Toronto, Ontario; Scarborough, Ontario; Markham, Ontario.
Beach Skateboard Park. Spring has really arrived in Toronto, but people not yet wearing shorts. Transition from winter wear to light top clothes seems practically overnight. (Ashbridges Bay, Toronto) 20150502Bike helmet selection. When safety equipment all looks about the same, is made with similar materials, and ranges in price from $22 to over $200, the conscientious shopper takes quite a while to decide. The last bike helmet may be a decade old, so the perhaps thriftiness isn’t the most important attribute. (Mountain Equipment Coop, King Street West, Toronto) 20150507Yonge and Grenville Streets. Two storey storefronts demolished, foundations for @YCcondos 66 floor glass tower in progress. Intensification of downtown core, a few blocks north of Ryerson University and Yonge-Dundas Square. I don’t remember this construction project starting, the warm weather means bicycling more frequently. (462 Yonge Street, Toronto) 20150509Silver City Fairview. No lineup at suburban Tuesday matinee of Avengers movie in its second week. Stadium seating in non-3D room, a better way to enjoy a Hollywood blockbuster. (Cineplex Silver City Cinema, Fairview Mall, North York, Ontario) 20150512Table of ten. Chinese dinner on a weekday night with aunt, cousin, sister, father. Only one son attending, so our branch not dominating the table. Lobster, Peking duck, lots of Cantonese dishes, all consumed. (Perfect Chinese Restaurant, Scarborough, Ontario) 20150513
Toronto, Ontario; Detroit, Michigan; Iowa City, Iowa; Fairfield, Iowa; Muscatine, Iowa; Port Huron, Michigan
English River lake freighter. Great Lakes water seem clear of ice, with small bulk carrier moored by Lafarge terminal in the Polson slip of the Toronto PortLands. In early spring, the vegetation doesn’t obscure visibility, over the fence from the Chinese supermarket. (Cherry Street, Toronto) 20150406Toronto IBM Club Retirees. Update on IBM Canada R&D Centre by @AllenLalonde, meeting the challenges of big data with collaborative innovation centres across universities, industry and government. CARET, SOSIP, CHIA, Ocean Networks Canada. Among retirees, seeing a few familiar faces. (St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Scarborough, Ontario) 20150407Design with Dialogue, April 2015. Special session for SSHRC question, six parallel streams, video capture and live sketching. Pulled together on short notice by SFI masters students. (Lambert Lounge, OCAD U) 20150408DBC Trio. Early Thursday set of @LuisDenizSax Rich Brown @ErnestoCervini in @RexHotelToronto relaxed and casual. No festival crowds, just another workday on a city where the arts thrive. (The Rex, Toronto) 20150416Detroit Greektown. Saturday night busy in popular nightlife district downtown. Most of family visiting #1 son in Michigan. Last time I was here could have been in the 1970s, when the Greek presence was stronger. (Detroit Greektown, Michigan) 20150418MOCAD. Normal Shift by Coco Bruner at Art X Detroit , 10.5×15 foot Baltic Birch Plywood floor, invites viewers to walk on it at their own risk. Kresge Arts Foundation sponsors show in Midtown. (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit) 20150419DIA. Alexander Calder 1970 La jeune filles et sa suites, on the lawn outside the Detroit Institute of the Arts, towers over local visitors. Family touring on a Sunday afternoon. (Detroit, Michigan) 20150419
Toronto, Ontario; Niagara Falls, NY; Allendale, NJ; New York City (Manhattan), NY
Former Unilever site . East of Don Roadway, north of Lakeshore Boulevard East, south of the Adelaide Street onramp, there’s 29 acres to be redeveloped, up to 60 acres with city and other private properties, says “Jobs, transit and the future: How an empty lot at the foot of Toronto could transform it” | Elizabeth Church | March 14, 2015 | Globe & Mail at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/jobs-transit-and-the-future-how-an-empty-lot-at-the-foot-of-toronto-could-transform-it/article23461556/ (Toronto) 20150515Systems Thinking Ontario March 2015. Session on Systems and Resilience Redux: Deciphering Panarchy (Some More) extended discussion from last month. Some attendees had not pre-read article, so interpreting figures without visual aids was like described video on television. Returning attendees thought that extra time spent on the same theme helped unwrap the mystery, and the month in between gave time for consideration. (Systems Thinking Ontario, OCAD U. Lambert Lounge) 20150318SFI class fishbowl. Inner circle of discussants on systemic design methods, with outer circle of observers who can swap into inner. Smaller group enables richer interaction amongst active participants, questions build amongst students paying attention. (Strategic Foresight and Innovation program, OCAD U., Toronto) 20150319Niagara Falls from Rainbow Bridge. On drive to NYC, stopped for hour walk through Niagara State Park. Oldest park on the U.S., quiet on a March Friday. First time to see falls on the American side, we have seen the more commercial Canadian side frequently. (Rainbow Bridge, Niagara Falls, NY) 20150321Celery Farm. Nature preserve with pond mostly still frozen. Watched mallard duck couple getting fat on sunfish in surface ice, and just through a small hole. Snapping turtles may be driving fish to the top. (Celery Farm Natural Area, Allendale, NJ) 20150322Times Square. Sunday spring stroll down 7th Avenue, at temperature above freezing. Loose weekend before a Monday morning meeting. Benefits of a friend with a Manhattan apartment. (New York City) 20150322
Toronto, Ontario, Tokyo (Haneda, Kiba, Ookayama), Osaka (Fushimi), Tokyo (Harajuku, Shinjuku, Toyama, Waseda)
Pearson gate E77. Short escape from chilly Toronto for rainy Tokyo. No courtesy upgrade today, so will sleep vertically against the window wall. Enjoyed chicken pho with vegetarian broth in Maple Leaf Lounge, multiple refills die to small bowls. (Toronto Pearson Airport Terminal 1) 20150224Haneda arrival gate corridor. Speedwalk fronted by windows in makes the long trek in daylight from international arrivals to the immigration hall less tedious. Airline terminal formerly just domestic fights, now includes Air Canada from Toronto. Easy walk to monorail, much closer to central Tokyo than Narita airport way out east (Tokyo Haneda Airport) 20150225Kiba Park Bridge and fountain plaza. Rainy walk to Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo on a different route from past trips. Path from Kiba station north through park leads to landmark Kiba Koen Ohashi bridge, over Kasaibashi Street and the Sendaiborigawa River. (Kiba Park, Tokyo) 20150226Scholarly after-lunch discussion. Beyond formal presentations, privilege of relaxed time for conversation of speculative ideas about the future. Wide variety of perspectives and backgrounds add to a rich dialogue. (7th floor, 9 West building, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Ookayama, Japan) 20150227Symposium on Service Systems Science. @JimSpohrer saying Moore’s Law for Service Systems may be found in Smart Service Systems with Cognitive Assistants, at the 8th annual symposium hosted at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Full day of lectures by experts, some regular participants in the invited workshops. (Tokyo Institute of Technology, 9 West Building) 20150228Gekkeikan Okura Sake Museum. Learning about varieties of rice used, and how sake is made. Small samples at end of tour still more alcohol than I’ve consumed in a year. Rainy day deterred outdoor sightseeing. Rode shinkasen bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto, day of touring, then continuing route by car to Osaka. (Gekkeikan Okura Sake Museum, Fushimi, Japan). 20150301
Toronto, Ontario
Pearl Court. Toronto is one of the few places where you can have dim sum while it’s snowing outside, observed EKI. Family lunch before an upcoming birthday where adult children don’t care so much about the celebration anymore. Relaxed conversation about life. (Gerrard Street East, Toronto) 20150208Systems Thinking Ontario Feb. 2015. Special session on “Systems and Resilience: Deciphering Panarchy”, with exceptional request that all attendees preread the 2001 Holling article. Rich discussion, with varying views on the helpfulness of diagrams to either clarify or confuse the text. (OCAD U., Toronto) 20150218
Crustaceans in tank. Crab towering over lobsters may have slightly longer life, as restaurant had double lobster special. Family dinner with visiting niece fulling in for errant son. Winter day slightly less cold, with snowfall slowing traffic uptown. (Perfect Chinese Restaurant, Scarborough, Ontario) 20150221
Toronto, Ontario.
Queen Saulter Library. Snowy January Saturday puts snow on the ground, but temperature swings with freezing rain will lead to uncertain Sunday outdoors. Winter with snow that endures is not a sure thing in our neighbourhood. (Riverside, Toronto) 20150105Storefront art. Lovebot concrete robot statues by Matthew Del Degan inside the sales centre for Riverside Square development, which will be on the south side of Queen Street, east of the Dion River. A winter stroll through our changing neighbourhood. (Toronto) 20150111Art at Union Station. As part of Villa Toronto, “Outliers” (2014) JD Walsh, in a narrow booth in the grand hall of the train station under construction. Images projected on the “cymbal” worth watching, although conditions in the venue are less than optimal. Exhibit by the Cooper Cole gallery, expected European works as Villa Raster is centered in Warsaw, Poland. (Toronto Union Station) 20150122
Systems Processes Theory has been under development for many decades, led by Len Troncale, a past president of the International Society for the Ssytems Sciences. Many have found getting a grip on the science to be a demanding task, both in scope and in depth. Over many decades, Lynn Rasmussen was a collaborator, refining and […]
The Socio-Technical Systems (STS) perspective, dating back to the studies of Eric L. Trist and Fred E. Emery, was on the reading list of organizational behaviour classes in my undergraduate and master’s degree programs. It wasn’t until 15 years later, when I got involved with the systems sciences and David L. Hawk, that the Socio-Ecological […]
Civic Tech can be described as projects using technology “for the public good“. Civic Tech may be related to, but different from Gov Tech. For the May 2024 Systems Thinking Onrtario, we had two knowledgeable guests in conversation. Dorothy Eng, executive director of Code for Canada since 2021, related her professional journey from engineering to […]
On my May trip through the UK, I accepted an offer to lead an Expert-Led Session at the University of Hull. I had previously been a Research Fellow of the Centre for Systems Studies, but haven’t travelled to the Hull for some years. As we worked out the arrangements, I found out that the seminar […]
I’ve been checking on the breadth of some personal research on systems thinkers. (The list is incomplete, and may orient more towards systems scientists). Searching on Scopus gives an h-Index that counts scholarly references (with a boost, for the first person on the list who received a Nobel prize in chemistry). The list below is […]
Reading a theorist who espouses the dao (tao) in their systems work? Here’s a challenge: is the writer referring to daojia, or daojiao? Daojiao 道教 is religious daoism, gaining legitimacy only with the Tang dynasty (712-758 CE), after many centuries with the religion of Confucianism as dominant. Classical Chinese philosophy is hard to interpret even […]
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 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 […]
In reviewing the original introduction for Systems Thinking: Selected Readings in the 1969 Penguin paperback, there’s a few threads that I only recognize, many years later. The tables of contents (disambiguating various editions) were previously listed as 1969, 1981 Emery, System Thinking: Selected Readings. — begin paste — Introduction In the selection of papers for this […]
In a recording of the debate between Michael Quinn Patton and Michael C. Jackson on “Systems Concepts in Evaluation”, Patton referenced four concepts published in the “Principles for effective use of systems thinking in evaluation” (2018) by the Systems in Evaluation Topical Interest Group (SETIG) of the American Evaluation Society. The four concepts are: (i) […]
