After what seemed like an endless Winter, the Northern Hemisphere of Earth will in fact experience a Vernal Equinox on MAR 20th and the Spring will begin! And a couple of days later, the Snowflakes will meet for the 22nd time...but this will not be like ANY of the previous 21 times. Here's why...
Anatomy of #BRAINSTORM2014
Unlike previous Winter Chaos conferences, we are bypassing the standard format of solo presentations and feedback for a more convergent one-day, all-in, fur on the walls discussion of both the future direction and focus of this group. A generation ago, the Winter Chaos conferences were a pioneering effort designed to harvest the ideas of leading edge thinkers in a unique and open setting. People from very different disciplines could witness (many for the first time) how vast the implications were for the study, experimentation, analysis, and research on dynamical systems. It was inspiring to see how many fields could benefit from this emerging science.
The price for expansion is scrutiny. Somewhere in the last decade or so, the transition from theory to application became more and more the emphasis. As science itself is undergoing the same self-reflexive inventory, the Snowflakes are at the point where the mirror must be faced collectively. So that's the backdrop of this year's meeting. Who are we? What are the principles we share? How do we convert those overlaps into something that will keep us connected and organized year-round? As you'll see in the featured attendee's profiles, the questions we're asking the group are as divergent as the people asking them. The hope is that we use the Springfield meeting as a starting point to begin to redirect our energies on a path that we can galvanize as we head for WC 23 in '15.
Featured Attendees
We asked all our attendees to answer three questions. One was just their bio information. One was about their current application of dynamical systems, what's their pet project this year? And the last one was to find out what was puzzling them about their work or their field in general that the group could help them resolve or at least loosen the jar for them. Here's the feedback we got on those...
Dr Robert M. Eldridge
Professor, Economics and Finance
Southern Connecticut State University
School of Business, Room 007
501 Crescent St.
New Haven, Conn., 06515
Telephone: 203.392.5628
Robert Eldridge is Southern Connecticut State University's finance and treasury program director.He's taught at undergraduate and graduate levels and previously served 24 years as a supply corps officer in the U.S. Navy, specializing in finance.He earned a B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy, and his M.S. and D.B.A. in finance from The George Washington University. Bob is currently studying studying chaos in asset markets and trends in asset price modeling. Machines can move markets faster than the mind of man can comprehend/react/interject. He also recently read a paper recommended by Ted Hoppe on Black Swan events and ultrafast machine ecology that he will include in his comments on asset markets.
Ted is studying neuroscience and he's interested in the a dynamical systems approach to human interactions. He's currently attending lectures and discussion at the U of Vermont Complexity Center. He's interested in learning what the group thinks about applying the fractal nature of complex adaptive systems to relevant aspects of quality of life and social well-being.
Frank's focus this year is 'The Great Attractor ' which he contends is happiness. Pascal says: "All men seek happiness. This is without exception ... This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves." His challenge for the group is to find a the third way there without the polarities of good and evil using self and consciousness as fundamental properties of what is. This has been an ongoing topic our Google Group for those interested in contributing to that discussion.
Rick Paar
Professor of Psychology
BS, Springfield College, 1972
MEd, Idaho State University, 1973
PhD, United State International University, 1980
Rick's work focuses on how i/we make sense in a universe that is infinite (all the way up, all the way down, all the way in every direction. One problem,,,,in such a universe there might not even be and up or down or direction or time or, hell, a me or you or any-thing. His project this year involved getting the assistance of two colleagues to put on a meeting of 200 springfield college faculty and 50 stakeholders from the city of springfield (congressman, mayor, city councilors, us marshal, greenspace people, health and nutrition specialists, early ed specialists, regional development people, business people...). The meeting was held at the museum of Springfield history and had ten "conversation" groups: media, public safety, early ed, health, downtown business, regional development, greenspace, housing, and the arts. The event went very well and the groups operated with a self-organizing principle which allowed for some creative ideas to emerge. His riddle for the group to discuss is the universe is infinite , isn't a leap to say that "things" don't exist in and of themselves. So how do i/we manage to create things?
Roulette Wm. Smith, Ph.D. - Director
Institute for Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Studies
P. O. Box 60846
Palo Alto, CA 94306 USA
(650) 493-0200 Voicemail only
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/roulette-wm-smith/8/ab9/255
Email: najms@postgraduate-interdisciplinary-studies.org
Email: najms@humanized-technologies.com
Stress appears to be a major cause of many cancers and their metastases ... as well as other diseases, disorders and conditions. A process of autovirulence that I discovered in 1983 and 1984 (i.e., in relation to my research on HIV/AIDS) appears to play an etiologic role. To wit, stress can activate one or more common viruses (e.g., the Epstein-Barr virus [EBV] and selected adenoviruses) that, in turn, release transmissible and infectious viral small RNAs (dubbed autovirions) that then interfere with host transcription and translation. The epigenetic byproducts (GERRs) subtend a myriad of downstream molecular consequences. Indeed, I now have documented more than 150 EBV-associated conditions, thereby putting to rest claims that common viruses cannot cause uncommon conditions. Some WC Snowflake conferees may recall me having mentioned working with a young Lebanese woman with cancer. There were two quite unusual outcomes of this collaboration. Research on these downstream consequences and reverse engineering of etiologies/causes is the EASY problem ... if we parody David Chambers' "hard problem of consciousness." Our HARD problems are to understand precise mechanisms of stress (including possible individual differences) and ways of relieving stress.
What are some of the issues? Is there a phenomenon of luck? Who is/are lucky? Are there any synchronicity issues - ala Carl Jung (e.g., "karma" among clients, merchants, vendors, gaming technologies, time of day et al.)? What are appropriate models of luck, synchronicity and stress-relieving gaming ... and abuses in gaming? What technological products might be beneficial for gamers? My cancer patient-friend provides another lesson. My research suggests that the onset of conditions giving rise to her cancer date back to the 1975 Lebanese civil war. She was born in 1952. At 23 years old in Beirut, she single-handedly saved her parents and 6 siblings from near-certain death by ushering them out of Lebanon to Europe and the USA ... and despite the loss of her family's upper-class fortune. Her cancer diagnosis did not occur until 2003. I have seen comparable situations associated with Kurds who were exposed to and survived Saddam Hussein's 1988 Halabja gas and chemical attacks. Prudently, we should now study potential unanticipated long-term consequences of the conflagration (as in Syria) and in other stress-associated sites around the world. With this in mind, I believe there is a need for anticipatory medicine and epidemiology, and, most important, models of dynamical systems, non-linear dynamics and chaos associated with unanticipated long-term downstream medical and epidemiological consequences.
Regarding WC 22, I therefore welcome discussions on applications fuzzy sets and logics, and non-standard scales of measurement in research on dynamical systems ... and especially non-linear dynamics and chaos theory. My cancer patient-friend (and many other cancer patients) constantly seek ways of purchasing cancer relief. Fortunes are spent and lost pursuing "alternative" and "complementary" therapies. It is not uncommon to find persons with cancers purchasing lottery scratcher tickets as a means of hope and, I have found, stress relief. I then realized that a study of luck and synchronicity could have significance not only in cancer research, it also could provide new insights in transpersonal psychology.
Featured Contributors
We had a lot of people who sent us their best wishes but did not get us their survey to us in time. We'll take a moment to mention their work and discuss some of their core ideas as they relate to ours here at the WC 22. We did receive some feedback from one distant and honary Snowflake...
Dan Winter Dan is most known as a teacher of Sacred Geometry and Coherent Emotion. His inventions, HeartTuner and BlissTuner, have earned him literary credit (book:'Instinct to Heal') for inventing the term Heart Coherence. Discovering the harmonic content of compassion in EKG and bliss - even enlightenment in EEG - lead him to a radical new physics: that IMPLOSION - the electrical - geometry of fractality- is the cause BLISS - as it is the cause of gravity in general - and the destiny of DNA in particular. He participated in the 2010 Coherence Coherence as well. FYI, his contributor page is archived here... http://www.somaspace.org/danwinter2010coco.html
He has a new published paper in 2013 by the General Science Journal... Compression, the Hydrogen Atom and Phase Conjugation http://fractalfield.com/mathematicsoffusion/
It shows the phase conjugate origins of all negentropic centripetal forces which proves that phase conjugation is the climax form of wave coherence. For more on the math behind these and other topics, visit http://goldenmean.info/coherencefractalfield.com/coherence
Alan Bachers was forced to forego attending due to a teaching responsibility. He submitted this post for us to consider. He will effort to join us for the afternoon session and/or the group dinner on SAT night.
Alan Bachers, PhD, Director
Neurofeedback Foundation
32 Elizabeth Street
Northampton, MA http://www.neurotribe.com/trainers-1/alan-bachers-ph-d
For several decades I have been immersed in neurofeedback as a training environment to propel each nervous system showing up to train, along their idiosyncratic evolutionary trajectories. Many of these trajectories now replicate Kurzweil's Singularity curve. Results so far have been typical for non-linear systems allowed to potentiate themselves with surprisingly robust results across the entire range of human experience. Neurofeedback flips intervention from something done TO someone, to eliciting the inherent NLD capacities within each nervous system, eager to participate in its own evolution by looking into a mirror at what it is doing right now.
I'd like to discuss startling, if anecdotal, telomere results from someone (myself) who has done over a thousand neurofeedback sessions. I have a 15 minute talk tying all this together, leading to a citizen scientist study I have proposed on http://genomera.com
Pre-WC 22 Reading
Aside from the profiles of the people highlighted here, everyone attending should at least have read through the two papers that we'll discuss at the conference late SAT morning. They represent the extremes of a continuum that we'll use in the afternoon session. It will save a ton of time if we all show up prepared to have that conversation. Same goes for my WC 22 proposal. Please take a moment and get familiar with it before the afternoon session begins. Again, it'll save a lot of time.
Saturday Conference Schedule
Once we're all settled in at Locklin Hall (see the map below)...here's a brief overview of the day. The morning session will be devoted to using the principles of dynamical systems to find common themes in the CONTENT of what our attendees present. In sense, what orders chaos? The afternoon session will focus on how we as the Snowflakes can operate as a group year round. I'll be making a formal proposal to the group which will serve as the proverbial fork in the road as we go forward. The conversation will continue with an informal and lively dinner on SAT night at a location TBD.
9:00am - Opening Remarks...ground rules...morning session schedule
9:05am - Fred Abraham - WC 22 mood-setting introduction
9:10am - Roll Call of all attendees
9:15am - Featured Attendees Questions & Answers Session
*Bob Eldridge
*Ted Hoppe
*Frank Mosca
*George Muhs
*Rick Paar
*Roulette Smith
10:15am - Featured Contributors Questions & Answers Session
*Alan Bachers
*Dan Winter
10:30am - Break
10:45am - Open Discussion of Featured Research Papers
5:00pm - WC 22 Conclusion - MAR '14 Conference Call Date & Time Set
Post WC-22 Follow-Up
We'll discuss several formats but the one I'd like to explore is a conference call slated for 9:00pm ET on THURS, MAR 24th. We'll review the conversation we had in Springfield and let people who couldn't join us add their ideas to it. I'll also have my chat room open for people to text each other during the call. The whole thing will serve as a field test for what I'd like to see become a monthly interaction as we ramp up to WC 23. Details for this and other Snowflake activities will be e-mailed.
Contact Information
Most of the out of towners will be staying at the Hilton Gardens near the Basketball Hall of Fame. Our contact person there for the WC 22 group is Danielle at (413) 886-8009. If you need to reach me before FRI, MAR 21st call my office at (914) 833-3388 or e-mail me at addchiro@mindspring. On FRI, I'll be accessible by e-mail until mid-day and then by my cell phone (914) 316-5783. The plan is to arrive at the hotel around 6:00pm on FRI night. I'll send out a group e-mail detailing our optional meet-up on FRI evening. That should get us all to town.
As far as the festivities on SAT, I'd point everyone to Rick Paar. The conference will be held at Springfield College - Locklin Hall, Room 105. We want to start promptly at 9:00am so please try and get there around 8:30am or so. Contact Rick directly at rickpaar@comcast.net with any logistical questions. The pic below is linked to the campus map proper. Watch your e-mail for any last minute details. Travel light to Springfield everyone. Show up ready to knock heads all day...fair warning! ;)
