Not just Norbert

Although Norbert Wiener is justifiably granted the epithet 'father of cybernetics', a number of other engineers from a control or telecommunications background also turned to areas that can broadly be categorised as cybernetic during and immediately after WW2. This paper gives an overview of some of these lesser-known technologist contributors to the emerging ideas of cybernetics.The paper is based on primary and secondary literature, as well as two interviews from the early 1990s. In Germany Hermann Schmidt, chair of the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure committee on control engineering (established in 1939) gave a talk on control engineering and its relationship with economics, social sciences and cultural aspects as early as October 1940. Winfried Oppelt, another member of the committee, also researched non-technological applications of control ideas in his subsequent career (economics, biology), as did Karl Küpfmüller (pharmacokinetics, models of the human nervous system). In the UK, Arnold Tustin developed a mathematical model of a human gun operator during the war, and then applied control ideas to economic systems in the late 1940s. The material presented here is not well known even within the control engineering profession, and is largely absent from histories of cybernetics – at least those in the English language

Cloud Computing and Virtualization: The “Entrepreneur without Borders” Workbench for 21st Century Enterprise Development

Norbert Weiner, one of the true great minds of the 20thcentury once said “Progress imposes not only new possibilitiesfor the future but new restrictions.” (1) Like Charlie Chaplinbefore him brilliantly exhibited in his marvelous silent film,Modern Times, technology must become our servant and notour master. One of the major complaints we often hear of laterevolves around just how absorbing technology has become interms of consuming our time and energy

Playing with tension:national charisma and disgrace at Euro 2012

By the time of Euro 2012, deepening tensions of nationalism and internal social struggles were developing across Europe in worsening conditions of systemic crisis. The official football ideology of UEFA conceives Euro 2012 as a civilizing platform for mutual respect and brotherhood between competing nations. In contrast, what I call Hyper-Critical Theory conceives of football competitions like Euro 2012 as part of a de-civilising ‘sports mode of production’ that necessarily produces crisis conditions, alienation and violence on a mass scale, fostering nationalism, militarism and racism. Between these polar perspectives, the figurational sociology of sport associated with Norbert Elias proposes that major international football competitions like Euro 2012 creates and dissipates contingent tensions of ‘group charisma’ and ‘group disgrace’. Study of Euronews ‘post-national’ coverage of Euro 2012 allows their explanatory adequacy to be compared. In a competition structure like the Euros no social group – players, officials, media or fans – is able to disregard entirely the field capabilities of the ‘best minority of 11’ in the serious game of exemplifying the group charisma of nations

Moral panic and social theory: Beyond the heuristic

Copyright @ 2011 by International Sociological Association.Critcher has recently conceptualized moral panic as a heuristic device, or 'ideal type'. While he argues that one still has to look beyond the heuristic, despite a few exceptional studies there has been little utilization of recent developments in social theory in order to look 'beyond moral panic'. Explicating two current critical contributions - the first, drawing from the sociologies of governance and risk; the second, from the process/figurational sociology of Norbert Elias - this article highlights the necessity for the continuous theoretical development of the moral panic concept and illustrates how such development is essential to overcome some of the substantial problems with moral panic research: normativity, temporality and (un) intentionality

Homotopical Algebraic Context over Differential Operators

Building on previous works, we show that the category of non-negatively graded chain complexes of $D_X$-modules -- where $X$ is a smooth affine algebraic variety over an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero -- fits into a homotopical algebraic context in the sense of Toen and Vezzosi

Sub-normal Solutions to Painleve's Second Differential Equation

In a recent paper, Aimo Hinkkanen and Ilpo Laine proved that the transcendental solutions to Painleve's second differential equation w"=a+zw+w^3 have either order of growth 3 or else 3/2. We complete this result by proving that there exist no sub-normal solutions (order of growth 3/2) other than the so-called Airy solutions