Toronto, Ontario; Ottawa, Ontario; Kingston, Ontario.
Sugar Beach umbrellas and sailboats in Toronto Harbour. At 23 degrees C, a perfect August day to be at Sugar Beach under an umbrella, or on the water in a sailboat on Toronto Harbour. Appreciating comfortable climate after having spent practically all of July in humid temperatures over 30 degrees in China, Vietnam and then Jamaica. Better planning would let me stay home in the summer, and travel to other parts of the world when I’ll appreciate their climate more. (Toronto) 20130807 1823Shooting Covert Affairs in Toronto. Clapperboard said @CovertAffairs, spotted @PiperPerabo in drivers seat of car with mic and grips behind, on The Esplanade, just west of Berkeley Street. Extras on sidewalk, police blocking traffic both directions, but filming stopped to allow TTC bus to pass. Basketball players on court in far background could care less. The city retains some glamour as a media production centre. I’ll have to watch out for the episode where this car shows up. (Toronto) 20130807 1834Dow’s Lake. Canoeists learning to paddle on Dow’s Lake near central Ottawa. Appreciate the moderate summer temperature on a August weekday. (Ottawa, ON) 20130815 1309Parliament Hill. Evening stroll in Otttawa by Parliament Hill, on the south bank of the Ottawa River. Compared to Toronto, the people in Ottawa are friendlier and seem less stressed. Since I spend so much time outside of Canada, I’m getting cognitive dissonance of dealing day to day with nice people where I don’t have to think so much about how we communicate (Ottawa) 20130815 2005Kingston Portsmouth Olympic Harbour. On the route home, by Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, right beside the Kingston Penitentiary, a maximum security prison. Noting the many boats on trailers that anyone could just drive up, hook up, and tow away, without supervision or security. Does the prison next door give thieves any pause to think about potential consequences? (Kingston, Ontario) 20130816 1858Edward Gardens Fountain. On our 28th anniversary renewal of vows, the limestone lady at the Edward Gardens fountain looks freshly cleaned. DY and I queued for a wedding party to clear, and then recommitted for another year. With my retirement and AHI’s surgery, it’s been a roller-coaster year. After the big family pilgrimage to China and then Vietnam, we’re considering couples travel together. (Don Mills, ON) 20130824 1458
Control room at Bell Lightbox. Expected to see movies previewing on monitors, but largest screens were cameras watching pedestrians on outside the Bell Lightbox King Street. Signs and programs of the Toronto International Film Festival posted on many walls. Walked around the building, haven’t yet seen a movie in it. (Toronto) 20130831 1654
Two years after submitting an academic manuscript and responding to double-blind reviews, “Rethinking work, with the pandemic disruption” has now been published in the International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior (IJOTB) as earlycite. The article has a DOI (Document Object Identifier), and should be streamed with an official volume and issue number soon. The […]
The 128th meeting of Systems Thinking Ontario was convened in person. The classroom was filled with current students, alumni, our regular participants, and a few curious newcomers. Moderated by Zaid Khan, the conversation was sparked by Stephen Davies and myself (David Ing) on the evolving styles in learning systems thinking. Stephen has been leading SFIN-6011 […]
The “Understanding Systems” SFIN-6011 course is a requirement in the master’s program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCADU. For winter 2025, the class is now led by Stephen Davies, breaking the incremental evolving of content since 2008. While still on faculty at OCADU, the original course designer Peter H. Jones is now a Distinguished […]
In the 1970s, five ways of knowing were established by C. West Churchman in The Design of Inquiring Systtems. In the 1990s, his student Ian Mitroff carried on the tradition and extended that work in The Unbounded Mind. Now in the 2020s, the technology of Generative AI opens up opportunties to query or request responses […]
For readers with an interest deeper than the 15-minute presentation given in August, the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Socio-Technical Perspectives in Information Systems (STPIS 2024) have now been formally publishied. The invited paper on “Reifying Socio-Technical and Socio-Ecological Perspectives for Systems Changes: From rearranging objects to repacing rhythms” was reviewed by the […]
The 125th meeting of Systems Thinking Ontario coincided with the closing day for the RSD13-RSDX online program. As a regular systems convening group, we’ve had monthly meetings since January 2013. Zaid Khan moderated a discussion including me (David Ing), Tim Lloyd, Allenna Leonard, and Kelly Okamura. We recollected starting as a spinoff from Design with […]
David L. Hawk (American management theorist, architect, and systems scientist) has been hosting a weekly television show broadcast on Bold Brave Tv from the New York area on Wednesdays 6pm ET, remotely from his home in Iowa. Live, callers can join…Read more ›
Following the first day lecture on Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 1 for the Global University for Sustainability, Keekok Lee continued on a second day on some topics: * Anatomy as structure; physiology as function (and process); * Process ontology, and thing ontology; * Qi ju as qi-in-concentrating mode, and qi san as qi-in-dissipsating mode; and […]
The philosophy of science underlying Classical Chinese Medicine, in this lecture by Keekok Lee, provides insights into ways in which systems change may be approached, in a process ontology in contrast to the thing ontology underlying Western BioMedicine. Read more ›
In conversation, @zeynep with @ezraklein reveal authentic #SystemsThinking in (i) appreciating that “science” is constructed by human collectives, (ii) the west orients towards individual outcomes rather than population levels; and (iii) there’s an over-emphasis on problems of the moment, and…Read more ›
In the question-answer period after the lecture, #TimIngold proposes art as a discipline of inquiry, rather than ethnography. This refers to his thinking On Human Correspondence. — begin paste — [75m26s question] I am curious to know what art, or…Read more ›
How might our society show value for the long term, over the short term? Could we think about taxation over time, asks @carlotaprzperez in an interview: 92% for 1 day; 80% within 1 month; 50%-60% tax for 1 year; zero tax for 10 years.Read more ›
In 2024, WordPress Studio was released, making installation on a local computer simpler. The instructions were modified from MacOS to Ubuntu Linux, by Daniel Kossmann, “How to install WordPress Studio in Ubuntu Linux” | Jun 15, 2024 at https://www.danielkossmann.com/how-to-install-wordpress-studio-ubuntu-linux/ I already had NVM installed, but in Terminal, with the result “command not found”. In the […]
The appreciation of change is different in Western philosophy than in classical Chinese philosophy. JeeLoo Lin published a concise contrast on differences. Let me parse the Introduction to the journal article, that is so clearly written. The Chinese theory of time is built into a language that is tenseless. The Yijing (Book of Changes) there […]
In trying to place the World Hypotheses work of Stephen C. Pepper (with multiple root metaphors), Nicholas Rescher provides a helpful positioning. — begin paste — Philosophical perspectivism maintains that substantive philosophical positions can be maintained only from a “perspective” of some sort. But what sort? Clearly different sorts of perspectives can be conceived of, […]
Finding proper words to express system(s) change(s) can be a challenge. One alternative could be diachrony. The Oxford English dictionary provides two definitions for diachronic, the first one most generally related to time. (The second is linguistic method) diachronic ADJECTIVE Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “diachronic (adj.), sense 1,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3691792233. For completeness, prochronic relates “to […]
The selection of readings in the “Introduction” to Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2, Penguin (1981), edited by Fred E. Emery, reflects a turn from 1969 when a general systems theory was more fully entertained, towards an urgency towards changes in the world that were present in 1981. Systems thinking was again emphasized in contrast […]
