Don't just do something, stand there! Reflections on the counterintuitive behavior of complex systems, seen through the eyes of System Dynamics, Systems Thinking and simulation.
I’m too busy to write much, but here are some quick updates.
C-ROADS is in the news, via Jeff Tolleffson at Nature News.
Our State of the Global Deal conclusion, that current proposals are not on track, now has more reinforcement:
Check out Drew Jones on TEDx.
A few weeks ago, Seattle racked up its hottest day ever, at 103 degrees F. I was there for the fun. Normally I argue that air conditioning in the Pacific Northwest is for wimps, but we weren’t too thrilled about experiencing the record heat in a hotel without functioning AC. The next day (still hot) I was at a hotel that did have AC (the Crowne Plaza), and found this amazing scene:
AC on full blast … and people huddled around a gas fire in the lobby?!
Don’t even get me started on the ice machinein a 100 degree closet, with an electric fan venting its waste heat into the hall, only to be expelled to the great outdoors by the building AC…
Incidentally, while it’s been mercifully cool and wet here in Montana, satellite records indicate that July 19 was possibly the hottest day ever recorded worldwide.
From the CSM on the Gates arrest:
“The rule is, if a police officer stops you in a car or on the street, he’s the captain of the ship, and whatever he says goes,” says Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police’s legislative division. “If you’ve got something to address, do it later. Do what he says, or else only bad things can happen.”
I think I see where this guy’s coming from, but it really sounds bad. If an officer asks me to stop doing something constitutionally protected (say, taking pictures), I can’t argue the case on the spot? I either give up my rights or go downtown?
Via ScienceDaily,
A large body of social science research has established that students tend to overestimate the amount of alcohol that their peers consume. This overestimation causes many to have misguided views about whether their own behaviour is normal and may contribute to the 1.8 million alcohol related deaths every year. Social norms interventions that provide feedback about own and peer drinking behaviours may help to address these misconceptions.
Erling Moxnes has looked at this problem from a dynamic perspective, in Moxnes, E. and L. C. Jensen (in press). “Drunker than intended; misperceptions and information treatments.” Drug and Alcohol Dependence. From an earlier Athens SD conference paper,
Overshooting alcohol intoxication, an experimental study of one cause and two cures
Juveniles becoming overly intoxicated by alcohol is a widespread problem with consequences ranging from hangovers to deaths. Information campaigns to reduce this problem have not been very successful. Here we use a laboratory experiment with high school students to test the hypothesis that overshooting intoxication can follow from a misperception of the delay in alcohol absorption caused by the stomach. Using simulators with a short and a long delay, we find that the longer delay causes a severe overshoot in the blood alcohol concentration. Behaviour is well explained by a simple feedback strategy. Verbal information about the delay does not lead to a significant reduction of the overshoot, while a pre test mouse-simulator experience removes the overshoot. The latter policy helps juveniles lessen undesired consequences of drinking while preserving the perceived positive effects. The next step should be an investigation of simulator experience on real drinking behaviour.
Via ScienceDaily,
Just about any road with a loose surface ’” sand or gravel or snow ’” develops ripples that make driving a very shaky experience. A team of physicists from Canada, France and the United Kingdom have recreated this “washboard” phenomenon in the lab with surprising results: ripples appear even when the springy suspension of the car and the rolling shape of the wheel are eliminated. The discovery may smooth the way to designing improved suspension systems that eliminate the bumpy ride.
“The hopping of the wheel over the ripples turns out to be mathematically similar to skipping a stone over water,” says University of Toronto physicist, Stephen Morris, a member of the research team.
“To understand the washboard road effect, we tried to find the simplest instance of it, he explains. We built lab experiments in which we replaced the wheel with a suspension rolling over a road with a simple inclined plow blade, without any spring or suspension, dragging over a bed of dry sand. Ripples appear when the plow moves above a certain threshold speed.”
“We analyzed this threshold speed theoretically and found a connection to the physics of stone skipping. A skipping stone needs to go above a specific speed in order to develop enough force to be thrown off the surface of the water. A washboarding plow is quite similar; the main difference is that the sandy surface “remembers” its shape on later passes of the blade, amplifying the effect.”
While the Case-Shiller index is down and the conventional wisdom suggests that housing prices will continue to fall, the RPX composite is up for the first time since 2007. The year-on-year ratio hit bottom in Feb 09. The RPX has a lot less lag than the CSI, but also a seasonal signal, so this could merely mean that seasonally adjusted prices are just falling more slowly, but it would be nice if it reflected green shoots. I’m not holding my breath though.
This just in from CNAS:
ABC News will air Earth 2100, the prime time documentary for which they filmed the war game, on June 2, 2009, at 9:00 p.m. (EST). You can view a promotional short report on the documentary from ABC News online, and hopefully you will all be able to view it on television or via Internet.
In conjunction with the airing of the documentary, CNAS has made the participant briefing book and materials from the game available online. We encourage other institutions to use and cite these materials to learn about the game and to stage their own scenario exercises. I also hope that they will be useful to you for your own future reference.
Finally, we are posting a short working paper of major findings from the game. While the game did not result in the kind of breakthrough agreements we all would have liked to see, this exercise achieved CNAS’s goals of exploring and highlighting the potential difficulties and opportunities of international cooperation on climate change. I know that everyone took away different observations from the game, however, and I hope that you will share your memories and your own key findings of the event with us, and allow us to post them online as a new section of the report.
Visit the Climate Change War Game webpage to view the CNAS report on major findings and background on developing the 2015 world, the participant briefing book, and materials generated from the game.
I was just trying to decide whether I believed what I said recently, that the current economic crisis is difficult to attribute to environmental unsustainability. While I was pondering, I ran across this article by Graham Turner on the LtG wiki entry, which formally compares the original Limits runs to history over the last 30+ years. A sample:
The report basically finds what I’ve argued before: that history does not discredit Limits.
Drew Jones of SI just ran a climate policy exercise in Croatia from his desk in NC. Sure, it takes some carbon to keep the servers humming, but a lot less than for a transatlantic flight. Aviation is often regarded as essential to a connected world … but what if it’s not?