Computers, Society, and Nature

Although he has pointed out some neat ideas towards building leaner greener cities, I think in part, it is mainly wishful thinking, because some of his approaches wouldn’t work long-term. For instance, he brings up an interesting point regarding transportation and demobilization. By restricting the amount of space for driving (taking away something of value), this will force drivers to look to other forms of transit that is less harmful and less destructive on the environment. Well this seems reasonable; however, his next argument goes against his first approach. He suggests we build poly-centric cities composed of “compact, multifunctional, pedestrian-scale neighborhoods interconnected by efficient transportation and telecommunication links” (Mitchell 150). Why build more roads when he specifically said to demobilize them? Even if neighbourhoods are interconnected by efficient transportation systems, when you build a new road, instead of reducing congestion (which may occur in the short term) rather it leads to long-term congestion, as people will switch to this new system, if it is faster and more efficient. Then as this road becomes congested, a new road is built, etc. until that one becomes congested. By decentralizing locations, this leads to what we call the suburb and urban sprawl, and encourages the use of private automobiles. I like the ideas about intelligent management, but I’m not sure if his ideas regarding the placement of transportation systems will likely lead to a long-term effective solution in terms of conservation.

While I was reading the daily in one of my classes today, about the marvel of something called a tabo, which apparently explains the mysterious bowl in the bathroom of a Filipino friend of mine many years ago. Here’s said article: Daily Article (who says our $10 fee gets us nothing)

Anyways, short summary, it involves washing yourself after you um… do your business, with a bowl of water, some soap, and your hand, and is the common practice in a lot of places. One can certainly see how this could probably in the end make things cleaner, generally we use soap and water to clean ourselves… not so much with the rubbing dry paper all over ourselves.

Now, if North America did this… well, we essentially would have no more need for toilet paper. Wikipedia tells us the average American uses 20 805 sheets a year, which certainly has to add up to a lot of trees.

Of course, those Japanese and Continental Europeans have also been cooking up TP alternatives, the bidet, which I can’t recall having ever seen in real life, and the Japanese with their technologically marvelous super toilets. Of course, as we’ve seen with a lot of ‘progress’, the cost of such super toilets may be more than meets the eye, and moving to the paperless bathroom may have the rather unfortunate consequence of creating junkyards of toxic electronic toilets. The negative effects of the bowl of water approach, other than some vague (or not so vague) discomfort on my part with the idea, don’t come to mind as easily. As an added side benefit, you’d be pretty sure everyone would be washing their hands after using the washroom.

The fact that I find it a disconcerting idea is probably indicative of a lot of Western ideas about things (I’ve already been indoctrinated see…). Dirty, gross, unsightly, or anything like it; we prefer to ignore it if we can, absolutely minimize our contact with it if we can’t, and will take a lot of illogically wasteful steps to do it. It still baffles me when people will clean spills up with huge wads of paper towel when rags are sitting by the sink, specifically for that purpose, simply so they won’t have to get their hands wet and/or rinse the rag out. Don’t even get me started on Swiffers.

Anyways, this post ended up being a lot more bizarre then I intended when I started writing it.
So, to close it off, here’s a link to confirm that, yes, in fact, most marketing IS designed to destroy the world: Because everyone needs to be encouraged to buy more paper products.

Here’s a somewhat obscure item but it illustrates just how much technology can affect every part of society and it fits in well with the globalization articles.

Statistics Canada regularly calculates various economic indicators for Canada, including the the GDP and the trade surplus. According to this report, a technical glitch caused the most recent reported trade surplus to be off by almost $4 billion!! They claim the technical problem has now been corrected. But not before it created a chain reaction of events, including the miscalculation of the US GDP, which is aparently calculated by US officials using Canadian data.

The global economic system has become intensely dependent on computerized data management and data transmission systems. As financial services become more integrated and the movement of capital and goods increases in speed, this dependence will only increase. So many millions of numbers floating out there, good thing they only get confused once in a while.

I read an interesting book a number of years ago called Growing Up Digital by Don Tapscot. The book is based on a series of interviews Tapscot conducted with kids aged 2 to 22 during the mid-90s. He draws some interesting conclusions about how the information age will affect young people. Among the themes he explores: a hightened perceived need for instant communication with those close to us; feelings of dependence on technology; and perhaps most interesting, changes in the way kids learn.

I often think about what it was like to learn about technology when I was young and then I look at my young cousins who have been on MSN since they could bang a keyboard. They are certainly getting a very different perspective.

This news item about a 19-year-old who was sentenced to jail time for creating a worm (a kind of computer virus) made me think of another, more insidious way in which technology has affected young people.

We have become like nomads again, constantly on the move. Although telecommunications has provided an outlet so that we don’t have to travel as much, instead it has spurred more interaction, and the amount of travelling is increasing as a result. We travel so much, that our homes are becoming less permanent. Whereas we used to have 99-year leases prior to the Industrial Revolution, now we see more impernanent homes, such as those on time-share, RVs and motor homes, even capsule hotels found in Japan used commonly by business people who need a cheap place to stay overnight. People seem to be bored with what they’ve got, and are seeking something new. It seems like time has sped up, and as computers were supposed to save us time, rather they have spurred a race against the clock. Even with all this technology, some people are working 60 hr. weeks or more in some cases. During the Industrial Revolution in Paris, it took 100-200 years to construct a cathedral and the architecture is still standing today. Renovations are done in order to keep the spirit of the buildings alive. However, in Canada and the USA this is not typically the case. Buildings often go up in a matter of months, and can be torn down in a matter of weeks. Maybe people should take development at a slower pace, both construction and technology, and really think about what we are doing. Can we see this product working 80-100 years from now or is it just going to end up in the waste stream, and if so, could we take apart those devices and devise an entirely new, enticing product with the same parts? The answer would usually lead to no, right now, since products are so specialized and are always changing. In terms of architecture, we don’t really need a lot of new buildings to change things. We just need to be more creative with what we’ve got. So many times I’ve seen malls go out of business, and developers think the solution is to build another mall somewhere else and tear down the old one, creating a false sense of demand. The people, the city, and the environment can’t afford such dumb solutions. I would recommend the movie “SHOWER” about a father who runs a traditional bath house in China and his son goes away and works in the City as a businessman. It is about the struggle of traditional vs. progress in modern China, but touches on some interesting issues. Perhaps we could watch the movie in class during the myth and metaphor section?

Okay, I did some googling, and found out that appliances and computers do indeed use electricity even when they are turned off! But I didn’t find anything about power bars using electricity (which doesn’t mean they don’t. If they do use electricity when turned off, it’s probably a very minute amount. Anything that is plugged into an outlet, there is some transfer of energy there, and the appliances, even when turned off, are draining power. Better thing to do is just unplug appliances, computers, synthesizers, whatever, when not in use, in order to save electricity and save money!) On the Energy Alternatives website, they refer to this energy drainage as “Phantom Loads”.

(I hope this post is not too technical, let me know if it is).
Most conventional crytography algorithms are based on mathematical problems that are hard to solve with the existing algorithm technologies and computing power. The currently most widely used of these mathematical problem is the problem of factoring a large number that has been made from the multiplication of two large prime numbers. If you can factor the large number (find the two prime numbers it was made from) you can break the code and find the key to decrypt the message.
The most notorious cryptography technology that uses this mathematical problem is RSA. RSA is a public-key cryptography system that is used everywhere, you might have heard of it before. The current size of the large number to factor is 128 bits. That’s why you hear 128-bit encryption all the time. A 128-bits number is quite hard to factorize, you need either a lot lot lot of computing power or to invent a new very clever algorithm or … build a quantum computer. Many believes quantum computers to be the next generation of computers. Although we are still far from building one, a lot of people are worried about it and a lot of research is going on about finding new ways to encrypt data (including quantum cryptography). Because as Prof. Brassard (a cryptography expert at university of montreal) said “If a quantum computer is ever built, much of the conventional cryptography will fall apart”. As more and more aspects of our life get digitalized (banking, commerce, etc…) and are secured with RSA… you can imagine the disastrous consequences that this could have on our society on a world wide scale.

This paper contains an interesting list of facts about the impact of quantum information processing on data security (first part).
For the more technicaly and mathematicaly inclined (and brave too), here’s a link to an introduction to quantum computing at the university of indiana. And here’s how RSA works and how it can be broken.

A lot of stock these days gets put into simulations of various complex events. For most of these simulations, there aren’t poor underfed graduate students doing calculations by hand, of course we use our computers to do these simulations for us.

Computers approximate our answers. In same cases for the sake of expediency: there’s an infinite number of numbers out there, it’s faster and cheaper to just ignore some of them, and of course, this leads to some inaccuracy and a loss of precision in performing calculations. However in a lot of cases, they approximate because we just don’t know what the ‘actual’ solution is. I’m not sure how many of you remember your calculus, but they always seemed to kind of ignore some integration questions, and for good reason, for almost all functions there’s no way known to get an exact integral. A lot of those functions are used all over the place. Similarly for many differential equations, and finding roots of polynomials of degree 5 or more, there’s no general solution we know of, so we approximate, and then proceed to use those approximations to make further approximations, and so on.

Now this works pretty well in practice for most applications. After all, we seem to be doing alright in space, using computers we seem to be able to have gone to the moon and launched many shiny objects. But for things which exhibit complex or chaotic behaviour, it turns out our computer models have quite a number of limitations. Want to do equations with gravity with 3 masses? We can do somewhat decent approximations, throw in say 20 masses, and things tend to get out of control pretty quickly. The weather is another system that we model, we’re able to gather quite a lot of data, and they have very powerful computers working on very complex models, and for all that the best predictions we have are at most a few days in advance, and are often wrong at that. Whoops!

So, the universe doesn’t give us exact answers most of the time, and sometimes even when it does, we prefer to take the quick and dirty route. Does this mean we throw our simulations of complex systems out? Of course not. Even if they get they’re never completely ‘right’, often the approximations can still give us a lot of insight.

In a lot of those climate change simulations I’ve seen discussed, of course the industry hacks like to bring this up as uncertainty about the actual effects of various inputs to the simulation. This is where people, and common sense, come in. Those simulations need people to analyze their results, to run them with different data, more data, better data, manual corrections, etc., to see what our approximations are telling us about the underlying universe. The models themselves have no fundamental truths to them. There’s still some art there.

General Simulations
Gravity Simulations

This relates to the article entitled “The Social Life of Information” but also to what we were discussing in class the other day, about cd or computer disk waste. The article seemed to bring up more questions than it answered. In terms of the music industry, it is very easy to download music from the internet and not have to buy cd’s. And this is usually done illegally, which hurts the music industry. But on the other hand, if people are downloading music onto an mp3 player, which can be used and reused, less cd’s are required, so that may be a reason to embrace this action, because the consequences to the environment are less than if you kept buying cd’s. But people often get blank cd’s and download music onto them, so in effect, the internet may encourage more cd use.

The article talks about the fluidity involved in information exchange, and sugests that musicians should “shift their income streams from products and copyrights (that rely on fixity) to performance (which is fluid)” (pg. 198). Taking this a step further, the fluidity of the internet has had some pros and cons. For instance, the bank ING Direct relies on telecommunications and internet communications for transactions. They do not have a lot of physical buildings in place, but rather they are able to offer a higher rate of interest because they do not have to construct or heat as many buildings, because most of the exchanges occur online or on the phone. On the one hand, this reduces the waste involved in construction of a building, and reduces energy in heating or cooling the building, but on the other hand, does this encourage more computer and phone use? And if banking is leaning towards this approach, instead of relying moreso on paper documents, ultimately we have something less tangible to rely on, and so security becomes a big issue, as was expressed in the article with the vinegar residue on the paper. It limits us from seeing a larger picture, and ironically too, it is allowing us to reach out and learn more about the bigger picture. But check out this news article on internet security: Wireless Net In the future, will we be able to track criminals that use a system that is so versatile and open to loopholes? We will have to keep updating security systems as each new technology becomes more complicated and advanced.

Sorry for the delay. I have finally found the info I was thinking of regarding Darwin and religion during last Tuesday’s class. It was from the November 2004 issue of National Geographic, in the article “Was Darwin Wrong?”, by David Quammen. According to this article, Darwin had done some studying to become a clergyman during his undergrad at Cambridge, but realized that science suited him better. Quamman even exposed the idea that the delay in the release of Darwin’s work was partially due to him not wanting to publish something that was so contrary to conventional Christian beliefs; he was especially worried about offending his wife. Darwin’s wife, Emma, was a seemingly devout Christian and “prayed for his soul” when her husband chose an agnostic belief structure.

It is interesting to note that there exists two very distinct categories that some naturalists fit into. Those that are skeptical of a God’s work in nature, like Darwin, and those that undoubtedly believe that no force other than God could have created something as magnificant, perfect and sacred as the natural world (like John Muir for instance). I’m not saying that all naturalists must fit into one or the other, just these are two categories that do exist.

Okay, not computers, society and environment but tres cool. First images of the Huygens probe to Titan, the giant moon of Saturn.

http://planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_firstimage_0114.html

(via Pete Barry)

Relating to the article, and a little bit about what we were discussing in class, I thought it’d be interesting to consider the adoption curve for the Linux, or GNU/Linux operating system.

As we mentioned in class, Linux is a free (REALLY free) operating system (OS), which anyone can download, or get on a cd for only the price of the cd. For the non-huge-nerds among us, Linux shares much with an operating system called Unix, which is what the IBM/Airlines/Banks/etc (big companies) used to run their computers way back in the 1970’s and 80’s. Like Unix, Linux is a powerful, stable, customizable OS. It is also (to some people, most importantly), open source software. Open source means that the code (which is just special text) used to build the operating system is also released with the program. Open source software is its own huge topic, but suffice to say, most huge-nerds agree it’s an excellent selling point, and a very strong attribute of Linux. Some excellent programs that were mentioned in class that you might use already are also open source are Mozilla (an internet tools suite), and Mozilla Firefox (a lightweight web browser).

You can do nearly everything you do on Windows or a Mac, and in many cases considerably more, for no cost other than the time it takes to learn some of the quirks of a new operating system.

Anyways, enough with the evangelizing. It’s interesting to try to figure out where on the adoption curve Linux is. The early adopters of course, were generally programmers, and other enormous nerds. They installed Linux when it was an ugly command line mess, and they loved every minute of it. Beyond them, Linux also seems to have picked up people who either don’t like the inherent evilness of Microsoft, are tired of dealing with viruses (not that Linux is immune), or need to things other OS’s simply won’t allow. However Linux certainly hasn’t gained widespread adoption, although I believe it now has significantly more users than MacOS, the perennial #2 to Windows on the desktop.

So I would argue we’re at the bottom of the curve. In the CS department, I’d guess maybe 1/3rd to 1/2 of the students have Linux installed. I would say nearly all tech-savvy people are aware of Linux, and of the small minority who have actually attempted to use it (particularly lately, as the user interface has improved considerably) come off favorably impressed. The things I feel which are holding back its widespread diffusion, beyond just general ignorance, are its user interface: it is still not as consistent as the MacOS, lack of social support in most circles (if your Linux PC has a problem, the friendly nerd you rely on most of the time may not know what to do), and it suffers from the ‘competing solutions’ problem, similar to the scurvy ‘cure’ in the reading, in that there are many groups and companies which release versions of Linux called distributions, and to a newcomer, it is pretty overwhelming, so they’re often as likely to just forget about it and stick with Windows.

Even if you’re not feeling up to the switch, I feel like it’s certainly a trend to watch. There is no one company distributing Linux, so Microsoft can’t buy them out of business, and Linux is only getting better with time. So hop on to the S-curve while it’s still cool to do so!

The last post was about humanizing machine, I thought that looking the other way around would be fun too. Using the power of machines to “upgrade” the human body. I remembered reading an article about that in Wired when I was U1 (in 1999). I could not find the same article, their archive does not go that far back, but I found a 1999 CNN article about the same experiment of Prof. Kevin Warwick of the cybernetic lab at University of Reading in the UK.
His first experiment (in 1998), Project Cyborg 1.0, was to get a microchip implant in his left arm, he was the first human to do so.
The microchip could interact with the intelligent building of the cybernetics department, automatically identifying him and opening doors, his computer would tell him how many new emails he got as he passed the door, etc…
This microchip was not linked in any way to his nervous system, but at this time he was already planning this experiment.

In 2002 he attempted a more ambitious experiment, project cyborg 2.0.
“On the 14th of March 2002 a one hundred electrode array was surgically implanted into the median nerve fibres of the left arm of Professor Kevin Warwick.”
He basically connected a microchip to his nervous system.

“A number of experiments have been carried out using the signals detected by the array, most notably Professor Warwick was able to control an electric wheelchair and an intelligent artificial hand, developed by Dr Peter Kyberd, using this neural interface. In addition to being able to measure the nerve signals transmitted down Professor Wariwck’s left arm, the implant was also able to create artificial sensation by stimluating individual electrodes within the array. This was demonstrated with the aid of Kevin’s wife Irena and a second, less complex implantconnecting to her nervous system. ”

The ability to link microchips to the human body nervous system would have obviously a lot of practical applications (medical and others… Here’s an example).
What do you think of upgrading the human body using microchips???

see: The project Cyborg 2.0
and Neural Interface

Well, in keeping with the pattern, I’ll make my first post primarily an introduction.

My name is Liam, and I’m doing a BSc. in Computer Science, in my third year. I am U2, because I came from outside of Quebec, more specifically Calgary, Alberta.

I’ve really grown up with computers, my family got its first computer (a Mac 512ke, with an entire half megabyte of memory! Who could ever need more?) when I was 3, and my mom has always speculated that I learned to read so I could actually use the computer. Thus I’ve never lived somewhere where I have not had immediate access to a computer, and have always felt very comfortable using, playing, and tinkering with them.

As I mentioned in class, I think this class will be a welcome change of pace. I got to do a few arts courses in my first year, but this will be the first time writing something for class in 3 semesters, so I’m looking forward to it. I also have an interest in the effects of technology on our society, and have something of an interest in economic and environmental sustainability, particularly in the third world, so I think this class can only help my thinking in that regard.

What I’ve been thinking about lately has been the effects of (sub)Urban sprawl. I’ve always lived ‘downtown’, so I have long been exposed to the benefits of being able to walk everywhere I need to go. It always baffled me when I was in Junior High and High School how most kids would absolutely need to be driven everywhere, as the communities they lived in were simply not designed for people to be able to walk anywhere, except sometimes to the gas station. I’ve often wondered if perhaps the internet would allow people to work from home a little bit more, and thus allow some communities designed for local foot traffic to emerge. However, I can’t say I’ve seen that at all in Calgary, as the houses continue to push deeper into the country, and rarely is there anything reachable on foot from most of those houses.

First my name is jean-sebastien and not jean-sebastian as my user name suggests, it took me a few trials before figuring out which mistake the prof could have made in my name :).
I’m currently in my first year master degree in computer science. This class doesn’t really have anything to do with my master degree, but I’m taking it because I’m interested to have a broader view of the impacts on society and nature of what I (and my colleagues) do. We tend to forget about these.

My girlfriend is currently visiting canada for the first time, she is originally from malaysia but lives in australia at the moment (I lived in australia for the last two years). So last weekend we went to visit the canadian national capital, Ottawa. And I saw this interesting road sign that reminded me the class discussion of thursday. I thought it was really interesting to see that even a road sign giving the direction to a public building (Universtity of Ottawa) was using a URL and not the actual name of the institution. I guess if you can’t find the university following the signs… at least you can find it online.

I’ll be honest, all weekend I’ve been trying to decide whether to take a course that is directly relevant to the career path I am planning or this class, which would broaden my perspective, generally, on the environment field. Well, I’ve chosen to go with the perspective broadening path. There, now you all know one at least thing about me: I think way too much about decisions that affect my personal life.

Any interest I have in computers stems entirely from a Pascale programming course I took in high school. I was at the top of the class of 24 boys and me, as you can imagine this caused a bit of power trip for me and for those few months I thought I was a computer genius. Well, my computer expertise hasn’t gone much farther than that, so I’ll be pretty out of the loop when we talk about “meatspace”, chip technology and cybernetics, along with everything else!

As I mentioned in class, my degree is in Environmental Science (maj) and Atmospheric and Oceanic Science (min) (i.e. a lot of science, not much social science). I went into the Environment program after a year of gruelling preparation for a BSc in Dietetics (not for me). I switched when I realized that there were things to study at university that I actually loved – like the outdoors. I’ve been a camper, canoer and hiker for as long as I can remember; it’s my favourite “escape from the real world”.

Well that’s a bit about me. I won’t go on with anymore details because I’m sure we will all get to know each other quite well as the semester goes on. See you this afternoon.

I’m 24 years old and in my final year of a B.A. at McGill in political science and geography. I was born in Halifax but moved to Montreal when I was very young and grew up here. Ever since I can remember I have had a passion for technology; always wanting to learn about the latest new technological fad and tinker with whatever electronics I could find. When I was 16 I started a company with some friends designing websites and fixing computers. I kept this business going until after CEGEP and that led me to a job offer from Adobe Systems. I worked in Adobe’s Canadian headquarters in Toronto for a year as the national PDF specialist, this was a really interesting experience as I traveled a lot and learned a lot not only about technology but also about the corporate world of computers. After one year of that, I came back to Montreal and started at McGill. My passion these days is politics, social justice, and urban geography. Although I am certain I do not want a career focused exclusively on computers, my interest in them has remained constant. I use computers and other kinds of technology in all my work and I love learning about these things from various perspectives.

Here’s an interesting news story about a computer recycling effort from various companies:

PC makers, critics join eBay recycle push
I guess only time will tell whether this effort pays off. Many companies seem to have well-meaning green policies and programs but I often wonder if they are working.

Arcosanti Home Page

Hannah’s first blog. This may relate indirectly to the course material, but I thought you may find it interesting. I had the opportunity of visiting Arcosanti in Arizona over the holidays. It is a social housing project, developed by Paulo Soleri in the 70’s. His philosophy is to combine architecture and ecology in what he terms “arcology”, with a goal to lessen our destructive impact on the earth. You can become part of the project, and help to develop the sustainable city, by volunteering through construction, design, planning or ceramics, and in return food and accomodation is provided. They recycle old car parts and use them in their construction in creative ways. The types of technology that are implemented are simple yet effective. Also they grow their own food, and the economy is based primarily on the selling of wind bells. Paulo Soleri seemed to be ahead of his time, and this is perhaps one solution to urban sprawl, but why hasn’t it gained as much popularity as one might expect? Check out the website: