What the phone didn't do

It seems the Blackberry outage is held to be responsible for a recent 40% drop in traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi, which would suggest four out of ten accidents there are being caused by people reading email at the wheel!


While a nice piece of trivia, it's also an interesting example of how events in one area (email outage) can result in significant changes in crowd behaviour in another, and, assuming some of these accidents might have been fatal, quite literally how these influences can be a matter of life and death.

What comes to my mind is the potential this shows for manipulating individual behaviour, for large scale effects, and the ethical questions that then arise.

Consider for example if a national government enforced a mobile phone data outage on a particularly dangerous stretch of road, or at particularly dangerous times. If this could be shown (as in Abu Dhabi) to save lives, would it be justifiable? Our instinctive personal reaction would probably be indignation at such restrictions, but could anyone honestly claim their email access tops the benefit of one less widow, or one less orphaned child? We already (largely) accept speed limits as a necessary curb on our personal freedom, so what would be the real difference? And of course, we're not legally allowed use a mobile phone when driving anyway, so technically only passengers could complain (any gut rejection we have I think is just another example of how immune we are to the tangible benefits to a society that can come from reducing what are to the individual, intangible risks; small changes in a massive driving population can save some lives, but we very rarely view it that way; but this is a topic for another dicussion!).

And of course, then there's Google. Given the location information it already has available, it surely is possible for Google to also detect if someone is in a speeding car, or, from knowledge of other users in the area, if they are in a group of speeding cars. Indeed, if they are using google maps navigation, then Google probably even knows which cars are going the same place. In principle, the company could delay (at least Gmail) emails being delivered, if even for a few minutes, if it detected the person was in an at risk situation. Not that there is much likelihood of them ever wanting (and hence) trying to do this, since while there might be long term commercial benefit in keeping customers alive, unfortunately no one thanks you for saving their life if they don't know it. But maybe they could use this traffic analysis in other areas - though we might get suspicious if after an accident (and our car is detected to stop suddenly in the middle of an intersection) we get a pop-up ad for the nearest breakdown service/taxi company. But the potential is there, and the likes of Google have a habit of following potential.

The point is, mobile phones represent a somewhat unique phenomenon : a system which majorly influences individual behaviour, but yet can be centrally controlled. There has been a lot of talk about 'nudge' policies, whereby society is gently prodded in a favourable direction; what the Abu Dhabi traffic incident shows is how easy this sometimes can be done directly, and to everybody. Though in this case it's more a question of what the phone didn't do.

Aristotle, marriage, and the balanced life

Have always found it hard to nail the philosophers down on marriage (not a lot to say, or wise enough to keep their mouths shut!) but a friend getting married reminded me of the topic, and I really must look into it again. Especially I must revisit Aristotle, since , whether by cultural default or reasoned choice,  I have a lot of time for him, and especially like (what I understand to be) his conception of the balanced life, involving family and children.

After Plato's excessive abstraction and airiness, Aristotle I think provided a wonderfully pragmatic foundation for Western civilization, as beautifully depicted in Raphael's "School Of Athens" which shows Plato gesticulating to the sky, while Aristotle points firmly back down to earth. While we must examine and question life, there is no point in wandering about with our head in the clouds. Life is about real things, real commitments and enterprises, not abstract wondering, and marriage, family, settling down, is somehow part of that reality for the social animal that is man.

 
                                        

What I also intuit from him (but need to confirm this) is the idea that via these things there is one of the roads to happiness, whereby one gains happiness not by striving for it itself, but by seeking it for others. As he says in the Nichnomachean Ethics, the essence of love "seems to lie in loving rather than in being loved".  Given our willful and whimsical nature, how we habituate and how desire begets satisfaction, begets desire, then there is something in this. This I think is complemented by the Aristotelian idea of such things a happiness etc. as actitivites rather than states : to be happy is to act in such a way, not to achieve a state, and to experience love, is to love, not to be loved.  And that is what a family offers - the opportunity to love by choice, not through duty or default, others, one's wife/husband, and children; to work for their benefit at the (at least partial) cost of one's own. And of course, it's nice the way evolution provides the innate drive to gain satisfaction from that as well, but one that doesn't habituate.

"In being loved, on the other hand, people delight for its own sake; whence it would seem to be better than being honoured, and friendship to be desirable in itself. But it seems to lie in loving rather than in being loved, as is indicated by the delight mothers take in loving; for some mothers hand over their children to be brought up, and so long as they know their fate they love them and do not seek to be loved in return (if they cannot have both), but seem to be satisfied if they see them prospering; and they themselves love their children even if these owing to their ignorance give them nothing of a mother's due. Now since friendship depends more on loving, and it is those who love their friends that are praised, loving seems to be the characteristic virtue of friends, so that it is only those in whom this is found in due measure that are lasting friends, and only their friendship that endures."
Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics, Book VIII

Quote of the day : Vanishing lives...

“Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people leave behind no monuments or lasting achievements: a shelf of photograph albums, a fifth-grade report card, a bowling trophy, an ashtray filched from a Florida hotel room on the final morning of some dimly remembered vacation. A few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people. Those people invariably tell stories about the dead person, but more often than not dates are scrambled, facts are left out, and the truth becomes increasingly distorted, and when those people die in their turn, most of the stories vanish with them.”
― Paul Auster

Digital Serendipity?

Some fascinating articles and books at the moment about the long term effects of the web's move towards personalization. On the one hand it means the web will deliver more of what you want, the problem is, getting what you want isn't the same as getting what you need. The more our sources of information and inspiration mould themselves around what we already are, the less opportunities we have to grow into something new. The phrase of the moment is 'serendipty' - the chance stumbling on something unsought, but well found.

There is indeed I think a lot to the idea that ever more impressive personalization will limit this, and some have gone so far as to say that a digital world, being definite and algorithm based, just can't provide the distractions and abstractions needed to stumble accidentally on something. But while not saying the current structures won't end up being so restrictive, in my vieww they don't need to. Any truly complex system is open to chaos-style behaviour, where small changes in input result in wild variations in output, and the internet, and even the search and match algorithms of the likes of Google and Facebook, could surely display, or be allowed to display, such behaviour.

Indeed, probably serendipity itself results from accidental pattern matching, where we are thinking of one kind of thing and suddenly spot something similar in a completely unrelated field, achieving a flash of insight which is maybe really a flash of recognition, a realisation of how theold can lead to the new; and pattern matching is what Google etc. are good at. Up to now they have probably been trying to emulate perfect 'directed' pattern matching, focused in one area, but surely there is also the potential (if not probability) for cross-field matching. If for example Google Translate is trained to match words across languages, what would happen if it was fed with a different data set, and tried to extract similar patterns in this new domain. Is this not exactly what the serendipitous brain does?

In fact, what is often portrayed as a bad thing, that even the very people who design and operate these systems are losing true insight into how they work, provides hope, since they may become semi-evolved 'intelligences' in their own right (and i only mean this in so far as excellend pattern matching machines), and provide us with unexpected insight - since what they produce will be unexpected.
So, when it comes to digital serendiptiy, as Google itself suggests, i'm feeling lucky.

better to have believed and lost or not to have believed at all?

One reason for even aetheists not to completely shield their children from Religion, is the idea that like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, it provides some harmless yet comforting fantasies to the young mind, support until it can fully grasp and handle the beautiful yet brutal realities of existance; however, the question then is whether the puncturing of that bubble is overall a worse knock, then not having had the bubble at all.

Without beginning to start the analysis that the topic needs, one piece of psychologic research I read about recently struck me as being perhaps relevent. Ironically putting things into perspective, it had to do with parents in a real nightmare scenario, with a seriously ill child. what was examined was, if, against the odds, the child seemed to be improving, but was still at some (but not too much of a) risk of a relapse, which of two attitudes worked better in terms of the parents' mental well being. First was the quietly optimistic but still very cautious approach of thinking yes, things were better, but wasn't worth getting too excited since weren't out of the proverbial woods yet. The other attitude was basically hallelujah, this was wonderful luck (which of course it was), and best to appreciate and enjoy it for what it was, and not worry about what might yet be. As could be expected, the latter strategy resulted in lower stress levels. As might also be expected if a relapse did occur, then the positive effects immediatey dissappeared, but what is important is the parents mood dropped lower than during the original onset of the illness. Dashed hope really does seem to be worse than no hope at all.

It's like a prisoner's dilemma of the heart - hope for the best, and end up worse, or keep hopes possibly needlessly dampened. Don't fly too low Icarus, let the water weigh down your wings, nor soar too high, lest the sun may burn them. Flying a middle course may sound like the best option, but how can we then reach for the stars?

brain simulations

(this is a VERY random thought - more a wondering than a pondering!)

A major goal of technology has always been to emulate human behaviour, especially reasoning, and far from getting closer to a solution, our modern advances seem to simply reveal more and more how hard the problem really is.

One problem is we are looking for a 'design', and this requires first an understanding of what it should really do, and then how it should do that. But this is of course a 'top down' approach, whereas the thing we're trying to copy, the human brain, is the product of a 'bottom up' mechanism - the evolution of our species over millenia.

Ironically our 'higher level' conceptual approaches can't seem to match the mindless simplicity of the natural process. The reason being of course, that we are trying to produce the same 'work', and work is a product of power and time; we have the power, but nature had the time, and for the moment our power pales in comparison.

There are though two ways to achieve something - through planning, and through trial and error. In principle any method could be discovered by just trying out all the possibilities, and (within the limits imposed by 'adjacent possibilities') this is basically what happened during our evolution - over time multitudes of organisms of increasing complexity were thrown into the testing ground of the world, and slowly whittled down until just us were left.

Even for the simplest problems, we don't ever really have time (or inclination) to really apply trial and error, but we have a powerful substitute : computer simulation. It could be that since we don't fully understand what we are really trying to emulate from the off, then maybe a better approach would be to use simulations and then see if anything produced actually matches what we were looking for (our ignorance in understanding the brain then is out of the equation, since we might not know much about intelligence but we know what we like when we see it).

The question then is, is this feasible, and if so what would be involved?

What i'd be interested to know sometime, is if (and that's a big if) we had a model of an earth environment, and could model some basic creatures in it (we could cheat and start of with some primitive lifeforms we DO understand better) - then how many iterations would be needed to match the simulation runs performed by evolution?

There are admittedly many parameters involved - at the very least not just the number of generations (years/lifespan?) but also the number of relevant interactions (reproductions/terminations) per generation.
But surely there is a number which could be worked out,even from what we currently know about the history of the earth and biology?

And if so, then what is the number of computer operations, or the number of years for a computer running at 1GHz (1,000,000,000 operations per second) it would take to run?

And I don't even think it is a problem that nature basically ran one large simulation, but for a very long time : that large simulation (history) consisted of a multitude of smaller simulations in parallel. Of course there needs to be room for cumulative effect, but it is also probably the case that the starting points in nature (the number of relevant creatures) was initially small and it is in the 'cone' of development that the amounts mushroom.

My point is not really that this is a valid approach for modelling human behaviour, but it would be interesting to quantify just what sort of domain space is involved.

And of course, there is still that big IF of how to model the environment, but probably we could again take a leaf out of evolution's book and not model ourselves a complex environment, but allow complexity arise through the interaction of a sufficient number of simple models.

I know in areas like game theory such long running interactive simulations are used, but I must do some research to see what sort of sizes of runs are involved, and how the addition of parameters increases them.

I would just be interested to know what for example would happen if took some of the most powerful computers today and ran a simulation of some simple interacting evolving structure for say a year?

Nature didn't have the guns, but it sure had the numbers. My question is - how many?!

Voyager, and a badly stuffed bear, live on

It seems voyager is now about to leave our solar system, which is quite significant, even for this long range traveler. The point was made that when our sun eventually explodes, as it must, then even if there was any trace if humankind left on Earth, or any of our neighboring planets, then this would be obliterated at the very latest then, and the only traces of us which would remain would be whatever, like voyager, had managed to escape the solar system .

It's a sobering thought, but there is also some resolve and pride to be taken in the fact that, no matter what happens now, and even if human civilization has already peaked and goes into decline from now on, at least one artefact, one achievement, will live on. And even if it will never be found by anyone or any being which can recover it, it is fitting that the words of Carl Sagan are out there somewhere on that golden disc -from the man who realized we are all from star dust,a message will live on long after we've returned to it.

And this also reminded me of a nice little idea I have, which even if just a fantasy, is somehow comforting and pleasant, even if I can't properly articulate why: the notion that, for everything that happened (outside at least but given things like xrays then maybe not just) there is in theory, at all times, some point which would just then be reached at the speed of light from the event, and where, with a powerful enough telescope, that past event can now be seen unfolding. Think of any fond incident, like playing outside as a child, and in theory, if not in practice, it's "happening" again somewhere right now. Those moments, like voyager, are flying out forever into the universe, and in a small way, will never be lost.

It reminds me too of the end of the last Pooh bear book, “The House at
Pooh Corner”,in which the boy is leaving for school and takes his leave of the companions of his youth :

“But wherever they go , and whatever happens to them on the way ,in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing. ”

This never fails to bring a tear to my eye, since for me it encapsulates the transience of our youth , our lives ,our loves and joys . . . and yet , somehow also the hope that these things live on somehow.

And that we can feel this I think shows that it is not just the astronomical immortality that is involved. Whether Voyager might really physically outlive our sun is not really the point, more that we can have the notion and feeling that it could. Our special moments and achievements endure not just in the outer world but in the inner as well, forever reverberating around our minds, and in the minds of those with whom we share them with. Like voyager, or the image of a boy playing with his bear, they will always in some sense be "happening", sometime, somewhere.

Or, as Bogart might say, we will always have Paris...



Posted from phone via Blogaway (so excuse any typos!)

The pen mightier than the key board

One of my main reasons for choosing the Galaxy S as my new phone was that it came with swype as an input method. I'd tried "shape writer" on the ipod before, and was very impressed with the speed at which one could write-much faster and in a more comfortable manner than with normal phone keys, tapping a virtual keyboard, or even I reckon with a  qwerty phone keypad (though I admit I haven't actually tried that). What I wanted was something that could come as close as possible to using a computer keyboard as possible. However, now that I have been using it for a little while,i realize no phone mechanism ever will, but that swype instead offers something else. It IS fast, but really is more comparable to writing with a pen than with a keyboard, and this is the point. Writing with a pen was much slower, and this, coupled with the difficulty in erasing mistakes, meant a completely different writing style was required. The cost and 'permanence' of words meant thoughts had to be much more collected and considered before they could be put to paper.  I often wonder how I managed to write essays etc. in school without the aid of backspace, and having to laboriously form every letter. Compared with writing on a computer it seems that one's thought are continually held back-wanting to rush onto the next sentence, but the first words of the current one are still being completed!

This makes me realize that writing on a computer, while not necessitating careless, throw away and a  stream of consciousness style of writing,  does encourage it. By contrast, writing with a pen, or now swype, encourages more thoughtful and succinct prose, since the extra effort increases the need for maximum efficiency. There are of course times when a gushing of words is suitable, in story telling or more descriptive passages, which need to sweep the reader doing and envelope him or her in the narrative; but for article and in my case blog writing, I think the slower ' manual' style is optimum.  Talk is cheap, and typing in a keyboard can make writing so as well, but there is something about having to craft and carve each letter of every word, that brings home their value.

There is also something graceful about writing with swype - the motion and drift as one creates swirling patterns of meaning. In fact sometimes there is the temptation during complicated words to get carried away with the shape rather than meaning of the word- trying to form and finish it with more flourish than accuracy. Also, like with predictive sms, there are the occasional humorous or even jarring non-sequiturs when the tool throws up unintended words, like technological freudian slips, or like when someone finishes another person's sentence (it just threw up "semtex" :-) but having seriously misread where they were going with it. Ok, maybe not what you want to happen too often, but a nice little mental prod when it occasionally happens!

Posted from phone via Blogaway (so excuse any typos!)

double distraction

Maybe I'm a relic of a fading generation, that whether we achieve it or not, does however think being able to focus on one task at a time is a good thing, and that while enjoyable, the distractions of the modern age are things we need to handle carefully if we are to concentrate on anything at all.

However I have read that the 'youth' of today take multitasking to new heights, not just texting and surfing while watching tv, but even watching two programmes simultaneously with regular flicking between the channels...

So I guess it's no surprise to hear about a new startup 'Starling' whose goal is to promote a tool for 'co-viewing'. On the one hand co-viewing, whereby lots of people are watching the same thing at the same time sounds like a nice return to the old days of fixed (and hence shared) TV schedules. However the tool would provide a second internet window on the TV, to allow chatting/surfing/tweeting with others. The statement from the founder was that it explicitly wasn't a main focus for attention, but just something to catch that surplus bit of attention which he claimed we all have when watching TV. I.e. it is the ultimate distraction - something which is only meant to be just that - a distraction! Now it might seem that being able chat in parallel with a show is a nice idea - but didn't the old method of discussing after make more sense?! Maybe again I'm old fashoined, but nothing annoys me more than someone providing an alternative commentary to what I'm actually trying to watch - it's why I'm watching it in the first place!

I'm not sure what sort of shows this guy watches, but if something is so mediocre that one needs to bring one's own secondary entertainment with one, then it maybe isn't worth watching after all?!

Again fits in with the notion of the internet, for all its power, promoting thin, surface attention, without the deep post-pondering and consideration needed to properly learn things. It seems in this world view television, and everything else, is meant just to be another light stream of semi-interest, to dip into and splash about with in parallel, but not as a means to itself. A lot of partial content may add up to a full occupation, but surely this can't be good for our mental powers - not just couch potatoes, but diced and chipped potatoes as well.

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/36716/Starling-unveils-co-viewing-social-TV-platform

mixed signals

Almost got knocked down at a pedestrian crossing the other day, and would have been completely my fault - set off across the road when the red man was still standing resolutely at attention. It's not even as if I wasn't watching him, but I still managed to misread the most basic and well learned set of signals in modern society - wait for the green man!

How could I have managed it?! What I realised had happened was when I pressed the button on the traffic light to summon said individual, an orange message popped up below the red man opposite. It actually said "green's coming" but the problem was, this red+orange combination is exactly what you get at Austrian traffic lights for cars, to indicate green really a second or two imminent and you can start revving up. Being more conditioned to seeing the lights from a car's perspective, this signalling combination triggered my 'start moving forward'response - and I only realised my mistake when halfway across the road and the written part sank in!

I wouldn't mind, but at the next set of lights, while I was still pondering the first incident, and my stupidity, it almost happen again. Red+orange, click, whirr, my brain revved me up to move.

Think says something slightly interesting about how we are conditioned by modern signalling to have automatic responses, and the dangers for mixing similar symbols in the wrong domains. And just show's even having the message 'green is coming' spelled out (literally) in front of me couldn't compete with the more basic colour flags I react to day in day out.

Just shows, no interface is fool (or conditioned fool) proof...

why have a cake if not to eat it?

actually always thought there was something wrong with the "have your cake and eat it" saying - for a long time thought the point of it was that the world was so ironically cruel, that if you wanted cake, then when you finally mangaed to actually 'have it' (in your possesion), some evil twist of fate would always prevent you from eating it! i.e. you can try to get the cake - but it will be useless by then!

And what would be the point of having cake if you couldn't eat the damn thing!

Eventually realised meant 'keep your cake and eat it' - makes more sense that way!

Why memory can't be googled

A modern misconception is that with the semi-infinite storage and search capabilities we now have, there is little need to remember anything. The problem with this, is to recall something, one has to know what one wants to remember, which means have to have some stored 'locally'. Ok, so maybe we could just have an index of titles, and would be able to look the details up when needed, but then the problem is - how much 'index' info is enough? And the answer i I think is, nothing is enough - and the more the better, which nullifies the original argument.... The reason is memory is rarely a simple search and recall task, but is a constant background illumination of possible related facts and ideas. If I am writing about a topic, then i can google for the interesting details, but this is just one use of memory, and the least important. Where memory comes into its own is when we are thinking about one topic, and gain inspiration or see relevance in another...

take for example something like the civil rights movement. Maybe if I just knew Martin Luther King's importance, i could find out some interesting facts when needed. But if I didn't know myself the details, then if i saw Glen Beck's rally at the washington mall, on 28th August, i might not see anything related between the two. Only if I knew where King had his rally, and which date, would the significance be revealed...

Also - like words in language, memories are more than mere meaning, but are associative. A word is subtly influenced by how it is commonly used or heard, and this colours our interpretation of how we perceive the world. Similarly with memory, if things, places, times etc. are linked, however slightly, with other things, this changes how we consider them. Memory changes the paths of our brains and this changes our minds - it is the influence of these structures on our thinking, and the resemblance of structures for different events, like Beck's rally with King's, that is irreplaceablt currently.

of course, there is the possibillity, that there will some day be a tool. However it would first of all need to have access to ALL our daily inpu data, not just what we read/watch, but what we see and hear, and how we feel about it. Some of these maybe could be captured by an ever-on recording device, but the emotional colouring? Allowing even if, with enough historical info this was possible, the second problem ], and probably the harder one, is it would need to pattern match the data constantly and pop up relevant information to us in a way our subconscious currently does. To identify the same info and provide it in a similar way is I think the hardest task, way beyond current technology. but it is in theory maybe possible, but we're a long way off yet

The basic point is memory is more than content, it is also relationships and structure, and for the moment, that can't be googled.

Thoughts on touchscreen input

Am always looking for the optimum mobile device input mechanism- and the ipod in landscape mode is the best i have at the moment. However, still can be frustratingly slow comparisoned to a proper keyboard; but then i realised that the input rate is probably comparable to my speed when actually writing with a pen, and when thought of that way, then maybe its restrictivness is not such a bad thing. After all, i often lament how typing a piece results in an impatient and often insuficiently considered torrent of words. This i felt was in contrast to the deliberation forced on one by manual writing with a pen. Well is not laborious touchscreen writing similar?

test - first post

Blah blah, blah blah blah blah.