Food SystemThe system of Shrimp starts in the ocean where they are caught by fishing boats and transported to processing and distribution. The U.S. imports the majority of its shrimp before it is prepared in restaurants and homes and consumed by the public. Some interesting feedback loops I discovered were the Social and Environmental negative loops. When a recipe becomes popular like Shrimp Scampi, there becomes a higher demand for shrimp leading to overfishing and a reduction in the shrimp population. The Environmental negative feedback loop is the effect of climate change creating warmer water and overfishing which once again lowers the shrimp population.
The positive feedback I noticed was aquaculture, which is the process of farming seafood. Aquaculture is a new and growing industry and is far more sustainable for the environment and economy than traditional shrimp fishing. By raising shrimp on a farm and harvesting instead of importing shrimp, the U.S. is able to create new jobs and save money, creating positive feedback in the economy. The environment also takes less of a hit from transportation and overfishing, which means less negative feedback for the Earth and the shrimp population. |
Senses System
Tree System
Depicted above is just one stem of the U.S. Army. To stay organized, soldiers are separated into groups that stem from one another. The smallest unit is a squad which can contain up to 10 soldiers and is lead by a Staff Sergeant. The next grouping is a platoon which can contain up to 3 squads and is lead by a Lieutenant. This continues on with larger groupings through battalions, divisions, and all the way up to a Field Army which at this point can have over 50,000 troops and is commanded by a General. In the U.S. Military services, rank determines who gets to tell whom what to do. The higher one's rank, the more authority and responsibility they have. There are all sorts of feedback loops that initiate with the commanding officer and travel down the chain of command to soldiers in a squad where each squad reacts differently.
Predator Prey Simulator
My predator prey model replicates the projected effect of the relationship between poachers and elephants. Humans have long killed and mutilated elephants for their tusks. It was not until 1990 that ivory trade was banned. Since then there has been huge amounts trafficked through the black market. Elephant population has been steadily declining as there is a market for ivory and there will always be poachers. In my predator prey model I created a stable number of poachers so they would not die or repopulate. I also made the ratio of elephants to poachers balanced. There are not so many elephants that they grow out of control and there are not so many poachers that all the elephants die right away.
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Weather System
Supervolcanoes are a natural phenomenon and a rare occurrence. Not only do these volcanoes devastate anything around them, places half the globe around can feel their unforgiving effects years later. Supervolcanoes spew more than 1,000 gigatons of ash, gas and molten lava. The molten lava itself obliterates anything in its path. Animals and humans suffocate from the smoke and gases. The smoke and ash can remain in the sky for weeks and carries across the globe. Sulfur Dioxide remains in the stratosphere and blocks the suns radiation, causing extreme temperature drops and acid rain. Acid rain ruins crops and pollutes drinking water. Entire civilizations have been wiped out due to the effect of supervolcanoes. When talking about volcanoes, people focus on the surface level of effects such as lava of ash when really there is an entire chain of systematic effects that occur over a period of years.
Microsystem
The inner mechanics of a beehive is a surprisingly complex system. Worker bees will travel from flower to flower collecting pollen to deliver to the hive. Once a worker bee returns it comes to a line of worker bees and like an assembly line bee after bee regurgitates the honey until it gets to the comb. The regurgitation process actually serves a very important purpose. Every time a bee digests the honey and regurgitates it again, it is adding enzymes to the honey. Once the honey is rich in enzymes and is regurgitated into the comb, it is fanned down by their wings. This process helps the water from the honey evaporate faster. When the honey becomes viscous, the comb is plugged with beeswax and the worker bees move on to the next comb to fill. The most interesting phenomenon I discovered about bees is their social behavior. When a bee discovers an area rich in pollen it does what looks like a dance to the other bees. It will walk in a straight line wiggling back and forth then loop back in a circle and repeat. The line it walks points in the direction of the pollen. The longer the line, the farther away and the more energetic the wiggle, the richer the pollen.
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Project 2
https://prezi.com/view/OxfUk6tnu53lj2kMOFUt/
I’ve always had a special interest in color and their effects on the eye and brain. When I discovered that I had a red green color deficiency at the eye doctor, I started to pay more attention to the two colors. I noticed how they would vibrate when next to each other. It was a dizzying effect but also mesmerizing. As an artist, I have begun to pay special attention to specific colors and the relationships they make as well as the effects they can cause. When thinking of an interactive topic for this project, playing with color illusions quickly came to me. Once I started to do research, I found that all the illusions I discovered were related to two theories of vision and the brain; Color Constancy and Lateral Inhibition. I read through the two theories and became familiar with their complicated nature. My goal for the presentation is to familiarize the class with each idea and then have them be able to spot these ideas in action. I started out on the course to teach color theory but found myself straying away from color and towards illusion and the brain. The brain makes so many incredible shortcuts to simplify things for us. Just about everything that we see isn’t actually what we process. Color constancy states that light wavelengths are constantly changing due to fluctuating illumination. This means that our eyes are picking up colors that are constantly morphing in and out of different hues and tones, yet we don’t see this. That is because our brain discounts the changing illumination. Everything would be extremely confusing if our brain chose not to ignore changing illumination. Lateral Inhibition is a theory that has yet to be disproven. Lateral Inhibition suggests that when our eyes focus on a point, that neuron that is being focused reduces the activity of surrounding neurons, causing you to see less. The effect this has is that edges pop out at us because there are not surrounded. Lateral Inhibition also causes simultaneous contrast. Simultaneous contrast is the heightened sense of contrast when different shades are put together or colors with different chromatic backgrounds are used. Imagine the same color (orange) is put into a space with different valued backgrounds. That same color (orange) then looks like two different values (one a darker orange than the other). The one with a lighter value background appears darker than the one with the darker value background. In these illusions, it is not our eyes that are deceiving us so much as our brain.
I’ve always had a special interest in color and their effects on the eye and brain. When I discovered that I had a red green color deficiency at the eye doctor, I started to pay more attention to the two colors. I noticed how they would vibrate when next to each other. It was a dizzying effect but also mesmerizing. As an artist, I have begun to pay special attention to specific colors and the relationships they make as well as the effects they can cause. When thinking of an interactive topic for this project, playing with color illusions quickly came to me. Once I started to do research, I found that all the illusions I discovered were related to two theories of vision and the brain; Color Constancy and Lateral Inhibition. I read through the two theories and became familiar with their complicated nature. My goal for the presentation is to familiarize the class with each idea and then have them be able to spot these ideas in action. I started out on the course to teach color theory but found myself straying away from color and towards illusion and the brain. The brain makes so many incredible shortcuts to simplify things for us. Just about everything that we see isn’t actually what we process. Color constancy states that light wavelengths are constantly changing due to fluctuating illumination. This means that our eyes are picking up colors that are constantly morphing in and out of different hues and tones, yet we don’t see this. That is because our brain discounts the changing illumination. Everything would be extremely confusing if our brain chose not to ignore changing illumination. Lateral Inhibition is a theory that has yet to be disproven. Lateral Inhibition suggests that when our eyes focus on a point, that neuron that is being focused reduces the activity of surrounding neurons, causing you to see less. The effect this has is that edges pop out at us because there are not surrounded. Lateral Inhibition also causes simultaneous contrast. Simultaneous contrast is the heightened sense of contrast when different shades are put together or colors with different chromatic backgrounds are used. Imagine the same color (orange) is put into a space with different valued backgrounds. That same color (orange) then looks like two different values (one a darker orange than the other). The one with a lighter value background appears darker than the one with the darker value background. In these illusions, it is not our eyes that are deceiving us so much as our brain.
Final
For the Final Project Hannah, Casey, and I used Processing to pull information from Yahoo weather and find the temperature and conditions of any city in the world.