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

TERM (Short-, Medium-, Long-) 1)

← Back

Different time scales in processes, rhythms and phenomena.

What short-, medium- and long- means must be clarified in each case. Geological cycles are obviously at a different scale than living beings, or meteorological events.

The really interesting aspects of different, but imbricated time scales are as follows:

- Time regularities can be observed in most processes at different scales. In living systems, circadian rhythms for example, are clearly distinct from seasonal ones, while both are inscribed within the long-term scale of life as a whole.

- Short-, medium- and long-term rhythms are more or less interconnected, because they correspond to interconnected phenomena. Population cycles of different species in predators-preys relationships may combine to induce a long-term global cycle. This also seems to be the case for the different economic and business cycles.

- Long-term cycles offer a limited predictive capability as to the progress of the medium and short term cycles. This seems to be related to chaotic determinism.

The whole subject deserves more intensive study.

See for example "Fractal scaling", "Frequency analysis", "Kondratiev cycle" and "Weierstrass equation ".

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]

We thank the following partners for making the open access of this volume possible:

© 2020 BCSSS Contact/Imprint