Tag Archives: general system theory

October 2022 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Hurricanes are hitting us (i.e., the United States: New Orleans and Puerto Rico being the examples) and we are not quite recovering back to the trend we were on before the hurricane. This seems to be happening elsewhere too, like the Philippines. This is how a system can decline and eventually collapse – it appears stable in the face of internal stressors until it is faced with an external shock, and then it doesn’t bounce back quite all the way, and each time this happens it bounces back a bit less.

Most hopeful story: Gorbachev believed in the international order and in 1992 proposed a recipe for fixing it: elimination of nuclear and chemical weapons [we might want to add biological weapons today], elimination of the international arms trade, peaceful sharing and oversight of civilian nuclear technology, strong intervention in regional conflicts [he seemed to envision troops under Security Council control], promotion of food security, human rights, population control [seems a bit quaint, but maybe we would replace this with a broader concept of ecological footprint reduction today], economic assistance to poorer countries, and expansion of the Security Council to include at least India, Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt [maybe this list would be a bit different today but would almost certainly include Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, and Indonesia].

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Here is a big, maybe dumb idea: Maybe the U.S. could build out a modern high speed rail system and electric grid along its interstate highways. Maybe some experts can write me and explain if there are technical reasons this can’t be done. It the reason it can’t be done is that bureaucracy A owns the highways and bureaucracy B owns the tracks and bureaucracy C the power lines, that is not an excuse to fail. You can also charge electric vehicles while they are on the move.

the goal of social distancing

Vox has an informative article with some visuals on the goal of social distancing in an epidemic. If you can reduce the total number of infections that is a bonus, but the primary goal is to reduce the peak number of infections happening at any one time. You can do this by delaying cases and spreading them out of time, so that the capacity of the health care system is better able to deal with them. This looks very similar to a stormwater or flood control engineer – often, our goal is also to reduce and delay the peak. Reducing the volume is a bonus if you can manage it. The lesson is not that epidemics are like hydrology, it’s that there are certain fundamental system structures that lead to fundamental behaviors, and they are shared between systems. A couple more that come to mind along the lines of this basic model are congestion pricing to spread traffic out over time, and batteries to store solar and wind energy and trickle them back over time.

2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Cape Town, South Africa looked to be in imminent danger of running out of water. They got lucky, but the question is whether this was a case of serious mismanagement or an early warning sign of water supply risk due to climate change. Probably a case of serious mismanagement of the water supply while ignoring the added risk due to climate change. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.
  • FEBRUARY: Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water. The other cities at risk mentioned in this article include Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Beijing, Cairo, Jakarta, Moscow, Istanbul, Mexico City, London, Tokyo, and Miami.
  • MARCH: One reason propaganda works is that even knowledgeable people are more likely to believe a statement the more often it is repeated.
  • APRIL: That big California earthquake is still coming.
  • MAY: The idea of a soft landing where absolute dematerialization of the economy reduces our ecological footprint and sidesteps the consequences of climate change through innovation without serious pain may be wishful thinking.
  • JUNE: The Trump administration is proposing to subsidize coal-burning power plants. Meanwhile the long-term economic damage expected from climate change appears to be substantial. For one thing, Hurricanes are slowing down, which  means they can do more damage in any one place. The rate of melting in Antarctic ice sheets is accelerating.
  • JULY: The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • AUGUST: Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • SEPTEMBER: A huge earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be by far the worst natural disaster ever seen.
  • OCTOBER: The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • NOVEMBER: About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.
  • DECEMBER: Climate change is just bad, and the experts seem to keep revising their estimates from bad to worse. The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply. An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.

Climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics. If I go back and look at last year’s post, this list of existential threats is going to be pretty much the same. Add to this the depressing grind of permanent war which magnifies these risks and diverts resources that could be used to deal with them. True, we could say that we got through 2018 without a nuclear detonation, pandemic, or ecological collapse, and under the circumstances we should sit back, count our blessings, and wait for better leadership. And while our leadership is particularly inept at the moment, I think Noam Chomsky has a point that political administration after political administration has failed to solve these problems and this seems unlikely to improve. The earthquake risk is particularly troublesome. Think about the shock we felt over the inept response to Katrina, and now think about how essentially the same thing happened in Puerto Rico, we are not really dealing with it in an acceptable way, and the public and news media have essentially just shrugged it off and moved on. If the hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts just keep hitting harder and more often, and we don’t fully respond to one before the next hits, it could mean a slow downward spiral. And if that means we gradually lose our ability to bounce back fully from small and medium size disasters, a truly huge disaster like an epic earthquake on the west coast might be the one that pushes our society to a breaking point.

Most hopeful stories:

I believe our children are our future…ya ya blahda blahda. It’s a huge cliche, and yet to be hopeful about our world I have to have some hope that future generations can be better system thinkers and problem solvers and ethical actors than recent generations have been. Because despite identifying problems and even potential solutions we are consistently failing to make choices as a society that could divert us from the current failure path. And so I highlighted a few stories above about ideas for better preparing future generations, ranging from traditional school subjects like reading and music, to more innovative ones like meditation and general system theory, and just maybe we should be open to the idea that the right amount of the right drugs can help.

Fossil fuels just might be on their way out, as alternatives start to become economical and public outrage slowly, almost imperceptibly continues to build.

There is real progress in the fight against disease, which alleviates enormous quantities of human suffering. I mention AIDS, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease above. We can be happy about that, of course. There are ideas about how to grow more food, which is going to be necessary to avoid enormous quantities of human suffering. Lest anyone think otherwise, my position is that we desperately need to reduce our ecological footprint, but human life is precious and nobody deserves to suffer illness or hunger.

Good street design that lets people get around using mostly their own muscle power. It might not be sexy, but it is one of the keys to physical and mental health, clean air and water, biodiversity, social and economic vibrancy in our cities. Come to think of it, I take that back, it can be sexy if done well.

Good street design and general systems theory – proof that solutions exist and we just don’t recognize or make use of them. Here’s where I want to insert a positive sentence about how 2019 is the year this all changes for the better. Well, sorry, you’ll have to find someone less cynical than me, and/or with much better powers of communication and persuasion than me to get the ball rolling. On the off chance I have persuaded you, and you have communication and/or persuasion super powers, let me know.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Whatever else happens, technology and accumulation of human knowledge in general march on, of course. Computer, robotics, and surveillence technology march on. The human move into space is much slower and painful than many would have predicted half a century ago, and yet it is proceeding.

I’ll never drop the waterless sanitation thing, no matter how much others make fun of me. It’s going to happen, eventually. I don’t know whether we will colonize Mars or stop defecating in our water supply first, but both will happen.

The gene drive thing is really wild the more I think about it. This means we now have the ability to identify a species or group of species we don’t want to exist, then cause it not to exist in relatively short order. This seems like it could be terrifying in the wrong hands, doesn’t it? I’m not even sure I buy into the idea that rats and mosquitoes have no positive ecological functions at all. Aren’t there bats and birds that rely on mosquitoes as a food source? Okay, I’m really not sure what redeeming features rats have, although I did read a few years ago that in a serious food crunch farming rats would be a much more efficient way of turning very marginal materials into edible protein than chicken.

The universe in a bottle thing is mind blowing if you spend too much time thinking about it. It could just be bottles all the way down. It’s best not to spend too much time thinking about it.

That’s it, Happy 2019!

emergy

There are still people working on emergy (embodied energy) as an accounting and system simulation system. This group is in Brazil.

Contribution of the Paraconsistent Tri-Annotated Logic to emergy accounting and decision making

The process of decision-making is a complex task that can become more challenging if the information provided by indicators is contradictory. Emergy accounting is an environmental accounting methodology that has been used to guide environmental decision making. In this paper we propose a comprehensive tool to support decision-making in emergy accounting. Paraconsistent Logic is a non-classic logic, which can aid in decision-making when the investigator is confronted with contradictory results. Paraconsistent Tri-Annotated Logic (PL3v) is proposed as a decision tool to compare different systems and allow selection of those alternatives with the best performance from the standpoint of sustainability defined in emergy terms. The rationale behind our selection of a set of emergy indicators to assess sustainability included such factors as increased efficiency, setting a priority for local resource use and minimization of the use of non-renewable resources. Two actual examples from the literature that resulted in contradictory evidence of system sustainability were compared within the framework of PL3v. Emergy indicators that correspond to positive evidence of sustainability (i.e., those that show increased efficiency and greater local resource use) were assigned as two favorable logic measures of sustainability. The PL3v analysis is completed with the identification of evidence that is unfavorable to sustainability, which is given by a third indicator negatively correlated with sustainability (i.e., non-renewable resource use). Operationally, the methodology proposed the normalization of the indicator values between [0,1] to fit to the PL3v annotation framework. Comparison of the systems examined is presented through the Paraconsistent Logic approach with the aid of a graphical representation and the calculation of the degree of certainty related to the truthfulness of the sustainability proposition.

a prosperous way down

This paragraph caught my eye in the blog A Prosperous Way Down:

The environment is not an element (subsystem) of the economy/finance role-playing game. The economy is actually a subsystem of society, which is embedded in the geobiosphere, its super-system. From a systems perspective, any rearrangement of the geobiosphere as a result of new driving forces, including anthropogenic emissions, affects the behavior, the stability and the sustainability of the global economy as a subsystem. Economically based choices do impact the environment, but the geobiosphere then readjusts its operation (somewhat unpredictably) and impacts the behavior of the global economy itself. Any hope to make significant changes to the global environment (the super-system) while at the same time keeping the operation of our economy fixed or expanding is inconsistent with systems thinking. But this seems to be exactly what people are trying to do, by trying to freeze the current status of the environment as a provider of raw material and ecosystem services that can guarantee economic growth.

If you think about it enough, it becomes fairly obvious that humans are not that different than other animals trying to gain an advantage by exploiting finite energy and other resources in our environment. We are such ingenious exploiters that we have been able to pretend the environment isn’t there, but it seems clear that the environment may finally be catching up with us. Reorienting the principles of economics in an ecological framework seems like an obvious and clear thing to do.

causal emergence

Causal emergence is either a brilliant new marriage of science and philosophy, or a bunch of useless nonsense. You can be the judge but I am leaning slightly toward the latter.

Some physical entities, which we often refer to as agents, can be described as having intentions and engaging in goal-oriented behavior. Yet agents can also be described in terms of low-level dynamics that are mindless, intention-less, and without goals or purpose. How we can reconcile these seemingly disparate levels of description? This is especially problematic because the lower scales at first appear more fundament in three ways: in terms of their causal work, in terms of the amount of information they contain, and their theoretical superiority in terms of model choice. However, recent research bringing information theory to bear on modeling systems at different scales significantly reframes the issue. I argue that agents, with their associated intentions and goal-oriented behavior, can actually causally emerge from their underlying microscopic physics. This is particularly true of agents because they are autopoietic and possess (apparent) teleological causal relationships.

In other words, how can your atoms and cells, which have no intentions or will, sum up to create you, a person who I presume has intentions and will. Then all of us persons with intentions and will add up to a civilization, which has intentions and will, which is part of a planet, a solar system, a galaxy, and universe, which arguably do not. If I were smoking something, I might find this profound, but I don’t see an application for it. But it does remind me of Howard T. Odum’s concept of a “mesoscope” as opposed to the microscope and macroscope, which refers to understanding systems at a middle scale where these complex, messy interactions between the physical and human worlds take place. Most of our scientists and engineers are studying the world through a microscope, and that is what we as a society and economy are rewarding, while the most important problems that could be solved at the middle scale are not being tackled by many people, and the people who are tackling them are not being sufficiently rewarded.

more on Irving Fisher’s hydraulic machine

I’ve talked before about Irving Fisher’s hydraulic model of the economy. Here is a 2005 article that appears to discuss all its pieces and parts in detail.

How to Compute Equilibrium Prices in 1891

William C. Brainard and Herbert E. Scarf
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology
Vol. 64, No. 1, Special Invited Issue: Celebrating Irving Fisher: The Legacy of a Great Economist (Jan., 2005), pp. 57-83
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3488117
Page Count: 27

 

reservoirs, resilience and system dynamics

This article in Water Resources Research uses a system dynamics simulation to examine the resilience of a reservoir. Some of these concepts may be adaptable to other types of water resources systems or systems in general.

Comparison of static and dynamic resilience for a multipurpose reservoir operation

Reliability, resilience and vulnerability are the traditional risk measures used to assess the performance of a reservoir system. Among these measures, resilience is used to assess the ability of a reservoir system to recover from a failure event. However, the time independent static resilience does not consider the system characteristics, interaction of various individual components and does not provide much insight into reservoir performance from the beginning of the failure event until the full performance recovery. Knowledge of dynamic reservoir behavior under the disturbance offers opportunities for proactive and/or reactive adaptive response that can be selected to maximize reservoir resilience. A novel measure is required to provide insight into the dynamics of reservoir performance based on the reservoir system characteristics and its adaptive capacity. The reservoir system characteristics include, among others, reservoir storage curve, reservoir inflow, reservoir outflow capacity and reservoir operating rules. The reservoir adaptive capacity can be expressed using various impacts of reservoir performance under the disturbance (like reservoir release for meeting a particular demand, socio-economic consequences of reservoir performance, or resulting environmental state of the river upstream and downstream from the reservoir). Another way of expressing reservoir adaptive capacity to a disturbing event may include aggregated measures like reservoir robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity. A novel measure that combines reservoir performance and its adaptive capacity is proposed in this paper and named ‘dynamic resilience’. The paper also proposes a generic simulation methodology for quantifying reservoir resilience as a function of time. The proposed resilience measure is applied to a single multi-purpose reservoir operation and tested for a set of failure scenarios. The dynamic behavior of reservoir resilience is captured using the system dynamics simulation approach, a feedback-based object-oriented method, very effective for modelling complex systems. The results of dynamic resilience are compared with the traditional performance measures in order to identify advantages of the proposed measure. The results confirm that the dynamic resilience is a powerful tool for selecting proactive and reactive adaptive response of a multipurpose reservoir to a disturbing event that cannot be achieved using traditional measures. The generic quantification approach proposed in the paper allows for easy use of dynamic resilience for planning and operations of various civil infrastructure systems.

gene circuits

Here’s another article on the idea of designed biological circuits.

Synthetic mixed-signal computation in living cells

Living cells implement complex computations on the continuous environmental signals that they encounter. These computations involve both analogue- and digital-like processing of signals to give rise to complex developmental programs, context-dependent behaviours and homeostatic activities. In contrast to natural biological systems, synthetic biological systems have largely focused on either digital or analogue computation separately. Here we integrate analogue and digital computation to implement complex hybrid synthetic genetic programs in living cells. We present a framework for building comparator gene circuits to digitize analogue inputs based on different thresholds. We then demonstrate that comparators can be predictably composed together to build band-pass filters, ternary logic systems and multi-level analogue-to-digital converters. In addition, we interface these analogue-to-digital circuits with other digital gene circuits to enable concentration-dependent logic. We expect that this hybrid computational paradigm will enable new industrial, diagnostic and therapeutic applications with engineered cells.