Sent to GMU 27 September 2007. This folder 17 in Box 91 holds printouts of 11 PowerPoint slides used for the Bertalanffy Lecture. (It probably also holds several other slides shows which look similar, but are more slides than the 11-slide title listed here in the database.) The Bertalanffy Lecture is named for Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy an Austrian philosopher who was instrumental in the beginnings of systems studies and was a co-founder of the Society for General Systems Theory a forerunner of the ISSS. In past years it had been an honor to be selected to give the Bertalanffy lecture. Usually the Bertalanffy speaker was in a keynote session, and had about an hour to present his talk. So in May 2002, assuming he would have an hour's time for the lecture, Warfield spent a great deal of time working up a presentation with 72 PowerPoint slides. The title of his lecture was going to be "The Road Less Traveled: Constructing Systems Science From the Basic Triad for All Science". But He did NOT present his 72 PowerPoint slides at his Bertalanffy lecture in China.

Here is the story: In June 2002 Warfield was informed that he would have only 15 minutes for his talk and 5 minutes for questions. So Warfield realized he would have no chance to decently present his "Triad of Science" idea, and he changed his talk, creating instead the slide show MIDDLE HUMAN SCIENCE with only 25 slides. He was still happy to be giving the honored Bertalanffy lecture. But again a surprise, as the conference date drew near it must have turned out that more and more Chinese officials wanted to present their talks. So Warfield got another message: The Plenary Session would have 10 speakers, 5 Chinese and 5 non-Chinese, leaving only 15 minutes for each speaker. Chinese and non-Chinese would alternate. So Warfield shortened his talk again and presented 11 slides in a very brief appearance in the University auditorium. His audience was probably 200 or 300 people, who spent the day listening to a LOT of speakers, each one on stage for about 10 min. However, at another time during the conference, Warfield had an opportunity to present his 75 slides (The Road Less Traveled) to a smaller audience, at an evening session. Also he gave long talks a day or two later for the Complexity Conference at TongJi University Business School, Shanghai, where I am sure he used much of the material he had prepared. In spite of shortened expectations, Warfield was glad to be at the conference, because he got to see Siwei Cheng again, and other Chinese friends, and also Roxana Cardenas was there and gave her talk about corruption, which was a very good talk and she presented it well. ===============

Although the shortest slide show was the formal Bertalanffy lecture, Warfield's computer holds three MIDDLE HUMAN SCIENCE slide shows, of diminishing size, as Warfield changed his PowerPoint documents to accommodate the changing schedules and varying audiences during the Shanghai trip. All three slide shows are on a CD Warfield sent to GMU Library Special Collections at the same time as the hard copy printouts.