Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Botanicalls

Ok, so this is not exactly what I was thinking about when I urged using technology to connect with nature but, you know, it's the right world view somehow.  Simple devices like Arduino boards put ubiquitous computing within the hands of anyone with a soldering iron and a little bit of easily acquired know-how.  I've got most of this stuff kicking around in the broom closet I call a home office (it's ok, I know I'm not a regular guy).  I may give this a try.

digital biophilia

The healthy discussion of our changing connection with nature continues in the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (full article behind a paywall but summary is free).  As I mentioned in a previous post, one concern is that any efforts to convince an increasingly urbanized population to consider themselves a part of a larger ecosystem is being hamstrung by our love affair with the artificial visual life that is presented by technology.  One British study showed that children were better at identifying Pokemon characters than they were at identifying animals like beetles and rabbits.  To solve problems like ensuring adequate water and food supplies to city dwellers, one solution is the economic one -- have people pay the full ecological cost of what they consume, rather than the deeply discounted current rate which relies on a heavy mortgage on our children's future which they will not be able to repay.  Though I worry about how the masses of marginalized people clinging to lifelines in our cities could be helped to survive under such a system (I fear that maybe they couldn't be), I am in favour of moving towards this kind of full cost recovery.

But in the longer term, the problem is not just one of shifting dollars around to change our patterns of consumption.  We also need to find a way back to a connection with nature that our ancient ancestors had, but at the same time from the perspective of a digitalized, urban culture.  Is such a thing remotely possible?  Without wanting to sound like a skipping Blu-Ray disc, the answer may lie in our finding ways to tap into our love of technology, the easy glimpse, the immersive view to help with that reconnection.

Today there's a story about the launching of a new initiative , an online encyclopedia that will catalogue all of the world's plant and animal species.  When the 30,000 page Encyclopedia of Life launched yesterday, the response was so strong that the server crashed (11.5 million hits in 5.5 hours).  You can try to link from here, but it's still not up and running again as I write these words.  This kind of visceral response to a simple offering of text and pictures of the natural world suggests to me that the desire for connections with the biosphere still runs deep and strong, even among those sitting passively in front of screens.  This is surely something to build on.  Let's find ways to use our love of tech-toys to remind us of who we are.  Let's use our massive computing resources to weld together the ancient circuits that cause us to seek out nature wherever we find it with the very modern and urgent need to respect our rightful relationship with the planet.

climate games

There's a really interesting study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which describes the outcome of an experiment designed to explore human behaviour and climate change.  Groups of six students were given a budget (40 euros) and they were told that on each "turn" of the game, they had to make a donation to a climate fund of either 0, 2 or 4 euros.  After 10 turns, if there was less than 120 euros in the kitty, then the students ran the risk of losing everything.  The size of that risk was also a variable.  Some student groups were told the probability of losing all if they did not reach the target was 90%.  Others were told either 50 or 10%.  So if you think about the numbers, what ensures that the climate fund is sufficient is if each player contributes 2 euros on each turn.  The math isn't hard (2 euros x 10 turns x 6 players).

So what do you think happened? 

When told the risk was 90%, students reached target about half the time.  On many turns, they just missed.  This means that some players, like the current US and Canadian governments, were not doing their share, perhaps hoping that others (France and Sweden?) would carry a larger than average share of the burden. 

When told the risk was 50% or 10%, hardly any worlds were saved, but the logic of the game was such that it actually didn't make sense for anyone to contribute anything.  On average, one stands to hang onto more euros by contributing nothing.

What does this tell us about combating climate change?

The main thing is that it suggests that our chances of surviving a climate change crisis depend very much on behaviour.  People need to be convinced that the risk of calamity is very high, or they won't act.  Other findings in these kinds of evolutionary games suggest that people are also more likely to pull their weight if they see that others are doing so as well.  Environmental champions who live lightly on the land should be singled out and lauded.  Freeloaders should similarly be brought to the attention of a larger audience.  One commentator (extract here but full comment behind a paywall) on the study suggested that gas guzzling cars could perhaps be equipped with mandatory warning stickers like those found on cigarette packs.

Interestingly, students were shown how much money went into the pot on each turn, so they knew how things were proceeding and this would also likely affect their choices.

In addition to the telling results from this study, I see it having potential for an instructive game for those interested in climate change to play with families, community groups, classrooms full of students at all levels.  This his how things play out with six individuals.  How about six billion?

Our future rests on our ability to understand behaviour.  We can't wait for technology, as if reaching down like the hand of God, to rescue us.

How animals think

There's a great article by Virginia Morell in this month's online National Geographic.  The article provides a good summary of many of the most interesting and exciting developments in our understanding of animal minds.  There are a few things I could quibble with (such as the idea that we've gotten over thinking of animals as machines--I think that in a way we're all machines and there isn't too much that's wrong with that) but what's certainly true is that in the past few years we've seen some of the last bastions of the perceived great divide between people and other animals gradually give way.  Animals can learn to understand certain parts of speech, if not utter them. Animals can lie and cheat, just like us.  It may even be true that dolphins can carry out complicated types of imitation.  They can watch a human being on a television carry out certain kinds of movements and in turn make movements that look as though they're trying to play "Simon Says".  Think about what this means.  Translating an observed set of bodily movements in another individual into movements of one's own body is complicated enough when those bodies are the same (and I should know -- I once tried ballroom dancing lessons and my instructor probably still has the scars to prove it).  Imagine translating among ill-matching body parts like legs, tails, and dorsal fins.

It did interest me that an old teacher of mine, Sarah Shettleworth, was the sole contrarian quoted in the piece.  Shettleworth, with some merit I think, argues that animals are frozen in time with no real notion of past, present, and future.  In the same way, I think that animals are glued to place.  It isn't that they can't move so much as that they spend their lives, every moment of them, in the moment, connected to a particular position on the planet.  This lock-grip on one place means they're attached to all places in a way that we aren't.  Our slippery travels through space and time are both freeing and disorienting.  However it happened, when we let go of the ground, like Icarus soaring into the sky, we won a great battle but put the outcome of the war in the balance.  Getting back down to Earth will require us to come to grips with this wonderful quirk of our own psychology.

Playing chicken with our future

This story would have escaped my radar completely if not for some intervention from my good friend Brooke Oland. The story describes the thwarted efforts of an urban farmer in Halifax to have a few chickens in her backyard to supply eggs to her family and some of her neighbours.  One of those neighbours complained that her chickens were attracting rats, so the city was forced to impose an existing bylaw on her and her chickens have been sent not just across the road but down the coast to Bridgewater.  Now the rats have the place to themselves again, thanks to the handy food sources provided by the neighbours.  But there are no more eggs.

Brooke and his wife Kate are remarkable people.  They've made a conscious and deliberate decision to, as much as possible, look after themselves and their children in an incredibly beautiful setting on Cape Breton Island.  They grow their own food, generate some of their own power, and their eventual goal is to go completely off-grid as part of a community of self-sufficient farmers and homesteaders.  Kate and Brooke are educated, vibrant, passionate and tireless global citizens (not to mention parents of three lovely young children) who are vitally concerned about many of the issues that concern me.  I'm writing about them.  They're living them in their bones.  When I say it's possible for people to live in a way that reminds them that they are a part of an ecosystem rather than something outside of it, on the other side of an imaginary glass wall, people like the Oland family stand as living proof that such a thing is possible.

Now Brooke is writing too.  Here's what he had to say about the Haligonian Chicken Affair:

"Re: A complaint by Reg Harper a resident who does not want chickens near his neighborhood.

Please don’t blame Mr. Harper for his attitude about chickens in the city. Most of us, like him, don’t really understand how our food arrives at our tables these days, and at what cost. It is becoming much more obvious that the colossal chemistry experiment we call “Modern Agriculture” isn’t really working very well. It has left farming communities desolate, while concentrating the control of much of our food supply and quality into the hands of a few corporations, which don’t necessarily have the interests of the average “you and me” at the heart of their operating principles.

 What most of us don’t understand is that an industrial approach to growing and distributing food is a very energy intensive process. This energy is required for a range of things depending on what is being grown. We use huge amounts of energy, primarily in the form of fossil fuels, to manufacture and apply fertilizers and pesticides; process, inspect, package, transport and refrigerate; and then finally in driving to and from the stores to buy our food. At its core, agriculture is essentially a way of converting solar energy into a form of energy we can directly utilize. We harness the power of the sun interacting with a soil ecosystem, which has been manipulated by planting etc. to result in something growing that we are able to eat, or in other words, gain energy from. Modern agriculture has vastly improved the yields we get from the land, but when we apply that extra energy to increase yields, we release orders of magnitude more carbon dioxide than is fixed in the processes of growing the food, and always create further external problems such as air, soil and water contamination, soil degradation and loss of biodiversity.

 More sustainable methods of farming like true organic or Permaculture approaches attempt to reduce the ecological impact of agricultural systems. Producing more food locally and using less energy intensive methods helps to reduce damage done to the ecosystem of which we are a part and which keeps us alive. With all of our science and modern understanding, nobody has come up with a way to keep us alive without a healthy and functioning ecosystem. We seem to have lost touch with the fact that we ARE part of the living land. Surely we are starting to see that our well intended meddling is a self limiting process.

 I guess we should also keep in mind that we take a great deal for granted when we think that the system we have in place is completely sound and will always continue to provide us with a steady supply of what we need at prices we can afford. I can almost guarantee that as energy costs increase, many of us will not have the luxury of making the kinds of choices we have made in the past. We are already starting to feel the effects of those increases as we hear stories of people having to make choices between heating and eating. I have personally seen places where, if Mr. Harper were living, he might consider himself fortunate to live next door to someone with a few hens; and perhaps even be happy to see the occasional large rat too, if you know what I mean. And sometimes it doesn’t take long to go from a seemingly sound society to a situation where getting a bit of food becomes THE concern.

 It’s possible that the rats (if any) that Mr. Harper sees are attracted by the organic kitchen wastes in garbage from people perhaps not dealing with it carefully enough. A city generates a lot of garbage, and not everyone may be as careful as Mr. Harper about sorting the recyclables and the compost.

 I can’t believe more people don’t keep chickens and grow gardens. We don’t seem to have much problem allowing budgies or parrots to be kept, or to put out lots of grain and seed for wild birds. Chickens are quite nice to have around and can help by converting some of our kitchen scraps into eggs. They’re great for cleaning up on earwigs and slugs. We let a few roam the gardens.  As an operator of a small subsistence farm in the Cape Breton hills (the kind from which my mother, father  and ancestors as far as can be traced once made their livings), I am heartened to hear of  people taking steps to become more involved in and more knowledgeable about their food. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect the Mr. Harpers of our world to understand the complexities of agricultural ecosystems, sustainable communities or thermodynamics; but perhaps we could ask them to not stand in the way of those who would take steps, however small, to try and turn the mess we have created for ourselves around.

 A concern I have, is that there are probably too many “Mr. Harpers” in government who stand in the way of making the changes we must make."

Data on the street

I've just discovered an interesting site engineered by Dan Hill, on the topics of architecture, planning, design, cities, and technology -- nice overlap with my own interests.  I'm not quite sure what Hill does for a living, but whatever it is leaves him time to write long and fascinating posts on design.  The most recent, pointed out to me by another excellent source of news and insight on urban space called Space and Culture (and this one Canadian to boot), was a long discussion of the presence, use, and future of the avalanche of digital information that resides on a city street.  From the clouds of signals emanating from wireless points, to GPS, cellphone, traffic cameras and other kinds of sensors and recording devices, our city streets are spilling over with bits.  Hill raises many questions about how such information can and should be used -- the possibilities for exerting social control, the potential for enhancing our experience of place by embedding our own peregrinations in a richer context that shows us where we are, who else is here with us, what has happened here in the past and what can happen in the future.  Hill's main point seems to be that planners should know and think about such issues and how they have an impact on how an urban space could work.

I see connections to my own arguments that such technologies, by sculpting our spatial relationship to the wider world beyond the purview of our senses, can change the way we feel about ourselves and our connections to the world.

Lonely long distance hearts?

For Valentine's Day, my wife and I are trying to think of subversive ways to celebrate the festivities.  I suggested we exchange hand-made cards in the shape of an organ other than the heart.  The brain would be an obvious choice for me, but I'm thinking perhaps liver--the organ that gets the lion's share of abuse in cases of unrequited love, no doubt.  I just spoke to a student, something of a social activist, who has organized a viewing of the film Blood Diamond to celebrate the day.  Good one.

I've also been reflecting a bit on love and distance (of course).  The possibilities for instantaneous love over infinite distance are like never before.  We're sending well over a billion SMS messages a day.  Some of them filled with words of love (more, probably, with lust--love's disheveled and grinning little cousin).  Social psychologists get to have all of the fun here.  They've done the studies showing that those of us in long distance relationships tend to be somewhat happier with their relationship than those who are up close.  Also, that when long-distance lovers find a way to close the gap, more often than not the love affair ends quickly.  Also, men and women who are in relationships have different levels of sex hormones to men and women who aren't.  But for men, it doesn't make a difference whether our relationship is long-distance or not.  For women, it does.  Being from Mars, I've no idea what this means, and not enough time to find out today.

What shape is a liver, anyway?

Virtual realty

Here's a nice CBC article on the use of Second Life to market real estate.  The writer, Luigi Benetton, hits some of the high points in terms of the limitations of the presentation of virtual reality simulations of real estate space to potential buyers.  The images can be grainy, the technology can be off-putting and unreal to some.  Whether these kinds of presentations are any more compelling than those dizzying little quicktime movies that realtors embed in their websites, or even nice glossy photographs, is as yet unclear.

The future promises more compelling experiences, though.  In my lab, we've built extraordinarily detailed virtual models of different types of house interiors, and users can wander them in immersive headsets producing convincing enough experiences that users reach out to touch imaginary furniture.  Connected to monitoring equipment, we can not only see where they go in virtual space and listen to what they say, but we can measure their stress levels and heart rates.  I think the real promise of this is not so much finding better ways to sell real estate as in the future of design.  How can the design of buildings enhance feeling, happiness, comfort?   How can our built settings be used to tune our personalities and bring out the best in each of us?  To me, this is much more exciting than a ride in a virtual helicopter.

Bill Gates, technology, society and the enigma of content

I'm excited that Bill Gates is visiting Waterloo again on what promises to be his farewell tour in his Microsoft persona.  Details are sparse, but the topic of his presentation is said to be "technology and society."  I haven't always been a fan of everything that Microsoft has done (those who know me well might guffaw at my gift for understatement) but I'm pleased to see Gates turn more of his attention to broader issues in technology.  Though I think the odds are slim that I'll find a way into the small hall for a talk geared to students (and wisely so -- these are the bright kids who hold the future in their hands), the possibilities, given the topic, excite me.

I've been a part of many discussions recently which have all come to the more or less the same conclusion.  We've become a society that is expert at designing and deploying technology--gigantic screens, virtual reality, dirt cheap information processing, light speed communication of huge amounts of image and sound data.  We know how to do it in a big way, but we're still trying to figure out what to do with it.  We have the toys.  Now we need the content.

Plenty of money has been made by those with the know-how to use computer technology, but I see a future where our main concern will not be to find a way to grow economies and make lots of bucks.  We'll be busy trying to find a way to turn what our super-intelligence has wrought into a viable future for the species and the planet.  This will entail some hard thinking about exactly what we are as a species, what forms our minds take, and how we can tap into our biologies with new technologies to make the world a place again.

I've written here before about how technology might be used to help our minds connect fragmented spaces, to help us see how we're connected to the wider effects of our actions, and I'm hoping that what Gates will have to say will light some similar sparks in a room full of very smart 20-something students.

What we need out of technology is a new set of tools for rethinking ourselves as an integral part of a planet we need to protect, rather than as some kind of boxed-off Wunderkind outlier set apart from the rest of the cosmos.  I think the kind of information technology that Gates has helped to build can do exactly that.  The way is now being led by creative new media artists like David Rokeby and Scott Snibbe, but what could lie ahead is an environment populated by permanent interactive architecture that responds to our actions, thoughts, and moods by reminding us of where we fit in the bigger picture.

I may not be able to get my body into the room for Gates' talk, but thanks again to technology, I'll be sure to get my head into his space.

Argentina's Guarani disconnect

I'm not quite sure what to make of this story yet.  I spend a lot of time arguing that the best way to build a better planet is to bring everything we have to the table--technology, urban planning, architecture, education and entertainment--in an all-out effort to help us make village style connections across a globe-sized space.  My reasoning is that we have minds that are predisposed to separate our own little spheres of life from the rest of the planet, even though we live now, more than ever before, with gigantic geographic footprints that are quickly rendering the very idea of place as an archaic and almost meaningless notion.

And then along comes an activist village chief, Silvino Moreyra, desperate to turn around the lives of a group of indigenous Argentinians whose life histories tell a story that is all too familiar to a Canadian -- a spiral of depression, substance abuse, suicide.  Moreyra declares a 60 day quarantine, effectively cutting off the Guarani from the rest of the world.  The quarantine is so popular that the Guarani vote to extend it for another 60 days.  All signs suggest that they will want to make the isolation permanent.  At present, the barricade between the Guarani village and the rest of the world is a bit artificial -- Argentinian social services deliver food to sustain the community.  But if Moreyra has his way, this will be a temporary measure.  His aim is isolation, independence, and self-sustainability. 

Other villages are paying attention and considering similar measures.  What I like about it is that, in a case such as this one, the villagers are being encouraged to pay attention to each other, to their own precious piece of real estate and to how their own plot of the planet can be coaxed to give them life.  But what bothers me is that the wider world continues around them.  The air heats up, the fresh water dwindles, biodiversity collapses.  Erecting walls might serve as an effective stopgap solution in a case like this, but it's hard to see it as a promising general approach.  I hope things go well for the Guarani, but I think the rest of us will have to think of something different.