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?

Evolution

Evolution is a vital part to our understanding of ourselves and of our history. To believe that we did not evolve means to believe that we will never change again and always be the same human beings which God put on earth starting with Adam and Eve. The most amazing thing about life is that it finds a way. Without evolution that magical part of life wouldn't exist and nothing would adapt or change to better suit it's environment. Because humans and every other living thing on the planet is constantly changing, it creates the biggest system that there is, if nothing was ever able to adapt then many systems would fail and be lost. But the fact that every living thing is able to change and keep their systems going proves Darwin and survival of the fittest, for systems which do not change or adapt, die out. Therefore evolution and understanding what it does for us is a vital part of understanding how everything in the world is able to better fit it's environment and be able to live successfully and carry on the changes to its following organism

Chapter 4 Notes: 552

1. Systems are always changing, therefore the system is never the same.
This reminds me of the saying about the river never being the same river because the water is always flowing.

2. Everything in the world is a model, nothing we picture in our head is reality.
The world doesn't always behave the way we expect it to, therefore, we are always being surprised. If the world was as we expected it to be, life would be unbelievably simple, no one would ever be caught off guard or confused. If each system ran predictably we would most likely not have many things which were spawned from self-organization.

3. Our ignorance of the world overshadows our knowledge of it. The more we learn about the world, the more we realize we don't know. For example, a huge percentage of the earth is water and compared to what we know of the things on land, we know nothing of what lies in the depths of the ocean, or what systems exist there. The more we know of what we already know shows us what we don't.

4. Systems are presented as a chain/series of events, which make them seem simple, this is called dynamic patterns of behavior. However, what we fail to observe is WHY. What is the purpose of a system and why is it occurring. Such as an election, we know we have to elect a new president because we are suppose to, but do we really know the root of why we have to?
5. In the diagrams, clouds are nonexistent boundaries, which to me seems contradictory because although they themselves have no boundaries, they provide boundaries to the system even though Meadows says that they are merely allowing us to ignore other stocks.  Clouds can technically be put anywhere, if a person wants to expand further on a diagram they need only replace the cloud with another cloud. T

1. A linear relationship between two elements is a system that can be drawn on a graph with a straight line. This relationship has constant proportions. This relationship is strictly between two things, such as amount of coffee grounds put in a pot and how much coffee is made.
2. A nonlinear relationship is one in which the cause does not produce a proportional effect. BEcause the world is unpredictable, these relationships are frequent. The best example I can think of is interpersonal relationships, if I encourage one person to do something and they do it, it's linear, if I encourage them to do something and they do the opposite, or something extremely dramatic, then it could be nonlinear.
3.In certain situations, clouds can make boundaries too small therefore complicating systems because other factors are necessary to understand the system.
4.WE MAKE OUR OWN SYSTEM BOUNDARIES. This phrase to me really resonated because with counseling, therapists need to set boundaries for their clients and they are totally self-imposed and can be changed with each
5.Although our minds are quick to jump to a single linear cause and effect situation, we should be aware that there are multiple causes for each and every effect. For example, when a plant grows in the backyard, there are many factors associated with its survival, such as climate, animal and other plant life, humans, water etc. All these things contribute to its life.

1. How do you know when to create a boundary on a system?
2. When creating a system, do time and delays need to be factored in to make the system accurate?

Oil and Water - David Orr

"water has shaped the landscape but oil has shaped the mindscape"
-oil is relative to speed and accumulation.

WATER AND OIL COMPLETE OPOSITES
- water makes life, oil is toxic.

This reminds me of the BP oil spill in which the two collided and systems were destroyed because of human's disregard for nature in contrast to the money that can be made through oil.

Orr says people tend to "binge" on oil, meaning when it was noticed as useful for so many things humans took advantage and never looked back.

Oil increased money and land intelligence, which is how fast we can travel over it.

Although oil and water is something we think of on a very basic level, such as putting vegetable oil in a bowl of water to demonstrate their contrast, however, we don't think of it as how it has an effect on the global level. We don't really think of ourselves as being so water-based, or at least I don't really. I understand what biology tells me in that I'm mostly made up of water, but that's not how I think about myself. Because I've grown up in the technology age I have never been exposed to a world that was full of nature, which water is the basis of. Oil however, and its importance in the world, is something I've definitely been exposed to, between watching gas prices go up and down, our country in debt and watching other countries fight and go to war just to be in control of the oil supply. The thing that I think of the most when I think of the difference between oil and water is the BP spill. IT brings it back to the basic level of oil mixing with water yet on a larger scale it shows how oil can destroy water and the systems which live in it. I think this article really lay's it out in a basic, easy to understand way, of how ridiculous it is to be so attached to something so hurtful and toxic.

Helpful Video!

This video was so unbelievably helpful for me to understand the ecological hierarchy more in depth. I don't necessarily have the brain for science and I know that's a mental block but I've always had trouble with it, when I first saw the diagram for the ecological hierarchy it made me really nervous to not understand it. Being able to watch this video, in class and again on my own, made me able to visualize the way the hierarchy works. Even being able to look at the picture of each part of the hierarchy made me understand the systems, and system diagrams much more. It allowed me to have a picture in my mind about the relationships between the individuals, populations and communities, which I had trouble understanding before. For instance, it's very easy after watching this to think of myself as the individual, the population my immediate family, and the community of our household and how we interact with each other. To make even more subsystems, I can imagine the doorways between our rooms and the hallways as the corridors  and our bedrooms as our patches, within each room being a whole new system. It's difficult to think at first, of a system and its relationship to the things around it but the more I'm exposed to the idea, the more it makes sense to create systems and subsystems out of everything around me. 

Notes 2/9/12

ecological hierarchy - observational template (how ecologist organize organisms)

-Individual: organism 

-Population: made up of individuals from same species in the same area

- for people, just that live in the same area

-community:                                                              

-ecosystems

-biome

-biosphere

-landscape

MACRO AND MICRO

Templates

-applied ecological thinking

-diagrams

-phylogeny (classification)

-place & LEK, local ecological ….

ECOSYSTEM LEVEL

Trophic Level is feeding level

-primary producers: things that photosynthesize (autotrophs)

-primary consumers: eat food (heterotrophs)

-secondary consumers: eat primary consumers (herbevores)

-Tertiary consumers: eat secondary consumers (carnivores )

Keystone Species

connect species

-indirect effect when keystone species is eliminated

LANDSCAPE: space 

-elements: patches(size), matrix(connections within patches), corridor (things that connect patches).

- area of patch related to number of species. 

-Meadows 3 connections:

resilience occurs because of self-organization, they are able to learn, adapt and evolve because of substructures, (i.e lung, hierarchy of substructures)

Meadows Chapter 3 Notes: Why Systems Work So Well

If pushed too hard, systems WILL fall apart.
Three important characteristics of systems: resilience, self-organization, or hierarchy.
Resilience: the ability to bounce or spring back into shape, position, etc.
- resilience arises from a rich structure of many feedback loops that can work in different ways to restore a system even after a large perturbation. Multiple loops bring about resilience.

A set of feedback loops that can restore or rebuild feedback loops is resilience at a higher level, even higher meta-meta-resilience comes from feedback loops that can learn, create, design and evolve ever more complex restorative structures.
Ex. of resilient system: the human body
- although it does have limits, human body is extremely resilient.
Ex. of resilient system: ecosystem
-ability to learn and evolve.

Resilient systems are not static or constant, but dynamic.
-systems that are constant over time tend to be unresilient.
- people often sacrifice resilience for stability or productivity.

Many chronic diseases comes from breakdown of reliance mechanisms that repair DNA, blood vessels etc.

The capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex by diversifying, complicating, evolving and learning, is called Self-organization.
-self-organization is often sacrificed for short-term productivity and stability.
-self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability.

Koch snowflake, long edge but contained within a circle. (complex self-organizational system)

Self-organizing systems often arise from simple rules.

Hierarchy: the process of creating new structures and increasing complexity, generated by self-organization.
-lots of subdivisions

Why do self-organized systems, which breed unpredictability, create a system of hierarchy which is organized?

Relationships WITHIN SYSTEMS ARE STRONGER AND DENSER THAN RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SUBSYSTEMS.
-HIERARCHY SYSTEMS CAN BE PARTIALLY DECOMPOSED.
-HIERARCHIES FORM FROM THE LOWEST LEVEL UP.

WHEN A SUBSYSTEMS' GOALS DOMINATE AT THE EXPENSE OF THE TOTALY SYSTEM'S GOALS, THE RESULT BEHAVIOR IS CALLED SUB-OPTIMIZATION.
-ANOTHER SIMILAR PROBLEM IS TOO MUCH CONTROL.

HOW CAN SELF-ORGANIZED HIERARCHIES BE CONTROLLED?

Notes 2/2/12

elements: perfume molecules. oxygen molecules. Bottle. People. 

interconnections: taking the cap off. patcholi bouncing of oxygen molecules. people smelling it.  

function: to smell. 

clouds=background

System: a collection of parts which are held together with some overall function

Boundaries depend of perspectives and space.

Nestedness: multiple levels, systems within systems within systems etc. 

Laws of thermodynamics: energy can only be transferred not created or destroyed. 

 All energy is decaying to pure heat. 

Feedback that occurs in systems: balancing, reinforcing. (Self-regulation)

-NonLinear: rapidly depletes a stock

DAVID ORR - Speed

Water:

How water flows, watershed is an area that is drained by one system. A river system is fractal. An ecosystem is like a human body, it's a complex system. 

ECOSYSTEM SERVICES 

- flood control

- soil stability

- biodiversity

Economy:

Money related to water. Sustainable source. Instead of water flow there is a networking economy, goods traded. With corporate businesses, more money is pulled out of the small system then goes in. 

Ecological Hierarchy:

Human society, ecosystem, human body. 

Human society IS an ecosystem.

Organ  system→Organism→Population→Community→Ecosystem→Biome→Biosphere

(ADD PHOTO)

-Taxonomic/Physiological/Military

Individual

- within individual: feeding, mating, moving, behavior.

- within populations: size, density, dispersion, growth and    regulation/dynamics

- within community: 

Chapter 2: 552

1.Important General Principle: The information delivered by a feedback loop can only affect future behavior: it can't deliver the information, and so can't have an impact fast enough to correct behavior that drove the current feedback.
2.Every balancing feedback loop has its breakdown point.
3.Complex behaviors of systems often arise as the relative strengths of feedback loops shift, causing first one loop and then another to dominate behavior.
4.Shifting dominance refers to the change in dominance between inflows and outflows.
5.Model utility depends not on whether its driving scenarios are realistic but on whether it responds with a realistic pattern of behavior.

1.Questions for testing the value of a model
            1. are the driving factors likely to unfold this way?
            2. If they did would the system react this way?
            3. What is driving the driving factors?2.Systems with similar feedback structures produce similar dynamic behaviors
3.A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes a system likely to oscillate.
4.Any physical, growing system is going to run into some kind of constraint sooner or later.
5.A quantity growing exponentially toward a constraint or limit reaches that limit in a surprisingly short time.

1. How does one identify out of a system what are the reinforcing, feedback and balancing loops? Guesswork?
2. How is one able to predict future patterns if the variables are always changing?

Meadows Chapter 2: A Brief Visit to the Systems Zoo

One Stock Systems:
A thermostat is an example of a stock with two competing balancing loops.
-In this example the heating loop dominates the cooling loop.
Competing Balancing loops often result in feedback loops.

Important General Principle: The information delivered by a feedback loop can only affect future behavior: it can't deliver the information, and so can't have an impact fast enough to correct behavior that drove the current feedback.

There will always be delays in responding.

A stock-maintaining balancing feedback loop must have its goal set appropriately to compensate for draining or inflowing processes that affect that stock. Otherwise the feedback process will fall short of or exceed the target stock.

Every balancing feedback loop has its breakdown point.


Whenever the inflow rate falls behind the outflow rate, the temperature falls.
Shifting dominance refers to the change in dominance between inflows and outflows.
Complex behaviors of systems often arise as the relative strengths of feedback loops shift, causing first one loop and then another to dominate behavior.

Questions for testing the value of a model
1. are the driving factors likely to unfold this way?
2. If they did would the system react this way?
3. What is driving the driving factors?

Model utility depends not on whether its driving scenarios are realistic but on whether it responds with a realistic pattern of behavior.
Systems with similar feedback structures produce similar dynamic behaviors
A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes a system likely to oscillate.
Delays are pervasive in systems and they are strong determinants of behavior. Changing the length of a delay and the relative lengths of other delays make a large change in the behavior of a system.

Two Stock Systems
Any physical, growing system is going to run into some kind of constraint sooner or later.
In physical, exponentially growing systems there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving the growth, because no physical system can grow forever in a finite environment.
The limits on a growing system can be temporary or permanent.
A quantity growing exponentially toward a constraint or limit reaches that limit in a surprisingly short time.
Nonrenewable resources are stock-limited. The entire stock is available at once at can be extracted at any rate. But since the stock is not renewed the faster the extraction rate, the short the lifetime of the resource.
Renewable resources are flow-limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. If they are extracted faster than they regenerate, they may eventually be driven below a critical threshold and become for all practical purposes nonrenewable.


This chapter was ultimately confusing for me! I have trouble seeing the charts and graphs literally which makes it difficult for me to understand.

Chapter 1 5 Factoids

Just noticed I forgot to include 5 facts about chapter one in my 552!

1.The most important part of a system is the relationships between elements.
2.Although stocks get left out they are extremely important!!
3.Systems can be found everywhere!
4.The feedback loop connects different parts of the system.
5.The word function is used for a nonhuman system whereas purpose is used for a human system

Chapter 1 (552)

1. I found it interesting how truly obvious a system is. I thought it would be more complicated but I found that I was noticing systems all around my room as i was reading the chapter. 

2. The idea that the elements of a system can change almost seamlessly without changing the purpose of a system. It seemed like the elements were an integral part and with them changing it would make the system different but I now understand that the main function of the system wouldn't be changed with the elements, this idea made complete sense to me after the football team analogy. 

3. Meadows talked about changing the outflow to increase the inflow. I thought this was a really cool idea, with the bathwater example it made so much sense that increasing the inflow was not the only way to fill the tub faster but also to decrease the outflow. Another example which was really helpful was the idea of instead of hiring more people to increase business size, merely decrease firing and quitting rates. 

4. My favorite part of this chapter was the question at the last page that said "if A causes B, isn't it possible that B causes A." I thought that was a really good way to end the chapter it got me thinking and questioning if that was possible.

5. My last interesting fact from the chapter is that not all systems need interference to balance themselves out, some of the balancing occurs on its own. I thought that was a really cool idea that nature tends to balance itself. 

Questions:

1. Why do people tend to focus more on stocks? If they are concerned with the input or output wouldn't it make sense to focus on that instead of just the stock?

2. What if B could cause A? How would that affect a system if an result caused an action?

Meadows Chapter 1: The Basics

What is a system? Its an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.

The system must include:

• elements
• interconnectedness
• a function or purpose

EVERYTHING HAS A SYSTEM! 

However, without the interconnectedness or function there is no system. Determining the relationships are more important than defining all the elements. Many interconnections are the flow of information. The elements of a system can be easily changed without harm to the system yet when the interconnections are altered, so is the system.

Stocks are the foundations of systems, the elements you can see, feel count or measure at any given time. Stocks change over time due to flows, a stock is a present memory of the history of changing flows within the system. 

The dynamics of stocks and flows is the behavior over. This helps us learn more about the stocks and flow and how they change. When the level of inflow to outflow does not change, it is called dynamic equilibrium. 

"Stocks take time to change because flows take time to flow"

Feedback loop: a feedback loop is formed when changes in stock affect the flows into or out of that same stock. The feedback loop needs to be stabilized. Feedback loops can also often operate in two directions. Feedback loops can be stabilized with a balancing Feedback loop, these are goal-seeking or stability-seeking. The other type of feedback loop is called a reinforcing feedback loop, this is described as an amplifying, reinforcing and self-multiplying force. This generates more input to a stock the more that is already there. 

That's it for today! That chapter really made me understand quickly what a system is and its real purpose, the loops were slightly confusing but hopefully after next class it'll make more sense.

What is the Scientific Method?

The scientific method differs largely from other ways of knowing in that it focuses mainly on observation and experimentation. Many ways of gaining knowledge come from sources such as books, authority figures (government, church, teachers, parents etc.). The scientific method however, allows one to make that jump to conclusion by oneself, through their experiments. For instance, if one was noticed that college students tend to sleep more than other age groups, there would be two different directions to go about finding out why. The most obvious answer, and definitely the easiest would be to ask someone, a teacher or even an online source (as many of us resort to google for everyday questions) which would give us a fact yet the validity of that fact is questionable. The other approach would be to conduct an experiment, surveying different age groups, their stressors, and their amount of sleep. AN experiment such as this would help to determine if the sleep levels are caused by the stress of being in college or merely needing more sleep at that age. 

The scientific method is truly a way for one to see the data laid out in front of them which would allow them to come to an educated guess which they have seen the results of, as opposed to getting information second-hand and accepting it as fact. 

Welcome!

Hello readers,
Welcome to my notebook blog for Patterns in Nature. This blog will follow my experience of this class from start to finish, including notes, project ideas, and reflections of class. I hope to include pictures and videos as well to enhance the experience of this read. Hope you enjoy!