“As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.” ~ a hella-queer Irish dude I hate to admit it, but tragedies like the recent Orlando shooting no longer shock me. For me, this…
Earlier this week, I spoke at OpenVisConf, about how systems thinking and simulations can CHANGE THE WORLD!!! or summin' like that. I'm happy that my talk was relatively early in the conference, so once I was done with it, I could relax and actually pay attention to the other talks.…
Here's the text version of a talk I gave a few days ago! My talk was about systems and simulations – and how they can make us more empathetic, more empowered, or at least, give us a deeper understanding of the world... or something like that. For some reason, I never…
When most people hear the word “simulation”, they probably think about The Matrix, and whether we're all living in a simulation or something. But real simulations are made for a purpose. They're created to figure out the past, improve the present, or explore possible futures. So the good news is,…
This week, I went to this small two-day workshop for journalists to learn about Systems Thinking, and to figure out how to apply it to their own work! Here are my messy sketch-notes, with some personal reflections. Good news & bad news – they skimmed over the basics of Systems Thinking.…
Imagine two students care a lot about the fishing industry. Maybe this is an Alaskan school, who knows. The first student, Alice, cares mostly about the ecological impact of the industry. She knows ecologies have a fine balance, so she makes a simplified model of the marine ecosystem, like so:…
Today, I started my Knight/Mozilla OpenNews Fellowship at PBS Frontline! So I'll be here in Boston, MA for the next ten months. Also, looking forward to schmoozing at the MIT Media Lab, also here in Boston. Anyway, pretty dang excited to be here! The first thing you see walking…