role of p2p movement
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Open Source 3-D Printed Nutating Mixer - Appropedia, the sustainability wiki - 0 views
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"As the open source development of additive manufacturing has led to low-cost desktop three-dimensional (3-D) printing, a number of scientists throughout the world have begun to share digital designs of free and open source scientific hardware. Open source scientific hardware enables custom experimentation, laboratory control, rapid upgrading, transparent maintenance, and lower costs in general. To aid in this trend, this study describes the development, design, assembly, and operation of a 3-D printable open source desktop nutating mixer, which provides a fixed 20° platform tilt angle for a gentle three-dimensional (gyrating) agitation of chemical or biological samples (e.g., DNA or blood samples) without foam formation. The custom components for the nutating mixer are designed using open source FreeCAD software to enable customization. All of the non-readily available components can be fabricated with a low-cost RepRap 3-D printer using an open source software tool chain from common thermoplastics. All of the designs are open sourced and can be configured to add more functionality to the equipment in the future. It is relatively easy to assemble and is accessible to both the science education of younger students as well as state-of-the-art research laboratories. Overall, the open source nutating mixer can be fabricated with US$37 in parts, which is 1/10th of the cost of proprietary nutating mixers with similar capabilities. The open source nature of the device allow it to be easily repaired or upgraded with digital files, as well as to accommodate custom sample sizes and mixing velocities with minimal additional costs."
How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World - 0 views
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historical role
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horizontalisation of human relationships
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allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation
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a huge sociological shift
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new life forms, social practices and human institutions
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emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm
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ethical revolution
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openness
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participation
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inclusivity
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cooperation
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commons
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the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP.
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political expressions
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the movement has two wings
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constructive
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building new tools and practices
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resistance to neoliberalism
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we are at a stage of emergence
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difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system
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At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other.
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Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.
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peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.
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Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.
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the horizontal meets the vertical
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mostly hybrid ‘diagonal’ adaptations
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For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.
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Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas?
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In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.
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Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.
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requires a clever adaptation
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use for our own benefit
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The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,
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platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects
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without network effects, there is no ‘there’ there, just an empty potential platform.
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p2p activists should work on both fronts
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using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.
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The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.
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So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.
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One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.
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we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.
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No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.
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the p2p dynamics
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the new networked culture
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the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.
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the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs, and ignore externalities.
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we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.
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abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets
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open design community
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will inherently design for sustainability
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for inclusion
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conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing
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entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.
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The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.
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accelerated end of capitalism
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Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!
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I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.
Beyond Blockchain: Simple Scalable Cryptocurrencies - The World of Deep Wealth - Medium - 0 views
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I clarify the core elements of cryptocurrency and outline a different approach to designing such currencies rooted in biomimicry
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This post outlines a completely different strategy for implementing cryptocurrencies with completely distributed chains
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Rather than trying to make one global, anonymous, digital cash
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we are interested in the resilience that comes from building a rich ecosystem of interoperable currencies
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What are the core elements of a modern cryptocurrency?
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Digital
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Holdings are electronic and only exist and operate by virtue of a community’s agreement about how to interpret digital bits according to rules about operation and accounting of the currency.
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Trustless
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don’t have to trust a 3rd party central authority
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Decentralized
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Specifically, access, issuance, transaction accounting, rules & policies, should be collectively visible, known, and held.
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Cryptographic
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This cryptographic structure is used to enable a variety of people to host the data without being able to alter it.
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Identity
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there must be a way to associate these bits with some kind of account, wallet, owner, or agent who can use them
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Other things that many take for granted in blockchains may not be core but subject to decisions in design and implementation, so they can vary between implementations
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It does not have to be stored in a synchronized global ledger
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does not have to be money. It may be a reputation currency, or data used for identity, or naming, etc
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Its units do not have to be cryptographic tokens or coins
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It does not have to protect the anonymity of users, although it may
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if you think currency is only money, and that money must be artificially scarce
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Then you must tackle the problem of always tracking which coins exist, and which have been spent. That is one approach — the one blockchain takes.
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You might optimize for anonymity if you think of cryptocurrency as a tool to escape governments, regulations, and taxes.
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if you want to establish and manage membership in new kinds of commons, then identity and accountability for actions may turn out to be necessary ingredients instead of anonymity.
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In the case of the MetaCurrency Project, we are trying to support many use cases by building tools to enable a rich ecosystem of communities and current-sees (many are non-monetary) to enhance collective intelligence at all scales.
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Managing consensus about a shared reality is a central challenge at the heart of all distributed computing solutions.
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If we want to democratize money by having cryptocurrencies become a significant and viable means of transacting on a daily basis, I believe we need fundamentally more scalable approaches that don’t require expensive, dedicated hardware just to participate.
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We should not need system wide consensus for two people to do a transaction in a cryptocurrency
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Blockchain is about managing a consensus about what was “said.” Ceptr is about distributing a consensus about how to “speak.”
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how nature gets the job done in massively scalable systems which require coordination and consistency
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Replicate the same processes across all nodes
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Empower every node with full agency
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Hold this transformed state locally and reliably
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Establish protocols for interaction
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Each speaker of a language carries the processes to understand sentences they hear, and generate sentences they need
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we certainly don’t carry some kind of global ledger of everything that’s ever been said, or require consensus about what has been said
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Language IS a communication protocol we learn by emulating the processes of usage.
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Dictionaries try to catch up when the usage
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there is certainly no global ledger with consensus about the state of trillions of cells. Yet, from a single zygote’s copy of DNA, our cells coordinate in a highly decentralized manner, on scales of trillions, and without the latency or bottlenecks of central control.
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Imagine something along the lines of a Java Virtual Machine connected to a distributed version of Github
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Every time this JVM runs a program it confirms the hash of the code it is about to execute with the hash signed into the code repository by its developers
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This allows each node that intends to be honest to be sure that they’re running the same processes as everyone else. So when two parties want to do a transaction, and each can have confidence their own code, and the results that your code produces
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Then you treat it as authoritative and commit it to your local cryptographically self-validating data store
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Allowing each node to treat itself as a full authority to process transactions (or interactions via shared protocols) is exactly how you empower each node with full agency. Each node runs its copy of the signed program/processes on its own virtual machine, taking the transaction request combined with the transaction chains of the parties to the transaction. Each node can confirm their counterparty’s integrity by replaying their transactions to produce their current state, while confirming signatures and integrity of the chain
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If both nodes are in an appropriate state which allows the current transaction, then they countersign the transaction and append to their respective chains. When you encounter a corrupted or dishonest node (as evidenced by a breach of integrity of their chain — passing through an invalid state, broken signatures, or broken links), your node can reject the transaction you were starting to process. Countersigning allows consensus at the appropriate scale of the decision (two people transacting in this case) to lock data into a tamper-proof state so it can be stored in as many parallel chains as you need.
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When your node appends a mutually validated and signed transaction to its chain, it has updated its local state and is able to represent the integrity of its data locally. As long as each transaction (link in the chain) has valid linkages and countersignatures, we can know that it hasn’t been tampered with.
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If you can reliably embody the state of the node in the node itself using Intrinsic Data Integrity, then all nodes can interact in parallel, independent of other interactions to maximize scalability and simultaneous processing. Either the node has the credits or it doesn’t. I don’t have to refer to a global ledger to find out, the state of the node is in the countersigned, tamper-proof chain.
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Just like any meaningful communication, a protocol needs to be established to make sure that a transaction carries all the information needed for each node to run the processes and produce a new signed and chained state. This could be debits or credits to an account which modify the balance, or recoding courses and grades to a transcript which modify a Grade Point Average, or ratings and feedback contributing to a reputation score, and so on.
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By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware.
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You also don’t need to incent people to hold their own record — they already want it.
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Another noteworthy observation about humans, cells, and atoms, is that each has a general “container” that gets configured to a specific use.
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Likewise, the Receptors we’ve built are a general purpose framework which can load code for different distributed applications. These Receptors are a lightweight processing container for the Ceptr Virtual Machine Host
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Ceptr enables a developer to focus on the rules and transactions for their use case instead of building a whole framework for distributed applications.
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how units in a currency are issued
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Most people think that money is just money, but there are literally hundreds of decisions you can make in designing a currency to target particular needs, niches, communities or patterns of flow.
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Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies. They create tokens or coins from nothing
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These coins are just “spoken into being”
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the challenging task of
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ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
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Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies
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These coins are just “spoken into being”
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the challenging task of tracking all the coins that exist to ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
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You wouldn’t need to manage consensus about whether a cryptocoin is spent, if your system created accounts which have normal balances based on summing their transactions.
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In a mutual credit system, units of currency are issued when a participant extends credit to another user in a standard spending transaction
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Alice pays Bob 20 credits for a haircut. Alice’s account now has -20, and Bob’s has +20.
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Alice spent credits she didn’t have! True
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Managing the currency supply in a mutual credit system is about managing credit limits — how far people can spend into a negative balance
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Notice the net number units in the system remains zero
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One elegant approach to managing mutual credit limits is to set them based on actual demand.
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concerns about manufacturing fake accounts to game credit limits (Sybil Attacks)
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keep in mind there can be different classes of accounts. Easy to create, anonymous accounts may get NO credit limit
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What if I alter my code to give myself an unlimited credit limit, then spend as much as I want? As soon as you pass the credit limit encoded in the shared agreements, the next person you transact with will discover you’re in an invalid state and refuse the transaction.
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If two people collude to commit an illegal transaction by both hacking their code to allow a normally invalid state, the same still pattern still holds. The next person they try to transact with using untampered code will detect the problem and decline to transact.
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Most modern community currency systems have been implemented as mutual credit,
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Hawala is a network of merchants and businessmen, which has been operating since the middle ages, performing money transfers on an honor system and typically settling balances through merchandise instead of transferring money
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Let’s look at building a minimum viable cryptocurrency with the hawala network as our use case
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To minimize key management infrastructure, each hawaladar’s public key is their address or identity on the network. To join the network you get a copy of the software from another hawaladar, generate your public and private keys, and complete your personal profile (name, location, contact info, etc.). You call, fax, or email at least 10 hawaladars who know you, and give them your IP address and ask them to vouch for you.
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Once 10 other hawaladars have vouched for you, you can start doing other transactions because the protocol encoded in every node will reject a transaction chain that doesn’t start with at least 10 vouches
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seeding your information with those other peers so you can be found by the rest of the network.
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As described in the Mutual Credit section, at the time of transaction each party audits the counterparty’s transaction chain.
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Our hawala crypto-clearinghouse protocol has two categories of transactions: some used for accounting and others for routing. Accounting transactions change balances. Routing transactions maintain network integrity by recording information about hawaladar
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Accounting Transactions create signed data that changes account balances and contains these fields:
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The final hash of all of the above fields is used as a unique transaction ID and is what each of party signs with their private keys. Signing indicates a party has agreed to the terms of the transaction. Only transactions signed by both parties are considered valid. Nodes can verify signatures by confirming that decryption of the signature using the public key yields a result which matches the transaction ID.
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Routing Transactions sign data that changes the peers list and contain these fields:
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As with accounting transactions, the hash of the above fields is used as the transaction’s unique key and the basis for the cryptographic signature of both counterparties.
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Remember, instead of making changes to account balances, routing transactions change a node’s local list of peers for finding each other and processing.
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a distributed network of mutual trust
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operates across national boundaries
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everyone already keeps and trusts their own separate records
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Hawaladars are not anonymous
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“double-spending”
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It would be possible for someone to hack the code on their node to “forget” their most recent transaction (drop the head of their chain), and go back to their previous version of the chain before that transaction. Then they could append a new transaction, drop it, and append again.
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After both parties have signed the agreed upon transaction, each party submits the transaction to separate notaries. Notaries are a special class of participant who validate transactions (auditing each chain, ensuring nobody passes through an invalid state), and then they sign an outer envelope which includes the signatures of the two parties. Notaries agree to run high-availability servers which collectively manage a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) servicing requests for transaction information. As their incentive for providing this infrastructure, notaries get a small transaction fee.
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This approach introduces a few more steps and delays to the transaction process, but because it operates on independent parallel chains, it is still orders of magnitude more efficient and decentralized than reaching consensus on entries in a global ledger
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millions of simultaneous transactions could be getting processed by other parties and notaries with no bottlenecks.
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There are other solutions to prevent nodes from dropping the head of their transaction chain, but the approach of having notaries serve out a DHT solves a number of common objections to completely distributed accounting. Having access to reliable lookups in a DHT provides a similar big picture view that you get from a global ledger. For example, you may want a way to look up transactions even when the parties to that transaction are offline, or to be able to see the net system balance at a particular moment in time, or identify patterns of activity in the larger system without having to collect data from everyone individually.
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By leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity to run numerous parallel tamper-proof chains you can enable nodes to do various P2P transactions which don’t actually require group consensus. Mutual credit is a great way to implement cryptocurrencies to run in this peered manner. Basic PKI with a DHT is enough additional infrastructure to address main vulnerabilities. You can optimize your solution architecture by reserving reserve consensus work for tasks which need to guarantee uniqueness or actually involve large scale agreement by humans or automated contracts.
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It is not only possible, but far more scalable to build cryptocurrencies without a global ledger consensus approach or cryptographic tokens.
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Article written by Arthur Brook, founder of Metacurrency project and of Ceptr.
The basic orientation of p2p theory towards societal reform: transforming civil society... - 1 views
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under the ‘leadership’ of corporations and those members of our society who have access to capital.
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Despite all democratic advances, the state forms have clearly been captured by private interests.
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continuous interchange and dialogue of citizens as they determine their collective life
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everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place
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in a capitalist system, ‘civil society’ is not directly productive of the goods and services that we need to survive, live and thrive
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Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.
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democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons
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infrastructures of collaboration, which are managed by a new type of ‘for-benefit associations’
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consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons
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which are not derived or secondary from either the private or state forms.
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civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.
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democratically decide
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? our values need be expressed in every action within the matrix, not just when a 'vote' is held, in fact general democratic 'voting' should probably disappear
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the ‘common good’ of society as a whole
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The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.
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Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.
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true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.
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Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.
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Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.
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designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders
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mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.
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surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners
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ethical mechanism that subsumes profit making under the social goal of strengthening the commons.
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because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .
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A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.
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mobilization of social forces to obtain a new social contract
James Grier Miller, Living Systems (1978) - 0 views
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reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy
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General living systems theory is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones
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a space is a set of elements which conform to certain postulate
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s. Euclidean space
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metric space
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topological space
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Physical space is the extension surrounding a point
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My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstracted spaces
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Physical or geographical space
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Euclidean space
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distance
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moving
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maximum speed
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objects moving in such space cannot pass through one another
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friction
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The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving.
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information can flow worldwide almost instantly
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Physical space is a common space
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Most people learn that physical space exists, which is not true of many spaces
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They can give the location of objects in it
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Conceptual or abstracted spaces
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Peck order
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Social class space
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Social distance
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Political distance
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life space
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semantic space
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Sociometric space
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A space of time costs of various modes of transportation
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space of frequency of trade relations among nations.
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A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups.
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These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space
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Social and some biological scientists find conceptual or abstracted spaces useful because they recognize that physical space is not a major determinant of certain processes in the living systems they study
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interpersonal relations
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one cannot measure comparable processes at different levels of systems, to confirm or disconfirm cross-level hypotheses, unless one can measure different levels of systems or dimensions in the same spaces or in different spaces with known transformations among them
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It must be possible, moreover, to make such measurements precisely enough to demonstrate whether or not there is a formal identity across levels
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fundamental "fourth dimension" of the physical space-time continuum
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is the particular instant at which a structure exists or a process occurs
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or the measured or measurable period over which a structure endures or a process continues.
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durations
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speeds
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rates
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accelerations
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irreversible unidirectionality of time
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thermodynamics
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negentropy
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"time's arrow."
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Matter and energy
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Matter is anything which has mass (m) and occupies physical space.
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Energy (E) is defined in physics as the ability to do work.
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kinetic energy
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potential energy
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rest mass energy
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Mass and energy are equivalent
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Living systems need specific types of matter-energy in adequate amounts
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Energy for the processes of living systems is derived from the breakdown of molecules
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Any change of state of matter-energy or its movement over space, from one point to another, I shall call action.
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It is one form of process.
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information (H)
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Transmission of Information
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Meaning is the significance of information to a system which processes it: it constitutes a change in that system's processes elicited by the information, often resulting from associations made to it on previous experience with it
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Information is a simpler concept: the degrees of freedom that exist in a given situation to choose among signals, symbols, messages, or patterns to be transmitted.
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The set of all these possible categories (the alphabet) is called the ensemble or repertoire
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.) The unit is the binary digit, or bit of information
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. The amount of information is measured as the logarithm to the base 2 of the number of alternate patterns
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Signals convey information to the receiving system only if they do not duplicate information already in the receiver. As Gabor says:
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[The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.'
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meaning cannot be precisely measured
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Information is the negative of uncertainty.
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information is the amount of formal patterning or complexity in any system.
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The term marker was used by von Neumann to refer to those observable bundles, units, or changes of matter-energy whose patterning bears or conveys the informational symbols from the ensemble or repertoire.
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If a marker can assume n different states of which only one is present at any given time, it can represent at most log2n bits of information. The marker may be static, as in a book or in a computer's memory
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Communication of almost every sort requires that the marker move in space, from the transmitting system to the receiving system, and this movement follows the same physical laws as the movement of any other sort of matter-energy. The advance of communication technology over the years has been in the direction of decreasing the matter-energy costs of storing and transmitting the markers which bear information.
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There are, therefore, important practical matter-energy constraints upon the information processing of all living systems exerted by the nature of the matter-energy which composes their markers.
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organization is based upon the interrelations among parts.
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If two parts are interrelated either quantitatively or qualitatively, knowledge of the state of one must yield some information about the state of the other. Information measures can demonstrate when such relationships exist
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The disorder, disorganization, lack of patterning, or randomness of organization of a system is known as its entropy (S)
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the statistical measure for the negative of entropy is the same as that for information
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entropy becomes a measure of the probability
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Increase of entropy was thus interpreted as the passage of a system from less probable to more probable states.
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according to the second law, a system tends to increase in entropy over time, it must tend to decrease in negentropy or information.
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therefore no principle of the conservation of information
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The total information can be decreased in any system without increasing it elsewhere
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but it cannot be increased without decreasing it elsewhere
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. Making one or more copies of a given informational pattern does not increase information overall, though it may increase the information in the system which receives the copied information.
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transforms information into negative entropy
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smallest possible amount of energy used in observing one bit of information
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calculations of the amount of information accumulated by living systems throughout growth.
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the concept of Prigogine that in an open system (that is one in which both matter and energy can be exchanged with the environment) the rate of entropy production within the system, which is always positive, is minimized when the system is in a steady state.
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in systems with internal feedbacks, internal entropy production is not always minimized when the system is in a stationary state. In other words, feedback couplings between the system parameters may cause marked changes in the rate of development of entropy. Thus it may be concluded that the "information flow" which is essential for this feedback markedly alters energy utilization and the rate of development of entropy, at least in some such special cases which involve feedback control. While the explanation of this is not clear, it suggests an important relationship between information and entropy
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amount of energy actually required to transmit the information in the channel is a minute part of the total energy in the system, the "housekeeping energy" being by far the largest part of it
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In recent years systems theorists have been fascinated by the new ways to study and measure information flows, but matter-energy flows are equally important. Systems theory is more than information theory, since it must also deal with energetics - such matters as
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the flow of raw materials through societies
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Only a minute fraction of the energy used by most living systems is employed for information processing
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I have noted above that the movement of matter-energy over space, action, is one form of process. Another form of process is information processing or communication, which is the change of information from one state to another or its movement from one point to another over space
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Communications, while being processed, are often shifted from one matter-energy state to another, from one sort of marker to another
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transformations go on in living systems
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One basic reason why communication is of fundamental importance is that informational patterns can be processed over space and the local matter-energy at the receiving point can be organized to conform to, or comply with, this information
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the delivery of "flowers by telegraph."
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Matter-energy and information always flow together
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Information is always borne on a marker
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. Conversely there is no regular movement in a system unless there is a difference in potential between two points, which is negative entropy or information
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If the receiver responds primarily to the material or energic aspect, I shall call it, for brevity, a matter-energy transmission; if the response is primarily to the information, I shall call it an information transmission
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Moreover, just as living systems must have specific forms of matter-energy, so they must have specific patterns of information
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example
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example
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develop normally
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have appropriate information inputs in infancy
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pairs of antonyms
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one member of which is associated with the concept of information (H)
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the other member of which is associated with its negative, entropy (S)
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System
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A system is a set of interacting units with relationships among them
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.The word "set" implies that the units have some common properties. These common properties are essential if the units are to interact or have relationships. The state of each unit is constrained by, conditioned by, or dependent on the state of other units. The units are coupled. Moreover, there is at least one measure of the sum of its units which is larger than the sum of that measure of its units.
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Conceptual system
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Units
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terms
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Relationships
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a set of pairs of units, each pair being ordered in a similar way
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expressed by words
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or by logical or mathematical symbols
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operations
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The conceptual systems of science
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observer
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selects
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particular sets to study
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Variable
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Each member of such a set becomes a variable of the observer's conceptual system
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conceptual system may be loose or precise, simple or elaborate
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Indicator
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an instrument or technique used to measure fluctuations of variables in concrete systems
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Function
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a correspondence between two variables, x and y, such that for each value of x there is a definite value of y, and no two y's have the same x, and this correspondence is: determined by some rule
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Any function is a simple conceptual system
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Parameter
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An independent variable through functions of which other functions may be expressed
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The state of a conceptual system
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the set of values on some scale, numerical or otherwise, which its variables have at a given instant
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Formal identity
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variables
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varies comparably to a variable in another system
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If these comparable variations are so similar that they can be expressed by the same function, a formal identity exists between the two systems
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Relationships between conceptual and other sorts of systems
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Science advances as the formal identity or isomorphism increases between a theoretical conceptual system and objective findings about concrete or abstracted systems
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A conceptual system may be purely logical or mathematical, or its terms and relationships may be intended to have some sort of formal identity or isomorphism with units and relationships empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
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Concrete system
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a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy, in a region in physical space-time, which is organized into interacting interrelated subsystems or components.
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Units
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are also concrete systems
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Relationships
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spatial
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temporal
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spatiotemporal
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causal
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Both units and relationships in concrete systems are empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
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patterns of relationships or processes
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The observer of a concrete system
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distinguishes a concrete system from unorganized entities in its environment by the following criteria
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physical proximity of its units
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similarity of its units
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common fate of its units
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distinct or recognizable patterning of its units.
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Their boundaries are discovered by empirical operations available to the general scientific community rather than set conceptually by a single observer
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Variable of a concrete system
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Any property of a unit or relationship within a system which can be recognized by an observer
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which can potentially change over time, and whose change can potentially be measured by specific operations, is a variable of a concrete system
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Examples
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number of its subsystems or components, its size, its rate of movement in space, its rate of growth, the number of bits of information it can process per second, or the intensity of a sound to which it responds
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A variable is intrasystemic
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not to be confused with intersystemic variations which may be observed among individual systems, types, or levels.
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The state of a concrete system
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its structure
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represented by the set of values on some scale which its variables have at that instant
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Open system
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Most concrete systems have boundaries which are at least partially permeable, permitting sizable magnitudes of at least certain sorts of matter-energy or information transmissions to pass them. Such a system is an open system. In open systems entropy may increase, remain in steady state, or decrease.
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Closed system
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impermeable boundaries through which no matter-energy or information transmissions of any sort can occur is a closed system
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special case
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No actual concrete system is completely closed
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In closed systems, entropy generally increases, exceptions being when certain reversible processes are carried on which do not increase it. It can never decrease.
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Nonliving system
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the general case of concrete systems, of which living systems are a very special case. Nonliving systems need not have the same critical subsystems as living systems, though they often have some of them
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Living system
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a special subset of the set of all possible concrete systems
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They all have the following characteristics:
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open systems
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inputs
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throughputs
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outputs
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of various sorts of matter-energy and information.
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maintain a steady state of negentropy even though entropic changes occur in them as they do everywhere else
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by taking in inputs
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higher in complexity or organization or negentropy
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than their outputs
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The difference permits them to restore their own energy and repair breakdowns in their own organized structure.
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In living systems many substances are produced as well as broken down
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To do this such systems must be open and have continual inputs of matter-energy and information
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entropy will always increase in walled-off living systems
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They have more than a certain minimum degree of complexity
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They either contain genetic material composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
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or have a charter
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blueprint
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program
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of their structure and process from the moment of their origin
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may also include nonliving components.
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They have a decider, the essential critical sub-system which controls the entire system, causing its subsystems and components to interact. Without such interaction under decider control there is no system.
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other specific critical sub-systems or they have symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other living or nonliving systems
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Their subsystems are integrated together to form actively self-regulating, developing, unitary systems with purposes and goals
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They can exist only in a certain environment
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change in their environment
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produces stresses
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Totipotential system
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capable of carrying out all critical subsystem processes necessary for life is totipotential
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Partipotential system
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does not itself carry out all critical subsystem processes is partipotential
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A partipotential system must interact with other systems that can carry out the processes which it does not, or it will not survive
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parasitic
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symbiotic
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Fully functioning system
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when it
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Partially functioning system
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it must do its own deciding, or it is not a system
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Abstracted system
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Units
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relationships abstracted or selected by an observer in the light of his interests, theoretical viewpoint, or philosophical bias.
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Some relationships may be empirically determinable by some operation carried out by the observer, but others are not, being only his concepts
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Relationships
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The relationships mentioned above are observed to inhere and interact in concrete, usually living, systems
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these concrete systems are the relationships of abstracted systems.
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The verbal usages of theoretical statements concerning abstracted systems are often the reverse of those concerning concrete systems
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An abstracted system differs from an abstraction, which is a concept
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representing a class of phenomena all of which are considered to have some similar "class characteristic." The members of such a class are not thought to interact or be interrelated, as are the relationships in an abstracted system
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Abstracted systems are much more common in social science theory than in natural science.
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are oriented toward relationships rather than toward the concrete systems
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spatial arrangements are not usually emphasized
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their physical limits often do not coincide spatially with the boundaries of any concrete system, although they may.
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important difference between the physical and biological hierarchies, on the one hand, and social hierarchies, on the other
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Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms
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we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom
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intensity of interaction
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in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity
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To the extent that interactions are channeled through specialized communications and transportation systems, spatial propinquity becomes less determinative of structure.
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This is the case of SENSORICA, built on web-based communication and coordination tools.
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PARSONS
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the unit of a partial social system is a role and not the individual.
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culture
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cumulative body of knowledge of the past, contained in memories and assumptions of people who express this knowledge in definite ways
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The social system is the actual habitual network of communication between people.
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RUESCH
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A social system is a behavioral system
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It is an organized set of behaviors of persons interacting with each other: a pattern of roles.
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The roles are the units of a social system
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On the other hand, the society is an aggregate of social subsystems, and as a limiting case it is that social system which comprises all the roles of all the individuals who participate.
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What Ruesch calls the social system is something concrete in space-time, observable and presumably measurable by techniques like those of natural science
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To Parsons the system is abstracted from this, being the set of relationships which are the form of organization. To him the important units are classes of input-output relationships of subsystems rather than the subsystems themselves
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system is a system of relationship in action, it is neither a physical organism nor an object of physical perception
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evolution
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differentiation
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growth
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from earlier and simpler forms and functions
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capacities for specializations and gradients
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[action] is not concerned with the internal structure of processes of the organism, but is concerned with the organism as a unit in a set of relationships and the other terms of that relationship, which he calls situation
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Abstracted versus concrete systems
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One fundamental distinction between abstracted and concrete systems is that the boundaries of abstracted systems may at times be conceptually established at regions which cut through the units and relationships in the physical space occupied by concrete systems, but the boundaries of these latter systems are always set at regions which include within them all the units and internal relationships of each system
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A science of abstracted systems certainly is possible and under some conditions may be useful.
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If the diverse fields of science are to be unified, it would be helpful if all disciplines were oriented either to concrete or to abstracted systems.
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It is of paramount importance for scientists to distinguish clearly between them
Geno DNA Ancestry Kit - 0 views
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"a research project in collaboration with scientists and universities around the world with a goal of revealing patterns of human migration"