Editorial

Citation

Rudall, B.H. (1999), "Editorial", Kybernetes, Vol. 28 No. 6/7. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.1999.06728faa.001

Editorial

None of the papers presented in this issue are "single discipline" contributions; on the contrary, each one exhibits the use of many of the multi-faceted methodologies and strategies that make the fields of cybernetics and systems truly both multidisciplinary and also transdisciplinary. We were fortunate to persuade Professor Raul Espejo to allow us to publish a paper based on his inaugural lecture at the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, which was delivered earlier at Lincoln, UK. It adds to our understanding of organisations and society. It develops the idea of complexity with implications that include the constitution of autonomous units within autonomous units. No one will disagree with his comment that in contemporary societies the rule is fragmented institutions rather than whole organisations. His assessments and outlines of future research will form a basis for our future endeavours in systems research. It was also a pleasure for the Editorial Board to feature Raul Espejo in our "Cyber profiles" series, which is aimed at providing the systems and cybernetics communities with background profiles of some of our outstanding researchers and contributors to our fields. Readers will, in this the officially selected journal of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics, note that Dr Espejo was honoured by the organisation in its award to him of the prestigious Honorary Fellowship. This is an award that is restricted to a small band of distinguished scientists, including many Nobel Prize winners, who have made outstanding contributions to systems and cybernetics.

Professor Raul Espejo is quite obviously, from the detail researched for his cyber profile, not an academic who merely inhabits an ivory tower, but also someone who takes his place at the cutting edge of industry and business. This is further recognised by his involvement with the Software Viplan Learning System which is an aid to learn about Stafford Beer's viable system model (VSM) and its applications. With his colleagues Diane Bowling and Patrick Hoverstadt at Syncho Ltd (UK) he has contributed a paper published here that provides an excellent introduction to the system and a description of the Viplan method. Readers will already be familiar with the VSM as a tool to model an organisation's structure and this contribution will provide an insight into a software system that has been designed to support its application.

No current review of research should be without a discussion of pansystems and we are grateful to our associate editor, Professor Wu Xuemou and his colleague Dr Guo Dinghe of the People's Republic of China, for compiling both an introduction and current "state-of-the-art". The framework, methodology and development of pansystems are discussed and readers will be astonished at the multiplicity of applications and involvements that are currently being pursued. In a sequel to his presentations on the arousability theory of intelligence and personality, Dr Uri Fidelman (Israel) examines neural transmission errors, cerebral arousability and hemisphericity and considers some relations with intelligence and personality. This is an ongoing research programme and the discussions between Dr Fidelman and a fellow researcher Dr D.L. Robinson through the pages of this journal have already been a source of great interest worldwide.

There is no better example of a transdisciplinary research programme than that led by Professor Yves Cherruault of MEDIMAT, Universita Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris VI, France. His team have produced many new and important approaches to what we would call biocybernetics. There is no constraint on the methodologies from any field that will be employed to "break down the frontiers of science". This is illustrated in the paper published in this issue, which has embraced neural networks for modelling an important process of transcriptional control in eukaryotic cells. This is a key activity in research in genetic molecular biology.

Applying cybernetics and systems in the stock markets of the world is but another example of the novel and unusual approaches that can be taken to current activities in the world's capital markets. Professor Ralf Ustermark and his fellow researchers provide a fascinating study in their contribution about what happens when an "interest shock" occurs in the market. They outline a neural network model, for example, in which the complicated response patterns can be observed.

We are glad to be able to encourage a new researcher to this journal who shows the initiative of taking a systems approach to some of the problems of explaining the phenomenon of biological structures in the universe. Andrey Kuskov is a Russian "freelance" researcher and a product of what appears to be a new and exciting breed of scientists now ready to exchange their ideas with us.

Professor Masudul Choudhury of the School of Business at the University College of Cape Breton (Canada) and currently visiting the King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (Saudi Arabia) presents a philosophico-mathematical theorem on the unity of knowledge. His comprehensive discourse relates to a world that is knowledge-centred so that any research that is designed to provide an analytical approach at the methodological level is particularly welcome.

Sociocybernetics is well represented in the wide-ranging contributions by Colin Dougall (UK), Guohua Bai and Lars-Ðke Lindberg (Sweden), and also by Frans Birrer (The Netherlands), together with a contribution by Akira Ishikawa (Japan). This exhibits the growing importance of the active sociocybernetics research groups that meet worldwide.

Finally, in our research communications section, three contributions are presented that provide some indication of the current interest in cybernetics and systems topics. The first describes a simulation model concerned with a real application in the aerospace manufacturing sector (J. Hoyt and Faizul Huq, USA), while in the second, Drs Edward and Madonna Lee (USA) provide algorithms for generating the generalised gray codes (GGCs), which have useful applications in implementing special fuzzy threshold or symmetric functions.

The remaining research communication is contributed by Andrey Kuskov (Russia) about his research that led to the production of his systems approach to problems in the universe published in this issue.

Needless to say, this special issue is but representative of the great number of research projects and programmes that are being carried out worldwide. They are indeed but the tip of the iceberg that is symbolic of research endeavours in systems and cybernetics.

B.H. Rudall