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Research

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Systems Theory

I have been researching into the common principles of engineered and natural systems and their development, collective perception and action, functions and protocols, language and other forms of representation, analysis and synthesis, organisational function and dysfunction, questions of optimisation of discipline and freedom, hierarchy, co-operation and conflict. I have been developing a new broad yet precise systems approach.

I have presented a seminar to the Department of Computational Intelligence at the University of Kent at Canterbury titled "Representation, Compositional Meaning and a Concept of Concepts" on 25th Feb 2013 based on this work. (Dr Peter Rogers is the head of the department.)

I also currently have about 400 pages of notes on the subject.

My interest in general systems came from three roots, philosophy, engineering and organisation.

Philosophy

Philosophical questions regarding the nature of human perception and understanding have haunted me since 1988 and these ideas were evolved in a text "The Blue Apple", so entitled to demonstrate the capacity of language to describe that which doesn't exist, It has since grown into other things.

Engineering

In my business there was a very practical need to bring the maturity of the electronic engineering industry, with it's clear datasheets and well defined components, into the software industry where most of the people in the industry cannot define software engineering and certainly don't practice it!

From the need to organise development projects, manage requirements, write clear specifications and good designs, sprang a text called "The Engineering Paradigm". Engineering, it states, is the putting together of systems out of components.

From this definition it became clear that the field, of what might be considered engineering, ranged across software, electronics, mechanical, civil and other traditional engineering, through to many other natural systems such as plants and animals.

Organisation

Over the years of running a business I found myself more and more absorbed in the search for an understanding of organisations and their function and dysfunction, questions of discipline and freedom and how individual objectives can be fulfilled at the same time as organisational objectives.

Conclusion

As a result of the work on "The Blue Apple", "The Engineering Paradigm", knowledge of businesses organisation and watching three children growing up I have done a lot of work directed towards understanding natural and engineered systems.

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Economics

This is the result of three months study of fundamental economics and some other collected material for people trying to understand economics. Some new concepts introduced that I have been unable to find elsewhere are;

Some other concepts that seem to be out there but are undervalued are;

Is it possible that economists create mathematical models of what are mainly social phenomena hoping for results as accurate as those of physics. In so far as the mathematics of economics, models real phenomena, it will give real predictions, and in so far as it models intuitive guesswork it will give intuitive guessed predictions. In computer terms "Garbage In Garbage Out."

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Torture

Provoked by Mosem Begg's autobiography regarding his experiences in Guantanamo, and the eternal hope in all of us that his story was simply the fiction of a deranged liar. I took the liberty of looking into the modern history of torture and besides finding that the story given in the book corresponded perfectly to all other documents on the subject that I could come by, I also found an unpleasant trail of almost mysticism that surrounded the use of torture beyond any sensibly justifiable levels. Seemingly torture and intimidation is a growth industry with the interrogation process more and more being handed out to private companies with serious violations of basic laws originally established in the Magna Carta!

I decided that the only way to counter this was with an entirely functional study. It was with considerable difficulty that I have put my distaste for the subject aside, in order to work on "The use and misuse of torture". The writing strives to be a concise functional examination of the subject.

Those concerned with the subject fall into too extreme groups, those who see torture is an uncompromising way to get results fast and those who see it as morally wrong under any conditions. My examination of the subject suggests both views are wrong.

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Mass Destruction

Prompted by the British governments discussions regarding the "updating" of the Trident ICBM system, so as to continue to give the UK government the capability of causing approximately 30 million deaths between 2020 to 2050. I began a study of the history of mass destruction, the need for it as an offensive measure against economies mobilised for war production, then the transition into a means of threat and counter threat after WWII, and the difficulty of decommissioning the military industrial complex at the time.

Examining the history of European attitudes to warfare appears to show that they have often overlooked a war's functional purpose, expressed in Sun Tzu's The Art of War (544-496BC), in favour of the more emotionally motivated approach of Carl Von Clousewitz in his book On War (1780-1831AD).

During WWII it appears that two cultures existed in the bombing fraternity. Those who believed in the Douhet's (1869-1930) principle of "demoralising the population" through mass civilian bombing and those who believed in crippling the war effort through destruction of the industrial facilities that sustained it.

During WWII and due largely to the technical failure of precision bombing these two groups could work together. However even with the advent of precision weapons, it still appears that some strategists still believe in civilian bombing despite evidence that it is far less effective than strategic and tactical bombing. To what extent is human conflict functional rather then emotional? This study has also contributed significantly to my other work on conflict.

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