Tag Archives: system thinking

youcubed

This site is all about fresh ideas for teaching high school math. Apparently a lot of people agree that the traditional U.S. approach of algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, and calculus is not working. A lot of people seem to think data science is the answer. It sounds okay to me to start with interesting data and then work backward to math theory and systems concepts. I do use geometry pretty much daily in my work, at least concepts like areas and volumes. Are those geometry? I think I originally learned them in high school chemistry class. I almost never use calculus symbols, but I use calculus concepts like rate of change and accumulating and depleting stocks daily. I solve those numerically rather than symbolically. So maybe this is what we should be teaching in high school, then working our way to the symbols for people who really need it, for example the ones who are going to be programming the computers that the rest of us use to solve various problems. A little statistics and probability is a good idea, but even that can be more experiment based and less symbolic at first.

special operations culture

This article by a Marine special operator says special operations have a culture problem. That doesn’t surprise me too much. Anyway, here is the prescription the author gives for addressing an organization’s culture problem:

  • Acknowledge the problem. It’s hard to spot a slow change from within an organization. One solution is to have a peer organization do a review.
  • Employ trusted agents. These are sort of the blue collar leaders.
  • Harness and rein in the cultural power brokers. These are more like the middle management.
  • Win the population. This is an idea for counter-insurgency where you try to peel the bulk of the population away from a few bad actors within their ranks.

The article mentions “core values”. My own observation about core values is that strong, well-functioning organizations tend to already have them implicitly, and when you have to make a big deal about training people in them explicitly your culture is already lost. I’m not sure you can change individuals’ core values all that much. You can try to weed out people with bad ones and bring in people with good ones.

2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Cape Town, South Africa looked to be in imminent danger of running out of water. They got lucky, but the question is whether this was a case of serious mismanagement or an early warning sign of water supply risk due to climate change. Probably a case of serious mismanagement of the water supply while ignoring the added risk due to climate change. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.
  • FEBRUARY: Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water. The other cities at risk mentioned in this article include Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Beijing, Cairo, Jakarta, Moscow, Istanbul, Mexico City, London, Tokyo, and Miami.
  • MARCH: One reason propaganda works is that even knowledgeable people are more likely to believe a statement the more often it is repeated.
  • APRIL: That big California earthquake is still coming.
  • MAY: The idea of a soft landing where absolute dematerialization of the economy reduces our ecological footprint and sidesteps the consequences of climate change through innovation without serious pain may be wishful thinking.
  • JUNE: The Trump administration is proposing to subsidize coal-burning power plants. Meanwhile the long-term economic damage expected from climate change appears to be substantial. For one thing, Hurricanes are slowing down, which  means they can do more damage in any one place. The rate of melting in Antarctic ice sheets is accelerating.
  • JULY: The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • AUGUST: Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • SEPTEMBER: A huge earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be by far the worst natural disaster ever seen.
  • OCTOBER: The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • NOVEMBER: About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.
  • DECEMBER: Climate change is just bad, and the experts seem to keep revising their estimates from bad to worse. The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply. An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.

Climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics. If I go back and look at last year’s post, this list of existential threats is going to be pretty much the same. Add to this the depressing grind of permanent war which magnifies these risks and diverts resources that could be used to deal with them. True, we could say that we got through 2018 without a nuclear detonation, pandemic, or ecological collapse, and under the circumstances we should sit back, count our blessings, and wait for better leadership. And while our leadership is particularly inept at the moment, I think Noam Chomsky has a point that political administration after political administration has failed to solve these problems and this seems unlikely to improve. The earthquake risk is particularly troublesome. Think about the shock we felt over the inept response to Katrina, and now think about how essentially the same thing happened in Puerto Rico, we are not really dealing with it in an acceptable way, and the public and news media have essentially just shrugged it off and moved on. If the hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts just keep hitting harder and more often, and we don’t fully respond to one before the next hits, it could mean a slow downward spiral. And if that means we gradually lose our ability to bounce back fully from small and medium size disasters, a truly huge disaster like an epic earthquake on the west coast might be the one that pushes our society to a breaking point.

Most hopeful stories:

I believe our children are our future…ya ya blahda blahda. It’s a huge cliche, and yet to be hopeful about our world I have to have some hope that future generations can be better system thinkers and problem solvers and ethical actors than recent generations have been. Because despite identifying problems and even potential solutions we are consistently failing to make choices as a society that could divert us from the current failure path. And so I highlighted a few stories above about ideas for better preparing future generations, ranging from traditional school subjects like reading and music, to more innovative ones like meditation and general system theory, and just maybe we should be open to the idea that the right amount of the right drugs can help.

Fossil fuels just might be on their way out, as alternatives start to become economical and public outrage slowly, almost imperceptibly continues to build.

There is real progress in the fight against disease, which alleviates enormous quantities of human suffering. I mention AIDS, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease above. We can be happy about that, of course. There are ideas about how to grow more food, which is going to be necessary to avoid enormous quantities of human suffering. Lest anyone think otherwise, my position is that we desperately need to reduce our ecological footprint, but human life is precious and nobody deserves to suffer illness or hunger.

Good street design that lets people get around using mostly their own muscle power. It might not be sexy, but it is one of the keys to physical and mental health, clean air and water, biodiversity, social and economic vibrancy in our cities. Come to think of it, I take that back, it can be sexy if done well.

Good street design and general systems theory – proof that solutions exist and we just don’t recognize or make use of them. Here’s where I want to insert a positive sentence about how 2019 is the year this all changes for the better. Well, sorry, you’ll have to find someone less cynical than me, and/or with much better powers of communication and persuasion than me to get the ball rolling. On the off chance I have persuaded you, and you have communication and/or persuasion super powers, let me know.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Whatever else happens, technology and accumulation of human knowledge in general march on, of course. Computer, robotics, and surveillence technology march on. The human move into space is much slower and painful than many would have predicted half a century ago, and yet it is proceeding.

I’ll never drop the waterless sanitation thing, no matter how much others make fun of me. It’s going to happen, eventually. I don’t know whether we will colonize Mars or stop defecating in our water supply first, but both will happen.

The gene drive thing is really wild the more I think about it. This means we now have the ability to identify a species or group of species we don’t want to exist, then cause it not to exist in relatively short order. This seems like it could be terrifying in the wrong hands, doesn’t it? I’m not even sure I buy into the idea that rats and mosquitoes have no positive ecological functions at all. Aren’t there bats and birds that rely on mosquitoes as a food source? Okay, I’m really not sure what redeeming features rats have, although I did read a few years ago that in a serious food crunch farming rats would be a much more efficient way of turning very marginal materials into edible protein than chicken.

The universe in a bottle thing is mind blowing if you spend too much time thinking about it. It could just be bottles all the way down. It’s best not to spend too much time thinking about it.

That’s it, Happy 2019!

emergy

There are still people working on emergy (embodied energy) as an accounting and system simulation system. This group is in Brazil.

Contribution of the Paraconsistent Tri-Annotated Logic to emergy accounting and decision making

The process of decision-making is a complex task that can become more challenging if the information provided by indicators is contradictory. Emergy accounting is an environmental accounting methodology that has been used to guide environmental decision making. In this paper we propose a comprehensive tool to support decision-making in emergy accounting. Paraconsistent Logic is a non-classic logic, which can aid in decision-making when the investigator is confronted with contradictory results. Paraconsistent Tri-Annotated Logic (PL3v) is proposed as a decision tool to compare different systems and allow selection of those alternatives with the best performance from the standpoint of sustainability defined in emergy terms. The rationale behind our selection of a set of emergy indicators to assess sustainability included such factors as increased efficiency, setting a priority for local resource use and minimization of the use of non-renewable resources. Two actual examples from the literature that resulted in contradictory evidence of system sustainability were compared within the framework of PL3v. Emergy indicators that correspond to positive evidence of sustainability (i.e., those that show increased efficiency and greater local resource use) were assigned as two favorable logic measures of sustainability. The PL3v analysis is completed with the identification of evidence that is unfavorable to sustainability, which is given by a third indicator negatively correlated with sustainability (i.e., non-renewable resource use). Operationally, the methodology proposed the normalization of the indicator values between [0,1] to fit to the PL3v annotation framework. Comparison of the systems examined is presented through the Paraconsistent Logic approach with the aid of a graphical representation and the calculation of the degree of certainty related to the truthfulness of the sustainability proposition.

do kids do better in private school than public?

The answer, at least in this study, is a clear no. Kids in private school are doing better than kids in public school, but it can be entirely explained by family income.

Does Attendance in Private Schools Predict Student Outcomes at Age 15? Evidence From a Longitudinal Study

By tracking longitudinally a sample of American children (n = 1,097), this study examined the extent to which enrollment in private schools between kindergarten and ninth grade was related to students’ academic, social, psychological, and attainment outcomes at age 15. Results from this investigation revealed that in unadjusted models, children with a history of enrollment in private schools performed better on nearly all outcomes assessed in adolescence. However, by simply controlling for the sociodemographic characteristics that selected children and families into these schools, all of the advantages of private school education were eliminated. There was also no evidence to suggest that low-income children or children enrolled in urban schools benefited more from private school enrollment.

“pro-growth education for Japan”

I was ready to rail against this article about “pro-growth education“, thinking from the title that it would be all about STEM and teaching job skills rather than thinking skills. But it turned out to be more about thinking skills, and went over some research on early childhood education with an emphasis to music, even giving a shout out to the Suzuki and Kodaly methods of teaching music to young children.

April 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

green roofs

Green roofs continue to catch on very, very slowly in the U.S. They are pretty common in Europe. Toronto has a fairly aggressive ordinance requiring them on most new non-residential buildings. Meanwhile, in the U.S. we have scattered demonstration projects and a few tax incentives. San Francisco has just become the first U.S. city to take steps toward requiring them in private development.

We have a strange relationship with technology in this country. We have embraced information technology, but in more traditional fields like civil engineering, architecture and construction our professionals seem to lack information, imagination, and intellectual curiosity about what is going on elsewhere in the world. The thinking typically goes that a new technology is not cost-effective because it is not common, and it is not common because it is not cost-effective. Short-term market forces don’t drive development of the technology in this situation, especially for long-lived technologies like buildings, highways, or pipes. Government can estimate the potential long-term benefits of adopting new technologies, then fund research, development, and lower barriers to new business creation by, to give just one example, freeing entrepreneurs from the burden of having health care tied to a full time corporate job. But our politicians seem incapable of understanding these slightly complex issues, and our citizenry is not demanding that they do.