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Purpose: This paper reviews the underpinning principles and scientific trends of cybernetics and the viable system model (VSM). Therefore, this paper aims to guide authors and managers active in management cybernetics and to inform them about the past, current and future trends in this discipline. Design/methodology/approach: This paper adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods. First, a descriptive and qualitative approach is used to review and analyze management cybernetics historical trends. Then, a frequency analysis (quantitative) is conducted on the 1,000 first publications in the field. Findings: The cybernetics was emerged in the Josiah Macy conference in 1946. Then, Wiener introduced the field of cybernetics and Ashby, Von Foerster and McCulloch developed this concept as a discipline. The Management cybernetics field that was introduced by Beer is a combination of system, control and management sciences. Beer presented VSM as an operational model in this area. Analyzing the 1,000 top-ranked publications shows that the introduction of this field reached maturity and further development became relatively mature. Moreover, based on the analyzed trends, VSM model application can now be strongly attractive. In this paper, the main journals, authors and research trends are analyzed. The main application area of this model is in the IT field and large-scale organizations. Practical implications: The present paper's implication for practitioners and researchers is guiding authors and managers to most appropriate studies in the field, so that they can produce and use the most efficient studies in this field. Social implications: The fields of IT, Policy-Making, Production, Social Issues, Service industry, Software developers, etc., are some of this paper's implications for industry and society. Originality/value: In this paper, the steps of VSM development are investigated. Then, recent trends (classifications, authors, journals and topics analysis) are surveyed by analyzing the top 1,000 publications in this field. This paper would help researchers find more appropriate research fields. In addition, it helps practitioners find the optimum solutions based on management cybernetics for their problems among vast numbers of publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PAPERS OF THOMAS A. EDISON Volume 7: Losses and Loyalties,April 1883-December 1884 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PAPER GARDEN An Artist (Begins Her Life's Work) at 72 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the AET book club catalog. The article provides a list of recent additions to the AET book club along with, white papers, bumper stickers, posters, and others. Books are from diverse field like, women's issue, multimedia, Islam, literature and fiction, no-fiction, and others.

Focuses on Advanced Photo System (APS) films and cameras. Reason why frame measures are different; Factors combined to make APS image quality match a 35millimeter (mm) camera; What APS cameras can offer; Information on other APS cameras.

Nobody's sure who invented the caricature. It might have been Leonardo da Vinci, whose studies of ''bizarre heads'' led his admirers to the realization that distorted aspects of physiognomy could serve a satirical purpose more directly than strict representation, or so INFINITE JEST: Caricature and Satire From Leonardo to Levine (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University, $45), by the Met curators Constance C. McPhee and Nadine M. Orenstein, suggests. ''Scholars still puzzle over the function of these drawings, which appear to have had a comic intent,'' Orenstein deadpans in her commentary on an etching of a pair of grotesque heads copied from Leonardo. Or it might have been some kid who noticed that if you draw somebody's nose and chin bigger it looks pretty funny. This book -- whose title seems inspired by the kind of logic that would call a collection of morning landscapes ''The Sun Also Rises'' -- serves as the catalog to an exhibition at the Met that runs through March 4. It surveys caricature from the 15th century onward, although it tapers off with the years when printing technology began opening up the field. It includes only half a dozen images from the past 60 years or so, including a dead-on 2008 piece by the Dutch artist Siegfried Woldhek that constructs George W. Bush's frowning face out of six downward-trending arrows on graph paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses the question of whether electronic books will supplant paper-based books and libraries. He cites various possible apocalyptic scenarios, such as nuclear war, environmental catastrophes, and global terrorism, and notes that in a post-apocalyptic future, access to electronic books, or even electricity, may not be an option. Therefore, he recommends stocking up on hard copies of books related to survival skills.

To call the work of Amy Sedaris ''quirky'' is too easy -- it's also a vast understatement. Known in some circles for her cheese balls and cupcakes just as much as for her offbeat film, television and stage appearances, Sedaris often defies definition. So does her book SIMPLE TIMES (Grand Central, $27.99), a hyperkinetic hodgepodge of ''Crafts for Poor People'' (written with Paul Dinello) celebrating traditional American handicrafts, as well as diversions like keeping pet rabbits and making mint juleps. Although the book's tag line may seem to mock the financially challenged classes, it's more likely Sedaris just wanted to announce that this is not a guide for stately Martha Stewart types with large materials budgets. Her list of ''Craft Room Necessities'' calls for affordable items like Popsicle sticks, ribbon, construction paper and ''googly eyes'' for novelties like the ''rusty nail wind chime'' and a mosaic of the soul singer James Brown made from corn, rice and beans. ''Crafting is putting ideas into action and then holding them together with an inexpensive adhesive,'' Sedaris writes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greece and Rome are always with us: Consciously inspired by a noble ideal of the Roman Republic, America's founders created a Senate, built a Capitol and wrote under pseudonyms like Publius, Brutus and Cato; in the Federalist Papers, some of them specified the new Constitution's greatest deviation from the Roman model: ''the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity,'' from any direct role in public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some years ago, I began spending time in the rural Southern town where my father had been raised, and I often found myself wishing for a decoder ring. Squirrels had longer tails, wisteria bloomed off schedule, and with all the diphthongs and dropped syllables, I had no idea what people were saying. The local language sprouted from the literal and cultural landscape that informed it -- its racial history and disappearing farms, the coexistence of deer festivals and meth busts, the households where people wore Carhartts without irony and put ''Queer Eye'' on TiVo. How to understand all this? An atlas would have helped. Not any atlas, mind you, but one as inventive and affectionate as Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California; cloth, $49.95; paper, $24.95), a collection of 22 maps and accompanying essays paying homage to the city where the author lives. ''Infinite City'' started as a commissioned project for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which turned to Solnit as it geared up for its 75th anniversary this year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ANJUM'S NEW INDIAN.By Anjum Anand. (Wiley, paper, $24.95.) Modern, approachable Indian dishes from the British television personality who's been called ''the Indian Nigella Lawson.'' (In a good way.) AROUND MY FRENCH TABLE: More Than 300 Recipes From My Home to Yours.By Dorie Greenspan. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40.) The baking expert (and part-time Parisienne) shows how the French really eat at home: with delicious ease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to have the walls of my diminutive apartment scraped and repainted, I recently had to heap all of my possessions in the center of the room. The biggest obstacle was my library. Despite what I like to think of as a rigorous ''one book in, one book out'' policy, it had begun to metastasize quietly in corners, with volumes squeezed on top of the taller cabinets and in the horizontal crannies left above the spines of books that had been properly shelved. It was time to cull. I am not a collector or a pack rat, unlike a colleague of mine who once expressed the fear that he might perish someday under a toppled pile of books and papers, like a woman whose obituary he once read. I was baffled the first time a friend explained to me that the book in my hand was his ''reading copy,'' while the ''collection copy'' resided upstairs, in some impenetrable sanctum. Having reviewed hundreds of books over the past 20-some years, I no longer subscribe to the notion that I have a vague journalistic responsibility to keep a copy of every title I have ever written about. I am not sentimental. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents information on the non-fiction book 'Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick,' by David Thomson. Remarks of Thomson on the papers of the film director; Condition given by Selznick's sons to cooperate with Thomson; Description of the sons of Selznick.