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.

Bioecological Systems Model
Developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner, this theory is applied to how children and maturing adults. Here is the helpful image below:

This system is helpful to see how components of each level interact with the other components and across levels. I am going to try and incorporate this into SocioEcological Systems Theory and figure out where Maslow's Hierarchy fits as well.

ANOVA Tables and Linear Regression
Analysis of Variance and seeing where points fall on an estimated line. This is actually way less difficult than anything else I’ve done in statistics and more important than that, actually useful. It still seems like magic when the wizard of my professor scrawls the incantations, the numbers, on the board but this is the first time the alchemy came together to make sense. The ability to predict where a data point can occur within some level of certainty is to me absurd. To think that I can do that is an odd concept
 
Contractor vs Scholar Thinking
I had my first official meeting with my committee this week and I can’t imagine a more distinct clash of paradigms. Three scholar sitting at a table and me. I prepared for the meeting fairly well and set out the agenda, the draft research questions, and what I was comfortable with and what I wasn’t. I felt good navigating this meeting. Twenty minutes into the meeting I realized that I wasn’t dealing with clients or employees. I began to realize that I was dealing with academics, with scholars. Instead of focusing on answering a question we focused on a theory to further, instead of focusing on how we could apply my research we focused on what methodology we could use. This to me seemed like a complete backwards way to go about it, like putting the cart before the horse. When I realized that I was thinking like a contractor, I told my committee so and asked them how I should change my thinking. They started with a “welcome to grad school” statement saying that whatever research method we choose should apply to a theory we’re interested in exploring and if the place or problem we’re looking at works, then it works. I’m going to need to think about this a lot more – this is new territory.

The Three Things this Week are the concepts of Meliorism, Wicked Problems, and Confidence Intervals. I really like the ramifications of thinking through conservation issues as a Wicked Problem. And I realized that I am a complete and total Meliorist.

Meliorism
In studying the philosophy of deviance in leisure this word kept appearing: meliorism. I’d never heard of it before.
 
Meliorism: the belief that the world can be made better by human effort
 
I guess I never thought about Meliorism. I’ve had the Hobbesian discussions with people about whether people are inherently good or bad but I suppose I’ve always assumed that focused and directed human effort toward making the world better can, in fact, make the world better. I’ve never thought anything different. My assumption has always been that most people aren’t striving to actively make the world a better place but are instead just trying to survive (e.g. make money, feed their family, provide for basic needs) or trying to build their life in accordance to the values they believe in (e.g. being a member of their family, of their community, of their church, etc). I’ve always assumed that our problems of pollution, overpopulation, overexploitation, and habitat destruction (let alone all social ills of crime, homelessness, etc) are repercussions of poor management of the commons and our basic desires for survival and maintaining the status quo.
 
Additionally, I’ve always believed that there are people who try to meet those two basic desires while simultaneously choosing to direct their efforts toward betterment of the group. This can manifest itself as police officers, politicians, and priests or revolutionaries, social workers, and conservationists. Whether you feel you are helping the world or not is subjective and whether you actually are or not is difficult to quantify and dependent on your rubric. I’ve thought this way and apparently that is Meliorism. The opposite belief is that we can’t make the world better.
 
Existentialism, nihilism, apathy, anomie and cultural subjectivity all play into this idea a little bit but the belief that you cannot objectively make the world a better place is so odd to me. Existentialism and nihilism as philosophies just say that you are choosing your moral structure and defining your own meaning and purpose. Apathy and anomie intuit that you just don’t care. Even Zen or Taoist acceptance are exercises in accepting the world as it is but make no reference to an inability at betterment. The conscious belief that the world cannot be made better ignores these personal choices and extends beyond the idea of checking out. It is an idea that presupposes an objective standard of what better is that will never be met.
 
The best I can wrap my head around this is as a cultural entropy.  All cultural expression is loss. I don’t think this a great analogy but I can’t imagine a belief system that actively believes that something, anything anywhere is getting better. I guess I am a meliorist.
 
Wicked problems
This is a concept that I believe contains the environmental issues we have. A Wicked Problem is vastly more complex than a normal problem. A normal problem, even a difficult problem, has at least one solution, a set of standards and examples in which to compare it to, and can be clearly identified before attempting to solve it. How to get to the moon and finding the Higgs Boson are difficult problems. How do you protect wildlife and rare habitats is an especially difficult problem. How do you feed and provide basic and above-basic needs for 7 billion problem with limited resources is, I think, a very very difficult problem.
 
But, how do you feed and provide for the human population while simultaneously protecting non-human nature and ensuring a habitable global climate with the ability to still explore off-planet and sub-atomic levels? This is a wicked problem.
 
Here are the characteristics of a wicked problem:

1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'
6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

 
I’m reminded of the Kardashev Scale and Robert Wright’s Non-Zero in thinking about wicked problems. Kardashev says that we have three types of civilizations (type 1 uses the energy of the sun that hits the earth, 2 uses the actual energy of the sun, and 3 uses the energy of the galaxy) and that we are currently a Type .85. He says that transcending from a .99 to a 1.01 will the most difficult of all the transitions ever because it requires a change in every level of existence (how we think, how we consume, what we value, etc). Other theorists have said that this means this transition has the greatest opportunity for collapse. And this is what Wright says in Non-Zero. The more complex our society gets the better we become because we develop more and more answers that are Non-Zero, as in not a zero sum conclusion where one party wins and one party loses. When you have a non-zero sum conclusion both parties gain something. This is the idea of trade versus war. When you war, one party comes out ahead and the other does not but the whole population stays the same. When you trade, both parties get something and the whole population is that much further ahead. But, maintaining these non-zero sum relationships requires a lot of resources and as you grow larger and more successful the greater the opportunity for collapse.
 
This is where I believe we are. Globally, I think we are very near developing the necessary thought processes and technologies to transcend to a Type 1 Civilization through more and more Non-Zero sum solutions. But! Pushing us past that last hurdle is a Wicked Problem. This is the best I’ve been able to state the problem but I have left out so many aspects of humanity (i.e. cultural expression and the utilitarian values of non-consumption species) that I don’t think we fully understand our problem. Also, we wont be able to recognize what is right or wrong but only trajectories of appropriateness. Further, if we fail and sea levels rise 10 ft or 30-60% of the planet’s biodiversity is lost, then we cannot reverse that. That makes it a ‘one shot operation’ with no alternative solutions. We have figure this out as we go and every temporary solution we develop has novel problems that have to also be solved timely.
 
Developing the statistical probability that an alternative hypothesis is within the Confidence Interval you determine.

I learned this however I am angry at it because I have a test coming up and it is taking me too long to apply what I’ve learned. So, my revenge is to not dignify this concept with any more page space. ​

This week was the first where I got into my schedule fully. 55 hours of classwork, research, and studying. I'm in it fully. The three this week are Standard Deviation, Ecosystem People and Biosphere People, and the intertwined concepts of Community, Social Capital, and Social Value.

Standard Deviation
A friend’s family member asked me earlier this summer what I would be, what I would do, if I wasn’t in conservation and if there were no limitations keeping me from that career. I was stumped. I choose conservation for specific reasons: it’s one of the only things that keeps my interest, I see conservation as having global importance and meaning, not very many answers are known in the field, it has the ability to be adventurous and exciting. Nothing much else meets these criteria for me (plus, I’m not really good at anything else). After a couple weeks of thought on that whole “no limitations” thing however, it occurred to me that I would be a Theoretical Physicist. Oh my goodness, how amazing would that be?! I’m fascinated by simple ideas like velocity, gravity, and light let alone dark matter, black holes, and subatomic physics.
 
But then there is the math, the arcane and obscure markings on the wall, the incantations that explain the natural world. I’ve never been inclined towards numbers. I’m more of a colors and shapes and shiny objects person. The scrawl upon the blackboard in those old Einstein photos are a terrifying bouncer at the physicist club.
 
The concept of a Standard Deviation is basic for anyone past high school math. However, to someone who studied art but has been fascinated by the wizards who can manipulate numbers this is an idea that has confused me. In working with the environment you hear it occasionally: well, this population is within one standard deviation. Well, why is it standard? What are you deviating from? How does deviating standardly from anything tell you anything meaningful?
 
In statistics we’ve been moving at a breakneck speed (for me). We covered standard deviation around day 4 and have moved on and are approaching week 5 quickly. But wait a second, I’m still staring at this equation trying to figure out how the magician pulled the doves out of his sleeves.

I’ve asked questions in class and stared meaninglessly at the textbook but it just didn’t make sense. I put some YouTube videos on and found the exercises at the end of the chapter. Four hours later a sense of enlightenment that had gradually enmeshed my brain peaked into understanding and transcended into a larger connection: the language the wizards use is … knowable. I think the larger connection was not much more than a dissolving of my preconceived assumptions that math is unknowable but still it was huge for me (although, now that I figured it out it looks easy – so it goes).
 
I figured out how to calculate a Standard Deviation. While the stats professor went over it I still feel I taught it to myself. The idea that I could do that caught me off-guard – I didn’t know I could teach myself this stuff. I’m still struggling with probability, null hypothesis equations, and Z tables but after conquering this concept I feel empowered to undertake these other ideas. Maybe Theoretical Physics isn’t as far off as I had believed (or didn’t even know I believed)…
 
 Ecosystem People and Biosphere People
This is a simple concept and almost not even worth elaborating on but it is both new vocabulary to me and vocabulary that frames the narrative new. Ecosystem people are those who are dependent on their local environment for basic needs (e.g. burning gathered wood for your food, trekking to the local water hole and carrying it back, etc). Biosphere people are “urban dwellers of the industrialized societies and people engaged in high-input agriculture and animal husbandry…They do not depend on local ecosystems for their basic needs; the catchment area for their resource needs is the whole biosphere.”
 
I like this binary better than first-world/third-world or developed/underdeveloped. It speaks to the usage and the material engagement better. I’m going to continue to under this paradigm when looking at conservation issues.
 
Social Capital, Social Value, and Community
In my philosophy course we’re reading about Community, Social Capital, and Social Value and how people respond to these ideas through everyday life and through their leisure. As someone on the introverted end of the scale but also as someone who deeply appreciates quality relationships and a community that is stronger than the sum of its parts, I resonated with these readings.
 
The researcher Troy Glover comments that “community is ironically one of the most palpable comforts and anxieties of our time.” He distinguishes between the various terms stating that “community and social capital are different, albeit complementary. Community is a source of social capital, and social capital represents the value of community.”
 
Basically, “social capital is premised upon the notion that an investment (in social relations) will result in a return (some benefit or profit) to the individual…” We have this belief that the more you put in to a community (be it your neighborhood, church, colleagues, etc) it will give you something tangible. But that return of profit is rarely tangible. The result you get from “investing” in a community is seen through emotions, through a sense of safety, or a sense of purpose. A type of neurosis occurs when normal concepts of “capital” are conflated with social capital. You can’t withdraw your investment at any point because “social capital is not embodied in any particular person, but rather is embedded in social relationships, even though it is realized by individuals. If the relationship fails to endure, social capital, presumably, diminishes, perhaps even disappearing altogether.” When you withdraw your investment, you demolish the investment, the currency, and potentially future earnings.
 
In trying to relate them to conservation I am reminded that conservation is a social study, a values-based field, and dependent upon human decisions and interactions. Conservation, in the end, isn’t about how conservationists view the world; it’s about developing positive relationships between humans and nature that benefit both individually and mutually. This manifests itself through working to benefit humans through increased market and labor opportunities, benefitting nature through increased ecological structure and function, and benefitting them both mutually through an intersection of creative solutions to develop both. Once you withdraw the investment you collapse the relationship.
 
I’m wondering if we can reverse the paradigm from exploitation of nature to one of “additionality” (another concept I learned that will be shared later) for humans and nature? I’m wondering if we can do that through a social capital framework? 

​In this balmy and thunderstormy late-August week Graduate School offered up new concepts, new terms, and new confusions. Considering my program is interdisciplinary these concepts are as schizophrenic as I am at the moment. 

First is Marcia’s Identity Theory. Almost as an aside in one of my courses, the professor drew an XY graph on the board and described a theory posited in the 1960’s describing how people identify themselves in accordance to the thing they are learning/playing with/engaging with. It describes a spiral of starting out excited about something but not knowing much about it. This excitement part is defined as “commitment” and the lack of knowledge is defined as “foreclosure” in relation to “exploration” (how little do you know compared to how much you know). As you go through the spiral you end up learning more but depending on how you respond to the various levels of challenge your commitment might fluctuate. This fluctuation occurs when the information you are learning challenges what you think you know about your topic, how hard it is to understand, or how little it corresponds to the thing about your topic that you are interested in. If you continue with the study and aren’t prohibitively challenged to the point of quitting then you will spiral through the stages toward more exploration (learning), back into higher commitment (once you are reinvigorated by what you’re learning and new connections you make), and to a new baseline level of foreclosure and commitment from which to work from. If you do ‘quit’ permanently, or more likely temporarily, you end up in the quadrant of moratorium. I would imagine that getting out of the moratorium requires a special level of grit and creativity (as discussed by Paul Tough in How Children Succeed).
 
Immediately, my first association of this theory is with Csikszentmihaly’s concept of Flow and Seligman’s Flourish. Luckily for me, the professor also made this connection and explained it terrifically.  In these concepts you find the sweet-spot of action between stress and interest to work in a state of Flow where you are accomplishing at a high level while also minimizing distracting noise (like children and bills…). Their argument is that the more time you can spend in flow the more contentment you will find with life due to your higher feeling of meaning, purpose, and hope in life. I would imagine this is because you feel like you have a greater sense of control over an aspect of your life that you value.

Ecosystem Services is the second concept that I stumbled across. This is huge to me because, if going off of Marcia’s concept above, this is the next iteration of exploration and opening up my foreclosure level with my study (and the reason I went back to grad school). After reading Neel’s text about managing longleaf pines and William Ginn’s book Investing In Nature I have come to realize that this idea has many names: Tending the Wild (from the book of that name), Ecosystem Based Management, Additionality, Working Landscapes, and Socio Ecological Systems Theory. Basically, all these terms invoke the idea of actively managing natural resources for their exploitation but with a conscientiousness that values the system, the ecology, the habitat, and the parts beyond just the marketable resource - both for their inherent sake and also as a literal investment into future (conscientious) exploitation. The idea boils down to an economic strategy as Neel states in his text: “…treat your forest like an annuity, harvesting a portion of your annual interest rather than all of it. You certainly do not want to spend all your capital. In fact, under the Stoddard Neel approach, we aim to put more money in the bank every year with timber growth than we take out for timber harvest.… Rather than maintaining a constant timber volume, we like to see our investments grow over time.” (169)
 
The reason I like the term Ecosystem Services is that it focuses on the result. However, I think one of the drawbacks of this interdisciplinary field is that it is hard to conceptualize and place into an easy box. This term or the other ones don’t do well toward that goal either. Maybe it’s too nuanced, maybe it is too much a capitalist fringe but it has proven successful as Ginn elaborates in his text and how Mark Tercek describes in his Nature’s Fortune. I will continue to focus on this niche of ecosystem services- or whatever I end up calling it- for the sake of developing reproducible models, adaptable methods, and serviceable techniques that can be applied to multiple habitats and their species facing overexploitation.

​Lastly, in my statistics course I finally learned what those boxes with the lines coming out of them are. They are called boxplots and they help to interpret data to understand where the most typical data is (the median), the range of data and sample variance (where most of the data is), and the outliers. Outliers are just that: they lie outside of the normal data. They can also screw up all kinds of things because they are by definition anomalous. Outliers usually have special circumstances and beyond a Malcolm Gladwell interpretation, they mess it up for the middle parts. Understanding what’s in the box (where most of your data is) helps with understanding patterns, comparisons, and trends.
 
The reason I like this -beyond the fact that I will have to actually use it when I conduct my own research- is because it helps me travel the labyrinth that is Slow Thinking. Daniel Kahneman wrote in his book Thinking: Fast and Slow that humans have two modes of thinking: fast and slow. Fast thinking accounts for almost all our decisions and we are both really good at it and really bad (you can be both when you use it all the time). Fast thinking is based on our reactions, mostly emotionally. We’re good at it because on the whole we react well to stepping out of the way of the oncoming car or identifying when someone is pleased or angry with us. We are bad it when we choose the donuts for breakfast or make connections that just aren’t there (most racism, gender stereotypes, etc). We rely on fast thinking because that’s our default. Slow thinking however is what is required when understanding processes, probabilities, cognitive biases, and long-range outcomes. We are almost never good at Slow Thinking and it takes practice and discipline to even understand what is occurring. The big problem arises because we apply Fast Thinking to almost all things that require Slow Thinking. We end up stumbling ungracefully into poor decisions because our brains have never had to adapt to Slow Thinking models. These models seem to me to be the world of statistics. If I can work to train my brain into more Slow Thinking ways of understanding probabilities and processes I hope I will be able to recognize my own cognitive biases more accurately and more quickly.