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.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

SINK 1)

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A fixed point that acts as an attractor for all points in its neighborhood.

There is no escape from a sink.

2. A place in the environment of a system which receives waste from the system.

Different types of waste go to different types of sinks, which receive either material (rubbish dumps of many different types) or energetic waste (f. ex. the atmosphere, as receptor of heat, i.e. degraded energy).

As the use of materials and energy is growing exponentially, the problem of sinks is growing at the same pace. This introduces the need for reusing as much as possible all kind of waste as sources of useful resources, i.e. the need for recycling.

Recently, we also started to create information sinks, by accelerated accumulation of unused (or unusable) data and premature invalidation of techniques. This will probably become a very serious problem in a near future.

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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