User:Msrasnw/Tessaleno Devezas

Tessaleno Campos Devezas (born 4 December 1946, Rio de Janeiro) is a physicist, systems theorist, and materials scientist known by his contributions to the long waves theory in socioeconomic development, technological evolution, as well as world system analysis.

Training and academic career
Devezas attended the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ) where he received a BSc in Physics in 1969 and the Instituto Militar de Engenharia (Military Institute of Engineering - IME),also in Rio de Janeiro, where he received a MSc in Materials Science in 1974. After that he went to the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg where he earned a PhD degree in Materials Engineering in 1981. Subsequently he taught at the Military Institute of Engineering (IME) and served as a senior researcher at the Brazilian General Command for Aerospace Technology (CTA) in São José dos Campos, São Paulo, and at the Polytechnic Institute of Rio de Janeiro (IPRJ). As of 1992 he moved to Portugal where he teaches several disciplines in the fields of Materials Science and Technological Forecasting for engineering students. Devezas is actually Associate Professor with Habilitation and leads the Research Groups AeroMaS (Aeronautical Materials and Structures) and TeFIM (Technological Forecasting and Innovation Management of the Research Unity CAST (Center for Aerospace Technologies) and serves as Member of the Editorial Board of Technological Forecasting & Social Change (Elsevier) and Journal of Aerospace Technology and Management (IAE – CTA). Devezas held visiting positions at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA in 2002 and at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), in Laxenburg, Austria in 2005.

Devezas acquired his Portuguese citizenship in 2002.

Awards
In March 2002 Devezas was honored with the “Elsevier Best Paper Prize 2001” for his paper proposing a model explaining the mechanism underlying the long economic waves (Kondratieff waves) and in 2006 another of his papers (about the growth dynamics of the Internet) received an Honor Mention from Elsevier. In 2004 he was awarded with the Silver Kondratieff Medal by the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (RAN) for his written contributions for the understanding of the Kondratieff waves, and in 2005 he was honored as Honorary Member of the International Kondratieff Foundation.

Selected papers on Socioeconomic Development and Systems Theory

 * The Impact of Major Innovations: Guesswork or Forecasting Journal of Futures Studies 1, (1997) pp 33 – 50.
 * The Biological Determinants of Long Wave Behavior in Socioeconomic Growth and Development Technological Forecasting and Social Change 68 (2001) pp. 1–58 (with J. Corredine).
 * The Nonlinear Dynamics of Technoeconomic Systems: An Informational Interpretation Technological Forecasting and Social Change 69 (2002) pp. 317–357 (with J. Corredine).
 * Power Law Behavior and World System Evolution: a Millennial Learning Process LAUR 02-5221, Los Alamos National Laboratory, August 2002. Published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change 70 (2003) pp. 819–859 (with George Modelski).
 * The Growth Dynamics of the Internet and the Long Wave Theory Technological Forecasting and Social Change 72 (2005) pp. 913–935 (with Harold A. Linstone and H. Santos).
 * Evolutionary Theory of Technological Change: State-of-the-Art and New Approaches Technological Forecasting and Social Change 72 (2005) pp. 1137–1152 (special issue on New Horizons and Challenges for Future Oriented Technology Analysis).
 * Evolutionary Theory of Technological Change: Discussion on Missing Points and Promising Approaches IIASA IR-05-49 (20 pages), December 2005.
 * The Portuguese as System Builders in the XVth-XVIth centuries: A Case Study on the Role of Technology in the Evolution of the World System Globalizations 3 (2006) pp. 503–519 (with George Modelski).
 * Political Globalization is Global Political Evolution World Futures 63 (2007) pp. 1–16.
 * Energy Scenarios: Toward a New Energy Paradigm Futures 40 (2008) 1-16
 * Crises, depressions, and expansions: Global analysis and secular trendsTechnological Forecasting and Social Change (2010)

Books

 * Kondratieff Waves, Warfare and World Security Editor, NATO Security Through Science Series E: Human and Societal Dynamics vol. 5, IOS Press, Amsterdam, March 2006. (ISBN 1-58603-588-6).
 * Portugal: o Pioneiro da Globalização – Inovação e Estratégia na História Moderna with Jorge Nascimento Rodrigues, Centro Atlântico, V.N. Famalicão, May 2007 (1st ed.), August 2007 (2nd ed.). (ISBN 978-989-615-042-6).
 * Globalization as Evolutionary Process – Modeling Global Change G. Modelski, T. Devezas and W.R. Thompson (Eds), Routledge, London, December 2007. (ISBN 0-415-77360-1 and 978-0-415-77361-4).
 * Pioneers of Globalization, Why Portugal Surprised the World with Jorge Nascimento Rodrigues, Centro Atlântico, V.N. Famalicão, December 2007 (ISBN 978-989-615-056-3).
 * 1509, A Batalha que Mudou o Domínio do Comércio Global with Jorge Nascimento Rodrigues, Centro Atlântico, V.N. Famalicão, October 2008. (ISBN 978-989-615-069-3).
 * Salomão, o Elefante Diplomata with Jorge Nascimento Rodrigues, Centro Atlântico, V.N. Famalicão, November 2008. (ISBN 978-989-615-073-0)
 * Portugal: o Pioneiro da Globalização – A Herança das Descobertas with Jorge Nascimento Rodrigues, Reviewed and extended edition, Centro Atlântico, V.N. Famalicão, July 2009. (ISBN 978-989-615-077-8).

Book Chapters

 * Long Waves and Warfare: an Enduring Controversy in T.Devezas (Ed.), Kondratieff Waves, Warfare and World Security Prologue, pp. vii-ix, NATO Security Through Science Series, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006.
 * The Emergence of Modern Terrorism, in T.Devezas (Ed.), Kondratieff Waves, Warfare and World Security, pp. 245–252, NATO Security Through Science Series, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006 (with H.J.S. Santos).
 * A New Approach to Globalization, in G. Modelski, T. Devezas e W.R. Thompson (Eds), Globalization as Evolutionary Process, Introduction, pp. 1–8, Routledge, London, December 2007. (with G. Modelski e W.R. Thompson).
 * The Portuguese as System-builders: Technological innovation in early globalization, in G. Modelski, T. Devezas e W.R. Thompson (Eds), Globalization as Evolutionary Process, Chapter 3, pp. 30–57, Routledge, London, December 2007 (with G. Modelski).
 * The growth of the Internet, long waves, and global change, in G. Modelski, T. Devezas e W.R. Thompson (Eds), Globalization as Evolutionary Process, Chapter 14, pp. 310–335, Routledge, London, December 2007 (with H.A. Linstone e H.J.S. Santos).
 * The Evolutionary Trajectory of the World System toward an Age of Transition, em W.R. Thompson (Ed), Systemic Transitions Chapter 11, pp. 223–240, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, January 2009.

Quotations – Draft of a Theory
"Society is a learning complex open system living on spaceship earth, fuelled by the sun’s energy. It must obey the laws of nature like any other physical system in the universe. The evolution of the socioeconomic system is a flow of human energy that must obey some constraints of physical origin, such as the learning time necessary to deal with a basic innovation. The constraints are the laws of physics that are simply the translation into mathematics of the great number of things that cannot be done."

(in “The Impact of Major Innovations: Guesswork or Forecasting”, Journal of Futures Studies, 1997).

"Today, futures studies are to some extent guesswork……. Two aspects of major innovations mean that the future of technology is still unforeseeable. G for great impact, U for unforeseeable, E for enormous potential, S for synergistic. We need another S to complete the acronym GUESS. We can find the lacking S in another characteristic of basic innovations: they have a touch of serendipity."

(in “The Impact of Major Innovations: Guesswork or Forecasting”, Journal of Futures Studies, 1997)

"What place then for free will? Perhaps none, if we look forward in a collective sense. There is apparently a weakness in the comparison between individuals in a crowd or in society and molecules in a gas. In the first case there is free will; each individual knows well where he is intending to go, or what he intends to do with his money. But on the other hand, it can be said that the end effect is the same: entropy grows inside the subsystems, work is produced, and energy dissipated. Thus, chance governs individual behavior, but not collective behavior. In collective behavior there is a certain necessity. The necessity of following the laws of nature. …..The balance between chance and necessity - this is the rule of thumb of the origin and evolution of the universe. And human society is just a very small part of an enslaving universe."

(in “The Impact of Major Innovations: Guesswork or Forecasting”, Journal of Futures Studies, 1997)

"In this way, the very regular alternation of light and darkness, of warm and cold, of blossom and fall, as well as the wonderful regularity of the dance of the celestial bodies, are thoroughly rooted in the human genome and in the human cognitive capacity. This work is an attempt to show that the observed patterns of regularity in human affairs, manifest as socioeconomic rhythms and recurrent phenomena, are constrained and codetermined by our natural human biological clocks, themselves the result of instructions impressed in the human genome by the physical regularity of fixed cosmic cycles."

(in “The Biological Determinants of Long Wave Behavior in Socioeconomic Growth and Development”, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 2001)

"Viewed on the most general level, living systems, from cells to societies, exhibit common properties, with some attending intrinsic fundamental invariants. Recognition of this fact in last decades is leading firmly to a new scientific paradigm, a complex bio-socioeconomics, whose embryo emerged with Synergetics and Chaos Theory, and is blossoming now with Complexity Theory and Systems Science. One of the purposes of this new scientific paradigm is to understand the uncanny order that is being discovered in complex and apparently random systems, and this includes social systems."

(in “The Biological Determinants of Long Wave Behavior in Socioeconomic Growth and Development”, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 2001)

"From Grecian antiquity, with Plato, to the birth of Sociology with August Comte, to modern History with Toynbee and Ortega y Gasset, the concept of generation has been recognized as a fundamental element in the tempo of human evolution, and constitutes a regular element in reasoning about long-term societal processes. So then, in the search for a clock giving the rhythm to long waves in human affairs, we are obliged to look at the generational process as a codeterminant of the phenomenon."

(in “The Biological Determinants of Long Wave Behavior in Socioeconomic Growth and Development”, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 2001)

"The way the present work was accomplished is perhaps one of the best examples of the revolution in the way of doing things: two persons on two continents, separated by an ocean and 3500 miles, changing ideas, opinions, texts and images in a few seconds, are using a set of equipment, concepts, source of data and technologies not existent (and even unthinkable) some 15 years ago."

(in “The Biological Determinants of Long Wave Behavior in Socioeconomic Growth and Development”, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 2001)

"If there is a beat in human affairs, the rhythm must be given by our biological clocks acting at the aggregate level, and not by economic or exogenous factors."

(in “The Biological Determinants of Long Wave Behavior in Socioeconomic Growth and Development”, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 2001)

"We proposed the name of Succeeding Technospheres for the phenomenon, taking into account that at the start of each wave there is observed a dramatic shift toward a meso-scale technological transformation. This transformation, pulsating regularly each half-century, is characterized by the synergistic combination of new technologies, the creation of new economic activities and industrial branches and a deep transformation of society as a whole — in summary, a new technological environment emerges, grows and diffuses in the body of society, killing or reviving previous technologies, until a leveling off is reached. Today’s youthful, growing global information and communication system is a living testimony to this argument."

(in “The Biological Determinants of Long Wave Behavior in Socioeconomic Growth and Development”, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 2001)