New Books in Systems and Cybernetics

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

Safi Bahcall's Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin's Press, 2019) reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges everything we thought we knew about nurturing radical breakthroughs.Bahcall, a physicist and entrepreneur, shows why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing new ideas to rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice. Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice.Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how a new kind of science can help us become the initiators, rather than the victims, of innovative surprise.Over the past decade, researchers have been applying the tools and techniques of this new science―the science of phase transitions―to understand how birds flock, fish swim, brains work, people vote, diseases erupt, and ecosystems collapse. Loonshots is the first to apply this science to the spread of breakthrough ideas. Bahcall distills these insights into practical lessons creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries can use to change our world.Along the way, readers will learn what James Bond and Lipitor have in common, what the movie Enigma Game got wrong about WWII, and what really killed Pan Am, Polaroid, and the Qing Dynasty.Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer are the hosts of the excellent podcast Curiosity Daily. Subscribe to Curiosity Daily here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

Michael E. Kerr, a psychiatrist and expert in Bowen Theory, shares insights from his extensive career in family therapy. He discusses how Murray Bowen developed family systems theory, revealing the emotional dynamics that shape family relationships. Topics include the impact of parent-child symbiosis on mental health, the balance between emotional closeness and independence, and the surprising links between chronic anxiety and physical health issues like cancer. Kerr's perspective sheds light on how understanding family dynamics can improve mental well-being.

Regular listeners of this podcast will, no doubt, be familiar with the name of Raul Espejo, former Director of Operations of Stafford Beer’s famed Cybersyn Project under the Chilean government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970’s.  This episode, the esteemed Dr. Espejo joins us in his role as co-editor of the volume, Cybernetics and Systems: Social and Business Decisions out from Routledge in 2019.  By extension, this work is also a reflection of Espejo’s role as former Director-General and now President of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC) as this book is, essentially, a collection of extended abstracts and mini-papers encapsulating the vast spectrum of cyber-systemic investigations on offer at that organization’s 2017 Congress in Rome focused largely on policy options across the domains of what contributor Elias G. Carayannis, extending the work of Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, has dubbed the  “quadruple helix” of innovation; namely, education, industry, government and the media.  Grouping the contributions within nine thematic streams including Human Aspects of Managing Systems, Sustainability and the Anthropocene, Smartness and Big Data, and Democracy, Transparency and Social Dynamics, the 600 plus pages of this volume provide a panorama of the field of cyber-systemics composed of vivid snapshots of rigorous case studies and bold theoretical advances that will surely do much to fire the imaginations and ambitions of researchers and practitioners around the world as they develop their own boundary defying research agendas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

Like a number of the books discussed on this podcast, A Guide to Systems Research: Philosophy, Processes, Practice (Springer, 2017), was intended to fill gaps in a field that, through its often fitful development across the widely spread branches of its multi-disciplinary networks, has found itself in need of comprehensive survey style textbooks to gather and clarify, for upper level undergraduate and graduate students, the assortment of profound insights generated over many decades. With this effort, editors Mary C. Edson, Pamela Buckle Henning, and Sankar Shankaran have succeeded brilliantly while tackling one of the field’s most challenging questions: What are the distinctive ethical and rigorous ways to conduct research on systemic phenomena? A cadre of eminently qualified researchers and practitioners take us around an adroitly articulated cycle of research activity structured around the Participatory Action Research Holon laid out in the book’s second chapter by John Kineman in a radically exciting fashion with profound philosophical implications echoing all the way back to Aristotle’s thoughts on causality. Keeping the dissertation writing graduate student in the forefront of its presumed audience, the book takes us carefully and thoroughly through problem structuring, taking action, communicating, and assessing the impact of systems research in a manner that is, itself, highly systemic and sure to provide expert guidance to both students new to the field and seasoned practitioners looking to make their work ever more rigorous and impactful. Co-editor, Pamela Buckle Henning is every bit as elegantly articulate in conversation as she, and her collaborators, are in writing; making for an engaging and insightful overview of a volume that is a must have for all serious students, and teachers, of systems research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics