In this article, I shall examine the way in which information was central to the development of cybernetics. I particularly contrast the different uses of the concept by two key participants in that development – Norbert Wiener, who argued that information was a quasi-physical concept related to the degree of organisation in a system; and Gregory Bateson, who considered information to be a proc...

This paper continues the study of the Gregory-Laflamme instability of black strings, or more precisely of the order of the transition, being either first or second order, and the critical dimension which separates the two cases. First, we describe a novel method based on the Landau-Ginzburg perspective for the thermodynamics that somewhat improves the existing techniques. Second, we generalize ...

Gregory Alushin received his bachelor degree in biochemistry from Columbia University in 2006. He then joined the laboratory of Eva Nogales to work on structural aspects of microtubules and kinetochores for his PhD in biophysics, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012. Greg then moved to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, NIH, Bethesda, as a postdoctoral fe...

Gregory Bateson was a thinker beyond disciplines, contributing not only to specific disciplines ranging from Communication to Family Therapy to Ecology, but also helping us to think about the nature of inquiry, thought and disciplinary organization. In this paper I argue Bateson was a transdisciplinary thinker, and illustrate how his work can lead us to a new approach to inquiry. I conclude by ...

A concern about large, export-orientated projects relates to the flows of foreign exchange into the domestic economy that they produce. These flows occur both during the investment phase of the project and subsequently during its operational phase, through export earnings. Foreign exchange inflows produce direct benefits for some groups, but may also indirectly harm others, through an appreciat...