So, I really need this book: Mad Science – Experiments you can do at home, but probably shouldn’t. I feel that it would be of great relevance to my ongoing research into unnecessarily hazardous fun.

I just want to quickly articulate the concept of suspended humiliation. Like suspended terror, where one is not presently terrified but well aware of the likelihood of a terrifying experience occurring at any moment, suspended humiliation is the sense that one might be called out and humiliated at any second. It’s the feeling you might… Read More »

Notes from one of the closing plenaries at the 27th System Dynamics Conference:: Using C-ROADS to Support Analysis of International Climate Change Proposals by Andrew Jones, John Sterman, Thomas Fiddaman, Travis Franck, Elizabeth Sawin Following on nicely from the presentation by Moxnes, in this presentation John Sterman talked about climate change, modelling, and decision making.… Read More »

I’m going to be making design changes to my blog (the one at Meme Hazard) over the next few weeks. Apologies in advance for the mess and inevitable breakdowns. For those of you reading this syndicated on Facebook, LJ or elsewhere, this is probably irrelevant. Please go about your normal business :)

Notes from one of the closing plenaries at the 27th System Dynamics Conference: Are advice adhered to? “Populist” versus “activist” or “systems analyst” advice by Erling Moxnes Hypothetically, imagine you’re a reindeer herder. Weird, I know, but this research is from Norway. You’ve got, say, 1850 reindeer on your island. Reindeer eat lichen, which grows… Read More »

This will be my last journal style post on the conference; I’ve got two detailed write-ups of the “Closing Challenges” presentations to post separately, and at some point, I’ve got some reflections on the conference as a whole, and in general on what one can get out of a conference, but they’ll wait till later.… Read More »

I’m splitting Day 3 in two, as there were three presentations later in the day in addition to the regular papers. They’ll take at least another hour to write up, and right now, I want to sleep. Here’s the papers, three on insurgencies, one on biology: The Role of Influence Operations in a Counterinsurgency Battle… Read More »

I saw six presentations today, three of which were interesting enough to write about: Simulating Pollution from Urban Stormwater in Project Twin Streams Catchment, Auckland, New Zealand by Ines Winz, Gary Brierley As far as I’m aware, the author of this paper was the only other person from NZ at the conference, though I haven’t… Read More »

The day begun with a keynote by Dennis Meadows on his ‘Limits to Growth’ work. I came away the following ideas: There’s a distinction between global problems and universal problems. Global problems affect everyone and cannot be solved without cooperation from everyone, whereas universal problems affect everyone but can be solved by local groups. Some… Read More »