The Systems View of the World

The Systems View of the World PDF Author: Ervin Laszlo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description

The Systems View of the World

The Systems View of the World PDF Author: Ervin Laszlo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Systems View of Life

The Systems View of Life PDF Author: Fritjof Capra
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107011361
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
The first volume to integrate life's biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions into a single, coherent framework.

Dynamic Systems for Everyone

Dynamic Systems for Everyone PDF Author: Asish Ghosh
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319107356
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This book is a study of the interactions between different types of systems, their environment, and their subsystems. The author explains how basic systems principles are applied in engineered (mechanical, electromechanical, etc.) systems and then guides the reader to understand how the same principles can be applied to social, political, economic systems, as well as in everyday life. Readers from a variety of disciplines will benefit from the understanding of system behaviors and will be able to apply those principles in various contexts. The book includes many examples covering various types of systems. The treatment of the subject is non-mathematical, and the book considers some of the latest concepts in the systems discipline, such as agent-based systems, optimization, and discrete events and procedures.

Engineering a Safer World

Engineering a Safer World PDF Author: Nancy G. Leveson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262297302
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
A new approach to safety, based on systems thinking, that is more effective, less costly, and easier to use than current techniques. Engineering has experienced a technological revolution, but the basic engineering techniques applied in safety and reliability engineering, created in a simpler, analog world, have changed very little over the years. In this groundbreaking book, Nancy Leveson proposes a new approach to safety—more suited to today's complex, sociotechnical, software-intensive world—based on modern systems thinking and systems theory. Revisiting and updating ideas pioneered by 1950s aerospace engineers in their System Safety concept, and testing her new model extensively on real-world examples, Leveson has created a new approach to safety that is more effective, less expensive, and easier to use than current techniques. Arguing that traditional models of causality are inadequate, Leveson presents a new, extended model of causation (Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes, or STAMP), then shows how the new model can be used to create techniques for system safety engineering, including accident analysis, hazard analysis, system design, safety in operations, and management of safety-critical systems. She applies the new techniques to real-world events including the friendly-fire loss of a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter in the first Gulf War; the Vioxx recall; the U.S. Navy SUBSAFE program; and the bacterial contamination of a public water supply in a Canadian town. Leveson's approach is relevant even beyond safety engineering, offering techniques for “reengineering” any large sociotechnical system to improve safety and manage risk.

Thinking in Systems

Thinking in Systems PDF Author: Donella Meadows
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603581480
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The classic book on systems thinking—with more than half a million copies sold worldwide! "This is a fabulous book... This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing."—Forbes "Thinking in Systems is required reading for anyone hoping to run a successful company, community, or country. Learning how to think in systems is now part of change-agent literacy. And this is the best book of its kind."—Hunter Lovins In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet—Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

World-systems Analysis

World-systems Analysis PDF Author: Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822334422
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
A John Hope Franklin Center Book.

The Systems Thinker

The Systems Thinker PDF Author: Albert Rutherford
Publisher: Vdz
ISBN: 9781951385149
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Find the optimal solutions to your problems. Gain a deep understanding of the "what, why, how, when, how much" questions of your life. Become a Systems Thinker and discover how to approach your life from a completely new perspective. What is systems thinking? Put it simply, thinking about how things interact with one another. Why should this matter to you? Because you are a system. You are a part of smaller and larger systems - your community, your country, your species. Understanding your role within these systems and how these systems affect, hinder, or aid the fulfillment of your life can lead you to better answers about yourself and the world. Information is the most precious asset these days. Evaluating that information correctly is almost priceless. Systems thinkers are some of the bests in collecting and assessing information, as well as creating impactful solutions in any context. The Systems Thinker will help you to implement systems thinking at your workplace, human relations, and everyday thinking habits. Boost your observation and analytical skills to find the real triggers and influencing forces behind contemporary politics, economics, health, and education changes. Systems thinking clears your vision by teaching you not only to find the differences between the elements but also the similarities. This bi-directional analyzing ability will give you a more complex worldview, deeper understanding of problems, and thus better solutions. The car stopped because its tank is empty - so it needs gas. Easy problem, easy solution, right? But could you explain just as easily why did the price of gas raise with 5% the past month? After becoming a systems thinker, you'll be able to answer that question just as easily. Change your thoughts, change your results. -What are the main elements, questions and methods of thinking in systems? -The most widely used systems archetypes, maps, models, and analytical methods. -Learn to identify and provide solutions even the most complex system problems. -Deepen your understanding about human motivation with systems thinking. The past fifty years brought so many changes in our lives. The world has become more interconnected than ever. Old rules can't explain the new world anymore. But systems thinking can. Embrace systems thinking and become a master of analytical, critical, and creative thinking.

Engineering Systems

Engineering Systems PDF Author: Olivier L. De Weck
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262297620
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
An overview of engineering systems that describes the new challenges posed for twenty-first-century engineers by today's highly complex sociotechnical systems. Engineering, for much of the twentieth century, was mainly about artifacts and inventions. Now, it's increasingly about complex systems. As the airplane taxis to the gate, you access the Internet and check email with your PDA, linking the communication and transportation systems. At home, you recharge your plug-in hybrid vehicle, linking transportation to the electricity grid. Today's large-scale, highly complex sociotechnical systems converge, interact, and depend on each other in ways engineers of old could barely have imagined. As scale, scope, and complexity increase, engineers consider technical and social issues together in a highly integrated way as they design flexible, adaptable, robust systems that can be easily modified and reconfigured to satisfy changing requirements and new technological opportunities. Engineering Systems offers a comprehensive examination of such systems and the associated emerging field of study. Through scholarly discussion, concrete examples, and history, the authors consider the engineer's changing role, new ways to model and analyze these systems, the impacts on engineering education, and the future challenges of meeting human needs through the technologically enabled systems of today and tomorrow.

The Power of Systems

The Power of Systems PDF Author: Eglė Rindzevičiūtė
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501706780
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
In The Power of Systems, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė introduces readers to one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War: the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an international think tank established by the US and USSR to advance scientific collaboration. From 1972 until the late 1980s, IIASA was one of the very few permanent platforms where policy scientists from both sides of the Cold War could work together to articulate and solve world problems. A rare zone of freedom, communication, and negotiation. East-West scientists co-produced computer simulations of the long-term world future, using global modeling to explore the possible effects of climate change and nuclear winter. Their concern with global issues also became a vehicle for transformation inside the Soviet Union. The Power of Systems explores how computer modeling, cybernetics, and the systems approach challenged Soviet governance by undermining the linear notions of control on which Soviet governance was based and creating new objects and techniques of government.

The Systems Work of Social Change

The Systems Work of Social Change PDF Author: Cynthia Rayner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198857454
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
The issues of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on linear thinking and traditional power dynamics to 'solve' social problems, are not helping. In fact, they may only be entrenching the status quo.Systemic social challenges produce bewildering results when we try to solve them due to their complexity, scale, and depth. While strategies to tackle complexity and scale have received significant attention and investment, challenges that arise from deeply-held beliefs, values, and assumptions that no longer serve us well have been largely overlooked. This book draws on stories of committed social changemakers to uncover a set of principles and practices for social change that dramatically depart from the industrial approach. Rather than delivering solutions or being lured by grander visions of 'systems change', these principles and practices focus on the process of change itself. Simple yet profound, these stories distil a timely set of lessons for leaders, scholars, and policymakers on how connection, context, and power sit at the heart of the change process, ensuring broader agency for people and communities while building social systems that are responsive in a rapidly-changing world.