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The three questions I posed at the beginning of the semester were:

• Where can we find examples of emergent systems to study and learn from?
• What can we learn from these systems & their interactions with other systems & the environment? 
• How might this knowledge be incorporated with other knowledge and used to illuminate or eliminate real-world problems?

In many ways I would say my questions now are the same.  Since our discussions tended more toward discussing emergence as a concept rather than as a phenomenon, I don't feel like we really answered my questions, although our discussions and projects would certainly inform or facilitate future efforts to answer these questions.  We mostly worked on figuring out what exactly emergence is, which seems an obvious precursor to my questions, which assume a certain idea of emergence and then go looking for it and for applications for it.  As a practical-applications minded person, I think I overlooked this step in my initial questions, but I think that now we are much better prepared to explore these questions with some theoretical basics in hand.