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November 23, 2007
Simulations Greetings, This Holiday Season
I'm a little thankfulness-ed out. So, let's take a break and look at what's going on in the world.
I like simulations, I like alien invasions, and I like thought-experiments. I also like thinking and talking about teaching and about pedagogy.
Which would make one think that I'd really, really dig Robert Farley's "Independence Day" infrastructure simulation project.
(When the movie came out, The Spouse and I were living in Washington D.C. Every time the preview hit this moment, the audience cheered. Every single time.)
Please click the link and read Farley's post. It's a fascinating idea.
So, to sum up (for those of you who refuse, even when I ask nicely, to click through and read the post), Farley is asking his students in the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky to think through the logistical and political problems of rebuilding a functioning democratic state after a catastrophic event. In this case, he's using the alien invasion from the movie Independence Day as his template for the "catastrophic event." I'm okay with that.
But the premises that Farley and his class have worked out appear highly suspect to me. And to many of his commenters, it seems. As Farley explains, he and his students developed the premises for their simulation through "repeated viewings of Independence Day." From their premises list:
- "The actual targets of destruction would probably take into account commercial and military importance in addition to raw population."
- "We assumed that the attack took place on July 2, 2007, in order to ease various narrative problems. Of course, this means that the United States is deeply involved in Iraq during the attack; Baghdad almost certainly would have been destroyed by an alien ship."
- "The attack resulted in the destruction of the 30 largest American urban centers, assuming that a ship can destroy a city every three hours, that the aliens allocated 3 ships to North America, and that only three targets each in Mexico and Canada were destroyed."
Now, basing your thought experiment on a movie premise sounds rational and interesting to me.
Basing it on the movie's plot points is, at best, a missed opportunity.
Shouldn't a group of academics (and graduate students are, at the very least, academics in training) be able to come up with a "better" attack plan than the special-effects folks at ILM? Shouldn't that be part of the exercise? If students are to really think through the issues and problems surrounding infrastructure, shouldn't they be charged with developing a really smart attack plan that does as much tactical damage to that infrastructure as possible, and then to think through the problems of rebuilding from that?
After all, as we have learned from Iraq, shock and awe does not equal instant and complete victory. It may, however, equal a big box office take.
I understand this this is not the "big" simulation project for the students, which happens in the spring. However, the premise seems to have enough potential to warrant an expansion of the project to really take advantage of all of the opportunities here. It may, even, lead to competition. I could imagine dividing the class into two groups: aliens and humans. The aliens' task is to develop an attack plan from which the humans would be unable to recoup (given reasonable constraints: aliens have x ships with y destructive capability which they can use for z time; humans have n time to rebuild to a functioning national, or possibly first world global democratic baseline). The constraints could come from the film or not. Either way, that's a project that's not only sexy, it's also maximally educational. And fun.
Posted by reparent at November 23, 2007 6:50 PM