Improvements: The knee chair

Thanks to a good friend I recently found out about this amazing blog, Study Hacks, which I have linked in my blogroll too. It’s a super insightful blog that talks about everything to do with research including time management, how to publish, how to avoid stress etc. It’s a treasure trove of useful advice, if you will, and I can highly recommend it.

Inspired by Study Hacks I decided that today I want to share something potentially helpful with the world too. I want to tell you about my new knee chair. It is baby blue and very comfortable. You sit on the top with the knees on the bottom part. This keeps the back perfectly straight which is of course ideal when you’re working at the desk for many hours.

At the moment I am wearing rather thick long socks, so whilst I’m kneeling here the pattern of the socks is being pressed into my flesh which is a bit uncomfortable, I must admit. I just take my legs off the lower part then, put the feet on the floor and sit as you would on any normal chair. The ergonomic effect is lost that way but it’s still a cool chair to sit on. My hope is that I won’t ruin my back by sitting in the wrong kind of chair for many hours every day and that I might even build up some core strength as I go about my geeky life. That would be pretty amazing.

What I don’t get is why this chair costs twice as much on Amazon UK as it costs on Amazon DE, i.e. in Germany. My chair cost 32 € on Amazon.de, the same chair on Amazon UK costs 57.90 GBP which is almost exactly double the price (click the hyperlinks if you don’t believe me). Maybe demand isn’t as high in the UK. That would also explain why there is no choice between different colours and styles.

Anyway, let me seize this opportunity to send greetings and well-wishes out to British and German PhD students. Good luck with it all! I’m sure at the end of the day we’ll all be in the same rotten sinking ship.

Gently

The fields have been tilled recently and are now ready for winter. I love the way the plough furrows travel into the distance. There is so much beauty in the gentle squeezing and then dilating of the lines and so much playfulness in how the furrows catch and hold the sunlight in them.

Hard labour has gone into the making of these curving lines of beauty. They tell human stories as well as a few animal ones (can you see the animal track in the first one? Probably deer.)

From now on, these fields will lie under the sky day and night, and they’ll be blown about by mighty winds. Siberian frosts will eventually creep in and strangle the earth. And then, in spring, the people will come milling back to the fields in their tractors and with their ploughs and the livelier part of the annual cycle will begin again.

But for now it’s just resting and waiting so beautifully and gently.

My heart-rate is fine, so I am fine – huh??

I don’t have a smart phone or any of the other devices that allow you to measure blood oxygenation, heart rate or body temperature. I don’t own the Nike system for runners that measures your pace and distance, though I must admit my arm pocket looks a lot like one of these techy systems but it’s just a strap-on pocket. Looks cool but really isn’t.

So when I am saying  that the conclusion that Gary Wolf comes to in the clip linked to the image is bonkers, I am not really relying on my vast experience of biometrics. I just know that knowing my biometrics doesn’t really do much for self-knowledge. That’s the conclusion Wolf seems to come to – but click on the image or the link here (only 5:11 mins) and see for yourself. I think this is a very reductionistic argument; it’s just like rationalising in the midst of a full-on passionate fight with your partner ‘oh geez, it’s my hormones, I’m premenstrual, that’s why I’m picking a fight’ or to think that your performance at work or sports has been low because you’ve been suffering from indigestion lately. Whilst all of these are beautiful instances of correct biometrics  – assuming you could in fact measure your oestrogene level and digestion status, I don’t think many would suggest that we’re talking about self-knowledge here. Knowing myself/my self does not really mean knowing that it was in fact indigestion that I have been suffering from, unless of course you’re working with a really strange notion of ‘the self’. The kind of talk in Wolf’s clip represents a ‘nothing but’ explanation, as William James illustrated 110 years ago; it doesn’t tell us much about our selves nor the phenomenon that we’re interested in. It merely covers the meaning of the phenomenon up and gives an easy and quick explanation. Women don’t pick fights because they’re hormonal (keep that in mind, guys) and, although other health problems do of course affect work performance so would a lot of other much more systemic factors, such as the bitchy colleague for instance.

I had expected a presentation on the subject ‘The Quantified Self’, because that was the topic of Wolf’s talk, to reach more profound conclusions. Why is it really that people use their smart phones to obtain their own personal biometrics? What does it do for people to know these specifics about their physical existence? Does it grant them a modicum of control, or peace, or illusionary comfort of mind? These are the really interesting questions on the topic, I think. What would also be more worthwhile to look into than what Wolf did is to inquire who instigated this obsession with the workings of my own body; Naomi Wolf argued convincingly in The Beauty Myth that the beauty discourse and the obsession with self and self-improvement detract people’s focus from thinking in social terms, in terms of systems and what can be changed in the world. Instead, people only want to change themselves, adapt, make do, get by.

This is a dangerous development. It should not be sold as anything but that and definitely not as a way towards increased self-knowledge. That’s just bonkers!

Research and living in the 21st century

China's Three Gorges Dam

The German sociologist Ulrich Beck has famously posited that modern societies, falsely believing that they can master nature and control their environment, have provoked a range of unforeseeable processes such as climate change, or nuclear catastrophes that, so it turned out, they can’t control after all. He deduced from his observations the universal thesis that all large-scale social action, especially technological innovation, has ‘unintended consequences’ that might well be beyond human comprehension and human power to counteract. Environmental disasters, themselves the consequence of climate change, are a case in point. Human societies are largely incapable of dealing with tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, nuclear holocaust, extreme levels of air pollution and increasing amounts of industrial and household waste. What to one political group or lobby is a wonderful feat of human skill, as is China’s Three Gorges Dam, for instance, to the government, is to others a disaster waiting to happen. Pollution, landslides and other catastrophic events might be in stall for the area upstream of the dam, environmentalists says.

Caution must be the order of the day in the sciences; technological advances should be treated with a modicum of suspicion and a huge amount of respect for the mighty forces they might be able to unleash. Think Large Hadron Collider: a number of members of the scientific community still believe that dark matter could be created here – which would be the end of the world.

It was therefore with a mounting degree of surprise and incredulity that I read Laura Samataria’s article about James Martin in the recent issue of Sublime. In this article, Martin, who has founded the James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University, talks about the first computer networks and ‘how it all began’. The most exciting and important areas of study in the 21st century will be stem-cell research and neuroscience, Martin says:

Today people say you can’t genetically modify humans because they’ll pass their genes on to your children, for ever, and things are going to go wrong. You don’t want to have things that go wrong being passed on to your descendants. But we’ve now discovered that we can insert a 24th chromosome into the body. Every human being has 23 pairs of chromosomes, and it’s very easy to insert a 24th. You can put any genes you want into that chromosome, but it won’t ever be passed on to your children. Stem-cell research makes the genetic modification of humans an acceptable thing to do. It’s not going to be long before you’ll have people saying, ‘I couldn’t give my daughter blue eyes …’ ‘Can I make my son more intelligent? Is there anything I can do with his genes that will make him a better, more capable person?’ We’re around the time where we will be ‘enhancing’ human beings.

Having Beck in the back of my mind, such obvious enthusiasm for technological innovation at the cellular level makes me more than a bit uncomfortable. It sounds awfully like a perpetuation of the myth of modern man who controls everything. The 21st Century School has a research focus on risk and the future of humanity, so one shouldn’t assume that Martin & Co. are a bunch of future-crazy scientists who innovate for the sake of science alone. Human advancement is very much at the heart of this research project. Nonetheless, the feeling of eerie discomfort persists; read this passage here and maybe you’ll know what I mean:

The Singularity [when computers become more intelligent than humans] is an inevitable consequence of computer intelligence feeding on itself. Computers will become increasingly successful at imitating aspects of human intelligence, and this will help produce systems that enable humans to use deep NHL intelligence when it reaches the Singularity level. Computers will become really interesting when they become intelligent, but since computer intelligence is so different, we’ll need a close synergy between the two.

I began to muse a bit about my strong reaction and discomfort whilst reading. No doubt I am sceptical because I don’t know a lot about these issues, and because these subjects do represent amazing possibilities for the future but also challenges for the present. In order to achieve true progress in stem-cell research, nanoscience and neuroscience and all the rest of it, and in order for these advances to not simultaneously signify the end of the world (hyperbolically speaking), researchers and staff involved in these projects must know a lot. Risk assessment must be through the roof with undertakings like this! (The same issue of Sublime also has an article on risk assessment, suprise surprise.)

But there is more to it: I simply cannot imagine that any researcher can undertake projects like this because no one around me is doing really important research that actually engages with the world we will live in 50 years from now. We don’t even have a conception of dynamic change in our research; we mostly look back on what has already happened. Most of the time, I think, we aren’t intelligent enough to be able to think ahead. But imagine the competent and intelligent individual involved in the kind of extraordinary research Martin talks about! He speaks of ‘the Oxford level of quality’:

Most academics work on only one discipline. They do a PhD on a single subject and they write papers for the journal of that discipline. But all of these big subjects involve a multiplicity of disciplines. You need to have interdisciplinary research that connects together other disciplines, and that research needs to be done at a high level of quality, an Oxford level of quality.

Multidisciplinarity is of course the way to go and is increasingly spreading across British academia. What should also spread is this kind of modernist belief in human capabilities. Access to the ‘Oxford level of quality’ should not spread, however. We are talking about the crème de la crème of bright minds here, and that, by definition, is a small group. They should, of course, be from all sorts of financial and family backgrounds. (Sometimes it seems to me that Britain would sooner get into stem-cell research big-time than attempt to change the class system, but that’s not really the issue right now.)

Yes, I said a minute ago that something modernist should spread. I am saying that in a climate in which everything I hear is how awful modernity has been. It’s all about postmodernity, withdrawing from wanting to control the world, wearing ethnic clothing and thinking deep thoughts somewhere in the wilderness. (Excuse the sarcasm. – It’s true though.) Of course I know about the unintended consequences of a lot of things, so trust me, I am not advocating a blind faith in progress and seizing control for its own sake. And I will never be convinced that ‘enhancing human beings’ is such a great idea – that’s still just spooky to me. But I am beginning to think that it isn’t all wrong to believe in the fact that human beings can learn a lot, can work multidimensionally, can move out of the feeble-mindedness that we seem to be encouraging at universities today, and that we all of us can emancipate once more, can set ourselves free to think creatively for and about our own future.

As I am beginning to understand, it is precisely this belief that is missing in Beck’s thesis and similar conceptions: Meaning to offer a more realistic assessment of what humans can actually achieve in the sciences and subsequently control, Beck implicitly advocates scepticism of innovation, creativity and ultimately change. And that cannot be the answer either. Cautious, very high-level research with excellent people on the team, that seems to be the way to go.

Swimming through the sound barrier

Did you hear about the new Supersonic car that came out this week? It can do 1000 mph. Crikey eh. What kind of person drives these things? Royal Air Force pilots, apparently. The current world land speed record holder is a Brit, in fact. This video here doesn’t capture so much the technological greatness of these things – though it does show the car breaking through the sound barrier. I felt a bit like watching aliens do alien things in an alien environment; quite strange, this supersonic racing…

Why paying for the Times Online won’t work

I don’t know if you’ve tried to read the Times Online recently and realised that you don’t have free access any more; I found out last week and it’s all over the newspapers, too (the other ones that I can still access). If you’re like me, your reaction to the Times‘ paywall is ‘I’ll just read my news somewhere else then, thank you very much’.

That’s what will happen, says Clay Shirky in the Guardian (which is freely available online) today. I can highly recommend his article there. Just like his blog posts, this is a comprehensive overview over his even more comprehensive and intricate arguments regarding the new internet-based media. Shirky’s prognosis for newspapers is that the printed form will die out pretty quickly. Paywalls won’t work because internet users are much less into consuming for its own sake than a lot of people (ok, just say it: a lot of academics) think. By now, they’re used to having access to information whenever they want and they want to keep on sharing info at no cost.

Just as the invention of the printing press transformed society, the internet’s capacity for “an unlimited amount of zero-cost reproduction of any digital item by anyone who owns a computer” has removed the barrier to universal participation, and revealed that human beings would rather be creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite think they should watch. Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous collective campaigns and social activism also emerging. The potential civic value of all this hitherto untapped energy is nothing less, Shirky concludes, than revolutionary.

“Then there’s this second effect, that anonymity makes people behave more meanly. What I think is going to happen there is we are slowly going to set up islands of civil discourse. There’s no way to make the internet not anonymous – and if there was, the most enthusiastic consumers of that technology would be Iranian and Chinese and Burmese governments. But there are ways of saying, while you’re here, use your real identity. We need to set up the social norms which say in this space you need to use your real names, or some well-known handle.

“Whenever you say that, people cry censorship, but frankly? Fuck off.” He breaks off, laughing. “You know, getting that right is important. The whole, ‘Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing’? We’re done with that. It’s just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good – that’s the really big challenge.”

Thoughtful and intelligent, and humorous. And spot-on. So a few newspapers will go down – and lots have already last year – but there is massive scope for civil discourse in all this. Very good point, I think.

Honestly, check out Shirky’s blog but do bring some time with you – this is a man who knows how to develop a good argument in readable short essays that talk about things that interest you and me (academia, the media, social change, politics etc.). Oh yah, and he has a new book out too.

Facebook is irreplaceable

I recently contemplated deleting my Facebook profile. ‘How silly’, you might think, especially if you’ve seen that South Park episode recently where Stan, whilst trying to delete his profile, gets sucked into Facebook where he has to fight for his survival. He stumbles across farmyards and talks to other profiles, all of which reveal information about themselves in the typical ‘x is having fun at the beach’ sort of way. Stan has to defend himself against his profile which does not want to be deleted. They play one of these weird Facebook games (Yahtzee) that I actually don’t know and Stan just happens to win/survive.

It’s not because of the dread of being sucked into Facebook that I decided not to delete my profile though.

It’s also not because I know that it takes ages to complete the deletion procedure.

It’s mainly because there are a number of people that I am connected with on Facebook that I really, really like and that I cannot see every day, or hardly ever at all. I want to still know what these guys are up to though in their respective countries far away, so that when I see them again one day I’ll still feel kind of close to them. Looking at friends’ pictures really helps with that actually.

The truth also is that there simply is no other way to communicate with all the many people that we all of us have met over the years. We live in a global world; surely, going back to mainly face-to-face communication – yes, I did contemplate that – is simply no solution. It would create more problems than it solves, I think. So that’s also why I am not going to delete my Facebook profile.

The matter of privacy and keeping different kinds of information about oneself separate…well, that’s an important issue, of course. But to be honest, it’s not that difficult to keep information to yourself. I certainly learned not to be too divulgy, or to only divulge and pour my heart out in messages that only the recipient can read. The privacy settings on Facebook are also not that difficult to understand, I don’t think. At the end of the day, Facebook users perform the marvellous 21st century act of performance of self for public consumption every day. (We’re also really good at it; the whole problem with fragmented identities isn’t really such a problem at all. You think someone should inform Antony Giddens of that?)

Let’s just hope that very few of them will have to fight their profile in a shoot-down or some such in Facebook.

Desert metropolis, carbonfree

This isn’t brandnew news but still super interesting: The emirate of Abu Dhabi is building a desert metropolis that will be completely carbonfree (and German architects and engineers are advising on the project, yay!)! Renewable energy takes care of everything – think solar panel big time. The name is Masdar City, check out their website here.

Speaking of solar panels in the desert: German engineers in cooperation with others have launched the project Desertec which seeks to build a huge energy network in the desert regions (and beyond) of North Africa. This is what Deutschlandmagazin.de says about this exciting project:

Some people compare it with the construction of the Panama Canal. Others see it as the greatest technological challenge since NASA’s Apollo programme which, after all, put the first man on the moon. Whatever the case, the news that circled the world from Munich on 13 July leaves no one exactly cold: on that Monday twelve companies called Desertec into being, probably one of the most ambitious technological projects in history. Huge solar thermal power plants will capture the desert sun in North Africa and Asia to produce electricity which is partly destined for Europe: this is Desertec’s vision. The idea is that 15 per cent of Europe’s energy requirements can be covered by the year 2050 in this eco-friendly way. 85 per cent of the energy produced by Desertec is however designated for use by the participating states of North Africa and Asia. The project will cost an estimated 400 billion euros.