Vancouver, BC; Toronto, Ontario
Motoretta Gelato: Lazy Easter Monday, after Lebanese lunch including zataar, wandered down towards harbour waterfront. Gelato flavours of Earl Grey vanilla and mascarpone espresso; vegan dark chocolate. NTA now styles Vancouverite wearing shorts on optimism of sun, we Easterners are still bundled up for the temperature drop. (Motoretta Gelato, West Cordova Street, Vancouver, BC) 20240401
Pendulum Gallery: Suspended from a glass ceiling, Alan Storey (1987) Broken Column is commonly mislabelled as a pendulum as it doesn’t have a clock. Aluminum metal duct of 3500 pounds has a slot on the north side, originally designed with a fan that would move warm air from the roof to ground level. Electric motor drives the duct over a stationary plinth, “sympathetic with the alpha waves our brains produce when we’re resting with our eyes closed”, in a movement that is both relaxing and terrifying when seated in a chair by the nearby tables. (Pendulum Gallery, West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC) 20240401
YVR Vancouver International Airport: Started journey home before sunrise, passing by Reg Davidson (2016) The Blind Halibut Fisherman, beside a bentwood box where the Haida would store ceremonial gear. From City Centre Station, Skytrain on Canada Line was uneventful. Unusual alert on x-ray scan meant body patdown, second pass through scanners, and report taking down name and profession. (YVR Vancouver International Airport) 20240402Fortune Seafood Restaurant: Late afternoon lab visit followed by early evening dinner. Vancouver crab was on special, as was jumbo shrimp, neither for allergic me. Grouper-tofu casserole as usual, and water spinach, enough leftovers for tomorrow. Free soup borth to start, sweet soup to finish. (Fortune Seafood Restaurant, Midland Avenue, Scarborough, Ontario) 20240403Brookfield Place: Indoor atrium has real butterfly boxes that would offer refurge from poor weather and predators, but fake butterflies. Narrow entry slots invite lepidoptera, rather than round holes for birds. Sunny spring day illuminates display encouraging pollinator gardens during April as Earth Month. (Brookfield Place, Bay Street, Toronto, Ontario) 20240406Dim Sum King: Family congregating at the spring festival banquet of the Lowkong Society, before the 10 courses started. We may now have a reputation as a karaoke group, choosing songs that bridge boomer and millennial generations. if the full immediate family comes out, we may have to book more than one table of 10. (Dim Sum King Seafood Restaurant, Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario) 20230413Theatre Passe Muraille: Panel @beyondWallsTPM hosted by @21sungelas with social entrepreneur @vanessalingyu and journalist @annhui on set of @SilkBathTO #WokingPhoenix. Discussed Chinese-Canadian “chop suey” cooking in its own legitimacy, now better in small town Canada than in the big cities. Common ties through food in lineages of Chinese heritage, even for those not brought up in Chinese restaurants. (Theatre Passe Muraille, Ryerson Avenue, Toronto, Ontario) 20240414Service Canada Centre Scarborough Town Centre: In-person visit, suggested after telephone call inquiry about not receiving letter about Canadian Dental Care qualifying for over-87 years of age in December 2023. One of multiple eldercare errands in the neighbourhood, the time required for the beneficiary to answer questions seems less than time it takes for the customer service to figure out the case on the computer. Helpful Service Canada agent explained she could handle everything except Canada Revenue Agency, and the public-facing websites are actually partitioned. (Service Canada Centre, Town Centre Court, Scarborough, Ontario) 20240417
Woodside Square: Paused by dinosaur display outside mall, on the way to trying a different lunch spot after a short doctor’s appointment. Hand-pulled noodles were genuinely superior to the usual, but even slight spiciness varies too far away from Cantonese cuisine preferences. Will have to revert from counter service formats, to restaurants with full service. (Woodside Square, Sandhurst Circle, Scarborough, Ontario) 20240425
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 […]
