Preoccupations

Wi-Fi and health

Recently, I needed to prepare something for use at school that would act as a summary to date of this debate. I took as my markers some of the high profile coverage Wi-Fi has received over the last year. It might be worth publishing this brief overview here.

1)  There's no basis for proceeding that's worthy of our consideration other than one based on the scientific evidence. There's masses of conjecture which generates fear, uncertainty and doubt.

2)  Let's start with mobile phones and phone masts - forms of wireless communication the radiation from which is (at source) far more powerful than that emitted by the kinds of wireless access points we'd be installing.

a)  December, 2006: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a study of 420,095 cell phone users (Danes). They began subscribing to cellular phone services between 1982 and 1995, and the study examines their cancer rates through to 2002. The study 'finds no increased risk of tumors or leukemia in subscribers'; 'Even among the 56,000 people who have used the phones for more than a decade, researchers found no increased risk of cancer'.

b)  July, 2007: the Essex University phone mast study — 'when tests were carried out under double-blind conditions, where neither experimenter nor participant knew whether the signal was on or off, the number of symptoms reported was not related to whether the mast was on or off. Two of the 44 sensitive individuals correctly judged whether the mast was on or off in all six tests, compared with five out of 114 control participants. This proportion is what is expected by chance and was not increased in the sensitive group'.

3)  Now we come to the Panorama programme, 'Wi-Fi: A Warning Signal', that ran last May and which the BBC's editorial complaints unit subsequently (November) conceded had not had 'adequate balance' and so had given 'a misleading impression of the state of scientific opinion on the issue'.

a)  There's a a succinct and clear explanation of a fundamental flaw in the Panorama programme here. From the same source: 'Wi-Fi uses radio frequency (RF) waves that are "non-ionising" - that means they are not powerful enough to knock electrons off molecules in cells. One way they could harm cells is by heating them up. But this requires much higher power than is delivered by Wi-Fi networks or mobile phones (which use similar frequencies).  As every cautious scientist will tell you, you can never prove that something is absolutely safe and no one would want to gamble with the health of children. But there is good reason for thinking that Wi-Fi is, if anything, safer than the radiation from a mobile phone. The UK's Health Protection Agency says a person sitting within a Wi-Fi hotspot for a year receives the same dose of radio waves as a person using a mobile phone for 20 minutes'.

b)  Ben Goldacre, who, of course, writes the excellent Guardian 'Bad Science' column, took the Panorama programme to pieces and has also analysed the whole melange of ideas swirling round the "electrosensitivity" theme: Electrosensitives: the new cash cow of the woo industry; Wi-Fi Wants To Kill Your Children… But Alasdair Philips of Powerwatch sells the cure! ('Of course you should be vigilant about health risks. I don't question that there may be some issues worth sober investigation around Wi-Fi safety. But this documentary was the lowest, most misleading scaremongering I have seen in a very long time.')

4)  I felt it was probably worth my including the two Independent articles from last year, Danger on the airwaves: Is the Wi-Fi revolution a health time bomb? and Wi-Fi: Children at risk from 'electronic smog' (both from April). These will have lodged themselves in the minds of some — and they're truly bad. Ian Betteridge took both apart here, concluding, 'what really matters is that the quality of the Indie's reporting on this is abysmal. Printing scare stories isn't just bad journalism - it's bad behaviour that actually damages our culture, promoting bad, hokey ideas as fact and encouraging anti-scientific and anti-rational propaganda. I'd love to ask the editor of the Indie which they prefer - a world where science and reason are encouraged, or a world of cranks, quacks and charlatans'.

A paragraph or two summing up what we can say we know and how best, then, we should proceed?  I can't really do better than these, from the Guardian article already cited in 3a above:

The World Health Organisation's advice on this is very clear. "Considering the very low exposure levels and research results collected to date, there is no convincing scientific evidence that the weak RF signals from base stations and wireless networks cause adverse health effects."  And an HPA statement issued last week is equally adamant that Wi-Fi almost certainly does not pose a problem. "On the basis of current scientific information Wi-Fi equipment satisfies international guidelines. There is no consistent evidence of health effects from RF exposures below guideline levels and therefore no reason why schools and others should not use Wi-Fi equipment.

And apart from bogus TV experiments, what do we know about the strength of Wi-Fi radiation in homes, schools and businesses? Kenneth Foster, a Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, took 356 measurements at 55 different sites in four different countries to find out. Even though he took his readings close to wireless routers, in all cases he found that the radiation level from Wi-Fi was far lower than international safety standards and often much lower than other radiation sources nearby.  Wi-Fi is a new addition to modern life and no scientist can say with her hand on her heart that it is perfectly safe - particularly in the long term. But there is no theoretical reason to expect problems and no good evidence for any harm. Of course we need more research to understand its effects more thoroughly and also sensible precautions. But misleading and irresponsible scare stories serve only to cloud the issue.

Technorati tags: WiFi, health, FUD, bad science, media

Narrating the work

E O Wilson in Consilience, quoted by Jon Udell:

The creative process is an opaque mix. Perhaps only openly confessional memoirs, still rare to nonexistent, might disclose how scientists actually find their way to a publishable conclusion. In one sense scientific articles are deliberately misleading. Just as a novel is better than the novelist, a scientific report is better than the scientist, having been stripped of all the confusions and ignoble thought that led to its composition. Yet such voluminous and incomprehensible chaff, soon to be forgotten, contains most of the secrets of scientific success.

As Jon put it elsewhere,

By narrating the work, as Dave Winer once put it, we clarify the work. There can be more than narrator, but it makes sense to have one team member own the primary role just as other members own other roles.

The first Jon Udell piece referred to above focuses on Timo Hannay:

As director of web publishing for Nature Publishing Group, Timo Hannay’s projects include: Connotea, a social bookmarking service for scientists; Nature Network, a social network for scientists; and Nature Precedings, a site where researchers can share and discuss work prior to publication. The social and collaborative aspects of these systems are, of course, inspired by their more general counterparts on the web: del.icio.us, Facebook and LinkedIn, the blogosphere.

Jon's interview with Timo Hannay is here. I'm keeping a close eye on what Nature is up to.

Dave Winer's original usage runs: 'I think that narrating your work is the way to go'. I can see why Jon Udell likes that as much as he does.

Technorati tags: E O Wilson, Jon Udell, Dave Winer, Nature, Timo Hannay, conversation

Erasing that memory

When Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out I was keen to go and see it — and I wasn't disappointed. I see I read the NYT review in April 2004 and then, when the DVD came out, blogged about it again (2006) and linked (via Mind Hacks) to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the mythical memory videotape.

Back in March 2004, I'd read Steve Johnson's review of the film in Slate, part of which ran:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is remarkably in sync with modern neuroscience, but in one respect the film put its emphasis in the wrong place. To be fair, it's a failing shared with a host of recent films about memory loss: Memento, 50 First Dates, Paycheck. Selective erasure of memories may not be a feasible procedure in the near future, but cosmetic memory enhancement is likely to be a reality in the next 10 years, just as targeted mood enhancers like Prozac have become commonplace over the past 10. You won't be able to sharpen your memory of a single person, but you may well be able to take a pill that will increase your general faculties of recollection. This is the ultimate irony of Eternal Sunshine and films like it. While the culture frets over the perils of high-tech erasure, we should really be worrying about the opposite: what will happen when we remember too much.

And then along comes this:

A single, specific memory has been wiped from the brains of rats, leaving other recollections intact. … The brain secures memories by transferring them from short-term to long-term storage, through a process called reconsolidation. It has been shown before that this process can be interrupted with drugs. But Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University and his colleagues wanted to know how specific this interference was: could the transfer of one specific memory be meddled with without affecting others? "Our concern was: would you do something really massive to their memory network?" says LeDoux.

To find out, they trained rats to fear two different musical tones, by playing them at the same time as giving the rats an electric shock. Then, they gave half the rats a drug known to cause limited amnesia (U0126, which is not approved for use in people), and reminded all the animals, half of which were still under the influence of the drug, of one of their fearful memories by replaying just one of the tones. When they tested the rats with both tones a day later, untreated animals were still fearful of both sounds, as if they expected a shock. But those treated with the drug were no longer afraid of the tone they had been reminded of under treatment. The process of re-arousing the rats' memory of being shocked with the one tone while they were drugged had wiped out that memory completely, while leaving their memory of the second tone intact.

LeDoux's team also confirms the idea that a part of the brain called the amygdala is central to this process - communication between neurons in this part of the brain usually increases when a fearful memory forms, but it decreases in the treated rats. This shows that the fearful memory is actually deleted, rather than simply breaking the link between the memory and a fearful response.

Greg Quirk, a neurophysiologist from the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, thinks that psychiatrists working to treat patients with conditions such as PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] will be encouraged by the step forward. "These drugs would be adjuncts to therapy," he says. "This is the future of psychiatry - neuroscience will provide tools to help it become more effective."

Technorati tags: memory, brain, mind, psychiatry, neuroscience, neurophysiology, Nature

Historic Quotes

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarised with the ideas from the beginning. — Max Planck

Found here — a great source of quotations, some just plain "historic", others forecasting the future, greeting new discoveries/ideas, etc, and getting things badly wrong:

"What use could this company make of an electrical toy?" — The President of Western Union responding to Alexander Graham Bell's offer to Western Union of the exclusive rights to the telephone for $100,000 in 1876.

Technorati tags: quotations, future, forecasting

Cerebrotonic

No sooner do I post about Auden and include 'The Fall of Rome' ('Cerebrotonic Cato may / Extol the Ancient Disciplines'), than up pops 'cerebrotonic' in another blog post.

'Cerebrotonic' sounds like an Auden coinage, but isn't. Here's the OED:

A. adj. Designating or characteristic of a type of personality which is introverted, intellectual, and emotionally restrained, classified by Sheldon as being associated with an ECTOMORPHIC physique. B. n. One having this type of personality. So cerebrotonia (-tn), cerebrotonic personality or characteristics.

1937 A. HUXLEY Ends & Means xi. 165 Dr. William Sheldon, whose classification [of types of human beings] in terms of somatotonic, viscerotonic and cerebrotonic I shall use. Ibid. xii. 193 The cerebrotonic is not such a ‘good mixer’ as the viscerotonic. 1940 W. H. SHELDON Var. Human Physique 8 In the economy of the cerebrotonic individual the sensory and central nervous systems appear to play dominant roles. 1945 A. HUXLEY Let. 2 Apr. (1969) 517 There was just enough of the somatotonic in his..cerebrotonic make-up to make him regret his cerebrotonia. 1950 Themes & Var. i. 121 Too secretively the introvert, too inhibitedly cerebrotonic, to be willing to take the risk of ‘giving himself away’. 1951 AUDEN Nones (1952) 28 Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines. 1954 R. FULLER Fantasy & Fugue iv. 75 You..unfortunately incline to the cerebrotonic ectomorphyou worry too much, you're too good looking, and you can't abandon yourself happily to booze.

The other blog post? Momus' Celebrating diversity means measuring difference. Momus writes about William Sheldon:

I discovered his writings when I was 20, and trying to understand my own problems and potentialities better. Sheldon proposed what seems at first like a very simple way to measure body types. He isolates three basic components: fatness, muscularity and thinness, which he calls endomorphy, mesomorphy and ectomorphy. … "Ectomorphy means linearity, fragility, flatness of the chest, and delicacy throughout the body," he wrote. "We find a relatively scant development of both the visceral and the somatic structures. The ectomorph has long, slender, poorly muscled extremities with delicate pipe-stem bones, and he has, relative to his mass, the greatest surface area and therefore the greatest sensory exposure to the outside world. He is thus in one sense overly exposed and naked to the world." …

I'm a classic ectomorph, which means that by temperament I'm a cerebrotonic. In ectomorph-cerebrotonics, "the sensory-receptor properties are well developed. As a consequence however the central nervous system (CNS) is soon overloaded and rapidly tires. The cerebrotonic has the gift of concentrating his attention on the external world as well as on his internal world. His vigilance and autonomic reactivity make him behave in an inhibited and uncertain way: introverted behaviour. He has problems with expressing his feelings and with establishing social relationships, and can very well bear to be alone. The elementary strategies of coping with life are perception, reconnaissance and vigilance, cognition and anticipation, and a certain amount of privacy." …

Personally, I like people who structure the world boldly, especially if their structurations ring true. I don't take any structuration as holy writ, though -- I like to play with them, snap them together and pull them apart. But I also like it when structurations make for lovely poetry. The way Sheldon describes the ectomorph has a behaviourist beauty, a 1940s severity. He has "a relative predominance of skin and its appendages, which includes the nervous system; lean, fragile, delicate body; small delicate bones; droopy shoulders; small face, sharp nose, fine hair; relatively little body mass and relatively great surface area".

"The cerebrotonic may be literate or illiterate," says Sheldon, "may be trained or untrained in the conventional intellectual exercises of his milieu, may be an avid reader or may never read a book, may be a scholastic genius or may have failed in every sort of schooling. He may be a dreamer, a poet, philosopher, recluse, or builder of utopias and of abstract psychologies. He may be a schizoid personality, a religious fanatic, an ascetic, a patient martyr, or a contentious crusader. All these things depend upon the intermixture of other components, upon other variables in the symphony, and also upon the environmental pressures to which the personality has been exposed. The essential characteristic of the cerebrotonic is his acuteness of attention. The other two major functions, the direct visceral and the direct somatic functions, are subjugated, held in check, and rendered secondary. The cerebrotonic eats and exercises to attend."

I know next to nothing about Sheldon and need to go back to Momus and read it all again. John Fuller, in his W H Auden: A Commentary, says only this apropos 'The Fall of Rome' and 'cerebrotonic':

Stanza 4: Auden was inclined to prefer the endomorphic type to either the ectomorphic ('Cerebrotonic Cato') or the mesomorphic ('muscle-bound Marines'). The typology is from W H Sheldon.

Momus, quoting Sheldon on endomorphs and mesomorphs:

For comparison, in endomorphs "The body is rounded and exhibits a central concentration of mass. The trunk predominates over the limbs, the abdomen over the thorax, and the proximal segments of the limbs predominate over the distal segments. The bones are gracile and the muscle system is poorly developed. Muscle relief and bone projections are absent. The body displays a smoothness of contour owing to subcutaneous padding. The head is large and spherical, the face is wide with full cheeks. The neck is frequently short and forms in side view an obtuse angle with the chin. The shoulders are high and rounded. The trunk is relatively long and straight, the chest is wide at the base. The limbs are comparatively short and tapering with small hands and feet."

"When mesomorphy predominates, the body is sturdy, hard and firm. The bones are large and heavy, the muscles well-developed, massive and prominent. The heavily muscled thorax predominates over the abdomen. The proximal and distal segments of the limbs are evenly proportioned. The bones of the head are heavy. The face is large in relation to the cranial part of the head. Massive cheekbones and square jaws are the rule. The arms and legs are uniformly massive and muscular, strongly built knees, massive wrists."

Ah, classificatory schema: they have their own fascination …

Oh, and one other gem from Momus:

Interestingly, Sheldon met and befriended Aldous Huxley during a residence at a writers and artists' refuge at Dartington Hall in Devon, England. Huxley also recognized himself as an ectomorph and cerebrotonic, and saw it as a limitation …

(Have another look at the clip from the OED above. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could overlay the OED with transfers of social and intellectual relationships? … Hey OUP, open up the OED!) You'll have to click through to iMomus to hear what Huxley had to say.

Technorati tags: William Sheldon, Shedlon, Momus, iMomus, Auden, W H Auden

Consilience

The Ghost Map: Steven Johnson and Brian Eno, 4 December 2006

In 1854 a cholera epidemic killed 50,000 people in England and Wales and become a battle between man and microbe unlike any other. At the ICA, Steven Johnson - author of Everything Bad is Good for You - will tell the story of Dr John Snow, the physician who pounded the streets of London, methodically noting the patterns in the outbreak. The conclusion he came to brought him into conflict with the entire medical establishment, but ultimately enabled him to defeat his era's greatest killer. In conversation with Brian Eno - musician, artist and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation - Johnson will explore what a cholera outbreak in the nineteenth century can tell us about solving the long term challenges we face in the twenty-first century.

Produced in collaboration with The Long Now Foundation.

Joe Lee's great photo of Steven Johnson and Brian Eno at the ICA

In the busy weeks since the 4th, I've returned many times to this evening — there was plenty to feed off: 'They started off talking about The Ghost Map but the conversation spread its tentacles to include Second Life, neighbourhoods, modern renaissance and slums' (Paul Miller). Once again, I was left wondering why university wasn't (isn't?) this exciting (inter-disciplinary, open to imaginative combinations of ideas) — something I afterwards put to both Steven Johnson and Brian Eno. Each said they often ask the same question (with an important qualification from Eno about his experience of art school).

For anyone who hasn't yet got to the write-ups, Matt blogged it there and then, and see also: Russell Davies; Rod McLaren ; Paul Miller (see above); Sebastian Mary; photos (= more by Joe Lee). Oh, and Steven Johnson. 

Afterwards, it was a great pleasure to catch up with Matt, Fiona, Dan and Rod, and to meet up with Tom again (last time was Reboot 8). 

***

The first manifestation of the Long Now Foundation in the UK, the evening unfolded in the context of the Foundation's wider work and thinking. I've been dipping into the Long Now seminars for a while and want to watch a number of the other videoed talks available there. Stewart Brand's views on city life were mentioned by Eno and Brand's City Planet seminar is one I'd seen before the ICA evening. I remember being brought up short by Brand's characterisation of city/rural life. In the Long Now discussion page about this talk, Craig Hubley writes: 

… he betrays a strong pro-urban bias by saying "In reality, life in the country is dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous. ... What's particularly odd is that Stewart follows this up by admitting how truly "impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous" city life can be: "One-sixth of humanity, a billion people, now live in squatter cities ("slums") and millions more are on the way." Perhaps that's because the propaganda is telling them that "the city is exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, and safe." And it's that very propaganda that makes it not so. This can be particularly tragic for women who believe that "in the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and family elder, pound grain, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children. Her independence goes up" unless of course she is exploited, enslaved, gets HIV while in prostitution. Why would she? Oh because she and her parents believe the fantasy myth about life in the city being necessarily better, of course.

Matt's notes from the evening catch the range of optimistic/positive things Johnson and Eno had to say about cities, but it was no surprise that in the Q&As slums figured prominently (Rod: 'some frisky questioning from the floor on first-world/middle-class elites vs developing-world/favelas, dismissed by Eno as an over-simplification'): are cities and their opportunities being talked up? Isn't the truth that thousands are being driven to the cities (slums) not out of choice but by mass privatisation of rural land? 

Peter Merholz, whilst travelling in Chile and Peru, has been reading Johnson's book, The Ghost Map, the originating focus for the ICA event. He describes himself as 'a fan of cities', but 'it's clear that we have to … consider the development of the modern megalopolis highly critically': 

Another thing I read while traveling was a recent New Yorker article on Lagos, Nigeria, which the author depicts as something akin to hell on earth. The author juxtaposes his (miserable) experiences with breathless commentary from folks such as Rem Koolhaas, demonstrating the disconnection from reality that urbanist cheerleaders suffer.

Because when you look at Lagos, or when I looked at Lima, I really had to wonder: are such cities a good thing? Lima is a city built on fear. It's grown phenomenally in the last half century and, in doing so, has seen a marked increase in crime, brought upon by the economic disparity within the citizenry. Everywhere you go, you see armed guards. Boring middle class apartment buildings are ringed with electrified fences. In public places, chairs have straps to latch your purse. This all comprises a literal architecture of fear. …

The growth of cities in the 20th century make their development feel inevitable, and cities are clearly the world's primary economic engine, but when that inevitability makes people feel like they're trapped in circumstance, what have we achieved?

In my notes from the ICA event, I have the titles of two books I want to read soon that take contrary views about mega-cities: Shadow Cities (Robert Neuwirth) and Planet of Slums (Mike Davis). (Eno also suggested Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts' novel about Mumbai.) 

Nineteenth century doomsayers predicted the collapse of London (then, with a population of some 2.5 million, the largest city on earth) and its survival as a much smaller entity. The nineteenth century worked out how to maintain cities of a few million and so, today, we see cities of 1-10 million as viable. Cities of 25 million are what we worry about. 

Some time in 2007, and for the first time in human history, more than 50% of the world's peoples will live in cities. For this new phase of human life, and for one of its key features, the megalopolis, what are the problems we need to address and how are these to be solved? 

***

Through all of the evening, there ran something else. When I got to speak briefly to Johnson after the talk, I asked him what he thought united his seemingly disparate books (Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, 1997; Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, 2001; Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, 2004; Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, 2005; The Ghost Map, 2006). His answer —  a long-term interest in consilience. 

The OED entry for consilience (for its etymology, see consilient: from the Latin, 'consilire, con- together + salire to leap'):

The fact of ‘jumping together’ or agreeing; coincidence, concurrence; said of the accordance of two or more inductions drawn from different groups of phenomena.

1840 WHEWELL Philos. Induct. Sc. II. 230 Accordingly the cases in which inductions from classes of facts altogether different have thus jumped together, belong only to the best established theories which the history of science contains. And, as I shall have occasion to refer to this particular feature in their evidence, I will take the liberty of describing it by a particular phrase; and will term it the Consilience of Inductions. 1847 Hist. Induct. Sc. II. 582 Such coincidences, or consiliences..are the test of truth. 1861 MILL Utilit. 94 The consilience of the results of both these processes, each corroborating and verifying the other.

Wikipedia has two entries about consilience, one on E O Wilson's book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, and one on the term itself, with several quotations from Wilson's book - eg,

If the natural sciences can be successfully united with the social sciences and humanities, the liberal arts in higher education will be revitalized. Even the attempt to accomplish that much is a worthwhile goal. Profession-bent students should be helped to understand that in the twenty-first century the world will not be run by those [who] possess mere information alone. Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to become global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? The answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

Back in August, Steven Johnson spoke with Jesse James Garrett:

JJG: Back when you were running FEED, you seemed to be most interested in cultural criticism, but since then your work has taken a sharp turn into science journalism. What prompted this transition, and what do you see as the connection between these areas of interest?

SJ: The first step was that I looked up at my bookshelf one day and realized that the last 15 books I’d read had been science books. So I thought: if this is what I want to read, maybe it’s what I should write. And then I read E.O. Wilson’s Consilience and thought: I love every bit of this except for the part where he talks about culture. I thought: it would be nice to have someone who came out of a culture crit background who was genuinely building bridges to the science, and not deconstructing it. And really, ever since then, that’s what all my books have been trying to do, in their different ways — to write about culture in ways that are genuinely open to the insights of science, where they’re appropriate.

Ferdinand Mount reviewed The Ghost Map for the WSJ (reprinted on the UCLA Department of Epidemiology website):

Snow had the precious gift of consilience -- "jumping together" … That is, he could bring side by side techniques or theories from two different disciplines to make a further leap forward.

Inductions drawn from 'different groups of phenomena', 'different disciplines' … different scales. Matt:

SJ: Snow was what you might call ‘a consilient thinker’ - he was looking at things on a number of different scales. He built a theory that worked on the very small and the very large scale at the same time.

And here's Russell Davies:

Steven Johnson talked about John Snow as a typical Victorian amateur dabbler. Which struck a chord with me. It's another definition of the creative generalist. Someone who's interested in all sorts of things, the arts and the science. And he talked about the idea of consilience and how John Snow was able to think at all sorts of different scales about the problem of cholera - the microbial one (sort of, they couldn't really see germs then), the human one (he was trained as a physician) and the societal one (he could see and understand the effects on the city as a whole).

Steven Johnson:

In many ways, the story of Broad Street is all about the triumph of a certain kind of urbanism in the face of great adversity, the power of dense cities to create solutions to problems that they themselves have brought about. So many of the issues that define the modern world today -- the runaway growth of megacities, environmental crises, fears of apocalyptic epidemics, digital mapping, the need for clean water, urban terror, the rise of amateur expertise -- are there, in embryo, in the Broad Street outbreak.

So The Ghost Map is in part a disease thriller, with some genuinely spooky and unsettling narrative turns. But it also widens its focus to tell the history of London's sewer system, the evolutionary history of bacteria, the biological and cultural roots of the miasma theory, the bizarre waste management techniques of Victorian society, and so on. It is the story of ten days in London in 1854, but it's also an attempt to tell that story at three different scales of experience: from the point of view of the humans living through it, but also from the point of view of the cholera itself, and the city.

***

I'm reading Johnson's book now. Next in line is Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. I see that Jenkins, in his concluding chapter, talking about how 'many schools remain openly hostile' to the kinds of new knowledge cultures he's exploring, writes that schools are 'continuing to promote autonomous problem solvers and self-contained learners'.

Consilience is about breaking down boundaries between disciplines,

Most of the issues that vex humanity daily - ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environment, endemic poverty, to cite several most consistently before us - cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities. Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is … (E O Wilson)

but it's also about breaking down barriers between learners. Consilience and open, collaborative knowledge cultures are tightly intertwined. Steven Johnson, in The Ghost Map (pp225-6):

... the lateral, cross-disciplinary flow of ideas. The public spaces and coffeehouses of classic urban centers are not organized into strict zones of expertise and interest, the way most universities or corporations are. They're places where various professions intermingle, where different people swap stories and ideas and skills along the way. Snow himself was a kind of one-man coffehouse: one of the primary reasons he was able to cut through the fog of miasma was his multidisciplinary approach, as a practising physician, mapmaker, inventor, chemist, demographer and medical detective. But even with that polymath background, he still needed to draw upon an entirely different set of skills — more social than intellectual — in the form of Henry Whitehead's local knowledge.

JP:

... with consilience amongst professions, we will learn even more. Man was born to bond, to act in community. To be altruistic. To make sacrifices for his family and friends. To belong.

***

Looking back over this year, consilience seems to have been the name of the trail I didn't realise I was following. I want to put that together with play. At the end of the ICA Johnson/Eno evening, talking with Matt about IT portal-keepers and the familiar cries of 'thou shalt not', I said something (obvious) about how we should be trying to create space in which users can join the bits in ways they discover have value. Matt said something (to my mind much better) along the lines of letting (the) play go on. Yes: let the game play on.

Here's to a thoroughly consilient 2007.

Technorati tags: consilience, Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map, Brian Eno, Long Now, ICA, cities, inter-disciplinary

Alchemy

Before I forget … Last Tuesday, passing en route Lincoln's Inn — looking beautiful on what we might soon come to call an unseasonably cold night, I went to the Royal College of Surgeons for a Royal Institution Lecture: 'Alchemy, the occult beginnings of science: Paracelsus, John Dee and Isaac Newton' — Dr Phillip Ball, freelance writer and consultant editor, Nature; Dr Peter Forshaw, British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of London; Professor William Newman, Chair of Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, USA.

Alchemy first came across my path back in my teens (again), reading Jung and then discovering the bizarre Helios bookshop at Toddington in rural Gloucestershire. A chance to attend a Jungian therapists' informal conference quickly brought all this to a close: I was taken aback at their anti-scientific attitude, but I continued to be fascinated by alchemy, the origins of science … and, later, the NeoPlatonism of the Renaissance.

We arrived a tad late at the RCS, courtesy of the warmth and cheer of the Seven Stars, to find Philip Ball already in full spate, rushing through the life of Paracelsus, his extraordinary travels (Russia, the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, Scotland), his aspiration to devise the first "theory of everything", his rootedness in NeoPlatonism, the doctrine of signatures, chemical medicine, the tria prima (sulphur, mercury, salt), macrocosm and microcosm …

Cornelius Agrippa and Marsilius Ficino investigated occult (hidden) forces and Paracelsus brought alchemy to this table. Philip Ball suggests that Paracelsus is important in the history or development of science — he worked from one observation to explain others and made central to his work the very idea of explaining the observed. Philip Ball's book, The Devil's Doctor, appeared earlier this year. The man was clearly extraordinary. From the Guardian review:

His stay in Basle [1527] had started out well. Many students had attended his unofficial courses. He told them that doctors didn't need "eloquence or knowledge of language and books", but "profound knowledge of Nature and her works". His own wisdom was, he told them, based "upon the foundation of experience, the supreme teacher of all things". 

… medicine in the early Renaissance had advanced little since Roman times. For instance, physicians did not think it necessary to examine patients, relying instead on a urine sample for diagnosis. "All they can do is to gaze at piss," said Paracelsus scornfully. He accused them of "villainy and knavery" and said that if people realised how they were being deceived, medics would be stoned in the street. They, in turn, accused him of drunkenness, and it's true that Paracelsus did prefer to expound his wisdom in taverns than in university lecture halls.

His written works, most of which were only published posthumously, could be "paranoid, repetitive, vain and self-aggrandising". But beneath the bluster and posturing were genuine insights. Giordano Bruno said of him: "Seeing how much this inebriate knew, what should I think he might have discovered had he been sober?" Paracelsus turned his back on Aristotle and Galen and embraced experience as his mentor. He taught that "every land is a leaf of the Codex of Nature, and he who would explore her must tread her books with his feet". Paracelsus brought "a new, questing spirit" to natural philosophy. He investigated the plague at considerable risk to himself, devised a "chemical diagnosis of madness" and, although celibate, wrote about "the diseases of women" at a time when medics turned a blind eye to their suffering.

… For Paracelsus, alchemy was not merely about the creation of gold, but was a medical and mystical philosophy that explained the functioning of the body (the transformation of food into flesh, blood and excrement) as well as the more general principles that revealed the mysteries of the earth. "Alchemy becomes so powerful and so beautiful in Paracelsus's hands," writes Ball, "because it is a part of a greater system: a magical vision of the universe distilled in the overheated alembic of a feverishly imaginative mind." Paracelsus saw the "great art of transformation" - alchemy - as the key to understanding man and nature. It was "a reflection of the natural art that makes a flower grow, that stores up metals in the earth, and brings wind and rain. By taking alchemy out of the smoky laboratory and setting it free in wild nature, Paracelsus stakes his claim to genius."

… writers from Blake to Borges have been captivated by his words …

Peter Forshaw took over, to speak at an equally fast pace about John Dee, adviser to Elizabeth I on matters astrological and scientific, a mathematician and a 'converser with angels'. A keen advocate of colonisation, he was the first man to use the term 'the British Empire'. Through the Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558) to Monas Hieroglyphica (1564; Dee's glyph, right, is "explained" in this work), alchemy figures. Owner of the largest private library in England at the time, his marginalia indicate he interrogated the alchemical texts he read, testing, checking weights, recording the time taken for experiments to run and results to be achieved. His reading of Pantheus' Voarchadumia, as revealed in his marginalia to that work, was mentioned, and this is the abstract to Hilde Norrgrén's article, 'Interpretation and the Hieroglyphic Monad: John Dee's Reading of Pantheus's Voarchadumia':

John Dee's marginalia in his copy of Johannes Pantheus's Voarchadumia (now in the British Library) are an interesting source of information about the development of Dee's scientific ideas in the period between the Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558) and the Monas Hieroglyphica (1564). In reading the book, Dee has systematically compared the text with Pantheus's earlier work, the Ars Metallicae, and noted any differences between the two largely identical works. Therefore, most of Dee's comments are not indications of his own interests, as has previously been assumed. Only the marginalia that are not concerned with comparing the two texts can be taken to express Dee's own views. These marginalia, probably written in 1559, provide evidence that Dee had already at this time a strong interest in cabbalistic methods as a means of gaining knowledge about natural substances. Cabbalistic speculation was to be central to Dee's thought in the Monas Hieroglyphica, and has previously been taken to indicate a dramatic change in Dee's scientific outlook, towards a spiritual quest. In his marginalia in the Voarchadumia, however, Dee appears to be using cabbalistic methods to gain information on wholly material, non-spiritual matters. The abundant use of the symbol of the hieroglyphic monad in the marginalia provides a further source of insight into the alchemical import of the symbol, five years before the publication of the Monas Hieroglyphica.

Finally, William Newman, author of Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution, and currently engaged in 'deciphering Isaac Newton's chymical laboratory notebooks and manuscripts' (read more at Newton's Alchemy, recreated). Boyle, Locke, Newton all believed in the possibility of transmutation. Professor Newman demonstrated some alchemical experiments performed by Newton: the "silica garden" (Newton's Alchemy, recreated: 'a 17th century version of a silica garden, made with potassium silicate and ferric chloride. In the 17th century, it was thought to confirm the fact that metals can be made to "vegetate"; 'Newton wrote an unpublished treatise about such metallic trees - for him they were an indication that metals had their own sort of life, and hence could, it was hoped, be made to multiply'); the apparent transmutation of silver into gold, as performed originally by Wenceslas Seiler (I think I have this name right) in 1677 at the Court of Leopold I; the "transmutation" of iron into copper, by immersing an iron nail in copper sulphate. (Inadequate cameraphone pics follow.)

 

 

Check out The Newton Project:

Although Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is best known for his theory of universal gravitation and discovery of calculus, his interests were much broader than is usually appreciated. In addition to his celebrated natural philosophical writings and mathematical works, Newton also wrote many theological texts and alchemical tracts. We already have texts and images of many of these works on offer on our site and our goal is to make all Newton's writings freely available online.

And the RCS needs an early re-visit …

   

Technorati tags: alchemy, history of science, Newton, Paracelsus, John Dee, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Institution, Philip Ball, Peter Forshaw, William Newman

Earth, from deep space

The photo that appeared on AOL some three days ago was amazing. Was it for real? A physicist colleague of mine confirms it is: it's a genuine NASA photo. This from NASA's Planetary Journal:

Not since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft saw our home as a pale blue dot from beyond the orbit of Neptune has Earth been imaged in color from the outer solar system. Now, Cassini casts powerful eyes on our home planet, and captures Earth, a pale blue orb -- and a faint suggestion of our moon -- among the glories of the Saturn system.

Earth is captured here in a natural color portrait made possible by the passing of Saturn directly in front of the sun from Cassini's point of view. At the distance of Saturn's orbit, Earth is too narrowly separated from the sun for the spacecraft to safely point its cameras and other instruments toward its birthplace without protection from the sun's glare.

The Earth-and-moon system is visible as a bright blue point on the right side of the image above center. Here, Cassini is looking down on the Atlantic Ocean and the western coast of north Africa. The phase angle of Earth, seen from Cassini is about 30 degrees.

A magnified view of the image … taken through the clear filter (monochrome) shows the moon as a dim protrusion to the upper left of Earth. Seen from the outer solar system through Cassini's cameras, the entire expanse of direct human experience, so far, is nothing more than a few pixels across. Earth no longer holds the distinction of being our solar system's only "water world," as several other bodies suggest the possibility that they too harbor liquid water beneath their surfaces. The Saturnian moon, Enceladus, is among them, and is also captured on the left in this image, with its plume of water ice particles and swathed in the blue E ring which it creates. Delicate fingers of material extend from the active moon into the E ring. See PIA08321, for a more detailed view of these newly-revealed features. …

The image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 15, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft angle of almost 179 degrees. Image scale is approximately 250 kilometers (155 miles) per pixel. At this time, Cassini was nearly 1.5 billion kilometers (930 million miles) from Earth.

The Cassini-Huygens mission can be found in cyberspace here and the imaging team homepage is here. The images reproduced here are courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Technorati tags: space, astronomy, NASA, Cassini, Saturn, Earth

Today, Truth!

Today, we hold our annual upper sixth (year 13) conference, something we run jointly with St Helen & St Katharine. (For those outside the UK, upper sixth = secondary school leavers/18 year-olds.)

I've enjoyed my involvement with these conferences, brief though it's been, and recall the others with pleasure:

• 2004: 'at the school I teach at, we are preparing for a sixth form conference on 'IT and the challenge of change'. Speakers include Cory Doctorow and Jyri Engeström. Cory will be talking about DRM and, in the run-up to this event, I have begun chatting with Colin Greenwood (Radiohead), getting the views of an artist, someone without whom there would be no music to share in the first place.'

Colin, Jyri and Cory gave memorable talks, and there was a great "panel" session with Cory sitting alongside Colin, fielding questions from some very engaged students. Jyri's talk, much admired on the day, is online here.

• 2005: 'Today, we hold our annual conference for our school leavers and this year the theme is 'Making a Difference: changing the world'. I am delighted that we will be welcoming to speak Sir Thomas Shebbeare, James Mawdsley and Julian Filochowski: respectively, they will be addressing — How to Make a Difference, Global Democracy and Justice, Global Poverty Issues.' (More about each speaker on my original blog post.)

James Mawdsley and Julian Filochowski made a great impact, comparable only to that of Clive Stafford Smith (Wikipedia) when he spoke here last November.

And today? Truth …

• Truth in Politics: Ann Widdecombe, MP — Wikipedia, own website
  
• Truth and Satire: Craig Brown, satirist — Wikipedia
  
• Truth, Diplomacy and The War on Terror: Craig Murray, formerly our Ambassador to Uzbekistan — Wikipedia, own website
  
• Truth and Activism: Laurie Pycroft & Tom Holder of Pro-Test

My colleague, Jim Summerly, a historian, will talk about 'Truth and History' (official histories and propaganda vs what's really going on — from Stalinist Russia to contemporary, democratic regimes). Now, if all that doesn't get the hall a-buzzing …

I particularly enjoyed establishing that Laurie could join us: he had to get out of school for the day. That's humbling. What were we each doing, aged 16?

Technorati tags: truth, activism, DRM, Cory Doctorow, Jyri Engeström, Colin Greenwood, James Mawdsley, Julian Filochowski, Ann Widdecombe, Craig Brown, Craig Murray, Laurie Pyecroft, Pro-Test

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: memory and film-making

I need to go out and buy the DVD of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I much enjoyed it when it came out and blogged about it twice, once with excerpts from Steve Johnson's Slate essay about it and once quoting from the NYT review of the film. The film's back on my screen again. Via Chris (del.icio.us link), today I came across the Buzz Image clip detailing some of their work on the film — and it's really impressive.

Last month, Mind Hacks had a piece on dream, memory and the film:

Seed Magazine has a video of a fascinating conversation between sleep scientist Robert Stickgold and film director Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Stickgold has reinvigorated sleep research by investigating the borderlands of consciousness with a series of novel experiments.

Favourite quote from the Stickgold/Gondry video clip: 'the reason why cuts work in movies is' (Stickgold) … 'because we dream' (Gondry)/'because we're all familiar with them' (Stickgold). 

From Mind Hacks, then, to the following: 

Gondry's new movie, The Science of Sleep, also explores the mind's outer reaches. …

Link to fantastic article on the cognitive science of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Also, from the last link:

Scientific American — Unmaking Memories: Interview with James McGaugh

Elizabeth F. Loftus

Now there's a whole bundle of stuff and possibilities for teaching …

Technorati tags: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, memory, mind, brain, neuroscience, CGI, CG, Mind Hacks

"bloody computer games … thin gruel indeed"

The quotation is from Michael Shayer, Professor of Applied Psychology at King's College, University of London, and appears in American Scientist's Smart as We Can Get?. To begin at the beginning:

Psychometricians have long been aware of a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—a widespread and long-standing tendency for scores on certain tests of intelligence to rise over time. … Ever since Flynn published his startling results, psychologists and educators have struggled to figure out whether people really are getting smarter and, if so, why. No clear answer has emerged. And now they have another curiosity to ponder: The tendency for intelligence scores to rise appears to have ended in some places. Indeed, it seems that some countries are experiencing a Flynn effect with a reversed sign.

'a Flynn effect with a reversed sign'. Or, at least, as some of the research from Scandinavia cited by American Scientist has shown, a plateau can be reached.

Back in January, the Guardian carried a lengthy piece about recent research conducted by Shayer:

New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and conducted by Michael Shayer … concludes that 11- and 12-year-old children in year 7 are "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago", in terms of cognitive and conceptual development.

"It's a staggering result," admits Shayer, whose findings will be published next year in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. "Before the project started, I rather expected to find that children had improved developmentally. This would have been in line with the Flynn effect on intelligence tests, which shows that children's IQ levels improve at such a steady rate that the norm of 100 has to be recalibrated every 15 years or so. But the figures just don't lie. We had a sample of over 10,000 children and the res