Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Canada's new minister of science and technology?

Overheard conversation between my five year old son and his five year old sister on the drive home from pre-school today:

Boy:  "Did you know that the dinosaurs and Einstein lived at the same time?"

Girl: "Einstein?  Who's that?"

Boy: "He's that big turtle."

I learn new stuff every day.

Rats of Manhattan

This is a quirky idea, but one that has also occurred to me, and connects with the work of one of my graduate students:

 

The image comes from a report by David Eilam of Tel Aviv University in which he unleashed rats in different kinds of "urban plans".  The one on the left is a Manhattan grid and the one on the right, as he describes it, resembles the layout of an irregular city like New Orleans.  Eilam shows that rats in both cities do the same amount of walking, but the Manhattan rats cover more territory.  I'm not sure how seriously to take his argument that this kind of setup could be used by urban planners as a design tool, though some similar work in our lab is motivated by our desire to show that certain types of principles used in architecture and planning are so deeply rooted in our biology that one can show them in different kinds of animals (with key differences related to the lifestyle of the animal involved).

Now what Eilam needs to do is to build some nice little subways and LRTs to see how movement at a wide range of speeds influences the mix.  You think I'm kidding.  You should see my lab.

This is no vacation

Just in case regular readers might be concerned that I've gone on permanent vacation, some reassurance that just the opposite is happening.  This is my busiest time of year by far.  Not only are courses just getting underway, but many new research grants are in the works (of which more will you hear (says Yoda) when there is more to tell).  As if all of this weren't enough, I've been going through the copyedited version of my book,which is now closely approaching the stage where the words leave my hands for the last time.  Funny thing:  last night I was telling my wife that I was finding it hard to resonate to the thought expressed by other writers about their reluctance to let go of their "baby" and to send it out into the world.  In contrast, I told her, I was long past ready to relinquish this book and was having a momentary struggle thinking about mustering the enthusiasm to promote it.  An hour later, copy-edit inspection completed, I found it ridiculously hard to stuff into the envelope to say 'goodbye'.  The caprices of the human heart.  Even funnier was that as soon as the book had gone under cover, I began thinking about the next book.  Fickle heart.

Recursion in nature

I've spent a lot of time this summer looking for recursive patterns in nature.  These patterns, repeating but not quite repeating, bursting with shape and colour at different scales of space, are both incredibly attractive, interesting, but also soothing.  The word that keeps occurring to me is resonance.  There's something out there that plays a nice tune using some ancient brain circuits of mine as an instrument.
This kind of recursion can take place at a wide range of sizes, from little blossoms in the forest, to sweeping rays of light and contours of clouds encompassing half the sky.  This particular combination of colour and pattern in both the sky and the lake was difficult to tear my eyes away from.

Ferns are great places to find these recursive patterns.  If you click on the fern picture, you should be able to see a larger image--large enough to see how the patterns of the leaves repeat themselves at multiple scales.  Evidence is beginning to accumulate that looking at these types of repeating patterns has a remarkable effect on how we feel--even our breathing patterns and heart rate are affected.

Footloose

The wide availability of cheap and reliable sensors is going to have all kinds of effects on how we live our future lives.  I'm actually a big fan of using sensors either carried on one's person or embedded in the environment to change and hopefully to enhance our connectedness to the world.  I usually think of this in terms of providing a cybernetic assist to our fragile grasp on place -- using cheap computing power to remind us of where we are, where we're not, and how the two are connected.

This is something entirely different, but at least in the same realm.  These clever researchers have found a way to put cheap sensors and computing into shoes to help with balance problems, particularly with the elderly.  We're now seeing legions of baby boomers reach retirement age, but unlike some past generations, these people are not going to be content to toddle off to a condo in Boca.  They're healthy, educated, and vibrant with life, but still afflicted with some of the physical and cognitive declines that come with advancing years.  So the challenge is to find ways to help them adapt to the inevitable changes within, but to still live up to their full potential.

In my own small way, I'm beginning to engage with questions like this in my research life.  How does (and how should?) design, especially architectural design, adapt to a cohort of seniors who aren't ready for the rocker on the porch so much as the trek in Nepal?  I don't think we know nearly enough about how to do this well.

Bee-ographic profiling

There's an old saying about not messing in your own backyard, which apparently is a wise rule adopted by a wide range of critters from insects to serial killers.  In research about to hit e-print, Nigel Raine and Steve Le Comber, a pair of entomologists from Queen Mary, University of London have teamed up with a criminal profiler, Kim Rossmo, a former detective who was the first police officer in Canada to earn a PhD in criminology for a technique that he pioneered called "geographic profiling."  Rossmo, who is now at the Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation at Texas State University developed sophisticated computer programs that were designed to zero in on the home locations of violent criminals based on the locations of their crimes.  Rossmo has been outspoken in his discussion of many crime investigations, including that of William Pickton in British Columbia.

What's most fascinating about this recent research is that it points out the interesting linkages between patterns of foraging and hunting behaviours in animals ranging from bees to sharks and the patterns of criminal acts in people.  One simple rule is that serial killers are less likely to commit crimes in areas close to their homes.  The profiler then can search for "holes" in the distribution of murders.  Oddly enough, foraging bees show similar patterns in that they are less likely to forage at flowers that are close to their hive because this might lead predators to find their homes.  This finding, along with other predictors, can make it possible for scientists to zero in on the location of a hive by analyzing the pattern of visited flowers.  The value of such studies is that understanding foraging patterns can help with conservation efforts.  At the same time, the studies with animals can help to hone computer models designed to catch killers because some of the principles generalize across species.

I'm game for anything

I'm sure these brain-wave reading headsets will turn out to be a crude early version of what will be available in two or three years, but I'm nothing if not an early adopter,so I've just ordered one of the first of such devices to come to market.  The OCZ "neural impulse activator" -- a bit of a cheezy title for the product to be sure -- promises to allow me to find ways to manipulate my computer using my thoughts.  All this for a couple of hundred bucks -- how could I refuse?  I suspect that what's really happening here is a little self-training to control combinations of brow-furrowing and eye-popping, but cheap methods of measuring bio-signals have come along by leaps and bounds in recent years, so one never knows what little surprises might be in store for me.

Other than the joy of gaming, I've been thinking a lot about the role of a computer interface in mediating our connections with cyberspace.  In our lab, we think this is pretty important.  That's why, when we place people into virtual environments simulating big houses, we lug a big van load full of delicate gear from our lab space to a large gym -- so that rather than using a mouse or a joystick to move around a space, people can just walk naturally.

I don't know how far this OCZ device will take me -- I'm keeping my expectations on the low side -- but imagine being able to generate an immersive virtual environment and then being able to wander through it just by wanting to, but separating the intention from the action itself, or at least much of it.  Even if it begins to feel as though you're controlling your place with your thoughts, how is that going to affect your understanding of where you are?

And now back to my day job.  Wait!  This is my day job!

The future of reading

The chatter is increasing about the influence of new technologies on the basics of how we read and otherwise parse information.  This article, justifiably, is receiving a lot of attention.  The premise is that our exposure to Internet technologies, and the alternative methods they give us for gathering information, may actually be changing the structure of human cognition, giving us what Cory Doctorow called an "outboard brain."  Now, the New York Times is chiming in with an in-depth series on the future of reading beginning with an article written by Motoko Rich (free registration with NY Times required to read this) and published this past weekend.

There are many important issues to be worked out here, and the articles linked above serve as a pretty good primer for some of them.  As an educator and a scholar, I find much to like in the recent exponential rise in the availability of good quality information in digital form.  In some ways, my job has become much easier.   In the past few years, the direction of my research has undergone a radical shift -- I've had to try to imbibe entirely new areas of knowledge in a dizzyingly short period of time.  I know there are gaping holes in my knowledge base, but I also know how to fill them quickly and efficiently from my desktop (which can be anywhere ranging from my office at the university to my backyard Muskoka chair to (much to the disgust of my little son and boon companion in "bear country") a twinkling smart phone beside a campfire.  As the Times article points out, with the loss of the careful editorial control of content that happens in the chaotic Internet, we've learned to rely on the rules of swarm intelligence to assess the patency of what we read.  Wikipedia, for all of its warts and wrinkles, seems to me to be right more often than it is wrong.  When 10 different websites say much the same thing, one can be ever so slightly more confident that one is at least circling the neighbourhood of a "fact".

One of the main criticisms of the Internet Information Age has to do with its potential to erode our span of attention and this, to me, seems like a more serious concern.  I had a short e-chat with a textbook editor friend of mine last week about this, and she felt that it had become more difficult for her to immerse herself deeply in text.  I feel the same tug of resistance to this kind of immersion myself.  When I read a novel, I often do so with a notebook computer close at hand so that I can both write notes to myself and check facts or follow up on random ideas, as I read.  I can't remember the last time I became so immersed in a book that I lost track of space and time, yet I know this used to happen to me on a regular basis.

On the weekend, Karen and I visited the Stratford Festival to take in a production of Taming of the Shrew.  When we heard that the running time was just shy of three hours, we both blanched a bit, yet this is not the least bit unusual for a Shakespeare production.  Looking around the half-filled auditorium, it was hard not to notice that the demographic spectrum of the audience tilted toward the aged, in spite of the aggressive marketing of the festival designed to bring under-18s into the auditorium.  Is full scale live theatre also a victim of the electronic age?  As I sat through what turned out to be a pretty solid production of an interesting play, I found myself struggling to maintain attention at times.  This never used to happen to me.

The night after our theatre expedition, I sat in our large family room and looked around at all of us--together in the same room yet each in their own space.  Only my four year old son lay on the floor immersed in a book (well, an Archie comic still counts....).  The rest of us stared at screens.  I tried an experiment.  I pulled a copy of Oliver Twist from the shelf (significantly, purchased at least five years ago and yet unopened until Saturday) and began to read aloud.  Soon, I had a litter of children at my feet (Karen too), lying on the carpet each with one ear facing me.  After a couple of chapters, I stopped, fearing that everyone was asleep.  One little head popped up, and then another.  My teenaged daughter, Jessica, asked "Can we read more tomorrow, Dad?"  It might not happen--we might not get through the whole book any time soon--but it was great to think that it might be possible.

Vacation

It's been a very exciting week for me.  Not only did I catch the first glimpse of what will probably be the cover of my forthcoming book, but I had a chance to try my hand at making a video trailer for the book.  This was something entirely new for me.  I've been a reluctant feature in home movies, but I've never had to try to to project any kind of message using video images.  Like any beginner doing this, I learned all kinds of hard lessons about myself.  I talked too fast.  I dropped my volume at the end of sentences sometimes.  I don't swing my arms very much when I walk, which looks weird (my wife, at breakfast this morning, almost spewed her coffee in amusement at the idea that I hadn't really known this before this week).  What was most interesting, though, was having a chance to see myself from the outside.

Just after I earned my PhD, a dear friend of mine gave me a book:  The Personality Surgeon, by Colin Wilson.  I have no idea how she chose this particular book for me and didn't have a chance to ask her, but I've probably wondered more about this gift over the years than almost any other that I've ever received.  From my current perspective, it seems like a remarkable act of prescience.  The premise of the book is that a psychiatrist stumbles upon the idea that if we could only see ourselves as others see us, many personality problems would be solved.  This basic idea is spun off in classic Wilson style by the introduction of the idea that if we see ourselves as we're not, perhaps our personalities can be changed.

I'm not sure whether seeing my hulking presence on a screen will turn me into a new man (I suspect not), but Wilson's idea, and my own thoughts about embodiment, have a kind of resonance.  How much of what we are depends on having that third person point of view concealed from us?  And when we look on, as we do when we see video images of ourselves or avatars representing ourselves in virtual reality, how does that change who we are? 

Much of our understanding of ourselves must come from feedback from the outside world.  I know I've hurt your feelings when I see you cry.  I know I've pressed the elevator button when I see it light up.  Turning a mirror on ourselves using any number of different space-shifting technologies changes those feedback loops in all kinds of interesting ways.

I'm going on vacation for a few days -- going to take in some nature scenery at a campground.  I have an idea which book I'll take with me.

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.