BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

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DECAY 1)4)

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The progressive degradation, disorganization of a system.

Decay is generally due to a non-compensated negative feedback, which progressively dampens the resilience of the system, i.e. its capacity to adaptively fluctuate within a not too narrow band of values or situations.

It also can result of the depletion of critical elements in the system.

Decay is somehow associated with ageing in living systems and also with clogging by excessive accumulation of some types of elements or residues, which poisons the system.

It is also related to the progressive loss of redundancy, and saturation of information channels in social systems.

In interactive parallel processing networks decay refers to a decrease of activity in the network, i.e. a decrease of the number of activation events in function of time.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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