Pratt celebrated its 124th commencement ceremony at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday, May 14th, 2013. I always try to make it to graduation to honor the hard work of our graduating seniors. Although there are usually a few students graduating who I worked with closely, mostly I go to see the many students Read More
A Major Post, Pratt InstituteRhett Bradbury has been a crucial member of Envirolutions over the past two years. Our only graduate student member, Rhett started coming to club meetings during his first semester at Pratt. Rhett’s skills as a graphic designer have had a profound effect on how Envirolutions has communicated with the rest of the campus: his posters, logos, and other visual Read More
A Major Post, Mentoring, Political ScienceDuring this year’s Green Week celebration, Envirolutions club members brought their Room for Improvement campaign to the campus, asking members of the Pratt community to identify where the campus has the most “room to improve” in terms of sustainability. Two enticements incentivized participation: those who filled out a survey could grab a snack and pick out their own Envirolutions button to Read More
A Major Post, Envirolutions, Resource Consumption, Sustainability, Sustainable EnergyI am excited by the recent publication of my review of Agent-based and individual-based modeling: a practical introduction in the January issue of Ecology. The review, entitled “Individual-based modeling for the masses“, lauds this valuable textbook designed to support individual-based modeling courses. I expect the combination of this text and the very valuable NetLogo modeling Read More
A Major Post, Ecological Modeling, Individual-based Models, My publications, Spatially Explicit ModelingThis week, students in Pratt’s Envirolutions club launched their newest campaign for on-campus sustainability. Called “Room for Improvement”, the campaign seeks to lower the environmental footprint of the school caused by resource consumption. The posters that advertise the campaign are themed around iconic “warning” posters: Envirolutions will also be tabling during Green Week on Thursday, March 28th to Read More
A Major Post, Envirolutions, Pratt Institute, Sustainability, Sustainable EnergyDo everyday people have any sense of their place in the world? Human beings live in incredibly complex societies undergirded by convoluted economies and overwhelmingly diverse cultures. Do we have a sense of how these societies came to be, or how they function and persist? For evolutionists, these are pretty vexing scientific questions: most researchers Read More
A Major Post, Behavior, Cooperation, Economic sustainability, Ethics, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Political Science, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Social DiversityIn a recent short opinion piece (Scientific American “Creation, Evolution and Indisputable Facts“), Jacob Tanenbaum argues that selectively rejecting evolutionary biology is dangerous to the scientific culture of America. He rightly points out that our populace does not reject science as a whole, but instead picks and chooses what science to doubt and what science Read More
A Major Post, Adaptation, Altruism, Articles, Belief, Cooperation, Evolution, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Religion, System StabilityMishele Lesser, a student who I mentored, just presented her final thesis project Genoscapes. Mishele and I spent a lively semester talking about the meaning of human genetics, a discussion that ranged from very mechanical questions about how genetics work to more philosophical questions about how to interpret genetic data and the potential identity it can Read More
A Major Post, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Genetics, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Human Uniqueness, Mentoring, Pratt Institute, Science in Art & DesignCulminating over three semesters of work, Pratt’s Envirolutions student club chose Election Day to celebrate the launch of eleven new recycling bins on the Brooklyn campus grounds. President Schutte joined students to cut the ribbons on the new bins, which were purchased by the 2011-2012 Student Government Association (SGA). A good-sized crowd of students, faculty, Read More
A Major Post, Center for Sustainable Design Studies, Envirolutions, Greenwashing, Pratt Institute, Resource Consumption, SustainabilityIf your brain is anything like mine, thoughts pretty much constantly race across it. As I consume media — especially media designed to inform — these thoughts intensify. As I read or listen or watch, my brain makes rapid connections between the new ideas I can recognize in the media I am consuming and the old Read More
A Major Post, Art & Design, Concept Mapping, Lesson Ideas, MSCI-160, Great Adventures in Evolution, Neuroscience, Pratt Institute