Browsing by Subject "Systems theory"

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Interpreting spiritual ecology for modern urban planning : increasing understanding of personal responsibility, community awareness, interdependent action, and spiritual awakening in communities
(2020-02-05) Alexander, Jena Plumeria; Wilson, Patricia Ann
The paper begins by describing limitations in city planning approaches that originate from worldviews that do not meet long-term community environmental, economic, or spiritual needs. It posits that a graduate-level education in city planning must go beyond solutions derived or implemented through data and engineering to solutions that build human dignity, well-being, and community through relational awareness and self-reflexive practice. This paper then introduces and defines, through examples and case studies, a branch of study called “spiritual ecology” that can provide a path beyond those limitations. The examples and case studies focus on several overarching themes such as Animism; ways of knowing such as deep patience, wisdom-seeking, observation, and reverence; principles of action such as self-restraint; systems thinking frameworks such as deep ecology and “interbeing”; community development through self-reflexive practice; and decentralized, participative systems. The paper explains, through the sections, how spiritual ecology logic and principles stemming from these overarching themes can be applied to city planning. The paper then examines the Thai Sufficiency Economy as a working model for implementation of spiritual ecology logic and principles. Throughout, the paper also explains why spiritual ecology is necessary for a graduate study in city planning. Lastly, a one-semester curriculum for a graduate course in Spiritual Ecology is outlined
System identification of dynamic patterns of genome-wide gene expression
(2011-12) Wang, Daifeng; Markey, Mia Kathleen; Arapostathis, Ari, 1954-; Vishwanath, Sriram; Aziz, Adnan; Wilke, Claus O.
High-throughput methods systematically measure the internal state of the entire cell, but powerful computational tools are needed to infer dynamics from their raw data. Therefore, we have developed a new computational method, Eigen-genomic System Dynamic-pattern Analysis (ESDA), which uses systems theory to infer dynamic parameters from a time series of gene expression measurements. As many genes are measured at a modest number of time points, estimation of the system matrix is underdetermined and traditional approaches for estimating dynamic parameters are ineffective; thus, ESDA uses the principle of dimensionality reduction to overcome the data imbalance. We identify degradation dynamic patterns of a genomic system using ESDA. We also combine ESDA and Principal-oscillation-pattern (POP) analysis, which has been widely used in geosciences, to identify oscillation patterns. We demonstrate the first application of POP analysis to genome-wide time-series gene-expression data. Both simulation data and real-world data are used in this study to demonstrate the applicability of ESDA to genomic data. The biological interpretations of dynamic patterns are provided. We also show that ESDA not only compares favorably with previous experimental methods and existing computational methods, but that it also provides complementary information relative to other approaches.