Tag Archives: system thinking

agent-based social system modeling

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One approach to agent-based social system modeling is the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework developed by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom at the Indiana University:

The IAD Framework offers researchers a way to understand the policy process by outlining a systematic approach for analyzing institutions that govern action and outcomes within collective action arrangements (Ostrom, 2007, 44). Institutions are defined within the IAD Framework as a set of prescriptions and constraints that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions (Ostrom, 2005, 3).  These prescriptions can include rules, norms, and shared strategies (Crawford and Ostrom 1995; Ostrom 1997). Institutions are further delineated as being formal or informal; the former characterized as rules-in-form and the latter as rules-in-use.

The IAD framework identifies key variables that researchers should use in evaluating the role of institutions in shaping social interactions and decision-making processes.  The analytical focus of the IAD is on an “action arena”, where social choices and decisions take place. Three broad categories of variables are identified as influencing the action arena:  institutions or rules that govern the action arena, the characteristics of the community or collective unit of interest, and the attributes of the physical environment within which the community acts (Ostrom 1999; Ostrom 2005). Each of these three categories has been further delineated by IAD scholars into relevant variables and conditions that can influence choices in the action arena.  For instance, the types of rules that are important in the IAD include entry and exit rules, position rules, scope rules, payoff rules, aggregation rules, authority rules, and information rules.  Key characteristics of the community can include factors such as the homogeneity of its members or shared values.  Biophysical variables might include factors such as the mobility and flow of resources within an action arena.

The IAD further defines the key features of “action situations” and “actors” that make up the action arena. The action situation has seven key components: 1) the participants in the situation, 2) the participants’ positions, 3) the outcomes of participants’ decisions, 4) the payoffs or costs and benefits associated with outcomes, 5) the linkages between actions and outcomes, 6) the participants’ control in the situation, and 7) information. The variables that are essential to evaluating actors in the action arena are 1) their information processing capabilities, 2) their preferences or values for different actions, 3) their resources, and 4) the processes they use for choosing actions.

Here are a couple papers that describe attempts to operationalize this framework:

MAIA: a Framework for Developing Agent-Based Social Simulations

Modelling socio-ecological systems with MAIA: A biogas infrastructure simulation

agent based modeling

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Agent-based modeling is one of those things I want to play around with some day if I theoretically ever had some time.

Modelling domestic water demand: An agent based approach

The urban water system is a complex adaptive system consisting of technical, environmental and social components which interact with each other through time. As such, its investigation requires tools able to model the complete socio-technical system, complementing “infrastructure-centred” approaches. This paper presents a methodology for integrating two modelling tools, a social simulation model and an urban water management tool. An agent based model, the Urban Water Agents’ Behaviour, is developed to simulate the domestic water users’ behaviour in response to water demand management measures and is then coupled to the Urban Water Optioneering Tool to calculate the evolution of domestic water demand by simulating the use of water appliances. The proposed methodology is tested using, as a case study, a major period of drought in Athens, Greece. Results suggest that the coupling of the two models provides new functionality for water demand management scenarios assessment by water regulators and companies.

what is a p-value?

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Five Thirty Eight has a video of statisticians trying to explain what a p-value is. Well, what’s disturbing to me is that they won’t really try. Then again, the maker of the video very well may have cherry picked the most entertaining answers. I can’t reproduce the research so I have no way of knowing.

Here’s another article slamming the humble p-value. It’s true, there will always be some false positives if the data set is large enough. As an engineer, I try to use statistics to back up (or not) a tentative conclusion I have reached based on my understanding of a system. I will question a statistically significant result using my understanding of a system. That way both statistics and system thinking can reinforce and make each other stronger, rather than our relying exclusively on one or the other. Another way to think about this is that as data sets grow and our traditional engineering system analysis methods are just taking too long to apply, we can use statistics to weed out a lot of the data that is clearly just noise, and then focus our brains on a reduced data set that we are pretty sure contains the signal, although we know there are some false positives in there. So i say relax, use statistics, but don’t expect statistics to be a substitute for thinking. Thinking still works.

 

guns in the U.S.

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Does the United States have a gun problem? There are facts and figures, and there are emotions. You are not a normal human being if you don’t react emotionally to certain kinds of events, and being in touch with these emotions can be a good guide to what you think is right and wrong. Then again, I believe any human being within the normal range can be trained to dig into the facts and evidence, draw appropriate conclusions and build their own personal mental model of the world. Once you have a sense of what you think is right and wrong, this is how you figure out what you think can and should be done about it. So, I’m going to quote from an article that caused a strong emotional reaction from me (warning, it’s probably upsetting to almost anyone but especially parents), and then I’ll go to some facts and figures that I find disturbing on an intellectual level, but also point toward some ideas about what can and should be done.

If you are not emotionally dead, you will be horrified by this stomach-churning New York  Times article about children who are killed accidentally by guns.

It had been a good day for Tristan. He had used the potty for the first time. He and his mother had danced a little jig. Down the hall, Tristan entered the bedroom where his father had been staying because of quarrels with his wife. She had chided her husband in the past for forgetting to safely store his .45-caliber handgun. But he had recently put a lock on his door to keep out his wife and children. He thought he had locked the door before going out to cut the grass.

The lock, though, had failed to catch. Tristan found the loaded gun under the pillow on his father’s bed. He pointed it at his own forehead and pulled the trigger. Hearing the gunshot, Sergeant Underhill sprinted inside to find Tristan face down on the bed, the gun beneath him. When he called 911, the sergeant was screaming so hysterically that the dispatcher initially mistook him for a woman.

“My 2-year-old just shot himself in the head,” he said breathlessly. “He’s dead.”

There’s a picture of the kid alive and happy, which makes it infinitely worse. That’s one horrifying anecdote in this story. It goes on and on and on.

That’s the horror. Let’s turn to some cold facts and figures. Here’s a blog posting called “Deaths from assault over time in 40 relatively rich countries“. Other rich countries do not have the level of violence that we have in the United States. If you are the evidence-inclined type, have a look at the graphics and note that they are on a log scale. The United States has a rate of violent death 5-10 times higher than our close cultural cousins like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. And all these places have a little bit higher rates than most of Western Europe and Asia. The places with rates equal or higher than the United States are developing countries and/or countries with organized crime on a large scale.

So is the easy accessibility of firearms the cause of violence? I tend to think tough guy culture (one thing that is unmistakable in both articles is that men and boys are the ones shooting and being shot), a history of inequality and racial discrimination, and the so-called war on drugs are the real drivers. These are the policy levers we need to be working in the medium to longer term. But being awash in guns certainly makes the violence that does occur more deadly. Common sense gun control policies would certainly be great in the short term to treat the symptoms, as long as they are backed up by policies to treat the disease. But hard-core, violent law enforcement approaches to treat the symptoms may actually make the disease worse in the long term, which is probably what happened in the 80s and 90s that we are continuing to pay for today.

November 2015 in Review

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What did I learn in November? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.

Negative stories (-10):

  • The World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Risks Report came out. Some of the top risks are interstate conflict, water crisis, failure of climate change adaptation, unemployment and underemployment. Hmm, that “interstate conflict” items might be what we used to call “war”. And I think there might be one underway right now in the Middle East, which Jimmy Carter says we are getting all wrong. And it just might be caused by the other items on the list. And speaking of war, there is a new book on the Vietnam War aimed at the middle grades, but it seems pretty harsh for that age to me. (-2)
  • I noticed that Robert Costanza in 2014 issued an update to his seminal 1997 paper on ecosystem services. He now estimates their value at $125 trillion per year, compared to a world economy of $77 trillion per year. Each year we are using up about $4-20 trillion in value more than the Earth is able to replenish. The correct conclusion here is that we can’t live without ecosystem services any time soon with our current level of knowledge and wealth, and yet we are depleting the natural capital that produces them. We were all lucky enough to inherit an enormous trust fund of natural capital at birth, and we are spending it down like the spoiled trust fund babies we are. We are living it up, and we measure our wealth based on that lifestyle, but we don’t have a bank statement so we don’t actually know when that nest egg is going to run out. (-3)
  • This crop of presidential candidates is easy for comedians to make fun of. I enjoy it but think it may be a contrary indicator for the health of the country. (-1)
  • Bicycle helmets are not making U.S. bicycle riders any safer. This is why we need streets designed on the European model to be safe for driving, bicycling, and walking. It’s 100% known technology and there can be no excuses! (-2)
  • In current events, we had the awful, shocking terrorist attacks in Paris. I suggested that the long-term answer to violence caused by angry young men anywhere is to understand why they are angry, address their legitimate grievances, and give them productive work to do. Short term, we also have to detect and disrupt any plots involving nuclear or biological weapons, of course, because we can’t afford even one. (-2)

Positive stories (+9):

Peter Checkland

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Peter Checkland is another system thinker that I have just discovered. Apparently he is well-known, but I find that systems thinkers are buried in a variety of disciplines, in this case management, and I wasn’t looking there.

This is from a 2000 journal article, Soft Systems Methodology: A Thirty Year Retrospective:

Although the history of thought reveals a number of holistic thinkers — Aristotle, Marx, Husserl among them — it was only in the 1950s that any version of holistic thinking became institutionalized. The kind of holistic thinking which then came to the fore, and was the concern of a newly created organization, was that which makes explicit use of the concept of ‘system’, and today it is ‘systems thinking’ in its various forms which would be taken to be the very paradigm of thinking holistically. In 1954, as recounted in Chapter 3 of Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, only one kind of systems thinking was on the table: the development of a mathematically expressed general theory of systems. It was supposed that this would provide a meta-level language and theory in which the problems of many different disciplines could be expressed and solved; and it was hoped that doing this would help to promote the unity of science.

These were the aspirations of the pioneers, but looking back from 1999 we can see that the project has not succeeded. The literature contains very little of the kind of outcomes anticipated by the founders of the Society for General Systems Research; and scholars in the many subject areas to which a holistic approach is relevant have been understandably reluctant to see their pet subject as simply one more example of some broader ‘general system’!

But the fact that general systems theory (GST) has failed in its application does not mean that systems thinking itself has failed. It has in fact flourished in several different ways which were not anticipated in 1954. There has been development of systems ideas as such, development of the use of systems ideas in particular subject areas, and combinations of the two. The development in the 1970s by Maturana and Varela (1980) of the concept of a system whose elements generate the system itself provided a way of capturing the essence of an autonomous living system without resorting to use of an observer’s notions of ‘purpose’, ‘goal’, ‘information processing’ or ‘function’. (This contrasts with the theory in Miller’s Living Systems (1978), which provides a general model of a living entity expressed in the language of an observer, so that what makes the entity autonomous is not central to the theory.) This provides a good example of the further development of systems ideas as such. The rethinking, by Chorley and Kennedy (1971), of physical geography as the study of the dynamics of systems of four kinds, is an example of the use of systems thinking to illuminate a particular subject area.

It’s sad to me to see his contention that general systems theory has failed.  It should be a central, foundational body of knowledge that people are trained in before they apply their focus to narrower fields. I have said many times, this would give a wider variety of intelligent people a shared body of knowledge, vocabulary, and respect for each other’s pursuits, and might accelerate the pace of innovation.

time to worry about the national debt?

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While the Republican candidates are obsessing over the national debt, economists are thinking the opposite, that Keynesianism is back and a lot of borrowing and spending is going to be necessary to keep the economy going. Your average person on the street can follow the first argument, because it seems similar to his household finances, and because it has an undertone of morality (debt=bad). But very few people understand the theories behind fiscal or monetary policy. Because our education system hasn’t given us the mental tools to understand the nested complex systems we are all embedded in. How are we supposed to elect the right people to make the right choices then?

Finally, there is a fourth view, championed most prominently by Larry Summers and Paul Krugman. They argue that there is little evidence that monetary policy will ever restore full prosperity. In this view, Milton Friedman’s dream of using strategic monetary interventions to offset economic shocks remains just that: a dream. It was only the unique circumstance in Europe and the US over the last half-century – most notably rapid demographic and productivity growth – that made his ideas seem plausible. “If nobody believes that inflation will rise, it won’t,” is how Krugman put it. “The only way to be at all sure of raising inflation is to accompany a changed monetary regime with a burst of fiscal stimulus.”

I do not claim to know which of these views is the correct one. But I do think that this discussion is the most important debate in the field of macroeconomics since John Maynard Keynes wrestled with similar questions in the 1930s. For Keynes, the answer was clear, and it was something close to what is being argued by Summers and Krugman; indeed, his conclusions are what transformed him from a monetarist into a Keynesian.

“It seems unlikely that the influence of [monetary] policy on the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself,” Keynes wrote in 1936. “I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment.” Those are words worth considering the next time we find ourselves needing the courage to act.

Oh, even if monetary policy did work, the Republicans want to destroy the Federal Reserve.

Raspberry Pi

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Here are a bunch of resources for learning Raspberry Pi:

To make it easier to find the kind of resource you want, we’ve grouped our resources under the headings of Teach, Learn and Make. In our Teach resources you’ll find individual lesson plans, complete schemes of work and teachers’ guides, including a teachers’ guide to using Raspberry Pi in the classroom to give educators who are new to the device the information they need to get started.

Our Learn resources guide learners through independent activities. One of the newest is Gravity Simulator, in which students learn about the effects of gravity and how to simulate them in Scratch with Mooncake, the official Raspberry Pi Foundation Cat. It’s one of a number of resources that support activities linked to British ESA Astronaut Tim Peake’s upcoming mission aboard the International Space Station.

Our Make resources support physical computing projects. They range from “getting started” activities for beginners and more in-depth standalone projects to fairly substantial, satisfying builds that you might complete over several sessions. One of these resources is a guide to making a Raspberry Pi marble maze using aSense HAT. A Sense HAT is at the heart of each of the two Astro Pi flight units that will soon be flying to the International Space Station; on board the ISS its gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer will be able to detect how the station is moving, and this activity uses the same sensors to work out which way a virtual marble will roll.

 

 

how big is the solar system?

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Here is an interesting reminder how big the solar system really is. These people used a weather balloon to represent the sun. Then the planets were marbles of varying sizes, and they had to be placed miles apart in the Nevada desert to represent the right size. They tried to measure it out accurately, then drove around in the dark and used time lapse photography to capture the orbits. Cool stuff.

 

Norbert Wiener

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Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

According to The Atlantic,

Wiener is best known as the inventor of “cybernetics,” a fertile combination of mathematics and engineering that paved the way for modern automation and inspired innovation in a host of other fields. He was also one of the first theorists to identify information as the lingua franca of organisms as well as machines, a shared language capable of crossing the boundaries between them…

Wiener refused, for ethical reasons, to accept research contracts from the military or from corporations seeking to exploit his ideas. Since the military and corporations were the main sources of research support, Wiener’s defiance hindered his progress during a period of unprecedented technological advance. Besides nuclear weapons, Wiener was perhaps most worried about the technology he was most directly responsible for developing: automation. Sooner than most, he recognized how businesses could use it at the expense of labor, and how eager they were to do so. “Those who suffer from a power complex,” he wrote in 1950, “find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions…”

The complete synthesis of humans and machines predicted by the transhumanists could represent the vindication of cybernetics—as well as Wiener’s ultimate nightmare. His fears for the future stemmed from two fundamental convictions: We humans can’t resist selfishly misusing the powers our machines give us, to the detriment of our fellow humans and the planet; and there’s a good chance we couldn’t control our machines even if we wanted to, because they already move too fast and because increasingly we’re building them to make decisions on their own. To believe otherwise, Wiener repeatedly warned, represents a dangerous, potentially fatal, lack of humility.