Winter Chaos Conferences 2015 fred's personal review.
Frederick D Abraham
The Winter Chaos Conferences 2015, a brief personal update by Frederick David Abraham.
The Winter Chaos Conference was spawned as a Northeast US/Canada experiment to see if the Society for Chaos Theory (and the Life Sciences, a later extension to its name) might develop regional organizations. It became independent of the SCTLP, but with a highly overlapping membership, and is more like a club, than a professional society. Much of its core members meet annually in spring meetings that have ranged from about 10 to about 50, but seems to have stabilized to about 18-20, allowing for a plenary format with 45-60 minute presentations and much discussion. It members have a great variability in interests while sharing an integrative, complexity, process oriented vision. We are very good at listening to each other and cross referencing our ideas. We mostly meet in the New England from which most of our members come, but have had meetings in Puerto Rico, Florida, and Pennsylvania We have had participants from such other nation-states as Greece, England, France, Italy, Australia, Canada, and California (Hi, Robin) and Long Island (Hi Frank, Jeff). We are now in a revitalizing/destabilizing mode (remember destabilization is essential for most bifurcations). We don’t yet know the attractors to which this trajectory will lead, but it will probably combine the same stimulating communitarian aspects, and create some products (papers, books, satellite meetings, community actions) which Mark Filippi and George Muhs, and myself have sought to generate within our community, and for which this year’s conferences may have sown some seeds, thanks in large measure to Linda Dennard’s leadership on the November Conference at Auburn University at Montgomery which focused on complexity and self-organizational dynamics in governance, or as she put it “a new feed of perspective, theory and science to the art of policy-making.” (http://www.winter-chaos-conference.com/)
Yes, I said ‘conferences’, as we had three. Two of them during a week in April. The first was a video conference run by Ted Hoppe, in which 7 people participated. Then a couple of days later about a dozen of us held a one-day conference at Smith College, thanks to Alan Bachers’ friendship with the head of their Philosophy Department (and former acting President) which made them cosponsors.
Our main conference was the Auburn one, dedicated to Bob Porter, a valued member of the Winter Conference Community, and run by Linda Dennard, who did a fantastic job organizing the conference and setting its theme in her opening remarks, all despite the recent loss of her daughter, and the assumption of parenting her granddaughter, a very captivating and definitely gregarious five-year old granddaughter.
There were great complexity frameworks at this conference, both metaphorical and explicit, given for conservation and sustainability through life-styles they bring us closer to natural environments (John Thompson with a Skype component by Australian-Aboriginal Noel Nannup, PhD), reconceptualizing race as an attractor landscape (by Sean Hill), a thermodynamic perspective on social power and change (with an emphasis on the Montgomery Bus Boycott in view of its 60th anniversary, by Mike McCullough), the transformation of information into action (Akhlaque Hague), and a surprisingly authoritative and detailed account of the evolution of Muslim-based insurgency, an area rife for network analysis (Bill Dean). There were also presentations of social action programs, including that by the Social Justice Initiative (Montgomery; Kiera Boone & Ben Schaefer), the role of smart communities, i.e., network infrastructure for recovery from a natural disaster in Italy (Franco Orsucci, Skyped from Great Britain).
There were also models and research on governance. Self-organizational boundaries of public finance on quality of life using agent-based (aka network) modelling (Bernardo Alves Furtado of the Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada, Skyped from Brasilia), criminological research which defined variables that could be plugged into future agent-based modelling (Jeff Walker), and research on civic development and health insurance programs using text and social network analyses (Göktuğ Morçöl). More difficult to categorize was Chris Hardy’s presentation of her new book which working from the Pauli-Jungian entanglement of a quantum universe and consciousness, took a trip through the known evolution of the universe from before the Big Bang, a talk whose speed equaled that of the expansion of the onset of the universe, but still did not allow time to apply network principles to a digital universe or to a digital society, but was nonetheless breathtaking for its own expansiveness.
This is a much abbreviated run through the history of the conferences, and this year’s efforts. Linda will elaborate in a more definitive account of the conference, and in possible derivative publications from it. I mainly wanted to make some remarks about an aspect of the Auburn meetings that were especially meaningful to me, and possibly for the future of the Winter Chaos Conferences. Focusing on governance was advantageous because there is a lot of applied research, especially that using networking theory, so we had more presentations of research than ever before. (That usually fell to Matthijs Koopmans’ research on dynamics of education, and he was scheduled to present again this year, but his Skyping-in became unfeasible; darn.) I will focus on Morçöl’s presentation as it used the most technical aspects of network analyses at the conference, which meant that it also helped me to further my own knowledge on the topic. While I have published a couple of entry-level articles on dynamics and networks recently, and gave a workshop on them at the conference, I found a lot of new methods which his work employs. In one of my articles I proposed that programs should be developed that would follow and display the evolution of network dynamics in psychotherapeutic settings that would be of use more generally. I found I was reinventing the wheel of network-meta-analysis. I might add that this type of meta-analysis was also evident in Terry Marks-Tarlow et al.’s article on quaternions also explored this type of meta-analysis (Newsletter, SCTPLS, 2015, 23(1).
Göktuğ used are a couple of tool-kits from the CASOS tool-chest by Kathleen Carley’s group at Carnegie-Mellon: that on text network analyses (AutoMap) and the other on social network analyses (ORA). One of its most interesting features is providing meta-analyses (with ‘sphere of influences’) which creates a network of several categories of nodes, such as names of terrorists, resources they use, places they use, ideologies, etc. I found an early paper of this group, unpublished, but on her Carnegie-Mellon webpages that gave additional network measures and program details. I have found other sources of such programs as well, such as by Nodus Labs who applied such analyses to psychotherapy; also they have programs that will take your highlighting in a Kindle reading and provide a network analysis of them; also they suggest the use of networking as memory assistants, better than a shopping list or calendar; boy I’d like to check all my music gigs at a glance instead of threading my way through a couple of months’ worth of a traditional calendar. So I have taken my PowerPoint on Networks, destined to become the third article in my Beginner’s series, and updated it with some of Göktuğ’s slides and some of Carley’s and a couple on the food-web destabilization of dinosaurs (Scientific American), on a network of philosophers (Nodus), an evaluation of psychotherapies (Barth et al. in Plos). These beefed up my PowerPoint in time for, at this writing, a presentation in Rome in early December. For anyone wishing copies of my papers or PowerPoints on this subject, I can put you on share in my DropBox. Send requests to fredericck...@gmail.com, or try finding them on Academia.edu or ResearchGate where I park a few things. This illustrates with one example, the kinds of value that I, and I suspect, others, can find in continuing with the Winter Chaos Conferences. It is hard for me to get or remember sufficient details from presentations, live or Skyped, so Göktuğ and I swapped articles and PowerPoints introducing me to his analytics and possibly motivating him to report integrative/global network measures in addition to centrality ones. I also swapped with Jeff and hope to learn research strategies from his work as well, just as I find Linda’s writings to be of exceptional value, especially at integrating complexity thinking with governance practices.
Linda and I will be discussing the possibilities for the future, and invite other to join in with us.
Enrico Wensing
thanasis...@gmail.com
