Talmudic Jew Norbert Weiner: Cybernetics, the Scamming automated Rabbi's Golem in Financial Markets

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Norber Weiner -- typical Talmudic-Maimonides Jew    creating a Jew "Golem" automaton in Gentile society.  The Financial Markets today are the "Rabbi's Golem" run by idiot J-Tribers at corrupt Hedge Funds.  The global financial markets are run by J-Tribe "Golem" algorithims.... perhaps the US "Midwest" can be a harsh mistress to these scammers someday... --CSR  

   Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, November 26,
1894. His father, Leo Wiener, was a most remarkable man who had
a tremendous influence on Norbert. Leo Wiener was born in Byelostok,
in the ghetto area of Tsarist Russia, in 1862. Fie was a descendant
of Aquiba Eger, Grand Rabbi of Posen from 1815 to 1837. He
was also supposedly descended from Moses Maimonides. Leo Wiener's
father had already broken with the ancient narrow Yiddish tradition
of the ghetto and Leo was raised with literary German rather
than Yiddish as his language. Whatever mixed feelings Norbert
Wiener may have had as an adolescent on first realizing he was a
Jew were completely gone when I met him in 1933. He was extremely
proud of his scholarly ancestors and of the outstanding achievement
of the Jews in mathematics, the physical and biological sciences and
medicine. An account of his Jewish origin begins on the second page
of Ex-prodigy [165]* and continues for a number of pages. He had
an interesting theory to account for Jewish devotion to learning. It
was in fact the case that a young man who was a good Talmudic
scholar, no matter how poverty stricken or unworldly, was considered
a good match for the daughter of even the wealthiest family.

In the summer of 1901 the family travelled to Europe. Norbert
particularly remembers visiting Israel Zangwill, the writer and Zionist,
and Prince Kropotkin, the Russian nobleman turned Anarchist.
(Some thirty years later a student of Wiener's turned out to be the
natural son of Kropotkin's secretary.)

Norbert learned to read spontaneously at a very early age and also
picked up arithmetic. Already by six he was reading the widest variety
of books in his father's library. He was attracted to zoology,
physics and chemistry. One article he read as a child excited in him
"the desire to devise quasi-living automata" [165, p. 65]. Cybernetics
had an early (Jew Talmudic-Kabbalistic) birth!

At seven an attempt was made to enroll him in public school. However
he did not fit readily into any grade and his father took him out
of school and became his teacher. Anyone who has taught a wife or
child, even something as simple as driving a car, knows the tensions
that arise in such a family situation. No wonder then that the overly
sensitive boy came to regard his perfectionist and highly reactive
father an "avenger of the blood" [l6S, p. 67]. His mother tried to
defend him but in his eyes at least was not very successful.
While Norbert realized his father's unusual qualities, nevertheless
even forty years later when he became depressed and would reminisce
about this period, his eyes would fill with tears as he described
his feelings of humiliation as he recited his lessons before his exacting
father. Fortunately he also saw his father as a very lovable man and
he was aware of how much like his father he himself was.
With his father he went through the mathematics textbooks of
Wentworth up to and including analytic geometry. He also learned
Latin and German. On his own he read biology texts and a vast
amount of literature. The science fiction of H. G. Wells and Jules
Verne delighted him. During this period he had many neighborhood
playmates and also enjoyed contact with his grandmothers, aunts,
uncles and cousins.

When Norbert was nine the family moved to Harvard, Massachusetts
and he was enrolled in nearby Ayer High School, which he completed
at age eleven. The small town high school was a friendly
place for this unusual child and he retained a warm affection for his
friends in Ayer.

http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1966-7 ... 1450-7.pdf

Sci-Finance: The Great Cybernetic Experiment, Part 1

By Cris Sheridan12/28/2012   


Mad scientists from MIT have taken over the markets to conduct the world's greatest experiment. What are the unintended consequences? Financial disaster is only part of it...

As recently reported by the Wall Street Journal many of the world's most powerful central bankers—including our own distinguished Ben Bernanke—received their PhDs at MIT. ZeroHedge chose to frame this by saying:

"...a handful of people from MIT, deeply steeped in economic theory (not practice), the same people whose actions incidentally were responsible for the first great financial crisis, and who yield more power than any potentate in the history of the world - people who, as the ECB showed in the case of Berlusconi, can take down presidents and PMs with the flick of a switch, meet in private. No transcripts or butlers are allowed.

    In other words, they are accountable to absolutely nobody.

    Which is to be expected: after all they are conducting the greatest experiment in monetary, geopolitical and social history. If they fail... when they fail, everyone loses."

Given ZH's popularity, they probably speak for a substantial majority. Is this all to the story though? For example, what is the significance of MIT? What is being researched there? How is it applied to the markets? When we start to look at these questions we discover that a fundamental transformation is taking place—one that we need to fully understand.

Right off the bat, the first thing we should recognize is the following: big banking and finance have fully merged with cutting edge math, science, and technology—the very reason those "who yield more power than any potentate in the history of the world" are getting their PhDs from MIT and not your typical business school.

The second thing we need to understand is the implications of this fact. That is, the financial markets have become, as ZH says, the "greatest experiment in monetary, geopolitical and social history." When most commentators express this sentiment, it is usually limited to those who leverage monetary policy; however, the experimental nature of what is operating in the markets today goes far beyond central bank intervention. It includes hedge funds, large commercial banks, and financial institutions using such high powered math and computation that it would make Einstein's head spin.
Code-Breaking Meets String Theory

Consider Simons at Renaissance Cracks Code, Doubling Assets

    A former code cracker for the U.S. National Security Agency, [Simons]...abandoned academia to start what would become Renaissance [one of the most successful hedge funds in the world], hiring professors, code breakers and statistically minded scientists and engineers who'd worked in astrophysics, language recognition theory and computer programming.

"All the quants in the world are trying to follow in Jim's footsteps because what he's built at Renaissance is truly extraordinary,'' says Andrew Lo, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Financial Engineering and chief scientific officer of quant hedge fund firm AlphaSimplex Group LLC. "I and many others look up to him as a tremendous role model"...

At the core of Renaissance's success — and the wealth Simons is creating — is his own mathematical mind-set. Outside the financial markets, he's best known for the Chern-Simons theory, which he co-developed with Chinese-American mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern in 1974.

    In simple terms, the theory provides the tools, known as invariants, that mathematicians use to distinguish among certain curved spaces — the kinds of distortions of ordinary space that exist according to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

    Chern-Simons is viewed as important partly because it has proven useful in explaining aspects of another field: string theory. This describes the building blocks of all matter and the universe as vibrating one-dimensional extended filaments or loops called strings.

    "It turns out these things we invented, Chern-Simons invariants, had their real applications to physics [and, oh yeah, vast sums of money in gaming the financial markets].

For all we know, Simons—another graduate from MIT—may have succeeded where Einstein left off by discovering the holy grail of science, a grand unification theory of the universe, and then chose fortune over fame. Or perhaps it just turns out that finding patterns in the complex vibrations of the market is a bit like code-breaking combined with string theory?

Given that no one knows what exactly lies in Renaissance Technologies' black box, the doors are wide open for speculation. If you do a little digging however, you'll find he was probably one of the first to combine AI and high frequency trading on a massive scale.
Artificial Markets

In order to understand what's truly taking place in our markets today, the most logical place to start such an investigation is none other than MIT's Laboratory for Financial Engineering—the global focal point for today's sci-finance. If you visit their site and click "Research", one of the first items listed is "Artificial Markets", which gives the following description:

"Fully electronic market will be ubiquitous in the near future. Because financial markets are the most efficient and best studied of all markets, they can provide unique insights in designing the next generation of electronic markets. In particular, in addition to automated electronic financial markets, there will be similar markets for bandwidth, for telephone time, and for many other commodities. The electronic markets of the future will achieve real-time, efficient and transparent allocation of resources between people and organizations and within electronic networks. In this project, we propose to study computational systems of loosely coupled, asynchronous, adaptable software agents with learning abilities. We will design, implement, and characterize artificial markets in which software agents endowed with different learning modules can interact, evolve, and compete."

Naturally, in order to design and experiment with "software agents endowed with learning modules" that "interact, evolve, and compete" you'll need to take a few classes—with funding provided by DARPA—across the hall at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where it is explained:

"Computation lies at the heart of understanding all physical and biological systems. Many solutions to the most challenging problems of our lives, our work, and our world, therefore, are based in computation. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) studies this vast, compelling field in an effort to unlock the secrets of human intelligence, extend the functional capabilities of machines, and explore human/machine interactions. We apply that knowledge with a long-term lens to engineer innovative solutions with global impact."

Since this is still somewhat vague, I scanned through a number of MIT's subpages and listed some of the topics that financial engineers, central banks, computer scientists, and hedge funds are toying with: evolutionary computing, neural networking, predictive modeling, sublinear time algorithms, cloud scale machine learning, genetic algorithms, nonparametric VAR models (Jim Rickards is not a big fan of these), artificial intelligence, behavioral modeling, neuroeconomics, and psychophysiology.

If you wanted to "unlock the secrets of human intelligence" and replicate it in a machine I imagine it would involve some combination of the above. Is is simply coincidence then that financial engineering and AI are closely related? Not at all. The financial markets are the perfect testing ground for rewarding highly adaptive, intelligent software. Question is, aside from profits, how do we measure success? By how well it can model and predict the mathematics of human behavior, of course.
Psychohistory: Sci-Fi or Sci-Finance?

This brings us back to the mad scientists from MIT who are unknowingly turning the market into a massive cybernetic intelligence. We might think a lot of this sounds far-fetched if it weren't for the fact that well-known financial engineers and Nobel Prize winning economists trace their inspiration to 1940s sci-fi novels.

Consider Unlocking the Economy of the Mind

"Andrew Lo traces his interest in economics to a seemingly unlikely source: science fiction author Isaac Asimov. As a student at New York's Bronx High School of Science in the mid-'70s, Lo was a fan of Asimov's Foundation series, whose central character, Hari Seldon, develops a fictional field of study called psychohistory that combines history, psychology, and statistics to predict the actions of a large group of people. "The idea that you couldn't tell what an individual was going to do but that you could say with more certainty what a population of individuals might do struck me as being quite plausible...That's exactly what the field of financial economics is all about."

Then there's Paul Krugman, writing for the New York Times:

    "Asimov, and specifically the Foundation trilogy, was my great inspiration; I became an economist because I wanted to be a psychohistorian, saving civilization through the mathematics of human behavior."

I should point out that—surprise, suprise!—both Andrew Lo and Paul Krugman come from MIT. Andrew Lo, as mentioned earlier, is the director of MIT's Laboratory for Financial Engineering and Paul Krugman received his PhD there.

Amazingly, this notion of "saving civilization through the mathematics of human behavior" was once an unattainable fantasy that made for good sci-fi. Today, we are closer than ever in reaching Asimov's pychohistorical vision as central bankers from MIT, i.e. technocrats, use global monetary policy in combination with high powered modeling and computation to financially engineer market stability. Given the trillions at stake, many are wondering whether the world's greatest experiment is going to succeed or lead to the fall of the global economy.

Technological Salvation

In an interview for NPR, Asimov said that he believed his technocratic vision of the future was not only inevitable, but a response to reading Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Evidently, he (along with many other sci-fi writers) believed there'd be a day when rulers could prevent catastrophes by applying science and technology to manage society. When asked,

"Do you think that would be good if there really was such a science?"

    Asimov: "Well, I can't help but think it would be good, except that in my stories, I always have opposing views. In other words, people argue all possible... all possible... ways of looking at psychohistory and deciding whether it is good or bad. So you can't really tell. I happen to feel sort of on the optimistic side. I think if we can somehow get across some of the problems that face us now, humanity has a glorious future, and that if we could use the tenets of psychohistory to guide ourselves we might avoid a great many troubles. But on the other hand, it might create troubles. It's impossible to tell in advance."

Lo, himself an aspiring psychohistorian, is applying its tenets quite literally. As a distinguished MIT professor, associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a well awarded scholar, he believes that its modern day equivalent, financial engineering, can actually be used to "cure cancer, stop global warming, and solve the energy crisis."

Quoting from one of his slides he asks:

What If We Could Focus This Power For "Good"?

        Financial engineering with a "conscience"
        Apply expertise to solve society's biggest challenges
        Finance facilitates collaboration; collective intelligence
        With the proper financial engineering, I believe we can solve the following problems in 20 years or less:

        Cancer
        Energy Crisis
        Global Warming

To him, the construction of complex financial products or applying AI to the markets is only the tip of the iceberg. Not only can financial engineering create (or destroy) vast sums of wealth, but by giving it a "conscience" and leveraging its "collective intelligence" humanity can unleash a vast source of innovative power and guide itself into Asimov's "glorious future."

As MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory states:

"Computation lies at the heart of understanding all physical and biological systems. Many solutions to the most challenging problems of our lives, our work, and our world, therefore, are based in computation."

If we can't solve our problems, computers will solve them for us. But, what if we are the problem? Break out the sci-fi books!

Let's tie all this together: Lo and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman believe that by using some combination of math, finance, and technology, high powered computation will not only tackle the world's greatest problems but, perhaps, even save civilization from disaster, to use Krugman's words. Furthermore, when we consider that a massive number of central bankers are now coming from MIT, it is clear that even in the domain of monetary governance this technocratic vision is taking hold.

It is much easier to believe that our financial authorities are bumbling idiots moving from one crisis to the next rather than mad scientists experimenting with high powered computation to predict the future and manage society but, then again, that's the direction we seem to be heading. Like I said in the beginning though, this experiment goes far beyond central banking—with unintended consequences far larger than merely financial disaster.  

In Part II of Sci-Finance: The Great Cybernetic Experiment we'll look at the market as a complex adaptive system, how it's evolving, and some insights from game theory to see where things are headed.

=========================================================

Sci-Finance: The Great Cybernetic Experiment, Part 2
By Cris Sheridan 01/04/2013   


"In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of machines."

—George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence

complex systems
Source: Sandia National Laboratories

In Part I of Sci-Finance, we looked at how the market has become a large-scale experiment for applying cutting edge science and technology previously considered the realm of science fiction. Things like evolutionary computing, neural networking, predictive modeling, cloud scale machine learning, genetic algorithms, artificial intelligence, and neuroeconomics. We also identified how this experiment to track and predict the mathematical behavior of the market using complex computation is being conducted at the highest level of global governance as many of the world's most powerful central bankers are technocrats straight out of MIT, the global focal point for much of today's sci-finance. Lastly, we highlighted the psychology endemic to financial authorities and experts that believe the key to managing the markets and saving the world from its greatest problems lies in financial engineering, high level computation, and, as Andrew Lo put it, harnessing the "collective intelligence" of the world—an intelligence we'll identify as cybernetic.

In Part II, we'll take a closer look at the nature of this experiment, how it is evolving, and a possible outlook for the future. To begin, let's return to some of the concepts mentioned in Part I—artificial markets, adaptable software agents, and machine learning—with a quote from Scott Patterson's latest book, Dark Pools: High Speed Traders, A.I. Bandits, and the Threat to the Global Financial System. As he explains, the trading world is now one...

    few outsiders could imagine, a worldwide matrix of dazzlingly complex algorithms, interlinked computer hubs the size of football fields, and high-octane trading robots guided by the latest advances in artificial intelligence...

    The new pools [or electronic markets] evoked a water-filled world of frictionless trading... With electronic innovations...and the rise of algorithms that swam in their pools, the market was evolving like a living organism, shape-shifting into something entirely new. And the algorithms were changing, too. They were no longer the dumb single-cell virus-like creatures operating on simple orders. (Has Microsoft's average price risen 1 percent? Buy.) They were learning how to adapt in the new pools, morphing into more advanced predators. Many were geared with advanced AI systems that could quickly detect hidden market signals using the high-bandwidth data feeds and react in a flash, learning and changing their behavior along the way.


AI Meets HFT: Humans Not Required

The notion that algorithms can actually learn, evolve, and become more "intelligent" isn't controversial because it isn't true, it is controversial because of the philosophical implications. In case there is any doubt, however, that firms aren't using such technology, I encourage you to consider the following key points from an interview conducted by High Frequency Trading Review with Adam Afshar   , CEO and President of Hyde Park Global:

They are a "100% Robotic investment and trading firm based on Artificial Intelligence...Genetic Algorithms (GA) and other Evolutionary models to identify mispricings, arbitrage and patterns in electronic financial markets."
    They employ "no analysts, portfolio managers or traders, ONLY scientists and engineers."
    Their AI robotic trading platform "does not allow any human intervention"
    It monitors the news, prices, and volumes of "3,000+ stocks every second", a feat which their CEO says, "no human trader, analyst or portfolio manager or even legions of traders can do"
    The higher the frequency of trading the quicker it learns, evolves, and adapts
    It can scan up to hundreds of thousands of news stories each day to identify trends, sentiment, market psychology, etc. (Keep this in mind when we get to the Keynesian Beauty Contest)

A Complex Adaptive System

Many are unwilling to place a machine at equal or greater intelligence than themselves. Sure, it might beat us in mathematical calculations, strategy, or even riddles, but it still isn't the same thing. There's something magical about human consciousness that can't be recreated in a machine, we are told. This is true; then again, we're not talking about a single machine but, as Scott Patterson writes, a global sea of algorithms "evolving like a living organism, shape-shifting into something entirely new." When we consider the self-organizing behavior of highly complex systems—that is, complex adaptive systems—this idea isn't all that strange. To quote Wikipedia:

Typical examples of complex adaptive systems, include - the global macroeconomic network within a country or group of countries; stock market and complex web of cross border holding companies; social insect and ant colonies; the biosphere and the ecosystem; the brain and the immune system...The internet and cyberspace - composed, collaborated, and managed by a complex mix of human–computer interactions, is also regarded as a complex adaptive system.

There are close relationships between the field of CAS and artificial life. In both areas the principles of emergence and self-organization are very important. The ideas and models of CAS are essentially evolutionary...biological views on adaptation...and simulation models in economics and social systems.

complex adaptive system

Cybernetics

We must understand that what is evolving in the market—or how the market is itself evolving—is not merely one of machines but a complex interaction between humans and machines. Specifically, we'd call this type of interaction cybernetic, named after the science largely developed by MIT's Norbert Weiner, which he called "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine." Once again, quoting from Wikipedia:

Cybernetics [comes] from the Greek meaning to "steer" or "navigate." Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and psychology in the 1940s...It includes the study of feedback, black boxes and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organizations including self-organization. Its focus is how anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information, and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks.

Since cybernetics was used to understand many of the fundamental mechanisms at work in both biological and non-biological systems, and certainly how the two interact or combine, most people know of it indirectly through the popular use of the word "cyborg"—that is, a cybernetic organism. Given their widespread use in science fiction, cybernetic systems are typically not well understood or simply disregarded as, well, fictional. However, when we consider that prominent Nobel prize winning economists and well-respected financial engineers actually trace their fields to science fiction (see Part 1), it is clear that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Consider now the current nature of our market. It is a highly complex adaptive system composed of humans and machines processing information from their environment to make decisions and then continually adjust them according to incoming feedback and market behavior. When you also consider the role of central banks in using control and communication strategies to herd the market's animal spirits, is it fair to call the market a cybernetic organism? Most definitely. We could even say it is the best and largest example of such a system so far ever developed. Call it a cyborg, the Frankenmarket, or what-have-you.

Let's stitch this all together now. What is the market exactly? It is a highly complex, adaptive, cybernetic, information processing system undergoing rapid technological advancement. Is it evolving? Certainly. Question is, what is it evolving into?

Keynesian Beauty Contest

Before you start to think this all sounds too far-fetched, let's connect some of these concepts back to one of the most famous descriptions of the market: a beauty contest.

The Keynesian beauty contest is the view that much of investment is driven by expectations about what other investors think, rather than expectations about the fundamental profitability of a particular investment. John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century, believed that investment is volatile because investment is determined by the herd-like "animal spirits" of investors. Keynes observed that investment strategies resembled a contest in a London newspaper of his day that featured pictures of a hundred or so young women. The winner of the contest was the newspaper reader who submitted a list of the top five women that most clearly matched the consensus of all other contest entries. A naïve strategy for an entrant would be to rely on his or her own concepts of beauty to establish rankings. Consequently, each contest entrant would try to second guess the other entrants' reactions, and then sophisticated entrants would attempt to second guess the other entrants' second guessing. And so on. Instead of judging the beauty of people, substitute alternative investments. Each potential entrant (investor) now ignores fundamental value (i.e., expected profitability based on expected revenues and costs), instead trying to predict "what the market will do." [eg, news, charts, etc.] The results are (a) that investment is extremely volatile because fundamental value becomes irrelevant, and (b) that the most successful investors are either lucky or masters at understanding mob psychology... [Source]

First of all, why is this a correct description of how the financial markets operate? From both a macroeconomic and company-specific perspective, the main reason has to do with the fact that a large amount of data is subject to error, prone to revision, or outright manipulated. The second has to do with the problem of interpreting this data—something also prone to large variation. Thirdly, one cannot consider the implications of such data without also taking into account how central banks will respond to it—an extra layer of complexity that exacerbates the whole economic calculation problem further.

It should be pointed out that much of the complexity and error continually creeping into the market system would normally be corrected for if allowed to rebalance and achieve a more economically-anchored homeostasis. If it weren't for the crucial role central banking has played in pushing investor psychology further out on the risk curve, relying less on long-term interest and savings, but on a growing dependency of complex trading strategies that offer no real economic benefit, the market would not be evolving into the ugly and potentially destructive cybernetic organism it is today. Unfortunately, this experiment will go on until the mad scientists from MIT lose control. Thing is, it won't really be lost, but handed over.

The Forbidden Market

The evolution of the market into a vast cybernetic intelligence has been largely invisible so far. It is hard to distinguish because it is a creature of the collective human mind, inextricable from society itself. It is being born, however, by the amplification of our intelligence through swarms of software feeding off human psychology and coalescing into a living organism. When will we finally see it? Perhaps when we become a threat to its own existence.

Paul Krugman and Andrew Lo take the optimistic view of science fiction. I take another. Welcome to the Forbidden Market:

    Doc Ostrow: Morbius was too close to the problem. The Krell had completed their project. Big machine. No instrumentalities. True creation.

    Commander John J. Adams: Come on, Doc, let's have it.

    Doc Ostrow: But the Krell forgot one thing.

    Commander John J. Adams: Yes, what?

    Doc Ostrow: Monsters, John. Monsters from the Id.

http://www.financialsense.com/contribut ... ent-part-2   


==============

Norbert Wiener Invents Cybernetics

Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics Inventor, Internet History

Since Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower. A century ago there may have been no Leibniz, but there was a Gauss, a Faraday, and a Darwin. Today there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction.

A man may be a topologist or an acoustician or a coleopterist. He will be filled with the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and all its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy.

- Wiener, Norbert; Cybernetics; 1948.

Norbert Wiener invented the field of cybernetics, inspiring a generation of scientists to think of computer technology as a means to extend human capabilities.

Norbert Wiener was born on November 26, 1894, and received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University at the age of 18 for a thesis on mathematical logic. He subsequently studied under Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, England, and David Hilbert in Göttingen, Germany. After working as a journalist, university teacher, engineer, and writer, Wiener he was hired by MIT in 1919, coincidentally the same year as Vannevar Bush. In 1933, Wiener won the Bôcher Prize for his brilliant work on Tauberian theorems and generalized harmonic analysis.

During World War II, Wiener worked on guided missile technology, and studied how sophisticated electronics used the feedback principle -- as when a missile changes its flight in response to its current position and direction. He noticed that the feedback principle is also a key feature of life forms from the simplest plants to the most complex animals, which change their actions in response to their environment. Wiener developed this concept into the field of cybernetics, concerning the combination of man and electronics, which he first published in 1948 in the book Cybernetics.

Wiener's vision of cybernetics had a powerful influence on later generations of scientists, and inspired research into the potential to extend human capabilities with interfaces to sophisticated electronics, such as the user interface studies conducted by the SAGE program. Wiener changed the way everyone thought about computer technology, influencing several later developers of the Internet, most notably J.C.R. Licklider.

In 1964, Norbert Wiener won the US National Medal of Science. In the same year, he published one of his last books called "God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion".

Resources. The following sites related to Norbert Wiener and cybernetics have been established for several years.

    Principia Cybernetica has more than a thousand pages, including a list of influential Cybernetics and Systems Thinkers.

    The Research Committee on Sociocybernetics is a member of the International Sociological Association, and operates under the auspices of UNESCO to "promote the development of (socio)cybernetic theory and research within the social sciences".

    The American Society for Cybernetics, whose objective is to "develop a metadisciplinary language with which we may better understand and modify our world."

    The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

    The University of Reading Department of Cybernetics.

    The Bacterial Cybernetics Group collected evidence of cybernetic sophistication by bacteria, including advanced computation, learning, and creativity.

   

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_wiener.htm   


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Chapter Five:
   Ex-Prodigies and Antiaircraft Guns

    Today, when molecular biologists talk about the "coding" of the DNA molecule, cognitive scientists discuss the "software of the brain," and behavioral psychologists write about "reprogramming old habits," they are all making use of a scientific metaphor that emerged from the technology of computation, but which has come to encompass much more than the mechanics of calculating devices. Cybernetics, the study of communication and control in physical and biological systems, was born when yet another unusual mind was drawn into the software quest through the circumstances of war.

        Because of the discoveries of Norbert Wiener and his colleagues, discoveries that were precipitated by the wartime need for a specific kind of calculating engine, software has come to mean much more than the instructions that enable a digital computer to accomplish different tasks. From the secrets of life to the ultimate fate of the universe, the principles of communication and control have successfully been applied to the most important scientific puzzles of our age. These principles were discovered through a strange concatenation of events, and the people who were involved in those events were no less unusual than the software patriarchs who preceded them.

        Eccentrics and prodigies of both the blissful and agonized varieties dominated the early history of computation. Ada Lovelace, George Boole, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Presper Eckert were all in their early twenties or younger when they did their most important work. All except Eckert were also more than a little bizarre. But for raw prodigy combined with sheer imaginative eccentricity, Norbert Wiener, helmsman of the cybernetic movement, stands out even in this not-so-ordinary crowd.

        Norbert's father, a Harvard professor who was a colorful character in his own right, had definite opinions about education, and publicly declared his intention to mold his young son's mind. Norbert was to become a lovingly but systematically engineered genius. In 1911, an article in a national magazine reported these plans:

            Professor Leo Wiener of Harvard University . . . believes that the secret of precocious mental development lies in early training . . . He is the father of four children, ranging in age from four to sixteen; and he has the courage of his convictions in making them the subject of an educational experiment. The results have . . . been astounding, more especially in the case of his oldest son, Norbert.

            This lad, at eleven, entered Tufts College, form which he graduated in 1909, when he was only fourteen years old. He then entered Harvard Graduate School.

        Norbert completed his examinations and his doctoral dissertation in mathematical logic when he was eighteen, then studied with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge and David Hilbert in Göttingen, where he later crossed paths with von Neumann, nine years his junior, also a student of Hilbert's, and a world renowned authority in several of Wiener's fields of interest. One of the most immediate differences between the two prodigies, even this early in their careers, was the pronounced contrast between their personalities.

        Rare was the teacher or student who failed to be charmed by von Neumann, who went out of his way to assure fellow humans that he was just as mortal as everyone else. Wiener, an insecure, far less worldly, sometimes vain, and often hypersensitive personality, simply didn't go to as much trouble to make an impression outside the realm of mathematics, where he was confident to the point of arrogance. Bertrand Russell wrote of Wiener, in a letter to a friend:

            At the end of Sept. an infant prodigy named Wiener, Ph.D. (Harvard), aged 18, turned up with his father who teaches Slavonic languages there, having come to America to found a vegetarian communist colony, and having abandoned that intention for farming, and farming for the teaching of various subjects. . . . The youth has been flattered, and thinks himself God Almighty -- there is a perpetual contest between him and me as to which is to do the teaching.

        Like Babbage, Wiener was famous for the feuds he carried on. While a student at Göttingen, he impressed the administrative head of the university, Richard Courant, but Wiener accused him of misappropriating several of the younger man's mathematical ideas and appending Courant's own name to them. When he returned to Cambridge, the outraged young genius turned his energies to a novel that was never published, about someone who bore a remarkable resemblance to Courant, and who was depicted as a man who stole the ideas of young geniuses.

        Before World War I, Wiener wrote pieces for Encyclopedia Americana, taught philosophy at Harvard and mathematics at the University of Maine. During World War I, Private Wiener was assigned to the U.S. Army's Aberdeen proving Grounds in Maryland, where he was one of the mathematicians responsible for the computation of firing tables. His service in 1918 was one of the reasons it was natural for Wiener's friend Vannevar Bush to think of Norbert thirty years later, when the allies needed a way to put firing tables directly into the radar-guided mechanism of antiaircraft guns.

        After the end of World War I, Norbert Wiener joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an instructor of mathematics. It turned out to be the beginning of his lifelong association with that institution. By the early 1920s, like his fellow polymath across the Atlantic, Wiener was turning out world-class papers in mathematics, logic, and theoretical physics. At MIT Wiener began his long friendship with Vannevar Bush, a man who in the early 1930s was deeply involved in the problems of building mechanical calculators, and in the 1940s took charge of the largest-scale administration of applied science in history.

        Decades later, Wiener quarreled with his lifelong friend because Bush didn't side strongly enough with Wiener in his feud with two other colleagues. Such feuds were one of the more well-known characteristics of Wiener's style -- he tended to take disagreements over scientific issues as personal attacks, even if the disputes involved his closest personal friends. Like Babbage, his judgement did not always seem equal to his imagination.

        It must be said that Wiener did have many warm lifelong friendships that didn't go sour. For all his moodiness and paranoia, Wiener truly cared about "the human use of human beings" (as he was to title one of his later books on the implications of cybernetics), and passionately reminded the scientific community of their special responsibilities regarding the apocalyptic weaponry they had created. Despite his failure to get along with some of his colleagues, Wiener never wavered in his belief that the future of scientific enterprise lay in interdisciplinary cooperation. His friendship with the physiologist Arturo Rosenbluth, and their shared dream of stimulating such interdisciplinary pursuits, catalyzed the origins of cybernetics. But Wiener might never have worked with Rosenblueth if it wasn't for the Battle of Britain.

        Like von Neumann, Wiener's most important need was for interesting problems. Like von Neumann, he knew that the quantum revolution was the most interesting problem of the 1920s. And one of the effects of quantum physics on the young mathematician's thinking was to convince him that some of the most interesting problems of purely theoretical mathematics could end up having the most concrete applications in the real world.

        Another effect of quantum physics was the importance of probability and statistical measures for dealing with phemomena based on uncertain information. Wiener's familiarity with these concepts was to mature under unexpected circumstances. Like von Neumann and Goldstine and Eckert, in the late 1930s Wiener wasn't yet aware that ballistics would be the avenue for bringing his knowledge of probability and statistics to bear on the most pragmatic problems, eventually to yield most astonishing results. But, like them, he would soon come to understand that his war-related task was leading to profound scientific consequences far beyond the bounds of ballistics.

        The scene was set for the emergence of Wiener's astounding results, not by any series of scientific events, but by the political circumstances of the early 1940s. When war broke out in Europe, Bush assigned Wiener to the antiaircraft control project at MIT, under the direction of Warren Weaver, himself a distinguished mathematician. It seemed like a natural step for Wiener, considering his prior experience in the early ballistic calculation efforts at Aberdeen during World War I.

        The key ideas that led to computers were in the air in the late 1930s, albeit in the rather rarefied air of metamathematics and other esoteric intellectual disciplines. The necessities of war and the coordinated scientific effort that they entailed served to bring those key ideas together with the few people who were equipped to understand them more quickly and urgently than might have happened in more normal times.

        Von Neumann and Goldstine's accidental meeting at Aberdeen was fortuitous and unlikely, but it could hardly be called incredible. One of the circumstances that brought Wiener together with the problem of antiaircraft guns, however, was downright weird. The technological turning point of the Battle of Britain, and a critical chapter in the science of communications systems in machines and organisms, originated when a young Bell Laboratories employee in America had an odd dream. The crucial dream was not about mathematics or engineering problems connected with computers, but was related to technical issues involving antiaircraft artillery. And it was the question of how to deal with dive bombers that was the rather urgent if indirect problem that led to Wiener's later insights.

        The pathway between military strategy and scientific theory was far too circuitous, coincidental, and unlikely to have been predicted in advance, and became clearly discernible only in retrospect. In many respects, the birth of cybernetics was the kind of story more likely to be found in a novel than in a scientific journal. One of the historical coincidences was the position of Vannevar Bush as the leader of war-related research. In his role as a research administrator, Bush knew that antiaircraft technology was one of his top priorities. As a scientist, MIT researcher, and friend of Norbert Wiener's, Bush was also concerned with the task of building high-speed mechanical calculators.

        The allies' two most pressing problems in the early years of World War II were the devastating U-boat war in the North Atlantic and the equally devastating Luftwaffe attacks on Britain. Turing's secret solution to the naval Enigma machine was responsible, in large part, for solving the U-boat problem. But where Turing's problem was one of cryptanalysis, of mathematically retrieving the meaning from a garbled message, the Luftwaffe problem was one of predicting the future: How can you shoot at a plane that is going as fast as your bullets?

        Radar made it possible to track the positions of enemy aircraft, but there was no way to translate the radar-provided information into a ballistic equation quickly enough to do any good. And attacking airplanes had a disconcerting habit of taking evasive action. Vannevar Bush was well acquainted with the calculation problem when Bell Laboratories came to him with an interesting idea for an electrically operated aiming device. That is where the young engineer's dream came in.

        His name was D. B. Parkinson, and he was working with a group of Bell engineers on an automatic level recorder for making more accurate measurements of telephone transmissions -- a "control potentiometer," they called it. In the spring of 1940, Parkinson had the following dream:

            I found myself in a gun pit or revetment with an anti-aircraft gun crew. . . . There was a gun there which looked to me -- I had never had any close association with anti-aircraft guns, but possessed some general information on artillery -- like a 3 inch. It was firing occasionally, and the impressive thing was that every shot brought down an airplane! After three or four shots one of the men in the crew smiled at me and beckoned me to come closer to the gun. When I drew near he pointed to the exposed end of the left trunnion. Mounted there was the control potentiometer of my level recorder! There was no mistaking it -- it was the identical item.

        The electrical device, as it happened, was a good start on an automatic aiming mechanism. But very serious theoretical and mathematical problems, having to do with the way the control device sent and received instructions, cropped up when they tried to construct such a mechanism. That is when Bush turned to Weaver and Wiener.

        During this wartime mathematical work related to radar-directed antiaircraft fire, Wiener recognized the fundamental relationship between two basic problems -- communication and control. The communication problem in the earliest days of radar was that the radar apparatus was like a badly tuned radio receiver. The true signal of attacking planes was often drowned out by false signals -- noise -- from other sources. Wiener recognized that this too was a kind of cryptography problem, if the location of the enemy aircraft is seen as a message that must somehow be decoded from the surrounding noise.

        The noisy radar was more than an ordinary "interesting problem," because once you understand messages and noise in terms of order and information measured against disorder and uncertainty, and apply statistics to predict future messages, it becomes clear (to a mathematician of Wiener's stature) that the issue is related to the basic processes of order and disorder in the universe. Once it is seen in statistical and mathematical terms, the communication problem leads to the heart of something more important, called information theory. But that branch of the story belongs to Claude Shannon as much as, or more than, it does to Wiener.

        The control problem was where Wiener, and his very young and appropriately brilliant assistant, an engineer by the name of Julian Bigelow, happened upon the general importance of feedback loops. Assuming that it is possible to feed information about a plane's path into the aiming apparatus of a gun, how can that information be used to predict the probable location of the plane? The use of statistics and probability theory was one clue. A method for predicting the end of a message based on information about the beginning was another clue. The device in Parkinson's dream was another clue.

        Then it occurred to Wiener and Bigelow that the human organism had already solved the problem they were facing. How is any human being, or a chimpanzee for that matter, able to reach out a hand and pick up a pencil? How are people able to put one foot in front of the other, fall face-forward for a short distance, and end up taking a step? Both processes involve continuous, precise readjustments of muscles (the servomechanisms that move the gun), guided by continuous visual information (radar), controlled by a continuous process of predicting trajectories. The prediction and control take place in the nervous system (the control circuits of the animating automata).

        Wiener and Bigelow looked more closely at other servomechanisms, including self-steering mechanisms as simple as thermostats, and concluded that feedback is the concept that connects the way brains, automatic artillery, steam engines, autopilots, and thermostats perform their functions. In each of those systems, some small part of the past output is fed back to the central processor as present input, in order to steer future output. Information about the distance from the hand to the pencil, as seen by the eye, is fed back to the muscles controlling the hand. Similarly, the position of the gun and the position of the target as sensed by radar are fed back to the automatic aiming device.

        The MIT team had wondered whether someone more informed about neurophysiology had come across analogous mathematics of pencil pushing, with similar results. As it happened, there was another team that, like Wiener and Bigelow, was made up of one infant prodigy and one slightly older genius, by the names of Pitts and McCulloch respectively, who were coming down exactly the same trail from the other direction. A convergence of ideas that was both forced and fortuitous, related to but distinctly different from the convergence on digital computation, was taking place under the pressure of war.

        Even von Neumann was due to get into the act, as Wiener wanted him to do -- Wiener persuaded MIT to try to outbid Princeton for von Neumann's attentions after the war. Politically, militarily, and scientifically, Wiener's corner of the plot was getting thick. The antiaircraft problem, the possible explanations for how brain cells work, the construction of digital computers, the decoding of messages from noise -- all these seemingly unrelated problems were woven together when the leading characters were brought together by the war.

        The founding of the interdisciplinary study that was later named cybernetics came about when Wiener and Bigelow wondered whether any processes in the human body corresponded to the problem of excessive feedback in servomechanisms. They appealed to an authority on physiology, from the Instituto Nacional de Cardología in Mexico City. Dr. Arturo Rosenblueth replied that there was exactly such a pathological condition named (meaningfully) the purpose tremor, associated with injuries to the cerebellum (a part of the brain involved with balance and muscular coordination).

        Together the mathematician, the neurophysiologist, and the engineer plotted out a new model of the nervous system processes that they believed would demonstrate how purpose is embodied in the mechanism -- whether that mechanism is made of metal or flesh. Wiener, never reluctant to trumpet his own victories, later noted that this conception "considerably transcended that current among neurophysiologists."

        Wiener, Bigelow, and Rosenblueth's model, although indirectly derived from top-secret war work, had such general and far-reaching implications that it was published under the title "Behavior, Purpose and Technology," in 1943, in the normally staid journal Philosophy of Science. The model was first discussed for a small audience of specialists, however, at a private meeting held in New York in 1942, under the auspices of the Josiah Macy Foundation. At that meeting was Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist who had been corresponding with them about the mathematical characteristics of nerve networks.

        McCulloch, a neurophysiologist based at the University of Illinois, was, naturally enough in this company, an abnormally gifted and colorful person who had a firm background in mathematics. One story that McCulloch told about himself goes back to his student days at Haverford College, a Quaker institution. A teacher asked him what he wanted to do with his obviously brilliant future:

            "Warren," said he, "what is thee going to be?" And I said, "I don't know," "And what is thee going to do?" And again I said, "I have no idea, but there is one question that I would like to answer: What is a number that man may know it, and a man that he may know a number?" He smiled and said, "Friend, thee will be busy as long as thee lives."

        Accordingly, the mathematician in McCulloch strongly desired a tool for reducing the fuzzy observations and theoretical uncertainties of neurophysiology to the clean-cut precision of mathematics. Turing, and Bertrand Russell before him, and Boole before that, had been after something roughly similar, but they all lacked a deep understanding of brain physiology. McCulloch's goal was to find a basic functional unit of the brain, consisting of some combination of nerve cells, and to discover how that basic unit was built into a system of greater complexity. He had been experimenting with models of "nerve networks" and had discovered that these networks had certain mathematical and logical properties.

        McCulloch started to work with a young logician by the name of Walter Pitts. Pamela McCorduck, a historian of artificial intelligence research, attributes to Manuel Blum, a student of McCulloch's and now a professor at the University of California, the story of Pitt's arrival on the cybernetic scene. At the age of fifteen, Walter Pitts ran away from home when his father wanted him to quit school and get a job. He arrived in Chicago, and met a man who knew a little about logic. This man, "Bert" by name, suggested that Pitts read a book by the logician Carnap, who was then teaching in Chicago. Bert turned out to be Bertrand Russell, and Pitts introduced himself to Carnap in order to point out a mistake the great logician had made in his book.

        Pitts studied with Carnap, and eventually came into contact with McCulloch, who was interested in consulting with logicians in regard to his neurophysiological research. Pitts helped McCulloch understand how certain kinds of networks -- the kinds of circuits that might be important parts of nervous systems as well as electrical devices -- could embody the logical devices known as Turing machines.

        McCulloch and Pitts developed a theory that regarded nerves as all-or-none, on-or-off, switchlike devices, and treated the networks as circuits that could be described mathematically and logically. Their paper, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," was published in 1943 when Pitts was still only eighteen years old. They felt that they were only beginning a line of work that would eventually address the questions of how brain physiology is linked to knowledge.

        When Wiener, Bigelow, and Rosenblueth got together with McCulloch and Pitts, in 1943 and 1944, a critical mass of ideas was reached. Pitts joined Wiener at MIT, then worked with von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study after the war. By the time this interdisciplinary cross-fertilization was beginning, the ENIAC project had progressed far enough for digital computers to join the grand conjunction of ideas.

        A series of meetings occurred in 1944, involving an interdisciplinary blend of topics that seemed to be coming from subject areas as far afield as logic, statistics, communication engineering, and neurophysiology. The participants were an equally eclectic assortment of thinkers. It was at one of these meetings that von Neumann made the acquaintance of Goldstine, whom he was to encounter again not long afterward, at the Aberdeen railroad station. Rosenblueth had to depart for Mexico City in 1944, but by December, Wiener, Bigelow, von Neumann, Howard Aiken of the Harvard-Navy-IBM Mark I calculator project, Goldstine, McCulloch and Pitts formed an association they called "The Teleological Society," for the purpose of discussing "communication engineering, the engineering of control devices, the mathematics of time series in statistics, and the communication and control aspects of the nervous system." In a word -- cybernetics.

        In 1945 and 1946, at the teleological society meetings, and in personal correspondence, Wiener and von Neumann argued about the advisability of placing too much trust in neurophysiology. Von Neumann thought that the kinds of tools available to McCulloch and Pitts put brain physiologists in the metaphorical position of trying to decipher computer circuits by bashing computers together and studying the wreckage,

        To von Neumann, the bacteriophage -- a nonliving microorganism that can reproduce itself -- was a much more promising object of study. He felt that much more could be learned about nature's codes by looking at microorganisms than by studying brains. The connection between the mysteries of brain physiology and the secrets of biological reproduction were later to emerge more clearly from theories involving the nature of information, and von Neumann turned out to be right -- biologists were to make faster progress in understanding the coding of biological reproduction than neuroscientists were to make in their quest to decode the brain's functions.

        The Macy Foundation, which had sponsored the meetings that led to the creation of the Teleological Society, continued to sponsor free-wheeling meetings. Von Neumann and Wiener were the dramatic co-stars of the meetings, and the differences in their personal style became part of the excited and dramatic debates that characterized the formative years of cybernetics. Biographer Steve Heims, in his book about the two men -- John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener -- noted the way their contrasting personae emerged at these events:

            Wiener and von Neumann cut rather different figures at the semiannual conferences on machine-organism parallels, and each had his own circle of admirers. Von Neumann was small and plump, with a large forehead and a smooth oval face. He spoke beautiful and lucid English, with a slight middle-European accent, and he was always carefully dressed; usually a vest, coat buttoned, handkerchief in pocket, more the banker than the scholar. He was seen as urbane, cosmopolitan, witty, low-key, friendly and accessible. He talked rapidly, and many at the Macy meetings often could not follow his careful, precise, rapid reasoning. . . .

            Wiener was the dominant figure at the conference series, in his role as brilliant originator of ideas and enfant terrible. Without his scientific ideas and his enthusiasm for them, the conference series would never have come into existence, nor would it have had the momentum to continue for seven years without him. A short, stout man with a paunch, usually standing splay-footed, he had coarse features and a small white goatee. He wore thick glasses and his stubby fingers usually held a fat cigar. He was robust, not the stereotype of the frail and sickly child prodigy. Wiener evidently enjoyed the meetings and his central role in them: sometimes he got up from his chair and in his ducklike fashion walked around the circle of tables, holding forth exuberantly, cigar in hand, apparently unstoppable. He could be quite unaware of other people, but he communicated his thoughts effectively and struck up friendships with a number of the participants. Some were intrigued as much as annoyed by Wiener's tendency to go to sleep and even snore during a discussion, but apparently hearing and digesting what was being said. Immediately upon waking he would often make penetrating comments.

        Although the nerve network theory was to suffer a less than glorious fate when neurophysiology progressed beyond what was known about nerve cells in the 1940s, the nerve-net models had already profoundly influenced the design of computers. (Later research showed that switching circuits are not such an accurate model for the human nervous system, because neurons do not act strictly as "all-or-none" devices.) Despite his misgivings about the state of the art in theories of brain functioning, in his 1945 "first Draft," von Neumann adopted the logical formalism proposed by McCulloch and Pitts. When the architectural template of all future general-purpose computers was first laid down, the cyberneticists' findings influenced the logical design.

        In 1944 and 1945, Wiener was already thinking about a scientific model involving communication, information, self-control -- an all-embracing way of looking at nature that would include explanations for computers and brains, biology and electronics, logic and purpose. He later wrote: "It became clear to me almost at the very beginning that these new concepts of communication and control involved a new interpretation of man, of man's knowledge of the universe, and of society."

        Wiener was convinced that biology, even sociology and anthropology, were to be as profoundly affected by cybernetics as electronics theory or computer engineering; in fact anthropologist Gregory Bateston was closely involved with Wiener and later with the first AI researchers. While Shannon published information theory, and von Neumann pushed the development of computer technology, Wiener retreated from the politics of big science in the postwar world to articulate his grand framework.

        After the war, as the plans for the Institute for Advanced Study's computer proposed by von Neumann were put into action, with Julian Bigelow as von Neumann's chief engineer on the project, and as Mauchly and Eckert struck out on their own to start the commercial computer industry, Wiener headed for Mexico City to work with Rosenblueth. Then, in the spring of 1947, Wiener went to England, where he visited the British computer-building projects, and spoke with Alan Turing.

        When he returned to Mexico City, Wiener wrote his book and

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

This Mexican Jew was involved with the Rockefeller foundation:

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Arturo Rosenblueth

Arturo Rosenblueth Stearns (October 2, 1900 – September 20, 1970) was a Mexican researcher, physician and physiologist, who is known as one of the pioneers of cybernetics.

Biography

Rosenblueth was born in 1900 in Ciudad Guerrero, Chihuahua. He began his studies in Mexico City, then traveled to Berlin and Paris where he obtained his medical degree. Returning to Mexico city in 1927, he engaged in teaching and research in physiology. In 1930 he obtained a Guggenheim Scholarship and moved to Harvard University, to the department of Physiology, then directed by Walter Cannon. With Cannon he explored the chemical mediation of homeostasis. Rosenblueth cowrote research papers with both Cannon and Norbert Wiener, pioneer of cybernetics. Rosenblueth was an influential member of the core group at the Macy Conferences.[1]

In 1944, Rosenblueth became professor of physiology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Eventually he became head of the Physiology Laboratory of the National Institute of Cardiology, head of the Physiology Department and, in 1961, director of the Center for Scientific Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav) at the National Polytechnic Institute.

Between 1947 and 1949, and again between 1951 and 1952, using grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, he returned to Harvard to further collaborate with Wiener.

Arturo Rosenblueth died September 20, 1970 in Mexico City.

Work

Since the 1930s Rosenblueth worked with Cannon on issues related with Chemical transmission among nervous elements. Between 1931 and 1945 he worked with several specialists, among them Cannon, del Pozo, H.G. Schwartz, and Norbert Wiener. With Wiener and Julian Bigelow he wrote "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology", which, according to Wiener himself, set the bases for the new science of Cybernetics.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Rosenblueth