September 20, 2019
For today
Work on the notebook for Chapter 3, and turn it in
Read Think Complexity Chapter 4 and do the reading quiz
Turn in the second installment of your annotated bibliography
Optional video: Raymond Hettinger Modern Python Dictionaries A confluence of a dozen great ideas PyCon 2017
Today
Chapter 4, PMF and CDF
How to save the world
Dijkstra's algorithm
Barabasi and Albert
Practice quiz
For next time
Turn in the third and final installment of your annotated bibliography.
Prepare for a quiz on Chapters 1-4 (here's last year's quiz)
Read the Project Proposal assignment and come to class ready to discuss project ideas.
Let's look at EmpiricalDist, and run this notebook.
If I were starting an engineering career, here's what I would work on:
Nuclear energy
Desalination
CO₂ sequestration
Geoengineering
Alternatives to meat
Transportation without fossil fuels
Global education (especially Africa)
Global child welfare (especially Africa)
Infrastructure for natural disaster and rising sea level
I think these are the keys to getting through the 21st Century with a habitable planet and a high quality of life for the people on it.
This list is based on a few conclusions I have come to, tentatively:
Climate crisis is now inevitable: Shift from small things to global scale. Shift from prevention to minimizing and dealing with the consequences.
Dealing with the consequences is mostly civil engineering: permanent infrastructure that minimizes natural disasters and temporary infrastructure to deal with crises.
Energy is the key to almost everything else: with abundant energy, food and water are solvable problems; without it, they are not.
Wind and solar can help, but without massive expansion of nuclear power, we cannot generate the power we need without fossil fuels.
We can't get fossil fuels out of transportation fast enough, everything else is easier.
We're going to need active sequestration. Agriculture is the most promising option.
Even in the best case, some amount of geoengineering is going to happen.
Rich countries will not stop eating meat, and as poor countries get richer, they will eat more.
World population will peak in 2100 between 9 and 11 billion people. Anything we do to get closer to 9 makes all the other problems easier.
If we get through this bottleneck, things get easier.
Most of the growth between now and then will be in Africa.
The difference between 9 and 11 mostly depends on the demographic transition in Africa.
The things that drive that are:
Childhood survival rates, driven by infectious disease and violence.
Economic opportunity (especially for women)
Education (especially for women)
My immediate advice: Choose an engineering career that addresses these problems. You probably have 70 years to work with; use them well.
Also, keep an eye on the Gates Foundation. I think they are on to something.
Barabasi and Albert
"Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks"
Please take 10 minutes to read the paper
Think about the following questions as you read:
1) What is the application domain? What is the system of interest?
2) What is the primary experimental question the authors address?
3) What kind of model do they use?
4) What methods do they apply to the model? Analysis? Simulation?
5) What work does the model do? Predict? Explain? Design?
6) What validation do the authors report?
7) Are the conclusions supported by the results?
We will discuss these questions and try to connect the paper to some of the themes of the class.
Then load the Chapter 4 notebook, read the text and run the code, work on exercises.