Podcasts by New Books in Systems and Cybernetics
Interviews with Scholars of Systems and Cybernetics about their New Books
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Further podcasts by Marshall Poe
Podcast on the topic Wissenschaft
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Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the view of Anthony Hodgson, fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles. To heal the rifts, Hodgson believes we need to reintroduce the hum...
ListenT. Fischer and C.M. Herr, "Design Cybernetics: Navigating the New" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Those who have followed this podcast in the past, and those who follow developments in cybernetics in the present, will be no strangers to the name Ranulph Glanville. This brilliant, multiple-PhD h...
ListenBrian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...
ListenLeslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...
ListenMatt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...
ListenPhillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...
ListenK. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...
ListenSafi Bahcall, "Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries" (St. Martins, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Safi Bahcall's Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin's Press, 2019) reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteri...
ListenXiao Liu, "Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
International and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of cour...
ListenAlberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...
ListenKathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...
ListenJ. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...
ListenMichael E. Kerr, "Bowen Theory’s Secrets: Revealing the Hidden Life of Families" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A pivotal development in the history of psychology was the invention of family systems theory by psychiatrist Murray Bowen. He was among the first to observe families in a naturalistic setting, and...
ListenRaul Espejo, "Cybernetics and Systems: Social and Business Decisions" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Regular listeners of this podcast will, no doubt, be familiar with the name of Raul Espejo, former Director of Operations of Stafford Beer’s famed Cybersyn Project under the Chilean government of S...
ListenPamela Buckle Henning, "A Guide to Systems Research: Philosophy, Processes, Practice" (Springer, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Like a number of the books discussed on this podcast, A Guide to Systems Research: Philosophy, Processes, Practice (Springer, 2017), was intended to fill gaps in a field that, through its often fit...
ListenDiscussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...
ListenGary Metcalf, "Social Systems and Design" (Springer Verlag, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the opening chapter of his edited volume, Social Systems and Design, out from Springer in 2014, Gary Metcalf asks if it is possible to establish ethical “first principles” for the design of soci...
ListenGeorge E. Mobus and Michael C. Kalton, "Principles of Systems Science" (Springer Verlag, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Of the many barriers to a more robust presence for systems approaches in the academy, the relative scarcity of sufficient introductory textbooks in the field stands out as a particular irritant. I...
ListenMcKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...
ListenRichard S. Marken, “Doing Research on Purpose: A Control Theory Approach to Experimental Psychology” (New View Publications, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Listeners familiar with our recent podcasts exploring the remarkable legacy of William T. Powers revolutionary Perceptual Control Theory of human behaviour, including its contribution to cognitive ...
ListenWarren Mansell, “A Transdiagnostic Approach to CBT using Method of Levels Therapy: Distinctive Features” (Routledge, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
To many, the title, A Transdiagnostic Approach to CBT using Method of Levels Therapy: Distinctive Features (Routledge, 2012) , may seem incongruous with a podcast channel called “New Books in Syste...
ListenPeter Harries-Jones, “Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of Difference” (Fordham UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The work of polymath Gregory Bateson has long been the road to cybernetics travelled by those approaching this trans-disciplinary field from the direction of the social sciences and even the humani...
ListenByron Reese, “The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity” (Simon & Schuster, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that t...
ListenRob Dekkers, “Applied Systems Theory” (Springer, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As Reader in Industrial Management in the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow, Rob Dekkers is well positioned to survey the currents of the vibrant systems tradition in the Unit...
ListenChris Clearfield and András Tilcsik, “Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It” (Penguin, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How can we learn from large system failures? In their new book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It (Penguin Press, 2018), Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik explore system f...
ListenDavid Peter Stroh, “Systems Thinking For Social Change” (Chelsea Green, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While Systems Thinking has enjoyed an increasing amount of societal influence through work of such practitioner/authors as Peter Senge, it is also true that the vast majority of the popular literat...
ListenKenneth Sayre, “Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The cybernetics community owes a great debt of thanks to the editors of Routledge Library Editions: Philosophy of Mind series, for bringing to light a neglected classic of the field in 2015. It wa...
ListenEden Medina, “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics. In the early 70’s, at the invitation of leftist presid...
ListenRichard S. Marken and Timothy A. Carey, “Controlling People” (Australian Academic Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The word “control”, with its seemingly instantaneous mental associations with forms of top-down oppression, is one that makes even some cyberneticians nervous and is often downplayed in contemporar...
ListenKarl H. Muller et al., “New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics” (World Scientific, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In their volume, New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics (World Scientific, 2017), editors Alexander Riegler, Karl H. Muller and Stuart A. Umpelby have assembled almost 60 articles, including the...
ListenBruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics and Narrative” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of...
ListenAnthimos Tsirigotis, “Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse” Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given...
ListenMolly Wright Steenson, “Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of wha...
ListenDmitry Novikov, “Cybernetics: Past to Future” (Springer Verlag, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With all of its entailed engagements with epistemology, emergence, and self-organization, cybernetics began (and arguably still is) the science of communication and control in the animal and the ma...
ListenJohn Mingers, “Systems Thinking, Critical Realism and Philosophy: A Confluence of Ideas” (Routledge, 2014( from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the fields of systems and cybernetics, such movements as Soft Systems Methodology and Second-Order Cybernetics have undermined the objective realist view from nowhere at the core of scientific p...
ListenLiss C. Werner, “Cybernetics: State of the Art” (Tech Uni of Berlin Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s no secret that we continue to live in the midst of digital revolution that continues to unfold in a rapidly accelerating fashion. Digital connectivity and the Internet of Things make possible ...
ListenAnthony Chaney, “Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anthony Chaney teaches history and writing at the University of North Texas at Dallas. His book Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness (University of No...
ListenBrian Clegg, “Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives” (Icon Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives (Icon Books, 2017), by Brian Clegg, is a relatively short book about a subject that has emerged only recently, but is rapidly beco...
ListenGualtiero Piccinini, “Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a num...
ListenKees van Deemter, “Computational Models of Referring: A Study in Cognitive Science” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions – things that pick out the entities...
ListenDavid Danks, “Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation “in some sense,” because that core idea...
ListenTara H. Abraham, “Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for his fou...
ListenAndy Clark, “Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and Embodied Mind” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The predictive processing hypothesis is a new unified theory of neural and cognitive function according to which our brains are prediction machines: they process the incoming sensory stream in the ...
ListenMary Chayko, “Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life” (SAGE, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
New technology has made us more connected than ever before. This has its advantages: instantaneous communication, expanded circles of influence, access to more information. And, of course, our conn...
ListenRonald R. Kline, “The Cybernetics Moment: Or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of l...
ListenRebecca Lemov, “Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity” (Yale University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Rebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less t...
ListenJeffery Pomerantz, “Metadata” (MIT, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the “stuff” that fuels the information society in which we live? In his new book, Metadata (MIT 2015), information scientist Jeffrey Pomerantz asserts that metadata powers our digital socie...
ListenEric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, “Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a Google search, new technology has allowed ...
ListenChristopher Vitale, “Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age” (Zero Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Networks seem to be the dominant metaphor for contemporary society. In Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age (Zero Books, 2014), Christopher Vitale sets out a manifesto ...
ListenMargaret Morrison, “Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics, and Simulations” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Almost 400 years ago, Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, mathematics is integral to physics and chemistry, and is becoming so in biology, econom...
ListenTimothy Jordan, “Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society” (Pluto Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Struggles over information in the digital era are central to Tim Jordan‘s new book, Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society (Pluto Press, 2015). The book aims to co...
ListenChristine L. Borgman, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Social media and digital technology now allow researchers to collect vast amounts of a variety data quickly. This so-called “big data,” and the practices that surround its collection, is all the ra...
ListenOrit Halpern, “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern‘s new book traces the emergence of the “communicative objec...
ListenFrank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Hidden algorithms make many of the decisions that affect significant areas of society: the economy, personal and organizational reputation, the promotion of information, etc. These complex formulas...
ListenHugh F. Cline, “Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There is no doubt that innovations in technology have had, and are having, a significant impact on society, changing the way we live, work, and play. But the changes that we are seeing are far from...
ListenAnne Jaap Jacobson, “Keeping the World in Mind” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Some theorists in the cognitive sciences argue that the sciences of the mind don’t need or use a concept of mental representation. In her new book, Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations...
ListenMarcin Milkowski, “Explaining the Computational Mind” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turing’s development of the basic ideas behind computer programming, specifically the manipulation of symbols according to rules. That idea ha...
ListenPeter Gardenfors, “The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A conceptual space sounds like a rather nebulous thing, and basing a semantics on conceptual spaces sounds similarly nebulous. In The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces (MIT ...
ListenVincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World” (Paradigm Publishers, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The “cloud” and “cloud computing” have been buzzwords over the past few years, with businesses and even governments praising the ability to save information remotely and access that information fro...
ListenMichael Strevens, “Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When we’re faced with a choice between Door #1, Door #2, and Door #3, how do we infer correctly that there’s an equal chance of the prize being behind any of the doors? How is it that we are genera...
ListenHallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the bi...
ListenMichael Weisberg, “Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply: they built a 1.5 acre model of the Bay area in a ware...
ListenTadeusz Zawidzki, “Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Social cognition involves a small bundle of cognitive capacities and behaviors that enable us to communicate and get along with one another, a bundle that even our closest primate cousins don’t hav...
ListenPaul Thagard, “The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We’ve all heard about scientific revolutions, such as the change from the Ptolemaic geocentric universe to the Copernican heliocentric one. Such drastic changes are the meat-and-potatoes of histori...
ListenSusan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or...
ListenSusan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2011-08-15T17:10
In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or...
ListenSusan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2011-08-15T17:10
In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or...
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