

SuperFreakonomics

Levitt and Dubner examine the homeostats of perverse economic incentive in, for example, prostitution, suicide bombing, altruism, cheap solutions to big problems (including hospital acquired infections), and global cooling. There is never a dull moment in this witty and innovative quantitative economic analysis that repeats the earlier success of "Freakonomics" (Charlie Rose video interview). "SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner ISBN 0060889578 John Morrow 2009 288 pages £20.00.

Relativity+

John Duffield presents physics with all it's deficiencies to the critical lay reader. He gives a brisk, popular but detailed account and brings the Williamson Model of the electron, as a self-closed photon, to a wider readership. In the process, for example, he covers the weaknesses of the Standard Model, Gravity, Black Holes and the neglected importance of the governing permeability and permittivity of free space. Here is a physics for cyberneticians enabled by Gordon Pask's 1992 mysterious assertion that a doubly twisted torus topology is required for analogy and dependence. In this book it is applied to the electron. There are 12 pages of commented references, many on the web. "Relativity+: The Theory of Everything" by John Duffield ISBN 9780956097804 Corella 2009 222 pages £9.99.

KES-AMSTA 2010 - Call for Papers and Invited Sessions Proposals

4th International KES Symposium on Agents and Multi-agent Systems (23-25 June 2010, Gdynia, Poland) is an international scientific symposium for research in agent and multi-agent systems.

Prof. P. Jedrzejowicz and Prof. N.T. Nguyen invite submissions of papers and proposals for invited sessions. Further details.

4th International Heinz von Forster Congress on Learning

To be held at the University of Vienna 12th - 14th November 2009. Speakers include John Holland, Margaret Boden, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Stuart Umpelby, Pille Bunnell, Bernard Scott and Ranulph Glanville.

There is no fee for the conference. Further details.

Voting on Google Project 10¹⁰⁰ closes October 8th

Proposals are presented concerning real-world issue reporting, science and engineering education, genocide alerting, health monitoring, free online education, innovation in public transport, landmine removal, user-reported news, education in Africa, transparency in government, natural crisis tracking, support for social entrepreneurs, urban data collection, better banking tools, improving the image of scientists and engineers, support for socially conscious tax policies.

A repository of real-time alerting statistics would support most of these desiderata with the subsequent application of modelling e.g. Beer's VSM. The commercial opportunities in relieving poverty and misery are not apparent so one concludes that, though worthy, this not as cybernetically stable as we might like.

Voting and further details.

The Cybernetics Society 2009 Annual Conference

This year's conference was held on September 12th at King's College. Programme, abstracts and supporting materials received. The speakers were:-

• Dr. John Williamson, Glasgow University, "Complexity from Simplicity: the Nature of Light and Matter"
• Dr. Artemis Papert, daughter of Seymour Papert, "In the Beginning was the Turtle"
• Prof. Robert Vall President of WOSC, "Observation Operators Revisited"
• Dr. Alex Andrew, Director General of WOSC. "Strong AI, Continuity and Evolution"
• Dr. Helmut Nechansky, Consultant in Systems Engineering, Vienna, "Miller's Living Systems and Beer's Viable Systems"
• David Buckley, Founder of Foundation Robotics, "A Tour of European Historical Robots and Cybernetic Art"
• Dr Janos Korn, Middlesex University, "Science and Design of Systems"
• Jasia Reichardt, Curator, "The Frankenstein Monster"

Dr Alex M. Andrew Wiener Medalist 2009

CybCon 2009 was pleased to congratulate Dr Alex Andrew who was awarded the Wiener Medal by Professor Robert Valle, President of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics, for his many contributions to our field. The Medal was instituted by Professor John Rose who founded WOSC.

On this auspicious occasion Professor Brian Rudall Editor-in-Chief of Kybernetes and Director and Head of the Norbert Wiener Institute presented Alex with the Emerald (who publish Kybernetes) Literati Network 2009 Outstanding Reviewer Award for his work on Kybernetes in 2008.

We at the Society treasure Alex's talks to the Society and his work in Cybernetics both at the bench and in his teaching and writing. Alex is a trustee of the Society.

Two new books by members of the Society

A Missing Link in Cybernetics by Alex Andrew

The relative failure of attempts to analyze and model intelligence can be attributed in part to the customary assumption that the processing of continuous variables and the manipulation of discrete concepts should be treated separately. Dr Alex Andrew considers concept-based thought as having evolved from processing of continuous variables. Although "fuzzy" theory acknowledges the need to combine conceptual and continuous processing, its assumption of the primacy of concept-based processing makes it evolutionarily implausible. The text begins by reviewing the origins and aims of cybernetics with particular reference to Warren McCulloch's declared lifetime quest of "understanding man's understanding". It is shown that continuous systems can undergo complex self-organization, but a need for classification of situations becomes apparent and can be seen as the evolutionary beginning of concept-based processing. Possibilities for complex self-organization are emphasized by discussion of a general principle that has been termed significance feedback, of which backpropagation of errors in neural nets is a special case.

It is also noted that continuous measures come to be associated with processing that is essentially concept-based, as acknowledged in Marvin Minsky's reference to heuristic con nection between problems, and the associated basic learning heuristic of Minsky and Selfridge. This reappearance of continuity, along with observations on the multi-layer structure of intelligent systems, supports a potentially valuable view of intelligence as having a fractal nature. This is such that structures at a complex level, interpreted in terms of these emergent measures, reflect others at a simpler level. Implications for neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence are also examined.

The book presents unconventional and challenging viewpoints that will be of interest to researchers in AI, psychology, cybernetics and systems science, and should help promote further research.

"A Missing Link in Cybernetics: Logic and Continuity" (IFSR International Series on Systems Science & Engineering) see inside at Amazon. Hardcover, Springer 2009, ISBN: 978-0-387-75163-4.

Science and Design of Systems by Janos Korn

Conventional science views parts of the world as phenomena classified according to shared properties, which are used to create mathematical relations or models that translate notions, fundamental or not, into refutable relationships by exposing them to the test of experience. There is another view of parts of the world, the view of related objects, the 'systemic view' of complexity and hierarchy, which is claimed to be pervasive and indivisible.

The aim of this book is to show how to convert the systemic view into systems science by following the method of conventional science to model aspects of the immense variety and diversity of objects (natural, technical, living, human and their conceivable combinations) and their activities. Having identified the fundamental notions, which are: qualitative as well as quantitative properties, objects and their relations, and interactions by means of flow of energy or information, the latter are organised into inferential structures using mathematics of 'ordered pairs' and predicate logic statements capable of carrying mathematics and/or measures of uncertainties. These structures are constructed to enable relations or energy and/or information to propagate, to produce an outcome as emergent property or final state, the possibilities of occurrence of which can now be investigated.

A design methodology, elicitation of requirements and a view and design of organisations and management are introduced using the inferential structures. Systematic thinking about actual, and as yet nonexistent, future scenarios, including human activities, has become possible. However, the unpredictability of living in particular human behaviour introduces additional uncertainty into, and opens debate about, the use of a formal method.

"Science and Design of Systems" see inside at Amazon. Matador 2009, ISBN: 978-1848761155.

Call for Symposium C, 20th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research

The Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research will be held at the University of Vienna, Tuesday 6th to Friday 9th April, 2010.

Symposium C will explore what is often called second order cybernetics. In 1968, Margaret Mead, one of the Macy Group that included Norbert Wiener [text needs editing] suggested that the American Society for Cybernetics should consider the way it wished to operate as a society in the light of understandings developed in cybernetics itself: the society for cybernetics should itself be subject to cybernetic analysis and development. This reflexive approach became generalised into what Heinz von Foerster called Second Order Cybernetics, cybernetics where the nature of the circularity in systems is taken seriously (e.g., the controlling element of a system is itself controlled by the remainder of the system, which it is controlling).

The second order cybernetic approach is at the heart of understandings of interaction, conversation and the creating of the new, all of which are central to understandings of the behaviour of humans together, and growing in importance in research. In second order cybernetics, the observer is recognised as present: Foerster described it as the cybernetics of observing (as opposed to observed) systems. Some believe that it returns to the basic understandings that drove the original formation of cybernetics, and is close to what many of the early cyberneticians, including Bateson, Mead and Wiener, and von Foerster, Pask and Ashby had in mind: in effect, that all cybernetics is second order, in origin. The symposium will be chaired by Ranulph Glanville.

Paper submission: November 10 2009

Notification of acceptance: December 15 2009

Final papers: 5 February 2010

Further details.

Fransisco Varela: A DVD

Varela was perhaps best known for his work with Maturana on autopoiesis or self-production.

Roger Harnden writes:

A wonderful DVD based on Varela's life and ideas. Beautiful quality and production, as well as casting light on many of his ideas and autopoiesis.

Annual General Meeting

The Society's 2009 AGM will be held on Tuesday 28th July. The times are as usual: Council Meeting 6:30 and AGM at around 7:15 in the Council Room at King's College, London.

Gordon Pask's work in Architecture

A new book by Gonzalo M. Furtado and C. Lopes has been announced from edition echoraum vienna entitled "Gordon Pask's Encounters: From a Childhood Curiosity to the Envisioning of an Evolving Environment". It includes an account of Cedric Price's work in development, town planning and Pask's encounters with him, John Frazier and the second order cybernetics of the evolving information environment.

Ten minute videos introducing cybernetics

Javier Livas introduces cybernetics and its application to management, organization, the mind, the state, law, the financial system, chaos and the redesigning of Government:

• What is Cybernetics?
• Management Cybernetics: The Science of Effective Organization
• Management Cybernetics: The Law of Requisite Variety
• Viable System Model
• Psycho-Cybernetics and Management Cybernetics
• Law & Cybernetics
• Financial Crisis & Cybernetics
• Management Cybernetics & Chaos Theory
• Management Cybernetics & Redesigning Government
• Management Cybernetics: The Cybernetic State

Javier Livas on YouTube.

Call for 1st Global Peter F. Drucker Forum

The conference will be held in Austria November 19-20 2009.

Helen Evans for organizers Emerald Group Publishing Ltd writes:

In 1954 Peter Drucker popularized Management by Objectives (MBO).

Call for Heinz von Foerster Congress 2009

The Heinz von Foerster Society, the Wiener Institute for Social Science Documentation and Methodology (WISDOM), the Department of Contemporary History and the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) announce the Fourth International Heinz von Foerster Conference to be held at the University of Vienna on 12-14th November 2009.

The theme is learning: Piaget, Pask, Maturana and von Glasersfeld are likely foci. Half page abstracts are requested before the end of June 2009 for review by an international committee. A final programme and website will be ready on 1st August 2009.

Currently the conference is sponsored by the Austrian ministry of Science and the City of Vienna and will be free. Registration is required.

"Database State": Rountree Reform Trust on UK Government IT

David Shutt, Lord Shutt of Greetland, Chair of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd. states

The assessment team from the Foundation for Information Policy Research included Professor Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory.

Download .pdf "Database State".

UK Transformational Government programme.

"Gordon Pask on Science and Art": Porto, Portugal June 1st- 15th 2009

The Heinz von Foerster Society presents a retrospective exhibition in collaboration with Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto and the Department of Contemporary History of the University of Vienna. Press release.

Wikinomics and Collaboration

Don Tapscott is a business strategist. This is his talk to the Institute of Direct Marketing 2009 Annual Lunch in London. He is best known for his book with Anthony Willams "Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything" and the subsequently produced mass collaborative "Wikinomics Playbook".

Stephen Wolfram describes WolframAlpha knowledge search engine

Wolfram's YouTube video gives a fascinating insight into the first release of his WolframAlpha computational knowledge project.

There are four main parts of the system. The first "curates" data input, then methods of computation collected from his earlier Mathematica and New Kind of Science project are applied. A linguistic analysis/understanding module, for which he claims ambiguity resolution easier than expected, interprets input queries and an automatic formatting engine sends the answer to the user. There will be both free and subscription access.

In his personal blog Wolfram claims "That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!"

BBC News gathers first use impressions from experts.

Lovelock interviewed by Nature

Nature's chief News and Features editor, Oliver Morton, interviews James Lovelock on the the possibility of the imminent collapse of Earth's human ecosystem. Lovelock notes seven climate events reducing Earth's human population in the first million years of man's evolution.

Nature's video archive.

Javier Livas on the Financial Crisis and Cybernetics

Dr Javier Livas is a Mexican cybernetician. He models the crisis in a short YouTube presentation and discusses the locus for negative feedback. Website (in Spanish) and his paper: "The Cybernetic State: The Unity of Economics, Law and Politics" is in English.

TurtleArt: the Art of programming

TurtleArt is a graphical software package, developed by Brian Silverman and Paula Bont, based on Logo for exploring programming, geometry and art. Introductory materials developed by Artemis Papert and Brian Silverman can be found here. The package is distributed with the One Laptop Per Child computer. Contact TurtleArt if you want a version for PC, Mac etc.

Call For Papers: Cyberworlds 2009

The International Conference on Cyberworlds will be held on 7-11 September 2009, University of Bradford, UK.

Conference topics include but not limited to: Visual cyberworlds, Cyberworlds and applications, Cyberethics and cyberlaws, Cybersecurity, Modelling and animation in cyberworlds, Virtual reality in cyberworlds, Computer vision and augmented reality, Shared virtual worlds, Bioinformatics for cyberlife and medicine, Healthcare in cyberworlds, E-business in cyberworlds, Cyberworlds for education, Cyberworlds for design and manufacturing, Cyberculture and cyberarts, Cyber social networks, Communication in cyberworlds.

The conference proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society with special issues in Virtual Reality Journal (Springer) and The Visual Computer (Springer). Paper submission 30th April 2009. Notice of acceptance 29th May 2009. Camera-ready paper 30th June 2009.

New Cybernetics books

Alex Andrew's "A Missing Link in Cybernetics: Logic and Continuity". The book is aimed at AI researchers and the systems and cybernetics community.

Paul Stokes' "The Viability of Societies: Governance and Complexity Today" is aimed at sociologists and cyberneticians with the themes of identity, control and the future of human society.

Ralph-Eckhard Tarke's "Governance" uses an Actor and Interaction approach to found a treatment of Beer's viability with application to communities in Hesse, Germany.

Patrick Hoverstadt's "The Fractal Organization" applies the Viable System Model to create resilient and sustainable organizations.

2nd Quicycle Conference

A small group of theoretical physicists met (March 29th- May 2nd) in Best, outside Eindhoven (Netherlands) to discuss development of the Williamson-van der Mark self-confined photon model of the electron producing, as van der Mark pointed out, a circulating current of around 15 amps. Professor Phil Butler (Canterbury N.Z.) gave an account of the Clifford Algebra approach. Richard Gauthier presented his transluminal energy quantum model of the electron. John Williamson led us through his Clifford-Dirac Algebra treatment.

This is of particular interest to cyberneticians because it applies Pask's 1993 doubly twisted torus topology of dependence and analogy to the necessary electron/photon spin transformation.

Williamson has shown the electron can be regarded as a homeostat because when it is hot it is small and when cool (e.g. in solid state) it is large and more likely to collide with photons which will heat it up. This may extend the domain of cybernetics to sub-atomic particle interactions. Professor Butler has a book in preparation.

UK Systems Society International Conference 2009

The UK Systems Society International Conference 2009 will take place on 1 and 2 September at St Anne's College, Oxford. The theme of the Conference will be 'Systems Research: Lessons from the Past - Progress or the Future'. A keynote address on this theme will be given by Prof. Peter Checkland and the majority of programme will be devoted to workshops and plenary discussions around the Conference theme, led by key members of the Systems community.

Contributions are invited from participants for a special, 25th Anniversary edition of The Systemist. A poster session will be held dedicated to viewing, informal discussions and networking.

Further details

Second Cwarel Isaf Conference "The Cybernetics of Crisis"

Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik presided at his company's MZSG headquarters for discussions and papers with leading management cyberneticians on 19th-20th March 2009. Talks were given on Sri Lanka, property economics, socionomics and logistics curves. Presenting his "Youth Bulge" theory in a remarkable second paper Prof. Dr Dr Gunnar Heinsohn showed that wars are sustained only when there are excess well-fed boys in a family. He concluded little prospect of war with Iran on this basis and poor prospects in Afghanistan for peace.

The Malik management zentrum in St. Gallen continues to grow teaching Beer's management cybernetics to german speaking countries. Dr Allenna Leonard showed how Beer's VSM can be applied to complex organizations in crisis.

Professor Malik challenged participants to produce a Road Map to the "Cybernetic Revolution". Work was started...

The Cybernetics Society Annual Conference September 12th 2009

To be held at King's College. Suggestions and submissions to the secretary Dr David Dewhurst please.

1st International Conference on Collective Intelligence

Last call for papers for the conference with the theme of the Semantic Web, Social Networks and Multiagent Systems. More details. Submission deadline 10th May 2009.

The conferenece runs from 5-7 October 2009 and will be held in Wroclaw, Poland.

CHAOS 2009

2nd Chaotic Modeling and Simulation International Conference (CHAOS2009), Conference will be held on June 1-5, 2009, in Chania, Crete, Greece. Poster and Information.

Topics include:Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics; Stochastic Chaos; Chemical Chaos; Data Analysis and Chaos; Hydrodynamics, Turbulence and Plasmas; Optics and Chaos; Chaotic Oscillations and Circuits; Chaos in Climate Dynamics; Geophysical Flows; Biology and Chaos; Neurophysiology and Chaos; Hamiltonian Systems; Chaos in Astronomy and Astrophysics; Chaos and Solitons; Micro- and Nano- Electro-Mechanical Systems; Neural Networks; Chaos, Ecology and Economy.

Lovelock says slow pyrolysis and burial of agricultiural waste could save the earth

"But I bet they won't do it" he says in an interview in New Scientist (24th January 2009). The scheme requires no subsidy and could produce small amounts of biofuel for sale.

The idea is for farmers to burn or "biochar" their waste and by controlling the air level produce charcoal. The charcoal must then be buried.

We trust Requisite Variety is satisfied.

James Lovelock FRS is an Honorary Fellow of the Cybernetics Society. He warns global warming will produce famine and could lead to a world population of less than a billion in a hundred years from now.

From Time magazine last December "Cornell's Lehmann is even more emphatic."If biochar could be massively applied around the globe," he says, "we could end the emissions problem in one to two years.""

This is a detailed review by Dominic Woolf from Swansea University.

International Biochar Initiative formed in 2006.

American Society for Cybernetics 2009 Conference

The 2009 conference of the American Society for Cybernetics, will be held on March 12-15, 2009, in Olympia, Washington. The conference title is "Cybernetics Talk Dance Anticommunication". Registration, except for certain students who have already made other arrangements, is via the ACTEVA service, at the following address: http://www.acteva.com/ttghits.cfm?EVA_ID=35631

The 2009 ASC Conference invites a variety of contributions including and not limited to papers, performances, displays, symposia, workshops, panels and hosted conversations.

The keynote speakers as are expected to be Lou Kauffman (cybernetician and mathematician), Tom Moritz (Associate Director of Research at the Getty Institute) and William Fox (novelist).

Suggestions for paper presentations, panel topics, or guided conversations are welcome, and should be sent to:- Arun Chandra, COM 301, The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA 98505, Telephone: (+1) (360) 867-6077, Fax: (+1) (360) 867-6663, Email: arunc@evergreen.edu

The deadline for proposals is Monday, February 1, 2009. The 2009 conference's day events will be held at the Olympia Community Center. Evening events, including the keynote addresses, will take place at The Evergreen State College and at the Washington Performing Arts Center. Attendees will be housed at the Governor Hotel (Olympia).

9th International Conference of Sociocybernetics: 29th June- 5th July 2008, Urbino, Italy

Call and invitation to "Modernity 2.0": emerging social media technologies and their impacts. Further details.

Oliver Selfridge

Alex Andrew writes: The death of Oliver Selfridge on 3rd December is reported in the New York Times. (Registration is required for free access.)

He was the grandson of the man who founded the London store, and active in the Lincoln Laboratory of MIT and author of the important "Pandemonium" paper in the 1958 Teddington Symposium. He was 82.

The Ross Ashby Archive

Received from Jill, Sally, Ruth, and Mick of Ashby's family:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is with great pleasure that we can now officially announce that The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive is available at http://www.rossashby.info

We would be delighted if you would take the time to have a look at the digital archive web site, and where appropriate, help to spread awareness of its availability, by mentioning it and linking to it in any mailing lists, newsletters, or web sites that you are involved in.

Professor Peter Felgett FRS

We were sorry to learn of the death of Professor Peter Fellgett over the weekend.

Alex Andrew writes: He was the first Professor of Cybernetics in Britain, appointed in Reading in 1964 (a few years before the Appointment of Frank George in Brunel). He had previously been on the staff of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh and had been a visiting worker in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in USA. In his earlier work he was responsible for a revolutionary improvement in means of recording infrared spectra of stars, termed the "Fellgett advantage". In Reading he headed a department in which undergraduate courses in cybernetics were set up, as well as research projects, in the face of some opposition from scientists in more established areas. Among other things he was responsible for a major development in sound recording and reproduction, in which use of four channels allowed "surround sound" with unprecedented realism.

Dr Richard Mitchell remembers "PBF" the Cybernetist.

Professor John Rose: Kybernetes Memorial Issue

Professor Brian Rudall, Editor-in-Chief of Kybernetes, writes:

Kybernetes Vol. 38 Issue 1&2 is published in honour of the memory of Professor John (Jack) Rose and to mark his enormous contribution to Cybernetics, Systems and other fields, in which he had been so active. It is not an obituary but a tribute to his life and a celebration of his achievements as a warm human being, a family man and an academic who showed such foresight at a time when research and developments in so many areas were not adequately communicated worldwide. In this compilation we shall concentrate on tributes and contributions written in his memory which recall his dedication to systems and cybernetics. We have also included three of Prof. Rose's own papers from past issues of Kybernetes.

Prof. Rose was the Founding Editor of the journal, and was also the founder of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC)

Kybernetes is currently offering free access to three papers from last years's special issue dedicated to Gregory Bateson.

Two design challenges from Google and the Buckminster Fuller Institute

Google Project 10¹⁰⁰ have committed $10 million to implement up to five projects that will "help people" with categories in Community, Opportunity, Energy, Environment, Health, Education, Shelter and "Everything else". From a selection of one hundred ideas the public will be asked to choose twenty semi-finalists. An advisory board will select up to five final ideas. Closing date October 20th, 2008. Details.

The second challenge comes from the Buckminster Fuller Institute. "Each year a distinguished jury will award a $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems". Details. Closing date for 2008 November 7th, 2008.

On the nature of the electron and other particles

After CybCon08 a further talk by Dr John Williamson at the Maxwell Society, Room 2C, King's College, October 20th, 2-3 pm, Strand Campus. Open to all.

Abstract: A minimal extension of the Maxwell theory is proposed. This introduces forces strong enough to confine electromagnetism, and allow the description of purely electromagnetic particles. The origin of charge, half integral spin and the exclusion principle are discussed. A speculative model for all the hadronic particles is also proposed.

Williamson's approach seems to confirm the applicability of Gordon Pask's doubly twisted torus topology of analogy and dependence. Pask also suggested a Klein Bottle form as necessary for communication between the tautomeric resonance forms of his toroidal coherences.

The meeting was full and followed by a seminar on the mathematical approach.

John's recent draft paper for Kybernetes.

AISB 2008 Symposium on the Turing Test

Sunday 12th October, 2008, Palmer Building, University of Reading, Whiteknights, UK. 9.50 - 18.00. Further Details.

ANZSYS08 Perth 1-3 Decemeber 2008

Papers will be given on System Thinking and Practice. Submission deadline 15th October. Further details.

The Cybernetics Society 40th Anniversary Conference

The Conference was held on Saturday September 20th at King's College, University of London. Non-members were welcome.

Speaker's biographies, personal web links, abstracts and a photograph

To apply for membership of the Cybernetics Society follow this link

Contact us with your proposals for our evening meetings programme.

Recent publications on Beer and Pask

"Holistic Management" by William F. Christopher is an account of the application of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model in commercial enterprises. (Wiley 2007 ISBN 9780471740636).

"Gordon Pask, Philosopher Mechanic" has the subtitle "An Introduction to the Cybernetician's Cybernetician". This is a collection of Chapters by ex-students focusing mainly on Conversation Theory, spiced with charming personal reminiscence, edited by Ranulph Glanville and Karl H. Miller (edition echoraum 2007 ISBN 9783901941153).

"Pask Present" is a catalogue of the exhibition of "art and design inspired by the work of Gordon Pask" held in Vienna earlier this year (also published by edition echoraum ISBN 9783901941313 and edited by Ranulph Glanville and Albert Miller with numerous contributions from ex-students and colleagues).

Members are reminded that reviews are welcome.

Topology and physics

Earlier this year president of the American Society for Cybernetics topologist Louis Kauffman sent a list of video clips to the CYBCOM discussion group. Here it is:

• Dirac String Trick
• Electron Phase Microscopy and the Double Slit Experiment
• Richard Feynman: One Two Three Four Five Six
• A Knot Trick
• Not Knot: One Two
• Sphere Eversion: One Two Three
• Alexander's Horned Sphere
• Klein Bottle
• Carl Sagan Explains the Fourth Dimension
• The Fundamental Group of the Torus is Abelian
• Garrett Lisi, E8 Lie Algebra and The Theory of Everything: One Two
• Penrose Triangle with Klezmer Music Background
• Solvay Physics Conference 1927

Also worthy of note are Free Science Videos and Lectures for demonstrations and Peoples Archive for long interviews with leading scientists, mathematicians and artists. Amongst the hundreds of hours of video are Richard Gregory, Dorothy Hodgkin, Sir Bernard Lovell, Donald Knuth, Carl Djerassi, Manfred Eigen, Murray Gell-Mann, Benoit Mandelbrot, John Wheeler, Sir Michael Atiyah, John Maynard Smith, Hans Bethe, Freeman Dyson. There are welcome surprises too like George Daniels the mechanical watchmaker.

Artificial Life update

Prof Kevin Warwick at the Department of Cybernetics Reading University announced today his team had used a rat brain preparation to control a mobile robot.

The Artificial life paradigm of cybernetics seems alive and well with many new automata and simulation environments.

The list of Alife organizations include the "Grey Thumb Society" which welcomes hobbyists.These are some photographs of a recent London based chapter meeting. This is the Grey Thumb blog.

The Cybernetics Society 2008 Annual General Meeting

The meeting will be held on Tuesday 29th July in Room KO.31 [2BA] Small Committee Room at King's College from 6.00pm to 9.00pm and will start at 6.30pm.

Cybernetic Serendipity Redux [text needs editing] 

40 years ago, Jasia Reichart's exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" showed that the interactive confluence of cybernetics, computing and art had arrived.

(60 years ago, Norbert Wiener published his book "Cybernetics". 50 years ago the worlds first electronic performance installation at [text needs editing] was launched.)

40 years later, while computers and art remain, cybernetics has nearly vanished, although there is a reviving interest in it in art.

In remembering Cybernetic Serendipity we have the chance to re-open the debate, to reconsider the relationship particularly between cybernetics and art, and to do so taking into account the way that cybernetics has developed during its period of near invisibility. Thus, we can revisit and reconsider: if Cybernetic Serendipity were to be launched today, what should go in it, how should it be exhibited, and what would cybernetics and art learn from each other?

That, of course, depends not only on developments in art practice, but also (and more critically) on what is new in cybernetics, and how can that inform art: and, what is new in art, and how can that inform cybernetics.

This is a chance to reopen the connection, to explore again, and to move beyond some of the current models taken from cognitive science, computing, AI and AL, and complexity, to the (much more radical) field of their origin, cybernetics.

The immediate celebration will be an online discussion, Cybernetic Serendipity Redux, considering art, exhibitions and cybernetics now. This will run during September. There is a small team of discussants, to keep the ball rolling, but I hope you'll join in as much as you can. You can find this here. There is also a Ning site, where we will store material.

Do please consider signing on to these sites and taking part. You would be greatly valued.

from Ranulph Glanville

Stafford Beer

Two conferences are announced on the management cybernetics models of Stafford Beer.

1st Stafford Spirit Seminar: How to make use of Stafford Beer's legacy in cooperating for our future?

Mid Sweden University, Sweden, August 7th-8th, 2008. Speaker abstracts submission deadline is July 1st. Contact Professor Stig C Holmberg. Conference flyer and further details at Conference website.

Metaphorum 2008 at Hull University Business School "Action Research and Organisational Cybernetics"

30th June to 1st July 2008. £50 including lunches and coffee breaks. The organizers particulary invite more junior researchers (e.g. postgraduate students) wishing to demonstrate the focus and direction of their research. Full announcement. Metaphorum website

Professor Gerard de Zeeuw inaugral lecture at University of Lincoln

"Learning Research" Tuesday 3rd June 2008 5.30pm for 6 o'clock at the Jackson Lecture Theatre, Brayford Campus. Refreshments 7.15. Tickets are free. To register call 01522 837008 or email events@lincoln.ac.uk. Short biography.

7th IEEE International Conference on Cybernetic Intelligent Systems 2008

The Conference will be held at the University of Middlesex September 9-10, 2008. Deadline for 6 page paper extended to 5th May. Further details.

1st Cwarel Isaf Conference March 25th - 26th, 2008- Short Report

Malik Management Zentrum St Gallen invited the world's leading management cyberneticians to a meeting at their new headquarters in St. Gallen, Switzerland. The Cwarel Isaf Institute was founded by the late Stafford Beer (and named after his cottage in Wales) and Fredmund Malik to make the life's work of Beer available to society, to steward his intellectual property and to transfer related knowledge into the benefits of practical applications.

Malik MZSG discussed and presented their approach to management based in Cybernetics. The twelve sessions covered the Viable System Model, Syntegration, General Systems Modelling (particularly the approach of Frederick Vester from his "The Art of Interconnected Thinking"), Bionics (supported with a richly illustrated book, by Malik staff, "Bionics: The intelligence of creation" with many contributions including Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Nobelist Gerd Binnig), Strategic Planning, Innovation and Audit.

Participants agreed, including many from the Metaphorum Group, this had been most useful and well presented development. The world is now closer to realizing the wide applicability and benefits of what, today, we can call the risk based evolutionary model of Stafford Beer's Viable System.

University of Gratz seeks Professor of Systems Science

Detailed information. Closing date for application: April 21st, 2008.

Our Cybernetics: American Cybernetics Society Conference 2008

May 11-15, 2008 at University of Illinois in Urbana, IL, USA. A call for proposals of papers, performances, displays, symposia, workshops, panels, hosted conversations relating to the conference as described or to the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Biological Computer Laboratory.

More details at ASC website.

Distributed Computing Workshop

To be held on Wednesday 21st May 2008 and organized by UK Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) & the Kite Club.

• Talks from top-level experts in Grid computing adoption & opportunities for Open Source.
• Adoption success stories showcasing the value-add of Grid computing.
• Top tips on how to get started from experts with proven experience.
• Dedicated Tracks on Energy & Finance and on Life Sciences & Healthcare.
• Elevator pitches from several new start-up activities in Grid computing that are being spun out of CERN and related laboratories.
• Q&A session with a panel of experts.
• Networking opportunities.

Agenda and more details. Participation is free and open to all interested parties.

If you feel you are able to contribute to this event or would like further information please contact Alex Efimov.

Pask Present- exhibition at 19th EMSCR Conference

Following "Maverick Machines" at the University of Edinburgh pieces from established artists, architects, designers, academics and students inspired by Gordon Pask's work will be exhibited including his interest in analogue computing and his experiments with elctrochemistry. Further details. The exhibition will be held at Atelier Aarbergasse 6, A-1010 Vienna, from 26th March to 4th April, open daily from 13:00 to 21:00. The opening ceremony will take place on 25th March, 19:00.Pask Present website

Lovelock on Climate change at the Royal Society

Our honorary fellow Professor James Lovelock discusses the response of the earth to global warming and possible interventions from the perspective of his Gaia model. "A feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet". Video of lecture "Climate change on the living Earth" (1:05:29 Real Player or Windows Media Player).

Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

Marvin Minsky talks on video (1:23:10 Real Player) at MIT about the problems of AI and his latest book. Visit Minsky's website to download the 2006 version along with many other of his publications. The sound is of variable quality but the setting of goals, the detection of difference, the building of analogies and the context dependency of interpretation has a contemporary ring in Pask's work. Minsky's use of critics and selectors on his suggested six level model is redolent of more English cybernetics in Beer's VSM.

Fourteenth WOSC Conference next September

The World Organistion for Systems and Cybernetics was be held in Wroclaw, Poland, September 9-12, 2008. Further details. Brochure.

Professor Klaus Krippendorff "Conversation and Causes of its Degeneration" (.ppt) and "Language (reconstructing its origins) and Accountability reconsidering its Cybernetics" (.ppt) workshop presentation.

Third International Heinz von Foerster Congress 16-19th November 2007 Vienna

Special Sections on Ernst von Glasersfeld who celebrated his 90th birthday this year and Gordon Pask (1928-1996) whose scientific papers are now archived at the Department of Contemporary History, University of Vienna. Participation is free. Further details. Register.

The 19th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR)

The meeting will take place in Vienna during the week after Easter 2008, March 25th to 28th (inclusive). This is, historically, the major biennial meeting in Europe. Full details

There are 15 symposia.

John Rose

Professor John Rose, founder of WOSC and of the journals Kybernetes and Robotica, died on Friday 3rd August 2007. As a refugee from the Nazis he made his home in Britain. He was active in education and consulting to industry. He produced more than 50 books on chemistry, cybernetics, automation, biomedical computing, environmental issues and medical biotechnology. WOSC obituary.

Donald Michie

Professor Donald Michie died in a car accident with his ex-wife Dame Anne McLaren earlier this month. From Rangoon to Rugby School then classics at Balliol he went to cryptography at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing and Jack Good. In 1944 he helped render Tommy Flowers' Colossus II programmable. In 1972 we learned the Colossi were destroyed by Churchill but in fact two were moved to "British secret service headquarters". After a DPhil in mammalian genetics Michie became UK's leading AI researcher founding the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at Edinburgh University. Obituaries and many more details in the Telegraph, Guardian, Times and Independent where he is described as part of the cybernetics movement. Andrew Murray writes that Donald and Anne had a lifelong commitment to socialism.

Allenna Leonard's keynote speech to WMSCI

Our member Dr Allenna Leonard of the Complementary Set and past president of the American Society for Cybenetics gave a keynote address to the 11th World Multiconfence on Systemics, Cybernetics and Infomatics in Orlando (WMSCI). Full text of her paper "The Viable Systems Model and its Application to Complex Systems".

The Pask Archive

The Institute for Contemporary History of the University of Vienna will host the Pask Archive. Rebecca Hibit tells us the Gordon Pask Archive will be open in time for EMCSR (2008). Pask introduced forces into Cybernetics with Paul Pangaro and later coined the term "new" cybernetics to include the eternal kinetic actor interactions that support the production of the bounded kinematic descriptions and conversations of observer participants. Pask's model of Self Organization "Like concepts repel, unlike concepts attract", where concepts are procedures composed of spins that produce relations in all media, should receive further attention in coming years. "They will come to know", he once said.

Pask's student, Dr Ranulph Glanville, will be chairing Symposium C at EMCSR on Second Order Cybernetics "making Gordon the central theme", Ranulph tell us. The formal announcement of the Pask Archive will be around November 18th when a collection of Pask's papers and essays he has edited will be published in support.He has also arranged a seminar with Dr Karl Mueller. Speakers will include Paul Pangaro and Bernard Scott.

Gordon was the recepient of many awards, including the Wiener Medal, but he had particular affection for the first award of "Ehrenmitglied" (Honorary Member) of the Kybernetik (the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies). It is entirely appropriate that the efforts of many including Dr Glanville and Dr. Bernard Scott has resulted in an archive in Vienna alongside his mentor Heinz von Foerster. Heinz called Gordon a genius (Kybernetes 30, 5/6, 2001).

Pangaro Inc's Pask Archive includes new presentations at the related site "http://www.cyberneticians.com" on Pask with Warren McCulloch, Lettvin and Maturana and video clips.

From Vanilla Beer: Maverick Machines - A public exhibition inspired by the maverick work of cybernetician Gordon Pask opened this month at the Matthew Architecture Gallery, Edinburgh. 24th July - 10th August, Open Mon - Fri 10am-4pm. More details

Neurotechnologija real-time image recognition software development kit

Neurotechnologija announce details of their SentiSight real-time moving and still image recognition SDK. Windows demo and SDK trial downloads.

Anatol Rapoport

Anatol Rapoport, a founder of General Systems Theory, died on January 20 2007, aged 95. A Commemoration was held last month in the University of Toronto.

A short appreciation and notes on sources.

Nineteenth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2008))

Call for papers at University of Vienna March 25- 28 2008: organized by the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies in cooperation with the Institute of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, Center for Brain Research, Medical University of Vienna and the International Federation for Systems Research.

World Chinese Forum on Science of General Systems (WCFSGS)

This is a new online journal. WOSC Director for International Affairs, Dr Alex Andrew, tells us the Chinese are leaders in Pansystems and Grey Systems. Some papers are in English.

WOSC 2008 Call for Papers

The next World Oranisation for Systems and Cybenetics (WOSC) will be held in Wroclaw, Poland September 9- 12, 2008. More details. Conference leaflet.

Real Time Reporting advocated by "Big Six" accounting firms

In a report "Global Capital Markets and the Global Economy" to the Global Public Policy Symposium in Paris CEOs and Chairs of PwC, KPMG, Grant Thornton, BDO, Deloitte and Ernst & Young advocated real-time reporting of performance on the web.

This is straight out of the management cybernetics textbook ("Brain of the Firm" Wiley 2nd Edition 1981) of our late honorary fellow Stafford Beer, himself an Ernst consultant.

Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) for sector specific accounting and harmonisation of National Standards by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) is advocated. Resistance to complex rules is urged which "can produce financial statements that virtually no one understands". Standards need, they say, to be principles-based. This promulgates the criticism made in the society by Karl-Gustav Hanssen at our 2003 conference.

What better principles than those of Beer's Viable System Model? Here (variety) resources are balanced to need with real-time reports of performance and financial audit. These data support alerting for timely management intervention and modelling of future development.

The Home Office is "not fit for purpose" says the incoming minister. The NHS struggles to become patient centred and an Afghani asks, as violence increases, "Where did the Aid money go?". We trust ministers and CEOs will put real-time reporting at the top of their agenda to make world development safer and more open.

"Neural Networks as Cybernetic Systems"

Holk Cruse has produced this open access etext with a supporting simulation tool, tkCybernetics (interpreted in Tcl/Tk, freeware which must be installed first) embodying a neural cybernetic approach to neural and systems modelling. The freeware graphical tool by Thorsten Roggendorf enables rapid select and drop modelling of non-linear and feedback systems using connected filter and function elements with graphical display of inputs and outputs for small circuits. Cruse's free ebook provides a tutorial introduction to the modelling approach and discussion of biological modelling with particular reference to neural nets.

The Department of Biological Cybernetics at Bielefeld University is to be congratulated and our thanks to Francis Heylighen (of Principia Cybernetica) for drawing our attention to the announcement of Soren Lorenz editorial coordinator of the host open access ejournal "Brains, Minds, and Media".

A very welcome development. The software was readily installed, run and tested under XP and is supported with a minimum of ambiguity for all platforms. Recommended for students learning cybernetics.

Fifty years of System Dynamics

"Reaching out with System Dynamics" is the Golden Anniversary celebration by the UK Chapter of the System Dynamics Society on 1st & 2nd February 2007 in Harrogate.

System Dynamics was created by Jay Forrester at MIT. The gathering will be focusing on how System Dynamics can be used by business to engage with potential customers and education for both students and government ministries - reaching out to new practitioners. Further Details.

Speakers include Dr Robert Thurlby on BT Business development, Michael Bean on websims, Dr Khalid Saeed on distance learning and Professor Alfredo Moscardini on recent work in Egypt.

A nanoengineer looks at red blood cells

Subra Suresh, MIT Professor of Biological Engineering in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering of the Biological Engineering Division, gives a video talk on "Nanotechnology and the Study of Human Diseases". The potentially low cost fluidic measurement of nanonewton forces can analyse the mechanical properties of deformation and mass of red blood cells- erythrocytes. Diagnostic aids and new approaches to treatment for diseases such as malaria, hereditary spherocytosis and pancreatic cancer are suggested. The Gobal Enterprise for Micro-Mechanics and Molecular Medicine- GEM⁴ website supports this development.

The 31st Annual Cybernetics Society Conference

The conference was held on Saturday 16th September 2006 at King's College. Program and Abstracts here.

We are pleased to report great interest expressed in the English foundational movement led by Ashby and the members of the Ratio Club, including Turing, Grey Walter, Mackay, Albert Uttley and Jack Good. Zivanovic's work reminded us of the contribution to gallery art by many of our founders. Papers on modelling and systems reminded us of the holistic or concurrent applicability of the cybernetic paradigm of feedback. The question of the nature of Symbol reappeared in probing the mystery of phlogiston and entropy applied to biology and again in the rules to screen aircraft for safety from terrorism. The Society thanks the contributors for a most stimulating event.

We trust many of the papers will appear in Kybernetes

Robot Perception Research Project

An EU funded project is being aimed at giving autonomous machines much greater perception abilities. The BACS (Bayesian Approach to Cognitive Systems) project, is a project under the 6th Framework Program of the European Commission which has been allocated 7.5 million in funding. The BACS project brings together researchers and commercial companies working on artificial perception systems potentially capable of dealing with complex tasks in everyday settings. The scientific work being carried out under BACS makes robots with new capabilities a real prospect: robots capable of handling incomplete information, analyzing their environment, acquiring context-specific knowledge, interpreting the data and, together with humans, taking decisions.

Specific implementations with market potential are planned. A prospective implementation with market potential is a system that can assist drivers of passenger cars and trucks by employing probabilistic control functions and driving strategies. This should make driving safer for both drivers and pedestrians. Another area of interest is 3D modelling and surveillance of safety-critical applications such as monitoring structural changes in buildings or mines and safety-relevant infrastructure elements in power lines.

European industry can use Bayes' alternative calculation models to good advantage; they have applications both in major companies in the automotive industry and mobile telephony, for example, and in small and medium-size companies active in niche markets such as healthcare, inspection, monitoring or even market forecasts. More.

Biologically Plausible Neural Systems and Virtual Robotics

Abstracts requested for a special session at the 5th Chapter Conference on Advances in Cybernetic Systems 2006 which will run on September 7th or 8th Sheffield Hallam University, UK .

There is a range of connectionist systems, but a much smaller set of neural network models corresponding to biological neural networks. Neural models range in biological validity through the traditional biological Hodgkin Huxley models to Leaky Integrate and Fire models that miss much of the biological detail. From a computational perspective, many of the biological details may be unnecessary to accurately simulate psychological and psychophysical behaviour, and these unnecessary details come with a computational cost. One of the challenges is to identify the level of detail necessary or beneficial for simulating behaviour at higher levels.

Virtual robotics as an application domain have several advantages. They enable the system to behave in domains that people use, in the fashion that people act. They do not require full fledged motor and sensing routines, so they present a lower implementation barrier. However, they do enable the system to ground symbols and provide the possibility of learning based on grounded symbols in domains that people use.

One major virtue to biological and psychological validity when simulating neural nets is that direct evidence from behaving biological systems can guide development of simulated systems. The fidelity of the robots virtual world to an assumed reality provides a minimum level of abstraction of the psychological phenomena that can be simulated. Coarse granularity in the virtual world, however, can enormously reduce computational effort and time while still being appropriate and sufficient for investigating more abstractly specified psychological phenomena. Consequently, a neural system for a virtual robot is an excellent domain for exploring core cybernetics problems such as symbol grounding, learning, and interactive behaviour.

This session will explore issues in biologically plausible neural systems, and their relationship to psychological, psychophysical and behavioural phenomena using virtual robotics.

Winning the Oil Endgame- with renewables

Rocky Mountain Institute founder and CEO Amory Lovins makes a brilliantly argued case that carbon fibre substitution of steel enables substitution of oil with renewables for all vehicles and substantial reduction of CO₂ emission. He describes a better cultural, economic and engineering homeostat for producing transport by applying existing technical know-how "to make all modes of transportation lighter and more fuel-efficient, and that big, fast change is possible". Lovins finds less than 1% of the energy used by a car is used to move the driver. This is a non-nuclear plan for "kicking the oil habit". Real format video from MIT.

New Amory Lovins interviewed by Stephen Sakur on BBC Hardtalk.

James Lovelock "The Revenge of Gaia"

In his latest book Professor J. E. Lovelock FRS presents the view that world climate collapse is imminent and nuclear power must be considered as part of the solution. Richard Mabey reviews in the Sunday Times. John Gray reviews in the Independent. Tyler Volk of NYU Department of Biology reviews in Nature. Professor Lovelock is an honorary fellow of the Society.

Royal Society Video Archive

A treasure trove including talks by Sir Tim Berners-Lee om the Future of the World Wide Web, Tim Palmer on Climate Variability and Predictability, Jarad Diamond on How societies choose to fail or survive, Wilson Sibbett on Optical science in the fast lane etc etc.

The Acceleration of Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics (GNR)

Ray Kurzweil is the pioneer inventor of text recognition and speech synthesis, winner of MIT's half million dollar Lemelson Prize and author of "The Singularity is near". He proposes "The Law of Accerating Returns" and gives an MIT video talk on GNR at the 2005 MIT Conference on emerging technologies.

Forthcoming Systems and Cybernetics Conferences

"Towards a Science of Complex Systems"

European Conference on Complex Systems 2006 (ECCS'06)

Oxford 25-29 September 2006. Call for papers (till 7th April) and Workshop proposals (till 5th May) Further details and contacts.

Complexity, Democracy & Sustainability

International Society for the Systems Sciences 50th Annual Conference July 9-14, 2006 Sonoma State University, California Call for participation.

The Emergences of Designs

Washington Evolutionary Systems Society (WESS) at Capital Science 2006 March 25-26, 2006

Contact Jerry Chandler tel.:703-790-1651

ALAS (Asociacion Lationamericana de Sistemas)

7th-9th August 2006 Buenos Aires YMCA. In Portugese and Spanish with tutorial workshops in Spanish 3rd-6th August 2006. Themes will include paricipatory governance and interdisciplinary application of cybernetics and the systems approach to Latin America.

The Six Webs, 10 Years On

Bill Joy, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (venture capitalists), former Chief Scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, designer and writer of Berkeley UNIX - the first open source operating system with built-in TCP/IP, reflects on the six webs- defined as far, near, here, weird, B2B, and D2D- as an ongoing organizing principle for thinking about the internet.

Video from MIT 51:35 with questions.

Project Cybersyn: multimedia documentation planned

Project Cybersyn (Chile 1970-1973) was the first application of formal cybernetic methods to the government of a country. Stafford Beer developed the Viable System Model he applied in Chile for the management of complex enterprises from his foundational work in management cybernetics. Real- time performance monitoring in actuality, capability and potential, variety analysis, algedonic alerting and participatory development modelling were all new then. The approach came out of Wiener's work on purposeful error correction and the inter-disciplinary focus it produced on self-organisation and autonomy. Now these techniques are becoming mainstream. Cheap high performance multimedia computing supporting email, workflow and data mining on the web can realise this potential. But still company and government accounts, for example, are produced seasonally reflecting agricultural practice rather than the real-time needs of a developing "postcode lottery" society unable or unwilling to regulate waste and allocate resources fairly.

The Chilean multi-media artists Catalina Ossa and Enrique Rivera have announced their intention to document the pioneering innovations in Chile. A website, documentary film and exhibitions are intended. Participants in the project are invited to get in touch. See the Metaphorum website for more details.

"Cybernetics - Linking Human and Machine Brains" by Prof. Kevin Warwick

Date & Time: Wednesday 8th February 2006. Time:17:30 to 18:30 Networking and opportunity to meet the presenter with light refreshments and sandwiches. Lecture to follow in the Theatre 18:30-20:00 thereafter the Kelvin Lounge will be open with cash bar available. Venue:IEE, Savoy Place, London, WC2 0BL. Registration recommended. Further details

Mars exploration, habitat formation, spray-on space suits and the Space Elevator

MIT Enterprise Forum presents a video packed with cybernetics of recently funded studies from the Nasa Institute for Advanced Concepts. 18 minutes in the rhetoric gives way to four presentations of some extraordinary interdisciplinary science and engineering studies including the Interlopter, a wing flapping robot (low Reynolds numbers only); ecological bioremediation, microbial exogeology (28'): lava tube habitats and hopping microbots; biospace suits with application to (40') disabled walking support: electroacting shrink wrap "spiderwoman" suit and the ultimate high road to space from an ocean platform: the Space Elevator (50') climbing on a carbon nanotube (40 times stronger than anything previously made) ribbon. Initial cost estimated at about $10 billion taking 15 years to build and cost per pound to geosynchronous orbit reduced from $5-10,000 to around $200. There are broadband, dial-up and audio only streaming options for this video "The Power of Revolutionary Thinking: What Today's Scientists Can Teach You About Driving Innovation In Your Organization" .

"From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A history of Soviet Cybernetics"

Stuart Umpleby, an ex-President of the American Society for Cybernetics, writes "The interplay between science and politics in the USSR was quite amazing". This book by Slava Gerovitch was published by MIT Press in 2002. From the jacket we learn: "Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and in society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With the new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science.

"Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev's political "thaw," however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of Stalinist science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as "science in the service of communism," but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into "Cyber-Newspeak."

Slava Gerovitch is a Dibner/Sloan Postdoctoral Researcher at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology and a Research Associate at the Institute for the History of Natural Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences."

"An exceptionally lively and interesting book. This is by far the best-informed and most insightful account of cybernetics in the Soviet Union." David Holloway, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Stanford University.

"Cybernetics was among the most important intellectual movements of the mid-twentieth century. Nowhere was its curious blend of mathematical technique, ideology, information technology, and postmodern scientific universalism more controversial or more interesting, than in the Soviet Union during the early Cold War. Slava Gerovitch is among the first scholars to command the linguistic skills, cultural resources, and historical awareness to offer a definitive account. From "Newspeak to Cyberspeak" not only sheds new light on the byzantine intellectual world of the Soviet Union, but holds up a fascinating mirror to the West as well. This is a groundbreaking achievement that deserves a wide audience." Paul N. Edwards, Director, Science, Technology and Society Program, University of Michigan

Dr Alex Andrew writes to CYBCOM about his experiences of the Russian cybernetics scene.

Cyberneticians might note Leonid Ototsky, our correspondent in Magnitogorsk, is developing a website on Stafford Beer. Beer's celebrated "World in Torment" paper is available for download.

Our attention was recently drawn to some work on Beer in New Zealand "A VSM Analysis of the New Zealand National Innovation System" by Sean Devine.

Negreponte on the $100 Laptop

In his first PowerPoint presentation Nicholas Negroponte talks about Media Lab's work on a wind-up laptop for developing nations. Video from MIT. High volume production is planned for 2007. This is truly fascinating: a non-profit business model is described with all the technical and cultural issues addressed. Excellent questions from a learned audience.

President calls for Government to back Robotics Competition

Should the UK instigate a Grand Challenge along the lines of the USA's competition to build a robotic vehicle to cross the desert unaided?

This was a topic of conversation at a workshop held by The National Advanced Robotics Research Centre NARRC at the University of Salford on December the 1st.

Robotics is widely predicted to be the growth technology of the 21st century in a similar fashion to the way the motor car was the major technology of the 20th. The UK is lagging way behind, Japan, America and Korea. The USA's Defense Advanced Projects Agency DARPA Grand Challenge was to build and race self navigating autonomous ground vehicles over a 132 mile (212km) course in the Mojave Desert, Nevada for a cash prize of 2 million dollars.

One of the NARRC delegates, David Buckley, has suggested a competition for a humanoid (biped) robot to negotiate a short obstacle course, pick up an empty drinks can and return to the start of the course with the can and place it on a table. It is difficult and expensive to make an advanced humanoid biped robot; the word's most advanced humanoid, Honda's ASIMO, is reputed to have cost over $140m to date. However useful robots need to work in our built environment; climb stairs, open doors, work at table top height, etc. The potential market for humanoid robots is huge if the cost can be made low enough. Early applications are likely to be in the areas of the three D's dirty, dangerous or dull. David suggests that there could be four classes of humanoid in various heights up to 2m tall. Radio control would be allowed. But who would fund the prize, the DTI, the MoD, the Department of Education or industry perhaps? It has been a long time since the UK government took such a step.

The last time was when the problem of deducing longitude at sea was solved in 1764 by the engineer John Harrison who created the first accurate seaworthy clock. The problem had been unsolved despite the best efforts of Galileo, Cassini and Newton until the Board of Longitude (the first science funding body in the UK) set up by the King and Parliament paid out the £20,000 prize money. The society's president would be delighted to receive comments.

Forthcoming Talks

Talks to the Society are held in King's College Council Room 6.30 for 7.00pm start. Directions.

More on the talks given this season.

If you would like to talk to the Society please get in contact with one of the meeting organisers.

Paul Pangaro videos and website

Dr Paul Pangaro has collected videos of von Foerster and Pask. Paul's excellent Stanford video lectures and supporting materials on Cybernetics and the entailment structures of Conversation Theory will be most helpful to practitioners and students alike. Thoroughly recommended. The collection includes a rare black and white film transcription of Pask's exhibit "Colloquy of Mobiles" from the famous Institute of Contemporary Arts Exhibition of 1968 "Cybernetic Serendipity".

The site covers much of Paul's activitiy in Cybernetics and hosts the Pask Archive.

New Journal: Constructivist Foundations

Constructivist Foundations (CF) is an independent academic peer-reviewed e-journal without commercial interests. Its aim is to promote scientific foundations and applications of constructivist sciences, to weed out pseudoscientific claims and to base constructivist sciences on sound scientific foundations, which do not equal the scientific method with objectivist claims. The journal is concerned with the interdisciplinary study of all forms of constructivist sciences, especially radical constructivism, cybersemiotics, enactive cognitive science, epistemic structuring of experience, second order cybernetics, the theory of autopoietic systems, etc.

Journal's website

The first issue's table of contents and articles can be found at: Volume 1, Number 1 (free registration required).

Alex Andrew reviews Conway and Siegelman's "Dark Hero of the Information Age: In search of Norbert Wiener, the father of Cybernetics"

Our distinguished member Dr Andrew has the advantage of many reviewers in actually "being there" at the time of the development of cybernetics working with Warren McCulloch. Cyberneticians will find his reminiscence of McCulloch, MacKay and the extraordinary Walter Pitts of particular interest. The importance of McCulloch and Pitts' "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity'' (1943) can hardly be overestimated and is foundational to Artificial Neural Network (ANN) research. Apart from building threshold logic equipment they established Turing Universality in a potentially concurrent context.

Download in .doc format (Kybernetes Vol.34 No.7/8 2005 pp1284-1289). With thanks to Kybernetes.

30th Annual Conference of Cybernetics Society
Developments in Cybernetics

The 30th Annual Conference was held in the Council Room at King's College in the Strand on Saturday September 10th 2005. Contact. Papers included Dr Susan Blackmore on evolving meme machines, Nick Hampshire on his e-book project, Tony Wilkes on his music recognition software, Jeremy Gordon on his Windows assembler, Tom Campbell on e-money micropayments, Doug Haynes about Stafford Beer on DVD, Prof Raul Espejo on resonsponsible governance and Prof Stephen Gage discussed trivial machines. Further details.

"Cybernetics of Cybernetics" (ed Heinz von Foerster 1974)
or "The control of control and the communication of communication"

Papers by Wiener, Pask, Ashby, McCulloch, Beer, Maturana, Umpleby, Loefgren, von Foerster and many others scattered with explanations of major topics like goal, feedback, homeostasis, entropy and information theory. The "parabook" contains the table of contents and indexed glossary- it is in the middle of the book.

Dr Allenna Leonard, President of American Society for Cybernetics, writes that Steve Carleton has copies of this classic "treasure chest" collection of papers for $49.95 (paperback) and $79.95 (hardback)

Email Diane Johnson who is handling order fulfillment with a cheque or credit card. Fax 1-763-560-2524.

The paperback is now available from Amazon in USA. Search on "Cybernetics of Cybernetics" with quotes.

American Society for Cybernetics
The Many Interpretations and Applications of Cybernetics

Many people have been using ideas, models and tools from the trans-disciplinary science of cybernetics such as: circular causality, feedback, systems and boundaries, constructivism, multiple realities or perspectives, dynamic simulations, and activities that build upon the possibilities and limitations of human and other information processing capabilities

Highlights

Takeshi Utsumi "Creating a Global University System"

Eric Dent "Assumptions Shared and Not Shared by the Various Fields of Systems Science"

Karl Mueller "From Second Order Cybernetics to Second Order Science"

Stuart Umpleby "Two Paradigms of Social Science Research: How Reflexivity Theory is different from Current Theories"

Russell Ackoff "Types of Systems and Models of Them"

Klaus Krippendorff "Language and Second-order Cybernetics: Technology and its Relation to Human Beings"

Catherine Bateson "Relationships between Demographic Changes and Cultural Transmission".

Ranulph Glanville "Knowledge and Design in the Era of Second-Order Cybernetics"

Full programme.

Changing Organisational Change!
International Conference on Sustaining Change Management 2005

This is a workshop format conference to be held in Vienna, Austria December 12-14 2005. Brochure (6 pages- 2.2 Megabytes .pdf)

18^th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research

18th-21st April 2006 in Vienna. The closing date for submitting papers is 11th October 2005

Cybernetics - "the study of communication and control in the animal and the machine" (N.Wiener) - has recently returned to the forefront, not only in cyberspace and cyberpunk, but, even more important, contributing to the corroboration of various scientific theories. Additionally, an ever increasing number of research areas, including social and economic theories, theoretical biology, ecology, computer science, and robotics draw on ideas from second order cybernetics. Artificial intelligence, evolved directly from cybernetics, has not only technological and economic, but also important social impacts. With a marked trend towards interdisciplinary cooperation and global perspectives, this important role of cybernetics is expected to be further strengthened over the next years.

Sixteen sessions are planned.

Ranulph Glanville writes: "EMCSR is one of the longest established and highest prestige conferences in the field of cybernetics/systems research. It has been associated closely with several major figures and the development of a number of important concepts in cybernetics/systems research." There is a briefing session on the next EU Reseach Framework. Ranulph will be chairing a session on "The Cybernetics of Cybernetics: Cybernetics, Interaction and Conversation"

Freeman Dyson reviews Conway and Siegelman's Wiener Biography

Freeman Dyson once remarked to a couple of members of our society "There are no such things as singularities". He compares the earlier Heims and Masani biographies. Masani edited "Norbert Wiener:Collected Works" in four volumes covering everything from time series, Fourier analysis, information, control, quantum theory, relativity and, of course, cybernetics. When a great man talks about another great man expect great things. "A Tale of Tragic Genius" NY Review of Books.

Intelligent Cybernetic Systems

This is a new Journal launched with a call for papers.

The Journal Intelligent Cybernetic Systems (ICS) publishes research papers containing contributions in experimental, theoretical and applied aspects of intelligent systems and cybernetics, including, but not limited to following topics:

Intelligent Systems, Robotic Systems, System Modelling and Control, Adaptive Control Systems, Image Processing, Pattern Recognition, Safety Reliability and Quality Assurance, Decision Support Systems, Manufacturing Systems, Data Mining, Large Scale Systems, Human Machine Systems, Soft Computing, Fuzzy Logic Systems, Neural Systems, Computational Intelligence, Knowledge Based Systems, Agent-based Systems, Swarm Engineering, Emerging and Evolutionary Methods, Biological Cybernetics.

Submitted articles may be of three basic types:

• Regular papers: Detailed discussion involving new research, applications or developments.
• Brief papers: Brief presentations of new technical concepts and developments.
• Correspondence: Letters to the Editor about the journal or to authors commenting on previously published papers.

Contact for submissions

"Forty Years of Cybernetics"

Professor Stafford Beer Hon. FCybS

From the Society archive we are pleased to present the audio file of Stafford Beer giving the Gordon Hyde Memorial Lecture in January 1990 (1hr 27mins).

He describes his student days and his use of OR in India as a Gurkha Captain in Intelligence. He makes a plea for an epistemological approach in science and attacks causality and correlation statistics in large systems. He recommends Eastern philosophy as a route to understanding holism.

Thence he moves to the Steel industry and a two mile long process plant producing cold rolled strip and wire. He read Wiener's Cybernetics in 1950 and wrote to him about feedback control and production. Wiener sent a telegram "Come to MIT at once". The imperatives of steel production prevented this but Purposeful Systems (bounded by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, ed.), Ashby, Grey Walter, Pask, production control charts, the cogging mill that breaks once in 130 years and the meagre pay rise for workers who increased their productivity 30% through his innovation make up for it. The Cybor House team, the 17th Pegasus 1k word machine, dicemen and runes, the brain, Ashby and variety, SIGMA and the Gas Board. He talks of SIGMA in Chile and Flores, pioneering work in newsprint- six times overmanned, and the International Consultancy scene. He introduces Wizard Prang. Remarks "Make Machines to investigate what you are thinking about!" and announces Geodesic Tensegrity (to become Syntegrity) at Manchester ending with "Coincidence in your life is the inability to see what really matters". Reviews invited.

More audio: Stafford responds to the Chilean Coup (6 mins) and contributes to a memoir of Buckminster Fuller (27 mins). Fuller's syntegrity led to Stafford's icosahedral syntegrity model and Pask's concurrent proof of the 60 degree architecture of a minimal space filling form.

Click the icon to download a free copy of Windows media player to play the Windows Media Audio (.wma) file.

The Fourth British Computer Society Machine Intelligence Competition

Tuesday December 13th 2005 at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, UK, during the annual SGAI conference AI-2005 Closing Date for Entries: October 1st 2005.

This is one in an annual series of competitions for live demonstrations of 'Progress Towards Machine Intelligence' organized by the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence (SGAI) in association with AKRI. The competition is sponsored by Electrolux Group.

The demonstration can be of either software (e.g. a question- answering system or a speech recognition system) or hardware (e.g. a mobile robot).

This competition will put on show real systems demonstrated live. It is hoped that the competition and the competitors, over several years, will provide a new interest and visible improvements in the development of machine intelligence.

Entry Fee: none, conference registration not required. Prize: A permanent trophy awarded for one year plus a £1,000 cash prize, sponsored by Electrolux.

Format: The prize will be awarded on the basis of a 10-15 minute live demonstration (not a paper or a technical description). The prize will be awarded to the demonstration that in the opinion of the judges best demonstrates 'progress towards an intelligent machine'.

Judges: All registered delegates at the conference will be eligible to vote in a secret ballot.

Eligibility: The competition is open to all. A maximum of 5 entries will be presented. To control numbers, these will be selected by the organizers on the basis of information provided by the entrants.

Further information the organizers Prof. Max Bramer (Chairman, SGAI) and Dr. John Gordon (Director, AKRI).

The Cybernetics of Managerial Cybernetics Practice
Special Guest: Allenna Leonard

7th Workshop in Sharing Practice: a One Day Workshop from 10am April 15th 2005, John Foster Building, John Moores University, 98 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool

Denis Adams describes the intentions with a commentary on the profession of Management Cybernetics and some background.

Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics

International Herald Tribune review by Corneila Dean of the New York Times.

The publisher writes:

In the middle of the last century, Norbert Wiener-ex-child prodigy and brilliant MIT mathematician -founded the science of cybernetics, igniting the information-age explosion of computers, automation, and global telecommunications. Wiener was the first to articulate the modern notion of "feedback," and his ideas informed the work of computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, and anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. His best-selling book, Cybernetics, catapulted him into the public spotlight, as did his chilling visions of the future and his ardent social activism. So what happened? Why is his work virtually unknown today? And what, in fact, is Wiener's legacy? In this remarkable book, award-winning journalists Conway and Siegelman set out to rescue Wiener's genius from obscurity and to explore the many ways in which his groundbreaking ideas continue to shape our lives. Based on a wealth of primary sources (including some newly declassified WW II and Cold War-era documents) and exclusive interviews with Wiener's family and closest colleagues, the book reveals an extraordinarily complex figure, whose high-pressure childhood, manic depression, and troubled relationships had a profound effect on his scientific work. No one interested in the intersection of technology and culture will want to miss this epic story of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and colorful figures.

Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman's new book is published by Basic Books ISBN 0738203688. Available now in US.

Recent Reviews

What does a new generation think? Tim Kelley studying for his Comp Sci Masters reviews Wiener's classic "Cybernetics". Cybernetics, he observes, "a field crushed by its own weight".

Science, complexity and the nature of existence

Professor George Ellis lectures on the central doctrine of classical multi-level cybernetics. This video feed is from the Royal Society Templeton Lecture. Newcomers to cybernetics will find this a useful introduction. A tour-de force indeed. Enjoy but...

Controversially he claims that the "goals" and "information" of cybernetics cannot be applied to objects smaller than supramolecules. This denies that force equilibria and the second law of thermodynamics apply below this level and smuggles a ghost into his machine. Professor Lewis Wolpert exorcises the ghost at question time. If physics improves the precision of descriptions it is not clear that Ellis' position on consciousness, that no experiment is possible to predict a new experiment, holds. Prof Lord May remarks that animals (that might evolve into physicists) are conscious. The Conant-Ashby Theorem (which asserts "Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system") extends some form of consciousness to all self-regulating, persisting or stable, distinguishable objects, like tables, rocks, atoms etc.

Pask, for whom durations were incommensurable for communicating domains, has shown (with his Lambda matrix p.49) causal asynchronous communication between synchronous circular processes, homeostats, requires a relativistic correction banishing master clocks and adopting coherence as boundary defining.

Prof Ellis adopts circularity but not its interior lack of causality. He criticises physics failure to predict the weather or model chess players but does not identify "agreement" with "equilibrium" or the pathology of serial/parallel computing and mathematical methods in n-body problems- a property not shared by nature which like a mechanical model is concurrently constrained.

Slides in Powerpoint (.ppt ) or web (.htm) format from Prof Ellis' lecture and Jean Marie Lehn's Nobel Prize lecture on Supramolecular Chemistry (.pdf).

BBC2: Design and Construction with Domestic Materials

If you, or someone in your family, has some technical, mechanical or DIY skills, and you might be interested in competing for cash prizes, have a look at their website for more details.

Cybernetics at UCLA

The Bruin reports. "The time of cybernetics has come", said program chair Joe DiStefano. "These tools have been around for a long time, but their utility and power wasn't recognized because the demand wasn't great enough."

Core material includes Cybernetics, Biomodelling, Probability, Statistics, Systems and Signals, Feedback Control Systems, Modelling and Simulation.

Multiple Versions of the World

Berkeley celebrates Bateson's centennial with a conference on his continued influence in cybernetics and anthropology. Berkeley News reports.

On the East Coast CUNY, New York , "Art, Circuitry, and Ecology: Honoring Gregory Bateson".

Cybernetics North (CN) at Manchester Business School

CN is based at John Moores University in Liverpool. With many Metaphorum members CN has held three Conferences on sustainability of communities and regeneration. Health services will be the theme for summer 05. Monthly workshops are being run at Manchester Business School. Contact Dr Robin Asby. Next workshop Friday 19th November: "Organisational Change; Mosaic Transformation, Ecocycle and the VSM".

CN is a society devoted to honouring Beer's work and wanting to create a context for sharing the experience of practitioners using systemic methods and tools, (not only) cybernetics, in the UK and in particular in the North of England.

Metaphorum in Dublin

Next Conference Dublin May 5th-6th 2005. Contact Dr Angela Espinosa. Metaphorum was also set up to develop the management methods of Stafford Beer applied to organisation.

Cybcon2004 "Cybernetics and Public Administration"
Friday September 3rd and 4th
jointly presented with Metaphorum

On the first day amidst much discussion posters were presented by Dr Y.I. Hayut-Man, Academy of Jerusalem, who presented an approach to a Virtual New Jerusalem to celebrate the Abrahamic Religions. Nick Green, Real Time Study Group, talked about management cybernetics of NHS IT in the NPfITplans.

Papers were given by Leonie Solomons, Sunderland University, applying Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) to development in Sri Lanka. Margeret Heath, Free University of Brussels, discussed VSM and the issues for cognitive science it poses.

On the second day Prof Alfredo Moscardini suggested closer affiliations between The Society, Metaphorum and Cybernetics North. Dr Allenna Leonard facilitated Dr Marcela Villarreal, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, who discussed the impact of AIDS in Africa on Agriculuture and development solutions required and John Clarke, UN Health Organisation, who discussed the difficulties of getting appropriate responses from agencies.

In the afternoon Dr Steve Wright, Omega Foundation, discussed his analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict and drew the Society's attention to social control technologies under development. Dr Paul Stokes, University College Dublin, discussed improving the applicabity of VSM to the Social Sciences and Luc Hoebeke criticised aspects of the paradigm under application. This most expert group of management cyberneticians was highly appreciative of the subsequent discussion which clearly will continue.

Dowload poster.

Full programme details.

The conference was a great success and we are pleased to say the proceedings will be published in a special edition of Kybernetes. We were honoured with the participation of Dr Allenna Leonard (the late Stafford Beer's partner), President of the American Society for Cybernetics and daughter, the painter, Vanilla Beer. We thank them both for their learned contributions.

Conference Downloads received so far Dr Paul Stokes "Identity as a Cybernetic Construct and Process", Dr Espinosa's "Measurement systems in socio economic development programs from a cybernetic view", Nick Green's NHS IT and Interactions of Actors posters, Dr Stokes' handout on VSM in Sociology and Dr Hayut-Man's on the Jerusalem Interfaith solution. Steve Wright on Northern Ireland and his report for the European Parliament on political control technology. Pictures from Vanilla Beer. Leonie Solomons of Metaphorum reports.

Annual General Meeting Cybernetics Society

July 26th 2004 7.30 Room 4.63 at King's College,The Franklin-Wilkins Building, Stamford Street, London SE1 9NN. Council Meeting 6.30p.m.

Summer Cybernetics

Visitors to UK this summer include Lofti Zadeh founder of Fuzzy Systems Theory for the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society conference in Ulster in September and Humberto Maturana renown for seminal work on cognition and Autopoiesis (self-production) for the UK Systems Society in Oxford, St Annes College September 7-8th. Past President of the American Society of Cybernetics Pille Bunnel the eminent systems ecologist will keynote for the theme "Citizens and Governance in the Knowledge Age The Contribution of Systems Thinking and Practice". See Conferences

RFID Tags for the Homless

U.S. plans to give the homeless subdermally implanted Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags to track their health.

NHS Patient Forum Organisation seeks error minimisation approach

PPIFO, Patient Public Involvement Forum Organisation is under development to support the new 5,000 odd voluntary NHS inspectors in the 570 NHS Trust Patient's Forums around England. "How do we minimise error in the NHS?" asks consulting cybernetician Nick Green in a request for suggestions. Contact PPIFO.

Can RFID tags help here? Start-up company Exavera Technolgies thinks its eShepherd system maybe the answer.

The Register ("Biting the hand that feeds IT") dubs RFID technology "Snake Oil" when applied to passports.

Lovelock urges more Nuclear Power for less Global Warming

Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power as the world's main energy source can prevent it overwhelming civilisation warns cybernetician James Lovelock FCybS(hon) in the May 24th Independent

"Nuclear creates enormous problems, waste we don't know what to do with; radioactive emissions; unavoidable risk of accident and terrorist attack." says Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth.

Stafford Beer's Prang

Stafford Beer's "Chronicles of Wizard Prang" are collecting on the web thanks to Ian Perry and the Cwarel Isaf Institute. Cybernetic koans? Or fairy tales for the concurrently challenged? The guru of management jests. [Link removed as no longer valid. Other sites dealing with Staford beer's books/character for children exist. AJ 2021]

SenseCam

SenseCam is a badge-sized wearable camera that captures up to 2000 VGA images per day into 128Mbyte FLASH memory. In addition, sensor data such as movement, light level and temperature is recorded every second. This is similar to an aircraft "Black Box" accident recorder but miniaturised for the human body. This can interface with the "Lifebits project" in which Gordon Bell (DEC's VP for R&D and PDP 6 Designer) has provided data for an experiment in lifetime storage and software research. This is a practical beginning of the pervasive computing of MIT's Project Oxygen. In a Sunday Times article Nick Bayliss, a psychologist from Cambridge University, is reported as regarding this as possible technology addiction and a substitute for living life to the full. Liberty are quoted "being repeatedly photographed and recorded risked everyone's becoming life public property". Can improved accountability make life riskier?

IFSR Meeting

Ranulph Glanville reports on the meeting of International Federation for Systems Research at the recent 17th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research where he represented the Cybernetics Society.

BCS Cybernetic Machine Specialist Group

Peter Marcer announces "Nilpotence" is the BCS CMSG objective for debate in 2004/2005. "Is it the unique key to the antechamber of the universe?"

Professor George Spencer Brown

It is with delight we learn that Spencer-Brown is back in UK. He can be contacted via Thomas Wolf's Laws of Form website.

Lou Kauffman gives an exposition of Laws of Form as a boundary calculus. Pask pointed out boundaries exert repulsive forces thus requiring a force axiom to permit counting.

"Interactions of Actors (IA), Theory and Some Applications"

The surviving 91 pages of Pask's previously unpublished 1993 manuscript have been assembled for download in .pdf format (last corrected 13/4/04). An index and table of contents has been added by Nick Green who worked with him in the last years of his life. In an extraordinary and wide ranging development of the earlier Conversation Theory (CT) Pask compares and contrasts his development of CT with IA

The style is dense but enlivened with wit, charm and criticism of conventional methods.

This work is foundational to the establishment of the Borromean Link model of learning, self-organising, continuity (or evolution) around a void and the current work on the strict coherence interpretation of Interaction.

From paragraph 326 in speaking of the new dynamic form of his proto-logic Lp he states "..resonance or local synchronicity of in-phase oscillations, radiating into an Lp field make sense."

The work was intended to put the so-called soft sciences on a stricter foundation. It re-interprets existing relativistic and string theory constraints with a general theory of force and organisation establishing cybernetics on a firm basis for future application. It remains to be seen if it will be accepted.

Pask's last paper "Heinz von Foerster's Self Organization, the Progenitor of Conversation and Interaction Theories" is now available in .pdf. It is a useful mature summary in written in 1996 of the 1993 work with hints of the final work in progress on coherence and the Borromean model. It is now with index.

Monthly Scientific Meetings

Dr. Alex Andrew FCybS concluded his fascinating talk "Loose Ends in Cybernetic Thinking" from October last year. Alex's excellent Notes from the talk include references.

Evening meetings are held at King's College Room 4.63 of the Franklin-Wilkins Building, Stamford St. SE1 9NN (Waterloo Campus of King's College London). Map of location.

Non-members welcome. Intending vistors please contact a Council Member.

EMCSR 2004 April 13 - 16, Vienna

Dr Ranulph Glanville has attended the 17th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR). He has represented us at the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR) meeting to be held during the Conference.

He chaired Symposium C: Cybernetics, Interaction, and Conversation on Wednesday, April 14.

• A Conscience for Cybernetics
  R. Glanville, University College London, United Kingdom
• Observations on Humorous Act Construction
• A. Nijholt, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
• A Scenario Synthesis of Knowledge Grounding in Engineering Applications
  Y. Liu, J. Yu, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK

Rail costs are 'out of control'

From the BBC: The rail industry is riddled with "uncontrollable costs" and needs fundamental change, according to a report by an environmental group.

The report uncovered "the staggering scale of costs and inefficiencies and secrecy", Transport 2000 said.

"This kind of waste appears routine in the unaccountable Public Service bureaucracies of the world" said our Council member Nick Green FCybS today, chairman of Real Time Study Group. "We call upon HM Treasury to consider again our proposals to solve this problem." The Group's approach is based on formally escalating alerts through the management system. Stafford Beer called this Algedonic Regulation.

From the Guardian "The current structure would not lead to significant service improvements and needed to be changed, said the report from the Commons transport committee." Nick Green added "This should be regarded as a technical management problem needing a technical mangement solution not another opportunity to rearrange the deckchairs."

Professor George Spencer-Brown

We are pleased to announce Spencer-Brown author of the ground breaking "Laws of Form" is alive, well and doing mathematics back in the UK. A new edition of Lof prepared by Thomas Wolf for Germany has led to a website hosting the Ross Ashby Memorial Lecture paper about the Four Colour Map Theorem. This was delivered to a plenary session of the Thirteenth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research at the University of Vienna in 1996 for the International Federation for Systems Research. GSB's latest is " Primes between squares". There is a autobiography in preparation. Some poems are to be uploaded soon.

The European IST Prize for 2004

The European IST Prize is the most distinguished Prize for innovative products and services in the field of Information Society Technologies.

The Prize is open to companies or organisations that present an innovative IT product with a promising market potential.

C. West Churchman

Werner Ulrich writes "C. West Churchman died on Sunday 21st of March in Bolinas, California. He was 90 years old.

You can find an obituary notice from the San Francisco Chronicle of 25th of March, along with more material in appreciation of West, in the "Tribute to West Churchman" section of my home page"

Recent Book Reviews from Kybernetes

By special arrangement with Kybernetes new reviews by Dr. Alex Andrew:

• "Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Declarative Problem Solving" by Chitta Baral
• "Analog VLSI: Circuits and Principles" by Shih-Chii Liu, Kramer, Giacomo Indiveri, Tobias Delbr and Rodney Douglas
• "Neurotechnology for Biomimetic Robots" edited by Joseph Ayers, Joel L. Davis, and Alan Rudolph

Have you read something that might be of interest to us? Send a review.

"Learning in Layers- Pathology and Liberation"

The Centennial Gregory Bateson Lecture Given by Professor Mary Catherine Bateson at the Tavistock Centre on 17th May. Free admission. Tickets required.

"Motivated Irrationality - Developing Games Theory Perspectives on NHS users with dramatec"

Many thanks to Professor Keith Cash for a most interesting talk in an area quite novel to members. Men often resist rational advice when faced with health risk. Keith demonstrated the application of Drama Theory to this akrasia. His presentation is in .pdf format.

More about Drama Theory at dramtec.

Governance and Cybernetics:
First Metaphorum Conference

An announcement and Call for papers has been made for the meeting to be held April 30th- May 1st in Sunderland.

President in new TV series

Professor Martin Smith, President of the Cybernetics Society, announced to day he is appearing in and consulting for a new programme on Sky and Cable "Mutant Machines".

Martin also tells us he is organising this year's Micromouse Competition to be held in Saturday 19th June at the Think Tank in Birmingham. More.

"Principles of organization are what really make our world knowable not theories of everything"

Prof. Robert B. Laughlin won the Nobel prize in 1998 with Horst L. Stoermer and Daniel C. Tsui "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations". In his talk discussing "The Self-Organization of matter" Laughlin says of the pathological limitations of serial mathematics and computing methods "Unfortunately, the latter [theory of everything equations] cannot be tested because the problem is bigger than any computer that now exists, or even any computer that can ever be built." This has led to the Anyon Calculus- but there is still no formal concurrent methodology in the Physics Community. In many respects Structural Engineers come closest to modelling this level of complexity.

Dr. Horace Townsend simulates
Ashby's Homeostat

Dr. Townsend is a retired Clinical Neuorologist developing a site on the interpretation of Electroencephalograms. The Java applet simulates a four pen chart recorder with perturbable pens.

"Fragments of the Void-Selecta"
by Professor Louis Kauffman

In the course of wide-ranging discussions on Forces in Cybernetics Professor Kauffman, introduced us to his new paper "Non-Commutative Calculus and Discrete Physics", [A,B] = AB - BA .

He also gave us a quote from "Fragments of the Void-Selecta". "The paragraphs are intended as intense little excursions into thoughts on the edge of the void, near the simplicity of one distinction or no distinction at all", he says.

He kindly agreed to publish it here as part of out Winter Solstice celebration.

Lou also drew attention to Knot Plot: first class software from Rob Scharein. A model example of documentation and support for those interested in knots or who would like to know more. You can download Knot Plot and its documentation to run on most machines. Load 6.3.2 will load a Pask Borromean concept/continuity model and minimising the energy or relaxing the link (select energy, undamped dynamics, and allow collisions) you will see some of the vibrational modes. The difficulties of simulating concurrence which this software attempts should not be underestimated.

To make a Borromean Link select the Braid tab on Control Panel. Set ngens at 6, nstrings at 3 and click aBaBaB and click Close. Select Main and click Go. Your Pask cybernetic model of learning continuity well relax in front of your eyes.

"Stafford Beer: A personal memoir"

This affectionate memoir from David Whittaker has a short review on Stafford's Memorial page. Highly recommended.

Open Mind Project

After the under achievements (" Not there yet" Minsky) of Lenat's Cycorp, MIT has launched an attempt at A.I. by directly collecting commonsense rules to explain story scenarios. Pask's I.A. was in part set up to repair the deficiencies in A.I. research but Minsky thinks serial machines can simulate minds without Pask field concurrence. You can contribute to the new approach which is a model of clean design.

Forthcoming Royal Society Two Day Discussion Meetings

• "Myosin, muscle and motility"
  17 and 18 May 2004
• "Catalysis in chemistry and biochemistry"
  14 and 15 June 2004
• "Beyond extinction rates: monitoring wild nature for the 2010 target"
  Monday 19 and Tuesday 20 July 2004

Admission Free. Tickets required.

Pask's IA axioms can produce a Viable System

With the vice-president in the chair Nick Green FCybS talked to our November Meeting about the application of Pask's Interactions of Actors Axioms to Development and Differentiation in Beer's Viable System Model. Pask produced a force based learning model where all persisting closed looping processes were regarded as concepts. Here self-organisation and evolution become equivalent.

An interesting discussion followed. Some members seemed to have difficulty with Pask's introduction of force into Cybernetics. Coherence and differentiation were how Pask saw this approach developing. Now concepts exert forces and we have the Borromean resonance model of continuity.

Nick is happy to deal with any queries.

Some Loose Ends in Cybernetic Thinking

Many thanks to Alex Andrew for his fascinating talk at our October meeting on "Some Loose Ends in Cybernetic Thinking". Full Text. A vigorous wide-ranging discussion ensued including much material on animal linguistics including "imitation".

Professor Donald Mackay

The late Donald Mackay amongst his many achievements and provoking insights was noted for his two types of information (Phil. Mag., 1950, 41, 289 ). In his talk to the Society Alex Andrew described them as structural classifiers: logons and "fine-tuning" or metrical types: metrons. Alex has prepared a list of Mackay's publications with some introductory remarks. We hope to resume discussion of his themes at our Meeting in 29th March 2004 (last Monday of every month is usual).

W. Ross Ashby Centenary Conference

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign March 4-6, 2004

Ashby's Requisite Variety, fundamental to our discipline, describes the equilibrium state of homeostasis. In 1994 because of the dynamic character of equilibrium Prof. Eugene Yates introduced the term "homeodynamics". In his 2002 paper for a National Institute of Health Conference on Aging " From Homeostasis to Homeodynamics", he distinguishes C.H. Waddington's "homeorhesis" and Iberall and Soodak's "homeokinetics" ("Homeokinetics: A physical science for complex systems" Science, 201: 579, 1978). A less used term is "rheostasis" coined by Nicholas Mrosovsky and discussed in his monograph "Rheostasis: The Physiology of Change" (OUP 1990 ISBN 0195061845) where the changing of the set-point of the homeostat is considered.

Restrictions on the applicability of the Law of Requisite Variety continue to be discussed.

" The Cyber Party"

Prof Helen Margetts is an ex-programmer/analyst and mathematician now Director of the School of Public Policy at UCL. Her paper " The Cyber Party" considers the possibilities for political party development in the age of widespread use of the Internet. There are more of her papers on e-government including " Cultural Barriers to e-government" commissioned by the National Audit Office.

"The bionic man"

A short report of the Clifford Patterson Lecture given by Chris Toumazou, Professor of Circuits and Systems at Imperial College London, at the Royal Society.

"Utopia theory"

From theories of pedestrian movement and traffic flow to voting processes, economic markets and war, researchers are striving towards a physics of society. Thanks, again, to Tony Booth for pointing this out.

The author, Philip Ball, is a science writer and journalist working in London. This article is based on his forthcoming book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another (Heinemann), which is due to be published in January 2004.

Members may remember Ron Atkin's work on traffic through hypergraphs and his "q-analysis". Ball's approach is somewhat evocative of this but the problems, principally the lack of applicable data, that prevented further application of Catastrophe Theory, for example, may also be an obstacle here. Jacky Legrand of Departement Informatique University, Paris 2 has an interesting primer and critique of the Atkin approach.

Although the route to sustainable development is clearing there is still some resistance to accountability to be overcome. The application of Cybernetics, rather than Physics, to move to Utopia is surely something we could formally address as a Society.

UPDATED CybCon2003 Report with some full texts and supporting materials.

Tim Berners-Lee, the father of HTML and the Web, on video
" The Future of the World Wide Web"
courtesy of the Royal Society

Dr Tim Berners-Lee FRS discusses the Semantic Web and its Resource Description Framework (RDF) support.

But can today's computers really "Do anything"? Tim suggests, at the end of his talk, this has been proved mathematically. This is a common mistake. Turing Universality implies decomposability into binary relations but does not imply generally applicable. Better to recognise, as currently realised, digital machines are limited to competence in serial or parallel process emulation and mathematics. Nature by contrast is concurrent. Let us hope Tim's apparent suspicion of self-reference and reliance on metalanguage are not similarly flawed. Thoroughly recommended a very stimulating talk. Now archived at Flyonthewall

Review of Nanotechnology

The Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering have requested initial views for this new study.

Critique of Memetics

Mary Midgley, the distinguished philosopher and critic of science attacks Dawkins' Memes in the Royal Institute of Philosophy Journal. This might be of less significance for us but for her warm endorsement of Lovelock's Cybernetically based Gaia Principle in her "Gaia:the Next Big Idea".

Last Conference Announcement and details

CybCon 2003:
Recent Topics in Cybernetics

Thanks to all involved for making our meeting such a success. Rather than merely marveling at the potential applicability of Cybernetics in their particular domain speakers invariably identified real world applications and solutions to practical problems.
We have requested longer abstracts from participants and full texts where possible.
Suggestions for next years conference welcome.

Robotic Waste Watch

News and Notices for details of a new series of articles by Professor Martin Smith, President of The Cybernetics Society.

First Metaphorum Group Breakfast Meeting at CybCon2003

Metaphorum was formed in June at the Hull University Staffordian Syntegration to set up a website to make Beer's techniques more widely available. The meeting is to ratify the Metaphorum constitution and objectives.

Conference on "Second-Order Cybernetics"

Past Proceedings - CybCon2002 for an account of The Cybernetics Society's Annual Conference in 2002, with photographs of the event.