New Books in 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

In the opening chapter of his edited volume, Social Systems and Design, out from Springer in 2014, Gary Metcalf asks if it is possible to establish ethical “first principles” for the design of social systems.  Inspired by his mentor, Bela Banathy (a giant of the systems field), and pondering the potential levels of influence we might actually have over the evolutionary development of the social systems in which we are all embedded, Metcalf provocatively asks what sorts of goals should we set for ourselves and what sorts of means should we use to achieve them.  In the subsequent eight chapters, a host of systems thinking luminaries including Alexander Christakis, Peter Jones, Merrelyn Emery, Thomas Flanagan and Raul Espejo (of Project Cybersyn fame) offer probing and detailed contributions to the search for answers to these questions.  Along the way, readers will gain an acquaintance with the concepts behind Dialogical Design Science, Co-Laboratories of Democracy, Third Phase Science, Open Systems Theory and much more.   This volume is a trans-disciplinary feast of some of the most progressive thinking going on in the systems field regarding such issues as sustainability, governance of the commons, and the maintenance and expansion of democracy.  My conversation with editor, Gary Metcalf, is no less engaging and thought provoking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

Of the many barriers to a more robust presence for systems approaches in the academy, the relative scarcity of sufficient introductory textbooks in the field stands out as a particular irritant.  In the decades since the publication of von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory in 1968, a vast agglomeration of conceptual frameworks and methodological heuristics in the study of systemic phenomena has continued to accrue while the facilitation of entry points to the field combining both accessibility and thoroughness have largely failed to keep pace.  George E. Mobus and Michael C. Kalton have leapt bravely into that breach with their co-authored volume, Principles of Systems Science (Springer Verlag, 2015).  As the title indicates, Mobus and Kalton are firmly focused upon an approach to systems grounded in the traditional scientific method and, while by no means objective realists of any remotely naïve sort, their project most definitely leans towards more positivistic approaches to the study of systemic phenomena; clearly separating their work from the wider, and arguably “softer” field of Systems “Thinking”.  Leaning on Herbert Simon’s notion of the near-decomposability of hierarchical systems as well as the computational accounts of contemporary cognitive science, the book’s 700 plus pages are carefully and thoughtfully structured to guide the reader through an array of crucial systemic topics including notions of system boundary, dynamics, emergence, complexity and adaptation.  Of particular note is the thorough and rigorous treatment cybernetics receives within the overall scope of the systems sciences; something that makes this book something of a bridge builder between two fields with blurry boundaries between them that, too often, seem to jockey for the historical high-ground and supreme position of being “meta” to each other.  While clearly keeping cybernetics within the wider conceptual margins of Systems Science, the central role that it is given to the very notion of what constitutes a system is sure to satisfy many who straddle both sides of the debate but consider cybernetics their disciplinary, intellectual, and ethical home.  Carefully balancing scope with detail, this sweeping work of diligent scholarship does much to provide the kind of foundational textbook of which upper-level undergraduate and graduate students have long been in need. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics