• “law of minimum.” It doesn't matter how much nitrogen is available to the grain, he said, if what's short is phosphorus. It does not no good to pour on more phosphorus, if the problem is low potassium.
• if-some-is-good-more-is-better syndrome.
• threshold effects: phenomena that offer benefits only to a particular point.
── People who consume half as much vitamin A as they need can lose their vision to an ugly disease called xerophthalmia;* eating twice as much Vitamin A as needed doesn't give them 20/10 vision.
• “parameter threshold”: this value must be no less than some minimal level
____________________________________
Donella H. Meadows, Edited by Diana Wright, Thinking in systems [ ]
p.101
A patch of growing grain needs:
• sunlight
• air
• water
• nitrogen
• phosphorus
• potassium
• dozens of minor nutrients
• a friable soil and the services of a microbial soil community
• some system to control the weeds and pests ([ ideally without pesticides, insecticides, herbicides or any chemical of that sort ])
• protection from the wastes of the industrial manufacturer
It was with regard to grain that Justus von Liebig came up with his famous “law of minimum.” It doesn't matter how much nitrogen is available to the grain, he said, if what's short is phosphorus. It does not no good to pour on more phosphorus, if the problem is low potassium.
Bread will not rise without yeast, no matter how much flour it has. Children will not thrive without protein, no matter how many carbohydrates they eat. Companies can't keep going without energy, no matter how many customers they have──or without customers, no matter how much energy they have.
This concept of a limiting factor is simple and widely misunderstood.
p.102
There are layers of limits [and minimum threshold effects] around every growing plant, child, epidemic [tipping point], new product, technological advance, company, city, economy, and population. Insight comes not only from recognising which factor is limiting, but from seeing that growth itself depletes or enchances limits and therefore changes what is limiting. The interplay between a growing plant and the soil, a growing company and its market, a growing economy and its resource base, is dynamic. Whenever one factor ceases to be limiting, growth occurs, and the growth itself changes the relative scarcity of factors until another becomes limiting. To shift attention from the abundant factors to the next potential limiting factor is to gain real understanding of, and control over, the growth process.
(Thinking in systems : a primer, Donella H. Meadows, Edited by Diana Wright, sustainability institute, 2008, QA 402 .M425 2008, )
• Insight comes not only from recognising which factor is limiting, but from seeing that growth itself depletes or enchances limits and therefore changes what is limiting.
• Whenever one factor ceases to be limiting, growth occurs, and the growth itself changes the relative scarcity of factors until another becomes limiting.
• To shift attention from the abundant factors to the next potential limiting factor is to gain real understanding of ... the growth process.
____________________________________
• Complementary Proteins
• Nutrient Partners
• biochemical partnerships that affect how well they are absorbed by the body.
Reader's digest., Family guide to natural medicine : how to stay healthy the natural way, 1993
p.268
Complementary Proteins
“Virtually all traditional societies used grain and legume combinations as their main source of protein and energy. In Latin America it was corn tortillas with beans, or rice with beans. In the Middle East it was bulgur wheat with chickpeas or pita bread falafel with hummus sauce (whole wheat, chickpeas, and seasame seeds). In India it was rice or chapaties with dal (lentils, often served with yogurt). In Asia it was soy foods with rice.
“In each case, the balance was typically 70 to 80 percent whole grains and 20 to 30 percent legumes, the very balance that nutritionists have found maximizes protein usability.”
── excerpted from “Diet for a small planet” by Frances Moore Lappé
bioavailability ── maximizes protein usability
p.276
Nutrient Partners
Although all vitamins and minerals influence one another, some have special biochemical partnerships that affect how well they are absorbed by the body. Vitamin C enhances the absorption of iron, which is why topping a bowl of iron-enriched cereal with strawberries ── excellent sources of Vitamin C ── is a tasty as well as healthy choice. Other nutrient partners include vitamin D and calcium, vitamin E and selenium, vitamin B12 and folic acid, and calcium and magnesium.
(Family guide to natural medicine : how to stay healthy the natural way / Reader's digest., 1. alternative medicine., includes bibliographical references and index., R733.F36 1993, 615.5─dc20, )
____________________________________
I got schooled : the unlikely story of how a moonlighting movie maker learned the five keys to closing American's education gap
p.33
linearity fallacy, and that I call the if-some-is-good-more-is-better syndrome. We find it difficult to recognize threshold effects: phenomena that offer benefits only to a particular point. People who consume half as much vitamin A as they need can lose their vision to an ugly disease called xerophthalmia;* eating twice as much Vitamin A as needed doesn't give them 20/10 vision. In the same way, a school that buys only half as many textbooks as it needs is in trouble, but one that buys twice as many as it needs is just wasting money.
('I got schooled : the unlikely story of how a moonlighting movie maker learned the five keys to closing American's education gap', M. Night Shyamalan, © 2013, Simon & Schuster)
(Shyamalan, M. Night(2013); 'I got schooled', © 2013, Simon & Schuster, [317.82694 Shyamala 2013], p.33)
* the M. Night Shyamalan Foundation have been funding vitamin therapy aimed directly at this problems for years.
____________________________________
Semyon D. Savransky., Engineering of creativity, 2000 [ ]
p.162
“parameter threshold” [4]
In an efficient technique this value must be no less than some minimal level, named by Boris I. Goldovsky as “parameter threshold” [4]. Provision for lift power exceeding aircraft weight by 10 to 20% was a threshold. This condition was necessary for reliable flight of an aircraft. Another threshold was connected with the distance a steamer could travel without refueling. This threshold alone has determined the transition from a steamboat to steamship and then to an ocean liner. A necessity to overcome the parameter threshold of the currently limited technological capabilities of a society determines the mode of performance of a technique to be invented and categorizes the problems to be solved in the second case.
( Savransky, Semyon D., Engineering of creativity : introduction to TRIZ methodology of inventive problem solving / by Semyon D. Savransky., 1. engineering--methodology., 2. problem solving--methodology., 3. creative thinking., 4. technological innovations., 2000, )
____________________________________
• But the combined effects of large numbers of improvements within a technological system may be immense.9
Nathan Rosenberg, Inside the black box: technology and economics, 1982
pp.56─57
Complementaries
Inventions hardly ever function in isolation. Time and again in the history of ... technology, it has happened that the productivity of a given invention has turned on the question of the availability of complementary technologies. Often these technologies did not initially exist, so that the benefits potentially flowing from invention A had to await the achievement of inventions B, C, or D. These relationships of complementarity therefore make it exceedingly difficult to predict the flow of benefits from any single invention and commonly lead to a postponement in the flow of such expected benefits. Technologies depend upon one another and interact with one another in ways that are not apparent to the casual observer, and often not to the specialist.
A serious difficulty in tracing out the social payoff to invention is that these linkages are both numerous and of varying degrees of importance and therefore difficult to measure with any pretense of precision. Thus an invention reducing the cost of power generation differentially affects different industries.
p.58
By the 1880s and the 1890s, as a result of refrigeration techniques, the rapidly growing populations of western Europe were becoming heavily dependent upon a wide range of overseas food products, including not only the North American midwest but also large quantities of lamb from New Zealand and Australia and beef from Argentine.5
pp.60─61
p.60
It is characteristic of a system that improvements in performance in one part are of limited significance without simultaneous improvements in other parts, just as the auditory benefits of a high-quality amplifier are lost when it is connected to a hi-fi set with a low-quality loudspeaker.
p.60
(For example, after the introduction of steel rails make possible the use of longer trains with heavier loads traveling at higher speeds, making them much more difficult to stop, Westinghouse “providentially” developed the air brake. The improved design of automobile engines and greater speeds were likely to be disastrous without a better braking system and better engineered roads.)
p.60
Similarly, improvements in power generation will have only a limited impact on the delivered cost of electricity until improvements are made in the transmission network and the cost of transporting electricity over long distances.
p.60
This need for further innovations in complementary activities is an important reason why even apparently spectacular breakthroughs usually have only a gradually rising productivity curve flowing from them.
pp.60-61
Really major improvements in productivity therefore seldom flow from single technological innovations, however significant they may appear to be.
p.61
But the combined effects of large numbers of improvements within a technological system may be immense.9
Moreover, there are internal pressures within such systems that serve to provide inducement mechanisms of a dynamic sort.
One invention sharply raises the economic payoff to the introduction of another invention.
The attention and effort of skilled engineered personnel are forcefully focused on specific problems by the shifting succession of bottlenecks that emerge as output expands.10
p.61
The role of complementarity relationships may be further observed, in finer detail, in the history of individual innovations. Sometimes a particular innovation has to await the availability of a specific complementary input or component; sometimes the evident need for the input is sufficient to lead to its invention;
(Inside the black box./ Nathan Rosenberg, 1. technological innovations., 2. technology─social aspects., HC79.T4R673 1982, 338'.06, first published 1982, )
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• All of the components need to be present to evoke the full response in a fire ant worker seen in the field and laboratory.
edward o. wilson, Letters to a young scientist, 2013 [ ]
pp.200-201
Years later, Robert K. Vander Meer, a natural product chemist working on fire ant pheromones in Florida, discovered the reason for our failure. The trail substance, it turned out, is not a single pheromone, but a medley of pheromones, all released from the sting onto the ground. One attracts nestmates of the trail layer, another excites them into activity, and still another guides them through the active space created by the evaporating chemical streaks. All of the components need to be present to evoke the full response in a fire ant worker seen in the field and laboratory. By not realizing this complexity, and thereby taking aim only at one of the components, we had failed to identify any of them.
a medley of pheromones (chemical trail):
(1) attracts nestmates of trail layer (attract trail layer),
(2) excites them into activity (excites and activate the trail layers),
(3) still another pheromone that guides them (pheromone that guide)
(Letters to a young scientist, by edward o. wilson, copyright © 2013)
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• 'distribution of effect'
• inter-action effects
• inter-action effects dominate main effects.
I got schooled : the unlikely story of how a moonlighting movie maker learned the five keys to closing American's education gap
pp.41-42
... an article entitled "Leadership as the Practice of Improvement." It was written by one of the most prominent educational researchers in the country, Richard Elmore at Harvard, who showed that there really aren't many direct effects in education that can be traced back to a single policy or program. What really happens is that a group of programs alters the distribution of effects around the mean. It shifts those curves of performance, usually in small and marginal ways.
What that means is that it isn't the direct effects that matter nearly as much as the 'distribution of effect'. Moving the curve, a little bit at a time. But that doesn't mean that the effect isn't real. Here's his important quote:
"In the language of old-fashioined analysis of variance,
inter-action effects dominate main effects. [emphasis
added. begin.] The effects most worth knowing about
in policy analysis, and the least analyzed, are inter-
action effects [emphasis added. ends.]"
As a filmmaker, interaction effect is practically all we do. In the famous example, if you put a shot of a man staring and edit it to a steaming bowl of soup, we will feel the man is hungry. If we put a shot of a man staring and edit it to a voluptuous woman, who is undressing, we will think he is lusting after her. I've been making movies for more than twenty years, and I know that no one scene makes a movie work. In fact, I'd take it a step further: Improving any one scene won't necessarily make the movie better. It's just as likely to make it worse. Interaction are what matter.
If Professor Elmore was right, what we were looking for wasn't a list of policies that helped to close America's achievement gap independent of one another. We needed to find the practices that had their biggest impact from interacting with other practices. We needed a system. "You have to do them all."
Now, for the first time, I knew what the question had to be, and I took it back to James. "Is there a handful of tenets in education, like 'sleep eight hours a day' and 'exercise three times a week,' that interact in ways that multiply their impact?"
Answering that question took nearly another year.
('I got schooled : the unlikely story of how a moonlighting movie maker learned the five keys to closing American's education gap', M. Night Shyamalan, © 2013, Simon & Schuster)
(Shyamalan, M. Night(2013); 'I got schooled', © 2013, Simon & Schuster, [317.82694 Shyamala 2013], pp.41-42)
____________________________________
• “law of minimum.” It doesn't matter how much nitrogen is available to the grain, he said, if what's short is phosphorus.
── It does not no good to pour on more phosphorus, if the problem is low potassium.
── Bread will not rise without yeast, no matter how much flour it has.
── context: baking, cooking, chemistry
── Children will not thrive without protein, no matter how many carbohydrates they eat.
── context: human biological system
── This concept of a limiting factor is simple and widely misunderstood.
── Insight comes not only from recognising which factor is limiting, but from seeing that growth itself depletes or enchances limits and therefore changes what is limiting.
── Whenever one factor ceases to be limiting, growth occurs, and the growth itself changes the relative scarcity of factors until another becomes limiting.
── To shift attention from the abundant factors to the next potential limiting factor is to gain real understanding of ... the growth process.
── context: system dynamics
• if-some-is-good-more-is-better syndrome.
• threshold effects: phenomena that offer benefits only to a particular point.
── People who consume half as much vitamin A as they need can lose their vision to an ugly disease called xerophthalmia;* eating twice as much Vitamin A as needed doesn't give them 20/10 vision.
── context: human biological system, disease model
── minimum threshold effects: to get the benefits, you must consume enough whole food (grains, fruits, vegetables, fishes, and others) and drink enough liquid that contain the specific nutrients, vitamins, trace minerals; ... .
── In the same way, a school that buys only half as many textbooks as it needs is in trouble, but one that buys twice as many as it needs is just wasting money.
── context: ???
── point, zone, range, area, territory, region, kingdom of diminishing return
• “parameter threshold”: this value must be no less than some minimal level
── Provision for lift power exceeding aircraft weight by 10 to 20% was a threshold. This condition was necessary for reliable flight of an aircraft.
── context: aircraft lift power, system, and transport
── Another threshold was connected with the distance a steamer could travel without refueling. This threshold alone has determined the transition from a steamboat to steamship and then to an ocean liner.
── context: seacraft refueling, system, and transport
• tipping point
── phase transition
____________________________________
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