Planetline notes

These are my notes from my planet line.

I really enjoyed my walk I learned a lot about how to identify species and I noticed how much you really see when you stop to look.

LOCATION: Earth, North America, USA, Massachusetts, Norfolk County, Norfolk, (NEIGHBORHOOD?)

BIOME: Eastern Deciduous Forest w/ coniferous trees

• terrestrial biome
• aquatic biome: wetlands (marshlands)

Wetlands

Wetlands are areas of standing water that support aquatic plants. Marshes, swamps, and bogs are all considered wetlands. Plant species adapted to the very moist and humid conditions are called hydrophytes. These include pond lilies, cattails, sedges, tamarack, and black spruce. Marsh flora also include such species as cypress and gum. Wetlands have the highest species diversity of all ecosystems. Many species of amphibians, reptiles, birds (such as ducks and waders), and furbearers can be found in the wetlands. Wetlands are not considered freshwater ecosystems as there are some, such as salt marshes, that have high salt concentrations—these support different species of animals, such as shrimp, shellfish, and various grasses.

Temperate deciduous forest

-climate: four seasons, temperature ranges from approximately 27 C/32 C to -1 C/-15 C, trees in deciduous forest lose leaves during winter, except cone trees. 

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/glossary/gloss5/biome/aquatic.html

http://www.thewildclassroom.com/biomes/wetlands.html

Latitude: temperate

Humidity: semihumid

Elevation: 65 meters (212 feet)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk,_Massachusetts

Watershed:

A watershed is the area of land where all of the water that is under it or drains off of it goes into the same place. John Wesley Powell, scientist geographer, put it best when he said that a watershed is:

"that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community."

http://cfpub.epa.gov/surf/county.cfm?fips_code=25021

Date of Walk Part 1: 4/17/12

Weather on 4/17: Hot, Sunny, approx 88 degrees

4/19 Exercise

DIAGRAM EXAMPLES

each large box is a tree

each triangle is a bird going from tree to tree with the little boxes being nests 

big box is habitat 

each box is a sentence

triangle's topic sentences

whole area paper/essay 

Big box a human mind

each individual statements are large boxes 

smaller boxes are thoughts that are not stated

all thoughts are interacting. 

Chapter 6 & 7 552's

Chapter 6
1. Leverage points are points of power! It can turn the tide of a whole system.
2.Although people involved in systems generally know where to find leverage points, they tend to push them in the wrong direction.
3.The world's leader's are fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems but they're pushing in the wrong direction!
4.In relation to cities, subsidized low-income housing is a leverage point. The less of it there is the better off the city is.
5.Counterintuitive: the word which Forrester uses to describe complex systems. We often use them backwards, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve

1.Most systems have evolved or are designed to stay far out of range of critical parameters. So most systems will not get to a danger zone on their own, people push them that way.
2.Buffers are usually physical entities, not easy to change.
3. The only way to fix a system that is laid out poorly is to rebuild it if possible.
4.Delays in feedback loops are critical determinants of system behavior. They are common causes of oscillations.
5.A delay in a feedback process is critical relative to rates of change in the stocks that the feedback loop is trying to control.

1. So in theory if systems were merely left alone and undisturbed by humans would they all work out?
2. Why are buffers difficult to change yet leverage points easy to shift in the wrong direction?

1.Social Systems are the external manifestations of cultural thinking patterns and of profound human needs, emotions, strengths, and weaknesses.
2.Self-organizing, nonlinear feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable.
3.Systems cannot be controlled only designed and redesigned.
4.Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity--our rationality our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision and morality.
5.Meadows assures us that everything we know and everything everyone knows is only a model.

1.Meadows decided he would like to add an 11th commandment and I thought I should quote it because it relates back to more than scientific information.."thou shalt not distort, delay or withhold information".
2.INFORMATION IS POWER.
3.The first step in respective language is keeping it as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible.
4. Pretending that something doesn't exist if its hard to quantify leads to faulty models.
5.Hierarchies exist to serve the bottom layers not the top. Don't maximize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole.

1.Things that are hard to identify may be more important that the things that are easy so why would one attempt to ignore it from a system?
2. Why would someone attempting to create a valid system ignore information?

Networks 552's

1. living cities have intrinsic network patterns.
2.Because of the increase in population, anti-fractal patterns have increased in major cities, the results of this are changing things for the patterns of life and cities.
3.towns and cities start of by slowly building a small-world network, with the increasing popularity of sites such as Facebook, these live connections starting at the small level are not being made, only the long distance connections of the internet.
4. A NETWORK IS ALWAYS DRIVEN TO ADJUST ITS COMMUNICATION INFRASTRUCTURE TOWARDS AN INVERSE-POWER HIERARCHY.
5.current cities are designed for short car trips, because of this much of the cities are populated with parking lots.

1. car city is different from modernist city because of our strong need and desire for close car connections. I see this every day when I drive to school, I easily could take the train but I would not feel in control of my commune therefore I demand a place to park as a driving commuter.
2.subways were built to compete with pedestrian travel to make it faster to get from point a to point b without disrupting the previously existing foot-travel network.
3.The World Wide Web itself has grown and has self-organized according to a self-similar, small-world structure (Barabási, 2002).
4.an over abundance of nodes in cities is damaging to the infrastructure.
5.IF WE NEED TO CONNECT THE ELECTRONIC CITY TO A PHYSICAL CITY, THEN THE PHYSICAL CITY MUST FOLLOW THE SAME STRUCTURAL LAWS.

1.if cities have been built building by building, how has such a strong pattern evolved from such random motives?
2.How will a modernist or car city be transformed into a electric city?

Fractals!

 1. Fibonacci series can be found everywhere in nature. Somehow he managed to find the perfect series of number which detailed patters in nature, things such as pinecones and some seashells display actual numbers as things of beauty.

2. A river system is a branching pattern.

3.the pattern of a tree's branches layed out flat on the ground, like a zen garden, actually has a calming effect on human beings.

4.scientific analysis could actually reveal many of these relaxing symmetric patterns in nature.

5.rocks form the backbone of zen garden pattern design

1.triangular rock clusters increase calming effect in zen gardens, the triangle represents earth, man and the divine. 

2.the idea of zen gardens can be found in Gestalt psychology which states that each individual can be part of a perceptual whole.

3.low contrast is required in zen gardens as to not shock the senses. 

4.the spacing between rocks in zen gardens is a ratio of the full size of the garden, meaning that all numbered measurements in the garden are related. 

5.to change the spacing of the rocks in a garden create a feeling. Farther apart would create emptiness and more clustered would introduce liveliness.

1. were the creators of original zen gardens aware of the complex fractal patterns that they were creating?

2. In ancient times how were zen gardeners able to understand these patterns without scientific analysis?

Here are some beautiful pictures of fractals I found, not only do these pictures accurately display fractals in nature but they are also beautiful slices of nature. 

So i've already made decent headway in terms of internships. I started off with my sophomore internship at an adult day care center in which I worked with the elderly who had either mental disabilities or Altzheimer's etc. I loved working with them and I really learned so much about working with disabilities. As for my next internship, I met with Dan Walker a few days ago and we decided that the two places which should be my priorities are Spark, which is a facility associated with BMC which works with kids that were born premature and with growth problems. The other is ARTZ which is a program which works with elderly with Altzheimer's and their caregivers to go on trips to places like the science museum and gather to watch old films. I definitely want to go for Spark because I'd like to get some experience working with kids because I currently have none. I'm hoping this internship will get me the experience I need to land my senior internship at a hospital setting because I really love the structure of a hospital and the work that is done there. 

As for my career I'm not positive what population I want to work with but I know that I definitely want to work as an expressive therapist somewhere because I love the work that can be done with it. I'm hoping to work with either kids or elderly because I like working with both. 

The guest speakers were very informative but unfortunately because I've really delved into the process of finding internships and planning my career, I previously knew many of the things which they spoke about but it was helpful to have a refresher.

These are the websites for the internships I hope to hear back from soon!

http://www.bmc.org/pediatrics-sparkcenter.htm

http://www.communityartcenter.org/

Chapter 5: 552 System Traps

1.Some systems not only resist policy and stay in a bad state but they get consistently worse. This related back to our discussion on evolution and how everything is constantly changing either for better or worse.
2. Systems fail gradually, like the "boiling frog syndrome" change doesn't always happen quickly, sometimes it slowly creeps up and before anything can notice, the system has failed.
3.Escalation occurs everywhere in our society. From squabbling siblings or friends to rivalry companies and businesses.
4.Escalation can equal monopolization.
5.Rule beating is evasive action to get around a systems rules. This is really important because so many things in nature do this to live their lives. Such as a person with not much money may steal just to eat, this is evading the law but in a necessary way.

1. The world is nonlinear. This is an important thing to remember while thinking about systems because an example of a system drawn on paper can only be linear, but one needs to remember that in reality, this system looks completely different.
2. Archetypes are systems which constantly produce problematic behavior. This is important because we need to be aware that not all systems are perfect, in fact many of them are flawed.
3.Policy-resistance comes from the event of subsystems pulling at each other in different directions.
4.The tragedy of the commons is a situation in which there is growth in a shared erodible environment. This is caused by missing feedback.
5.Privitizations works better than exhortation.

1.How can one tell if an archetype is fixable?
2. Is there a way to predict if a system is going to fail?