Colin Ellard - You Are Here

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.

Taking my family into the heart of darkness

It's a funny thing to be blogging about, but I've pulled the Internet plug at my house.  As we decided to ditch television about five years ago (and have only ever been sorry during the Stanley Cup Playoffs), my house is now cut off from the outside world except via telephone (which nobody uses anymore it seems), print media, and word of mouth.

Initially, this was something I did not out of any deep reflection on the philosophical ramifications of cyberlife.  It's rather a long story, but it won't be unfamiliar to readers with kids.  On the weekend, most of my children lost their minds at more or less the same time for reasons that in one way or another could be connected to internet access.  My four year old son wanted access to his Club Penguin account.  My 12 year old daughter wanted to spend 8 hours per day on MSN messenger.    I'm not even sure what my other kids wanted to do as they'd drop the screen as soon as I was in the same room.  There was yelling, unhappiness, battles over cyber-time that erupted into yelling and shoving. In one case an adult child of mine descended into fits of kicking and throwing around her school books.   So  after watching this circus develop for a couple of days, I just got up and pulled out the router and I hid it.

Now, life at home is different.  For one thing, several of my children are no longer speaking to me.  There are other positive changes as well.  We're all reading a bit more.  We're spending more time outside the house.  We live in a lovely central neighbourhood that either accidentally or perhaps by ancient design stumbled upon all of the right planning principles to urge neighbours off the front porch and into each other's interesting lives.  We're getting out from behind our terminals and we're going to visit.  Suddenly, more than at any time in recent memory, we have a place. 

I know it won't last forever.  My wife is getting tired of not being able to pay her bills online.  Inevitably, my kids will bring home a school assignment that will require them to conduct what passes for "research" these days and it will need to be done far into the wee hours of the morning.  But right now what seems to be happening is that when my kids need the 'net, they go somewhere else to find it (school, a coffee shop with a wireless zone).  I get my cyberwork done at work rather than at home (sorry editors, but I swear I'm still making good progress on the book).  In the meantime, we're getting the weeds pulled in the yard, we're planning a little social gathering on the front lawn on Thursday night, and we're noticing what the weather is like outside and what phase the moon is in.

Don't tell my kids, but I've actually wondered about pulling the plug permanently.  What if internet portals weren't absolutely everywhere but existed as shared social resources in public spaces?

I know.  Crazy.

The Internet ate my brain

Unlike some of the people I know who share my intense concern about the future of our planet, I'm not particularly opposed to technology.  In fact, I've been known to raise the ire of an ecologist or two with my suggestion that we can actually use technology to understand why it is that contact with nature is so important to our health, well-being, and sanity.  I think we can.  In fact, I will be so bold as to say that in my laboratory, I think we have all the tools and brainpower we need to arrive at some preliminary answers to that question in the next few years.

In spite of my being soft on screens, microprocessors, and nice wide bandwidths of bits being pumped into my house and office at screaming speeds, I can't help sometimes thinking about the impact on my life, especially my working life, of having a big hose filled with information that is, literally, never out of my hand's reach at any time of the day or night.  Most of the time, I think this is a positive impact.  Because I know that any lapse in memory can be quickly patched up by a Google search, I can relax about what's in the knowledge bank and worry more about making the connections between things that I think constitute the real power of intelligence (on the other hand, I sometimes worry, especially late at night, that my mind is now IN the Internet or at least exists in some kind of bio-silicon hybrid form).

A bigger concern for me, though, is what's happening right now as I write these words.  I'm also, from time to time, peering over at another screen which displays my email.  Occasionally, I feel a small buzz at my hip which is a vibrating alert on my phone indicating that one or more of my children is reporting in on their whereabouts.  When I'm working on something dull, or something difficult, or one of those tasks for which I seem to have a daily threshold (I can only grade five papers per day -- after that my judgement wanders), I take frequent breaks to look around at other items on my screens.  My email program is set to harvest new messages at 20 minute intervals.  I can sometimes tell whether I'm utterly absorbed in a task when the full 20 minutes elapses and is not co-opted by a manual send/receive command shooting out of my finger.

In a way that never used to be true, my attention is distributed.  Though I can remember being so absorbed in a problem, a piece of computer programming, or a book to such an extent that I would look up and notice that it was 4 am and I hadn't eaten supper, I can now no longer remember the last time this happened.  Now there are just too many different inputs vying for my attention and it has become my normal mode of existence to shuffle my mind around from one thing to another on a fairly regular and frequent basis.  Some might say that I've evolved, but I'm pretty sure I've lost something as well.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be an examiner on a dissertation that included a clever set of studies on something called the "attentional bottleneck."  It can be very complicated, but the basic idea is that human attention is narrowly focused in a way that allows us to only actually attend to a small amount of information at one time.  The attentional bottleneck is why it is not a good idea to talk on a cellphone while driving, for example.  I remember commenting to the student that what I found most remarkable about this processing bottleneck was that everything we know about how brains work suggest that they're massive parallel processors -- they can do lots of things at the same time.  Given this, it seems strange that there is this fundamental limit on how much of these wondrous goings-on we can pay attention to -- very little it seems. 

Why does that bottleneck exist and what does it mean to us that we live in a rich informational environment that provides us with constant encouragement to try to widen it?  I think that without the bottleneck, we'd have an entirely different way of experiencing the world.  For one thing, it would be more difficult for us to figure out the temporal order in which things happened to us, so hard to put together the story of our lives. 

I wonder -- is our understanding of time worse now than before we allowed ourselves to be immersed in data soup?

Googles

If this invention comes to fruition and doesn't require us to carry around a computer the size of a refrigerator, it brings to mind lots of interesting ways of embedding added content into our wanderings through city and country.  Not only would we have to worry less about losing our keys, but we could also call up a large database of information related to everything that we might see.  Theoretically, we'd never be lost.

I've had this argument with my students about GPS and I'm not always sure I know where I stand.  Driving or walking with a GPS on hand more or less ensures that we don't get lost (though we might sometimes crash into things).  Surrendering ourselves to the instrument means that we can free our minds to wander, using a spatial crutch.  But when we detach the things that we see from the greater context in which we find them (whether that means the place where they reside or whether it means something else), then it encourages a kind of fractured, piecemeal understanding of the world, which is a part of what has gotten us into trouble in the first place.

In the land of the stereoblind, the one-eyed man is, well, stereoblind

I have to confess that I greet the news of a possible expansion of 3-d experiences in cinemas with a bit of chagrine.  The reason is -- deep personal confession here -- that like about 10% of the population, I'm stereoblind.  This isn't the same thing at all as not having vision in one eye.  Both eyes work, but they don't work well together.  Like Rembrandt, I can't fuse images from the two eyes together to get that pop-out of the third dimension.  I'll never "get" a Magic Eye picture.  I'll never really be able to enjoy these 3-d movies and in fact having to wear those glasses may even detract from my experiences. 

What's interesting about this, though, is that I  had no idea of my deficit until I had some vision testing at the age of 18 as part of an interview for a summer job at a glass factory (!!).  The company nurse, fearing that I wouldn't be able to detect huge slabs of sharp-edged window panes coming at me, wouldn't recommend me for a job.  When I tell people that I'm stereoblind, they often ask me why I don't bump into things or how I cope with a world that must look just like a picture.   But the truth is that we have lots of other sources of 3d information, especially different kinds of visual motion, so that I don't at all feel as though I'm trapped in Flatland (though I can have no idea of how the world might look different to me if I did have stereovision).

I have to tell you, though, that for a guy who works in a lab with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment designed to generate painstakingly realistic stereoscopic simulations of the world, there are days when I have to laugh a little at my own predicament.  Perhaps it even has something to do with my own penchant for getting lost.  But if so, the prevalence of stereoblindness must be much higher than we think because most of us spend some part of every day not really knowing where we are.

E-heckling

This morning I had cause to run up the aisles of the big lecture hall where I was teaching (admittedly to a smallish crowd of bleary-eyed souls who had braved the -22C temperatures and the first day of daylight savings to listen to me).  It's something I don't do enough.  In part I say that because it always makes me think of Phil Donahue, which itself brings back fond memories of high school days spent playing hookie, lying on the couch, watching the tube.  But a bigger reason is because, following the lead of a great tip given to me by my dean, I like to watch the reactions of students sitting behind laptops.  When it comes to minimizing windows, they have pretty wicked trigger fingers, sleep deprived or not.  It's something that professors have had to learn to live with (except for one lecturer of legend who climbs on a chair to unplug the wifi portal in his classroom before the beginning of each class).  I don't think it bothers us all that much.

This context made reading some of the accounts of the shenanigans at the SXSW conference all the more interesting for me tonight.  Mark Zuckerberg, wunderkind CEO of Facebook was scheduled to deliver a keynote, but the uber-technophile audience staged a kind of e-revolt, beginning with a mad bout of Twittering but then ending up the old-fashioned way with hoots and shouts.  They weren't happy with the questions that were being asked, and eventually took control of proceedings.  It seems clear that what in a conventional format might have amounted to nothing more than a dull murmur of discontent and perhaps a bit of an exodus to the coffee urn in the lobby was turned into something much more positive and productive by the priming presence of an extra layer or five of electronic communication in the room.

In another event, Meebo users expressed their boredom forcefully, electronically, and with all the maturity and wit of a gang of high school students.  The back channel chatter becomes the event, with multiple threads connecting the content of the presentation to the moods, expressions, and goofiness of the conference goers until the whole shebang becomes something like an act of swarm behaviour.  Not that this is a bad thing.  Swarm intelligence can generate some great stuff.  Look at termite mounds.  Look at great migrating flocks of Canada geese.

The potential for turning public speaking events like conference presentations, keynotes, and even humble little university lectures into something entirely different is something that interests me a lot.  It's as if we turn a physical location into the convergence zone of some kind of dynamic collaborative adventure.  I'm not even sure I understand the role of the speaker in such a setting.   The audience is the facilitator.  The "speaker" is just a kind of catalyst in an enzymatic reaction brought about by the occasion -- a space, a time, and a context mocked up by whomever happens to be in the audience and what they're thinking about on that particular day.

It would be really interesting to see more of this kind of interchange in a classroom setting.  At present, we can use things called "clickers" which can allow us to elicit simple push-button responses from an audience.  Imagine if they could give us much more than yes's and no's, abc's and 123's.  At times, the whole thing would dissolve into chaos.  But sometimes I bet things entirely new and unexpected could emerge.

One of the most interesting parts of all of this for me is that in a way it seems as though a new kind of cognition, a kind of freely floating unfocused attention would be needed to follow and understand proceedings like these. I wonder if we have it in us.

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.

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?