It’s Not The Economy, Stupid!

“Humans have a tendency to fall prey to the illusion that their economy is at the very center of the universe, forgetting that the biosphere is what ultimately sustains all systems, both man-made and natural. In this sense, ‘environmental issues’ are not about saving the planet — it will always survive and evolve with new combinations of atoms — but about the prosperous development of our own species.”

— Carl Folke (Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University)

A timely thought.

As an aside, here’s an interesting historical perspective (up to 2008):

Picture credit here.

A Demo Of Wireless Electricity

I’ve just come across this engaging talk by Eric Giler (CEO of MIT-inspired WiTricity ) at TED Global in 2009 where he demonstrates using wireless electricity to power up a TV and Google, Apple and Nokia mobile phones.

The idea is so appealing! There’s a basic overview of their approach here and also see the image below (click to enlarge).

A previous post on this subject is one of the most popular I’ve written, indicating a strong interest in the subject!

The Aurora Borealis

From Der Spiegel:

The aurora borealis, or the northern lights, are seen in the sky above the village of Ersfjordbotn near Tromsø in northern Norway, early in the morning on Monday. Aurorae are caused by the interaction between energetic charged particles from the Sun and gas molecules in the upper atmosphere of the Earth, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) up. A stream of charged particles, called the solar wind, flows out into space continuously from the Sun at speeds of 400-500 kilometers per second. Upon reaching Earth, the charged particles are drawn by Earth’s magnetic field to the poles, where they collide with gas molecules in the upper atmosphere, causing them to emit light.

A very impressive photo!

Picture credit: web link above.

The Ant Farm Story

Whilst making coffee this morning, I idly browsed a newspaper that was lying around. It happened to be open on the Obituary page and I started randomly reading about a certain Milton Levine who I had never heard of before, and quickly became fascinated.

There are many stories of unconventional ideas for successful large scale products but this one, an ant farm, I found quite hard to believe – I even double checked to see if it was a hoax of some form. As a niche offering I can understand it but 20 million sales is very impressive! Not so good for the ants used though as they all doomed to an early death.

From an innovation point of view I doubt if any number of company brainstorms would have come up with this as a viable commercial product. As sometimes happens, it’s one person who gets fascinated by something, wants to share this and then has enough enthusiasm to actually do something about it. It’s interesting that he started with small scale in mind but accidentally tapped into something quite extensive.

Here’s the part that caught my attention:

Levine got the idea for his ant farm at a Fourth of July picnic in Los Angeles in 1956 when he became fascinated by a colony of undertaker ants building towers, transporting crumbs and generally doing what ants do. Thinking that children would be fascinated by watching the ants, he developed a prototype “farm” using a clear plastic handkerchief box with a wooden base and filling it with sand. He then took some ants from a nearby field to populate his new world.

After placing an advert in a newspaper he found himself deluged with orders. Unable to meet demand, he eventually secured the services of a family of ant rustlers to collect red harvester ants in the Mojave Desert at one cent per ant. The breed was deemed best-suited for the ant farm because they are plentiful, are active in the daytime, are vegetarian, and do not thrive indoors if they escape.

Though the original sand was replaced with lighter volcanic gravel to make it easier to see the ants, the design of the farms remained largely unchanged until Levine’s son took over the business in the 1990s, when the ants had their digs upgraded with new modules. These included such novelties as tiny bungee ropes and ant-sized skateboarding parks. Half a century after Milton Levine’s Fourth of July picnic, more than 20 million ant farms had been sold.

All the same, some found the performance of the insects a mite disappointing. As federal law prohibits the shipment of the queen ants (which are necessary for a colony to survive), the colonies tended to be short-lived and, deprived of the pheromones that give the colony a purpose, sometimes seemed caught in an existential crisis. “After a while, they just start dying,” observed one reviewer. “They always bury their dead, and it gets a little sadder every day watching them haul the latest deaths off to where the other little bodies are. Finally there’s only one ant left, huddled up all by himself, with no one to bury him when he finally goes.”

Picture credit: top here and bottom here.

Just Do It

I run a blog for a local nature reserve, Fleet Pond, which, as the name doesn’t suggest, is a rather large freshwater lake (see picture above when it was recently covered with snow).

In relation to this I noticed a post on the Zoho blog that discusses open data sharing for a local nature reserve in the UK. I’ve been toying with Zoho for couple of years now as a handy way to share information across communities, both for  a charity, Fleet Pond Society, and more widely.

I’ve also looked at related systems such as Huddle (which is free for charity use).

Investigating the links in the Zoho post lead to a document written by Tim Berners-Lee on putting Government data online which is amazingly refreshing in it’s candour. Here’s an extract (see under ‘Just Do It’):

The chances are quite high that the data your department/agency runs off will be largely in relational databases, often with a large amount in spreadsheets.

There are two philosophies to putting data on the web. The top-down one is to make a corporate or national plan, by getting committees together of all the interested parties, and make a consistent set of terms (ontology) into which everything fits. This in fact takes so long it is often never finished, and anyway does not in fact get corporate or national consensus in the end. The other method experience recommends is to do it bottom up. A top-level mandate is extremely valuable, but grass-roots action is essential. Put the data up where it is: join it together later.

A wise and cautious step is to make a thorough inventory of all the data you have, and figure out which dataset is going to be most cost-effective to put up as linked data. However, the survey may take longer than just doing it. So, take some data.

A really important rule when considering which data could be put on the web is not to threaten or disturb the systems and the people who currently are responsible for that data. It often takes years of negotiation to put together a given set of data. The people involved may be very invested in it. There are social as well as technical systems which have been set up. So you leave the existing system undisturbed, and find a way of extracting the data from it using existing export or conversion facilities. You add, a thin shim to adapt the existing system to the standard.

The crazy thing is that this example of a no-nonsense and wise appraisal of a real-world situation is so, so true and yet it’s still the exception rather than the rule.  So, hopefully, more candour in text and conversations in 2011 for better results!

See also here.

Candour: the quality of being open and honest (OED 2008).

Picture credit: above (me) and below here.

Beyond The Tipping Point?

‘Beyond the Tipping Point?’ is a documentary film about climate, action and the future. It is a free resource for groups to provoke discussion and open up debate.

Link and picture credit here.

Blog Action Day Today – Water Conservation

15 October 2010 is Blog Action Day, with this year’s theme being water conservation:

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. It was started in 2007 by the Envato founders, Collis and Cyan Ta’eed, and last year over 13,000 blogs participated to draw attention to climate change.

The topic this year focuses on water conservation. Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us who are subject to preventable disease and even death because of something that many of us take for granted. Water is a global issue, and it affects all of us.

Technology Footprint: On an average day, 500 billion liters of water travel through US power plants to power all the technology that we use every day. For example, that shiny new iPhone in your pocket requires half a liter of water to charge. That may not seem like much, but with approximately 6.4 million active iPhones in the US, that’s 3.2 million liters to charge those alone.

On this aspect, there’s an interesting water ‘game’ provided by IBM (see Water/Energy tab) to help explore technology-oriented possibilities (see also the Decade of Smart).

Picture credit here.

Africa, Aid and Outliers

I recently read a very provocative article by Kurt Gerhardt on rethinking the principles of development aid for Africa, first paragraph here:

Development aid to Africa has been flowing for decades, but the results have been paltry. Instead, recipients have merely become dependent and initiative has been snuffed out. It is time to reform the system.

Money plays a lucrative role, of course, for all sides, but in addition it can cultivate a predominantly ‘numbers’ approach to the issue:

The urge of foreign aid workers to quickly produce results promotes quantitative thinking and gives short shrift to efforts aimed at helping locals learn how to develop themselves. One example of this erroneous notion is the goal among donor companies, adopted 40 years ago, to donate 0.7 percent of GDP in the form of development aid.

It makes no sense to establish amounts before discussing the projects that should be funded with that money. The worst thing about this discussion is that it, once again, is purely quantitative. It feeds the disastrous attitude that more money necessarily means more development. In this way, lessons learned over the past decades are completely ignored.

Instead, people like Bono and Bob Geldof are allowed open access to our governments, where they propagate the “more money” idea — and where they become stumbling blocks to African development.

To be fair, I’ve heard this argument many times before but it seems that now the situation is becoming critical and perhaps everyone is actually prepared to try out some very different and perhaps more politically radical approaches.

In this light, there’s been quite a lot of publicity on Positive Deviance recently (see eg here) as an alternative ‘bottom-up’ approach to some of these sorts of problems.

Positive deviance? It is an awkward, oxymoronic term, but the concept is simple: look for outliers who succeed against all odds. Such individuals are outliers in the statistical sense – exceptions, people whose outcomes deviate in a positive way from the norm.

…

But it is also important that those in authority (e.g., village chiefs, funding NGOs, CEOs, etc.) be committed to giving the process a try. It is a bottom-up approach that entails a leap of faith that, first, those in the ranks below include some with winning strategies and practices and, second, that when the community (not the experts or those in authority) discovers this wisdom in their midst they will adapt it without the usual exceptionalism that thwarts top-down “best practices” initiatives.

Very thought provoking and challenging stuff!

There’s a Basic Field Guide to the Positive Deviance Approach here. The approach is not limited to aid work of course and can be applied to many organisations.

Picture credit here.

Crowdsourcing And The Oil Spill Mess

As the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is seemingly continuing unabated, there’s a timely piece at Blogging Innovation on how crowdsourcing (of one type or another) might provide a breakthrough. The infographic above gives a comprehensive and vivid overview of the situation.

The pros of the approach are offered as:

Diversity of ideas increases the odds of finding something that will be useful

While no one idea may solve it, visibility (as opposed to private phone calls) increases the odds of finding parts of ideas that lead to viable solutions

The brain power of enthusiastic participants across the globe is a good match to BP’s in-house experts

Potentially a good PR move, as the company demonstrates that it’s leaving no stone unturned to solve the leak

and the cons discussed are

Little previous experience with crowdsourcing

Deep technical domain experience is required

Site becomes a place for public criticism

Obviously BP has extensive academic and industry networks to tap into, both formal and informal. The question is whether a wider group of suggestions, including those from innovative small businesses, would be helpful in a crisis and time-critical situation. Helpful can mean technically and PR wise (the latter being notoriously fickle of course).

After the situation is under control, a wide-ranging ‘lessons identified and learnt’ activity will certainly take place (as well as the more vicious blame game). There are many posts on this blog on the challenge of actually learning lessons and benefiting from mistakes (just do a search). It’s certainly not easy!

However one interesting output might be that innovative means for developing fast and relevant responses to tricky problems from the widest set of communities is investigated and trialled, say with a mock crisis. This might then lay the foundations for an effective crowdsourcing type of approach in the future.

In parallel with this, there’s another post on crowdsourcing the oil spill here. This focuses on providing information and practical ways that people in the area can help.

There is useful information from BP on the oil spill issue here.

Let’s hope it’s sorted soon.

Picture credit: here.

Complex Or Complicated?

Interesting, physics-oriented post, on Backreaction on the issues of better dealing with global political, economic and environmental problems. These are often popularly described as complex (as opposed to complicated):

The difference between complex and complicated is that a complex system has new, emergent features that you would not have seen coming from studying its constituents alone…The complex problem, it can’t be decomposed. It can’t be reduced. It’s global, interrelated, it’s on many timescales, and it doesn’t respect professional boundaries either. Worse, you don’t know were it begins and ends. It’s full of “unknown unknowns.” It’s not only their problem, it’s our problem too.

Then there’s the issue of handling such problems!

It is however not true that we don’t know what to do with a complex problem. We just don’t do it. In contrast to our political systems, humans are good at solving complex problems. It’s the complicated ones that you better leave to a computer. Look at the quote from Avril Lavigne that is title for this post. She’s talking about relationships. Navigating in a human society is multi-layered task on many time-scales with unexpected emergent features. It’s full of unknown unknowns. That’s not a complicated problem – it’s a complex one. We have the skills to deal with that… The reason why we can’t use our abilities to deal with economic or political problems is simply lack of input and lack of method. These are solvable problems. And they are neither complex nor complicated.

There’s also the very interesting suggestion that Google may have a role to play in providing some of the required input:

It is not too far fetched to think that Google will play a role in that with creating “real-time natural crisis tracking system,” “real-world issue reporting system” or “collecting and organize the world’s urban data” (see: Project 10 to the 100). The next step is to find a good way to extract meaning from all this data to be able to react in a timely manner to changes.

Quite fascinating ideas!

I’ve written previously on complexity here and here.