After the holidays

Well, a conference and holidays and before you know it a month has passed!
The conference was a good one. KGCM 2008 in Orlando, Florida on Knowledge Generation, Communication and Management aims to bring researchers together from Systems Theory, Cybernetics and Engineering, but attracted a much more diverse audience.My own presentation was on the last day of the conference in the afternoon, but luckily I ended up talking to a larger audience than just my wife. I had written a somewhat abstract methodological article called "Complex Systems and Patterns" where I aimed to argue that we can research complex systems by expanding the classical -but very successful- paradigms of (general) systems theory (GST) with the paradigms of (design) patterns. However, this synthesis requires a number of changes on the base premises of GST that would need careful consideration. Most notably, I consider that our everyday notion of information to be fundamentally incorrect. The idea of information as a package that can be transported from a sender to a receiver is only possible when both the sender as the receiver already know how to intepret the message. Basically only patterns are communicated and this can be reconstructed into information when the receiver has the means to perform the reconstruction. Information -in the sense of its classic meaning of 'having taken up form'- therefore denotes a relationship between availability (of pattern) and acceptability (of the receiver). Only if these two conditions are met, then pattern can become information. This notion correlates very much with an embodied notion of information that coincides with the pioneers of the second cybernetic wave (see Katherine Hayles' "How we Became Posthuman") but also the work of Niklas Luhmann reflects this.
I think that my presentation went quite well, and managed to make the abstract story a bit more understandable. the only thing that I regretted later is that I missed an opportunity to give a very simple advice afterwards that could immediately make clear how patterns can be used to improve cross-disciplinary scientific communications, therefore I'll just do that over here...

It is really quite simple,

If you are preparing an article and you're adding a table, drawing or schematic to elucidate the point that you're making, just take a moment to reflect if this table or schematic is specific for your work, or if it looks like something you've seen or read before. For in that case you might have found a pattern!
I often find myself finding patterns in popular scientific books on topics that are not quite related to my own research, in which I suddenly see a graph or description that resembles something I read elsewhere, and in which the equivalence seems to go beyond that of an analogy. Now I tend to yell "PATTERN!!!" when that happens...

...it makes me feel a bit like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in "Men in Black", where they scanned the gossip tabloids for the presence of aliens...