Group items tagged

The Energy Systems Language (right), also referred to as Energese, Energy Circuit Language and Generic Systems Symbols, was developed by the ecologist Howard T. Odum and colleagues in the 1950s during studies of the tropical forests funded by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. They are used to compose energy flow diagrams in the field of systems ecology.

I was looking at the Systems Modeling Language page on Wikipedia, and noticed this link to Energy Systems Language, by Howard Odum. It's an interesting idea ... although it brings questions to the choice of modeling languages and approaches. No model is value-free.

daviding says: If the foundation of the system is in entropy rather than equilibrium, we'll need to figure out how exchange-based societies work, and the function of money (as information, in a general theory of systems).

The specific purpose of this paper is to trace the development of entropy-related thought from its thermodynamic origins through its organizational and economic applications to its relationship to money information. That trace reveals that existing entropy measures are of states or changes in states that are caused by energy processes. We propose that entropy may as well be conceived as entropic process. The social emergent specific exchange value provides a metric by which entropic process may be quantified. The analysis connects the traditional state-oriented entropy measures to measures of entropic process in social systems. In doing so, the character of exchange-based societies and the function of money information within them are elaborated.

This 5 minute video describes the notation of Ecolanguage. At 0:25, the voiceover says "There are 25 basic symbols, but there are only 6 kinds". At the bottom of the screen, those kinds are: - Sources - Organisms - Flows - Controls - Storage - Contexts At 4:00, four symbols of context are described: - All purpose (abstract, for anything you want) - Central context (abstract, for ideas and information that a group holds in common, also used to mark the leader of the group) - Land property (the ownership of land) - Price (market transaction) Red symbols mean money, and yellow symbols mean matter-energy. The other color are only symbolic (e.g. green for green plants)

The notation of ecolanguage uses shapes and colors.

I watched the first video, and it made the U.S. social security system (mismanagement) easy to understand. Note the references: Odum, Basteson, Jantsch.

Ecolanguage introduces a few new things: (1) the use of regular motion as a part of standard grammar, and (2) the use of a visual symmetry -- the hexagonal snowflake -- to stand for an organization of any kind, at any level of nature and society. In the center, we put the ruler. Everything else is based on things which came before. By using old and new things, Ecolanguage comprises: (A) an international systems language, (B) an accelerated learning strategy, (C) an integration of important and crucial topics, and (D) a scientific philosophy, emerging from many thinkers and writers over the last century, that brings the life, social, and cognitive sciences into the same picture as the physical sciences. We put the new basics of INFORMATION and ORGANIZATION alongside the established basics of MATTER and ENERGY. Now we can represent purposiveness, intention, relationship, agreement, and belief. We can locate the position of mathematical and physical deduction within a larger picture of communication and exchange. We can indicate both analysis and synthesis, including the redundancy of parts and their transcendence into wholes. It is a picture of our perceptual framework, no matter where we look. For a fun primer on this philosophy, please watch: New Chart, for Descartes. (For the old pointers, see the following bibliography.)