Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of...
Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the...
View ArticleMichael Strevens, “Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure”...
When we’re faced with a choice between Door #1, Door #2, and Door #3, how do we infer correctly that there’s an equal chance of the prize being behind any of the doors? How is it that we are generally...
View ArticleVincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World” (Paradigm...
The “cloud” and “cloud computing” have been buzzwords over the past few years, with businesses and even governments praising the ability to save information remotely and access that information from...
View ArticlePeter Gardenfors, “The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual...
A conceptual space sounds like a rather nebulous thing, and basing a semantics on conceptual spaces sounds similarly nebulous. In The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces (MIT...
View ArticleMarcin Milkowski, “Explaining the Computational Mind” (MIT Press, 2013)
The computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turing’s development of the basic ideas behind computer programming, specifically the manipulation of symbols according to rules. That idea has...
View ArticleAnne Jaap Jacobson, “Keeping the World in Mind” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
Some theorists in the cognitive sciences argue that the sciences of the mind don’t need or use a concept of mental representation. In her new book, Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations and...
View ArticleHugh F. Cline, “Information Communication Technology and Social...
There is no doubt that innovations in technology have had, and are having, a significant impact on society, changing the way we live, work, and play. But the changes that we are seeing are far from...
View ArticleFrank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control...
Hidden algorithms make many of the decisions that affect significant areas of society: the economy, personal and organizational reputation, the promotion of information, etc. These complex formulas, or...
View ArticleOrit Halpern, “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945”...
The second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern‘s new book traces the emergence of the “communicative...
View ArticleChristine L. Borgman, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the...
Social media and digital technology now allow researchers to collect vast amounts of a variety data quickly. This so-called “big data,” and the practices that surround its collection, is all the rage...
View ArticleTimothy Jordan, “Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the...
Struggles over information in the digital era are central to Tim Jordan‘s new book, Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society (Pluto Press, 2015). The book aims to...
View ArticleMargaret Morrison, “Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics, and...
Almost 400 years ago, Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, mathematics is integral to physics and chemistry, and is becoming so in biology, economics,...
View ArticleChristopher Vitale, “Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a...
Networks seem to be the dominant metaphor for contemporary society. In Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age (Zero Books, 2014), Christopher Vitale sets out a manifesto for...
View ArticleEric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, “Knowledge Machines: Digital...
By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a Google search, new technology has allowed...
View ArticleJeffery Pomerantz, “Metadata” (MIT, 2015)
What is the “stuff” that fuels the information society in which we live? In his new book, Metadata (MIT 2015), information scientist Jeffrey Pomerantz asserts that metadata powers our digital society....
View ArticleRebecca Lemov, “Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity” (Yale...
Rebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less...
View ArticleRonald R. Kline, “The Cybernetics Moment: Or, Why We Call Our Age the...
I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of...
View ArticleMary Chayko, “Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social...
New technology has made us more connected than ever before. This has its advantages: instantaneous communication, expanded circles of influence, access to more information. And, of course, our...
View ArticleAndy Clark, “Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and Embodied Mind”...
The predictive processing hypothesis is a new unified theory of neural and cognitive function according to which our brains are prediction machines: they process the incoming sensory stream in the...
View ArticleTara H. Abraham, “Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life...
Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for his...
View ArticleDavid Danks, “Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical...
For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation “in some sense,” because that core idea can...
View ArticleKees van Deemter, “Computational Models of Referring: A Study in Cognitive...
Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions – things that pick out the entities we...
View ArticleGualtiero Piccinini, “Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account” (Oxford...
A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a number...
View ArticleBrian Clegg, “Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our...
Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives (Icon Books, 2017), by Brian Clegg, is a relatively short book about a subject that has emerged only recently, but is rapidly becoming...
View ArticleAnthony Chaney, “Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of...
Anthony Chaney teaches history and writing at the University of North Texas at Dallas. His book Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness (University of North...
View ArticleLiss C. Werner, “Cybernetics: State of the Art” (Tech Uni of Berlin Press, 2017)
It’s no secret that we continue to live in the midst of digital revolution that continues to unfold in a rapidly accelerating fashion. Digital connectivity and the Internet of Things make possible not...
View ArticleJohn Mingers, “Systems Thinking, Critical Realism and Philosophy: A...
In the fields of systems and cybernetics, such movements as Soft Systems Methodology and Second-Order Cybernetics have undermined the objective realist view from nowhere at the core of scientific...
View ArticleDmitry Novikov, “Cybernetics: Past to Future” (Springer Verlag, 2016)
With all of its entailed engagements with epistemology, emergence, and self-organization, cybernetics began (and arguably still is) the science of communication and control in the animal and the...
View ArticleMolly Wright Steenson, “Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and...
For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we...
View ArticleAnthimos Tsirigotis, “Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse” Palgrave...
On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given the...
View ArticleBruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics and Narrative” (University of Minnesota Press,...
As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of...
View ArticleKarl H. Muller et al., “New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics” (World...
In their volume, New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics (World Scientific, 2017), editors Alexander Riegler, Karl H. Muller and Stuart A. Umpelby have assembled almost 60 articles, including their...
View ArticleRichard S. Marken and Timothy A. Carey, “Controlling People” (Australian...
The word “control”, with its seemingly instantaneous mental associations with forms of top-down oppression, is one that makes even some cyberneticians nervous and is often downplayed in contemporary...
View ArticleEden Medina, “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in...
It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics. In the early 70’s, at the invitation of leftist president,...
View ArticleKenneth Sayre, “Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind” (Routledge, 2015)
The cybernetics community owes a great debt of thanks to the editors of Routledge Library Editions: Philosophy of Mind series, for bringing to light a neglected classic of the field in 2015. It was...
View ArticleDavid Peter Stroh, “Systems Thinking For Social Change” (Chelsea Green, 2015)
While Systems Thinking has enjoyed an increasing amount of societal influence through work of such practitioner/authors as Peter Senge, it is also true that the vast majority of the popular literature...
View ArticleChris Clearfield and András Tilcsik, “Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What...
How can we learn from large system failures? In their new book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It (Penguin Press, 2018), Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik explore system...
View ArticleRob Dekkers, “Applied Systems Theory” (Springer, 2017)
As Reader in Industrial Management in the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow, Rob Dekkers is well positioned to survey the currents of the vibrant systems tradition in the United...
View ArticleAlbert Müller, ed., “The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name: Seven...
Between his retirement from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne in 1975 and his death in 2002, many cyberneticians made the pilgrimage to Pescadero, California to unravel the oft-elusive...
View ArticleByron Reese, “The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the...
In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that...
View ArticlePeter Harries-Jones, “Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of...
The work of polymath Gregory Bateson has long been the road to cybernetics travelled by those approaching this trans-disciplinary field from the direction of the social sciences and even the...
View ArticleWarren Mansell, “A Transdiagnostic Approach to CBT using Method of Levels...
To many, the title, A Transdiagnostic Approach to CBT using Method of Levels Therapy: Distinctive Features (Routledge, 2012) , may seem incongruous with a podcast channel called “New Books in Systems...
View ArticleRichard S. Marken, “Doing Research on Purpose: A Control Theory Approach to...
Listeners familiar with our recent podcasts exploring the remarkable legacy of William T. Powers revolutionary Perceptual Control Theory of human behaviour, including its contribution to cognitive...
View ArticleMcKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First...
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the...
View ArticleGeorge E. Mobus and Michael C. Kalton, "Principles of Systems Science"...
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...
View ArticleGary Metcalf, "Social Systems and Design" (Springer Verlag, 2014)
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...
View ArticleDiscussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing
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...
View ArticlePamela Buckle Henning, "A Guide to Systems Research: Philosophy, Processes,...
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...
View ArticleRaul Espejo, "Cybernetics and Systems: Social and Business Decisions"...
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...
View ArticleMichael E. Kerr, "Bowen Theory’s Secrets: Revealing the Hidden Life of...
A pivotal development in the history of psychology was the invention of family systems theory by psychiatrist Murray Bowen. He was among the first to observe families in a naturalistic setting, and his...
View Article
