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The purpose of this paper is to introduce the cybernetics audience to the fundamental interdisciplinary concept of hyperseeing and its application to hypersculptures.

Briefly, hyperseeing is seeing from multiple viewpoints in a very general sense. In particular, the author first discusses hyperseeing a sculpture. A sculpture is defined as an object in a fixed position relative to a horizontal plane (base, ground). Two sculptures are congruent if they consist of the same object. A hypersculpture is a set of congruent sculptures. A hypersculpture is a more complete presentation of the sculptural possibilities of an object.

A specific example is given of hyperseeing a knot sculpture made of copper tubing.

The paper demonstrates how the study of hypersculptures facilitates gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation of sculpture.

This paper aims to analyze the evolution of direct selling – a retail channel that successfully sold products ranging from cosmetics to radios to automobiles – to multilevel marketing (MLM), an industry now apparently heavily reliant on selling to itself. As the courts have found some MLM companies to be pyramid schemes, the analysis includes the overlap between the legal MLM model and an illegal pyramid scheme.

The development of direct selling in the USA was examined, followed by the factors contributing to the design and growth of the MLM model and its non-commission-based compensation structure. Then, the key legal decisions regarding illegal pyramid schemes operating under the guise of MLM, the relative stagnation of direct selling and the state of the MLM industry were examined.

As the MLM model operates on the dual premise of retailing through a network of distributors and recruiting new distributors to do the same, it was found that federal regulators and the courts consistently focus on the “retail question” – the existence and extent of sales to consumers external to the distributor network. The authors argue that without a significant external customer base, internal consumption by an ever-churning base of participants resembles neither employee purchases nor a buying club.

As the MLM model facilitated the growth of pyramid scheme fraud, creating victims rather than customers, this research highlights successful efforts to regulate this type of consumer fraud.

Few papers have been written on MLM and pyramids schemes, and none thus far has taken an historical perspective.

Presents a review on implementing finite element methods on supercomputers, workstations and PCs and gives main trends in hardware and software developments. An appendix included at the end of the paper presents a bibliography on the subjects retrospectively to 1985 and approximately 1,100 references are listed.

Reports the results of a study on the social and environmental disclosure practices of New Zealand companies. In addition to providing an up‐to‐date description of such practices, and placing them in an international context, examines some potential determinants of these practices. Replicates and extends a recent US study (Patten, 1991). Makes improvements on Patten’s study by measuring the amount of disclosure as a continuous variable using both page amount and the number of sentences. The results indicate both measures are highly correlated. Consistent with Patten (1991) and other studies, reports that both company size and industry are significantly associated with social and environmental disclosures, and that profitability (both current and lagged) is not. In addition to these variables, provides some tentative evidence that New Zealand companies with dual (overseas) stock exchange listings are greater disclosers of social and environmental information.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

We use normal accident theory to analyze the financial sector, especially that part of the financial sector that processed home mortgages, and the mortgage meltdown. We maintain that the financial sector was highly complex and tightly coupled in the years leading up to the mortgage meltdown. And we argue that the meltdown exhibited characteristics of a system or normal accident; the result of a component failure (unusually high mortgage defaults) that, in the context of unique conditions (which included low interest rates and government policy encouraging home loans to less credit-worthy households), resulted in complex and tightly coupled interactions that financial elites and government officials were ill-equipped to control. We also consider the role that agency and wrongdoing played in the design of the financial system and the unfolding of the mortgage meltdown. We conclude that a fundamental restructuring of the financial system, so as to reduce complexity and coupling, is required to avert future similar financial debacles. But we also conclude that such a restructuring faces significant obstacles, given the interests of powerful actors and the difficulties of labeling those responsible for the meltdown as wrongdoers.

Argues that the gold standard is the only monetary regime consistent with the philosophy of free enterprise and assesses the contributions of Friedman, Mundell and Hayek to monetary theory as supporters of the free market but opponents of the gold standard. Critically reviews the basic ideas of each and notes that Greenspan, while apparently endorsing the gold standard, has not actually used his position as chairman of the US Federal Reserve System to move towards it. Lists some economists who support both free enterprise and the gold standard as a “vital aspect of political economy”.

This volume includes two major explanations of the meltdown that I critically discuss. The first is a “normal accident theory” arguing that the complexity and coupling of the financial system caused the failure. Although these structural characteristics were evident, I argue that the case does not fit the theory because the cause was not the system, but behavior by key agents who were aware of the great risks they were exposing their firms, clients, and society to. The second interpretation is a neoinstitutional one, emphasizing that ideologies, worldviews, cognitive frames, mimicry, and norms were the source of behaviors that turned out to be disastrous for the elites and others. The implication is that elites were victims, not perpetrators. I argue that while ideologies, etc., can have real effects on the behavior of many firm members and society in general, in this case financial elites, to serve personal ends, crafted the ideologies and changed institutions, fully aware that this could harm their firms, clients, and the public. Complexity and coupling only made deception easier and the consequences more extensive. For anecdotal evidence I examine a decade of deregulation, examples of elected representative, regulatory officials, firms, and the plentiful warnings.