International Society for the Systems Sciences: Journals ISSS

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A cybernetic approach to hurricane hazard management on O’ahu, Hawai‘i

Author: Reissberg Anja
Publication venue: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2010, Waterloo, Canada
Publication date: 16/07/2010
Field of study

This dissertation was set out to reveal deficiencies in hurricane hazard management on the island of O’ahu, Hawai‘i. The hurricane risk for a strong hit or near miss on O’ahu lies at about 1-3%. This probability seems low, but risk is mathematically constituted by the probability of an event times the magnitude of the consequences of the event. Consequently, the severity of the impacts needs to be considered. As the vulnerability analysis showed, those impacts would be catastrophic. Compared to the damage extent of Hurricane Katrina still vivid in the memories of many, O’ahu faces a much more vulnerable situation due to its isolation, high population density and fragile infrastructure. In human terms, the biggest difference is the infeasibility of evacuation of the island’s population of almost one mio. people, which would be highly vulnerable due to the failure of 80% of the island’s infrastructure. Honolulu International Airport would be unavailable for an extended time and the extensive damage to harbor facilities and smaller inland airports would limit the island’s resource access to a great extent. Overall, all critical infrastructure including energy, transportation, communications, food, sanitation and water distribution and emergency services would be severely impacted. Given the picture of great potential problems, there is a need for a way to maintain a society’s internal stability and reduce the vulnerability in face of such an external threat. Cybernetics in general and the VSM in particular, seemed to offer potential solutions. The objectives of this dissertation were (1) to investigate if hurricane hazard management in Hawai‘i can be improved by the VSM looking both at the structure and the processes; and (2) to evaluate the VSM’s applicability to disaster management and the insights for Geography and hazard management research. The VSM revealed that all system elements were in place, but the balance, quality and importance of some need urgent adjustments. A major structural drawback was the hierarchical structure of the National Incident Management System, even though it had cybernetically sound aspects such as a redundant system structure and a maximum of seven System 1 elements. System 2 was evident on paper, but overall it was an unpracticed system element. System 3* (audits) was failing through all Levels of Recursion. System 4 (intelligence) was evolving, but very weak at the time of investigation. System 5 (policy) was strong given the subject matter. Overall, the application of the VSM to hurricane hazard management confirmed the model’s usefulness. It is specifically capable of dealing adequately with the discontinuous temporal character of a ‘hibernating’ system such as a disaster organization. Besides application problems such as the abstractness of its language and concepts, it was concluded that after the big effort in the beginning shortens with more experience, the model reveals its excellent diagnostic capabilities. The VSM is analogous to a treasure map: You can run around an island and find the treasure by chance. This way, one can know about the treasure, but take forever to find it. The VSM, in contrary, leads you right to it. The insights could maybe be found out without the VSM, but it would take a longer time to reach those insights, one would need a variety of other approaches to do so and therefore need a variety of experts that speak the same meta-language. This is the great advantage of a VSM application: it can integrate different fields of knowledge and fits therefore into the field of Geography. It is capable to grasps the full complexity of the very interdisciplinary field of disaster management. This shows why the cybernetic meta-language and abstract concepts are necessary, highly useful and worth learning

2010 EARTHQUAKES IN HAITI AND CHILE. A SYSTEMIC COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Author: Aceves Francisco J
Audefroy Joel F
Publication venue: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2010, Waterloo, Canada
Publication date: 25/08/2010
Field of study

Why did a relatively mild earthquake of 7.0 degrees on the Richter scale in Haiti cause more than 200,000 dead?  And why did a very intense 8.8 Richter earthquake in Chile cause less than one thousand dead? In this paper, the socio-economic, demographic, legal, cultural, and natural causes of these differences are analyzed from a systemic standpoint. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the creation of a set of standards for Latin-American cities, to be better prepared in confronting the effects of disastrous events such as earthquakes. Some of the preliminary conclusions of this paper are that the lack of high construction standards in Haiti, together with poverty and uncontrolled demographic growth in Port au Prince made the city very vulnerable. Chilean cities, on the other hand, with a better socio-economic and cultural level, and very strict construction standards, survived the earthquake and its sequels better than in Haiti

Different Types of Misperception regarding Benevolence

Author: Kawabe Shutaro
Kobayashi Norimasa
Publication venue: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2010, Waterloo, Canada
Publication date: 25/08/2010
Field of study

.  This paper introduces misperception to bilateral decision situations with benevolent players (Bergstrom, 1999) based on hypergame framework (Bennett, 1979). In Bergstrom (1999), a benevolent player not only considers the opponent’s private subutility but also his benevolence towards her. Accordingly, we analyze two cases in which the player misperceives only the opponent’s private subutility and only the opponent’s benevolence respectively. An interesting result we obtained is that misperception of the opponent’s benevolence only has the unit change effect, such that in many applications the effect of opponent’s benevolence may be ignore

Enacting Wholeness-Praxis Communities for Transforming Global Unsustainability with Collective Wholeness Consciousness

Author: Li Ming-Fen
Lin kingkong
Publication venue: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2010, Waterloo, Canada
Publication date: 26/08/2010
Field of study

I. Background－The Planet as a generative network In the past decade, more and more organizations across the governmental and nongovernmental sectors come to realize that they must come together to face the imminent challenges-crises in order to maintain a livable and sustainable earth. This global consciousness, once being well recognized, could guide organizations to find new approaches to organizational transformation. In the past few years, Senge and his colleagues (Scharmer, Sue & Jaworski, 2004) have been working to cultivate a collective consciousness of global sustainability, aiming at fostering a new social technology of ‘presencing.’ Indeed, organizations across the 3 sectors have to collaborate with one another in order to create possibilities in the complicated ‘problem maze’ for resolving unending problems and emerging crisis. Organizational leaders’ wholeness awareness and awakened global consciousness undoubtedly would help nurture the public’s collective consciousness of human’s shared wholeness. Moreover, it is encouraging to observe that not only do more organizations across the 3 sectors endeavor in building sustainable culture with wholeness perspectives, innumerous divergent learning communities are also undertaking the grass-root movement of wholeness praxis. Therefore, in this paper, the authors will highlight the emerging wholeness spirit embodied in the practice of many small but rigorous learning communities, and explicate how the wholeness praxis communities might interact and evolve with other communities. II. Research Questions and Methodology It is revealing that the learning communities taking the holistic approach tend to embrace wholeness paradigm of organizational learning and transformation. Such a new paradigm of wholeness praxis is grounded in the community leaders’ perspectives of wholeness wellness. It is essential to explore how the community leaders’ lives are transformed with their wholeness praxis. The research aims at exploring the community leaders’ professional practice and life transformation, and how such transformation guides them to create new possibilities and opportunities. It is expected that with more and more learning communities transcending from their bounded world view and being transformed into wholeness praxis communities, it is more likely that we might create a positive and negentropic global force to prevent our environment and ecology from being further exploited. There are three main research questions to be inquired in depth, which are listed below: 1. How might learning communities transform into wholeness praxis communities and how the community leaders’ lives are transformed? 2. How do the wholeness praxis communities interact with other communities to realize their vision and mission, and become self-generative and self-organized communities? 3. How do such self-generative, self-organized communities cultivate the public’s wholeness consciousness for global sustainability? In this study, the authors integrate three approaches for research design and data collection. They are whole systems design and wholeness dialogue design of the world café, models integration and application, and textual analysis, which serve for wholeness praxis theory construction and revision. They also designed two tools for guiding the collective dialogue in the world café and in-depth interviews. One is the life transformation model and the other is holistic dialogue model. The participants of this research are community leaders and their learners from 12 divergent learning communities with various practice of wholeness. III. Research findings and results The results of this study reveal that leaders of the emerging “wholeness praxis communities” not only experience deep life transformation, but also wholeheartedly committee themselves to creating supporting and regenerative network for their wholeness practice and their learners’ wholeness experiential learning. With the cultivation of wholeness spirit, they could relate to as many organizations as possible in order to co-create collective transformation for realizing a sustainability world. Moreover, such wholeness praxis communities are generative and regenerative in nature, which emerge from the spirit of co-relating, co-suffering, co-sensing, co-presencing and co-creating. In brief, the primary findings of this study include: 1. The wholeness images, wholeness mindfulness, wholeness enlightenment and wholeness praxis (e.g. learning design) of the community leaders. 2. The essence of the emerging wholeness praxis communities and their critical roles in building a global sustainable culture. 3. The levels of wholeness consciousness cultivated in the wholeness praxis communities in this study. 4. The wholeness dynamics to be enacted among the wholeness praxis communities and other communities, such as communities of practice, communities of meaning construction, and communities of spiritual awakening for building a global sustainable culture. It is expected that this contemplative and philosophical reconceptualization of organizational transformation and community praxis would bring forth more inspiring and intellectual discussions about the emerging wholeness-praxis organizations and communities in the contemporary age. If more and more communities or organizations could transform from knowledge learning and skill development to wholeness learning and praxis, the many ecological, global, technological, and ethical challenges we are facing would serve to illuminate our reflective dialogue and enlighten our collective thinking. Moreover, collaboration within the wholeness praxis communities and with other generative communities would be likely to shape a new culture for global sustainability

SYSTEMS THINKING APPROACH AS A UNIQUE TOOL FOR SUSTAINABLE TOURISM DEVELOPMENT: A CASE STUDY IN THE CAT BA BIOSPHERE RESERVE OF VIETNAM

Author: Mai Thanh Van
Publication venue: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2010, Waterloo, Canada
Publication date: 25/08/2010
Field of study

Tourism is not simply an industry, but is an open, dynamic and complex system. The system consists of many interacting components and involves many different stakeholders. The development of tourism in a sustainable way impinges on and is subject to many factors. The limitation of traditional approaches to tourism research has become evidently in many cases. These approaches have usually looked at a particular issue or issues of the whole tourism picture. As a result, it has become difficult to manage tourism toward sustainability. This paper provides an overview of the systems thinking approach and its application in the study of the tourism system in the Cat Ba Biosphere Reserve of Vietnam. This study shows that systems thinking has proved to be an effective and powerful tool to explain the complexities of the tourism system.  It has helped to simplify, clarify and integrate isolated problems associated with the industry, and provided a mechanism for group learning and decision making to achieve desirable outcomes. The paper proposes systems thinking be used as an appropriate tool for sustainable tourism development

Systems of Belief More than Reality in Socio-economic Evolution

Author: Hilton Brian John
Publication venue: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2010, Waterloo, Canada
Publication date: 25/08/2010
Field of study

Abstract Systems of Belief More than  Reality in Socio-economic Evolution   This paper examines the interaction between two versions of human reality, the perceived one and the evidentially unobserved one. Choice is made on the basis of how we perceive reality and this is not necessarily co-incident with what we might accept as reality if our rationality were truly unbounded by our ignorance. Many things we purchase, consume, cover come to own etc have a subjective value far in access of their objective value. That is nowhere more evident in stock markets.   Here the value of a share is what people believe it to be worth rather than any objectively measurable means of valuing it. The physical assets and current realisable assets of a corporation can be far below the market value puts on its shares in the stock market. This depends as much on the worth of the IPR the company is seen to own, the brands it owns, the perceived competence or not of its senior leadership, even fashion as much as it is on its measurable assets.   This is most evident with respect to money which only has value if we believe it does. In recent history it is no longer backed by a real commodity gold but by government debt and its deposit levels but as all good banking students know the bank keeps only a small amount of cash to allow those normally wishing to realise their deposits supplied. If confidence in the bank is lost and all its depositors come at the same time to realise their deposits, a run on the bank, it is impossible for nay bank to satisfy its creditors and it must collapse. Banking and money more than anything else depend on people’s belief in value not actual realisable value. As long as belief can be maintained value can be maintained. When confidence collapses value collapses so given the value we get out of our social belief in the value of money we all work hard to maintain general confidence in such value for without it all is lost.   All the above holds true in social, political and cultural systems belief is most everything most of the time and if we cannot sustain it that it supports crumbles to dust.   Belief is so powerfully useful consider the converse of the above. The sustainment and endorsement of each other’s beliefs and of all beliefs the value and significance of different parts of knowledge that drive our modern social technological system is pivotal. It seems if we as human being can envisage something it comes to be. In my life space travel, colour movies, flat-screen televisions  computers, mobile phones global TV stations were all impossible now they are our everyday lives.   Fundamental to our knowledge in the 20th Century is a dilemma as yet unresolved. Light is corpuscular and light is a wave form. Two inconveniently inconsistent beliefs which we have resolved short term, in the absence of a General Theory of Relativity though candidates do now exist, by managing to believe inconsistently in both of them at the same time as it suited our convenience.   Where lies truth knowledge and evolution in an age where value is more and more determined by belief. The material, production and logistic cost of a Nike shoe selling for

150 is around

10 70 goes to the retailer for the ambiance of his store and the remaining 70 goes to the person that conceived the design and marketing campaign that created its value.   In an age of triple bottom line accounting what are the implications of this as in a sense knowledge creation and distribution is virtually costless and consumes hardly any real physical resources at all only the food to sustain the creators and thinkers so employed

Associations for the Reciprocal and Mutual Sharing of Advantages and DisAdvantages

Author: Bricage Pierre
Publication venue: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2010, Waterloo, Canada
Publication date: 26/08/2010
Field of study

To survive the living systems must to eat and not to be eaten. But, soon or late, every one is eaten http://tinyurl.com/surviepbafscet. The law of the strongest is not-at-all the best ! The only way to escape from the struggle is to enter into an Association for the Reciprocal and Mutual Sharing of Advantages and DisAdvantages (ARMSADA). A lichen which is both an organism and an ecosystem, a cell which is also an ecosystem and an endosyncenosis (ceno: to meet and fuse, syn: into a system, endo: with a new internal structural and functional organisation), both are ARMSADAs. Every ARMSADA merges when the partners do lose simultaneously the capacity to kill the other one(s). In the new Whole, all that is an advantage for a partner is a disadvantage for the other one(s) http://tinyurl.com/pbsustdev. The ôparcenersô are fused together ôfor the best and for the worstö. The benefits are only for their Wholeness which expresses new ôabilitiesö http://tinyurl.com/andesymbiosis. The synthesis of the myelin, in the case of the neurone, emerges from the ôunity through diversityô between a population of Schwann's cells and a giant cellular body. The nitrogen fixation of the legumes' nodes emerges from the fusion of a population of Monera with -and within- an organism. The eukaryotic cell has emerged from the help of a RNA virus from a microbial mat of Monera http://tinyurl.com/pbcellorigin. In their new endophysiotope (endo: internal, tope: space, physio: of functioning), the ôparcenersô are absolutely dependant from each others. But, through the iteration of the process of new ARMSADAs' emerging, the new -more and more complex- ôsystem-of-systemsö is, more and more, independent of its ecoexotope (exo: external, tope: space, eco: of inhabitation) http://tinyurl.com/phylotagmotaphology. The endophysiotope of a i level of organisation is the ecoexotope of previous i-n levels. So the Whole is also less and more than the sum of its parts: because of the semi-autonomy of the parceners, simultaneously abilities of the previous levels are lost and new are gained http://tinyurl.com/anlea05pau. There is never advantages without disadvantages. To survive is to turn disadvantages into advantages and to avoid advantages turning into disadvantages. The systemic disfunctioning of its ARMSADA explains the apoptosis of the cell. That is the result of the death of one endangered internal partner (the monere parts: the population of mitochondria or the nucleus) which results into the death of the endosyncenosis. Cancer also is a breaking of the cell's ARMSADA http://tinyurl.com/pbcancerlisboa. Cells that should have to die, because of external dangers, ôthanksö to the escape of internal dormant viruses do not. Through this metamorphosis -http://tinyurl.com/pbmeta1- their new endophysiotope survives but their previous ecoexotope, the organism, is altered and endangered. Into an ARMSADA each partner can survive only if the other ones survive first. Man is not an exception http://tinyurl.com/WHYma

THE INTELLIGENT SCENARIO SELECTION IN DYNAMIC HOIST SCHEDULING PROBLEM: THE REAL-LIFE ELECTROPLATING LINE CASE

Author: Kujawski Krzysztof
Świątek Jerzy
Publication venue: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2010, Waterloo, Canada
Publication date: 16/07/2010
Field of study

The paper presents a scheduling system which was designed for a electroplating production line. The system allows flexible production, in the real time environment. The number of transport hoists is routed as well as chemical and material treatment processing stations are scheduled in order to create a functional production line. The expert knowledge is used for preparation of production scenarios. The system manages to create schedules in the real time because of using machine-learning methods to identify production system state and support the decisive process of scenario selection. The Intelligent Scenario Selection Method is used on the real-life production line located in Wrocław, Poland. The paper presents issues that occur on analyzed line and the results achieved by using The Intelligent Scenario Selection Method

SYSTEMIC DESIGN FOR THE RECYCLING OF SOLID AND LIQUID ORGANIC WASTE AND THE HYDROPONIC GROWTH OF ORGANIC FOOD: A NATURAL CYCLE OF LIFE

Author: Peon-Escalante Ignacio E
Turpin-Marion Silvie
Sanchez-Gongora Maria Antonieta
Publication venue: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2010, Waterloo, Canada
Publication date: 25/08/2010
Field of study

We propose a systemic design for the total recycling process of solid and liquid organic waste, its anaerobic and aerobic treatment, and the production of organic food through the use of hydroponics under a controlled environment. In Mexico City, as in many other cities in the world, waste management is a growing problem, solid and liquid, organic and inorganic. One half of solid waste in Mexico City is organic. The city government also has considerable difficulties with the disposal of waste. Another relevant issue is the availability of water for Mexico City’s, 20 million inhabitants. At the Instituto Politecnico Nacional (IPN), a large and influential public university in Mexico, a technical research project has been designed to provide a systemic solution for these important needs. In nature, there is a Cycle of Life in each of the biotic parts of an ecosystem there is a synergetic relationship between biotic and non-biotic systems. When a living being dies, its organic waste becomes a favorable substrate for decomposers, in the organic waste, living beings obtain water and nutrients for their growth. The main composition of living beings is water. We can observe how ecosystems work, and use an ecosystemic metaphor for a systemic design of a recycling process. A systemic socio-technical solution is being developed under the conceptual guideline of the ecosystemic metaphor through a participative action-research process to design an integral solution to the problems of waste, water and food production. For almost thirty years we have been working on this type of solutions alongside rural and urban communities, the next step is to optimize the recycling and construction process with an action-research systemic project on its technological, economic, social and environmental dimensions

FALLACY AND OSTENTATION OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (IN SOME COMPANIES)

Author: Frias Ricardo Andres
Barrera Ricardo Mario
Publication venue: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2010, Waterloo, Canada
Publication date: 26/08/2010
Field of study

Companies that achieve a more or less consolidated market position and a sustainable growth in it, start working on improving their corporate image. Among the strategies to achieve this social recognition the preferred one is develop their actions under the principles of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a concept that involves procedures and attitudes that should be ethical, rational and sustainable of these firms in their environment. We consider that there is a fallacious behaviour of many of these companies that are covered under CSR but they commit very serious damage to the environment, sometimes unwittingly and sometimes with full awareness of it. And worst, they make an ostentatious display of it. A narrow view of the meaning of CSR leads to these firms misleads them and deceives the community. So we think it is important to stop and analyze a series of examples that can demonstrate that the lack of broader vision of the whole in time and space, leave out of consideration effects or emergent properties of a system designed as model to follow (CSR) but adversely affects a large proportion of the population

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