School is well underway at this point. I had decided not to attempt to finish this ridiculous program in two years and resigned myself to taking one more semester next fall... but then i realized there's a summer semester, so maybe i can graduate a year from now. We'll see. I am no longer teaching the mediocre urban planners of tomorrow here at the University of Illinois. A professor who i pretty much told off at the end of last semester hired me to do research for him. The project is this giant computer program called Landuse Evaluation and Assesment Model (LEAM) which is designed to predict landuse outcomes in the future based on certain choices. It is used by government policymakers to help make complex landuse decisions. My part is to research "the value of ecological systems" so that we can inject this into the model. I'm trying to answer questions like how much is a standing old-growth forest
worth in terms of the services it provides to the economy free of charge? I hate this research it in that: 1. i hate computers, especially computers who can purportedly making decisions for human beings. 2. i hate pretending that nature can be stripped down to the economic value it provides to people. I love this research because 1. right now, the official value used for decisionmaking of a standing old growth forest is currently zero, and we're trying to change that. 2. policymakers in Chicago, St. Louis, and Peoria already use LEAM. If we add this stuff into it, they will probably still use LEAM. So... what i do will actually make a difference in the world. Yaaay!
How are you guys? How are the senior years and the transfer going? What is new and interesting over on the East Coast?
