Wrapped up paperwork on closing out family buildings in Gravenhurst, returned to classes and technical conferences in usual pattern of learning.
Toronto, Ontario; Markham, Ontario; Gravenhurst, Ontario; North York, Ontario
Harbourfront Centre: Cycle of heating glass in furnace, shaping with pliers and then applying torch @HarbourfrontTO Craft and Design studios. Curves might have been for the neck of a bird in glass, I didn’t observe any blowing. Watching artists at work always a warm venue, particularly on the first day clocks return to standard time, and darkness comes earlier. (Harbourfront Centre, Queens Quay West, Toronto, Ontario) 20191103CASCONxEvoke 2019: Workshop #CASCONxEvoke led by @RohanAlexander @prof_lyons on Barriers to Data Science Adoption: What Existing Frameworks Aren’t Working, with industry panelists providing perspectives. Definitions for #ArtificialIntelligence , #MachineLearning, #DataScience blurred under misconceptions and unfounded expectations. Session served as kickoff towards a research proposal that might be executed over the next 5 years. (CASCONxEvoke conference, Hilton Conference Centre, Markham, Ontario) 20191105Riverside neighbourhood: Removing gazebo cover in the backyard, as chances of warm weather diminish. The sprinkle of snow didn’t stay last week, but frost in the evenings is coming. We might have chosen a warmer day, but the fall has been unusually busy. (Riverside neighbourhood, Toronto, Ontario) 20191110Systems Thinking Ontario: Update at #SystemsThinking Ontario https://wiki.st-on.org/2019-11-11 on http://systemschanges.com research progress, making distinctions between ecological and behavioral perspectives, on #GeoffreyVickers #AppreciativeSystems reality judgment, value judgment and instrumental judgment. Introduced basics on #ObjectProcessMethodology used to improve the rigour in our modelling. Agenda change announced just 3 hours before scheduled start, topic changed with our original speaker unexpected still in Europe. (Lambert Lounge, OCADU, McCaul Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20191111Sharpe Street West: Last visit to the family buildings, picking up photographic slide carousels that wouldn’t fit on our prior (presumed last) visit. Came and left in less than an hour, routing around the snowbank to load into the car. We already had a meeting in Orillia, so the extended drive north for personal effects was based on expecting that future generations might appreciate these artifacts when elders can’t explain them. (Sharpe Street West, Gravenhurst, Ontario) 20191114Pycon 2019: What @CBCNews knows about Canadians @robroc #PyData @pyconca, analyzing text with #word2vec on corpus of 6 years of news stories. Looking for similarities, didn’t find biases reported in American research. Using gensim and spacy, cosine similarity training took hours, but then model allowed audience to interactively ask questions. Montreal is to poutine, as Vancouver is to sushi. (Python Canada 2019, The Carlu, College Park, Yonge Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20191116Pycon 2019: Data Insights from Linked Data #JordanPedersen @UofTLibraries @pyconca @rwangca @swcarpentry in #PyData track http://shorturl.at/rtJOV . Described RDF, into notebook with RDFLib and SPARQL, now exploring graph databases. Alternative ways of cataloguing records in library. (Python Canada 2019, The Carlu, College Park, Yonge Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20191117St. Michael’s Hospital: Looking over shoulder of lab technician for carotid ultrasound, unofficially read as normal. Precautionary diagnostic in assessing risk associated with high blood pressure, since my family practice doctor wants to prescribe medication, and my Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor assesses me as normal. Ultrasound is non-invasive, seemly more common in Asia, as the technician says that those patients arrive with previous histories in hand. (St. Michael’s Hospital, Queen Street East, Toronto, Ontario) 20191118Toronto Biennial of Art: At @TorontoBiennial, approaching the neon sign #LaurentGrasso 2012/2019 Visibility Is a Trap refers to #MichelFoucault #panopticon, as the viewer becomes illuminated by the installation. The exhibition question of what does it mean to be in relation, so viewers become part of the show. Venue is large, a former automobile dealership with repair bays, this temporary space will likely be replaced as with the tower next door. (Toronto Biennial of Art, 259 Lake Shore Boulevard East, Toronto, Ontario) 20191123
Forest Lawn Crematorium: Japanese handbell on path to becoming a family heirloom, handed down from grandfather, now through father to daughters. Celebration of life for an artist who led a quiet life, remembered by spouse as a square who became a hippie. Our children played together in the parenting centre, when we first moved downtown. (Forest Lawn Crematorium, Yonge Street, North York, Ontario) 20191129
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 […]
