This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I created a redirect from conversation theory to this article. Eventually, content may be split off from the Gordon Pask article to population a separate article on conversation theory. Nesbit 16:31, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
John Hi, CT and AI have much in common the main defining property is the eternality of Actor Interaction and the begins and ends of Conversation Theory. Pask helpfully, ahem, provides a table at the end of IA Theory highlighting more... The key thing is that Actors support Conversations. The details: the Uns, the Cons, the Procs, the Progs, the Aps, the Ds and Inters are do-able but the precise distinction is not always absolutely clear at first. I don't know anyone who has an intuitive grasp of all this yet. Anti-meshes, analogy and ontology meshes came as something of a surprise. Most of us thought they were implicit. Usually these things can be resolved with extreme thought. Time and again after years one finds oneself saying "Ah yes"- one comes to know as G. would have it. File:CTand AI compared.jpg There's still a lot to sort out. Hopefully Bernard Scott and Ranulph Glanville will contribute to this Edit Talk page in coming weeks. But we may need some bright PhD student to come along and sort this out. Any thoughts Paul? -- Nick Green 01:02, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
Just put up some CT graphics. If they could be inproved. Any offers from a Photoshop wizard? If anyone has a copy of Conversation Theory could they please scan the cognitive reflector pages and I will redraw for the section- unless one of you has a better idea.--
Nick Green 01:47, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
I noticed that Pask was president of the Cybernetics society. If anyone has information about other past presidents we could make a nifty succession box like the one for Lee Cronbach (past president of AERA). Nesbit 23:38, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
The cross-disciplinary prose especially with regards to physics, angular momentum and cosmology (?!) are not standard explanations in regards to these subjects. I don't know anything about the subject of this article, but I do know that these sections are not factually correct, and if the subject of this article really does advocate such explanations he is basically advocating pseudoscience with respect to those formulations. Thus I have put the totally disputed tag on this article to indicate this problem. Please comment here on how we can resolve this matter. -- ScienceApologist 21:21, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
What facts are you challenging?
Some critics have come to grief on the very idea of thoughts exerting forces, but since thoughts are thermodynamic processes they must. Cosmology and epistemology are closely related by the way differentiation in the Universe is said to have evolved. Anyway if you could state what it is you find factually incorrect I will be happy to amend with supporting references. Can I email you anywhere?
-- Nick Green 01:46, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
Writing NPOV means clearly demarcating what is Pask's opinion and what is verifiable fact. As it is, for example, there are no cosmologists that I'm aware of who take this stuff seriously even though a reading of this article would have the reader believe otherwise. -- ScienceApologist 14:59, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
You, ScienceApologist, say cosmologists would not take this seriously.
Since you can't deny that knowledge is an outcome of cosmic evolution I am somewhat perplexed by your criticism.
Pask's approach produces a wave theory of matter first suggested by de Broglie but brushed aside by the Copenhagenists (as Carver Mead points out- see refs- and see quote at end of his Wiki entry). I've just added a url to this. If you have any other arguments to submit please do. Clearly I support Nesbit who started this article. As I tried to show Pask was well known and respected in Cybernetics, the author of some 200 papers and recepient of two doctorates, by examination, and a third Sc.D. from his old college Downing Cambridge for his life's work. What he says may seem counter intuitive- but that makes it worth saying. There is much worth discussing arising out of Pask's work and I look forward any further criticism. Perhaps a look at Penrose, as ref'ed, talking about his possible new Cosmolgy might satisfy you. -- Nick Green 17:31, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
Thanks SA. Pask was influential in physics in that his remarks about Stirling Numbers of the Second kind may have inspired the formation of the ANPA group (lately addressed by JH Conway, L Kauffman and Osborne & Pope) whose aim was to explain the universal constants as the outcome of combinatorical processes- but he certainly never contributed to the cosmological literature. In an early paper to the 1961 Namur Cybernetic Congress, "The cybernetics of evolutionary processes and of self organizing systems", he remarks "The idea of Self Organization belongs to the present and imperfect search for coherence" (1.8.1). Coherence as a both a defining and dynamic process is a major theme in the IA manuscript. I hope this resolves the dispute.
Pask, in common with many cyberneticians, wanted a cybernetics that was rigorous in its interdisciplinary application. If physicisists can ever be persuaded to give up their sub-atomic particle model in favour of a wave model, as Carver Mead suggests and Penrose is leaning, he may yet succeed. -- Nick Green 19:58, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
Well perhaps one of us could remove your objection. You might like Sir Michael Atiyah's (video) Kelvin lecture to the IET (no available at present) "Solitons - A new paradigm in mathematical physics" -- Nick Green 20:57, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
I really wanted to have a discussion about the issues of how to handle this article in NPOV fashion, but that has seemed to have gone nowhere. So I'll start with a partial list of problems (which come up about every single sentence in the section I tagged):
Pask considered concepts to be persisting circular spin processes in any medium: stars, liquids, solids, gases or, indeed, brains. Is this a list that Pask provided? Is there a cite to this? Why stars, liquids, solids, gases, and brains as the list? What distinguishes them as special for Pask's "spin"?
Interactions of concepts produce learning, evolution, cosmology and, in general, self-organization lately called emergence. This is stated as fact. It's not a fact. Interaction of concepts do not "produce" cosmology nor evolution in the sense that most naturalists describe these subjects. Unless you are arguing the old materialist argument here, in which case you need to make it clear that it is the POV of whomever is making the argument.
IA is a wave mechanical theory of processes and the products they produce. Really? What is the wavelength of these processes? Does the waveform carry angular momentum? If you act the Hamiltonian on the wavefuction do you get the total energy of the form?
With further consideration it may be applicable to nanotechnology assembler design. You have a citation for this?
In 1995 Pask stated (Green 2004) what he called his Last Theorem for all forces: "Like concepts repel and unlike concepts attract". This is a good sentence and should be considered a model for the prose in this article.
Angular momentum considerations make this feasible when the origin of a co-ordinate scheme is constructed on one of the three minimal concepts. This is a consequence of the Superposition principle. This is a jumble according to the physics articles that are linked to. Is this Pask's opinion? If so it needs to be cited.
A time domain projection shows unlike phase cancellation and like phase summation in a sine wave representation. Put simply the interference, "beats" and polarization of different and similar frequencies produce the universe. Polarization has nothing to do with "phase cancellation and like phase summation". This prose in terms of physics is poorly written and doesn't seem connected to anything else in the previous paragraph. If this is a cited opinion of Pask, great. Cite him. But right now this reads like a failing response to one of my Intro Physics essay exams. I don't even know how to correct it. Even as an educator, I don't know what kind of information this sentence is trying to convey.
In their angular momentum synthesis of gravitational and electromagnetic forces Osborne and Pope independently found "like spins repel" and "unlike spins attract". Huh? Spin is different than mass, charge, etc. They are all measured with different units. If this is Pask's idea, cite it, but right now it looks just plain wrong to this physics instructor.
This approach acknowledges that an observer is a subjective participant in physics and in general. Is this in contrast to any other approach? Really, I'd love to know a physics that doesn't acknowledge an observer.
From relativity Pask found that no two concepts could be the same because of their different acceleration histories. He sometimes called this the "No Doppelgangers clause" - later stated as "Time is incommensurable for Actors". We can rewrite this sentence, I hope, to conform to exactly what Pask was saying. "Acceleration memory" is definitely a pseudoscience I've seen before, so if that's what he's advocating we have plenty of critics we can cite which illustrate the problems with this idea.
The mechanism of thought he proposed was the repulsive unfolding by braided wavefronts Mathematically, what is a "braided wavefront"?
of a concept entailment mesh into its circular component ( frequency) processes. What is a "circular component process? Because "frequency" is just the reciprocal of the period of an oscillation.
Pask (1996) found concepts are packed to a depth of "countable infinity" when sampled with begins and ends. What does this mean? I have studied countable and uncountable infinities in analysis, but can we have a cite for this claim that "concepts" are "packed" to this "depth"? (I don't even know where one is packing said concepts).
This can be seen in the Fourier series decomposition of an observation and in a concurrent universe where everything interacts with everything else, albeit very weakly with distant objects. This sentence also makes no sense in terms of a sentence that uses concepts from physics to discuss physical ideas. A Fourier decomposition occurs when you take a signal and decompose it in phase space. One can Forier decompose anything, but this sentence does not serve as physical evidence for the previous indecipherable sentence.
After a sufficient duration of interaction (he called this duration "faith") a pair of similar or like-seeming concepts will always produce a difference and thus an attraction. Again, if Pask said this, quote it and cite it because right now I have no idea where "faith" is coming from.
At this point I hope you see that I have an enormous numbers of objections to the prose written in this article. It was for this reason that I didn't list specific objections because there are just so many. What I wanted first was a concensus on how to proceed in the general philosophy of reporting in this article. -- ScienceApologist 08:02, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
Every remark attributed to Gordon is either in his published work, his unpublished last manuscript or been reported in peer reviewed Journals eg like my two papers in Kybernetes. Difficulty in understanding, yes but no dissention yet! Happy to consider any specific rewriting recommendations to make things clearer. The interplay of kinematic seeming epistemolgy (the permissive condition) and kinetic Interactions can be confusing. The point about cybernetics comparing and contrasting has not appeared in print before but maps beautifully into comparing and contrasting a pair of complex waveforms which constructively and destructively interfere (or beat) which I suppose is the central message.-- Nick Green 15:04, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
Nesbit: I like the changes you have made. But I should point out you call Pask a psychologist and cybernetician. His first PhD was in psychology in 1964 according to Scott's obituary but he had been contributing to the Cybernetic literature for some years by then eg the 1961 paper "The cybernetics of evolutionary processes and of self-organizing systems", 1959 "Physical analogues for the growth of a concept" Proc National Physical Laboratory Symposium on the mechanisation of a thinking process, Her Majesty's Stationary Office and 1958 "Growth process in a cybernetic machine" Proc. Int Ass. Cybernetics. He called himself a "cybernetist" a term coined by Felgett (a Fellow of Royal Society) to evoke physical rather than the more common and euphonius "cybernetician" of, strictly, biological cybernetics. see Pask (1993)para 293 and 321. His great collaborator Scott (from whom we might hear more about the Saki, CASTE and Thoughsticker machines, P and M-idividuals for example) was a psycholgist.
With regard to physics I would be reluctant to withdraw references to Carver Mead and Penrose in that they are contemporary authorities supporting Pask's 1990s (and earlier) position. But feel free to make any changes of emphasis or style you think might improve. As an ex chemist/physicist (now IT and cybernetics- Fellow of the society since 1980 and now member of the Council) I was initially appalled when Pask spoke to me of the "atomic hypothesis" but realise now his criticism was well founded, with e.g. de Broglie (1923) and Schroedinger (1926) being the parents of this approach. SA trusts you and so do I!-- Nick Green 23:03, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
It seems to me ScienceApologist is just arguing against de Broglie et al. There is agreement about some of your criticisms but there can also be agreement-to-disagree about the importance of x or y's contribution. I am happy to say something like Pask's Last theorem awaits a proof but I will want to point at ways it might be done and relevant work of others otherwise Pask appears to be a crank which he was not.
I'll try to draw this together in coming days. I have given "knock down" arguements but you yet resist eg Fourier (where we agree the technicalities), the proton speeds (Borel and relativity to support no doppelgangers- Pask held since seventies Pask 1993 paras 82,187) and that wave mechanics (WM) produces self organization. WM is not one process in this context it is the process. Have you any other candidates? Your turn to be the suspect crank now. Then there's your remark about nobody caring about STM/Tokmak control. Then "faith" you ask for a reference, get it, and think it's politically incorrect. I may agree but that is what Pask said and why should religion have all the good words? You need faith in your hypothesis before you conduct an experiment but you can't resist an opportunity to witch hunt. These human terms aid applicability and that is what this is about to Pask as educational psychologist: Faith the time it takes for a process to produce a product (or description). What could be fairer than that? Then your response to birefringence and the anistropy implicit, incidentally, in the prismatic tensegrity force model. I sympathise with your difficulty with the "level" we are talking but we are just talking about the way waves with angular momentum interact: Pask's oscillators' "radiation" (Pask 1993 paras 84, 145, 204, 338, 326 or Pask 1996 p361). One can say he was using analogies but then so is anyone building a model and using a notation. In the end we can only improve our descriptions. Your point about Penrose not commenting on Pask is surely irrelevant and actually yes Pask does mention Penrose twice in Pask 1993.
It would help me if you could clarify your position with reference to Carver Mead's criticism of the Copenhagen Interpretation which I suspect you are determined to resist. Knowing more about you will help in keeping explanation focussed eg do you know anything about knots? I might introduce Pask's process/product complimentarity which may clarify a lot for you and others. Then we can move on to some of the technicalities eg the Fourier business and the topology questions. I might for example take the "Compare and Contrast" approach as outlined above but I want to avoid a wrangle about quantum gravity which I see looming where Pask only spoke of forces and made no phenomonological claims. If you have a Wiki respectable term to use which refers to waves that carry angular momentum please suggest it.--
Nick Green 04:14, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
Well, no one seemed to be taking my criticism seriously, so I rewrote the section to conform to a style that would be more in keeping with NPOV than the previous prose. I don't pretend that this is accurate, complete, or even free of bias. It's simply, in my opinion, a better written section that comes closer to the ideals I was espousing above. -- ScienceApologist 05:25, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
In all honesty I have to say it's not bad, but, of course I have problems with it. Clearly the **all** forces problem is one of them but a remarkable piece of work. Well done. One way out might be to use the term radiation rather than electromagnetic radiation but I'm not in love with that. Sorry you felt Carver Mead couldn't be squeezed in but I see why Wiki might think that.At least I can say you've kept much that I thought was under threat! Will think further. I've always had difficulty with the Borromean model and its attendant prismatic tensegrity. Let's hope Penrose comes up with a formal paper soon. I should probably clean up the CT section with the same style graphics you have used. Thanks. -- Nick Green 00:59, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
I should add you can take off the dispute notice as far as I am concerned.-- Nick Green 01:02, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
SA's revisions do scan better. Although I've been known to consort with them, I'm not a physicist and can't comment in an informed way on the natural science issues. There is room for further improvement in the article, especially in clearer explanations suitable for a general audience. Classification is an unavoidable part of the WP biography business. I agree, looking especially at his publication venues, that Pask was primarily a cybernetician, and then secondarily a psychologist. He did have a notable impact on instructional theory, and so I'd like to keep him in the educational psychologists category, not to the exclusion of other categories of course. Nesbit 01:54, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
SA you said to me "If the article were actually written from the tone of "Pask said this about thus-and-such" then there would be no issue and we could move on." Much is written from this perspective. I said Pask said his last Theorem applied to all forces. I have reported this twice in peer reviewed journals given two papers at conferences and discussed at various meetings-on this yet you have removed it. This is no service to Wiki, Pask's memory or physics. Why so touchy? Check out sparticles GUT etc what's your problem? He was ill for the last few years of his life and this almost has the status of a dying man's confession.-- Nick Green 23:41, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
SA I see you've also taken out the prismatic Tensergrity reference. We took these models to an address he made to the Club of Rome and consultancy he was doing for Hydo Aluminum yet because you cant see the major axes of a Borromean link are equivalent in some sense to a prismatic tensegrity and a potential concurrent computing element we are censored.These too were reported as above. Hmm. Waiting.-- Nick Green 23:54, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
Your statements about mass are wholly incorrect. Mass is not produced from waves. Rest mass energy is not in the form of a wave, though there are untested speculations about this. See quantum gravity for the problem. Since there is no theory of everything, we really don't have a good way of connecting quantum wave mechanics to general relativity which seems to be what you are suggesting Pask is doing. I disagree, I think that pask is saying that the "force" between "concepts" behave as waves as a means of analogy. He then goes on to claim that his analogy may not be far off from physics, but doesn't make any statements about physics per se. -- ScienceApologist 19:55, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
But ask what distinction needs making to make it a fully competent model? The policy of original research spell it out. Since there is no verifiable "solution" to the problem of quantum gravity claiming that Pask offers a solution is problematic. What's more, Wikczek is not the subject of this article. We should go by what Pask says. -- ScienceApologist 01:43, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
Self organization is a concept that applies to various endeavors, it is not a catch-all application that plugs in wherever you want. Wilczek, Mead, Penrose, Laughlin, Osborne and Pope are not Pask. Claiming that they represent Pask's work is original research. -- ScienceApologist 22:15, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
You cannot reference "recent work" simply because you as an editor perceive parallels with the recent work and that of Pask. That's the very reason the original research guideline was developed. That said, if you can reference a notable, verifiable, and reputable source who draws parallels, Wikipedia as a project encourages you to cite them and include them. As the article was written previously, many of the references to the interdisciplinary ramifications were based on your own interpretations rather than on the published sources that actually made the syncretic arguments presented in the article. If you disagree with this aim of Wikipedia to marginalize your original research, you can always publish your work elsewhere. -- ScienceApologist 23:10, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
Nick is correct that simply explaining and reporting on Pask's work is not original research. On the other hand, SA correctly observes that certain types of explanations can easily stray into original research. It looks to me that compromise is definitely attainable if you focus on the wording of specific sentences. First pick a sentence from the current article that you think is incorrect or does not follow WP guidelines. On the talk page rewrite the sentence in a way that is acceptable to you, and you think might be acceptable to the other. Then the other either accepts the sentence or rewrites again. After the first few sentences are done it's easier to start working in paragraphs. Nesbit 06:48, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
Well, Nick, I looked at the references you provided and could find nothing other than hearsay in support of the contention that Pask believed his last theorem applied to all forces. I really do want you to give me a direct quote of Pasks along the lines of "My Last Theorem applies to every force in the universe" to include in the article. I'm just not seeing, for example, that Pask was contending that viscous forces, for example, could be modeled by his Last Theorem. Until we have a good source for this, it just doesn't belong in the article, in my opinion. Perhaps we should start an article Request for comment or post a comment to Wikiproject:Physics regarding this. What do you think? -- ScienceApologist 22:24, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
See page 1437 in Nick's paper, where he writes "this statement is intended to embody all forces...". The obvious compromise is to insert up to two sentences following the literal description of what Pask wrote with something like the following "According to Green(2004), Pask intended this to apply to all physical forces, including nuclear gravitational, and electromagnetic forces." In my view we can sustain a sentence or two citing Nick's publications, but any more than a couple of sentences would run up against the vanity and notability guidelines This article should keep the focus quite firmly on the ideas that Pask published. There is a lot more to be done on clarifying the central and widely recognized contributions of Pask, without spending more energy on arguments about whether they had implications for theories of planetary evolution. Nesbit 22:56, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
I would be fine with the inclusion: According to Green (2004): "This statement is intended to embody all forces... which give rise to the self-organising character we see in Nature." Since we don't explain how Pask accounted for the four fundamental forces, I say leave that part of the quote out. The other suggestions by Nick I would omit as bordering too much on original research. -- ScienceApologist 19:19, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
How about: "Pask intended to apply his theorem to all forces (Green 2004). It describes periodic momentum transfers that cancel or reinforce to make concepts or "coherencies and distinctions" (Pask 1993) that evolve through their interactions." Please no more about original research -this is a deep theory about the origins of knowledge and self organisation! Obvious really.-- Nick Green 22:48, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
1. There is also no explanation for how "waves" interact with concepts.
2. This doesn't resolve the problem because "a procedure for bringing about a relation" doesn't provide definitions for "procedure" or "relation". "All media" in physics usually means anything that take up space, but in Pask's formulation this cannot be the case unless he is extending space beyond physical space which is an abstraction that prevents us from evaluating Pask in terms of fundamental physics he may or may not have been commenting on. -- ScienceApologist 21:41, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
Further note to help you understand Pask's perspective: He formulated his Complementarity Principle: Every product is produced by a process and every process produces a product. So waves produce particles. There's no crazy coexistence and entanglement of all possible states as in wave particle dualism. Carver Mead's position, roughly, wave mechanics works Quantum mechanics doesn't- he rejects the Copenhagen Interp and all its associated blind alleys becaue phase information, so vital for practical men, and Pask, is lost. But that's a debate for another day. The question is how do I explain what Pask said without the Wiki thought police getting uptight!-- Nick Green 22:56, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
IA being a wave theory is already included in the article. We cannot use your cites to conteporary wave theorists or to Penrose because those people are not Pask and don't have anything to do with Pask. You're going to have to uncompact what Pask means by "medium" if you want to include the quotes about it. Drawing comparisons between human and cosmological media is not straightforward and would not be clear to most readers. -- ScienceApologist 17:36, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
I restored parts of this article that were modified which did not conform to WP:NPOV standards. -- ScienceApologist 18:59, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Pask's theory applies to all forces and all media as a competent theory of self-organisation should. You are surpressing his work. If you have further objections from physics or the referenced works then state them as you have done before. Otherwise please restore my last edit. If you want private discussion email me at nickgreen.cyb@gmail.com. -- Nick Green 23:45, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
We have discussed this before. See our exchange of 28th June above. Why is this extraordinary? You said around 26th June above (or was it Nesbit?) "In 1995 Pask stated (Green 2004) what he called his Last Theorem for all forces: "Like concepts repel and unlike concepts attract". This is a good sentence and should be considered a model for the prose in this article." Later you said it was an analogy but to Pask who did considerable work on analogy all descriptions are analogies to a greater or lesser extent. All this has appeared in Journals before reviewed by people who know Pask's work e.g Glanville and Scott. Whether you or I agree with what he said is neither here no there. It is not original research in the Wiki prejorative sense and it is vital to make clear to ordinary people what Pask said. The point is there is no fundamental objection from physics even tho it may have grated, at first, on our intuitions. It is a matter of respectable academic record as, I hope you'll now agree I have repeatedly shown. The rest is fully referenced so please restore the edit.-- Nick Green 03:05, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Nesbit: I'm not happy that the new quote in IA meets your "general audience" criterion but if they're prepared to think and not too hide bound it is very rewarding. Ideas for cleaning up the diagrams welcome. In a talk to MIT Frank Wilczek confirms angular momentum at heart of asymptotic freedom of QCD. So that's the strong force for you. It's rather more obvious for beta decay so that's the weak force the rest follows from the very fact of Newtonian defn of force. Pity we are banned from making this clear to the general reader. So further improvements are posible but I need to think how.
I am interested in Pasks theory on metaphors, especially the definition of cybernetics as "the art and science of manipulating defensible metaphors". This quotation is generally attributed to Pask, but always misses detailed informations about the actual source. (A starting point for a search could be Pasks "An Approach to Cybernetics" (1961), but this book is hard to get in Europe.) I hope someone can give me a hint. - Armin B. Wagner 13:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm removing the Category:Cybernetics again, because persons are not to be listed such a category if there is specific Category:Cyberneticists. This is the rule. Now I can imagine that this was happened because of the mentioning in the article of:
An easy solution here is to create two separate articles, and put them in the Category:Cybernetics - Mdd 18:37, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
I've proposed merging No Doppelgangers here, since I can find no evidence of notability of that theorem of Pask; Pask himself passes notability, I think, though the evidence needs to be made clear in this article by citing independent sources about him. Dicklyon 05:41, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Since notability is not inherited, and lacking better suggestions, I went ahead and did the merge. I could probably use some checking, cleanup, refs improvement, or whatever. As to Gordon Pask, I find over 600 books mention him, compared to none in English that mention him along with no doppelgangers. Dicklyon ( talk) 22:47, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 06:54, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
Although I'm loathe to get anywhere near this discussion, I have to make one or two points, based on personal knowledge:
Pask was never appointed to a substantive chair at the Open University. I am quite sure about this because I happened to be a member of staff at the OU Institute of Educational Technology at the time. Pask was employed for a couple of years as a consultant on a curriculum project funded by the Ford Foundation (Project Leader was Brian Lewis). At that time and for many years before and afterwards, Gordon's home base was Systems Research Ltd in Richmond (which I notice is not mentioned). He also held a part-time chair in Cybernetics at Brunel, and a visiting chair at (I think) Illinois/Urbana-Champaign (
Heinz von Foerster was a close friend). The Open University may have given him, temporarily, the title of Visiting Professor.
Along with a lot of bright ideas, Gordon was full of... well, self-promotion is maybe the best way to put it. It doesn't surprise me at all that contributors have found him difficult to sort out! His prose was about as incomprehensible as it is possible to get; sentences abound 250 words long and full of special terms used by Pask alone. My advice would be to stick to the WP basics: facts verified with refs, dates, quotes with refs... It's hard work, but who says biography should be easy?
Macdonald-ross (
talk) 17:01, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
three of the Gordon Pask 'obituary' links point to the sub-domain www2.venus.co.uk which appears to be no longer available -- (www2.venus.co.uk hosted pages that were originally published by Venus Internet Ltd, both of whose directors knew Gordon Pask -- Venus Internet Ltd was sold and is now part of Venus Business Communications Ltd) Oniscoid ( talk) 10:27, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
in the list of cyberneticists?? - cyberneticians at the end, one important guy is missing, Gotthard Gunther - /info/en/?search=Gotthard_G%C3%BCnther Jpkeno ( talk) 13:17, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
I have moved the interactions of actors information to its own page, as it was dominating this biography. 86.155.99.174 ( talk) 19:56, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
I've got rid of the banner saying that it was too much like a resumee. I think I've made it less like one, but if other editors feel diffrently feel free to change it. The article still has issues, but I think it's slowly coming along. If I've done a faux pas by getting rid of the banner, please say (and my apologies if so). T. O. Manning ( talk) 18:40, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I created a redirect from conversation theory to this article. Eventually, content may be split off from the Gordon Pask article to population a separate article on conversation theory. Nesbit 16:31, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
John Hi, CT and AI have much in common the main defining property is the eternality of Actor Interaction and the begins and ends of Conversation Theory. Pask helpfully, ahem, provides a table at the end of IA Theory highlighting more... The key thing is that Actors support Conversations. The details: the Uns, the Cons, the Procs, the Progs, the Aps, the Ds and Inters are do-able but the precise distinction is not always absolutely clear at first. I don't know anyone who has an intuitive grasp of all this yet. Anti-meshes, analogy and ontology meshes came as something of a surprise. Most of us thought they were implicit. Usually these things can be resolved with extreme thought. Time and again after years one finds oneself saying "Ah yes"- one comes to know as G. would have it. File:CTand AI compared.jpg There's still a lot to sort out. Hopefully Bernard Scott and Ranulph Glanville will contribute to this Edit Talk page in coming weeks. But we may need some bright PhD student to come along and sort this out. Any thoughts Paul? -- Nick Green 01:02, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
Just put up some CT graphics. If they could be inproved. Any offers from a Photoshop wizard? If anyone has a copy of Conversation Theory could they please scan the cognitive reflector pages and I will redraw for the section- unless one of you has a better idea.--
Nick Green 01:47, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
I noticed that Pask was president of the Cybernetics society. If anyone has information about other past presidents we could make a nifty succession box like the one for Lee Cronbach (past president of AERA). Nesbit 23:38, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
The cross-disciplinary prose especially with regards to physics, angular momentum and cosmology (?!) are not standard explanations in regards to these subjects. I don't know anything about the subject of this article, but I do know that these sections are not factually correct, and if the subject of this article really does advocate such explanations he is basically advocating pseudoscience with respect to those formulations. Thus I have put the totally disputed tag on this article to indicate this problem. Please comment here on how we can resolve this matter. -- ScienceApologist 21:21, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
What facts are you challenging?
Some critics have come to grief on the very idea of thoughts exerting forces, but since thoughts are thermodynamic processes they must. Cosmology and epistemology are closely related by the way differentiation in the Universe is said to have evolved. Anyway if you could state what it is you find factually incorrect I will be happy to amend with supporting references. Can I email you anywhere?
-- Nick Green 01:46, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
Writing NPOV means clearly demarcating what is Pask's opinion and what is verifiable fact. As it is, for example, there are no cosmologists that I'm aware of who take this stuff seriously even though a reading of this article would have the reader believe otherwise. -- ScienceApologist 14:59, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
You, ScienceApologist, say cosmologists would not take this seriously.
Since you can't deny that knowledge is an outcome of cosmic evolution I am somewhat perplexed by your criticism.
Pask's approach produces a wave theory of matter first suggested by de Broglie but brushed aside by the Copenhagenists (as Carver Mead points out- see refs- and see quote at end of his Wiki entry). I've just added a url to this. If you have any other arguments to submit please do. Clearly I support Nesbit who started this article. As I tried to show Pask was well known and respected in Cybernetics, the author of some 200 papers and recepient of two doctorates, by examination, and a third Sc.D. from his old college Downing Cambridge for his life's work. What he says may seem counter intuitive- but that makes it worth saying. There is much worth discussing arising out of Pask's work and I look forward any further criticism. Perhaps a look at Penrose, as ref'ed, talking about his possible new Cosmolgy might satisfy you. -- Nick Green 17:31, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
Thanks SA. Pask was influential in physics in that his remarks about Stirling Numbers of the Second kind may have inspired the formation of the ANPA group (lately addressed by JH Conway, L Kauffman and Osborne & Pope) whose aim was to explain the universal constants as the outcome of combinatorical processes- but he certainly never contributed to the cosmological literature. In an early paper to the 1961 Namur Cybernetic Congress, "The cybernetics of evolutionary processes and of self organizing systems", he remarks "The idea of Self Organization belongs to the present and imperfect search for coherence" (1.8.1). Coherence as a both a defining and dynamic process is a major theme in the IA manuscript. I hope this resolves the dispute.
Pask, in common with many cyberneticians, wanted a cybernetics that was rigorous in its interdisciplinary application. If physicisists can ever be persuaded to give up their sub-atomic particle model in favour of a wave model, as Carver Mead suggests and Penrose is leaning, he may yet succeed. -- Nick Green 19:58, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
Well perhaps one of us could remove your objection. You might like Sir Michael Atiyah's (video) Kelvin lecture to the IET (no available at present) "Solitons - A new paradigm in mathematical physics" -- Nick Green 20:57, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
I really wanted to have a discussion about the issues of how to handle this article in NPOV fashion, but that has seemed to have gone nowhere. So I'll start with a partial list of problems (which come up about every single sentence in the section I tagged):
Pask considered concepts to be persisting circular spin processes in any medium: stars, liquids, solids, gases or, indeed, brains. Is this a list that Pask provided? Is there a cite to this? Why stars, liquids, solids, gases, and brains as the list? What distinguishes them as special for Pask's "spin"?
Interactions of concepts produce learning, evolution, cosmology and, in general, self-organization lately called emergence. This is stated as fact. It's not a fact. Interaction of concepts do not "produce" cosmology nor evolution in the sense that most naturalists describe these subjects. Unless you are arguing the old materialist argument here, in which case you need to make it clear that it is the POV of whomever is making the argument.
IA is a wave mechanical theory of processes and the products they produce. Really? What is the wavelength of these processes? Does the waveform carry angular momentum? If you act the Hamiltonian on the wavefuction do you get the total energy of the form?
With further consideration it may be applicable to nanotechnology assembler design. You have a citation for this?
In 1995 Pask stated (Green 2004) what he called his Last Theorem for all forces: "Like concepts repel and unlike concepts attract". This is a good sentence and should be considered a model for the prose in this article.
Angular momentum considerations make this feasible when the origin of a co-ordinate scheme is constructed on one of the three minimal concepts. This is a consequence of the Superposition principle. This is a jumble according to the physics articles that are linked to. Is this Pask's opinion? If so it needs to be cited.
A time domain projection shows unlike phase cancellation and like phase summation in a sine wave representation. Put simply the interference, "beats" and polarization of different and similar frequencies produce the universe. Polarization has nothing to do with "phase cancellation and like phase summation". This prose in terms of physics is poorly written and doesn't seem connected to anything else in the previous paragraph. If this is a cited opinion of Pask, great. Cite him. But right now this reads like a failing response to one of my Intro Physics essay exams. I don't even know how to correct it. Even as an educator, I don't know what kind of information this sentence is trying to convey.
In their angular momentum synthesis of gravitational and electromagnetic forces Osborne and Pope independently found "like spins repel" and "unlike spins attract". Huh? Spin is different than mass, charge, etc. They are all measured with different units. If this is Pask's idea, cite it, but right now it looks just plain wrong to this physics instructor.
This approach acknowledges that an observer is a subjective participant in physics and in general. Is this in contrast to any other approach? Really, I'd love to know a physics that doesn't acknowledge an observer.
From relativity Pask found that no two concepts could be the same because of their different acceleration histories. He sometimes called this the "No Doppelgangers clause" - later stated as "Time is incommensurable for Actors". We can rewrite this sentence, I hope, to conform to exactly what Pask was saying. "Acceleration memory" is definitely a pseudoscience I've seen before, so if that's what he's advocating we have plenty of critics we can cite which illustrate the problems with this idea.
The mechanism of thought he proposed was the repulsive unfolding by braided wavefronts Mathematically, what is a "braided wavefront"?
of a concept entailment mesh into its circular component ( frequency) processes. What is a "circular component process? Because "frequency" is just the reciprocal of the period of an oscillation.
Pask (1996) found concepts are packed to a depth of "countable infinity" when sampled with begins and ends. What does this mean? I have studied countable and uncountable infinities in analysis, but can we have a cite for this claim that "concepts" are "packed" to this "depth"? (I don't even know where one is packing said concepts).
This can be seen in the Fourier series decomposition of an observation and in a concurrent universe where everything interacts with everything else, albeit very weakly with distant objects. This sentence also makes no sense in terms of a sentence that uses concepts from physics to discuss physical ideas. A Fourier decomposition occurs when you take a signal and decompose it in phase space. One can Forier decompose anything, but this sentence does not serve as physical evidence for the previous indecipherable sentence.
After a sufficient duration of interaction (he called this duration "faith") a pair of similar or like-seeming concepts will always produce a difference and thus an attraction. Again, if Pask said this, quote it and cite it because right now I have no idea where "faith" is coming from.
At this point I hope you see that I have an enormous numbers of objections to the prose written in this article. It was for this reason that I didn't list specific objections because there are just so many. What I wanted first was a concensus on how to proceed in the general philosophy of reporting in this article. -- ScienceApologist 08:02, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
Every remark attributed to Gordon is either in his published work, his unpublished last manuscript or been reported in peer reviewed Journals eg like my two papers in Kybernetes. Difficulty in understanding, yes but no dissention yet! Happy to consider any specific rewriting recommendations to make things clearer. The interplay of kinematic seeming epistemolgy (the permissive condition) and kinetic Interactions can be confusing. The point about cybernetics comparing and contrasting has not appeared in print before but maps beautifully into comparing and contrasting a pair of complex waveforms which constructively and destructively interfere (or beat) which I suppose is the central message.-- Nick Green 15:04, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
Nesbit: I like the changes you have made. But I should point out you call Pask a psychologist and cybernetician. His first PhD was in psychology in 1964 according to Scott's obituary but he had been contributing to the Cybernetic literature for some years by then eg the 1961 paper "The cybernetics of evolutionary processes and of self-organizing systems", 1959 "Physical analogues for the growth of a concept" Proc National Physical Laboratory Symposium on the mechanisation of a thinking process, Her Majesty's Stationary Office and 1958 "Growth process in a cybernetic machine" Proc. Int Ass. Cybernetics. He called himself a "cybernetist" a term coined by Felgett (a Fellow of Royal Society) to evoke physical rather than the more common and euphonius "cybernetician" of, strictly, biological cybernetics. see Pask (1993)para 293 and 321. His great collaborator Scott (from whom we might hear more about the Saki, CASTE and Thoughsticker machines, P and M-idividuals for example) was a psycholgist.
With regard to physics I would be reluctant to withdraw references to Carver Mead and Penrose in that they are contemporary authorities supporting Pask's 1990s (and earlier) position. But feel free to make any changes of emphasis or style you think might improve. As an ex chemist/physicist (now IT and cybernetics- Fellow of the society since 1980 and now member of the Council) I was initially appalled when Pask spoke to me of the "atomic hypothesis" but realise now his criticism was well founded, with e.g. de Broglie (1923) and Schroedinger (1926) being the parents of this approach. SA trusts you and so do I!-- Nick Green 23:03, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
It seems to me ScienceApologist is just arguing against de Broglie et al. There is agreement about some of your criticisms but there can also be agreement-to-disagree about the importance of x or y's contribution. I am happy to say something like Pask's Last theorem awaits a proof but I will want to point at ways it might be done and relevant work of others otherwise Pask appears to be a crank which he was not.
I'll try to draw this together in coming days. I have given "knock down" arguements but you yet resist eg Fourier (where we agree the technicalities), the proton speeds (Borel and relativity to support no doppelgangers- Pask held since seventies Pask 1993 paras 82,187) and that wave mechanics (WM) produces self organization. WM is not one process in this context it is the process. Have you any other candidates? Your turn to be the suspect crank now. Then there's your remark about nobody caring about STM/Tokmak control. Then "faith" you ask for a reference, get it, and think it's politically incorrect. I may agree but that is what Pask said and why should religion have all the good words? You need faith in your hypothesis before you conduct an experiment but you can't resist an opportunity to witch hunt. These human terms aid applicability and that is what this is about to Pask as educational psychologist: Faith the time it takes for a process to produce a product (or description). What could be fairer than that? Then your response to birefringence and the anistropy implicit, incidentally, in the prismatic tensegrity force model. I sympathise with your difficulty with the "level" we are talking but we are just talking about the way waves with angular momentum interact: Pask's oscillators' "radiation" (Pask 1993 paras 84, 145, 204, 338, 326 or Pask 1996 p361). One can say he was using analogies but then so is anyone building a model and using a notation. In the end we can only improve our descriptions. Your point about Penrose not commenting on Pask is surely irrelevant and actually yes Pask does mention Penrose twice in Pask 1993.
It would help me if you could clarify your position with reference to Carver Mead's criticism of the Copenhagen Interpretation which I suspect you are determined to resist. Knowing more about you will help in keeping explanation focussed eg do you know anything about knots? I might introduce Pask's process/product complimentarity which may clarify a lot for you and others. Then we can move on to some of the technicalities eg the Fourier business and the topology questions. I might for example take the "Compare and Contrast" approach as outlined above but I want to avoid a wrangle about quantum gravity which I see looming where Pask only spoke of forces and made no phenomonological claims. If you have a Wiki respectable term to use which refers to waves that carry angular momentum please suggest it.--
Nick Green 04:14, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
Well, no one seemed to be taking my criticism seriously, so I rewrote the section to conform to a style that would be more in keeping with NPOV than the previous prose. I don't pretend that this is accurate, complete, or even free of bias. It's simply, in my opinion, a better written section that comes closer to the ideals I was espousing above. -- ScienceApologist 05:25, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
In all honesty I have to say it's not bad, but, of course I have problems with it. Clearly the **all** forces problem is one of them but a remarkable piece of work. Well done. One way out might be to use the term radiation rather than electromagnetic radiation but I'm not in love with that. Sorry you felt Carver Mead couldn't be squeezed in but I see why Wiki might think that.At least I can say you've kept much that I thought was under threat! Will think further. I've always had difficulty with the Borromean model and its attendant prismatic tensegrity. Let's hope Penrose comes up with a formal paper soon. I should probably clean up the CT section with the same style graphics you have used. Thanks. -- Nick Green 00:59, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
I should add you can take off the dispute notice as far as I am concerned.-- Nick Green 01:02, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
SA's revisions do scan better. Although I've been known to consort with them, I'm not a physicist and can't comment in an informed way on the natural science issues. There is room for further improvement in the article, especially in clearer explanations suitable for a general audience. Classification is an unavoidable part of the WP biography business. I agree, looking especially at his publication venues, that Pask was primarily a cybernetician, and then secondarily a psychologist. He did have a notable impact on instructional theory, and so I'd like to keep him in the educational psychologists category, not to the exclusion of other categories of course. Nesbit 01:54, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
SA you said to me "If the article were actually written from the tone of "Pask said this about thus-and-such" then there would be no issue and we could move on." Much is written from this perspective. I said Pask said his last Theorem applied to all forces. I have reported this twice in peer reviewed journals given two papers at conferences and discussed at various meetings-on this yet you have removed it. This is no service to Wiki, Pask's memory or physics. Why so touchy? Check out sparticles GUT etc what's your problem? He was ill for the last few years of his life and this almost has the status of a dying man's confession.-- Nick Green 23:41, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
SA I see you've also taken out the prismatic Tensergrity reference. We took these models to an address he made to the Club of Rome and consultancy he was doing for Hydo Aluminum yet because you cant see the major axes of a Borromean link are equivalent in some sense to a prismatic tensegrity and a potential concurrent computing element we are censored.These too were reported as above. Hmm. Waiting.-- Nick Green 23:54, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
Your statements about mass are wholly incorrect. Mass is not produced from waves. Rest mass energy is not in the form of a wave, though there are untested speculations about this. See quantum gravity for the problem. Since there is no theory of everything, we really don't have a good way of connecting quantum wave mechanics to general relativity which seems to be what you are suggesting Pask is doing. I disagree, I think that pask is saying that the "force" between "concepts" behave as waves as a means of analogy. He then goes on to claim that his analogy may not be far off from physics, but doesn't make any statements about physics per se. -- ScienceApologist 19:55, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
But ask what distinction needs making to make it a fully competent model? The policy of original research spell it out. Since there is no verifiable "solution" to the problem of quantum gravity claiming that Pask offers a solution is problematic. What's more, Wikczek is not the subject of this article. We should go by what Pask says. -- ScienceApologist 01:43, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
Self organization is a concept that applies to various endeavors, it is not a catch-all application that plugs in wherever you want. Wilczek, Mead, Penrose, Laughlin, Osborne and Pope are not Pask. Claiming that they represent Pask's work is original research. -- ScienceApologist 22:15, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
You cannot reference "recent work" simply because you as an editor perceive parallels with the recent work and that of Pask. That's the very reason the original research guideline was developed. That said, if you can reference a notable, verifiable, and reputable source who draws parallels, Wikipedia as a project encourages you to cite them and include them. As the article was written previously, many of the references to the interdisciplinary ramifications were based on your own interpretations rather than on the published sources that actually made the syncretic arguments presented in the article. If you disagree with this aim of Wikipedia to marginalize your original research, you can always publish your work elsewhere. -- ScienceApologist 23:10, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
Nick is correct that simply explaining and reporting on Pask's work is not original research. On the other hand, SA correctly observes that certain types of explanations can easily stray into original research. It looks to me that compromise is definitely attainable if you focus on the wording of specific sentences. First pick a sentence from the current article that you think is incorrect or does not follow WP guidelines. On the talk page rewrite the sentence in a way that is acceptable to you, and you think might be acceptable to the other. Then the other either accepts the sentence or rewrites again. After the first few sentences are done it's easier to start working in paragraphs. Nesbit 06:48, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
Well, Nick, I looked at the references you provided and could find nothing other than hearsay in support of the contention that Pask believed his last theorem applied to all forces. I really do want you to give me a direct quote of Pasks along the lines of "My Last Theorem applies to every force in the universe" to include in the article. I'm just not seeing, for example, that Pask was contending that viscous forces, for example, could be modeled by his Last Theorem. Until we have a good source for this, it just doesn't belong in the article, in my opinion. Perhaps we should start an article Request for comment or post a comment to Wikiproject:Physics regarding this. What do you think? -- ScienceApologist 22:24, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
See page 1437 in Nick's paper, where he writes "this statement is intended to embody all forces...". The obvious compromise is to insert up to two sentences following the literal description of what Pask wrote with something like the following "According to Green(2004), Pask intended this to apply to all physical forces, including nuclear gravitational, and electromagnetic forces." In my view we can sustain a sentence or two citing Nick's publications, but any more than a couple of sentences would run up against the vanity and notability guidelines This article should keep the focus quite firmly on the ideas that Pask published. There is a lot more to be done on clarifying the central and widely recognized contributions of Pask, without spending more energy on arguments about whether they had implications for theories of planetary evolution. Nesbit 22:56, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
I would be fine with the inclusion: According to Green (2004): "This statement is intended to embody all forces... which give rise to the self-organising character we see in Nature." Since we don't explain how Pask accounted for the four fundamental forces, I say leave that part of the quote out. The other suggestions by Nick I would omit as bordering too much on original research. -- ScienceApologist 19:19, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
How about: "Pask intended to apply his theorem to all forces (Green 2004). It describes periodic momentum transfers that cancel or reinforce to make concepts or "coherencies and distinctions" (Pask 1993) that evolve through their interactions." Please no more about original research -this is a deep theory about the origins of knowledge and self organisation! Obvious really.-- Nick Green 22:48, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
1. There is also no explanation for how "waves" interact with concepts.
2. This doesn't resolve the problem because "a procedure for bringing about a relation" doesn't provide definitions for "procedure" or "relation". "All media" in physics usually means anything that take up space, but in Pask's formulation this cannot be the case unless he is extending space beyond physical space which is an abstraction that prevents us from evaluating Pask in terms of fundamental physics he may or may not have been commenting on. -- ScienceApologist 21:41, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
Further note to help you understand Pask's perspective: He formulated his Complementarity Principle: Every product is produced by a process and every process produces a product. So waves produce particles. There's no crazy coexistence and entanglement of all possible states as in wave particle dualism. Carver Mead's position, roughly, wave mechanics works Quantum mechanics doesn't- he rejects the Copenhagen Interp and all its associated blind alleys becaue phase information, so vital for practical men, and Pask, is lost. But that's a debate for another day. The question is how do I explain what Pask said without the Wiki thought police getting uptight!-- Nick Green 22:56, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
IA being a wave theory is already included in the article. We cannot use your cites to conteporary wave theorists or to Penrose because those people are not Pask and don't have anything to do with Pask. You're going to have to uncompact what Pask means by "medium" if you want to include the quotes about it. Drawing comparisons between human and cosmological media is not straightforward and would not be clear to most readers. -- ScienceApologist 17:36, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
I restored parts of this article that were modified which did not conform to WP:NPOV standards. -- ScienceApologist 18:59, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Pask's theory applies to all forces and all media as a competent theory of self-organisation should. You are surpressing his work. If you have further objections from physics or the referenced works then state them as you have done before. Otherwise please restore my last edit. If you want private discussion email me at nickgreen.cyb@gmail.com. -- Nick Green 23:45, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
We have discussed this before. See our exchange of 28th June above. Why is this extraordinary? You said around 26th June above (or was it Nesbit?) "In 1995 Pask stated (Green 2004) what he called his Last Theorem for all forces: "Like concepts repel and unlike concepts attract". This is a good sentence and should be considered a model for the prose in this article." Later you said it was an analogy but to Pask who did considerable work on analogy all descriptions are analogies to a greater or lesser extent. All this has appeared in Journals before reviewed by people who know Pask's work e.g Glanville and Scott. Whether you or I agree with what he said is neither here no there. It is not original research in the Wiki prejorative sense and it is vital to make clear to ordinary people what Pask said. The point is there is no fundamental objection from physics even tho it may have grated, at first, on our intuitions. It is a matter of respectable academic record as, I hope you'll now agree I have repeatedly shown. The rest is fully referenced so please restore the edit.-- Nick Green 03:05, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Nesbit: I'm not happy that the new quote in IA meets your "general audience" criterion but if they're prepared to think and not too hide bound it is very rewarding. Ideas for cleaning up the diagrams welcome. In a talk to MIT Frank Wilczek confirms angular momentum at heart of asymptotic freedom of QCD. So that's the strong force for you. It's rather more obvious for beta decay so that's the weak force the rest follows from the very fact of Newtonian defn of force. Pity we are banned from making this clear to the general reader. So further improvements are posible but I need to think how.
I am interested in Pasks theory on metaphors, especially the definition of cybernetics as "the art and science of manipulating defensible metaphors". This quotation is generally attributed to Pask, but always misses detailed informations about the actual source. (A starting point for a search could be Pasks "An Approach to Cybernetics" (1961), but this book is hard to get in Europe.) I hope someone can give me a hint. - Armin B. Wagner 13:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm removing the Category:Cybernetics again, because persons are not to be listed such a category if there is specific Category:Cyberneticists. This is the rule. Now I can imagine that this was happened because of the mentioning in the article of:
An easy solution here is to create two separate articles, and put them in the Category:Cybernetics - Mdd 18:37, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
I've proposed merging No Doppelgangers here, since I can find no evidence of notability of that theorem of Pask; Pask himself passes notability, I think, though the evidence needs to be made clear in this article by citing independent sources about him. Dicklyon 05:41, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Since notability is not inherited, and lacking better suggestions, I went ahead and did the merge. I could probably use some checking, cleanup, refs improvement, or whatever. As to Gordon Pask, I find over 600 books mention him, compared to none in English that mention him along with no doppelgangers. Dicklyon ( talk) 22:47, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 06:54, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
Although I'm loathe to get anywhere near this discussion, I have to make one or two points, based on personal knowledge:
Pask was never appointed to a substantive chair at the Open University. I am quite sure about this because I happened to be a member of staff at the OU Institute of Educational Technology at the time. Pask was employed for a couple of years as a consultant on a curriculum project funded by the Ford Foundation (Project Leader was Brian Lewis). At that time and for many years before and afterwards, Gordon's home base was Systems Research Ltd in Richmond (which I notice is not mentioned). He also held a part-time chair in Cybernetics at Brunel, and a visiting chair at (I think) Illinois/Urbana-Champaign (
Heinz von Foerster was a close friend). The Open University may have given him, temporarily, the title of Visiting Professor.
Along with a lot of bright ideas, Gordon was full of... well, self-promotion is maybe the best way to put it. It doesn't surprise me at all that contributors have found him difficult to sort out! His prose was about as incomprehensible as it is possible to get; sentences abound 250 words long and full of special terms used by Pask alone. My advice would be to stick to the WP basics: facts verified with refs, dates, quotes with refs... It's hard work, but who says biography should be easy?
Macdonald-ross (
talk) 17:01, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
three of the Gordon Pask 'obituary' links point to the sub-domain www2.venus.co.uk which appears to be no longer available -- (www2.venus.co.uk hosted pages that were originally published by Venus Internet Ltd, both of whose directors knew Gordon Pask -- Venus Internet Ltd was sold and is now part of Venus Business Communications Ltd) Oniscoid ( talk) 10:27, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
in the list of cyberneticists?? - cyberneticians at the end, one important guy is missing, Gotthard Gunther - /info/en/?search=Gotthard_G%C3%BCnther Jpkeno ( talk) 13:17, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
I have moved the interactions of actors information to its own page, as it was dominating this biography. 86.155.99.174 ( talk) 19:56, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
I've got rid of the banner saying that it was too much like a resumee. I think I've made it less like one, but if other editors feel diffrently feel free to change it. The article still has issues, but I think it's slowly coming along. If I've done a faux pas by getting rid of the banner, please say (and my apologies if so). T. O. Manning ( talk) 18:40, 13 April 2023 (UTC)