Emergy Webinar 1.0 - watch here
Using a Systems Thinking stock-and-flow approach in the description of biomedical systems
May 13, 2022 @ 10:00AM EST (2:00PM GMT)
The basic idea is to introduce the analysis founded on stock-flow systemic diagrams in the study of biomedical systems. We are interested in those diseases whose evolution and behaviour remain still unexplained by the conventional clinical descriptions, as well as by more recent -omics approaches. In particular, several incurable diseases (blood cancer forms, self-immune diseases) exhibit systemic patterns and systemic features that cannot be framed into conventional local cause-effect chains, as is typical in the reductionist approach of both biology and medicine. In our approach, the disease itself is considered a complex system, whose behaviour depends – at different hierarchical time scales – on the presence of a feedback network that includes healthy parts of the microenvironment. In this scenario, therapies and clinical responses are treated as external drivers that force the disease as a system to change its configuration. In this way, the plasticity of some incurable forms of cancer may be described as a systemic resilience in terms of the capacity of rearranging itself. The purpose of the research is first to describe the disease dynamics, setting up a set of coupled differential equations to build a computer simulator. This should allow to study and possibly predict the evolution of the disease starting from clinical data for the involved variables (stocks) and parameters, as well as to point out possible systemic leverage points for intervening. This novel approach should eventually address the use of energetic common units such as emergy, also considering the astonishing level of knowledge reached by biology in the reductionist description of what happens at the cell level.
Emergy Webinar 2.0
Information and Emergy: What Did Odum Intend?
1st round - June 10th 2022 @ 9:00 AM EST (1:00 PM GMT) - watch here!
2nd round - June 17th 2022 @ 08:50 AM EST (12:50 PM GMT) - watch here!
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Over two years and a deep dive into Odum’s writings on the topic of ‘information’, I have written three papers, coming at the topic from different directions. I wish to share what I have learned with the emergy community. The first paper is a review of Odum’s theoretical position on information, what it is, and what it does. That paper then connects Odum’s information and his Fifth Law Hierarchy Principle to my continuing development of a hierarchy of cultural information forms. The second paper looks exclusively at Odum’s application of emergy to information. It reviews all of Odum’s information emergy studies to extract a number of evaluation principles that he developed over time. It then applies those principles in a new emergy analysis of one of the scales of cultural information production, duplicating several of the approaches that Odum established. The third paper is addressed to exploring Odum’s ‘structural life cycles’ approach to the information cycle, an approach that I now feel is superior to his first efforts in 1996. That method is demonstrated with Odum’s analysis of Texas Highways. In total, this talk should give you an ‘Odum overview’ of an extremely important topic in the world, the production and reproduction of information. Today, we know these information forms as social media, scientific research, movies, games, sacred texts, money, military tactics and technologies, laws, and others, each that ‘feeds-back control’ to shape all of our lives.