Kybernetes: Volume 20 Issue 2

Contemporary Systems and Cybernetics

The concern about Safety‐critical Systems highlighted in this and other publications, and at meetings and conferences in Europe and the United States has, perhaps, influenced the…

Modern Forms of Alienation in High‐complexity Environments: A Systems Approach

Felix Geyer

Alienation will be viewed as a generic term for different kinds of information‐processing problems in human individuals, viewed as autopoietic, variable‐boundary systems. Applying…

A Six‐compartment Model to Study the Kinetics of 14C‐labelled Glucose

Y. Cherruault, V.B. Sarin

The problems of absorption and elimination by an organism through its natural processes are in reality quite complicated, and can be analysed more easily in terms of general…

On the Role of Lag Selection in Minimum‐Relative‐Entropy Spectral Estimation

Rallis C. Papademetriou

The possibility of improving the quality of the minimum relative entropy spectral estimates by properly selecting the set of autocorrelation values is demonstrated. The study…

AI and the Eye — A Discussion and Review

Frank George

A discussion and review of the contributions presented at the 11th European Conference on Visual Perception by researchers working in the fields of biological vision and machine…

Communications: DBMS Metaphor for Meta‐information Systems

Z. Chen

Conceptual integration of existing information systems provides an alternative way of approaching a kind of metasystem, namely, meta‐information systems. Since various external…

A Topological Approach to Architectural Design

Wolf Pearlman

One of the neglected roles of experiment is the creation of phenomena which then become the centrepiece of theory. The belief that seminal experiments in architectural design must…

The Status of Requisite Variety

David Dewhurst

Ashby's concept of requisite variety is not a generally applicable law but a limited tautology. Attempts to regard it as an empirical truth ignore a wide class of contradictory…