John Mingers: Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis (1995)

23 March 2012, dusan

“This is the first volume to offer comprehensive coverage of autopoiesis-critically examining the theory itself and its applications in philosophy, law, family therapy, and cognitive science.”

Publisher Springer, Dordrecht
Contemporary Systems Thinking series
ISBN 0306447975, 9780306447976
246 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-29)

Félix Guattari: Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992–) [PT, EN, ES, IT]

8 October 2011, dusan

Guattari’s final book is a succinct summary of his socio-philosophical outlook. It includes critical reflections on Lacanian psychoanalysis, structuralism, information theory, postmodernism, and the thought of Heidegger, Bakhtin, Barthes, and others.

Originally published in French as Chaosmose, Editions Galilee, Paris, 1992.

English edition
Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis
Publisher Indiana University Press, 1995
ISBN 0253210046, 9780253210043
144 pages

publisher (EN)
google books (EN)

Caosmose (Portuguese, trans. Ana Lúcia de Oliveira and Lúcia Cláudia Leão, 1992, added on 2013-9-26)
Chaosmosis (English, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, 1995, updated on 2015-3-26)
Caosmosis (Spanish, trans. Irene Agoff, 1996, added on 2013-1-5)
Caosmosi (Italian, trans. Massimiliano Guareschi, 1996, no OCR, added on 2013-1-5)

James Gleick: The Information. A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011)

15 March 2011, dusan

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011
ISBN 0375423729, 9780375423727
496 pages

review (Freeman Dyson, NY Books)

publisher
google books

PDF (EPUB; updated on 2012-7-17)