# Why are we exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity?
This is a quickly-sketched model created from a breakout group conversation during the MUN School of Graduate Studies’ “Earth’s Carrying Capacity” dialogue.
Tag: Systems
-
Systemic lessons from South Korea's Patient 31
This changed with the emergence of âPatient 31.â
Reuters’ coverage of the “Korean clusters” provided the world with a vivid glimpse of the volatility of COVID-19. One person showed poor judgement, and in turn caused cascading catastrophe in her communities.
Events like the COVID-19 pandemic are thankfully rare. Moments like theseâwhen a lot happens all at once, and the experience is shared by a collectiveâshape future history like nothing else. We are learning a lot from this. Not only are epidemiologists now a famous profession, but we’re all learning exactly what it takes to provide good healthcare, what good governance looks like, how public health is community health, and more.
Patient 31 holds a simple lesson for systemics: the fragility of apparently solid social systems. South Korea seemed to do everything right. Yet, due to the volatile nature of this particular socio-health system, a single “free radical” caused immense damage.
Similar volatility is evidentâbut more subtleâin other social systems. Consider how memes spread. Our massive communities may seem immovable at times, but it’s clear that the wrong (or right) phenomena can spread rapidly and deeply.
Stay safe.
-
'This is Sticking with Them:' Professor Explores Benefits of Model-Based Learning
Through model-based learning, students use diagrams as a way to think about and reason with systemsâand to think about how complex systems interact and change.
âModel-based learningâ seems like a reframing of classic teaching practices, but itâs nonetheless a powerful reframing. Emphasizing the modelâand encourage students to test and iterate their modelsâis catchy. Itâs also deliberately organizationalâit requires students to organize and structure their thinking about a given system, often visually.
-
a ton of people received text messages overnight that were
# A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentineâs Day
Something strange is happening with text messages in the US right now. Overnight, a multitude of people received text messages that appear to have originally been sent on or around Valentineâs Day 2019. These people never received the text messages in the first place; the people who sent the messages had no idea that they had never been received, and they did nothing to attempt to resend them overnight.
It is incredible to think that this could happen on a scale big enough to hit headlines now, but it wasnât noticeable on Valentineâs Day originally.
Thatâs one of the problems with our ever-more-complex technologies. Weâre accommodating to the bugs. It gets easier and easier to dismiss weird tech events as glitches and move on without worrying. Unreliability is, itself, unreliable.
But there can be major consequences to seemingly innocent bugs:
… one person said they received a message from an ex-boyfriend who had died; another received messages from a best friend who is now dead. âIt was a punch in the gut. Honestly I thought I was dreaming and for a second I thought she was still here,â said one person, who goes by KuribHoe on Twitter, who received the message from their best friend who had died. âThe last few months havenât been easy and just when I thought I was getting some type of closure this just ripped open a new hole.â
-
Bad RCS implementations are creating big vulnerabilities, security researchers claim
Scary:
One issue identified on an unnamed carrierÊŒs implementation could allow any app on your phone to download your RCS configuration file, for example, giving the app your username and password and allowing it to access all your voice calls and text messages. In another case, the six-digit code a carrier uses to verify a userÊŒs identity was vulnerable to being guessed through brute force by a third-party. These problems were found after researchers analyzed a sample of SIM cards from several different carriers.
RCS is supposed to be a big deal. Itâs fascinating how these system-wide policies can be messed up in microsystem implementations.
-
John Kerry, Arnold Schwarzenegger wage âWorld War Zeroâ on climate change
Today former Secretary of State John Kerry and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared war on climate change. The two led an all-star cast of lawmakers and celebrities to launch an initiative called World War Zero, which aims to get individuals, businesses, and governments to drastically slash greenhouse gas emissions. The initiative, for now, boasts a lot of glitzy names without many details on how it will achieve its goal. Its bipartisan founding members â which include Bill and Hillary Clinton, Richard Branson, Jimmy Fallon, Cindy McCain, and Al Sharpton, and more than 70 other notable names â plan to hold 10 million âclimate conversationsâ in 2020, The New York Times reported over the weekend.
Seems like an incredible effort. And itâs an excellent angle. âWarââwhen declared by major public figuresâcertainly catches the public attention.
Kerry compared the urgency of climate change to the challenges facing America during World War II. âWhen America was attacked in World War II we set aside our differences, united and mobilized to face down our common enemy,â Kerry said in a statement. âWe are launching World War Zero to bring that spirit of unity, common purpose, and urgency back to the world today to fight the great threat of our time.â
Of course, actually waging war doesnât always garner the unity or have the results we aim for, especially when itâs a war against a social issue.
-
Piret TÔnurist & Systems Change: how to get started and keep going?
This is a great talk from Piret Tönurist of the Observatory on Public Sector Innovation.
One of the core issues of the talk is innovation doubtâthe “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. To paraphrase Piret:
[…] why are we doing innovation at all? Maybe sometimes things are working fine, why do we think about innovation at all? We start off with four questions:
- Do you want to do things better?
- Do you have goals and purposes to fulfill?
- Do you want to address the needs of your stakeholders?
- Do you want to prepare for the risks and uncertainties that the future holds? If you answered “yes” to at least one of those questions, then your job is to do innovationâyour job is to be a changemaker.
Also, the talk includes a neat model for different varieties of innovation, image courtesy of this post by Adrian M. Senn over on Medium: https://miro.medium.com/max/1210/1*AaPZeqAVLoo85RfY7Dxspw.png
-
Systemic Strategy: Systemic Design Methods for Complex Systems Change
# Systemic Strategy: Systemic Design Methods for Complex Systems Change
A presentation from Peter Jones and I at RSD9, virtually in Ahmedabad, India.
More on this here.