Seppälä notes that creates a sort
of positive feedback loop where connected people feel cheerful and chatty and this cheerfulness helps them connect with yet more people.
This seems to be an important finding because social behavior in a course apparently seems to be highly correlated with commitment to completing a course since a sense of community through social interactions creates a kind
of positive feedback loop for the learners, as suggested in the study.
Another innovative idea that will make internet powered education even more effective will be to connect assessment with learning in order to allow the
creation of a positive feedback loop that will enable information to get back to the learner.
A few people send a link to friends, but soon the links become
part of a positive feedback loop, and before long big media news sites have noticed the file, and the initial cluster of visitors becomes a swarm.
«But it was important, because there are studies going back decades that assume this
kind of positive feedback loop: We grow, we expand our capacity to extract energy, and then we grow some more.»
Probably not a big contribution, but it would appear that they have a significant global affect — and feed into
some of the positive feedback loops which in turn increase their intensity and duration.
CO2 can act as both a primary driver, if humans burn fossil fuels to increase CO2 levels, and a secondary driver (part
of the positive feedback loop) if CO2 levels increase naturally as a result of other forcings which cause a warming and which, in turn, lead to increased CO2 levels.