A brief history of (ancient) systems thinking

Systems thinking is not new. I have been thinking about its ancient history and so far this is what I have gathered: 600 B.C. – philosophers used systems thinking to organize their thoughts (e.g. Lao Tze) 2,700 B.C. – Egyptians, like Imhotep, showed evidence that he was using systems thinking during his roles as architect, […]

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Survival of the selfless

The current issue of New Scientist Magazine has an interesting article that compares selfish behaviors with altruistic behaviors and produces a theory of how group-oriented collaboration has a track record of survival. “ALTHOUGH a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other […]

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Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature.

I’m reading Gregory Bateson’s book, Mind and Nature. Bateson was an anthropologist, sociologist, second order cyberneticist and philosopher. In this book Bateson wrote an accessible philosophy that acknowledges issues in science and in popular forms of thinking. I would recommend this book to anyone that likes this blog. Mind and Nature proposes transdisciplinary studies as […]

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Five Trends That Will Transform Society

“Author Richard Watson examines emerging patterns and developments and society, politics, science and technology, media and entertainment, and other industries in his book Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years — and makes educated, and witty speculations as to where they might take us.” Source: Fast Company; Five Trends That Will Transform Society […]

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Reading list 10-11-2007

Oxford University Press just reprinted a book called the Oxford Guide to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich. This is a dictionary-like, encyclopedia-like book with 1,000 pages delving into philosophy from A-Z. This hardback is surprisingly affordable ($9.99 U.S.D. at Border’s Books and Music). If you’re a geek like me, you may find that the elaborate […]

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How Crime May Affect Health Indirectly

Somewhere among the big pile of tags I use on this blog there’s one called “social-ecology”. I created this tag in order to classify stories and thoughts about how our built-environment, (urban design and the dynamics within it) affect our society. My goal here is not only to raise awareness but also to trigger innovations […]

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The Assault on Reason

Quoting Al Gore from a National Public Radio interview about his new book The Assault on Reason. “The point of this book is that our nation is so shockingly vulnerable to such crass manipulation. And it’s happening over and over again…” – Al Gore (…talking about The Assault on Reason, his latest book. Via NPR) […]

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Call for papers: social theory, politics and the arts

New YorkUniversity’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, the Arts Council Manhattan, the Research Center for Leadership in Action, and the New York Foundation for the Arts are happy to invite proposals for the 33rd Conference on Social Theory, Politics and the Arts (STPA) being held on October 11-13, 2007 in New York […]

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Social innovation

“Realizing that innovation driven solely by technology often failed to meet customer needs, many organizations turned to a consumer (marketing) oriented approach where consumer research and observation is handled by “experts”. Green believes that this approach is starting to reaching end of life. [Josephine Green's (of Philips Design)] main point is that we need to […]

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Two blogs

“There are only two kinds of people – those who generalize and those who don’t” – unknown Someone once wrote that there are two kinds of bloggers, those that point to the blog postings on other blogs and those that author original content. Well, I am pointing to two other blogs that write original postings […]

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