Rare but spectacular

The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan is reminder that natural disasters have a magnitude of their own, and irrespective of where they strike, there is not much we puny humans can do. All the technology one can deploy is, at best an early warning, at worst a dangerous sense of false security. At the end of it all, one can only hope the human cost of the disaster is minimized.

I am still hoping that things start to get better soon, especially for the tens of thousands that are without basic amenities in sub-zero conditions. But through it all, I cannot but help consider certain aspects about the general reaction to this disaster. It is difficult to be objective when human suffering is involved, but here is an attempt.

During the first couple days of the disaster I realized a certain detachment in me with regards to the earthquake and tsunami. As if the news did not really get through to me. It was not until I took pause at the details emanating from the various news reports did the full impact of the disaster sink in. I realized that I was, unconsciously, tuned out to disasters on the news. Like the boy who cried wolf, our media is obsessed with keeping us abreast of everything, as if it is critical for my survival. When every day and every headline is blared out at the highest volume, how can one distinguish between the latest antics of a movie star and a disaster that is impacting millions? When every news programs promises to "follow the latest developments" for me, it is increasingly difficult to determine what news I care about.

The markets, predictably reacted by falling. Both the Japanese markets and US markets moved in step with news emanating from the disaster zone. But for all the rationality of the markets there is a very little linkage between the actual economic impact of the disaster. The image on the right is an example of the (ir)rationality of the markets. The real question is not whether the market is rational, but the fact that this is yet another drum beat into the echo chamber of the daily news cycle. Yet another source of ominous calamitous predictions of impossibly dire consequences.

The third aspect, which is also the reason for the title of this post, is Nuclear power. Most news coverage has been (mis)using terms like meltdown and radiation exposure, because they sound great on the evening news. What this does is two things. Firstly it takes away from coverage of the real tragedy, thousands needing basic necessities along with the real rebuilding that needs to happen. Secondly it helps bring about suboptimal decision making for our future, due to the inherent bias we have to fear the rare but spectacular.

Power generation is a dangerous endeavor, be it wind, coal or nuclear. Even though wind generates less than one percent of world's power, it accounts for a fatality rate of 0.15 deaths per terawatt-hour. Compared to nuclear power which accounts for 15% of world's production and accounts for 0.0009 deaths per terawatt-hour. Coal, on the other hand, clocks in at 161 deaths per terawatt-hour. This is a similar bias as seen in the argument for lack of safety in air transportation.

As a commentator on Marketplace puts it...

... a 9-plus Richter scale earthquake and tsunami represent about as extreme an event as any nuclear reactor could ever face. If the danger from this shock is contained, nuclear will have passed its most extreme test. It's like the movie "Apollo 13" -- this is either nuclear's worst disaster or finest hour.

There is so much that we can understand, learn and admire from the people facing incredible difficulties in Japan. The best we can do is help in our own way. The worst is fall prey to the constant drumbeat of fear and let the rare-but-spectacular determine how we decide to live the biggest chunk of our rather mundane lives.

Update: An unbelievably awesome rant from TechCrunch, about the hysteria surrounding the nuclear "apocalypse".

Statistics are sexy

Professor Hans Rosling, is the co-founder of a very interesting website called Gapminder. The website is dedicated to using graphics, animation and interactive charts to display and interpret global data. The tools initially developed by the site, now lives as the Motion Chart gadget within Google docs.

The technology, while not cutting edge, is nifty. Information of up to four dimensions plus time is displayed beautifully in an interactive way. There is no dearth of data around, but having a way to view, interpret, understand and communicate the knowledge hidden within all that data is what makes the data usable.

This is a perfect example where technology meets society in ways deeper than Facebook and Twitter can. Where technology directly faces societies' challenges and is able to directly make a difference. Something like the Random hacks of kindness, a story I heard on NPR a couple of weeks ago (embedded below).

Back to Prof Hans. He hosts a BBC program that makes statistics sexy and enjoyable. After the break is a wonderful visualization of the progress made by humanity in the last two hundred years. A simple, yet powerful, metric of life as we know it.

Emergence and Democracy

Emergence is the idea that given sufficient numbers of simple interactions, a relatively complex outcome may result, that cannot be trivially traced back to the simple interactions. Wikipedia, which is itself a great example of emergent behavior, defines emergence as:

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.

It struck me, in listening to coverage of the recent election season, that it should be possible to see voting as the building blocks of simple interactions, which should result in complex emergent behavior when it comes to the results of such elections. Having listened to pundits rave and rant on election results across the two largest democracies, there seems to be very little of this spontaneous complexity. Yes, parties win and lose, but over the generations of going through this process has not, in my opinion, produced a directed long-term behavior transcending local variations. To me that means that we are either asking the wrong questions of elections (and consequently democracy), or lack the tools to recognize emergence, or have democracy set up in a way to never achieve emergence.

The final thought is scary. Especially if you consider that most of humanity (caveats include China of course, but with the understanding that their adoption of democracy is only a matter a time) have hitched their future to this bandwagon. It appears, at least according to the superficial analysis above, that the current form of democracy is not set up to deliver on the promise of a future for humanity. The questions, therefore, are: why is today's democratic setup unable to produce emergent behavior, and what can we do about it.

When I initially thought about this, I had imagined this to be a problem with the lack of bounds for democratic emergence. Because there are so many parameters that modern democracies have to deal with, I figured the setup was not scaling in breadth. But the more I think, emergence has nothing to do with bounds. Emergent behavior changes with the change in bounds, but the behavior should nonetheless exist. Instead, I imagine the following three ideas may describe the reason for non-emergence in today's democracies.

Delayed feedback - emergent systems typically have a feedback loop as part of the simple interactions driving it. Democracy is time-delayed. Instead votes determining government actions occur every X years, while the actions themselves are continuous. This biases voting actions to the most recent governmental actions making the simple actions for emergence flawed.

Representative vs. Direct democracy - most democratic systems involve choosing of representatives who in turn make legislation. This one-removed nature of legislation eats into the continuity of feedback. There are no simple actions that vote on simple outcomes. Instead simple actions now are voting on complex outcomes themselves.

Non-uniform participants - emergent behavior requires all non-directed actions to be completed by similar participants. In other words, all voters ought to be equal. Unfortunately, this is not always so. With the Junta in Myanmar at one extreme of this example and the special interest groups in the US at another, participants in a democracy are never practically the same. This also means, the goal of pure emergence is that much tougher to attain.

This post is by no means the first look at such an idea. Joichi Ito, a Japanese journalist, talked about the idea of Emergent Democracy in 2001, and how blogs were/are going to be the engine towards making it happen. Wikipedia lists a book by Clay Shirky, called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In both cases, the organization itself is proposed to be emergent as a result of the Internet.

While it is intriguing (and rather far-fetched) to give up the current democratic setup for the promise of anarchistic self organization of societies - there may be a case for a moderately direct form of democracy leveraging the Internet. And just may be establish a true form of emergent democracy that is actually able to propel human society forward.

Stuff It

The Story of Stuff - is a cute and conscientious effort at promoting a more responsible and sustainable way of living. Narrated by a breathless Annie Leonard, the main video (embedded below) is an exploration of our current consumption-based economy and how unsustainable it really is. Interspersed with cute stick cartoons, Annie describes the linear nature of western economies, with particular focus on America - starting from extraction through to disposal of various material goods.

The core idea is not revolutionary - be sustainable because our current way of life is most certainly not. But the presentation seeks to gain a leg up via two different approaches, cartoon factoids and conspiracy theories. All through the video, you find instances of figures and ratios written up on virtual blackboards. They may all be true, or they may just represent the worst case scenario - one would never know from how neatly they are packaged. And then there are the conspiracy theories, right from the government - big business nexus to the secret cabal of post war economists and marketing directors. By no means is all of it false, and indeed expecting to get anything more than that in 20 minutes is rather naive. But by the same token, I would be hard pressed to imagine that all of today's economy is nothing more than a carefully packaged, herd the sheep, dog and pony show (talk about animated analogies).

With the facetious itch out of the way, let's get a tad more serious. The problem with sustainability in my mind, is that it has facets of the prisoners dilemma. In effect if all of us try to live sustainably, then it is a huge payoff for everyone. But if some of us do it and the others do not, then it leaves those of us acting in a sustainable manner worse off than those who are not. That is the way the dice of today's economy is loaded. When Annie talks about external costs she is not joking. Living off by your own self is not only more expensive, but it is not supported by the way society is set up today. That is what makes sustainable living a catch-22 situation.

Who then do we turn to? The same government that we blame for secretly getting us into this mess in the first place? The big business who care only about profits above all else? Or is the answer a more inclusive - all of the above? And that is the big issue I have with the tone of the message. The big question isn't how can we live more sustainably, but how do we make sustainability a social & economic imperative? Not one or the other. I have not heard a great answer yet.

Nevertheless, the video is a great way to communicate the message and urgency of a more sustainable life - to quote - "Make 'em Safe, Make 'em Last, and Take 'em Back."

2053? Really?

When it comes to nuclear technology, I guess I never stopped to think about all the testing that actually goes into one. I knew about all the insane nuclear weapon stockpile numbers from the cold war, but never realized that there were almost as many tested. 2053, over the period from 1945 to 1998. Including the two that were actually used in war.

Maybe it is time to be thankful for the fact that the others were merely tests. Or scared dry that there is a lot more where the first two came from.

The video below is a visualization, as part of an art project by Isao Hashimoto, and really brings the message home. And here is a link to Google Maps, showing the craters in one of the test ranges in Nevada. Another one from Wikimapia. Scary.

Via Discover Magazine. Including a spirited discussion in the comments over there.

Khan Academy

Came across this site called the Khan Academy. Apparently this guy - Salman Khan (for those with a Bollywood background - it is not him) - that has taken upon himself to record and publish educational videos about every topic on earth. Thankfully he is starting with K-12 subjects and already has almost 14,000 videos published on Youtube. What's more, all his videos are released under a Creative Commons license.

Achieving schooldom

Spent the day yesterday at the Academy of Accelerated Learning school, as part of the Junior Achievement program in our city. We spent the day with kids in the third grade, taking them through a course about Our City, talking through aspects of entrepreneurship, financial literacy and work readiness.

Junior Achievement has a unique way of presenting people from the workforce to students still in school. They allow volunteers to deliver curriculum in the schools while sharing their experiences with the students. Makes me want to do the same with my alma mater.

This being our first adventure of this kind, I had two key takeaways - first, teaching a class is fun, but is not easy. In between emails, meetings and deliverables I may be stretched in my day job, but that is not as emotionally sapping as having 30 pairs of eyes on you alternating between unforgiving scrutiny and inattentive boredom. Second schools of my time in India are very different and very similar at the same time to the schools in the US. While the rules, techniques and rooms are vastly different, the kids in the schools are the same the world over.

On a related note, here is a pertinent TED article that talks about creativity in our schools and the importance of creativity for the future of mankind. Check it out after the break.

Scientific denial

An interesting watch - for a variety of reasons. This is an issue that generally seems to be splitting a lot of educated people down the middle. While no one seems to deny the impact science has had on humans, few seem to want to trust science either.

Maybe it is all down the the definitions. As I grew up, my vision of a 'scientist' was someone in a lab, highly intelligent, educated and motivated, pursuing a topic with a single minded dedication. A scientist, I believed, did not have to deal with the worldly problems & pressures like the rest of us - as if they lived in a sterile environment, just like in their own experiments.

Unfortunately, this is seldom the case. Scientists, live in and share the same world as us. And there is no 'science' that stands alone, in unblemished purity. So when people attack science, or they think they are, they really are not. They are attacking a hybrid cabal of scientists, businessmen, government and media. The reason they are attacking this cabal, is because the cabal is advertising itself as 'science'. When we have scientifically proven face creams, that are more in-your-face than the lack of correlation between vaccines and autism - how can you really distinguish between the two.

I don't believe the intelligent disbeliever is directly questioning science as defined by the scientific method, but what is questionable is the cabal claiming indulgence in and of the scientific method. That is not to say there there will always be someone that will never believe, but instead want to take things to their illogical extreme conclusions. I guess they believe they are 'scientists' in their own right.

Science & Morality

Have always been a fan of the TED website, and their collection of talks. Having just heard one of their videos, I was browsing the site, trying to learn a bit more about them - turns out, they actually encourage embedding and discussing their videos. Cue, glint in eye. So, here we are.

Morality, in the sense discussed in the video below is the definition of right and wrong, irrespective of what people think. Sam Harris, argues that, on the contrary to what many people assume, science is capable of reaching such definite answers on its own, based on facts, and can therefore complete eliminate the need for a morality-based declarations. Well thought and presented of course - but for me the crux of the matter lay in the Q&A at the end. When asked to prove the immorality of the Burqa, Sam scientifically fell back to the answer the basically said - we may not have a rigorous proof now, but given the rate of our scientific progress, we will eventually get there.

In his answer, I believe, Sam was absolutely correct and negligent. Yes, science will eventually get there, but people need an answer now - on what is correct and what is not. People have all been created with consciousness, but a varying degree of intellect. Waiting for an intellect-appealing morality, that may eventually get here is a very bad survival skill. Instead, society taking advantage of the common denominator, appealed to human consciousness. Turns out, morality is a lot like having immortal parents. Even if you replace parents with Man with beard in sky, things work just as well. True, such a replacement has side-effects, a lot of side-effects, but at least it kept humanity going till science would eventually evolve to appeal to the most intellectually-challenged among us.