In the News

[Roberta Spencer]

Early this year we announced a new page that lists Bibliography updates and recent publications related to System Dynamics. Since the end of January, nineteen peer-reviewed articles, published in seventeen journals, have been submitted. You may also access links to the System Dynamics Review current issue and early view from the update page to see all articles included in this update. The published-elsewhere references are listed in order of receipt and will remain listed until the next Bibliography update. We are confident there are more articles; we would like to hear about them and publicize your work. Send references for recent articles or articles of any age to office@systemdynamics.org to be included on the list and in our Bibliography.

An updated version of the Bibliography, with over 10,000 references, is now available. Please visit the System Dynamics Bibliography page.

[Roberta Spencer]

To celebrate the fourth-year anniversary of the first module (class) in Dynamic Modeling of Public Policy Systems, at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, John Richardson’s students will be giving “final examination” presentations describing their original model-based projects to a wider audience comprising members of Singapore’s academic and public policy communities. This will also mark the completion of the module by more than 100 students from Singapore, China, India, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Pakistan and the many other nations that the Lee Kuan Yew School serves. Most students will return to or embark on careers as public policy professionals.

What does the module in the Dynamic Modeling of Public Policy Systems entail? Students are expected to define a policy relevant problem and craft a system dynamics model that addresses it. After rigorous validity and robustness testing, the model is used to diagnose the problem and point to policy recommendations. These must be accessible and compelling to potential clients with no background in dynamic systems modeling. These final oral presentations, backed up with written reports and documentation, provide class members with the opportunity to demonstrate the level of mastery in public policy modeling that they have attained..

[Roberta Spencer]

A University of Bergen student team developed a system dynamics model to win this year’s Case Competition in Bergen, Norway. The team included Aklilu Tadesse and Melak Ayenew, master’s students from Ethiopia who study under SD professors David Wheat, Pål Davidsen, and Erling Moxnes; plus Hasan Baniamin and Mizanur Rahman from the department of administration and organizational theory. The team members shared the cash prize of 20,000 NOK ($3400). The Case Competition is an annual collaborative case study project sponsored by Study Bergen, the Career Centre Springbrettet, and representatives from business and industry. This year’s problem stemmed from the office relocation plans of Aibel AS, an engineering and construction company within Norway’s energy sector. Five student teams competed to find solutions to the challenges of change management and logistics. The teams had two weeks to identify the core problem, develop a solution, write a report, and make a presentation to the judges. The candidates were free to chose any problem solving method. When announcing their decision, the judges said the winning team produced a focused and solution-oriented response to the problem, and that the SD model gave the solution a sound scientific basis. The students engaged in this project on their own, outside of their regular study schedule. Their initiative as well as success made their professors very proud. These sources provide more details: Utdanningibergen.no; Springbrette.org

[Roberta Spencer]

The University of North Dakota (UND) and the University of Bergen (UIB) signed an agreement on Tuesday, March 19th, to exchange students, faculty and research. This agreement has established a new partnership between UND and UIB to solve the social problems associated with the western North Dakota’s oil boom. System Dynamics approach will be used in this collaboration to allow social scientists and engineers to work together and develop an integrated view of social problems. Society members Pål Davidsen, a faculty member in the Faculty of Social Sciences at UIB, and Scott Johnson, the principal advisor at the Institute of Energy Studies (IES) at UND are participating in this project. For more details, please read UND News; NBC News

[Roberta Spencer]

The UK Chapter of the System Dynamics Society is planning the commemorative event “Geoff Coyle: legacy and prospects for system dynamics” on May 29, to be held at the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College, London. The event will be hosted by the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College. Speakers will include Eric Wolstenholme, Jonathan Coyle, Bob Cavana, and John Morecroft. For the speaker topics, hotel information and further details, please visit the proposed programme.

[Thomas Fiddaman]

The Smithsonian symposium on Limits to Growth is live now (archived later) at http://si.edu/consortia/limitstogrowth2012 Dennis Meadows is on in 10 minutes.

[R. Joel Rahn]

There is an article in the Jan.7-13 2012 New Scientist: Boom and doom: Revisiting prophecies of collapse, an excellent brief survey and appreciation of The Limits to Growth 40 years after its first publication. The full article is only available to subscribers ($99CAD/yr) but should be available in a good science library.

The author is careful to note the most egregious mistaken interpretations encountered in the popular and academic press, particularly the false assertion that the World 3 model's results are predictions. Worth a read.

[Roberta Spencer]

The C-ROADS system dynamics simulation and its latest analysis has been picked up by the climate blog: Climate Progress -- http://bit.ly/s4iEee. To see the project website visit: http://www.climateinteractive.org

[Andrew Jones]

Folks:

Climate Interactive Co-Director and system dynamicist Beth Sawin (who is coping with life in newly flooded Vermont – she and family are okay BTW) posted, just minutes ago, a timely perspective on this week’s Irene disaster on Romm’s Climate Progress blog.

Check it out on Romm’s blog: http://bit.ly/nfcQRP (scroll down a bit) or on ours: http://climateinteractive.wordpress.com/ .

Quote her, interview her, or just link/tweet the post, which focuses on implications from climate and energy modeling for the rebuilding that Vermont now must undertake.

IMHO, she’s got a unique voice and perspective. Why? She’s likely one of few people on Earth who:

1. Lives right there. She, her family and community is dealing directly with the impacts of the biggest climate/energy-related natural disaster to hit Vermont in decades (you may be seeing places like Woodstock, Killington, and Quechee showing up in your reporting: her home and farm in Hartland is right there!) Not quite “Reporting from the rooftop amidst helicopters-chopping-overhead post-Katrina” but she’s there.

and

2. Has ideas on adaptation. The post shares wisdom about responding effectively to our current climate instability, in Vermont and around the world.

and

3. Is a global expert on mitigation science. The post draws upon her extensive experience (you likely know her work with the C-ROADS simulation and the climatescoreboard.org and the UNEP “Emissions Gap Report”) on minimizing the potential for future Irenes.

Could you forward to anyone you think could use this information?

Drew



Contact Information for Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

+1-802-436-1129 (office) +1 -603-715-0116 (mobile) esawin@climateinteractive.org www.climateinteractive.org



Dr. Elizabeth Sawin is Co-Director of Climate Interactive, a consortium that uses interactive computer simulations of climate and energy systems to help citizens and decision-makers address the challenge of climate change and the opportunities of a clean energy transition. The Climate Interactive team created the C-ROADS model, which was widely used during COP-15 in Copenhagen, and the Climate Scoreboard, which tracks countries' greenhouse gas emissions targets and calculates possible long-term implications of these targets.

Dr. Sawin holds a Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has written and taught widely on the application of system analysis to the issue of sustainability.



In the post:

She says that the rebuilding ought to be carried out in the context of climate change "knowing that the same streams and rivers that caused such disruption a few days ago likely will not be as quiet for the next hundred years as they have been for the last hundred.”

And she points out that Vermont can rebuild in ways that facilitate the transition to clean energy: "If a section of power line needs to be rebuilt, prepare for the smart-grid that can transmit clean energy from wind and solar. If a bridge needs to be replaced, rebuild it with a bicycle lane."


Andrew (Drew) Jones
Co-Director
Climate Interactive
1-828-236-0884
apjones@climateinteractive.org

Project: http://www.climateinteractive.org
Blog: http://climateinteractive.wordpress.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/climateinteract

[Thomas Fiddaman]

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/05/0511magnetic-core-memory/

May 11, 1951: RAM Is Born

1951: Jay Forrester files a patent application for the matrix core memory.

Back when computers still weighed hundreds of pounds and were primarily used by the military, computer memory relied on cathode rays to retrieve information. But the Navy needed a faster computer that could run flight simulations in real time.

In stepped a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Led by professor Jay Forrester, the researchers developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind.

The structure consisted of a plane made of wires and magnetic rings called cores. Each ring contained one bit of data. Every bit on the memory plane could be accessed with a single read-and-write cycle.

In short, magnetic core memory was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed. The time it took to request and retrieve information from memory was a microsecond — hundreds of thousands of times slower than memory today, but nonetheless a magnificent achievement in the 1950s.

“When we were working on this, in a million years we couldn’t imagine what would happen with memory,” said Bernard Widrow, who worked on Project Whirlwind with Forrester, in a 2009 interview with Edison Tech Center.

Forrester applied for a patent on his invention May 11, 1951. Project Whirlwind stayed active until 1959, though the technology was never used for a flight simulator.