Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Where we want to be

While I've been trying to charge the jets over this long restful Canada Day weekend, I've been struggling a bit with something.  The news continues to be filled with the skyrocketing cost of oil and speculations about the reasons for this (and in spite of all the eternal optimists who think that mostly what is behind the current spike is the busy work of speculators, I really do think we're seeing big instabilities emerge because supply is straining to keep pace with demand.  If there was plenty of oil, the market wouldn't twitch every time Iran released a news report or a new hurricane was forecast). 

While we're all worrying about oil prices and what they will mean to our immediate future, much of the discussion has centered on transportation.  In the short term, flying will become a more expensive and less available option for all of us.

Which leads me to the obvious question: why fly?  I haven't managed to collect all of the data I'd like to have on this (I am trying to enjoy a sort of holiday after all), but it seems that most air flight is of the passenger kind.  We're expending lots of dough, burning lots of fuel, and polluting lots of air -- to what end?  It's all about getting our bodies from one place to another, and nothing more than that.  What's a little strange about this is that we have more technology at our disposal than at any time in our history to obviate the need to be there bodily.  Telephone, messaging, email, social networking, wikis, collaborative internet-based applications of all kinds make it possible for us to "be" anywhere at any time.  A few strokes on my keyboard or phone and I can catch up with my brother in Singapore or a friend in Vancouver without rising from my chair. 

The objection most people raise to the idea of replacing  costly travel with cheaper electronic forms of displacement is that, for some things, it's just not the same as "being there."  To close a huge business deal, we need face time.  To commit to the purchase of an expensive piece of equipment, we aren't happy reading spec sheets or looking at photos.  We want to see the thing, run our hands over its surfaces, talk to the people who made it.

But as the extended costs of transportation ratchet steadily upward, we might want to re-think this.  What exactly does it mean to be there.  What kinds of things contribute to that ephemeral sense of presence, and are there ways that we can use technology to duplicate it?  I think that there are.  Visiting a friend last night, he pulled out an old stereoscope to show me (and I think to taunt me a bit as well).  We looked at a grainy old sepia print of some soldiers in the Boer war, and then slid the print into the stereoscope.  My friend told me that the stereo image made him feel more as though he was "there" suggesting that there are measurable degrees of the feeling of "being there."

A couple of weeks ago, I led a realtor friend of mine through a remarkable immersive simulation of a Frank Lloyd Wright home that we've built in our laboratory.  In the simulation, we use a few computer tricks and a very expensive helmet display to present virtual spaces of one kind or another.  When she walked into a simulated sunlit bedroom, she told me that she could feel the warmth of the sun on her arm, as if she were actually "there".  Last week, an architect who has spent much of his life working on 3d visualizations of buildings told me much the same thing.  He was "there". 

All of this suggests to me that the appropriate tools are now available to generate that feeling of "being there", a true telepresence.  Will this feeling alone be enough to lessen the need for transport of the body?  Right now, I suspect not.  What will also be needed is a new way of thinking about what it means to have a body that is not only in one particular place, but extends across the globe (and beyond) using a meshwork of electronic tentacles.  We need some new definitions of what it means that where I actually am is defined more by the location of my awareness and attention than it is by the position of my bum in a chair or my feet on the ground. 

We human beings are built in a strange and wondrous fashion to have this ability to throw awareness from one place to another at our every whim.  It causes us some headaches, but it has also allowed us to build an extraordinary and new type of civilization.  Moving into a viable and sustainable future means harnessing technology that takes advantage of our neural penchants for telepresence.

Sensing the city

I wrote recently about the interesting new findings, reported in Nature, in which movement patterns of large numbers of urban dwellers were logged using GPS enabled cell phones.  These findings, modest in some ways compared to what's coming, represent the thin edge of the wedge as we try to find ways to make use of the masses of location-based data that will soon come online.

Now, a New York based startup  named Sense Networks is one of the first to jump into an area that could not only provide useful information for commercial ventures, but, if it was widely adopted, could revolutionize the ways we make decisions about where to go.  Sense Networks has just launched a free service called CitySense, designed for Blackberry and iPhone users which can give an online display of where the action is in a city (at the moment, just San Francisco, but soon other major cities in the US).  Beyond the undeniable coolness of a multicoloured display showing where everybody is, CitySense can also learn the preferences of the user, so the display will only show hotspots filtered according to the observer's personal definitions of "heat". 

I like all kinds of things about this.  Perhaps most of all, the fact that this kind of mind candy will help sensitize users to the warp and woof of social space.  The red hot areas (and the cold black ones) will be telling us something tangible about what's going on, and they will invite us to think about why.  As a researcher, I'm all over the idea of getting access to this kind of information.  What I want to do is to understand how to design spaces in accord with individual psychologies and collective consciousness so that they work well.  For my purposes, this is the killer app.

I can also see how a tool like this might change the game for those trying to understand and model the decision-making of large collections of beings (in this case, human ones).  In the field generally referred to as complex adaptive system research, one of the modal systems is one in which a large collection of actors are trying to decide where to go based on predictions about where everyone else will be.  In his nice readable book on the subject, "Two's Company, Three is Compexity" Neil Johnson invites us to imagine that we're trying to decide whether to go to a popular bar on a Friday night.  We might or might not be able to get through the door, depending on what everyone else decides.  In the classic case, we make predictions based on past experience.  But what if we didn't have to guess?  The game changes in all kinds of interesting ways.

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Sometimes I feel as though I'm trying as hard as I can to do my part.  I power my house with green energy.  My children understand the three R's.  I have an air conditioner but I don't use it.  I walk or bike whenever I can make it work.  Other days, those little measures seem woefully, laughably inadequate.  And maybe they are  There are days when I read the latest media report of a large group of politicians who are agreeing to sit down two or three years from now to try to agree on a goal for the next two or three years when I despair a bit. 

Like too many others, I think that I cover up my growing anxiety for how my kids are going to cope with the legacy we've left for them with some cool, ironic posturing, some jokey sneering about short-sighted policy makers and the incredible inertia of a population that by now is very well-informed but still remarkably slow to act considering that so many signs suggest that we're perched on the edge of an abyss from which there will be no return.

There's a chapter or two in my book where I address what I think are some of the reasons for our ability to deny what is obvious.  I even make some modest suggestions for some measures that I think might help.  But I always somehow come back to the trusting look in my toddler son's eyes as I put him to bed with the reassurance that in the morning when he wakes up things will be the same as they were the day before and I'll be able to look after him and keep the world safe for him.  I think about my bright-eyed daughter, just become a teenager, smart as a whip, filled with fire and energy, and I wonder how she'll have to live when she's my age, or if she'll even want to.  I think about everything we've accomplished in a span of time that amounts to a tiny blink of an eye, and I want the legacy of the miraculous dawning of human self-consciousness to be something more than a scorched and ruined planet.

We need many things, but perhaps one of them is a single, simple, loud message that everyone can understand and support.  Perhaps we need a number that we can stand behind, believe in, and use as a call to action.

Understanding Manhattan

I'll admit it.  In spite of my deep love of nature, an appreciation for the influence of green thickets of mathematically fascinating foliage, and a love of the sound of birdsong on a summer morning, one of my favourite places on the planet is New York City. 

What's worse is that it isn't just the frenzy of activity, the opportunities to shop, eat, listen and talk that attracts me.  It's the very look of the place.  I love walking across intersections and sighting down long, perfectly straight chasms bordered by skyscrapers.  I like the clean angles and perfect geometry of the place.  I even like the grid of streets.  The problem here is that much that I've learned about how space works suggests that I shouldn't really like such things.

Let's begin with the chasms.  Decades of research in environmental psychology suggests that what I really want in a route is mystery.  I want an opportunity for walking that winds me in by keeping some details back.  Think of the winding pathway in a John Constable landscape.  That's what I'm supposed to like.

And the grid.  In the language of space, we describe grids as being 'spatially unintelligible' because without the signs at street corners there is no way for us to know where we are.  Even with the signs we can become disoriented if we don't remember our compass bearings.  Yet when I walked out of our hotel this weekend with my 13 year old daughter I gave her a one minute briefing on the grid and then told her "it's simple.  You can't get lost."  And in a way, that's true.  As a stranger to the city, you may never really know where you are, but you're never lost because an absurdly simple little rule of street numbering can set you right in an instant.

Perhaps that's all there is to it.  New York, like few other urban megalopoli (think of London, for example), has a spatial design that is so simple that we can surrender ourselves to it.  Like individual facets of a marvelous crystal, we can enjoy each tiny sparkle or we can zoom out to take in the whole teeming enormity of the thing.  Every city block is the same, yet every one is entirely different.

I don't understand everything this city is trying to tell me yet, but I'm happy to put in the time to learn the lessons.

The place of food

I've just come back from a few days in the wilderness with my son, Captain Oreo, to many news accounts of flood devastation in the US Midwest, especially Iowa.  Most of the mainstream news accounts seem to have been focusing on the devastation of homes in Cedar Rapids and the (fortunately very low) losses of human lives.  It's completely human that our attention would be gripped by the images of submerged houses and cityscapes.  As most of us live in urban settings, we can identify most strongly with families who have lost everything in the rising waters.  But the sleeper story, which is now slowly but surely rising to awareness, is the impact on US agriculture.  These floods have also laid to ruin millions of acres of planted fields.  We'll all feel the effects of this rain in the fall but by then it will be so much more difficult, because of the distorting lens of space and the quiet passage of months, for us to put together cause and effect. 

I just went out to my yard to check on our seedlings -- a small patch of spinach and kale in a postage stamp urban yard.  They're doing just fine so far.  I'll take the Captain out there tonight for a little survey.  It may not seem like much, but I'll do whatever I can do to help him understand that his dinner doesn't really come from the supermarket.

A larger perimeter

I think it's great news that Mike Lazaridis is giving another 50 million dollars to Waterloo's Perimeter Institute.  This comes on the heels of the announcement of the new director, Neil Turock, a close friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking, meaning that the PI may be able to lure the grand old man of theoretical physics to my neighbourhood for a few months of the year.  I'll save a spot on my porch.

I'm not qualified to comment on the success of the physics that gets done at the PI, but I never cease to marvel over their incredibly successful public outreach program.  The lectures, held once a month, are free but require an online ticket "purchase".  If you miss out on sending your request on the day that sales open, you can almost always expect to be placed on a waiting list.  There is a new hotel in the works for Waterloo, and one of the arguments for it is that we need a place for out of town visitors to stay after the talks.  These are for -- did I mention? -- theoretical physics talks.  I usually attend these talks with a group of men from the neighbourhood.  We have a club that parallels our wives' book club with only two rules:  we don't talk about books (though we do all read....harumph!) and we do drink beer.  Ah, a night out with the boys talking about quantum computing and cosmology over a pint or two at the local.

Linked to the article about about the PI is an interview with Lazaridis describing the history of RIM and his thoughts about the future of the smartphone.  I remember, when I first came to the University of Waterloo, seeing posters plastered all over my building advertising a cocky startup venture called "Research in Motion" that was all about mobile computing.  For some reason, it conjured an image of someone wired up with a backpack laptop, cybernetic camera glasses, and wires poking out of the top of his head.  "It'll never catch on," I thought, in a lapse of judgment every bit as big as that of acquaintances of mine who were asked to make an initial investment with an upstart couple of guys who had an idea for a game called "Trivial Pursuit."

Most interesting about the article is the way Lazaridis describes his early vision of the Blackberry as a device that would free us from the office and so allow us to spend more time with our families.  I'm not sure everyone feels that's what has happened.  I don't use a Blackberry, but I do carry something quite similar around on my hip and I do sneak peeks at my email during playtime.  When I first bought it, the argument I made to my wife was that this was preferable to my stealing down the stairs to the basement computer whenever I needed to make contact with the outside world, but it isn't clear to me that this is what has happened.  I think I just spend more time online.  My awareness is more often distributed across my contact list rather than being focused on the place where I am.  How do we cope with technology that keeps us from ever settling completely into one geographic location?  More to the point, perhaps, why do we like it so much?  What mental switch turns a Blackberry into a Crackberry?

When it comes to space, we can be a bit pedestrian

A new study published in Nature by the Centre for Complex Network Research in Boston took advantage of the locational information that is available through our cell phones to track human movement.  On a large scale, this is one of the most successful attempts that I know of to understand how groups of people move through a city.  Some of the potential benefits of such understanding are clear. The more we know about behaviour in cities, the better we can design them.  Calculating the general rules that underly our movement can help us to understand how catastrophic diseases might spread through cities and what could be done to slow the process.

The main outcome of this study suggests that it may be fairly simple to model our movements through cities because we're, well, fairly boring creatures when it comes to movement and space.  On average, city dwellers don't go very far in the course of a day and they tend to go back to the same few places over and over again.  This is, perhaps, not rocket science.  Other than transient events like vacations and business trips, most of us travel in endless simple routes -- home, office, supermarket, cinema, etc.  Few of us leap out of our chairs to go off on long spontaneous psychogeographic wanderings to stretch our spatial abilities.  More's the pity.

I can't help wondering how  such patterns might have changed over time and how they might vary in different types of living arrangements. Modern patterns of living have made everything available everywhere and so discouraged us from moving very far at all.  As a result, we've become physically frail, overweight creatures without much of a sense of where we are or what's out there.