Dana Meadows Award 2015 Announcement of Winners
Announcement Text by Tom Fiddaman, Member of the Dana Meadows Award Committee
The Dana Meadows Award is given for the best paper, by a student, presented at the Annual
Conference. The Award was first presented at the Atlanta Conference in 2001, to honor the life and
work of Dana Meadows. Dana pursued a long and brilliant career in education and research focused on
a systems approach to social and environmental issues. From her contributions to Limits to Growth to
her later writings in The Global Citizen, Dana was an inspiration to generations of students and
researchers in System Dynamics.
The Dana Meadows Award is instituted by the Society to bring recognition to the very best student work
and thereby, to inspire students to contribute to the growing body of theory and applications of System
Dynamics inspiration that Dana demonstrated throughout her career.
The Award is funded through an endowment established by the Society, initially by a generous donation
from Jane and Allen Boorstein to launch the Award in 2001, and by many subsequent donors whose
support the Society gratefully acknowledges. Currently, the winner receives a cash prize of $750 as well
as conference registration plus travel expenses (up to a combined maximum of $750).
The members of the selection committee this year were Florian Kapmeier, John Sterman, Krystyna
Stave, Ozge Pala, Tom Fiddaman, and Richard Dudley, with Joel Rahn presiding.
The DMA Committee receives manuscripts from across the wide spectrum of topics presented at the
Conference and seeks to recognize a representative sample of award-worthy papers (that also meet the
criterion of excellence). The mix of short-listed topics inevitably varies from year-to-year and a balanced
view of award-worthy work can best be seen in the history of winners, rather than in a snapshot of a
single-year.
Before announcing the winner let me offer some general comments for the benefit of the many
students gathered here. First, | encourage all of you to continue submitting good work. After an initial
screening, Committee members read and discuss your manuscripts carefully. In doing so we enjoy a
unique and valuable ‘window’ on current student research, the best of which is very good indeed.
We urge future applicants to consider one piece of advice: when you submit a paper, make sure you first
read the Award guidelines very carefully - and stick to the rules as you write your manuscript! Papers
that ignore the guidelines, by neglecting to provide a word count, for example, will be deemed ineligible
and are screened out of the short-listing process.
This year, the committee recognized two runners-up, which are coincidentally both well-crafted
behavioral experiments that address John Sterman’s challenge to identify ways to improve thinking
about accumulation.
Does Analytical Thinking Improve Understanding of Accumulation?, by Arash Baghaei-Lakeh and Navid
Ghaffarzadegan tested subjects on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, identifying several
interventions, including priming for analytical thinking, that condition performance on stock flow tasks.
Rethinking intuition of accumulation principles, by Chris Browne and Paul Compston explored a set of
rich social and multimedia tasks for improving thinking about accumulation in an earth system context.
The 2015 winner is Information Diffusion through Social Networks: the Case of an Online Petition, by
Mohammad Jalali, Oscar Herrera-Restrepo, Armin Ashouri Rad, and Hui Zhang.
This paper explores strategies that the creators of an online petition might use to drive it to success and
influence. The problem space is interesting, because it involves the kind of detail complexity that would
often drive a modeler toward an agent based approach, which might yield complementary insights, but
greatly complicate model analysis. Instead, through judicious simplifications, the authors develop an
aggregate model and compare it to a dataset from a real petition.
The analysis of the model is a technical tour de force. The authors calibrate the model to the data using
appropriate (Poisson) statistics, compare the goodness of fit to a simpler Bass diffusion model, and
explore information criteria for model selection as well as behavior and errors. Then they develop
confidence bounds on the parameters and use them to map the policy responses in the parameter
space of the model.
This is not merely an exercise in computation for its own sake; the deep analysis of the model yields
insights. It’s a good example of balanced process, in which deep understanding emerges from a
thorough analysis of a relatively simple model. It’s also a good example of documentation for
transparency; the authors provide the model, data and scripts needed to reproduce their work in their
supplemental material.
Bob Eberlein The Outstanding Service Award Delft, July 21, 2015
Several years ago we established The Outstanding Service Award - an award inspired by Julie Pugh, the
Society’s First Executive Director, who helped get the Society up and running. Julie's effort was entirely
volunteer work, and every time we give the award | feel we are also honoring her.
Luckily, there is no shortage of people deserving of recognition for their volunteer contributions to the Society.
We, as a committee, a Society and a really a community are incredibly lucky to have so many dedicated people
working so hard - at conferences - both here and abroad - for our publications - for Society governance - there
is just a tremendous amount of work that people do and it is truly wonderful that this is the way it is.
All of this combines to make serving on what Roberta calls her "Favorite Committee" a real pleasure. When we
choose to recognize an individual it comes as a total surprise to everybody, most especially the person (or
people) we are honoring. There is no cash award, no trip to an exotic destination, just the heartfelt thanks we
express to someone who, invariably, turns a little bit red by the time they get up here to accept the award.
Over the past years we have honored people like those standing around me - David Andersen, Peter Milling
and Andy Ford, individuals who have gone above and beyond reasonable effort and just kept going. These are
also individuals who have done outstanding work in the field of System Dynamics, and while this award is not
about that contribution, it is not surprising that the dedication crosses over.
This year we are honoring someone who, like Julie Pugh, was never at the forefront of research in our field,
but he has been at the forefront of something. Since 2000, this conference has become a bit more
memorable. Every year we have a fantastic number of great photographs, and if you go in and study those
photographs you might notice a pattern - there is one person who appears less frequently than others - one
person who is almost always on the other side of the lens.
Dean Christensen, please join us on the stage so we may express our thanks.
For many years, Dean has provided a creative and community-building service to the Society 0 at every
conference for the past seven years, and some before that, he has documented every aspect of the
conference from satchel stuffing to, the banquet to the closing ceremony. Beyond that, he has created a
photographic record of each local site. He has captured important moments at each conference as well as
some unguarded but priceless ones.
Because of his efforts there is a clear and colorful visual history of our conferences that will always be
available.
He has been our very own paparazzi, or at least a polite version thereof. Every year he makes the rounds at
the banquet to photograph the tables of participants enjoying themselves. Over the years he has captured
pictures of speakers, of participants networking with acquaintances old and new, of our sponsors, and of
special events like the Poster Symposia and Fireside Chats. He has taken pictures of previous award winners!
This photographic chronology of our conferences is invaluable. Thanks to Dean’s efforts the images that he has
created will allow us to relive some of our conference experiences time and again. His ‘focus’ and dedication
are truly appreciated.
For everyone else with a camera - please make sure you capture Dean receiving this award as we are not going
to let him do it himself.
