Quotes about interaction
page 3

“The art of motion has always intrigued me. How a body - when it throws its weight from side to side and sits down - actually sits down. What muscles interact to bring that simple movement to its conclusion. Movement is a fascinating process and each creature I have made and animated has had its own character according to its physiognomy.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Source: An Animated Life (2003), p. 7

Art, Animals

“From the statements we have made, a stupendous perspective emerges, a vista towards a hitherto unsuspected unity of the conception of the world. Similar general principles have evolved everywhere, whether we are dealing with inanimate things, organisms, mental or social processes. What is the origin of these correspondences?
We answer this question by the claim for a new realm of science, which we call General System Theory. It is a logico-mathematical field, the subject matter of which is the formulation and derivation of those principles which hold for systems in general. A "system" can be defined as a complex of elements standing in interaction. There are general principles holding for systems, irrespective of the nature of the component elements and of the relations or forces between them.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: 1950s, Problems of Life (1952, 1960), p. 199 as cited in: D.C. (1969) "Systems Theory — A Discredited Philosophy". in: Abacus V. p. 8

World, Mathematics, Question, Nature

“World views, as related to the sciences, ethics, arts, politics and religions, are integral parts of all cultures. They have a strongly motivating and inspiring function. A socially shared view of the whole gives a culture a sense of direction, confidence and self-esteem. Moreover, interactions between cultures change constantly.”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Source: World views. From Fragmentation to Integration (1994), p. 8

World, Religion, Art, Confidence

“Only a modern systems approach promises to get the full complexity of the interacting phenomena - to see not only the causes acting on the phenomena under study, the possible consequences of the phenomena and the possible mutual interactions of some of these factors, but also to see the total emergent processes as a function of possible positive and/or negative feedbacks mediated by the selective decisions, or "choices," of the individuals and groups directly involved.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 79; As cited in Gregory A. Daneke (1999) Systemic choices: nonlinear dynamics and practical management http://books.google.nl/books?id=q_YbuU52ejUC&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82. p. 82.

Decision, Study

“Gentile maintained, with Marx, that the ‘essence’ of man is not individual—but social. The human person is a function of a complex pattern of interactions with both nature and other persons in a law-and-rule-government environment. The human being is essentially a social creature (a Gemeinwesen)—and outside society, loses humanity.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 95

Law, Nature, Personality

“Because of the variables and the complexity of their interaction, the data assembled by descriptive musicology yield relatively few observable regularities.”

Leonard B. Meyer (1918–2007) American composer and philosopher

"Universalism and Relativism in the Study of Ethnic music", Ethnomusicology 4, no. 2:49-54 (1960); reprinted in Reading in Ethnomusicology, p. 270-71.

“I am concerned about information and technical processes that affect the change in human behavior, the changing forms of interaction between people. Mankind is in a hectic state, and the concentration of people’s attention exclusively on their internal thinking processes is transformed into a permanent meditative state in which people remain even when they go out and appear in public. I’ve watched it many times. These changes will ultimately change humans, and such people as me or you, most probably, will cease to exist. There will be others, and we will most likely be the last of Homo sapiens.”

Nicholas Ovcharov (1988) Ukrainian writer and film director

"The Interaction: modern media art in Ukraine" in EMPR (19 March 2018) https://empr.media/culture/movie/the-inetraction-modern-media-art-in-ukraine/

People, Behavior, Thinking, Appearance

“In recent years there have been elaborate attempts to bring into one framework the concepts and findings derived from three different areas of inquiry: the individual personality, social interaction, and society. I would like to suggest here a simple addition to these inter-disciplinary attempts.”

Erving Goffman book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Source: 1950s-1960s, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p. 155

Personality

“Under complexity science, the more interacting factors, the more unpredictable and irregular the outcome. To be succinct, the greater the complexity, the greater the unpredictability.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 40

Science

“It is probable that when future historians of economic thought look back over this century, the thirties will appear as an era of rapid development in economic theory. Not only has there been unusual activity in monetary theory, theory of value. but extensive transformations have also been made in the basic theory of value. The outstanding publications in this field are, of course, Joan Robinson's Theory of Imperfect Competition and Chamberlin's Theory of Monopolistic Competition, the first produced in Cambridge, England, and the second in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These volumes mark the explicit recognition of the theory of the firm as an integral division of economic analysis upon which rests the whole fabric of equilibrium theory. General equilibrium is nothing more than the problem of the interaction of individual economic organisms, under various conditions and assumptions; as a necessary preliminary to its solution, an adequate theory of the individual organism itself is necessary.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, The theory of the firm in the last ten Years, 1942, p. 791

Problem, Appearance, Future

“!-- What you have to do first is separate yourself from the world, most new-born babies don’t see any difference between them, their playpen and their Dad. It’s all them. Only after a little while do they start to realise that it’s not all me, just this bit is me. So by the invention of something similar to the word or concept ‘I’ we separate ourselves from the universe. Then we start to separate up the universe. We will divide sky from ground, the organic from inorganic. Looked at like this, doesn’t it provide a literal interpretation of the Biblical Creation story. -->If you take the idea of God in the Bible as a metaphor for any nascent, formative just-created intelligence, is that not how we all create the universe. We divide the firmament up from the waters of the abyss, and the key to how to do this is in the first line: in the beginning, there was the word. By giving sky one word, the ground into another, we break the universe down into manageable things that we can interact with through language.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

God, World, Intelligence, Idea

“The relationship of agency is one of the oldest and commonest codified codes of social interaction. We will say that an agency relationship has arisen between two (or more) parties when one, designated as the agent, acts for the other, designated the principal, in a particular domain of decision problems. Examples of agency are universal.”

Stephen A. Ross

Stephen A. Ross "The Economic Theory of Agency: The Principal's Problem," Amer. Econom. Rev., 63 (1973), 134-139; As cited in Eisenhardt (1985, 136)

Problem, Decision, Universe

“The Uniﬁed Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is used to specify, visualize, construct, and document the artifacts of a software system. It captures decisions and understanding about systems that must be constructed. It is used to understand, design, browse, conﬁgure, maintain, and control information about such systems. It is intended for use with all development methods, lifecycle stages, application domains, and media. The modeling language is intended to unify past experience about modeling techniques and to incorporate current software best practices into a standard approach. UML includes semantic concepts, notation, and guidelines. It has static, dynamic, environmental, and organizational parts. It is intended to be supported by interactive visual modeling tools that have code generators and report writers. The UML speciﬁcation does not deﬁne a standard process but is intended to be useful with an iterative development process. It is intended to support most existing object-oriented development processes.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

James Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson, & Booch (1999) The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. p. 1

Understanding, Support, Decision, Past

“Where will we be ten years from now? CRT’s will be a thing of the past, multimedia will no longer be a buzzword, pen-based and voice input will be everywhere, and university students will still be editing with emacs. Pens and touchscreens are too low-bandwidth for real interaction; voice will probably also turn out to be inadequate. (Anyway, who would want to work in an environment surrounded by people talking to their computers?) Mice are sure to be with us a while longer, so we should learn how to use them well.”

Rob Pike (1956) software engineer

Rob Pike (1991). " A Minimalist Global User Interface http://research.swtch.com/help.pdf". Proc. Summer 1991 USENIX Conference, pp. 267–279.

People, Learning, Universe, Past

“The point of departure is the measurement problem, as it appears in physics; the manner in which measurements allow us to characterize subsystems; the role of such subsystems as tools in system analysis; and the relationships existing between different ways of perceiving or interacting with the same system. Our conclusions are: (1) there exists no universal family of of analytic units appropriate for the treatment of all interactions; (2) there are on the contrary many such families of analytic units, all of which are equally “real” and entitled to be treated on the same footing; (3) the appropriate use of natural interactions can enormously extend the class of physical observables accessible to us; (4) the concept of a model must be formulated, in its most general terms, as the sharing of a subsystem by two otherwise distinct systems, capable of imposing the same dynamic on an appropriate system with which they can both interact. We establish these results through a variety of terminologies which turn out to be equivalent: stability, invariance, symmetry, homeostasis.”

Robert Rosen (1934–1998) American theoretical biologist

Introduction; Quoted in: " Fundamentals of Measurement and Representation of Natural Systems by Robert Rosen http://www.panmere.com/?page_id=15" at panmere.com. Fundamentals of measurement and representation of natural systems. (1978)

Family, Way, Departure, Nature

“By technology is meant the actions that an individual performs upon an object, with or without the aid of tools or mechanical devices, in order to make some change in that object. The object, or 'raw material', may be a living being, human or otherwise, a symbol, or an Inanimate object. People are raw materials in people-changing or people-processing organizations; symbols are materials in banks, advertising agencies, and some research organizations; the interactions of people are raw materials to be manipulated by administrators in organizations; boards of directors, committees, and councils are usually Involved with the changing or processing of symbols and human interactions, and so on.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1960s, "A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations", 1967, p. 195

People, Change

“One of the distinct features of XP is the lack of any documentation whatsoever, except for the code itself. This is a contraposition to the modeling techniques like the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which strongly focus on documentation. XP takes an extreme position there, not even documenting the architecture of the system. Often, it is very difficult to extract the overall structure, behavior or interactions with the environment from the code. The code is a rather detailed and fragile representation of the system’s tasks. Even though the code contains all necessary information about the system, this information is often burdened with details and it is tedious to extract the aspects one is interested in. Therefore, it would be useful to have a more compact system representation. The UML does provide a number of notations that are suited for this purpose. However, the tools so far are not capable of supporting UML in such a manner that it can be well-integrated with the approach of Extreme Programming.”

Bernhard Rumpe (1967) German computer scientist

Source: Executable Modeling with UML. A vision or a Nightmare (2002), p. 698

Behavior, Support

“Piaget, who was originally trained as a biologist, views intellectual development as an interaction of an inherited genetic program with the environment. It is no coincidence that he calls this conception "genetic epistemology," in effect the study of the hereditary unfolding of understanding.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.3 Development

Understanding, Study, Training

“A teacher?”
“Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which here is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves.”
“Interesting.”
“Well. Yes. There is god of sorts, Croaker. Do you know? Not a mover and shaker, though. Simply a negator. An ender of tales. He has a hunger that cannot be sated. The universe itself will slide down his maw.”
“Death?”
“I do not want to die, Croaker. All that I am shrieks against the unrighteousness of death. All that I am, was, and probably will be, is shaped by my passion to evade the end of me.” She laughed quietly, but there was a thread of hysteria there. She gestured, indicating the shadowed killing ground below. “I would have built a world in which I was safe. And the cornerstone of my citadel would have been death.”
The end of the dream was drawing close. I could not imagine a world without me in it, either. And the inner me was outraged. Is outraged. I have no trouble imagining someone becoming obsessed with escaping death.
“I understand.”

Glen Cook book The White Rose

“Maybe. We’re all equals at the dark gate, no? The sands run for us all. Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair!”
Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 39, “A Guest at Charm” (p. 625)

Life, Death, Hunger, God

“The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. This internal contradiction exists in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes.”

Mao Zedong book On Contradiction

On Contradiction (1937)

“My interaction with the Himalayan tribespeople overturned my pre-conceptions. There was no superior or inferior being. I was just a human being like them […] I lived with people who had no electricity or cars and yet they lived very fulfilling lives. They had no schools but they were very intelligent people. I became even more thirsty to understand and learn more about the tribes people of the world.”

Stephen Corry (1951) British anthropologist and activist

An insight into the life of Stephen Corry http://www.mmegi.bw/2004/March/Thursday18/90140841657.html, Mmegi Online. March 18, 2004

People, World, School, Cars

“Coherence and harmony in relations and interactions between the members of a human social system are due to the coherence and harmony of their growth in it, in an ongoing social learning which their own social ( linguistic) operation defines and which is possible thanks to the genetic and ontogenetic processes that permit structural plasticity of the members.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: The tree of Knowledge (1987), p. 199 as cited in: Vincent Kenny (1989) " Life, the Multiverse and Everything; an Introduction to the Ideas of. Humberto Maturana http://www.oikos.org/vinclife.htm".

Learning

“Non-local influences do not diminish with distance. They are as potent at a million miles as at a millimeter.
Non-local influences act instantaneously. The speed of their transmission is not limited by the velocity of light.
A non-local interaction links up one location with another without crossing space, without decay, and without delay. A non-local interaction is, in short, unmediated, unmitigated, and immediate.”

Nick Herbert (1936) American physicist

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 12, Bell's Interconnectedness Theorem, p. 214

Light, Speed

“While in improvisation there is a sense of craft within one's own instrument and in being able to interact with other musicians, in noise this disappears to the extent of anti-virtuosity becoming a virtue. A nihilist approach to improvisation in which the interaction is not based upon developing common denominators for some communication to happen among the players, but rather a matter of developing the freedom of individual expression.”

Mattin (1977) Spanish musician

Page 173.
"Anti-Copyright: Why Improvisation and Noise Run Against the Idea of Intellectual Property" (October 2008)

Communication, Sense, Freedom

“Technology has always been a central variable in organizational theory, informing research and practice. Despite years of investigative effort there is little agreement on the definition and measurement of technology, and no compelling evidence on the precise role of technology in organizational affairs. I will argue that the divergent definitions and opposing perspectives associated with technological research have limited our understanding of how technology interacts with organizations, and that these incompatibilities cannot be resolved by mutual concession. What is needed is a reconstruction of the concept of technology, which fundamentally re-examines our current notions of technology and its role in organizations.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 389

Understanding, Effort

“An analysis of social relations in 2 parts: the properties of 2-person relations, and an extension of the chief concepts to the complex relations of larger groups. Beginning with the assumption that most social interactions must be reinforced to be repeated, the authors analyze 2-person matrices designed to express all the possible interactions and their outcomes in terms of rewards and costs to the participants. Also investigated are: the exogenous and endogenous determinants of rewards and costs, interactive interference and facilitation, formation and evaluation of the 2-person relation, power and dependence, norms and roles, tasks, and nonvoluntary relations. The chapters on larger groups take up interdependence, status, conformity, and group goals. 300-item bibliog”

John Thibaut (1917–1986) American social psychologist

Abstract
The social psychology of groups. 1959

Parting, Dependency, Personality

“The sexuality of creativity – on that level, human interaction becomes less of an oppressive pyramid and more of a dance, an orgy, something that you can imagine being a bit of fun. It seems to work naturally, except when order is imposed upon it, from above, and then everything starts getting a bit screwed up. The information, the energy, starts to get messed up.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Imagination, Nature, Dance

“The ability to interact with a computer presence like you would a human assistant is becoming increasingly feasible.”

Vint Cerf (1943) American computer scientist

Source: "Your Life: Vinton Cerf" (2016), p. 30

“Adrian Slywotzky believes the Internet will overturn the inefficient push model of supplier-customer interaction. He predicts that in all sorts of markets, customers will use choiceboards—interactive, on-line systems that let people design their own products by choosing from a menu of attributes, prices, and delivery options. And he explores how the shifting role of the customer—from passive recipient to active designer—will change the way companies compete.”

Clayton M. Christensen (1952–2020) Mormon academic

Adrian J. Slywotzky, Clayton M. Christensen, Richard S. Tedlow, Nicholas G. Carr (2000) "The future of commerce." Harvard Business Review Vol 78.1. p. 39-53. ( abstract http://hbr.org/product/future-of-commerce-hbr-onpoint-enhanced-edition/an/4681-PDF-ENG) 2000s

People, Way, Change

“An objective of O. R. as it emerged from this evolution of industrial organization, is to provide managers of the organizations with a scientific basis for solving problems involving the interaction of the components of the organization in the best interest of the organization as a whole. A decision which is best for the organization as a whole is called optimum decision.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1940s - 1950s, Introduction to Operations Research (1957), p. 6; Partly cited in: Werner Ulrich (2004) " In memory of C. West Churchman (1913–2004) http://www.wulrich.com/downloads/ulrich_2004d.pdf." Journal of Organisational Transformation and Social Change. Vol 1 (Nr. 2–3) p. 210

Problem, Decision

“Biological communities are systems of interacting components and thus display characteristic properties of systems, such as mutual interdependence, self-regulation, adaptation to disturbances, approach to states of equilibrium, etc.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

As cited in: Debora Hammond (2005). "Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Systems Thinking", in: tripleC 3(2): pp. 20–27.
1950s, Problems of Life (1952, 1960)

Communication

“Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are extracted from messes by analysis. Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Cited in Donella Meadows (2008) Thinking in Systems: a Primer. p. 1.
1970s, The future of operational research is past, 1979

Problem, Change

“It is a question of going beyond the description of mechanisms of interaction between locations and activities, in order to discover the structural laws of the production and functioning of the spatial forms studied… There is no specific theory of space, but quite simply a deployment and specification of the theory of social structure, in order to account for the characteristics of the particular social form, space and its articulation with other historically given, form and processes.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, 1977, p. 124 as quoted in: Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin (2010) Key Thinkers on Space and Place. p. 101

Law, Question, Study

“Strong, weak and electromagnetic interaction are evidently part of a grand unified theory. These temperatures are today quite inaccessible. They were achieved only in the earliest moments of the Big Bang. Since then, the universe has congealed, losing its symmetry.”

Sheldon L. Glashow (1932) American theoretical physicist

Source: The Charm of Physics (1991), p. 244

Strong, Universe, Parting

“The most important thing was the notion of information presentation and the notion of the integration of the audience into the information. One sees oneself exiting form the elevator. If one stands there for 8 seconds, one sees oneself entering the gallery from the elevator again. Now at the same time one is apt to be seeing oneself standing there watching Wipe Cycle. You can watch yourself live watching yourself 8 seconds ago, watching yourself 16 seconds ago, eventually feeling free enough to interact with this matrix realizing one's own potential as an actor.”

Ira Schneider (1939) American artist

Ira Schneider (1969), , Arts Magazine, Vol. 44, p. 21; As cited in: David Antin. Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005. 2012, p. 81-82: On the Wipe Cycle

Feeling, Time

“All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 48).

Hope, Game, Reality, Universe

“The standard SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) theory of strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions appears to correctly describe physics down to the smallest distance scales yet probed.”

Leonard Susskind (1940) American physicist

[1984, The gauge hierarchy problem, technicolor, supersymmetry, and all that, Physics Reports, 104, 2–4, 181–193, 10.1016/0370-1573(84)90208-4]

Strong, Appearance

“Religious ritual survives cultural transmission by embedding episodes of intense, life-defining personal experiences in public performances. These performances involve sequential, socially interactive movement and gesture (chant, dance, murmur, sway) and formulaic utterances that rhythmically synchronize affective states among group members in displays of cooperative commitment. This is often accompanied by sensory pageantry, which further helps to emotionally validate and sustain the moral consensus.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 16
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Life, Help, Dance, Personality

“The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make" the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

" The Confusion over Cloning http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/oct/23/the-confusion-over-cloning/," The New York Review of Books, 23 October 1997. Review of Cloning Human Beings: Report and Recommendations of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission.

Life, Death, Disease, History

“The parallel existence and mutual interaction of "state" and "market" in the modern world create "political economy"; without both state and market there could be no political economy.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Source: The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), Chapter One, Nature of Political Economy, p. 8

World

“The correct relationship between the higher and lower classes, the appropriate mutual interaction between the two is, as such, the true underlying support on which the improvement of the human species rests. The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs; the former are the thinking and designing [Entwerfende] part, the latter the executive part.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

The System of Ethics According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre (1798; Cambridge, 2005), p. 320.

Support, Thinking, Parting

“One is faced with a dilemma: If one places total trust in all other users, one is vulnerable to the antisocial behavior of any malicious user—consider the case of viruses. But if one tries to be totally reclusive and isolated, one is not only bored, but one's information universe will cease to grow and be enhanced by interaction with others. The result is that most of us operate in a complicated trade-off zone with various arrangements of trust and security mechanisms.”

Fernando J. Corbató (1926–2019) American computer scientist

Source: On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991), p. 79

Behavior, Universe

“A very plausible choice for when inflation might have happened would be when the energy scales of the universe were at the scale of grand unified theories… which unify the weak, strong and electromagnetic interactions into a single unified interaction... we're talking about energies which are about 1016 times the equivalent energy of a proton mass. …the initial patch would only have to be the ridiculously small size of about 10-28 cm across to be able to lead ultimately to the creation of everything that we see on the vast scale of which we see it.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)

Strong, Universe, Time

“This is the type of AI I am interested in—what can the human and machine do together, and not in the competition which can arise. …There are doubts as to what fraction of the population can compete with computers, even with nice interactive prompting menus.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

“Here is a list of some of the questions and their short answers (…) The interesting thing is to recognize how totally unavoidable they are, provided you place your confidence in science to provide the answers
Is there a God? No.
What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is.
What is the purpose of the universe? There is none.
What is the meaning of life? Ditto.
Why am I here? Just dumb luck.
Does prayer work? Of course not.
Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding?
Is there free will? Not a chance!
What happens when we die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.
What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them.
Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral.
Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don't like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes.
What is love, and how can I find it? Love is the solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don't look for it; it will find you when you need it.
Does history have any meaning or purpose? It's full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.
Does the human past have any lessons for our future? Fewer and fewer, if it ever had any to begin with.”

Alexander Rosenberg (1946) American philosopher

The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)

Love, Life, God, Feeling

““Organization theory,” a term that appeared in the middle of the twentieth century, has multiple meanings. When it first emerged, the term expressed faith in scientific research as a way to gain understanding of human beings and their interactions. Although scientific research had been occurring for several centuries, the idea that scientific research might enhance understanding of human behavior was considerably newer and rather few people appreciated it. Simon (1950, 1952-3, 1952) was a leading proponent for the creation of “organization theory”, which he imagined as including scientific management, industrial engineering, industrial psychology, the psychology of small groups, human-resources management, and strategy. The term “organization theory” also indicated an aspiration to state generalized, abstract propositions about a category of social systems called “organizations,” which was a very new concept. Before and during the 1800s, people had regarded armies, schools, churches, government agencies, and social clubs as belonging to distinct categories, and they had no name for the union of these categories. During the 1920s, some people began to perceive that diverse kinds of medium-sized social systems might share enough similarities to form a single, unified category. They adopted the term “organization” for this unified category.”

Philippe Baumard (1968) French academic

William H. Starbuck and Philippe Baumard (2009). "The seeds, blossoming, and scant yield of organization theory," in: Jacques Rojot et. al (eds.) Comportement organisationnel - Volume 3 De Boeck Supérieur. p. 15

People, School, Faith, Way

“The fact that map is a fuzzy and radial, rather than a precisely defined, category is important because what a viewer interprets a display to be will influence her expectations about the display and how she interacts with it.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

A.M. MacEachren (2004). How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design, The Guilford Press. p. 161

“A social system is a mode of organization of action elements relative to the persistence or ordered processes of change of the interactive patterns of a plurality of individual actors.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Source: The social system (1951), p. 15

Change

“Humans… entered the 'cognitive niche.' Remember the definition of intelligence from Chapter 2: using knowledge of how things work to attain goals in the face of obstacles. By learning which manipulations achieve which goals, humans have mastered the art of the surprise attack. They use novel, goal-oriented courses of action to overcome the Maginot Line defenses of other organisms, which can respond only over evolutionary time. The manipulations can be novel because human knowledge is not just couched in concrete instructions like 'how to catch a rabbit.' Humans analyze the world using intuitive theories of objects, forces, paths, places, manners, states, substances, hidden biochemical essences, and, for other animals and people, beliefs and desires…. People compose new knowledge and plans by mentally playing out combinatorial interactions among these laws in their mind's eye.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 188

People, World, Law, Art

“Computer programs are the most intricate, delicately balanced and finely interwoven of all the products of human industry to date. They are machines with far more moving parts than any engine: the parts don't wear out, but they interact and rub up against one another in ways the programmers themselves cannot predict.”

James Gleick (1954) American author, journalist, and biographer

James Gleick (2002). What just happened: a chronicle from the information frontier, p. 19 cited in: George Stepanek (2005), Software Project Secrets: Why Software Projects Fail, p. 10

Way, Parting

“Interaction is the mode of life of living organisms. Each must feed on its environment, ingesting chemicals or other organisms. This is something more than "interaction", it is activity directed towards the environment. Since the organism must be selective in what it ingests, it needs to discriminate among the entities in its environment. From very primitive forms of discrimination, the sensory mechanisms of organisms have evolved into the senses of man, interpreted by an internal cognitive apparatus, memories of past experiences, and an ability to take rational decisions. By "rational" I mean activity that achieves intended results because it is based on a reliable understanding of the nature of the environment. In interacting with each other to carry out tasks jointly, men have further developed language, leading to a shared understanding of the environment. This shared understanding is knowledge.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Brian Vickery (2009) " The development of knowledge http://web.archive.org/web/20100125043520/http://www.lucis.me.uk/devtknow.htm" on lucis.me.uk, 2009.

Life, Men, Understanding, Nature

“It starts at the bottom, viewing an organism as a large population of simple machines, and works upwards synthetically from there — constructing large aggregates of simple, rule-governed objects which interact with one another nonlinearly in the support of life-like, global dynamics. The ‘key' concept in AL is emergent behavior.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Source: Artificial Life (1989), p.2

Life, Behavior, Support

“In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change".
I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable.
It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this."”

Michael Joyce (1945) American academic and writer

The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive. An interview with Michael Joyce and review of Liam’s Going at Trace Online Writing Centre Archive (2 December 2002) http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=33

Life, World, Fear, Beauty

“Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

Bernal (1967) The Origin of Life, p. xv. Preface

Life

“It is necessary to study not only parts and processes in isolation, but also to solve the decisive problems found in organization and order unifying them, resulting from dynamic interaction of parts, and making the the behavior of the parts different when studied in isolation or within the whole.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 2. The Meaning of General Systems Theory, p. 31

Behavior, Problem, Decision, Study

“The world about us can be looked at in a variety of ways. One way is to see the world as made up from many interacting systems: weather, societal, economic, ecological, floral, faunal, tectonic plate, oceanic, and so on. This is very much a connected view of the world: nothing is isolated and totally independent; everything is part of something bigger, and everything comprises many interacting parts — subsystems.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Derek Hitchins (2013) at " Systems World http://www.hitchins.net/" at hitchins.net

World, Way, Parting, Weather

“"Interactive Decision Theory" would perhaps be a more descriptive name for the discipline usually called Game Theory.”

Robert Aumann (1930) Israeli-American mathematician

Robert Aumann (2000) Collected Papers: Vol. 1. p. 47

Game, Decision

“The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the earth.
But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here.
Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interaction of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness.
I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this.
So my question is—consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (pp. 509-510)

Life, People, World, Way

“Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. […] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Shields of Expectation—and Actuality", p. 425
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Search, Understanding, Knowledge

“It was found [in the 1970s], unexpectedly and without anyone really having a concept for it, that the rules of perturbation theory can be changed in a way that makes relativistic quantum gravity inevitable rather than impossible. The change is made by replacing point particles by strings. Then Feynman graphs are replaced by Riemann surfaces, which are smooth - unlike the graphs, which have singularities at interaction vertices. The Riemann surfaces can degenerate to graphs in many different ways. In field theory, the interactions occur at the vertices of a Feynman graph. By contrast, in string theory, the interaction is encoded globally, in the topology of a Riemann surface, any small piece of which is like any other. This is reminiscent of how non-linearities are encoded globally in twistor theory.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

"The Past and Future of String Theory" in The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Celebrating Stephen Hawking's Contributions to Physics (2003) ed. G.W. Gibbons, E.P.S. Shellard & S.J. Rankin

Way, Change

“I do not claim that intelligence, however defined, has no genetic basis—I regard it as trivially true, uninteresting, and unimportant that it does. The expression of any trait represents a complex interaction of heredity and environment. [… A] specific claim purporting to demonstrate a mean genetic deficiency in the intelligence of American blacks rests upon no new facts whatever and can cite no valid data in its support. It is just as likely that blacks have a genetic advantage over whites. And, either way, it doesn't matter a damn. An individual can't be judged by his group mean.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"Racist Arguments and IQ", pp. 246–47
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Way, Intelligence, Support

“In many kinds of social interaction, unofficial communication provides a way in which one team can extend a definite but non-compromising invitation to the other, requesting that social distance and formality be increased or decreased, or that both teams shift the interaction to one involving the performance of a new set of roles.”

Erving Goffman book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Source: 1950s-1960s, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p. 121

Way, Communication

“A fundamental problem in such studies stems from the long tradition that has regarded artistic productions as social facts. By regarding such productions as social facts the analyst is relieved of the burden of demonstrating what meanings these productions have for the artist and his audience. It is too frequently assumed that such meanings can be identified by a capable analyst, independent of the interpretations brought to such works by the artist or his audiences. In my judgement artist productions must be seen as interactional creations; the meanings of which arise out of the interactions directed to them by the artist and his audience.”

Norman K. Denzin (1941) American sociologist

Problem, Study

“It would be bypassing the issue to say that the artist's business is how to work with this and that material and manipulate the findings of perceptual psychology, and that the rest should be left to other professions… The total scope of information he receives everyday is of concern. An artist is an isolated system,… he has to continuously interact with the world around him. Theoretically there are no limits to his involvement.”

Hans Haacke (1936) conceptual political artist

Source: Art international, Vol. 13, (1969), p. 56; As cited in: Art Inquiry: Recherches Sur Les Arts. Vol. 1-4. (1999), p. 116

World, Business

“When a mess, which is a system of problems, is taken apart, it loses its essential properties and so does each of its parts. The behavior of a mess depends more on how the treatment of its parts interact than how they act independently of each other. A partial solution to a whole system of problems is better than whole solutions of each of its parts taken separately.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Cited in: Can Alpaslan, Ian Mitroff (2011) Swans, Swine, and Swindlers: Coping with the Growing Threat of Mega-Crises and Mega-Messes. p. 16.
1970s, The future of operational research is past, 1979

Behavior, Problem, Parting, Dependency

“Once helium burning has occurred… the next possible reaction—carbon burning—is not necessarily slow… This reaction involves …a strong as opposed to a weak interaction. …Carbon burning results in magnesium. …Taking a cross section of a highly evolved star would reveal a system of many layers. The inner layers have been subjected to the largest pressures, thereby forced to the highest temperatures, and burned the furthest; the outermost layers, by contrast, have not burned at all. Thus, as we proceed from outside in, there will be an outermost layer with the initial mix of hydrogen and helium, a layer of mostly helium, a layer of carbon, a layer of magnesium, and so on. …So we arrive at the picture of a star, in the latest stages of its evolution… now composed of mostly carbon nuclei and other explosive material.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Star, Strong

“The basic insight of the finance conception was that such a firm could be more tightly controlled by strict accounting. This progression does not imply, however, that one conception of control caused the emergence of its successor. New conceptions of control evolved out of key interactions among firms and between firms and the state.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 16

“One of the most intriguing discoveries of experimental economics is that (1) as we have seen, people invariably behave non-cooperatively in small and large group ‘impersonal’ market exchange institutions; (2) many (up to half in single play; over 90% in repeat play) cooperate in ‘personal’ exchange (two-person extensive form games); (3) yet in both economic environments all interactions are between anonymous players.”

Vernon L. Smith (1927) American economist

Source: "Constructivist and ecological rationality in economics," 2002, p. 528.

People, Game, Personality

“One may generalize upon these processes in terms of group equilibrium. The group may be said to be in equilibrium when the interactions of its members fall into the customary pattern through which group activities are and have been organized. The pattern of interactions may undergo certain modifications without upsetting the group equilibrium, but abrupt and drastic changes destroy the equilibrium.”

William Foote Whyte book Street Corner Society

p 263
Street Corner Society, 1943

Change

“Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

A Conversation With Bill Gates About the Future of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/article/A-Conversation-With-Bill-Gates/132591/ in The Chronicle of Higher Education (25 June 2012) 2000s

People, Communication, Teachers, Change

“Many Taiwanese people have been interacting and associating with the Chinese for a long period of time, so their perspectives can be very valuable when addressing issues concerning Mainland China. We should view Mainland China from the perspective of Taiwan as a whole, instead of only from the DPP's point of view.”

Su Tseng-chang (1947) Taiwanese politician

Su Tseng-chang (2013) cited in " Taiwan should know more about China: Su http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/china-taiwan-relations/2013/05/23/379305/Taiwan-should.htm" on The China Post, 23 May 2013.

People, Time

“Tracking the individual learning curves of the major technologies that comprise the infrastructure of information technology provides a more detailed account of the present and future state-of-the art of the technologies underlying convergence. The base technologies of digital electronics, general-purpose computer architectures, software and interaction are mature and provide solid foundations for computer science. The upper technologies of knowledge representation and acquisition, autonomy and sociality, support product innovation and provide the beginnings of foundations for knowledge science. Well's dream of a world brain making available all of human knowledge is well on its way to realization and it is in the representation, acquisition, and access and effective application of that knowledge that the commercial potential and socio-economic impact of convergence lies.”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

Last paragraph
Convergence to the Information Highway (1996)

World, Dreams, Art, Way

“If we are to understand the interactions of a large number of agents, we must first be able to describe the capabilities of individual agents.”

John H. Holland (1929–2015) US university professor

Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 1. Basic Elements, p. 7

Understanding

“Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man "in power" depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he "causes" things to happen…it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation.”

Gregory Bateson book Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Source: Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), p. 494

Time, Dependency

“In discussing all these aggressive and submissive behaviour patterns, it has been assumed that the individuals concerned have been 'telling the truth' and have not been consciously and deliberately modifying their actions to achieve special ends. We 'lie' more with our words than our other communicative signals, but even so the pheneomenon cannot be overlooked entirely. It is extremely difficult to 'utter' untruths with the kind of behaviour patterns we have been discussing, but not impossible. As I have already mentioned, when parents adopt this procedure towards their young children, it usually fails much more drastically than they realize. Between adults, however, who are much preoccupied with the verbalized information content of the social interactions, it can be more successful. Unfortunately for the behaviour-liar, he typically lies only with certain selected elements of his total signalling system. Others, which he is not aware of, give the game away.”

Desmond Morris book The Naked Ape

(2010), p. 115-116
The Naked Ape (1967)

Children, Truth, Lie, Game

“Often, when two teams enter social interaction, we can identify one as having the lower general prestige and the other team the higher. Ordinarily, when we think of realigning actions in such cases, we think of efforts on the part of the lower team to alter the basis of interaction in a direction more favourable to them or to decrease the social distance and formality between themselves and the higher team. Interestingly enough, there are occasions when it serves the wider goals of the higher team to lower barriers and admit the lower team to greater intimacy and equality with it.”

Erving Goffman book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Source: 1950s-1960s, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p. 126

Thinking, Effort, Parting

“nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging.”

John H. Holland (1929–2015) US university professor

Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 1. Basic Elements, p. 23

Behavior

“So no, I'm not in that camp, but I do think that statutory regulation is not required, and most of the heinous crimes that came up and have made such a splash in front of this Inquiry have already been illegal. Contempt of court is illegal. Phone tapping is illegal. Taking money from - policemen taking money is illegal. All of these things don't need a code. We already have laws for them. The fact that these laws were not rigorously enforced is, again, due to the behaviour of the police, the interaction of the police and News International, and - I mean, let's be honest about this - the fact that our politicians have been very, very involved, in ways that I think are not sensible, with senior News International people, and I hope you'll be calling the Prime Minister and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to explain how that comes down from the top.”

Ian Hislop (1960) Satirical comedian, Editor, Television and radio presenter

At the Leveson Inquiry, 17 January 2012.

Money, People, Law, Hope

“It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about these responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Preface To The 2011 edition, p. xi
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)

Lie, Behavior, Understanding, Nature

“Our civilization seems to be suffering a second curse of Babel: Just as the human race builds a tower of knowledge that reaches to the heavens, we are stricken by a malady in which we find ourselves attempting to communicate with each other in countless tongues of scientific specialization… The only goal of science appeared to be analytical, i. e., the splitting up of reality into ever smaller units and the isolation of individual causal trains…We may state as characteristic of modern science that this scheme of isolable units acting in one-way causality has proven to be insufficient. Hence the appearance, in all fields of science, of notions like wholeness, holistic, organismic, gestalt, etc., which all signify that, in the last resort, we must think in terms of systems of elements in mutual interaction…”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Attributed to Bertalanffy in: Mark Davidson (1983) Uncommon Sense, the Life and Thoughts of Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Houghton Mifflin, p. 159, as cited in: Thomas Mandel (2004) " Is there a general System? http://www.isss.org/primer/gensystm.htm" on isss.org Attributed from memory and posthumous publications

Way, Communication, Knowledge, Thinking

“The development of information research has increased considerably the interaction of emerging information science with other disciplines. Librarianship has traditionally had links with education and classification and has drawn ideas from logic and philosophy. But during the last fifty years new insights and methods have been derived from sociology and social psychology, from computer science, from operations research and related quantitative approaches, from communications research, from linguistics, and most recently from the new hybrids: cognitive science and artificial intelligence.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Fifty years of information progress (1994), p. 7.

Education, Intelligence, Communication, Idea

“There are several world view assumptions present in enterprise engineering. The first assumption is that the enterprise can be viewed as a complex system. This is necessary because systems in organizations are systems of organized complexity. Complexity is the result of the multiplicity and intricacy of man’s interaction with other components of the system. Secondly, the enterprise is to be viewed as a system of processes. These processes are engineered both individually and holistically. The final assumption is the use of engineering rigor in transforming the enterprise. The enterprise engineering paradigm views the enterprise as a complex system of processes that can be engineered to accomplish specific organizational objectives. In the Enterprise Engineering paradigm, the enterprise is viewed as a complex system of processes that can be engineered to accomplish specific organizational objectives.”

Donald H. Liles (1947) American engineer

Source: Enterprise modeling within an enterprise engineering framework (1996), p. 993

World

“On visiting India this time, because of my previous visit, I did have a certain amount of knowledge about the country, but I also felt that there was much greater interest in Japan and deeper interaction between the two countries now than the last time I was there.”

Akihito (1933) Emperor of Japan

Knowledge, Time, Country

“A good building should contribute and interact with the environment and underline human values.”

Johan Neerman (1959) Belgian architect

“Object”, Van Treehouse tot maxi Sampan (April 1998), p. 78.

“Recognition that art was located in an interactive system rather than residing in a material object… provid[ed] a discipline as central to an art of interactivity as anatomy and perspective had been to the renaissance vision.”

Roy Ascott (1934) British academic

“Interactive Art,” unpublished manuscript, 1994, p. 3; as cited in: Edward A. Shanken. " Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s http://www.responsivelandscapes.com/readings/CyberneticsArtCultConv.pdf." 2002

Art

“More generally, the hidden variable account of a given system becomes entirely different when we remember that it has undoubtedly interacted with numerous other systems in the past and that the total wave function will certainly not be factorable. The same effect complicates the hidden variable account of the theory of measurement, when it is desired to include part of the 'apparatus' in the system. Bohm of course was well aware of these features of his scheme, and has given them much attention. However, it must be stressed that, to the present writer's knowledge, there is no proof that any hidden variable account of quantum mechanics must have this extraordinary character. It would therefore be interesting, perhaps, to pursue some further 'impossibility proofs,' replacing the arbitrary axioms objected to above by some condition of locality, or of separability of distant systems.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

On the problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics (1966)

Knowledge, Distant, Past, Parting

“The concepts of social power and social control are closely interrelated, since the process of social control involves the exercise of the bases and resources of power. But both terms also have their negative and even threatening connotations. All of us, or at least most of us, like to think that we are independent agents, and being subjected to social power restricts that sense of independence. The thought of being "socially controlled" also brings forth strong negative feelings. Yet, when we consider it more carefully, power and influence are part of our everyday interaction and contribute to individual and collective benefit. Similarly for social control.”

Bertram Raven (1926) American psychologist

Source: "Influence, Power, Religion, and the Mechanisms of Social Control," 1999, p. 161

Feeling, Exercises, Thinking, Sense

“Sanctimonious slogans have a way of lulling well-meaning people, and at the same time providing self-seekers with means to frustrate the very controls that are most needed. Take, for example, a report entitled, “The Engineer’s Responsibility in Environmental Pollution Control,” submitted in 1971 to the government’s Council of Environmental Quality by the National Industrial Pollution Control Council. The report is an amorphous collection of noble generalities. It conjures up a vision of a crusading army of engineers, thousands abreast, marching in unison. The banner of this army is “cooperation.” Its mission is to “coordinate,” “unify,” “interact,” “centralize efforts,” and “pool resources.” Its weapons are “shared objectives,” “common goals,” “interdisciplinary concepts and techniques.” The cloud of pieties serves, not to enlighten, but to obscure the real truth, which is that environmental pollution control can never be achieved by the worthy sentiments of industr8ial spokesmen, but only by government regulation.”

Samuel C. Florman (1925) American writer and civil engineer

Source: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976), p. 27

People, Truth, Way, Effort

“It was very personal. Political comes from the viewing process. Nothing is ever political if it's genuine. In the reaction, yes, it can be political. But the motives were based completely on a deep need to communicate and share information. The film language has evolved enough that you should get people interacting with the film. It's exciting for us to exhibit it, and it's exciting for people to watch it…I think it's very important for the gay community to have random characters that represent nothing more than people…I think it's part of a wave that will set a precedent of some sort so that you will no longer need a label.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

On My Own Private Idaho, The Face, (1992)

People, Communication, Motivation, Thinking

“Use cases, scenarios or scripts are roughly synonymous terms for important ways to focus our design activities. I prefer the term use case (although quickly saying it three times can leave your tongue tied) because it emphasizes usage. A use case is a textual description of a sequence of interactions between an actor (roughly corresponding to an external agent or class of users) and the system we are designing. Use cases were first described by Ivar Jacobson in his book “Object Oriented Software Engineering A Use Case Driven Approach.”
Use cases have been around in various forms for quite some time. Jacobson, however, made the keen observation that use cases can be treated as refineable, extensible and even reusable specifications of system requirements. We’ve had these same goals for object designs. We know that it is harder to actually accomplish them than it is to talk about them.”

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (1953) American software engineer

About What is a Use Case?
Designing scenarios: Making the case for a use case framework (1993)

Books, Way, Time

“Objects are the real and conceptual things we find in the world around us. An object may be hardware, software, a concept (e. g., velocity), or even "flesh and blood." Objects are complete entities, i. e., they are not "simply information" or "simply information and actions." Software objects strive to capture as completely as possible the characteristics of the "real world" objects which they represent. Finally, objects are "black boxes," i. e., their internal implementations are hidden from the outside world, and all interactions with an object take place via a well-defined interface.”

Edward V. Berard

Source: Essays on object-oriented software engineering (1993), p. 335; as cited in Edward V. Berard (1995) " A Comparison of Object-Oriented Development Methodologies http://www.ipipan.gda.pl/~marek/objects/TOA/OOMethod/mcr.html". The Object Agency, Inc.

World, Box

“This paper develops a new theoretical model with which to examine the interaction between technology and organizations. Early research studies assumed technology to be an objective, external force that would have deterministic impacts on organizational properties such as structure. Later researchers focused on the human aspect of technology, seeing it as the outcome of strategic choice and social action. This paper suggests that either view is incomplete, and proposes a reconceptualization of technology that takes both perspectives into account. A theoretical model-- the structurational model of technology--is built on the basis of this new conceptualization, and its workings explored through discussion of a field study of information technology. The paper suggests that the reformulation of the technology concept and the structurational model of technology allow a deeper and more dialectical understanding of the interaction between technology and organizations. This understanding provides insight into the limits and opportunities of human choice, technology development and use, and organizational design. Implications for future research of the new concept of technology and structurational model of technology are discussed.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 389; Abstract

Understanding, Study, Future

“Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most “obvious,” “accurate,” and “natural” style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Seeing Eye to Eye, Through a Glass Clearly", p. 72
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Art, History, Nature, Thinking

“Thoughtful consideration has led me to decide that romance, involving as it does the highly complex interaction of human neurochemisty{sic} with cultural and technological factors, is hard SF. Very hard SF because romance is especially difficult to mentally simulate accurately, not easy-peasy like rocket science. Romance as hard SF may seem counterintuitive, but it’s the counterintuitive results of modeling that are often the most interesting outcomes.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

review of Don't Fear the Reaper, by Zen Cho http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/dont-fear-the-reaper, 2016 2010s