Fwd: June 18 Blender at Santa Fe Complex

[Don Begley]

Please join us.

> ..
> a community studio creating connections in science, technology and art
> Santa Fe Complex Announces June 18 Blender
> Numbers and Metaphor
>
>
>
> Wednesday, June 18
> 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
> 632 Agua Fria St.
>
> Blenders are a Wednesday night feature at Santa Fe Complex, located  
> at 632 Agua Fria St. Entrance is on Romero St. Admission is free.  
> Light refreshments will be served; donations to defray their costs  
> are welcome.
>
>
> Admission is free.
> Refreshments provided.
>
> Click here for directions.
> Santa Fe, NM - Aug 16, 2008 - This Wednesday's Blender at Santa Fe  
> Complex brings four national experts on the study of form through  
> numbers in a a blend of morphology, metaphor and category. Ralph  
> Chapman, Tiha von Ghyczy, Thomas P. Caudell, and Steve Smith will  
> discuss their own research interests and their applications of  
> morphology, metaphor and category in understanding complex problem  
> spaces. It will be a wide-ranging talk, moving from paleographic  
> fossils to modern business communications and neuroscience. The  
> speakers will limit their formal presentations to 15 minutes each,  
> leaving time for contributions from the audience and lots of  
> discussion.
> What Is Morphology?
>
> Numbers are metaphor: they describe the world in an abstract manner  
> that implies their object. They can tell us how much something  
> weighs, how tall its is or how fast it is going. Or, they can delve  
> deeper into their objects and help us understand them in an almost  
> intuitive way.
> When numbers are used to study variations in nature-and learn how  
> natural processes influence organisms-they form the basis for the  
> field of morpholoy, the study of changes in form. Morphology  
> underlies much of our knowledge about the evolution of creatures  
> over time, particularly in the fossil record. By studying how a line  
> of fossils changes, for example, paleontologists can theorize about  
> evolutionary forces that create species or variations within species  
> long-since vanished from the planet.
>
>
> About the Speakers
>
> Steve Smith, founder of Los Alamos Visual Analytics (LAVA) and  
> former Visualization Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory,  
> has nearly 30 years experience in helping scientists understand  
> their data, models and theories through immersive perceptualization.  
> Steve will guide the discussion of how the application of cognitive  
> or conceptual metaphors and the structure-function duality can be  
> used to aid in the exploration, discovery and analysis of complex  
> problem spaces.
>
> Ralph Chapman, a paleontologist by training and member of LAVA, is  
> the former director of the National Museum of Natural History's  
> Applied Morphometrics Laboratory, the former director of the Idaho  
> Virtualization Laboratory, and an instructor at the first NSF-funded  
> workshop on evolutionary morphometrics.
>
> Tiha von Ghyczy, a fellow at the Strategy Institute at the Boston  
> Consulting Group, will describe the Strategy Institute's Strategy  
> Gallery, a collection of over 250 metaphors they have found useful  
> for gaining insight into complex business strategies. Tiha studied  
> philosophy and mathematics at the University of Amsterdam and earned  
> his M.B.A. from IMEDE (now IMD), in Lausanne, Switzerland.
>
> Dr. Tom Caudell, the director of the High Performance Computing  
> Center at the University of New Mexico, is an astrophysicist by  
> training and a pioneer in the development of augmented and virtual  
> reality with specific application to understanding complex  
> information spaces and processes. Dr. Caudell will discuss his work  
> in the application of category theory to the understanding of  
> complex systems ranging from decision and risk support systems to  
> neural architectures.
>
> Quotes on Morphology
>
> In 1966, Fritz Zwicky proposed a generalized form of morphological  
> research now known as General Morphological Analysis:
>
> "Attention has been called to the fact that the term morphology has  
> long been used in many fields of science to designate research on  
> structural interrelations - for instance in anatomy, geology, botany  
> and biology. ... have proposed to generalize and systematize the  
> concept of morphological research and include not only the study of  
> the shapes of geometrical, geological, biological, and generally  
> material structures, but also to study the more abstract structural  
> interrelations among phenomena, concepts, and ideas, whatever their  
> character might be." (Zwicky, 1966, p. 34)
> In The Fruitful Flaws of Strategy Metaphors, Tiha von Ghyczy  
> examines the power of both cognitive and rhetorical metaphors.
>
> Such metaphors communicate and clarify complex ideas using seemingly  
> disparate sources-and in so doing, spur creativity. In this piece,  
> the author contends that cognitive metaphors can be a particularly  
> effective means for generating innovative business strategies. Tiha  
> von Ghyczy believes that by focusing on something unfamiliar (that  
> is, the subject of the metaphor), a metaphor can spark creative  
> thinking about something familiar (the object of the metaphor).
> In the 1980 Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson  
> introduced conceptual metaphor as referring to the understanding of  
> one idea, or conceptual domain in terms of another, and being  
> pervasive in everyday life and thinking.
>
>
> About Santa Fe Complex
> We are a community studio creating connections in science,  
> technology and art. Our roots lie in the rich cultural, scientific  
> and artistic traditions of northern New Mexico; our vision is a  
> world where technology supports a renaissance in art and science  
> that opens our minds and hearts to our full human potential.
> Santa Fe Complex
> Don Begley
> Managing Director
> 505/26.7562
>
> 624 Agua Fria St
> Santa Fe, NM 87501
> http://sfcomplex.org
> Santa Fe Complex supports the open source and GNU public license  
> philosophies. Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim  
> copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. Please  
> credit our work.
>
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> Santa Fe Complex | 632 Agua Fria | Santa Fe | NM | 87501
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