Bradley Joseph Horowitz is an American entrepreneur and internet executive. He was a vice president at Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Horowitz (more)

Rival Voices: You Can’t Judge Memes. The ‘Existential Hope’ arm of the Foresight Institute is presently running a Meme Contest with a $10,000 prize. A panel of judges will evaluate entries based on things like their “virality potential.” (more)

Artificial Intelligence as fork from Cybernetics: In 1955, a summer study project at Dartmouth College was proposed by John McCarthy (with Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon, who is said to have proposed it)... The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it... Attendees at the Dartmouth summer project included: W. Ross Ashby, Alex Bernstein, Julian Bigelow, Tom Etter, John Holland, Donald Mackay, John McCarthy, W.S. McCulloch, Marvin Minsky, Trenchard More, John Nash, Allen Newell, Abraham Robinson, Nathanial Rochester, Arthur Samuel, David Sayre, Oliver Selfridge, Claude Shannon, Kenneth R. Shoulders, Herbert Simon, and Ray Solomonoff, who gave us the most complete record of the workshop proceedings. The absence at the Dartmouth Summer Project of the pioneer of cybernetics, MIT's Norbert Wiener, was most conspicuous. The conference proposal deliberately did not mention cybernetics. That was the basis of the famous Macy Conferences, which ran from the mid 1940's to around 1960, and included several of the AI pioneers mentioned above. McCarthy wanted to avoid discussions of simple automata theory. By avoiding cybernetics, which focused on analog feedback, it meant he also avoided debates with the powerful Wiener... McCarthy thought mathematical logic should be the basis for the new field. His slogan was "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." (more)

Artificial Intelligence (more)

Stuart Alan Kauffman (born September 28, 1939) is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He was a professor at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Calgary. He is currently emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute for Systems Biology. He has a number of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Wiener Medal. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as discussed in his book Origins of Order (1993). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman (more)

Talcott Parsons (December 13, 1902 – May 8, 1979) was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in sociology in the 20th century.[17] After earning a PhD in economics, he served on the faculty at Harvard University from 1927 to 1973. In 1930, he was among the first professors in its new sociology department.[18] Later, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons

Systems theory is a transdisciplinary approach that abstracts and considers a system as a set of independent and interacting parts. The main goal is to study general principles of system functioning to be applied to all types of systems in all fields of research. As a technical and general academic area of study it predominantly refers to the science of systems that resulted from Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory (GST), among others, in initiating what became a project of systems research and practice. Systems theoretical approaches were later appropriated in other fields, such as in the structural functionalist sociology of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory (more)

Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (19 September 1901 – 12 June 1972) was an Austrian biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory (GST). This is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics and other fields. Bertalanffy proposed that the classical laws of thermodynamics might be applied to closed systems, but not necessarily to "open systems" such as living things. His mathematical model of an organism's growth over time, published in 1934,[1] is still in use today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Bertalanffy

Management cybernetics is concerned with the application of cybernetics to management and organizations. "Management cybernetics" was first introduced by Stafford Beer in the late 1950s and introduces the various mechanisms of self-regulation applied by and to organizational settings, as seen through a cybernetics perspective. Beer developed the theory through a combination of practical applications and a series of influential books. The practical applications involved steel production, publishing and operations research in a large variety of different industries. (more)

Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causal[1] processes such as feedback and recursion, where the outcomes of actions return as inputs for subsequent actions.[2][3] It is concerned with general principles that are relevant across multiple contexts,[4] including engineering, ecological, economic, biological, cognitive and social systems and also in practical activities such as designing,[5] learning, and managing. Cybernetics' transdisciplinary[6] character means that it intersects with a number of other fields, resulting in a wide influence and diverse interpretations. (more)

Gordon Brander: Self-Organizing Ideas. Organizing ideas through sheer force of will is difficult, and I am lazy. Luckily there may be another way. Given the right mechanisms, the right conditions, and enough energy and time, a system can self-organize. (more)

A thermostat is a regulating device component which senses the temperature of a physical system and performs actions so that the system's temperature is maintained near a desired setpoint... A thermostat operates as a "closed loop" control device (negative feedback), as it seeks to reduce the error between the desired and measured temperatures. Sometimes a thermostat combines both the sensing and control action elements of a controlled system, such as in an automotive thermostat. The word thermostat is derived from the Greek words θερμός thermos, "hot" and στατός statos, "standing, stationary". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermostat

Perceptual control theory (PCT) is a model of behavior based on the properties of negative feedback control loops. A control loop maintains a sensed variable at or near a reference value by means of the effects of its outputs upon that variable, as mediated by physical properties of the environment. In engineering control theory, reference values are set by a user outside the system. An example is a thermostat. In a living organism, reference values for controlled perceptual variables are endogenously maintained. Biological homeostasis and reflexes are simple, low-level examples. The discovery of mathematical principles of control introduced a way to model a negative feedback loop closed through the environment (circular causation), which spawned perceptual control theory. It differs fundamentally from some models in behavioral and cognitive psychology that model stimuli as causes of behavior (linear causation). PCT research is published in experimental psychology, neuroscience, ethology, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, robotics, developmental psychology, organizational psychology and management, and a number of other fields. PCT has been applied to design and administration of educational systems, and has led to a psychotherapy called the method of levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_control_theory (more)

aka Statistical Process Control

Lorin Hochstein: Poor Deming never stood a chance. The two management giants of the mid-twentieth century were Peter Drucker and W. Edwards Deming... it was Drucker that proved to be more influential in America. (more)

Deming talk: Does anybody give a hoot about profit? On the afternoon of 11 July 1990, Dr W Edwards Deming gave a short presentation to some 25 executives from major European companies. This article provides an edited transcript of that presentation and the subsequent Question and Response Session. The presentation was structured around Dr Deming’s paper “A System of Profound Knowledge” (May 1990). (more)

Product Quality guru http://deming.eng.clemson.edu/ (more)

Tabstack by Mozilla: Extract web data and automate browsers, no scraper required. Tabstack gives AI agents and apps finished output from the live web in a single API call. Extract structured data to a schema you define, convert pages to Markdown, run cited multi-source research, and automate browser tasks. Every call returns exactly what you asked for. Built for developers shipping autonomous agents and those adding web interaction to an existing app or stack. Built by Mozilla, with ephemeral processing, no model training on your data, and robots.txt compliance by default. https://tabstack.ai/ | https://www.producthunt.com/products/tabstack

David Siegel (/ˈsiːɡəl/ SEE-gəl) is currently chief executive officer (CEO) of Meetup.[1][2] Formerly, he was the CEO of Investopedia.[3] Siegel became a director at DoubleClick at age 25 and its chief executive officer at 30.[4] He served as the President of SeekingAlpha and a Senior Vice President for 1-800 Flowers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Siegel_(executive)

WeWork-owned Meetup brings on David Siegel as CEO. Late this past summer, Meetup founder and CEO Scott Heiferman announced his intention to move into the chairman position. Today, Meetup has announced that David Siegel will be taking the helm at the 16-year-old company.