Nature can be used as a model or measure for your own designs. Natural selection reflects the way that a design should evolve and change as you find what does and does not work. Through this evolution, nature has produced designs that humans are still learning from today. Taking a product and trying something new, testing and improving the design until all you are left with is the best of the best. Nature acts as a mentor for my own designs/life as it never stops growing and progressing, continually improving. Designs should continue to grow and improve, and should not be considered stagnant or as final products. Lastly, nature also is perseverant. After natural disasters, nature grows back anyway, which is an ideology that should be applied to designs and life.
Being Resource Efficient is something that I have to take into account every day in my life. I always have something to do and something that I need to get done, when I start my day I make a plan on how I am going to spend my time and I try to make sure that I use every second. If I waste time doing something that I don’t really need to or could do faster and better, then I am missing out. Not being efficient means I could have done more, I want to make the most of my time and do that I have to make the most efficient use of it as I possible can. This also applies to my project, as there are resources that I must use efficiently. There is information in an Ebola database that has to be used in an efficient manner. In addition, we must be as efficient as we can with time– a resource that is very limited in Sierra Leone and must be used efficiently.
When I envision a project, I don’t make something that can’t be made for as long as it is needed. If I create something I want it to be something that doesn’t create more problems than it solves, something that doesn’t need to be limited in supply and use up resources and create a shortage that makes everyone’s life worse. This concept can be applied to this project by not using the resources from the Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016 that may not last too long. We should create a survey for the model that is not dependent on these resources for it to be used in the future.
I have learned many things from friends and professors that were completely alien concepts to me. When I first learned about quantum mechanics I was blown away. It was crazy to think that things would or would not happen based on probability and not through just the standard physical models. This concept opened my eyes to how much of what we learn is just models and approximations, which do not accurately predict many things in the universe.
Economics and how economists thought about the world was something I had not considered. The worth of things being dictated by the specifications of how it was made and how much people want it was totally new to me, I had only considered how valuable things were by how much they seemed to be, the fact that that value wasn’t decided by some immutable property but by people was inspiring to me.
I had an argument recently and it seemed that we could get nowhere. When I brought this up to my friends, they said that, for most people, the truth wasn’t what was actually true, but what people could be convinced was true. In fact, telling people certain facts repeatedly makes them more likely to believe them. In classical sciences, things are simply true or false. It was completely alien for me to think of the truth as a reflection of someone’s perspective and experiences, and not as empirical fact.