My nephew Steven was visiting us recently and we were watching some TV. The subject turned to heroes and whether there was something happening in TV, Film, and Comics. And, in an unrelated but perhaps synchronistic event, I exchanged some email with Jason Ohler http://www.jasonohler.com/ on the value of storytelling in learning. That set me to thinking about whether something MIGHT be happening.
Storytelling when I was a young adult was fairly simple stuff. The stories were, of course, in books, movies, and TV. That has not much changed. But, the depth and structure of those stories from the 1940's, -50's, and -60's, when you go back and look at it critically, were very shallow Despite some amazing work which pushed literature forward, even when I go back and look at some of the most important stories of those times, I find a simplicity of structure, a lack of depth, and even a naivete that went unnoticed and uncommented upon during that time.
TV and movies were in their infancy then and it is perhaps to be expected that their storytelling skills were not as evolved. Oh, I know, Citizen Kane is STILL considered the best movie ever made, but for heaven's sake, it was Welles ... what can you do? Heterosis had to occur in somebody...we were just lucky enough for it to be Orson.
But the run of the mill film, even those we consider classics now, are, under the electron microscope of 21st century expectations, rather anemic story and structure wise.
Fast forward to the nineties and some very interesting thngs are happening. first, WE WON! Those of us who fought teachers, parents, grandparents, scout masters, teacher, nun, and every other "authority figure" of the 50's and 60's who told us those horrible comic books would rot our brains and seduce the innocent. We won and the graphic novel has emerged as a legitimate literary form.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Sunday, June 03, 2007
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Found Picturetrail recently and it's great. It let's you build small display widgets with your own photos then embed them onto your own websites...very cool.
Other technology that's begining to shw up includes Microsoft's Surface, a computing table that is almost a one for one match to some of the ideas I wrote about here a couple years ago. It's good to see some of these things finally appearing but I still think the actual usage model is developing.
Microsoft wants to make $5k-$10k tables a standard sort of approach. Not a bad idea, but the price is too high. I think smaller form factors, simpler implementations and lower costs will be important to making surface computing more ubiquitous.
I've been asked to provide a keynote this week to a learning technolgy conference and I think this technology of touch and feel and manipulation is one of the key ones emerging right now. But it's not just a matter of lookig at your photos, or moving things around on a table with your fingers. it is about being able to manipulate a world that exists around you. it's about computing splashed on the walls.
For learning, this means access to information, knowledge, training, expertise, advice, and ideas all the time, spashed onthe walls and tables, on the surfaces that surround you.
I think that is the promise of so called surface computing (look back at my old entry on a new theory of surfaces), not these simple photo sharing apps we see in the MS Surface marketing vids.
But the technology is coming along nicely. Microsoft's is intriguing, but Apple's may be better. And we are experimenting with our own here at DERI.
Bill
Friday, April 20, 2007
The Darkling Plane
Much has happened this week. I feel I shoulld write about the events at Virginia Tech, should offer some thoughts and reactions.
But I find I have little to say. The events are, of course, horrific. The news coverage is, of course, pornographic. The "manifesto" is, of course, "rambling". The killer was, of course, a loner. Nothing is very different from previous massacres.
There are questions, of course. But I am constantly reminded of two songs: Jeremy by Pearl Jam, written about 16 year old Jeremy Delle, a student at a Richardson, TX high school who killed himself in class and I Don't Like Mondays by The Boomtown Rats about 16 year old Brenda Spencer who sat in her room across from a school and fired her new rifle at the playground.
Specifically, the lines "Jeremy spoke in class today" from Jeremy and "And he can see no reasons / 'Cos there are no reasons / What reason do you need to die, die?" from I Don't Like Mondays.
The events occurred 12 years apart, in 1991 and 1979 respectively.
There are no reasons behind such events. Indeed there is unreason, the absence of reason, the dark void of rationality, a darkling plane of anger, hurt, fear, emptiness.
The victims are tragic, the famlies left behind are deeply bereft and it is only natural to ask why. But there truly are no reasons. A young man descended into the darkness of madness and the word 'reason' does not apply.
At least this time there can be no claim of "we didn't know", "no one ever suspected", he was such a quiet boy", etc, etc. This man was known to be ill, he was known to be disturbed, and many people DID try to get him help and to protect the world from his growing anger. But in vain. The rules and the laws, and the circumstances worked against the possibility of stopping him. But at least some people in his life tried.
There are heroes in this story. The 72 year old professor who gave his life so 20 of his students could escape; a true hero of the people. The survivors who aided fallen friends. There will be more stories of heroes as we learn more. But these events show, once again, heroes are not special, they have no 'powers'. They are ordinary people who perform extraordinary feats in a crisis...and some pay the ultimate price.
And there was a villain as well. But we should also mourn him. His descent into madness must have been intensely painful and lonely. He is a victim as well; a victim of something in his brain that took him onto that darkling plane. No condoning here, no excuses. But a realization that this was an illness which, had it been recognized when the chance to do so presented itself, 33 people would still be alive.
But there are no reasons. What reason do you need?
Bill
But I find I have little to say. The events are, of course, horrific. The news coverage is, of course, pornographic. The "manifesto" is, of course, "rambling". The killer was, of course, a loner. Nothing is very different from previous massacres.
There are questions, of course. But I am constantly reminded of two songs: Jeremy by Pearl Jam, written about 16 year old Jeremy Delle, a student at a Richardson, TX high school who killed himself in class and I Don't Like Mondays by The Boomtown Rats about 16 year old Brenda Spencer who sat in her room across from a school and fired her new rifle at the playground.
Specifically, the lines "Jeremy spoke in class today" from Jeremy and "And he can see no reasons / 'Cos there are no reasons / What reason do you need to die, die?" from I Don't Like Mondays.
The events occurred 12 years apart, in 1991 and 1979 respectively.
There are no reasons behind such events. Indeed there is unreason, the absence of reason, the dark void of rationality, a darkling plane of anger, hurt, fear, emptiness.
The victims are tragic, the famlies left behind are deeply bereft and it is only natural to ask why. But there truly are no reasons. A young man descended into the darkness of madness and the word 'reason' does not apply.
At least this time there can be no claim of "we didn't know", "no one ever suspected", he was such a quiet boy", etc, etc. This man was known to be ill, he was known to be disturbed, and many people DID try to get him help and to protect the world from his growing anger. But in vain. The rules and the laws, and the circumstances worked against the possibility of stopping him. But at least some people in his life tried.
There are heroes in this story. The 72 year old professor who gave his life so 20 of his students could escape; a true hero of the people. The survivors who aided fallen friends. There will be more stories of heroes as we learn more. But these events show, once again, heroes are not special, they have no 'powers'. They are ordinary people who perform extraordinary feats in a crisis...and some pay the ultimate price.
And there was a villain as well. But we should also mourn him. His descent into madness must have been intensely painful and lonely. He is a victim as well; a victim of something in his brain that took him onto that darkling plane. No condoning here, no excuses. But a realization that this was an illness which, had it been recognized when the chance to do so presented itself, 33 people would still be alive.
But there are no reasons. What reason do you need?
Bill
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Nerds and Visions
I was invited to deliver a lecture recently for the Arts Faculty here at NUIG and my title was Learning to be Human: Why Nerds Need the Humanities. I hope my audience enjoyed it. I made it informal but tried to get across the notion that we nerds (those of us who willingly devote our lives to the pursuit of technological knowledge and seek total enlightenment and fullfillment through the deeper undersanding of technical issues) need the study of art, history, philosophy and the other humanities because without those subjects, we have no context within which to place our tech.
The talk went well and I, at least, had fun. The subject is acctually vital because our universities around the world have begun allowing satudents to focus and concentrate so much in singel areas such as IT, medicine, engineering, etc, that the students thus turned out do not have to have a braoder cultural literacy within which to place their knowledge and emotions. i would say that they were, consequently, not fully human...they have not learned to BE human. And it is their loss as well as that of the world.
My talk went round to th esubject of how you teach art, history, etc to such nerds as we now sow among our classes and culture. Given that the world truly changed 25 years ago with the invention of the personal computer, that THIS device truly CHANGES how generations of future people will view the world, then we need different ways, i contend, to teach these same old stories from history and literature.
Jane Austen doesn't work anymore for a lot of students; her novels are timeless and pertinent but not contextual enough to resonate at first blush. the movie Clueless, however, might work better.
The other aspect of this, I believe, is that our stories, our literacy, our timeless learned messages are about heores. You can HAVE stories abotu other things, but the importnat stories, the ones that teach us to be human are, interestingly enough, about heroes.
Those who know me will, by now, have figured out that I then talked about today's mythiical heroes and of course that meant Buffy, Batman, Superman, Skywalker, and the others.
Out of all this, I think there is a message evolving that I want to discuss in more depth. That is the message of how we teach and how we help students learn these messages. Not just WHAT we teach (although this is vital) but HOW we teach an what we use to teach with.
Enter a new invitation. I have been invited to present a keynote to the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) June conference here at NUIG. I've been giving this one a lot of thought in the light of this mesaage that I am evolving. That talk, Visions of a Learning Future will focus on the idea tht learnign will be continuous, technolgical, and immersive and engaging.
The nature of learning is changing. It's easy to say that no, people are the same always, therefore learning will essentially remain the same for the rest of history. but I don't think that's so.
Technology changes us. While many of our aspirations, instincts, goals, and drives remain the same over the centuries, I think others truly do change. We are NOT the same as cro magnon was. Our different understanding of the universe literally makes us different at a very low level from medeival folk. And reading and writing on papyrus makes you a DIFFERENT kind of person than if you only use clay tablets.
Of course the differences may be small at first. They may be incremental based on how divergent technologies are, how divergent knowledge is. But that's the crux of the matter. The divergence rate is accelerating. The singularity is near and as we approach teh knee in the curve of technologicla change the difference of each generation's inhabitants from those before is greater than the generational differnece before.
The effects of accelerating change like this are hard to grasp, because we want the acceleartion to only apply to a few select things. But the acceleration of EVERYTHING is increasing...better, perhaps to think of our world as existing as an expanding universe of manifold dimensions. Everyting is expanding and rushing away from what came before. Think of those metadata browsers that cluster documents or files or other objects based on some notional idea of 'proximity' . Whichever idea you choose, each generation of objects is always further away, less proximal, to each other than the previous generation .
That's actually an interesting idea. the iplication is that, past the takeoff point, we will change so rapidly that successive generations may not recognize each other as being of the same species. Charles Stross plays with this idea a bit in Accelerando.
I'll write a bit more about learning technologies and how they affect this in anothe rpost, I think.
One place where it will begin to play in the near future, however, is the migration of education into the immersive virtual world of 3d games...we'll look at how those will emerge and blend for everyday learning next time.
Bill
The talk went well and I, at least, had fun. The subject is acctually vital because our universities around the world have begun allowing satudents to focus and concentrate so much in singel areas such as IT, medicine, engineering, etc, that the students thus turned out do not have to have a braoder cultural literacy within which to place their knowledge and emotions. i would say that they were, consequently, not fully human...they have not learned to BE human. And it is their loss as well as that of the world.
My talk went round to th esubject of how you teach art, history, etc to such nerds as we now sow among our classes and culture. Given that the world truly changed 25 years ago with the invention of the personal computer, that THIS device truly CHANGES how generations of future people will view the world, then we need different ways, i contend, to teach these same old stories from history and literature.
Jane Austen doesn't work anymore for a lot of students; her novels are timeless and pertinent but not contextual enough to resonate at first blush. the movie Clueless, however, might work better.
The other aspect of this, I believe, is that our stories, our literacy, our timeless learned messages are about heores. You can HAVE stories abotu other things, but the importnat stories, the ones that teach us to be human are, interestingly enough, about heroes.
Those who know me will, by now, have figured out that I then talked about today's mythiical heroes and of course that meant Buffy, Batman, Superman, Skywalker, and the others.
Out of all this, I think there is a message evolving that I want to discuss in more depth. That is the message of how we teach and how we help students learn these messages. Not just WHAT we teach (although this is vital) but HOW we teach an what we use to teach with.
Enter a new invitation. I have been invited to present a keynote to the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) June conference here at NUIG. I've been giving this one a lot of thought in the light of this mesaage that I am evolving. That talk, Visions of a Learning Future will focus on the idea tht learnign will be continuous, technolgical, and immersive and engaging.
The nature of learning is changing. It's easy to say that no, people are the same always, therefore learning will essentially remain the same for the rest of history. but I don't think that's so.
Technology changes us. While many of our aspirations, instincts, goals, and drives remain the same over the centuries, I think others truly do change. We are NOT the same as cro magnon was. Our different understanding of the universe literally makes us different at a very low level from medeival folk. And reading and writing on papyrus makes you a DIFFERENT kind of person than if you only use clay tablets.
Of course the differences may be small at first. They may be incremental based on how divergent technologies are, how divergent knowledge is. But that's the crux of the matter. The divergence rate is accelerating. The singularity is near and as we approach teh knee in the curve of technologicla change the difference of each generation's inhabitants from those before is greater than the generational differnece before.
The effects of accelerating change like this are hard to grasp, because we want the acceleartion to only apply to a few select things. But the acceleration of EVERYTHING is increasing...better, perhaps to think of our world as existing as an expanding universe of manifold dimensions. Everyting is expanding and rushing away from what came before. Think of those metadata browsers that cluster documents or files or other objects based on some notional idea of 'proximity' . Whichever idea you choose, each generation of objects is always further away, less proximal, to each other than the previous generation .
That's actually an interesting idea. the iplication is that, past the takeoff point, we will change so rapidly that successive generations may not recognize each other as being of the same species. Charles Stross plays with this idea a bit in Accelerando.
I'll write a bit more about learning technologies and how they affect this in anothe rpost, I think.
One place where it will begin to play in the near future, however, is the migration of education into the immersive virtual world of 3d games...we'll look at how those will emerge and blend for everyday learning next time.
Bill
Saturday, March 10, 2007
The Illusionist -- a Study in Cinematic Language
Went to see the Illusionist today. Excellent film, a little slow starting, but the pace grew quickly. It was, of course, a bit predictable, but the story is probably a better one than The Prestige from a literary stance.
I won't give away any spoilers here, but the cinematic language used in The Illusionist is fascinating. The manner in which the plot is communicated visually, even down to some unusual costuming choices, telegraph the plot to you if you are prepared to receive it. There are, in fact, two scenes, with no dialogue, that disclose the entire plot. There are also a handful of scenes that provide more discernible clues, but the action and dialogue are very good at not giving away too much. At the same time, there is no cheesy use of cinematic special effects or illusions to hide or disguise the actual plot.
Cinematic language, from the interplay of characters in frame and out, to the precise angle of a mirror in a scene can be most telling if you learn to expect it, keep an eye out for it, and interpret it. In the Illusionist, I found the use of such language to be quite precise. it was very well done.
The hilarious bit is in one line where the lead character (Ed Norton) is taking to the Police Inspector (Paul Giamatti). Eisenheim asks, "Are you totally corrupt?" and Inspector Uhl replies, "Not totally, no". It was great.
Regards
Bill
I won't give away any spoilers here, but the cinematic language used in The Illusionist is fascinating. The manner in which the plot is communicated visually, even down to some unusual costuming choices, telegraph the plot to you if you are prepared to receive it. There are, in fact, two scenes, with no dialogue, that disclose the entire plot. There are also a handful of scenes that provide more discernible clues, but the action and dialogue are very good at not giving away too much. At the same time, there is no cheesy use of cinematic special effects or illusions to hide or disguise the actual plot.
Cinematic language, from the interplay of characters in frame and out, to the precise angle of a mirror in a scene can be most telling if you learn to expect it, keep an eye out for it, and interpret it. In the Illusionist, I found the use of such language to be quite precise. it was very well done.
The hilarious bit is in one line where the lead character (Ed Norton) is taking to the Police Inspector (Paul Giamatti). Eisenheim asks, "Are you totally corrupt?" and Inspector Uhl replies, "Not totally, no". It was great.
Regards
Bill
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Face of Fashion --- A Disaster in Photogrpahy
Went to London an dcaught the face of Fashion exhibit at the National Gallery. now, photography exhibits at musuems usually bore me because they are all war shots, suffering shots, screaming shots, or poor naked baby shots. And while I understand the importance and significance of such photographs, there is a limit to the amount of ugliness I will seek out in a museum.
But Face of Fashion sounded promising
God, was I wrong.
First, there were only 6 photographers represented
There weren't more than 50 photos, many very small
There were only 2 decent photos in the lot...one of Tilda Swinton and one of Angelina Jolie
And, Oh yes, THERE WAS NO FASHION
Most of the exhibit was centered around and obsessed with Kate Moss (maybe she funded it). Cocaine Kate is a very uninteresting face, has the anorexic body of a starved 12 year old boy and cannot emote to the camera worth a damn. Corrine Day should find something else to shoot...Kate is over.
Oh yeah...just an FYI ... Nude photos do not constitute FASHION photography. nothing wrong with nudes, but they are not Fashion ... unless the model is wearing a hat!
This was not a fashion photogrpahy exhibit...this was a celebrity photo exhibit. And let's catch them or pose them in unflattering poses, with images of agony on their faces...after all, this IS for a museum.
The exhibit might have been valid as art if it had been titled Celebrities in Bondage or Paqinful Poses or something...but these were not, many of them, fashion models, there was no fashion in the shoe, and the pictures just made the people look ugly, not sensitive, not metaphorical, not interesting...just ugly.
A photo of Justin Timberlake (fad maybe, fashion...NOT!) with a bloody nose and Kevin Federline with a gashed throat just do not cut it as fashion, and not even as the 'faces of fashion'. One might have expected portraits of designers from the title...maybe some beauty and style from such photogrpahers as Helmut Newton or Irving Penn but no, we got to see Kate Moss naked and Justin Timberlake bloody.
the best photos were by Paolo Roversi and his photo of Tilda Swinton was lovely...and fashion concious in that she was wearing a very interesting leather jacket. Unfortunately, he photographs small...his photos were not large enough to reveal interesting details.
So this was a fine way to waste £16 ... 8 each for me and Linda. I hope the National Gallery does something worthwhile with the money.
Bill
But Face of Fashion sounded promising
God, was I wrong.
First, there were only 6 photographers represented
There weren't more than 50 photos, many very small
There were only 2 decent photos in the lot...one of Tilda Swinton and one of Angelina Jolie
And, Oh yes, THERE WAS NO FASHION
Most of the exhibit was centered around and obsessed with Kate Moss (maybe she funded it). Cocaine Kate is a very uninteresting face, has the anorexic body of a starved 12 year old boy and cannot emote to the camera worth a damn. Corrine Day should find something else to shoot...Kate is over.
Oh yeah...just an FYI ... Nude photos do not constitute FASHION photography. nothing wrong with nudes, but they are not Fashion ... unless the model is wearing a hat!
This was not a fashion photogrpahy exhibit...this was a celebrity photo exhibit. And let's catch them or pose them in unflattering poses, with images of agony on their faces...after all, this IS for a museum.
The exhibit might have been valid as art if it had been titled Celebrities in Bondage or Paqinful Poses or something...but these were not, many of them, fashion models, there was no fashion in the shoe, and the pictures just made the people look ugly, not sensitive, not metaphorical, not interesting...just ugly.
A photo of Justin Timberlake (fad maybe, fashion...NOT!) with a bloody nose and Kevin Federline with a gashed throat just do not cut it as fashion, and not even as the 'faces of fashion'. One might have expected portraits of designers from the title...maybe some beauty and style from such photogrpahers as Helmut Newton or Irving Penn but no, we got to see Kate Moss naked and Justin Timberlake bloody.
the best photos were by Paolo Roversi and his photo of Tilda Swinton was lovely...and fashion concious in that she was wearing a very interesting leather jacket. Unfortunately, he photographs small...his photos were not large enough to reveal interesting details.
So this was a fine way to waste £16 ... 8 each for me and Linda. I hope the National Gallery does something worthwhile with the money.
Bill
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Parking as Self Organizing Behaviour
Well Christmas and New Year's are both done now. We had a very nice holiday season which included our son Ian coming to visit and day trips to both Dublin and Limerick.
While shopping around Galway I began to understand why some people complain about the traffic here. They don't REALLY have traffic jams that are much worse than anywhere else in terms of the time they tie you up, but as I mentioned in a previous post, parking can take a while.
However, lately I've begun to think that the populace of Galway have responded to the parking needs of the city in a very self-organized manner. Typically by large scale violations of the law. A few examples will illustrate what I mean.
First, there is Salthill, the suburb I live in. Salthill has a main street, a street lined with restaurants, bars, casinos, shops, banks, and a post office. And on this street, parking is allowed only on one side. The entire road is only wide enough for four vehicles side by side and parking is prohibited on one side via the double yellow line marking common in Europe.
However, this double yellow line is completely ignored. People park on both sides of this street, most often, it seems, to do business in the post office. I suspect the mental gymnastics that occur follow the lines of "I will only be in the post office a few minutes, so parking won't matter".
But another way of looking at this behaviour is from the standpoint of a system which is either random or self-organizing. My thinking goes like this:
The people of the town have to do business in person in the post office
The people no longer walk as much as they did when the PO was built and the road designed
People drive much more now
The PO needs to provide a parking lot
The PO has no parking lot
The road is therefore used as a parking lot to the degree it is required
Parking on both sides does not slow traffic too much
Most people actually ARE done in just a few minutes
So people automatically began to park on the double yellow line
The Garda is sometimes seen in Salthill
A Garda station is approximately 2 blocks from the main street
Sometimes they are seen walking up and down on main street
They are not seen clamping cars parked on the double yellow lines
There seems to be an acceptance of the violations. It is apparently recognized that there is a necessity for the parking but there is no place it can be done. There is a self organized behaviour that emerges and which COULD be resisted by the authorities, but doing so would be hopeless...the number of illegally parked cars probably exceeds the number of clamps available for use.
A second example I noticed this evening. We drove to a restaurant in a shopping centre. There was, by the time we got there, plenty of parking in the 'official' parking lot with its rows of orthogonal spaces across the two lanes of shopping centre traffic. But many parkers had opted to park closer to the restaurant by parking at an angle across a yellow box painted on the road on the side of the roadway next to the restaurant.
These cars were definitely parked illegally, but because of the time of day, they were not causing anyone any trouble. The yellow box was not supposed to be blocked, but at least 15 cars were doing exactly that. They had parked parallel to each other, but at an angle that was convenient, not orthogonal to the curb. These people had self organized to form a convenient and effective solution to parking...it just happened to be illegal.
Some might simply say that people here engage in these illegal, unsanctioned solutions because there is insufficient Garda presence to enforce the rules. but the Garda participate in that they do not clamp such parkers in Salthill (a reaction that would just tie traffic in knots anyway). while they do clamp other offenders in different places.
Rather, I submit, a consensus emerges from the group dynamic in response to the conditions. Consequently, parking patterns emerge as self organizing behaviour, arrived at individually and commonly, organized to accommodate the needs of the parkers and the drivers alike, representing a system that is adapting to the constraints it finds itself under.
Regards
Bill
While shopping around Galway I began to understand why some people complain about the traffic here. They don't REALLY have traffic jams that are much worse than anywhere else in terms of the time they tie you up, but as I mentioned in a previous post, parking can take a while.
However, lately I've begun to think that the populace of Galway have responded to the parking needs of the city in a very self-organized manner. Typically by large scale violations of the law. A few examples will illustrate what I mean.
First, there is Salthill, the suburb I live in. Salthill has a main street, a street lined with restaurants, bars, casinos, shops, banks, and a post office. And on this street, parking is allowed only on one side. The entire road is only wide enough for four vehicles side by side and parking is prohibited on one side via the double yellow line marking common in Europe.
However, this double yellow line is completely ignored. People park on both sides of this street, most often, it seems, to do business in the post office. I suspect the mental gymnastics that occur follow the lines of "I will only be in the post office a few minutes, so parking won't matter".
But another way of looking at this behaviour is from the standpoint of a system which is either random or self-organizing. My thinking goes like this:
The people of the town have to do business in person in the post office
The people no longer walk as much as they did when the PO was built and the road designed
People drive much more now
The PO needs to provide a parking lot
The PO has no parking lot
The road is therefore used as a parking lot to the degree it is required
Parking on both sides does not slow traffic too much
Most people actually ARE done in just a few minutes
So people automatically began to park on the double yellow line
The Garda is sometimes seen in Salthill
A Garda station is approximately 2 blocks from the main street
Sometimes they are seen walking up and down on main street
They are not seen clamping cars parked on the double yellow lines
There seems to be an acceptance of the violations. It is apparently recognized that there is a necessity for the parking but there is no place it can be done. There is a self organized behaviour that emerges and which COULD be resisted by the authorities, but doing so would be hopeless...the number of illegally parked cars probably exceeds the number of clamps available for use.
A second example I noticed this evening. We drove to a restaurant in a shopping centre. There was, by the time we got there, plenty of parking in the 'official' parking lot with its rows of orthogonal spaces across the two lanes of shopping centre traffic. But many parkers had opted to park closer to the restaurant by parking at an angle across a yellow box painted on the road on the side of the roadway next to the restaurant.
These cars were definitely parked illegally, but because of the time of day, they were not causing anyone any trouble. The yellow box was not supposed to be blocked, but at least 15 cars were doing exactly that. They had parked parallel to each other, but at an angle that was convenient, not orthogonal to the curb. These people had self organized to form a convenient and effective solution to parking...it just happened to be illegal.
Some might simply say that people here engage in these illegal, unsanctioned solutions because there is insufficient Garda presence to enforce the rules. but the Garda participate in that they do not clamp such parkers in Salthill (a reaction that would just tie traffic in knots anyway). while they do clamp other offenders in different places.
Rather, I submit, a consensus emerges from the group dynamic in response to the conditions. Consequently, parking patterns emerge as self organizing behaviour, arrived at individually and commonly, organized to accommodate the needs of the parkers and the drivers alike, representing a system that is adapting to the constraints it finds itself under.
Regards
Bill
Monday, November 27, 2006
The Pace of Life in Galway
Well, it's one of my insomnia nights and here I am blogging again. This is not good because I have to catch a train to Dublin in the morning...maybe i'll sleep on the train.
but what I've been thinking about, my brain all awhirl with sleeplessness, is what i am missing at this time of year as we prepare for christmas.
And what i am missing is the slow, langorous, leisurly pace of my life in Dallas at christmas time.
If I hear one more Galwegian decry the hectic pace of life in the US, I may explode. let me make this perfectly clear. You folks living here in Galway lead a tremendously hectic, fast paced, fast talking, confusing life. there is no leisurely pace here. i know...I've tried to do some christmas shopping the last two weeks and I am giving it up
first, let me explain my Christmas time rituals in Dallas. We take a weekend or two around Thanksgiving (this week of the November calendar) and begin to accumulate a few things for a Turkey dinner. We know who's comng to dinner by then, whos cooking, what we'll make, and we have all we need.
At Thanksgiving, contrary to the sitcoms you see, the turkey is perfect, the meal is grand, the relatives are loving and lovely, the friends stop by, and the weather is gorgeous. I cannot recall a bad thanksgiving dinner in the last 30 years...perhaps the dinner rolls were not QUITE DONE when everyone sat down to eat, but that is the most significant issue.
The quiet after dinner period, bellies full of turkey and bloodstreams full of triptophan, are times of speculation, conversation, football watching and football playing. Perhaps a movie in the evening and, of course, leftover turkey sandwiches for dinner.
The next day begins the official christmas shopping season. Which we partake of.
A quiet leisurely drive to the mall, valet parking to avoid the crush. Then the fun begins. A four, maybe six hour saunter around the four floors and four hundred stores available to us for shopping. Just walking the mall from end to end on a single floor can take 90 minutes of slow, contemplative browsing and talking. We solve the world's problems on the way.
We wander around slowly, no hurries. We watch the children's shows with the puppets, the carollers, the kiddie train, the SPCA with their pets. We glance at shop windows never intending to enter...not yet, that would break the spell.
We stop for hot chocolates or coffees (and a christmas cookie, of course). Perhaps we step into a fine italian restaurant and make a reservation for later in the evening. We ooh and ahh over some of the window displays; Victroria's Secret with lovely lingerie clad angels cleverly and oh so effectively mixing eroticism with religion. But we do not enter such a hallowed temple yet...that's for later.
Home theater stores and electronics stores beckon with gadgets and TVs showing sports on 30 channels it seems. The NASCAR store has a huge video wall of a race in Sao Paulo or perhaps Daytona. Maybe we even get to see our own Texas Motor Speedway. the 40,000 people at it might explain why the mall is not as crowded as the news people always predict.
We stop and look over the rail from the third floor at the ice rink on the basement level, nearly 50 feet below. The Zamboni finishes its magical smoothing circuit and the suddenly the children are swirling around the rink widershins, flying in laughing rings around the Christmas tree that rises from the rink to top out above our heads near the roof of the fourth floor. looking up at its apex, we see joggers through the barrel vaulted glass roof of the mall as they trot their way around the rim of the mall roof in the cool autumn air. One of them glances down through the glass and slows to watch the children far below; both parties wave at each other.
The music in the mall at this time of year is phenomenal and we take our time around the musical displays. A small chamber group is playing carols on woodwinds outside a bookstore. A little further down, an animatronic puppet theater is enthralling more children sitting in front of it as a musical version of Dicken's Christmas Carol is played out over an elaborate 45 minutes of story and song...children from 2 to 20 sit on th floor and watch, never moving.
At least three groups of carolers, dressed in Victorian costumes, of course, slowly make their way around the mall perimeters on each floor stopping to sing in rich, but quiet voices. Their timings are coordinated so they never overlap spatially and do not interfere with each other or other dipslays. Pink noise is wafting through the malls PA system, perpetually maintaining a softness and comfortable level to the ambient sound. The carpeted floors and soft uphosltery also serve to moderate the noise of 20,000 people passing through a shopping center larger than Shannon airport.
One whole end of the mall has been given way to a christmas train journey that takes up about 15000 square feet of storefront. The mall management company actually reserves this storefront all year so that it may be used for the ride. in other seasons it is an art gallery or rented to smaller merchants who agree to vacate for the christmas season in return for much lower rents during the year.
Santa, of course, is also near so wishes can be expressed and photographs can be taken. he's a pretty good looking one this year and the children love telling him what they want. he arrived by helicopter on Thankgiving day during the downtown parade, then this morning by helicopter just as the stores were opening.
for us (my wife and I) the bookstores beckon, of course, and we check out the displays in Rizzoli's (The place for photography books in particular) and Brentano's (art books, architecture, and perfect gift books) and Shakepeare Beethoven (they always have the most high brow). On later shopping excursions we will go to a different mall that has a 100,000 square foot Barnes and Noble store in one corner. most of our actual purchases will be made there. It is great for browsing, reading in the overstuffed chairs, and listening to book clubs and speakers or getting into conversations with friends you haven't seen in a year.
finally, after several hours of just looking about and listening and eating and drinking perhaps with a stop for something a bit stronger in the bar of the hotel attached to this mall, we decide to actually do a bit of purchasing. The recon pass is mostly over and we've seen several things we decide to get at the CD/DVD store, the bookstore, a craft shop, and the pen store (something for my business partner who collects pens). The goth clothing store for a gift for a musician friend and a golf present for my brother-in-law from one of the sporting memoribilia stores.
Then it's about dinner time. The sky has darkened over the glass roof, the mall lights are a bit dimmer for the evening, the soft blue lights in the glass rails and floating tree gardens creating a gentle wintry feel without the cold. The restaurant is italian and serves fantastic food on the terrace overlooking the ice rink. There is a great mexican restaurant and an american grill down at rink level, but we enjoy Nicola's best.
finally, we are ready to leave...we pick the car up from the valet (he's been holding it by the curb for us because we are regular customers and i tip well...these guys work hard and deserve it) then head for home. traffic is light on the freeway and we talk about catching a movie first as we pass the cinemas on the way toward the house. We have over 60 screens to choose from in about ten minues distance from the house.
Tomorrow we'll go look at christmas trees. Our favorite lot will be open and set up...they come down from Michigan. we'll wander around the garden center and the tree lot for an hour or so sipping the hot chocolate they give to customers. When we find a tree we'll arrange for them to deliver it on Sunday and set it up in the house. These are the greatest christmas tree sellers we've ever encountered. their trees smell fantastic, fragrances of cedar and pine and douglas fir. my favorite tree lately though is the noble fir and they always have wonderful ones with the soft silvery green needles and the splayed branches. I love the smell too...nobles have a tang most other evergreens don't.
After tree buying it's off to Cotton Patch restaurant for a bit of comfort food in the form of chicken fried steak, cream gravy, black eyed peas and green beans with soft wheat rolls drowned in hot butter and tupelo honey...and a chat with our favorite waiter Zak who in a fevered delirium recently shaved his head, but cannot explain exactly why. we spend about 2 hours enjoying lunch, then back home to knock around the house and get the living room ready for the tree.
Once the tree is up we'll take weeks to decorate it, a little at a time each evening. Linda always embroiders a few new ornaments each year using plastic canvas and sparkling yarn. She works on one for a couple of nights then pops it on the tree. After that it becomes one more in the collection. some of them go to family as gifts as well.
We'll string out what lights we have, then go buy several replacement strings because it makes no sense to spend our time trying to find the one burned out bulb when a new string of 100 or 200 costs $2.
I'll set up the lights in the yard (we drape lights over the waterfall at the end of our pool) as well and then we'll spend a few evenings driving around the neighborhoods and city centers looking at lights. The gated communities with their perfectly orderly identical and supremely manicured decorations...the middle class neighborhoods with much more variety like the korean christmas decorations next to the kwansa house, and the guy who puts out ten thousand more lights than anyone else, but is willing to climb on anyone's roof to help set up their lights just because he loves christmas.
The older neighborhoods go all out with an absolute riot of styles, colors ,ideas, and traditions...hispanic neighborhoods are the most beautiful in many ways. And the people who have done their houses up always sit on their porches long into the evening, chatting, sometimes singing carols and having big block parties with barbeques and huge meals.
Somewhere in december we take a few afternoons off to go out to malls separately and pick up items we have seen that we know each other will like. We take our time and accumulate our presents slowly under our tree, enjoying the experience of shopping, seeing store people we know, running into friends and chatting for a while over at starbucks or maybe hooking up for dinner. recently I have begun to have most off my presents wrapped by the charity tables in the malls. its a good way to contribute to their causes and I am a lousy wrapper. My packages look oh so much neater now. but I always wind up wrapping several items myself on Christmas eve.
Electronic shopping allows a lot of our gifts to be ordered and wrapped and shipped without having to travel to the post office, but there is always a day when we must go there and stand in line a while...usually chatting with strangers for 5 or 10 minutes until its our turn. The US post office always puts on extra staff and arranges to make it as easy as possible to get the mailings done quickly...although it pays to know WHICH of the five post offices nearby are the most efficient ones. i like to finish up those afternoons with a lunch of fried chicken gizzards...more comfort food and best when the air has finally chilled to about 6 degrees celcius a week before christmas. i get a mess of gizzards to go then take them over to starbucks at barnes and noble and eat them with double espressos or hot chocolate and several magazines or newspapers from around the world...pure heaven.
Of course there are the parties to go to , but we take those casually and most poeple try to meet up for small dinners rather than big parties.
so our pace of life in Dallas at christmas is slow and deliberate. we noticed that the same thing applied in San Jose although on a slightly smaller scale.
here though, I was astounded to get caught in terrible traffic trying to get into city center yesterday, then there is no place to park, i had to go all the way to the top deck of the MCP and walk back down a flight of metal steps in the biting wind ... valet parking would be a really good idea.
And we lost so much time getting there that we had only a couple of hours before things closed. Not much stays open to 11.30 around here as in Dallas at Christmas. the streets were filled with people rushing headlong up and down, the stores were frightfully crowded, very few sales people to help, and quite hot with all the bodies pressed in.
everyone was rushed and harried, you had to literally grab someone to get any attention (tried desperately to buy a new pair of shoes and wound up in some very strange discussion where this woman could only tell me that all shoes in ireland were smaller than US shoes...i still am not sure i know what she meant, but she was quite annoyed with me for asking for 48's.
What with having to go not only to shopping street, but to the Woodies DIY, the ARGOS (49 working days for delivery of some flatpack wardrobes seems outrageous) then to the Wellpark Centre to check out something at the Sony Centre, we spent a huge amount of our time burning petrol in long traffic jams.
My wife Linda sums it up about the roads here by saying that there is no excuse for a western civilized country to not have high speed limited access motorways between at least its three major cities. She is right...spend the few billion euro, hire the workers from anywhere you can find them, use the latest, fastest, most sophisticated technology, build the roads in 5 years, and just get it done...or the CELTIC TIGER will die of starvation, caught in a snare of its own making...GOVERNMENTS SHOULD BUILD ROADS...from the time of Rome this has been the key to prosperity. The US has the economy it has today because of the interstate highway system.
So don't talk to me about the pace of life in the US...we have a slow, quiet, peaceful pace of life in Dallas (and its even slower in Austin and San Antonio). The ludicrous situations you see in American TV shows and movies are crafted to counterpoint the reality, to make us laugh in relief because we know our lives are not so hectic and thereby we are made grateful for the calmness we have. Those idiots on TV, the overweight middle aged guys with imporbably beautiful wives struggling through ridiculous scenarios and situations are exactly NOT us. for which we give thanks at this time of year :)
But here I have to dodge people flying headlong on their errands because they have so much effort to expend to get from errand to errand and so little time left in each day to do them. Do you ever wonder how much time people in this town waste trying to park a car? Not only the slow creep LOOKING for the spot, but the in and out and in and out routine to get the car into the spot? It adds up to a significant portion of life that could be spent enjoying the flowers. First thing to do, ANGLE the parking spaces...you have a positive fetish about one way systems here anyway, so why not angle the spaces in the right direction. second thing...re-mark the spaces to match the emerging average car size...SUVs and Mercedes sedans do NOT fit the old spaces...the populace has voted with its euros...they LIKE bigger cars, they BUY bigger cars...make it easier for them to PARK bigger cars...it translates into more time they spend in the shops BUYING stuff than in the car park trying to park.
it is time to rebuild Galway to make it convenient for its citizens. A convenient city prospers because it provides more opportunity for commerce to flow, for services to emerge, and for efficiencies to appear...cities are machines and systems for maximizing the prosperity of residents; they should be lubricated with convenience.
So that is what I am missing here in Galway at Christmas...my peaceful leisurely pace of life in Dallas around this time of year. We're going to take a few days to go to London for some quiet shopping too...now that's a place where you can really relax and take your time about shopping.
regards
Bill
but what I've been thinking about, my brain all awhirl with sleeplessness, is what i am missing at this time of year as we prepare for christmas.
And what i am missing is the slow, langorous, leisurly pace of my life in Dallas at christmas time.
If I hear one more Galwegian decry the hectic pace of life in the US, I may explode. let me make this perfectly clear. You folks living here in Galway lead a tremendously hectic, fast paced, fast talking, confusing life. there is no leisurely pace here. i know...I've tried to do some christmas shopping the last two weeks and I am giving it up
first, let me explain my Christmas time rituals in Dallas. We take a weekend or two around Thanksgiving (this week of the November calendar) and begin to accumulate a few things for a Turkey dinner. We know who's comng to dinner by then, whos cooking, what we'll make, and we have all we need.
At Thanksgiving, contrary to the sitcoms you see, the turkey is perfect, the meal is grand, the relatives are loving and lovely, the friends stop by, and the weather is gorgeous. I cannot recall a bad thanksgiving dinner in the last 30 years...perhaps the dinner rolls were not QUITE DONE when everyone sat down to eat, but that is the most significant issue.
The quiet after dinner period, bellies full of turkey and bloodstreams full of triptophan, are times of speculation, conversation, football watching and football playing. Perhaps a movie in the evening and, of course, leftover turkey sandwiches for dinner.
The next day begins the official christmas shopping season. Which we partake of.
A quiet leisurely drive to the mall, valet parking to avoid the crush. Then the fun begins. A four, maybe six hour saunter around the four floors and four hundred stores available to us for shopping. Just walking the mall from end to end on a single floor can take 90 minutes of slow, contemplative browsing and talking. We solve the world's problems on the way.
We wander around slowly, no hurries. We watch the children's shows with the puppets, the carollers, the kiddie train, the SPCA with their pets. We glance at shop windows never intending to enter...not yet, that would break the spell.
We stop for hot chocolates or coffees (and a christmas cookie, of course). Perhaps we step into a fine italian restaurant and make a reservation for later in the evening. We ooh and ahh over some of the window displays; Victroria's Secret with lovely lingerie clad angels cleverly and oh so effectively mixing eroticism with religion. But we do not enter such a hallowed temple yet...that's for later.
Home theater stores and electronics stores beckon with gadgets and TVs showing sports on 30 channels it seems. The NASCAR store has a huge video wall of a race in Sao Paulo or perhaps Daytona. Maybe we even get to see our own Texas Motor Speedway. the 40,000 people at it might explain why the mall is not as crowded as the news people always predict.
We stop and look over the rail from the third floor at the ice rink on the basement level, nearly 50 feet below. The Zamboni finishes its magical smoothing circuit and the suddenly the children are swirling around the rink widershins, flying in laughing rings around the Christmas tree that rises from the rink to top out above our heads near the roof of the fourth floor. looking up at its apex, we see joggers through the barrel vaulted glass roof of the mall as they trot their way around the rim of the mall roof in the cool autumn air. One of them glances down through the glass and slows to watch the children far below; both parties wave at each other.
The music in the mall at this time of year is phenomenal and we take our time around the musical displays. A small chamber group is playing carols on woodwinds outside a bookstore. A little further down, an animatronic puppet theater is enthralling more children sitting in front of it as a musical version of Dicken's Christmas Carol is played out over an elaborate 45 minutes of story and song...children from 2 to 20 sit on th floor and watch, never moving.
At least three groups of carolers, dressed in Victorian costumes, of course, slowly make their way around the mall perimeters on each floor stopping to sing in rich, but quiet voices. Their timings are coordinated so they never overlap spatially and do not interfere with each other or other dipslays. Pink noise is wafting through the malls PA system, perpetually maintaining a softness and comfortable level to the ambient sound. The carpeted floors and soft uphosltery also serve to moderate the noise of 20,000 people passing through a shopping center larger than Shannon airport.
One whole end of the mall has been given way to a christmas train journey that takes up about 15000 square feet of storefront. The mall management company actually reserves this storefront all year so that it may be used for the ride. in other seasons it is an art gallery or rented to smaller merchants who agree to vacate for the christmas season in return for much lower rents during the year.
Santa, of course, is also near so wishes can be expressed and photographs can be taken. he's a pretty good looking one this year and the children love telling him what they want. he arrived by helicopter on Thankgiving day during the downtown parade, then this morning by helicopter just as the stores were opening.
for us (my wife and I) the bookstores beckon, of course, and we check out the displays in Rizzoli's (The place for photography books in particular) and Brentano's (art books, architecture, and perfect gift books) and Shakepeare Beethoven (they always have the most high brow). On later shopping excursions we will go to a different mall that has a 100,000 square foot Barnes and Noble store in one corner. most of our actual purchases will be made there. It is great for browsing, reading in the overstuffed chairs, and listening to book clubs and speakers or getting into conversations with friends you haven't seen in a year.
finally, after several hours of just looking about and listening and eating and drinking perhaps with a stop for something a bit stronger in the bar of the hotel attached to this mall, we decide to actually do a bit of purchasing. The recon pass is mostly over and we've seen several things we decide to get at the CD/DVD store, the bookstore, a craft shop, and the pen store (something for my business partner who collects pens). The goth clothing store for a gift for a musician friend and a golf present for my brother-in-law from one of the sporting memoribilia stores.
Then it's about dinner time. The sky has darkened over the glass roof, the mall lights are a bit dimmer for the evening, the soft blue lights in the glass rails and floating tree gardens creating a gentle wintry feel without the cold. The restaurant is italian and serves fantastic food on the terrace overlooking the ice rink. There is a great mexican restaurant and an american grill down at rink level, but we enjoy Nicola's best.
finally, we are ready to leave...we pick the car up from the valet (he's been holding it by the curb for us because we are regular customers and i tip well...these guys work hard and deserve it) then head for home. traffic is light on the freeway and we talk about catching a movie first as we pass the cinemas on the way toward the house. We have over 60 screens to choose from in about ten minues distance from the house.
Tomorrow we'll go look at christmas trees. Our favorite lot will be open and set up...they come down from Michigan. we'll wander around the garden center and the tree lot for an hour or so sipping the hot chocolate they give to customers. When we find a tree we'll arrange for them to deliver it on Sunday and set it up in the house. These are the greatest christmas tree sellers we've ever encountered. their trees smell fantastic, fragrances of cedar and pine and douglas fir. my favorite tree lately though is the noble fir and they always have wonderful ones with the soft silvery green needles and the splayed branches. I love the smell too...nobles have a tang most other evergreens don't.
After tree buying it's off to Cotton Patch restaurant for a bit of comfort food in the form of chicken fried steak, cream gravy, black eyed peas and green beans with soft wheat rolls drowned in hot butter and tupelo honey...and a chat with our favorite waiter Zak who in a fevered delirium recently shaved his head, but cannot explain exactly why. we spend about 2 hours enjoying lunch, then back home to knock around the house and get the living room ready for the tree.
Once the tree is up we'll take weeks to decorate it, a little at a time each evening. Linda always embroiders a few new ornaments each year using plastic canvas and sparkling yarn. She works on one for a couple of nights then pops it on the tree. After that it becomes one more in the collection. some of them go to family as gifts as well.
We'll string out what lights we have, then go buy several replacement strings because it makes no sense to spend our time trying to find the one burned out bulb when a new string of 100 or 200 costs $2.
I'll set up the lights in the yard (we drape lights over the waterfall at the end of our pool) as well and then we'll spend a few evenings driving around the neighborhoods and city centers looking at lights. The gated communities with their perfectly orderly identical and supremely manicured decorations...the middle class neighborhoods with much more variety like the korean christmas decorations next to the kwansa house, and the guy who puts out ten thousand more lights than anyone else, but is willing to climb on anyone's roof to help set up their lights just because he loves christmas.
The older neighborhoods go all out with an absolute riot of styles, colors ,ideas, and traditions...hispanic neighborhoods are the most beautiful in many ways. And the people who have done their houses up always sit on their porches long into the evening, chatting, sometimes singing carols and having big block parties with barbeques and huge meals.
Somewhere in december we take a few afternoons off to go out to malls separately and pick up items we have seen that we know each other will like. We take our time and accumulate our presents slowly under our tree, enjoying the experience of shopping, seeing store people we know, running into friends and chatting for a while over at starbucks or maybe hooking up for dinner. recently I have begun to have most off my presents wrapped by the charity tables in the malls. its a good way to contribute to their causes and I am a lousy wrapper. My packages look oh so much neater now. but I always wind up wrapping several items myself on Christmas eve.
Electronic shopping allows a lot of our gifts to be ordered and wrapped and shipped without having to travel to the post office, but there is always a day when we must go there and stand in line a while...usually chatting with strangers for 5 or 10 minutes until its our turn. The US post office always puts on extra staff and arranges to make it as easy as possible to get the mailings done quickly...although it pays to know WHICH of the five post offices nearby are the most efficient ones. i like to finish up those afternoons with a lunch of fried chicken gizzards...more comfort food and best when the air has finally chilled to about 6 degrees celcius a week before christmas. i get a mess of gizzards to go then take them over to starbucks at barnes and noble and eat them with double espressos or hot chocolate and several magazines or newspapers from around the world...pure heaven.
Of course there are the parties to go to , but we take those casually and most poeple try to meet up for small dinners rather than big parties.
so our pace of life in Dallas at christmas is slow and deliberate. we noticed that the same thing applied in San Jose although on a slightly smaller scale.
here though, I was astounded to get caught in terrible traffic trying to get into city center yesterday, then there is no place to park, i had to go all the way to the top deck of the MCP and walk back down a flight of metal steps in the biting wind ... valet parking would be a really good idea.
And we lost so much time getting there that we had only a couple of hours before things closed. Not much stays open to 11.30 around here as in Dallas at Christmas. the streets were filled with people rushing headlong up and down, the stores were frightfully crowded, very few sales people to help, and quite hot with all the bodies pressed in.
everyone was rushed and harried, you had to literally grab someone to get any attention (tried desperately to buy a new pair of shoes and wound up in some very strange discussion where this woman could only tell me that all shoes in ireland were smaller than US shoes...i still am not sure i know what she meant, but she was quite annoyed with me for asking for 48's.
What with having to go not only to shopping street, but to the Woodies DIY, the ARGOS (49 working days for delivery of some flatpack wardrobes seems outrageous) then to the Wellpark Centre to check out something at the Sony Centre, we spent a huge amount of our time burning petrol in long traffic jams.
My wife Linda sums it up about the roads here by saying that there is no excuse for a western civilized country to not have high speed limited access motorways between at least its three major cities. She is right...spend the few billion euro, hire the workers from anywhere you can find them, use the latest, fastest, most sophisticated technology, build the roads in 5 years, and just get it done...or the CELTIC TIGER will die of starvation, caught in a snare of its own making...GOVERNMENTS SHOULD BUILD ROADS...from the time of Rome this has been the key to prosperity. The US has the economy it has today because of the interstate highway system.
So don't talk to me about the pace of life in the US...we have a slow, quiet, peaceful pace of life in Dallas (and its even slower in Austin and San Antonio). The ludicrous situations you see in American TV shows and movies are crafted to counterpoint the reality, to make us laugh in relief because we know our lives are not so hectic and thereby we are made grateful for the calmness we have. Those idiots on TV, the overweight middle aged guys with imporbably beautiful wives struggling through ridiculous scenarios and situations are exactly NOT us. for which we give thanks at this time of year :)
But here I have to dodge people flying headlong on their errands because they have so much effort to expend to get from errand to errand and so little time left in each day to do them. Do you ever wonder how much time people in this town waste trying to park a car? Not only the slow creep LOOKING for the spot, but the in and out and in and out routine to get the car into the spot? It adds up to a significant portion of life that could be spent enjoying the flowers. First thing to do, ANGLE the parking spaces...you have a positive fetish about one way systems here anyway, so why not angle the spaces in the right direction. second thing...re-mark the spaces to match the emerging average car size...SUVs and Mercedes sedans do NOT fit the old spaces...the populace has voted with its euros...they LIKE bigger cars, they BUY bigger cars...make it easier for them to PARK bigger cars...it translates into more time they spend in the shops BUYING stuff than in the car park trying to park.
it is time to rebuild Galway to make it convenient for its citizens. A convenient city prospers because it provides more opportunity for commerce to flow, for services to emerge, and for efficiencies to appear...cities are machines and systems for maximizing the prosperity of residents; they should be lubricated with convenience.
So that is what I am missing here in Galway at Christmas...my peaceful leisurely pace of life in Dallas around this time of year. We're going to take a few days to go to London for some quiet shopping too...now that's a place where you can really relax and take your time about shopping.
regards
Bill
Sunday, November 19, 2006
The Latest Bond
Went to see Casino Royale today
first -- VERY good movie
second -- VERY long movie -- 2:45 -- got my money's worth
third -- He still doesn't look like BOND! -- He's not suave enough, he's not sophisticated enough, he's got the wrong color hair, and his eyes are too close together. My wife says he's not pretty enough.
All that said, the story was pretty good, long enough to develop the primary tenets of the book, and gives insight into the origin of the bond character
Of course, the continuity is destroyed.
The movie is set in 2006 ... but James becomes a 00 at the begining of the film...and Judi Dench is already M.
The producers apparently plan on rebooting the franchise ... so maybe we will shortly see a new version of Dr. No or Thunderball (apparently already in planning).
Daniel Craig played Bond fairly well ... he is a good actor. However, he just does not look right...in the way that Roger Moore never looked right and even George Lazenby looked more Bondly (is that a word? ... it is, now.) connery remains the one closet to the look of richard Conte who inspired Casino Royale's cover.
We were missing a few characters that should be in every Bond film, but aside from that, it was a good serious adaptation of the book...modernized, of course, but not overly divergent from the novel.
Amazing to think the Bond franchise has gone on now for 53 years...and the stories can still be interesting and immensely enjoyable.
bill
first -- VERY good movie
second -- VERY long movie -- 2:45 -- got my money's worth
third -- He still doesn't look like BOND! -- He's not suave enough, he's not sophisticated enough, he's got the wrong color hair, and his eyes are too close together. My wife says he's not pretty enough.
All that said, the story was pretty good, long enough to develop the primary tenets of the book, and gives insight into the origin of the bond character
Of course, the continuity is destroyed.
The movie is set in 2006 ... but James becomes a 00 at the begining of the film...and Judi Dench is already M.
The producers apparently plan on rebooting the franchise ... so maybe we will shortly see a new version of Dr. No or Thunderball (apparently already in planning).
Daniel Craig played Bond fairly well ... he is a good actor. However, he just does not look right...in the way that Roger Moore never looked right and even George Lazenby looked more Bondly (is that a word? ... it is, now.) connery remains the one closet to the look of richard Conte who inspired Casino Royale's cover.
We were missing a few characters that should be in every Bond film, but aside from that, it was a good serious adaptation of the book...modernized, of course, but not overly divergent from the novel.
Amazing to think the Bond franchise has gone on now for 53 years...and the stories can still be interesting and immensely enjoyable.
bill
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
LIFT Conference (2006) -- Bruce Sterling (2006)
Fascinating 30 minute speech by Bruce Sterling on a future about 30 years away where the world is filled with blogjects and things he calls spimes. I think it's closer than that.
| |
| Bruce Sterling is a writer and visionary. He speaks about "spimes and the future of artifacts". | |
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Issues of assessment
I had a very interesting day today shopping around for some stuff and it suddenly made me think of a very serious research area we need to look into here at DERI.
Looking back over today's adventures I realized that about 85% of the time, when I asked a question of a sales or service person here in Galway, the first answer I was given was incorrect.
These questions ranged from "is the item I ordered from Argos ready for pickup?" to "Do you have that in stock?", to "How many potato skins come in a small order?"
These were completely mundane questions and the sort of questions you would expect clerks, waiters, and service persons to know. However, in virtually every case, the FIRST answer given was incorrect. Analysis later (and some careful questioning of these folks) revealed that, largely, this was because they wanted to impart information, they wanted to be helpful, and in most case honestly believed the first answer was correct and were surprised to discover they were wrong. In one case the clerk was quoting a computer generated report and IT was wrong.
As I thought about this I suddenly realized that, if this is a cutltural phenomenon, it could be very important for issues of elearning, particularly assessment. In any culture where accuracy is sacrificed to answers, assessment of the efficacy of an elearning regime may need to take that into account to be effective and to properly reflect the state of the student.
So one very interesting research project would be to ask and answer the question,"How often is the FIRST answer to factual questions correct in a given culture/country/region?" Does it vary significantly with culture? Does it vary enough that it needs to be adjusted for in eLearning assessment strategies? Is this one more area where systems need to be contextually aware and make semantically powered adaptations?
Thoughts on this?
Bill
Looking back over today's adventures I realized that about 85% of the time, when I asked a question of a sales or service person here in Galway, the first answer I was given was incorrect.
These questions ranged from "is the item I ordered from Argos ready for pickup?" to "Do you have that in stock?", to "How many potato skins come in a small order?"
These were completely mundane questions and the sort of questions you would expect clerks, waiters, and service persons to know. However, in virtually every case, the FIRST answer given was incorrect. Analysis later (and some careful questioning of these folks) revealed that, largely, this was because they wanted to impart information, they wanted to be helpful, and in most case honestly believed the first answer was correct and were surprised to discover they were wrong. In one case the clerk was quoting a computer generated report and IT was wrong.
As I thought about this I suddenly realized that, if this is a cutltural phenomenon, it could be very important for issues of elearning, particularly assessment. In any culture where accuracy is sacrificed to answers, assessment of the efficacy of an elearning regime may need to take that into account to be effective and to properly reflect the state of the student.
So one very interesting research project would be to ask and answer the question,"How often is the FIRST answer to factual questions correct in a given culture/country/region?" Does it vary significantly with culture? Does it vary enough that it needs to be adjusted for in eLearning assessment strategies? Is this one more area where systems need to be contextually aware and make semantically powered adaptations?
Thoughts on this?
Bill
Monday, July 17, 2006
Superman Returns
So here I am, hanging out in Galway
It's been a busy month here, but the new job is working out great and I have an apartment, (which overlooks Rusheen Bay, by the way and is exquisite) and I have settled in almost completely. Of course, I still have to go back to San Jose and finish crating and freighting.
But today I am insomiac, it's 3.30 am, and it's been a quiet, uncomplicated Sunday. So I'm writing this.
This afternoon I went out to see Superman Returns.
WOW. This is one of the best movies I have seen this year. The story is solid, the acting is excellent and Kevin Spacey makes a scary Lex Luthor.
But mostly I was impressed with the serious way the film dealt with what it means to be Superman. And the fact that the writers and director did not cop out and take the predictable characterizations and plot lines.
So, when characters act in unexpected ways and the plot develops along lines that are not as stagnantly predictable as most films these days, I am impressed.
I'm not sure I care for Routh in the part, however. His acting is fine but he looks odd for Superman...he has features that are too heavy and sharp. However, he is reminsicent of Chris Reeve and that seems to have been a plus for him.
So I definitely recommend seeing this film..it is solid and outstanding.
On other fronts, Galway is very beautiful. Recently the weather has been sunny and fair and warm. I'm learning where things are and what's available. Finally got the right bed in the apartment. I'm finding costs a bit higher than Dallas, but lower than San Jose.
Running the gauntlet of officaldom has been the biggest challenge...trying to get work permit, bank account, debit card, pin for debit card (was sent to california by mistake) and online access (pin also sent to california) has been the biggest frustration, but those are finally sorting themselves out. I await one more magic number from the formal officialdom of Ireland and then I think I am completely installed.
Even the Irish joke about how long things take in Ireland and how everything takes longer than you expect. The 4pm movie today didn't start the projector until 4.15. But all things come to those who wait.
From a standpoint of work, I am enjoying the challenge of setting up and growing our eLearnign Cluster. We have openings for several post and pre docs and we have some interesting labs being set up to facilitate research. These include a computer/human interface lab, a mobile and multi modal device lab and potentially a psychology lab to study why people do not jump at elearning opportunities. I already have an ePedagogy, Semantic infrastrucutres, development , and business analysis lab set up and staffed.
My goal is to really grow our cluster into one that suports a wide variety of elearning research initiatives which a robust de velopment group transforms into deliverable technologies. So far, I've met with nothing but support from everyone here.
Take care everyone...i'll writed later
bill
It's been a busy month here, but the new job is working out great and I have an apartment, (which overlooks Rusheen Bay, by the way and is exquisite) and I have settled in almost completely. Of course, I still have to go back to San Jose and finish crating and freighting.
But today I am insomiac, it's 3.30 am, and it's been a quiet, uncomplicated Sunday. So I'm writing this.
This afternoon I went out to see Superman Returns.
WOW. This is one of the best movies I have seen this year. The story is solid, the acting is excellent and Kevin Spacey makes a scary Lex Luthor.
But mostly I was impressed with the serious way the film dealt with what it means to be Superman. And the fact that the writers and director did not cop out and take the predictable characterizations and plot lines.
So, when characters act in unexpected ways and the plot develops along lines that are not as stagnantly predictable as most films these days, I am impressed.
I'm not sure I care for Routh in the part, however. His acting is fine but he looks odd for Superman...he has features that are too heavy and sharp. However, he is reminsicent of Chris Reeve and that seems to have been a plus for him.
So I definitely recommend seeing this film..it is solid and outstanding.
On other fronts, Galway is very beautiful. Recently the weather has been sunny and fair and warm. I'm learning where things are and what's available. Finally got the right bed in the apartment. I'm finding costs a bit higher than Dallas, but lower than San Jose.
Running the gauntlet of officaldom has been the biggest challenge...trying to get work permit, bank account, debit card, pin for debit card (was sent to california by mistake) and online access (pin also sent to california) has been the biggest frustration, but those are finally sorting themselves out. I await one more magic number from the formal officialdom of Ireland and then I think I am completely installed.
Even the Irish joke about how long things take in Ireland and how everything takes longer than you expect. The 4pm movie today didn't start the projector until 4.15. But all things come to those who wait.
From a standpoint of work, I am enjoying the challenge of setting up and growing our eLearnign Cluster. We have openings for several post and pre docs and we have some interesting labs being set up to facilitate research. These include a computer/human interface lab, a mobile and multi modal device lab and potentially a psychology lab to study why people do not jump at elearning opportunities. I already have an ePedagogy, Semantic infrastrucutres, development , and business analysis lab set up and staffed.
My goal is to really grow our cluster into one that suports a wide variety of elearning research initiatives which a robust de velopment group transforms into deliverable technologies. So far, I've met with nothing but support from everyone here.
Take care everyone...i'll writed later
bill
Monday, June 19, 2006
Designer Babies will be perfect...won't they?
Sorry for the month and a half delay...recovering from the pneumonia just left me with little energy until now
I'm at Heathrow waiting on a plane. Watching a SKY news report on whether we can expect designer babies soon.
My gut reaction is yes, of course we will have this ability soon. The next question is, of course, what would you design in?
The assumption is always that babies will be designed with perfect health, eyesite, hearing, optimal height for high powered careers, high intelligence, and a good football scholarship.
But wait...
Assume for a moment you are a soon to be pregnant couple. And either your country has been or will soon be at war for a long time...you assume 20 plus years...or you are afraid that in 10 years a new 10 year war will begin. Certainly in 1979 people legitimatley predicted we would be at war in the mid east within 2 decades and they were correct.
Perhaps your country has mandatory military service for healthy adults and that service is NOT a safe tour...very high casualty rates.
So you want to design in a few flaws:
poor enough eyesight to avoid the airforce
flat enough feet to avoid the infantry
a propensity for motion sickness that disqualifies your child for shipboard duty
Maybe not QUITE so tall and hefty and strong
A weak abdominal muscle which can herniate easily under extremes of stress
Mild chronic anemia to make them just a bit too weak for duty
Many such conditions are correctable, but correction requirements could disqualify your child from service...making them safer.
Would you spoof the system in such a way? Would your doctor?
is it ethical? more or less so than to order up a perfect child? Do you tell your child what you did? When?
Sometimes the obvious assumptions have unintended consequences and people in the real world make what seem to be unusual uses of technology...uses we technologists seldom see on the horizon.
Thoughts and comments?
I'm at Heathrow waiting on a plane. Watching a SKY news report on whether we can expect designer babies soon.
My gut reaction is yes, of course we will have this ability soon. The next question is, of course, what would you design in?
The assumption is always that babies will be designed with perfect health, eyesite, hearing, optimal height for high powered careers, high intelligence, and a good football scholarship.
But wait...
Assume for a moment you are a soon to be pregnant couple. And either your country has been or will soon be at war for a long time...you assume 20 plus years...or you are afraid that in 10 years a new 10 year war will begin. Certainly in 1979 people legitimatley predicted we would be at war in the mid east within 2 decades and they were correct.
Perhaps your country has mandatory military service for healthy adults and that service is NOT a safe tour...very high casualty rates.
So you want to design in a few flaws:
poor enough eyesight to avoid the airforce
flat enough feet to avoid the infantry
a propensity for motion sickness that disqualifies your child for shipboard duty
Maybe not QUITE so tall and hefty and strong
A weak abdominal muscle which can herniate easily under extremes of stress
Mild chronic anemia to make them just a bit too weak for duty
Many such conditions are correctable, but correction requirements could disqualify your child from service...making them safer.
Would you spoof the system in such a way? Would your doctor?
is it ethical? more or less so than to order up a perfect child? Do you tell your child what you did? When?
Sometimes the obvious assumptions have unintended consequences and people in the real world make what seem to be unusual uses of technology...uses we technologists seldom see on the horizon.
Thoughts and comments?
Monday, May 08, 2006
Whoa Dude? How'd I wake in Hospital?
What a bizarre two weeeks
- Went to Galway. Great meetings, great people. Felt great all dat friday as I wandered Galway looking at shops and such.
- boarded for Dublin...no worries
- Laid over in Dublin for a shot time, then boarded for the US
- Laid over in CHicago for 5 hours. took shower,had dinner, felt great
- boarded for SJC
- 3/4 through the filght I start feeling like I'm being buzzed or something, then less and less well, then really sick
- Land, stagger, barely able to breathe, off the plane and into car home
- Chills, fever of 102.3 (44.7 to the world citizens aout there), nausea, the works!
- Clears by the end of the firrst full 24 hours
- Can't to sleep as hour after hour pain builds in right lobe of back
- Spend all day Monday trying to get ready for AOL visit
- Cancel visit at 10am...i am too sick
- pain clears at 12noon...I have rescheduled for wed just in case however
- Walk to McDonald's with my wife fir sime errands, exercise, and lunch
- Start getting worse on way back
- Can't breathe and am in intense pain by 5pm
- Head for emergency roon at 5
- Have prelim diagnosis of pneumonnia by 10pm and am admitted by 12
- Have been here since May 1...feeling better
Two tired for rest of story right now...will blog more tomorrow
Bill
Friday, April 07, 2006
Been a busy month
Let's see, what's been going on.
Came down with a terrible two week cold around the middle of March...just in time for my meeting with IBM.
Found some really interesting consulting to do. It dovetails nicely with the FrankenFilm concept. Can't say much about it yet, but keep an eye on the FrankenFilm site; new developments will most likely show up there.
Had a wonderful time visiting IBM's Alamden Research Center to present thoughts on self adapting content and the future of computing surfaces. I am becoming more and more interested in these ideas I am formng about new computing surfaces...beyond desktops and tablets.
Will be going off to Galway again soon to talk to the folks at DERI. That is a very interesting group and they are exploring some of the most fascinating semantic web ideas out there.
I've included a photo Gavin Mckenzie found of a bunch of us at the Intl Semantic Web Conference we attended last year...otherwise entitled Geeks!
Gavin on the left in the rear, me on the right, everyone else were folks gathered around a powerpoint we all shared...geeks indeed!
So, a busy month!
Got through my patent submission and did some more work on FrankenFilm but it needs more work before it is ready.
Need to get patent work on it finished soon too.
Guess I have to do taxes soon...getting close to deadline time.
That's it for the moment. Been raining cats and dogs here in San Jose, but that's supposed to clear up by mid April. Hope so, I didn't move out here for the rain!
Bill
Came down with a terrible two week cold around the middle of March...just in time for my meeting with IBM.
Found some really interesting consulting to do. It dovetails nicely with the FrankenFilm concept. Can't say much about it yet, but keep an eye on the FrankenFilm site; new developments will most likely show up there.
Had a wonderful time visiting IBM's Alamden Research Center to present thoughts on self adapting content and the future of computing surfaces. I am becoming more and more interested in these ideas I am formng about new computing surfaces...beyond desktops and tablets.
Will be going off to Galway again soon to talk to the folks at DERI. That is a very interesting group and they are exploring some of the most fascinating semantic web ideas out there.
I've included a photo Gavin Mckenzie found of a bunch of us at the Intl Semantic Web Conference we attended last year...otherwise entitled Geeks!
Gavin on the left in the rear, me on the right, everyone else were folks gathered around a powerpoint we all shared...geeks indeed!
So, a busy month!
Got through my patent submission and did some more work on FrankenFilm but it needs more work before it is ready.
Need to get patent work on it finished soon too.
Guess I have to do taxes soon...getting close to deadline time.
That's it for the moment. Been raining cats and dogs here in San Jose, but that's supposed to clear up by mid April. Hope so, I didn't move out here for the rain!
Bill
Monday, March 06, 2006
The Mother Paradox - A Resolution
I haven't seen this explaination before, so I thought I would submit it here.
The Mother or Grandfather paradox is a classic when discussing Time Travel scenarios. Essentially it goes:
If a time traveller goes back in time and kills his mother before he was born then you have a paradox...he wasn't born so he can't have gone back in time to do the killing in which case he was born and did in which case he wasn't and didn't, etc, etc
But the classic statement of the paradox ignores an interpretation of quantum physics, namely Wheeler's Many Worlds Hypothesis.
If the time traveller DOES kill his mother, then he creates a new world, a new universe in which he exists having crossed over from the universe in which he never existed. The paradox is resolved by a simple sideways shuffle. After the killing, he resides in a universe in which he exists, but in which he never did exist.
The beauty of it is that this gets around cosmic censorship while still observing it. No, you cannot have time travel in a manner which creates paradoxes. cosmic censorship sees to that. So you have to move into a universe in which your presence does not create a paradox. With an infinite number of them to choose from, not a problem.
Regards
Bill
The Mother or Grandfather paradox is a classic when discussing Time Travel scenarios. Essentially it goes:
If a time traveller goes back in time and kills his mother before he was born then you have a paradox...he wasn't born so he can't have gone back in time to do the killing in which case he was born and did in which case he wasn't and didn't, etc, etc
But the classic statement of the paradox ignores an interpretation of quantum physics, namely Wheeler's Many Worlds Hypothesis.
If the time traveller DOES kill his mother, then he creates a new world, a new universe in which he exists having crossed over from the universe in which he never existed. The paradox is resolved by a simple sideways shuffle. After the killing, he resides in a universe in which he exists, but in which he never did exist.
The beauty of it is that this gets around cosmic censorship while still observing it. No, you cannot have time travel in a manner which creates paradoxes. cosmic censorship sees to that. So you have to move into a universe in which your presence does not create a paradox. With an infinite number of them to choose from, not a problem.
Regards
Bill
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Intelligent Designers
Isn't it interesting that people, for some obscure psychological reason, continue to ascribe to dieties those powers and abilities rightfully reserved for humans and other intelligent species?
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Discussions on Visualizations
I attended Pat Hanrahan's talk the other day at Adobe. It was on visualization techniques. It was interesting although I found it a little basic. The techniques he described have a long history, dating back to Minard's map of Napoleon's Russian campaign. Phase Space representations and simplified distorted topologies were both shown and discussed. These are certainly valuable visualization techniques, but both have been around for a while.
Phase space representations came of age in 1963 when when Edward Lorenz was plotting weather data and derived the Lorentz Attractor which is a phase space visualization of the data he gathered.
Hanrahan's primary point, however, that the visualization should be chosen to work best with the context in which the data needs to be delivered, is spot on. In many respects, a contextually approrpriate visualization can present data in a manenr that highlights the information content specifically.
This is especially important for self-adapting content. You can extrapolate most of the same principles when the issue of transforming or adapting content to different devices and contexts.
Phase space representations came of age in 1963 when when Edward Lorenz was plotting weather data and derived the Lorentz Attractor which is a phase space visualization of the data he gathered.
Hanrahan's primary point, however, that the visualization should be chosen to work best with the context in which the data needs to be delivered, is spot on. In many respects, a contextually approrpriate visualization can present data in a manenr that highlights the information content specifically.
This is especially important for self-adapting content. You can extrapolate most of the same principles when the issue of transforming or adapting content to different devices and contexts.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Belief -- Why We Know What We Know
I had a fascinating conversation recently regarding belief. It got me to thinking about the nature of belief and faith and knowledge.
I am very interested in knowledge, what we know, how we know it and how we model it. But knowledge has, for humans, an emotional component. That is, while you know what you know (to an infinite level of recursion by the way) you also have an emotional response to that knowledge we call belief.
Why do I classify belief as an emotional response? Because belief is our emotional response that defends, in a way, our model of the universe. Those things we know very well we come to believe.
Of course belief can be mistaken and it can be changed. We may believe something very strongly, but cease to believe it when presented with strong evidence to the contrary. So, for many years people believed there were only 8 planets in the solar system. Then in 1930 people had to change their belief to accommodate a 9th planet. Many people took quite some time to accommodate this.
We are actually watching a similar belief transition now as people come to terms with the new knowledge that there is a 10th planet beyond Pluto.
But the conversation I was involved in centered around a belief in God. And the person I was in discourse with wanted to know why anyone would not simply choose to believe. He referred to Pascal's Wager which is an argument attributed to Pascal justifying belief in the Christian God on the basis of probability. Essentially, the argument states that one should believe because if one is correct there is an infinite reward to follow whereas if one is wrong there is no harm in having believed during life.
The core problem with this argument, of course, is that we do not CHOOSE to believe. We are drawn to belief, we are coerced to belief by evidence. If I do not find sufficient evidence to believe in a god, I cannot choose to believe in one anyway. In contrast, if I do find sufficient evidence to believe, I cannot choose to NOT believe. Believe is not a choice, it is a coercion.
Tim Holt's website http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/pascalswager.html has a good analysis of the objections to Pascal's Wager of which this is the third.
Belief may be coercive, but it also IS plastic. As evidence accumulates in one direction or another a belief can shift. This is typically, for complex issues and decisions, not a binary switch but rather a continuum that takes the person from a strong belief into the area of doubt, then ultimately to an accolades of the new belief.
But, again, belief is coercive. The accumulation of evidence will ultimately one to a conclusion and a belief even if that is in opposition to previous belief. How many parents honestly believe their child cannot have done THAT (whatever THAT is) only to finally have to acknowledge that the child DID do THAT in the face of more and more incontrovertible evidence.
However, there IS that issue of evidence. While one is coerced to belief by an accumulation of evidence, one's INTERPRETATION of evidence IS a matter of choice. Well, to some degree, anyway. For some things, the evidence is fairly incontrovertible. Or, as Holmes said, "circumstantial evidence my be virtually convincing, as when a trout is found in the milk."
But bigger issues typically have much less clear evidence. So where one person may see evidence of a god in a grain of sand, another may see evidence of complex forces driven by random events. And there is an emotional component to this interpretation as well. We often WANT to believe in particular positions which DOES color our interpretations of evidence even when we try to minimize this.
So where does this leave us? Well, it probably means there is very little chance of people with completely polarized beliefs will be able to convince each other based on current bodies of evidence. And since the interpretation IS colored by other emotionalaspects such as a need or a desire to believe a particular outcome, it is very difficult to move from one point of view to another based solely on improved interpretations. Rather, more and more dramatic evidence is needed. And it is seldom forthcoming.
Comments?
Regards
Bill
I am very interested in knowledge, what we know, how we know it and how we model it. But knowledge has, for humans, an emotional component. That is, while you know what you know (to an infinite level of recursion by the way) you also have an emotional response to that knowledge we call belief.
Why do I classify belief as an emotional response? Because belief is our emotional response that defends, in a way, our model of the universe. Those things we know very well we come to believe.
Of course belief can be mistaken and it can be changed. We may believe something very strongly, but cease to believe it when presented with strong evidence to the contrary. So, for many years people believed there were only 8 planets in the solar system. Then in 1930 people had to change their belief to accommodate a 9th planet. Many people took quite some time to accommodate this.
We are actually watching a similar belief transition now as people come to terms with the new knowledge that there is a 10th planet beyond Pluto.
But the conversation I was involved in centered around a belief in God. And the person I was in discourse with wanted to know why anyone would not simply choose to believe. He referred to Pascal's Wager which is an argument attributed to Pascal justifying belief in the Christian God on the basis of probability. Essentially, the argument states that one should believe because if one is correct there is an infinite reward to follow whereas if one is wrong there is no harm in having believed during life.
The core problem with this argument, of course, is that we do not CHOOSE to believe. We are drawn to belief, we are coerced to belief by evidence. If I do not find sufficient evidence to believe in a god, I cannot choose to believe in one anyway. In contrast, if I do find sufficient evidence to believe, I cannot choose to NOT believe. Believe is not a choice, it is a coercion.
Tim Holt's website http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/pascalswager.html has a good analysis of the objections to Pascal's Wager of which this is the third.
Belief may be coercive, but it also IS plastic. As evidence accumulates in one direction or another a belief can shift. This is typically, for complex issues and decisions, not a binary switch but rather a continuum that takes the person from a strong belief into the area of doubt, then ultimately to an accolades of the new belief.
But, again, belief is coercive. The accumulation of evidence will ultimately one to a conclusion and a belief even if that is in opposition to previous belief. How many parents honestly believe their child cannot have done THAT (whatever THAT is) only to finally have to acknowledge that the child DID do THAT in the face of more and more incontrovertible evidence.
However, there IS that issue of evidence. While one is coerced to belief by an accumulation of evidence, one's INTERPRETATION of evidence IS a matter of choice. Well, to some degree, anyway. For some things, the evidence is fairly incontrovertible. Or, as Holmes said, "circumstantial evidence my be virtually convincing, as when a trout is found in the milk."
But bigger issues typically have much less clear evidence. So where one person may see evidence of a god in a grain of sand, another may see evidence of complex forces driven by random events. And there is an emotional component to this interpretation as well. We often WANT to believe in particular positions which DOES color our interpretations of evidence even when we try to minimize this.
So where does this leave us? Well, it probably means there is very little chance of people with completely polarized beliefs will be able to convince each other based on current bodies of evidence. And since the interpretation IS colored by other emotionalaspects such as a need or a desire to believe a particular outcome, it is very difficult to move from one point of view to another based solely on improved interpretations. Rather, more and more dramatic evidence is needed. And it is seldom forthcoming.
Comments?
Regards
Bill
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Medical Costs of the Future...Lower and Lower
The following is an esay from a book I co-authored in 2000 on the impact of technology on future life (Critial Mass, MC2 Publishers, 2000).
This particular essay is on how I and my writing partner came to feel that medical costs would peak, then fall during the 21st century.
Computers and Medicine: Hippocratic Art becomes Marketing Artifice
People of our generation (so called Baby Boomers) were raised to believe several things about doctors and medicine. First, doctors were members of some sort of priesthood. They knew things we could never know. They had education above and beyond that of normal people. We were encouraged to believe that doctors knew what was best for us and knew things about us we could never know.
Second, medical knowledge was the hidden knowledge of the inner sanctum, the runes of health often cast in terms the average person could not even begin to decipher. Body parts, diseases, conditions, bacteria, and viruses were named in Latin or Greek and often seemed deliberately obtuse. We were not meant to read the prescriptions scrawled by our doctors, or to ask too many questions.
Third, they gave you a sucker if you were a good patient.
The attitude is changing, though. Rising medical costs, coupled with a new understanding of disease and health is changing perceptions about the world of medicine. The cost of medical treatment rises at about 3 to 5 times the rate of inflation. Nothing seems to reduce it. Hospitals have tried to rein in costs. Their ideas, from reducing staff and shortening stays to timesharing equipment among facilities do not keep pace. In desperation, hospitals form conglomerates and try to become managed care associations, which tends to reduce the service to their patients while failing to contain costs. Managed care tries to rein in doctor fees, but the cost in care quality is high. They even stop giving away the suckers.
Finally, they try marketing. It begins to work, but in unforeseen ways.
We have a national (perhaps cultural) taboo against marketing medicine. We don’t like our doctors hawking cures to people so desperate they’ll try anything. We used to see it; we called it Patent Medicine and it earned a well-deserved reputation for deception and danger. When anyone could set up shop on a street corner and sing the praises of assorted elixirs to cure everything from smallpox to social diseases the population was at risk and had no recourse when the so-called cures failed. As a nation, we stepped in and began to regulate medicine and drugs as a way to protect ourselves from the charlatans along the road.
Yet, we have found ways to market prescription medicine and even medical care again. We see commercials about new medicines (carefully avoiding any statement of what they treat) and we see billboards from hospitals regarding the level of obstetric and neo-natal and cardiac care they provide (again, carefully couched to avoid any claims or any discussion of costs). Every sports magazine, women’s magazine and health magazine on the newsstand carries at least a few full page advertisements form prescription medicine, complete with information about uses and side effects that used to be available only to doctors.
We see it because our perception of medicine has changed. The only effective and ethical way to mass-market medicine was to make it more approachable, more understandable. It became necessary to involve patients in their own care to keep costs down. To do that some of the mysticism had to move aside.
Concomitant with the public’s increasing awareness of health and medical issues, computer technology made it possible to consumerize many aspects of medicine. Blood pressure machines began appearing in stores. Electronic thermometers and blood sugar monitors emerged as over the counter devices. Even digital stethoscopes are available to the causal buyer.
While medicine is becoming more approachable and understandable, we still want more. So, what other role does high technology, particularly information technology, play in this move to consumerize medicine?
Start with the hugely expensive MRI and CAT machines. We see amazing images produced by these non-invasive scanners. We can see the Visible Man Project, which available for anyone to see via the Internet, but only possible with computed tomography. Otherwise you would just have thousands of flat photos looking like sliced liver. Because of computed tomography, you can see a three dimensional image that can be rotated in all three axes and zoomed or probed with virtual views. We see TV shows like The Operation with incredibly high tech medical gear. Microsurgery, aided by motion control computers like those used in cinema, allows surgeons to perform absolute miracles.
These devices, while deeply dependent on computer technology, are only the beginning. They are large, complex, and may require a new priesthood of computer-savvy technicians. In addition, they require trained analysts to read the results. What if that were not so?
For centuries, medicine has been viewed as more of an art than a science. Hippocrates’ famous oath, in fact, describes medicine as an art, not a science. The original oath (circa 300 BCE) required young doctors to care for their teachers and teachers’ families and to teach other doctors at no cost. That was probably the first clause to go. It also prohibited surgery (leaving that to the barbers of the time as they had the blades) and abortion. The AMA has changed the original oath just a bit.
Despite the changes in the oath, medicine remains as much art as science. Or, at best, a science in the service of an art.
For example:
Diagnosticians follow complex and intuitive chains of reasoning. Chains they are often at a loss to explain. Arriving at the correct diagnosis in the shortest possible series of steps is still considered one of medicine’s finest skills and students are tested in it constantly. It is obviously important to diagnose the correct problem in the minimum of time since a failure to do so can leave someone very dead. Some doctors have an almost mystical skill at this and they command very high respect in their profession.
Surgeons constantly talk about the delicacy of their operations. “The hands of a surgeon” is a phrase that captures the shamanistic nature of the awe in which surgeons are often held.
And, of course, the old joke goes that you and I, when confronted with a perplexing but solvable problem in our area of expertise, say that, after all, “it’s not rocket science!”
Rocket scientists say, “it’s not brain surgery!”
Brain surgeons say, “actually, it is brain surgery!”
Theirs, it is believed, is the most complicated and delicate of the surgeon’s art. Typical neurosurgeons know this too. They know it all too well. Very big heads in neurosurgery.
Understandable, really. But, perhaps, on the edge of changing.
The advent of the computer has begun a change in this view of medicine. With tremendous amounts of computing power available it is possible to better image the interior of humans and to better simulate the reactions taking place there. Art implies a certain lack of certainty and precision; science implies the opposite. The art of medicine is finally becoming a true science of medicine as our understanding of biochemistry matures. It matures because we can visualize molecules and simulate reactions using computers.
Let us look at a few examples.
Pharmaceutical companies have always referred to their discovery of drugs because of the brute force approach used throughout that industry. The process is changing, however, and now they refer to a drug and its design. Pharmaceutical companies now seek to design molecules, not discover drugs, because we now understand health and disease as macro-level manifestations of molecular processes. To get to this point they have employed information technology at its highest level.
Visualization on computers now allows researchers to see biological processes in simulation. Incredibly complex mathematics used to derive and predict the chemical forces that bind, shape, attract, and repel one organic molecule from another are available as 3D models. Virtual reality with force feedback allows designers to feel those forces as they pick up, twist, bend, and shape chemical compounds into novel and useful forms.
Animal testing moves into the past as our drugs become so tailored to the human condition that the only way to accurately assess their efficacy, other than with human trials, is to simulate their reactions in a human body. Animal models are still great for many purposes, but we can already see the writing on the wall. With the focus now on a genetic basis for disease it will no longer be as useful to test a drug on a rat, a rabbit, or even a chimp. The new class of pharmaceuticals that will emerge in the next few decades will be computer generated and so tailored to humans that animal testing will be useless.
Classic biology has left the realm of the taxonomic and descended to the garage level of the mechanic. Over the last two decades, aided by information technology, biology has begun to finally flourish as a predictive and engineered science. More and more high school biology classes are dissecting frogs virtually rather than using real frogs. Technology created for the film industry to show the subtle changes of a body as it disappears has been re-targeted for use in medical schools to replace the dissection of human cadavers.
Practical medicine is becoming more mechanistic as we unlock the molecular basis of disease, reproduction, and life. As it becomes more mechanistic, it becomes more amenable to being reflected in cyberspace. That is, as our understanding of our physiology drills down toward the lowest molecular nature of life, the information becomes more amenable to digitization. Once digitized, the information that describes the processes that make us ill or make us well can be recognized, manipulated, and administered by computers in far more precise ways than possible today.
Medicine will continue, for a while, to increase in cost. Pharmaceuticals will be costly to develop and the intellectual property represented by them will be hotly protected. But, not for long.
When the computer simulations become accurate enough and when the processes are understood well enough, you will begin to see the movement of medical treatment out of the hospital, outpatient surgery center and doctor’s office to Wal-Mart. You will begin to see computer kiosks that use expert systems to diagnose symptoms described by the customer. Note we said customer, not patient. At this level, you cease being a patient (that has always seemed an interesting term) and become a consumer and customer.
The psychology of taking your medical advice from a machine is considerably different that that of taking such advice from a human practitioner. The writer Larry Niven has referred to autodocs in many of his stories and novels. These are machines you slide into which perform examinations, diagnosis, and finally treatment. Not unlike the booth at the Levi’s shop that measures you for custom made jeans.
We may be a while before we have whole-body autodocs, but you can expect that computerization of medicine will migrate treatment for many ailments into kiosks, into your home and into the mass market. Who needs a pharmacist when a computer can take the prescription and synthesize the molecules needed (the medicine) and dispense directly to you? Who needs a doctor when a computer can take the history, perform the tests, diagnose the ailment, and write the prescription?
Who needs either of them when this can be performed at home? For example, a toilet which will perform many chemical tests on your urine and feces is being developed. The analysis of our eliminations has a long and proud history in medicine (short of surgery, how else could a doctor get anything out of you that had been through the loop, so to speak? Former food was convenient.). Such a toilet will be able to analyze and diagnose a wide variety of conditions. It will recommend treatment, which may be automatically included in your next grocery order since your refrigerator will talk to your toilet.
There is little reason to think that automated treatment is out of the question. Antibiotics could be administered by your bed linens while you sleep or by your clothing the next day. Antibacterial fabric is already a reality. Antibiotic fabric is not too far behind. Nicotine and arthritis patches have made it quite acceptable to have medication dispensed to you through skin absorption.
Our understanding of the effects of particular molecules is increasing steadily. With appropriate analysis of the customer (at the DNA level) and with sufficient computing power it will be possible to have a pharmaceutical synthesizer in your home to catalyze and synthesize molecules tailored to you and your condition. Security is a consideration, but it will be much harder to get an autodoc to dispense unneeded barbiturates or amphetamines than it is to corrupt a human doctor.
A while back Bill had Lasik surgery to improve his eyes. The procedure was painless, quick, and almost completely controlled by computer. It is not too hard to imagine that, in a few years, a machine at a Sears would be available to perform a similar surgery sans ophthalmologist. The necessary computer system to measure, calculate, track and focus a laser to perform such an operation is not beyond imagination at all.
It is not hard to imagine how other forms of simple surgery can be computerized and consumerized. Almost any skin surgery could be done with special lasers and software. Wart, mole, and cyst removal, Melanoma diagnosis, even some liposuction and vein stripping could be made fully safe, cheap, and computerized. Non-invasive surgical techniques will continue to improve with the growing sophistication of computer targeted and focused ultrasound, x-ray, microwave, and other forms of energy.
An elegant solution to bacterial infections is the possibility of using bacteriophages instead of antibiotics. These are viruses which are parasites of bacteria. Specific phages attack specific bacteria. Once the bacteria are dead, the phages die off. The two organisms evolved in twain with each other and bacteria are not likely to develop immunities to phages. They have already adapted as much as necessary. The phage for a particular strain of bacteria is typically found with the bacteria. In the human being, this is usually in the feces.
A computerized toilet could recognize particular disease bacteria, then isolate and amplify the phage associated with that bacteria. The toilet could then insert, inject, or transduce the phage back into the human through injections or patches.
This would form an extremely elegant solution to certain common bacterial infections where today we use broad spectrum antibiotics that prompt many bacteria to form resistant strains. The bacteria die and the phages then die off as well. The intelligent toilet is needed to make it work.
The result is that, in the not too distant future, medicine will become cheap. Sure, we will need controls to make it safe and effective. There will be failures and there will be quackery, but there is a lot of that out there now. We have to move forward to improve medical care, and we can do this if the specialized knowledge of doctors is captured and digitized, the specialized facilities of pharmaceutical companies are miniaturized and digitized, and there is a growing demand for cheaper care.
The driving forces are technological innovation, synthesis miniaturization, and computer control of those processes. The computer control issue is well in hand. Much of the synthesis technology we can take from NASA robot analysis technology on Mars probes. Nanotechnological advances will make chemical factories small and cheap. Research into all of these is in high swing now and we can expect dramatic developments in the future. We can also expect strong resistance.
Pharmaceutical companies are entrenched. Doctors are entrenched. Pharmacists are entrenched. They will all resist as will the public at first. Until the bills roll in.
Where will autodocs catch on first? Probably in third world countries that can’t afford medical care today, much less in the future if the costs keep rising. Provide a village with a device that can accurately diagnose and treat a variety of ailments and injuries for virtually free and third world governments will adopt it with a vengeance. Automated medicine could save millions in developing nations.
Second world nations who are struggling under the effects of brain drains from the cold war will probably adopt it next (they may even be a major part of the development). China, North Korea, and Russia are prime candidates who have or can have the technological skill to develop automated medicine and the lack of skilled practitioners of traditional medicine to prompt a demand.
Ultimately, as our own groaning medical system reaches the limit of its abilities to cope with an aging boomer population (aging into its hundred and twenties because of advances in traditional medicine), we will adopt it here as well. We’ll demand it.
What of the concern that pharmaceutical companies will still be needed to manufacture and distribute the medicines and might still charge inflated prices for them? Pharmaceutical companies rely on intellectual property rights. The molecules they produce and the processes they use to produce them are the secrets they hold dear. But the ability of computer-controlled nanotechnology to manipulate individual atoms into molecular combinations on demand will make those secrets very fleeting.
Once the processes are automated at the atomic or molecular level (rather than the macro reagent level they operate at now) there will be almost nothing to stop any particular drug being taken apart and then re-assembled. Slight, irrelevant changes in the molecule may be the way small firms get around patent issues. Some, in remote seriously ill corners of the globe, will just copy the drug and licenses be damned.
Think of it. Even now, if any village in South Africa (with 10% of its population HIV positive) could synthesize as much AZT as it needed on demand, would patent rights stop them? Not likely.
Sound outrageous? Consider the following:
Cloning of Dolly the sheep (and now many other animals) was accomplished by using delicate but well understood and very replicable techniques. The key turned out to be the application of a minute amount of electricity at just the right point in the process. It is all documented and the equipment and chemicals needed are available and not expensive. Farmers are already looking into it.
DNA strands can now be analyzed by computer circuitry using a special chip that has DNA molecules attached to silicon transistors on the chip. Such a device will soon be used routinely to analyze samples for infections. A home model is already planned.
Scientific American recently published a method by which amateur scientists could invoke the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) in their homes. PCR is a process used in genetic research for rapidly reproducing DNA segments into quantities sufficient for analysis and use. It was invented a few years ago and made DNA research tremendously more effective by reducing the wait times for DNA reactions by factors of thousands. Now, you can do this in your kitchen.
We talk about high-tech medicine in this country all the time, but we’ve seen nothing yet. Most medicine is still the purview of doctors who listen to patients, make an educated guess of the problem, perform a test or two confirm the hypothesis and write a prescription. The “perform a test or two” step is so seriously discouraged by HMO’s and Managed Care insurance (and by National Health in other countries) it is often skipped. None of that is difficult to automate.
When it comes to hospital care, we need to be careful about assuming too much regarding its importance. Most people do not want medical care in hospitals. They tolerate it when nothing else will do. Much hospital care is devoted to easing discomfort in lieu of anything else to be done. People accept that because the discomfort is distracting and depressing.
What people want is medical repair. They want the problem to be corrected and to get on with their lives. Yes, we do want the quick fix. But, if the quick fix actually is a quick fix and the problem actually is corrected, what’s the problem? Influenza used to send millions to their beds and hundreds of thousands to their graves. Now it is a minor annoyance for most in this country.
So, while hospice care for terminal patients will continue in those situations we cannot correct (and there will be many), do not expect people to complain too much about not having hospitals to take care of them when a quick trip to KMart for their cancer cure or to Target for their cardiac repair kit will get them back on track with their life. Automated medicine will offer that.
Medicine and medical care will become very cheap in the future because both are highly amenable to technological innovation and computerization. It is at exactly this intimate level that cyberspace’s digital reflection of our society will be at its sharpest.
This essay is copyright Bill McDaniel and Pat McGrew...used with permission
This particular essay is on how I and my writing partner came to feel that medical costs would peak, then fall during the 21st century.
Computers and Medicine: Hippocratic Art becomes Marketing Artifice
People of our generation (so called Baby Boomers) were raised to believe several things about doctors and medicine. First, doctors were members of some sort of priesthood. They knew things we could never know. They had education above and beyond that of normal people. We were encouraged to believe that doctors knew what was best for us and knew things about us we could never know.
Second, medical knowledge was the hidden knowledge of the inner sanctum, the runes of health often cast in terms the average person could not even begin to decipher. Body parts, diseases, conditions, bacteria, and viruses were named in Latin or Greek and often seemed deliberately obtuse. We were not meant to read the prescriptions scrawled by our doctors, or to ask too many questions.
Third, they gave you a sucker if you were a good patient.
The attitude is changing, though. Rising medical costs, coupled with a new understanding of disease and health is changing perceptions about the world of medicine. The cost of medical treatment rises at about 3 to 5 times the rate of inflation. Nothing seems to reduce it. Hospitals have tried to rein in costs. Their ideas, from reducing staff and shortening stays to timesharing equipment among facilities do not keep pace. In desperation, hospitals form conglomerates and try to become managed care associations, which tends to reduce the service to their patients while failing to contain costs. Managed care tries to rein in doctor fees, but the cost in care quality is high. They even stop giving away the suckers.
Finally, they try marketing. It begins to work, but in unforeseen ways.
We have a national (perhaps cultural) taboo against marketing medicine. We don’t like our doctors hawking cures to people so desperate they’ll try anything. We used to see it; we called it Patent Medicine and it earned a well-deserved reputation for deception and danger. When anyone could set up shop on a street corner and sing the praises of assorted elixirs to cure everything from smallpox to social diseases the population was at risk and had no recourse when the so-called cures failed. As a nation, we stepped in and began to regulate medicine and drugs as a way to protect ourselves from the charlatans along the road.
Yet, we have found ways to market prescription medicine and even medical care again. We see commercials about new medicines (carefully avoiding any statement of what they treat) and we see billboards from hospitals regarding the level of obstetric and neo-natal and cardiac care they provide (again, carefully couched to avoid any claims or any discussion of costs). Every sports magazine, women’s magazine and health magazine on the newsstand carries at least a few full page advertisements form prescription medicine, complete with information about uses and side effects that used to be available only to doctors.
We see it because our perception of medicine has changed. The only effective and ethical way to mass-market medicine was to make it more approachable, more understandable. It became necessary to involve patients in their own care to keep costs down. To do that some of the mysticism had to move aside.
Concomitant with the public’s increasing awareness of health and medical issues, computer technology made it possible to consumerize many aspects of medicine. Blood pressure machines began appearing in stores. Electronic thermometers and blood sugar monitors emerged as over the counter devices. Even digital stethoscopes are available to the causal buyer.
While medicine is becoming more approachable and understandable, we still want more. So, what other role does high technology, particularly information technology, play in this move to consumerize medicine?
Start with the hugely expensive MRI and CAT machines. We see amazing images produced by these non-invasive scanners. We can see the Visible Man Project, which available for anyone to see via the Internet, but only possible with computed tomography. Otherwise you would just have thousands of flat photos looking like sliced liver. Because of computed tomography, you can see a three dimensional image that can be rotated in all three axes and zoomed or probed with virtual views. We see TV shows like The Operation with incredibly high tech medical gear. Microsurgery, aided by motion control computers like those used in cinema, allows surgeons to perform absolute miracles.
These devices, while deeply dependent on computer technology, are only the beginning. They are large, complex, and may require a new priesthood of computer-savvy technicians. In addition, they require trained analysts to read the results. What if that were not so?
For centuries, medicine has been viewed as more of an art than a science. Hippocrates’ famous oath, in fact, describes medicine as an art, not a science. The original oath (circa 300 BCE) required young doctors to care for their teachers and teachers’ families and to teach other doctors at no cost. That was probably the first clause to go. It also prohibited surgery (leaving that to the barbers of the time as they had the blades) and abortion. The AMA has changed the original oath just a bit.
Despite the changes in the oath, medicine remains as much art as science. Or, at best, a science in the service of an art.
For example:
Diagnosticians follow complex and intuitive chains of reasoning. Chains they are often at a loss to explain. Arriving at the correct diagnosis in the shortest possible series of steps is still considered one of medicine’s finest skills and students are tested in it constantly. It is obviously important to diagnose the correct problem in the minimum of time since a failure to do so can leave someone very dead. Some doctors have an almost mystical skill at this and they command very high respect in their profession.
Surgeons constantly talk about the delicacy of their operations. “The hands of a surgeon” is a phrase that captures the shamanistic nature of the awe in which surgeons are often held.
And, of course, the old joke goes that you and I, when confronted with a perplexing but solvable problem in our area of expertise, say that, after all, “it’s not rocket science!”
Rocket scientists say, “it’s not brain surgery!”
Brain surgeons say, “actually, it is brain surgery!”
Theirs, it is believed, is the most complicated and delicate of the surgeon’s art. Typical neurosurgeons know this too. They know it all too well. Very big heads in neurosurgery.
Understandable, really. But, perhaps, on the edge of changing.
The advent of the computer has begun a change in this view of medicine. With tremendous amounts of computing power available it is possible to better image the interior of humans and to better simulate the reactions taking place there. Art implies a certain lack of certainty and precision; science implies the opposite. The art of medicine is finally becoming a true science of medicine as our understanding of biochemistry matures. It matures because we can visualize molecules and simulate reactions using computers.
Let us look at a few examples.
Pharmaceutical companies have always referred to their discovery of drugs because of the brute force approach used throughout that industry. The process is changing, however, and now they refer to a drug and its design. Pharmaceutical companies now seek to design molecules, not discover drugs, because we now understand health and disease as macro-level manifestations of molecular processes. To get to this point they have employed information technology at its highest level.
Visualization on computers now allows researchers to see biological processes in simulation. Incredibly complex mathematics used to derive and predict the chemical forces that bind, shape, attract, and repel one organic molecule from another are available as 3D models. Virtual reality with force feedback allows designers to feel those forces as they pick up, twist, bend, and shape chemical compounds into novel and useful forms.
Animal testing moves into the past as our drugs become so tailored to the human condition that the only way to accurately assess their efficacy, other than with human trials, is to simulate their reactions in a human body. Animal models are still great for many purposes, but we can already see the writing on the wall. With the focus now on a genetic basis for disease it will no longer be as useful to test a drug on a rat, a rabbit, or even a chimp. The new class of pharmaceuticals that will emerge in the next few decades will be computer generated and so tailored to humans that animal testing will be useless.
Classic biology has left the realm of the taxonomic and descended to the garage level of the mechanic. Over the last two decades, aided by information technology, biology has begun to finally flourish as a predictive and engineered science. More and more high school biology classes are dissecting frogs virtually rather than using real frogs. Technology created for the film industry to show the subtle changes of a body as it disappears has been re-targeted for use in medical schools to replace the dissection of human cadavers.
Practical medicine is becoming more mechanistic as we unlock the molecular basis of disease, reproduction, and life. As it becomes more mechanistic, it becomes more amenable to being reflected in cyberspace. That is, as our understanding of our physiology drills down toward the lowest molecular nature of life, the information becomes more amenable to digitization. Once digitized, the information that describes the processes that make us ill or make us well can be recognized, manipulated, and administered by computers in far more precise ways than possible today.
Medicine will continue, for a while, to increase in cost. Pharmaceuticals will be costly to develop and the intellectual property represented by them will be hotly protected. But, not for long.
When the computer simulations become accurate enough and when the processes are understood well enough, you will begin to see the movement of medical treatment out of the hospital, outpatient surgery center and doctor’s office to Wal-Mart. You will begin to see computer kiosks that use expert systems to diagnose symptoms described by the customer. Note we said customer, not patient. At this level, you cease being a patient (that has always seemed an interesting term) and become a consumer and customer.
The psychology of taking your medical advice from a machine is considerably different that that of taking such advice from a human practitioner. The writer Larry Niven has referred to autodocs in many of his stories and novels. These are machines you slide into which perform examinations, diagnosis, and finally treatment. Not unlike the booth at the Levi’s shop that measures you for custom made jeans.
We may be a while before we have whole-body autodocs, but you can expect that computerization of medicine will migrate treatment for many ailments into kiosks, into your home and into the mass market. Who needs a pharmacist when a computer can take the prescription and synthesize the molecules needed (the medicine) and dispense directly to you? Who needs a doctor when a computer can take the history, perform the tests, diagnose the ailment, and write the prescription?
Who needs either of them when this can be performed at home? For example, a toilet which will perform many chemical tests on your urine and feces is being developed. The analysis of our eliminations has a long and proud history in medicine (short of surgery, how else could a doctor get anything out of you that had been through the loop, so to speak? Former food was convenient.). Such a toilet will be able to analyze and diagnose a wide variety of conditions. It will recommend treatment, which may be automatically included in your next grocery order since your refrigerator will talk to your toilet.
There is little reason to think that automated treatment is out of the question. Antibiotics could be administered by your bed linens while you sleep or by your clothing the next day. Antibacterial fabric is already a reality. Antibiotic fabric is not too far behind. Nicotine and arthritis patches have made it quite acceptable to have medication dispensed to you through skin absorption.
Our understanding of the effects of particular molecules is increasing steadily. With appropriate analysis of the customer (at the DNA level) and with sufficient computing power it will be possible to have a pharmaceutical synthesizer in your home to catalyze and synthesize molecules tailored to you and your condition. Security is a consideration, but it will be much harder to get an autodoc to dispense unneeded barbiturates or amphetamines than it is to corrupt a human doctor.
A while back Bill had Lasik surgery to improve his eyes. The procedure was painless, quick, and almost completely controlled by computer. It is not too hard to imagine that, in a few years, a machine at a Sears would be available to perform a similar surgery sans ophthalmologist. The necessary computer system to measure, calculate, track and focus a laser to perform such an operation is not beyond imagination at all.
It is not hard to imagine how other forms of simple surgery can be computerized and consumerized. Almost any skin surgery could be done with special lasers and software. Wart, mole, and cyst removal, Melanoma diagnosis, even some liposuction and vein stripping could be made fully safe, cheap, and computerized. Non-invasive surgical techniques will continue to improve with the growing sophistication of computer targeted and focused ultrasound, x-ray, microwave, and other forms of energy.
An elegant solution to bacterial infections is the possibility of using bacteriophages instead of antibiotics. These are viruses which are parasites of bacteria. Specific phages attack specific bacteria. Once the bacteria are dead, the phages die off. The two organisms evolved in twain with each other and bacteria are not likely to develop immunities to phages. They have already adapted as much as necessary. The phage for a particular strain of bacteria is typically found with the bacteria. In the human being, this is usually in the feces.
A computerized toilet could recognize particular disease bacteria, then isolate and amplify the phage associated with that bacteria. The toilet could then insert, inject, or transduce the phage back into the human through injections or patches.
This would form an extremely elegant solution to certain common bacterial infections where today we use broad spectrum antibiotics that prompt many bacteria to form resistant strains. The bacteria die and the phages then die off as well. The intelligent toilet is needed to make it work.
The result is that, in the not too distant future, medicine will become cheap. Sure, we will need controls to make it safe and effective. There will be failures and there will be quackery, but there is a lot of that out there now. We have to move forward to improve medical care, and we can do this if the specialized knowledge of doctors is captured and digitized, the specialized facilities of pharmaceutical companies are miniaturized and digitized, and there is a growing demand for cheaper care.
The driving forces are technological innovation, synthesis miniaturization, and computer control of those processes. The computer control issue is well in hand. Much of the synthesis technology we can take from NASA robot analysis technology on Mars probes. Nanotechnological advances will make chemical factories small and cheap. Research into all of these is in high swing now and we can expect dramatic developments in the future. We can also expect strong resistance.
Pharmaceutical companies are entrenched. Doctors are entrenched. Pharmacists are entrenched. They will all resist as will the public at first. Until the bills roll in.
Where will autodocs catch on first? Probably in third world countries that can’t afford medical care today, much less in the future if the costs keep rising. Provide a village with a device that can accurately diagnose and treat a variety of ailments and injuries for virtually free and third world governments will adopt it with a vengeance. Automated medicine could save millions in developing nations.
Second world nations who are struggling under the effects of brain drains from the cold war will probably adopt it next (they may even be a major part of the development). China, North Korea, and Russia are prime candidates who have or can have the technological skill to develop automated medicine and the lack of skilled practitioners of traditional medicine to prompt a demand.
Ultimately, as our own groaning medical system reaches the limit of its abilities to cope with an aging boomer population (aging into its hundred and twenties because of advances in traditional medicine), we will adopt it here as well. We’ll demand it.
What of the concern that pharmaceutical companies will still be needed to manufacture and distribute the medicines and might still charge inflated prices for them? Pharmaceutical companies rely on intellectual property rights. The molecules they produce and the processes they use to produce them are the secrets they hold dear. But the ability of computer-controlled nanotechnology to manipulate individual atoms into molecular combinations on demand will make those secrets very fleeting.
Once the processes are automated at the atomic or molecular level (rather than the macro reagent level they operate at now) there will be almost nothing to stop any particular drug being taken apart and then re-assembled. Slight, irrelevant changes in the molecule may be the way small firms get around patent issues. Some, in remote seriously ill corners of the globe, will just copy the drug and licenses be damned.
Think of it. Even now, if any village in South Africa (with 10% of its population HIV positive) could synthesize as much AZT as it needed on demand, would patent rights stop them? Not likely.
Sound outrageous? Consider the following:
Cloning of Dolly the sheep (and now many other animals) was accomplished by using delicate but well understood and very replicable techniques. The key turned out to be the application of a minute amount of electricity at just the right point in the process. It is all documented and the equipment and chemicals needed are available and not expensive. Farmers are already looking into it.
DNA strands can now be analyzed by computer circuitry using a special chip that has DNA molecules attached to silicon transistors on the chip. Such a device will soon be used routinely to analyze samples for infections. A home model is already planned.
Scientific American recently published a method by which amateur scientists could invoke the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) in their homes. PCR is a process used in genetic research for rapidly reproducing DNA segments into quantities sufficient for analysis and use. It was invented a few years ago and made DNA research tremendously more effective by reducing the wait times for DNA reactions by factors of thousands. Now, you can do this in your kitchen.
We talk about high-tech medicine in this country all the time, but we’ve seen nothing yet. Most medicine is still the purview of doctors who listen to patients, make an educated guess of the problem, perform a test or two confirm the hypothesis and write a prescription. The “perform a test or two” step is so seriously discouraged by HMO’s and Managed Care insurance (and by National Health in other countries) it is often skipped. None of that is difficult to automate.
When it comes to hospital care, we need to be careful about assuming too much regarding its importance. Most people do not want medical care in hospitals. They tolerate it when nothing else will do. Much hospital care is devoted to easing discomfort in lieu of anything else to be done. People accept that because the discomfort is distracting and depressing.
What people want is medical repair. They want the problem to be corrected and to get on with their lives. Yes, we do want the quick fix. But, if the quick fix actually is a quick fix and the problem actually is corrected, what’s the problem? Influenza used to send millions to their beds and hundreds of thousands to their graves. Now it is a minor annoyance for most in this country.
So, while hospice care for terminal patients will continue in those situations we cannot correct (and there will be many), do not expect people to complain too much about not having hospitals to take care of them when a quick trip to KMart for their cancer cure or to Target for their cardiac repair kit will get them back on track with their life. Automated medicine will offer that.
Medicine and medical care will become very cheap in the future because both are highly amenable to technological innovation and computerization. It is at exactly this intimate level that cyberspace’s digital reflection of our society will be at its sharpest.
This essay is copyright Bill McDaniel and Pat McGrew...used with permission
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