Who we are
CASSANDRA CROSSINGS is a person !
A juridical one…
(in other words: it’s the page of a think tank)
Why Cassandra ?
Cassandra is a reference to the Trojan princess of Greek mythology who was given the gift of foresight by the god Apollo, but also cursed to be disbelieved by everyone, even her own family…
She was eventually murdered at the end of the Trojan War after having accurately predicted (among other things) the death of the Greek king Agamemnon.
Crossings refers to the place where several rail roads intersect. We chose the Outside Double Slip Switch as a symbol, which offers 8 possible routes where two roads intersect while guaranteeing perfect safety.
But CASSANDRA CROSSINGS also refers to the 1976 film “The Cassandra Crossing” which told the story of the passengers of a train in which an activist infected with a bacterium as deadly as it was contagious had managed to board.
All the passengers will also be infected and the authorities will quarantine the train before directing it to an abandoned line leading to an old camp where the passengers will be treated.
The route passes over a bridge that is out of use and will collapse when the train enters it.
Some passengers will save their lives after realizing that the bacterium has not survived in the oxygen-enriched atmosphere of the closed air conditioning system designed to prevent any risk of external contamination.
In a spectacular maneuver, they will separate their cars from the rest of the train a few kilometers before the fateful bridge.
We chose this reference because we liked the underlying lesson:
Those who know how to observe their environment and who dare to use their brains will save their skin!
The CASSANDRA CROSSINGS adventure began in December 1984 with the discovery of a small booklet presenting another way of perceiving reality. It was a small booklet detailing some of the work of what is known as the “Palo Alto School” or radical constructivist school (among other more or less approved designations.)
Many people have been involved in the creation and development of this school of thought, but one of them has had a profound influence on us: Gregory Bateson
There is a Gregory Bateson Institute, founded in 1987 in Belgium, which has subsequently branched out into 3 centers for consultation and training. Our work has absolutely nothing to do with these institutes which deal with mental health, whereas our work belongs to the world of social engineering.
The studies we present on this site are the results of analyses for which we have developed our own methods based on the work of G. Bateson and others.
Our analyses have the following characteristics:
- they are systemic in the sense that they study the concomitant evolution of many elements gathered in a whole that obeys specific rules, i.e. a system.
- they are cybernetic because they are subject to rules that steer them towards a final situation corresponding to the goal to be achieved. More precisely, we are interested in observing the evolution of the system to define these intrinsic rules.
- they are teleological because understanding the purpose of the system is crucial in formulating the rules of operation.
- finally, they meet the criteria of scientific work because:
- they are predictable – based on a situation at a given point in time, it is possible to predict a future situation that arises from the implementation of the rules being studied.
- they are formalized within an appropriate theoretical framework – they are not written ex abrupto without further explanation.
- and they are falsifiable, i.e. there is a framework in which they apply – the situation for which they were defined – and there are situations for which they do not apply (the archetypal example of an unfalsifiable rule is the religious dogma that applies everywhere and has no other explanation than “It is so and you must believe without trying to understand…”)
All those who have read this page so far will have the impression (provided they are old enough…) of a journey through time that has brought them back to the end of the second millennium, when the world wide web was still in its infancy…
This is an aesthetic choice that we claim and fully endorse!
This ultra-minimalist presentation is deliberate because we have given priority to substance over appearance.
There are no banners or animations that could disrupt the reading. There is only the information that we consider worthy of sharing.
And if there were to be many feedback on the topics covered, we would be happy to exchange our points of view (according to the aphorism of Evelyn Beatrice Hall aka S. G. Tallentyre “I do not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the end so that you can say it.” often attributed apocryphally to Voltaire)
Our Documents
Social Retroengineering
In this document, we examine the hypothesis that language influences the possibilities of information sharing.
We demonstrate that French, for structural and cultural reasons that we explain, is the language that offers the greatest diversity of mastery of thought.
As a result, France should be at the top of the economic, academic and diplomatic world if France were able to fully realize its potential.
Sadly, is it also crystal clear that France is far from dominating the world.
Therefore, the observation raises an obvious question: what is preventing France from occupying a place that it should rightfully hold given its potential?
Comparison UK – US – Europe – Asia
This document is a dinosaur, it was born at the beginning of this millennium in response to the events of 11 September 2001.
We were astonished by the reaction of the Americans after the discovery of the network behind these attacks and we were dumbfounded to see them accuse a country that seemed to have had no part in these acts, thus aligning ourselves with the majority opinion in continental Europe, particularly in France.
We were dumbfounded by some hysterical reactions (French Fries renamed Freedom Fries and other transatlantic oddities) and, above all, we discovered an Anglo-Saxon herd mentality that left us very confused.
All these questions required in-depth analysis in order to understand and explain these behaviours that seemed illogical.
We had long since realised that illogism often conceals a lack of understanding of the conditions under which the other party is thinking and we sought to understand what explanations would make these behaviours seem logical.
The studied behaviours, whether they are from France, Germany, Switzerland or the vast Anglosaxon world, all have an internal logic that is undeniably coherent. However, the confrontation of these behaviours, these cultures, can lead to situations of blatant incompatibility, situations that generate a misunderstanding all the more marked because the habits born from a longer or shorter period of cohabitation have led to the belief that ‘they are not so different from us…’ whereas a simple logical reflection should have taught us that if cultures are different, it is precisely because ‘those people are not like us, otherwise we would have the same culture!’
Here is the result of our findings and analyses from the beginning of our studies in 2003 to the present day.
Information Technology and Supervision
In this paper, we review the history of the growth of computer science from the perspective of software engineering from the 1960s to the present day.
We focus mainly on the issues of quality and ergonomics as well as on the working methods that are supposed to deliver products that meet the expectations and needs of users