Steering without Circe : attending to reinforcing loops in social systems

Relating system dynamics to the broad systems movement, the key notion is that reinforcing loops deserve no less attention than balancing loops. Three specific propositions follow. First, since reinforcing loops arise in surprising places, investigations of complex systems must consider their possible existence and potential impact. Second, because the strength of reinforcing loops can be misinferred - we include an example from the field of servomechanisms - computer simulation can be essential. Be it project management, corporate growth or inventory oscillation, simulation helps to assess consequences of reinforcing loops and options for interventions. Third, in social systems the consequences of reinforcing loops are not inevitable. Examples concerning globalization illustrate how difficult it might be to challenge such assumptions. However, system dynamics and ideas from contemporary social theory help to show that even the most complex social systems are, in principle, subject to human influence. In conclusion, by employing these ideas, by attending to reinforcing as well as balancing loops, system dynamics work can improve the understanding of social systems and illuminate our choices when attempting to steer them.

Commonly used farm disinfectants can select for mutant Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium with decreased susceptibility to biocides and antibiotics without compromising virulence

Objectives: To determine if one passage of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium in the presence of farm disinfectants selected for mutants with decreased susceptibility to disinfectants and/or antibiotics. Methods: Eight Salmonella Typhimurium strains including field isolates and laboratory mutants were exposed to either a tar oil phenol (PFD) disinfectant, an oxidizing compound disinfectant (OXC), an aldehyde based disinfectant (ABD) or a dairy sterilizer disinfectant (based on quaternary ammonium biocide) in agar. The susceptibility of mutants obtained after disinfectant exposure to antibiotics and disinfectants was determined as was the accumulation of norfloxacin. The proteome of SL1344 after exposure to PFD and OXC was analysed using two-dimensional liquid chromatography mass spectrometry. Results: Strains with either acrB or tolC inactivated were more susceptible to most disinfectants than other strains. The majority (3/5) of mutants recovered after disinfectant exposure required statistically significantly longer exposure times to disinfectants than their parent strains to generate a 5 log kill. Small decreases in antibiotic susceptibility were observed but no mutants were multiply antibiotic-resistant (MAR). Notably exposure to ABD decreased susceptibility to ciprofloxacin in some strains. Mutants with increased disinfectant tolerance were able to survive and persist in chicks as well as in parent strains. Analysis of proteomes revealed significantly increased expression of the AcrAB-TolC efflux system after PFD exposure. Conclusions: Data presented demonstrate that efflux pumps are required for intrinsic resistance to some disinfectants and that exposure to disinfectants can induce expression of the AcrAB-TolC efflux system, but that single exposure was insufficient to select for MAR strains.

Epoxide ring opening in a zinc(II) complex in water without any Lewis acid catalyst: formation of only one diastereomer out of 2

The epoxide ring in 5,6-dihydro-5,6-epoxy-1,10-phenanthroline (L) opens up in its reaction with 4-methylaniline and 4-methoxyaniline in water in equimolar proportion at room temperature without any Lewis acid catalyst to give a monohydrate of 6-(4-methyl-phenylamino)-5,6-dihydro-1,10-phenanthrolin-5-ol (L′·H2O) and 6-(4-methoxyphenyl-amino)-5,6-dihydro-1,10-phenanthrolin-5-ol (L″) respectively. Reaction time decreases from 72 to 14 h in boiling water. But the yields become less. Reaction of L with Zn(ClO4)2·6H2O in methanol in 3:1 molar ratio at room temperature affords white [ZnL3](ClO4)2·H2O. The X-ray crystal structure of the acetonitrile solvate [ZnL3](ClO4)2·MeCN has been determined which shows that the metal has a distorted octahedral N6 coordination sphere. [ZnL3](ClO4)2·2H2O reacts with 4-methylaniline and 4-methoxyaniline in boiling water in 1:3 molar proportion in the absence of any Lewis acid catalyst to produce [ZnL′3](ClO4)2·4H2O and [ZnL″3](ClO4)2·H2O, respectively in 1–4 h time in somewhat low yield. In the 1H NMR spectra of [ZnL′3](ClO4)2·4H2O and [ZnL″3](ClO4)2·H2O, only one sharp methyl signal is observed implicating that only one diastereomer out of the 23 possibilities is formed. The same diastereomers are obtained when L′·H2O and L″ are reacted directly with Zn(ClO4)2·6H2O in tetrahydrofuran at room temperature in very good yields. Reactions of L′·H2O and L″ with Ru(phen)2Cl2·2H2O (phen = 1,10-phenanthroline) in equimolar proportion in methanol–water mixture under refluxing condition lead to the isolation of two diastereomers of [Ru(phen)2L′](ClO4)2·2H2O and [Ru(phen)2L″](ClO4)2·2H2O.

Famines without shortages

We present a model that describes features common to many famines: (i) a famine may occur without a substantial decline in aggregate food availability; (ii) famines often have a very uneven impact on different groups of population; and (iii) expectations about future food markets affect current market behaviour and result in starvation for certain groups of population. We consider an exchange economy with two types of agents, food producers and non-food producers. An agent starves if his consumption of food falls below the minimum subsistence level. We show that non-food producers are more vulnerable to starvation than food producers, and may fail to survive even when the aggregate amount of food in the economy is enough to guarantee survival of all agents. In an economy with government procurement and public distribution, we show that the government policy may become unsustainable if the food producers condition their expectations about future public sales on current public stock level.

File Transfer Protocol

The discourse surrounding the virtual has moved away from the utopian thinking accompanying the rise of the Internet in the 1990s. The Cyber-gurus of the last decades promised a technotopia removed from materiality and the confines of the flesh and the built environment, a liberation from old institutions and power structures. But since then, the virtual has grown into a distinct yet related sphere of cultural and political production that both parallels and occasionally flows over into the old world of material objects. The strict dichotomy of matter and digital purity has been replaced more recently with a more complex model where both the world of stuff and the world of knowledge support, resist and at the same time contain each other. Online social networks amplify and extend existing ones; other cultural interfaces like youtube have not replaced the communal experience of watching moving images in a semi-public space (the cinema) or the semi-private space (the family living room). Rather the experience of viewing is very much about sharing and communicating, offering interpretations and comments. Many of the web’s strongest entities (Amazon, eBay, Gumtree etc.) sit exactly at this juncture of applying tools taken from the knowledge management industry to organize the chaos of the material world along (post-)Fordist rationality. Since the early 1990s there have been many artistic and curatorial attempts to use the Internet as a platform of producing and exhibiting art, but a lot of these were reluctant to let go of the fantasy of digital freedom. Storage Room collapses the binary opposition of real and virtual space by using online data storage as a conduit for IRL art production. The artworks here will not be available for viewing online in a 'screen' environment but only as part of a downloadable package with the intention that the exhibition could be displayed (in a physical space) by any interested party and realised as ambitiously or minimally as the downloader wishes, based on their means. The artists will therefore also supply a set of instructions for the physical installation of the work alongside the digital files. In response to this curatorial initiative, File Transfer Protocol invites seven UK based artists to produce digital art for a physical environment, addressing the intersection between the virtual and the material. The files range from sound, video, digital prints and net art, blueprints for an action to take place, something to be made, a conceptual text piece, etc. About the works and artists: Polly Fibre is the pseudonym of London-based artist Christine Ellison. Ellison creates live music using domestic devices such as sewing machines, irons and slide projectors. Her costumes and stage sets propose a physical manifestation of the virtual space that is created inside software like Photoshop. For this exhibition, Polly Fibre invites the audience to create a musical composition using a pair of amplified scissors and a turntable. http://www.pollyfibre.com John Russell, a founding member of 1990s art group Bank, is an artist, curator and writer who explores in his work the contemporary political conditions of the work of art. In his digital print, Russell collages together visual representations of abstract philosophical ideas and transforms them into a post apocalyptic landscape that is complex and banal at the same time. www.john-russell.org The work of Bristol based artist Jem Nobel opens up a dialogue between the contemporary and the legacy of 20th century conceptual art around questions of collectivism and participation, authorship and individualism. His print SPACE concretizes the representation of the most common piece of Unicode: the vacant space between words. In this way, the gap itself turns from invisible cipher to sign. www.jemnoble.com Annabel Frearson is rewriting Mary Shelley's Frankenstein using all and only the words from the original text. Frankenstein 2, or the Monster of Main Stream, is read in parts by different performers, embodying the psychotic character of the protagonist, a mongrel hybrid of used language. www.annabelfrearson.com Darren Banks uses fragments of effect laden Holywood films to create an impossible space. The fictitious parts don't add up to a convincing material reality, leaving the viewer with a failed amalgamation of simulations of sophisticated technologies. www.darrenbanks.co.uk FIELDCLUB is collaboration between artist Paul Chaney and researcher Kenna Hernly. Chaney and Hernly developed together a project that critically examines various proposals for the management of sustainable ecological systems. Their FIELDMACHINE invites the public to design an ideal agricultural field. By playing with different types of crops that are found in the south west of England, it is possible for the user, for example, to create a balanced, but protein poor, diet or to simply decide to 'get rid' of half the population. The meeting point of the Platonic field and it physical consequences, generates a geometric abstraction that investigates the relationship between modernist utopianism and contemporary actuality. www.fieldclub.co.uk Pil and Galia Kollectiv, who have also curated the exhibition are London-based artists and run the xero, kline & coma gallery. Here they present a dialogue between two computers. The conversation opens with a simple text book problem in business studies. But gradually the language, mimicking the application of game theory in the business sector, becomes more abstract. The two interlocutors become adversaries trapped forever in a competition without winners. www.kollectiv.co.uk

Surviving Objects

Surviving Objects (2012) is a devised multi-media practice-as-research performance based on extensive interviews conducted with my elderly mother and recorded on a hand-held device. Our conversations concern her experiences as a child refugee following violent deportation by the Soviet Army from Eastern Poland to Siberia (1941), and her subsequent route, via Persia, to a British-run refugee camp in Northern Rhodesia, where she remained for 6 years before arriving in the UK. In order to aid my mother’s reflections, our recorded conversations focus on the objects remaining from that period in her life – my ‘inheritance’. The material presence of this handful of objects is central to the ninety-minute performance. Surviving Objects constitutes my attempt to locate a theatrical form through which to root/re-route this engagement with my mother’s marginalised voice. The end-on performance haptically navigates themes of intimacy and failing memory – navigates, indeed, my constantly shifting relationship with my mother. It searches for new cross-medial pathways along which her experience, and my experience of her, can play-out. Surviving Objects involves: 1. live performance (two silent female actors handling/presenting my mother’s objects); 2. Film (two synchronously-playing, large-scale projections exploring the objects by means of a highly-magnifying macro lens); 3. Pre-recorded sound (my mother’s voice, taken from our recorded interviews, which were conducted in Polish, with my own verbal contribution meticulously editorially excised from those conversations); 4. My translation of her stories (appearing periodically as written text that ‘overlays’ - rather than sub- or surtitles - the projected imagery).

Surviving without leading: Jacques Chirac

The presidency of Jacques Chirac in France (1995-2007) was scarred by two crushing defeats: the parliamentary elections of 25 May and 1 June 1997, and the referendum on the European Constitution of 29 May 2005. As both were highly personal setbacks, since both votes were taken at Chirac’s initiative they suggest that a dominant presidential position, twice won, was twice squandered owing to a failure of leadership. This chapter argues, firstly, that the weaknesses of the presidency arose chiefly from the three decades of Chirac’s career before the 1995 election – and, secondly, that Chirac’s record of presidential leadership, though limited, is more substantial than these two major failures suggest.

Motion planning of autonomous vehicles in a non-autonomous vehicle environment without speed lanes

Planning is one of the key problems for autonomous vehicles operating in road scenarios. Present planning algorithms operate with the assumption that traffic is organised in predefined speed lanes, which makes it impossible to allow autonomous vehicles in countries with unorganised traffic. Unorganised traffic is though capable of higher traffic bandwidths when constituting vehicles vary in their speed capabilities and sizes. Diverse vehicles in an unorganised exhibit unique driving behaviours which are analysed in this paper by a simulation study. The aim of the work reported here is to create a planning algorithm for mixed traffic consisting of both autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles without any inter-vehicle communication. The awareness (e.g. vision) of every vehicle is restricted to nearby vehicles only and a straight infinite road is assumed for decision making regarding navigation in the presence of multiple vehicles. Exhibited behaviours include obstacle avoidance, overtaking, giving way for vehicles to overtake from behind, vehicle following, adjusting the lateral lane position and so on. A conflict of plans is a major issue which will almost certainly arise in the absence of inter-vehicle communication. Hence each vehicle needs to continuously track other vehicles and rectify plans whenever a collision seems likely. Further it is observed here that driver aggression plays a vital role in overall traffic dynamics, hence this has also been factored in accordingly. This work is hence a step forward towards achieving autonomous vehicles in unorganised traffic, while similar effort would be required for planning problems such as intersections, mergers, diversions and other modules like localisation.

Towards a lawn without grass: the journey of the imperfect lawn and its analogues

In much of the English-speaking world the lawn is the most common of all garden features. For arguably a millennium it has played a significant role in the landscape and during that period it has been inextricably linked with grasses. Nevertheless other plant species have accompanied the grasses and also been used in creating lawns. From medieval wildflowers to Victorian weeds, the plants that challenge the formal concept of the perfect lawn have journeyed with it but have until recently remained only small players within the dominion of grass. By the beginning of the 21st century, with a new environmental ethos permeating the garden, the long journey of the grassy lawn and its plant companions has led to the grass monoculture being heretically rethought: by removing both the monoculture and the grass.