I learned a lot this week. Not too much from my classes but because I think I read more than normal. Two cross-country flights and a day of down time were filled with too much reading. I learned about Salgado, Neotony, and Resilience vs Adaptation. I also destroyed Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty and am still recovering from his analysis and predictions of current patrimonial capitalism..
 
Sebastio Salgado
Holy hell this is good photographer. Now in his 70s, Salgado focuses on victims of globalization and postmodern capitalism primarily but he’s been turning his camera toward environmental issues later in his career. A Brazilian who resides in Paris, Salgado got his Economics PhD in his 20s, picked up a camera in his early 30s and created the rest of his globe-trotting photojournalist existence from there. I’m picking up his big (I mean BIG!) environmental photo book called Genesis from the Clemson Library this week and am pretty excited. His website is here: https://www.amazonasimages.com/ but if you just google images his name you will find better results.

Neotony
The way I understood this through a text I came across was as length of parental investment (18 years for humans, 0 time for Sea Turtles, etc) or even length of gestation (9 months for humans, 2 years for elephants, etc). But, looking it up Neoteny is more about “the retention by adults of traits previously seen only in the young.” Humans are neotenous as they look generally the same as babies.
 
Resilience and Adaptation
I’ve been using Resilient wrong. From Angela Duckworth, Paul Tough, and the positive psychology movement, I learned of the importance of resilient behavior through human development stages. However, I had always used it as the ability to adapt to situations. I’ve used Adaptive Management as it is technically defined, adjusting your strategy to achieve goals. However, I learned from Dan Flores’ American Serengeti that resiliency is maintaining the same strategy, or in the case of evolution - the same physical development, in regards to challenges. Adaptation however is doing whatever is necessary to survive the challenge. I am going to play with these concepts more.

This should have been last Friday but I was both depressed and travelling. I do think these 3 things are pretty incredible though.
 
Inductive and Deductive Logic and how it relates to Coding
Top down, bottom up. Last week we discussed these ideas and how they apply to research and my research in general. Here’s the basis of the dichotomy: “Deductive reasoning starts with a general theory, statement, or hypothesis and then works its way down to a conclusion based on evidence. Inductive reasoning starts with a small observation or question and works it's way to a theory by examining the related issues”
 
How this relates to coding is pretty interesting and I can totally see myself using this. Coding is the idea of generalizing something into an arbitrary topic you choose. For example, if you see a stack of photos and find one with birds that photo might be coded as “nature,” “avians,” or “wings” depending on what you’re looking for.  This is helpful for pulling meaning out of data and being able to make sense of the narrative of a stack of otherwise chaotic documents.
 
Deductive coding is the idea of having your codes already figured out. For a variety of reasons you might need to see only photos of birds, photos of mammals, or photos of fish so your codes become birds, mammals, and fish. Inductive coding is allowing your documents to give you your codes. You go through your data and find how the data lump themselves into different codes.
 
Phenomenology/ Phenomenography
In a related way Phenomenology and Phenomenography deal with the subjective and objective respectively as well. I learned philosophy in my undergrad and it has surprisingly helped shape my paradigm, my weltanschauung. ever since. I regularly put new information in boxes of epistemology, ontology, existentialism, critical theory, and phenomenology to name a few so that I can understand what I am experiencing. I didn’t realize this was a type of phenomenography.
 
Phenomenology is basically understanding a phenomenon. Not a phenomenon in the sense of the dramatic or otherworldy but in the basic sense of an event or situation. Why is the sky blue or why does the sun return every morning are great examples of phenomenology. You can explain them through myths or through science.
 
Phenomenography on the other hand is how an individual experiences an event or situation. How you experience the sky being blue may be different than how your best friend experiences it. This is a helpful construct when thinking about conservation and developing a rigorous methodology around understanding how people interact with conservation aspects can help me get to understanding behavior motivations.
 
Practical Nostalgia
This is a slippery idea that I don’t fully comprehend yet but I think it has significant explanatory power for a lot of regressive actions. I learned it last week as creating a template for how things should be in the future based upon a perceived concept of how things were in the past. Phillip Moore defines it a bit differently: “The argument developed here is that nostalgia can be more than just a longing or a yearning for an unattainable golden era located some unspecified time in the past, when social life was well organised and clearly understood, but rather that nostalgia can also take on a tough critical edge when its practical uses are recognised and exploited. Couched as practical nostalgia, such interpretations of the past provide a vision that can be used as a way of creating a space for the development of a critique of the present and opening up possibilities for the future.”
 
To me, these seem contradictory. I will explore further…

Heteroscedasticity -  what a fun word!
What the hell does that mean? No idea. This crazy term is “…refers to the circumstance in which the variability of a variable is unequal across the range of values of a second variable that predicts it.” This doesn’t make sense unless you look at a scatterplot 

The way I’m going to think about it is as the more growth that a variable encounters the more difference it undertakes. The website below uses the example of the deviation from the average of income earning through age. At 20, most wage earners will make an equal amount. As they get older the difference increases as some folks end up making significantly more and others way less. On the whole everyone makes more than they did when they were 20, especially according to the average but the difference increases even further as they age.
 
I’m sure this has implications for systems theory. It just ‘looks’ like it is the total being more the sum of the parts. It looks like chaos theory.
 
http://www.statsmakemecry.com/smmctheblog/confusing-stats-terms-explained-heteroscedasticity-heteroske.html
 
Blue Carbon
Blue carbon is a term for the carbon found in marine and aquatic habitats. These habitats sequester carbon in large amounts. I’m familiar with the idea and the process – at least superficially- bt I have never heard the term before or the initiative before. http://thebluecarboninitiative.org/
 
This is a really interesting way to market climate change and ocean conservation issues. There is some great information on this website and I look forward to utilizing it in some of the coastal habitats I get to work with.
 
Instrumental vs Intrinsic Case Study
I had my first meetings with my committee and committee members this last week. We’re drilling down on my research project. One of the things that was thrown around was an instrumental case study or an intrinsic case study. My response: sure – wait, what? So I had to ask. That’s another thing I’m learning – don’t fake it, ask if you don’t know something.

According to http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/casestudy/n175.xml "An instrumental case study is the study of a case (e.g., person, specific group, occupation, department, organization) to provide insight into a particular issue, redraw generalizations, or build theory. In instrumental case research the case facilitates understanding of something else...." whereas "An intrinsic case study is the study of a case (e.g., person, specific group, occupation, department, organization) where the case itself is of primary interest in the exploration." 

It makes sense. Intrinsic studies are intrinsically important within themselves and Instrumental studies are tools in understanding something else.