Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.

I study people, technology, and the worlds they make

Month: January 2010 (page 1 of 5)

Trip to Oxford

January 31, 2010 / / Comments Off on Trip to Oxford

Last week I went to Oxford for a few days. I was giving a talk and had to be back for my daughter’s school play, so it was just a quick trip. I hope to make it back for a longer trip before too long.

Fortunately, Oxford was no longer buried under the show-stopping two inches of snow that has assaulted the nation the week before. By the time I got there the place was back to normal, so I was able to get around without any trouble.


Oxford, via flickr

I arrived on Sunday afternoon, worked on my talk for most of the day, then went to a Lebanese restaurant for dinner and walked around afterwards. The restaurant was great, and doubtless I’ll go back there, but it has a bit of an Eastern Promises feel to it: I got the sense that there were plenty of things going on besides grilling lamb and making hummus (which was excellent, don’t get me wrong).

Hummus appetizer
excellent hummus, via flickr

And I was by the far the least swarthy person in the restaurant, which for me is an unusual state of affairs.

I stayed at the Royal Oxford, which was fine as always, though my room looked out at the central courtyard and the ventilation system was about two feet away from my window. But it was a pretty big room, so I guess it was an acceptable trade-off. My feelings about the bathroom design still hold, though: they fell down on the job during the renovation, made the bathtubs too tall, and made it hard to get in an out in a way that feels safe.

Monday was work, so after breakfast I spent most of the rest of the day actually doing what I went there to do. Monday night I had dinner at a rather nice French restaurant in Jericho, one of the neighborhoods of Oxford. I met up with David Orrell, the author of The Future of Everything and someone whose work I find quite interesting.

When I looked it up, it sounded like Jericho was a suburb of Oxford, and I imagined having to take a bus out there; but it turns out to be about a 5-minute walk from the center of town to the edge of the neighborhood. Apparently it started out as a working-class area (Oxford was actually a manufacturing center for a long time, in addition to being a university town), and recently has been gentrified.

IMG_0694.JPG
Brasserie Blanc, via flickr

Orrell is a very interesting character, a physicist who did some really interesting work on model error in meteorology, and now works in synthetic biology. We spent a couple hours at dinner, talking about prediction, futures, computer and mathematical models, and economics. One of the more interesting things he talked about was how simple models often do a poorer job of explaining the past than elaborate models (that to some degree are tailored to fit historical data), but do a better job of predicting the future. I’ve been turning over in my mind whether it’s possible to apply this to the kind of futures that I do. I’m usually sensitive to the complexity and contingency of human action and decisions, and that tends to make me assume that you can’t simply model human behavior in a usefully predictive way- that people’s interactions with scientific ideas and technologies aren’t quantifiable and computationally tractable.

Maybe this observation helps explain Bruce Bueno De Mesquita’s success. His method does well because of its formality and relative simplicity: he claims to be able to predict the outcomes of political negotiations or corporate power struggles with a pretty limited, specific amount of information. Of course, he also succeeds because he recognizes the limits of his model, and doesn’t push it into areas where it seems likely to fail. I’d like to think that there are no good models for predicting scientific and technological change because they’re too complex. But maybe I’m not looking hard enough for the simplicity.

I don’t know if I’m on a lucky streak, or if I tend to gravitate unconsciously to books written by pleasant and generous people instead of self-righteous jerks- Andrew Parker was really a great person to have breakfast with— but David maintained my streak of having interesting meals with people I basically cold call when I’m in Europe. One of the virtues of being American is that you can deploy a level of extroversion (or intrusiveness) when you travel and, so long as you don’t go overboard with it, people will forgive you for it. (I suspect that one of the keys to living abroad is figuring out when you really have to fit it with the local culture, and when you can get away with things because of Where You’re From.)


Oxford, via flickr

After dinner I walked around a little, as is my custom when I’m on the road; but since I had to pack and be up very early to catch the bus to Heathrow, I decided not to stop at any of the fifty or so pubs I’ve passed that inspired a “oh that looks good, I’ll have to have a drink there sometime” reaction. Next time. And the time after that.


Oxford, via flickr

Tuesday morning I was up at a punishingly early hour to get home. I’ve gotten in the habit of falling asleep to movies or music when I travel, and tonight for some reason had on a playlist of Michael Mann movies; so I drifted in and out of sleep to the sound of gunfire and vague apprehension of beautifully-illuminated but sinister cityscapes. Then I got the X70 bus to Heathrow, had breakfast in the Red Carpet Club, and got on my plane.

[To the tune of Rob Dougan, “Clubbed to Death 2,” from the album Furious Angels (a 4-star song, imo).]

More on Avatar

January 31, 2010 / / Comments Off on More on Avatar

The New York Times weighed in a few days ago on the Avatar Interpretation Complex (something I wrote a bit about), and I’m just now getting around to reading it:

[“Avatar” has] found itself under fire from a growing list of interest groups, schools of thought and entire nations that have protested its message (as they see it), its morals (as they interpret them) and its philosophy (assuming it has one).

Over the last month, it has been criticized by social and political conservatives who bristle at its depictions of religion and the use of military force; feminists who feel that the male avatar bodies are stronger and more muscular than their female counterparts; antismoking advocates who object to a character who lights up cigarettes; not to mention fans of Soviet-era Russian science fiction; the Chinese; and the Vatican. This week the authorities in China announced that the 2-D version of the film would be pulled from most theaters there to make way for a biography of Confucius.

That so many groups have projected their issues onto “Avatar” suggests that it has burrowed into the cultural consciousness in a way that even its immodest director could not have anticipated. Its detractors agree that it is more than a humans-in-space odyssey — even if they do not agree on why that is so.

“Some of the ways people are reading it are significant of Cameron’s intent, and some are just by-products of what people are thinking about,” said Rebecca Keegan, the author of “The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron.” “It’s really become this Rorschach test for your personal interests and anxieties.”

[To the tune of Oleta Adams, “I’ve Got To Sing My Song,” from the album Circle Of One (a 2-star song, imo).]

Slime mold, efficiency expert

January 31, 2010 / / 1 Comment

Jim Nash reports on a new study that… well, you’ve got to just read about it yourself.

Researchers have turned to a slime mold for tips on work efficiency…. Physarum polycephalum built a replica of the Tokyo train system in 26 hours that’s just about as efficient, reliable and “expensive” to run as the real thing….

[A team of British and Japanese scientists] created a map of the Tokyo metro area using oat flakes for the major cities. Then they put a gelatinous blob (technically, a plasmodium) of Physarum on “Tokyo,” and sat back to see what would happen.

Within about 12 hours, the mold had covered the area with a thin and wet veined sheath of itself. By the 26th hour, the sheath was gone, replaced by mushy tunnels connecting the flakes. The tunnels mimicked Tokyo’s transit system.

An article in Science offers some more detail:

The trick has to do with how slime molds eat. When Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold often found inside decaying logs, discovers bacteria or spores, it grows over them and begins to digest them through its body. To continue growing and exploring, the slime mold transforms its Byzantine pattern of thin tendrils into a simpler, more-efficient network of tubes: Those carrying a high volume of nutrients gradually expand, while those that are little used slowly contract and eventually disappear.

Researchers have harnessed this behavior to amusing effect in the past. In 2000, for example, a team led by mathematical biologist Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University in Japan, showed that P. polycephalum could find the shortest path through a maze to connect two food resources. (The work won an Ig Nobel prize.)

But that was a puzzle with a single correct solution. In the new work, the team wanted to know how the mold would perform in a real-world situation in which several competing objectives had to be balanced at once. Designing a railway network that connects many cities presents just such a problem. “The planning is very difficult because of the tradeoffs,” says cell biologist Mark Fricker of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who was also involved in the research. For example, connecting all cities by the shortest possible length of track often compels travelers to take highly indirect routes between any two points and can mean that a single failure isolates a large part of the network. Building in more redundancy makes the network more convenient and more resilient, but at a higher cost.

While it seems like a bit of a lark, I think there’s something pretty interesting here. You can see it as an example of the application of natural-world expertise (or to use an even more fraught term, animal intelligence) to engineering problems, a kind of biomimicry: you don’t need to know how the slime mold figures out how to optimize routes, but can trust that over millions of years it has figured out the shortest paths to food. This would be one of its core competencies.

[To the tune of Oleta Adams, “Rhythm Of Life,” from the album Circle Of One (a 3-star song, imo).]

Redesigned Sigma Scan

January 31, 2010 / / Comments Off on Redesigned Sigma Scan

I just noticed that Sigma Scan, a project I worked on for the British government a few years ago, has had its Web site redesigned.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet. I came to the conclusion last year that the ways futurists normally communicate with audiences has some serious limitations that are belied by the familiarity we and our clients share for things like scenarios and roadmaps; and that we have some great opportunities to push communication about the future out of texts and into things, or as I put it in another post, "to learn to talk about the future through things." Consequently, while I'm never one to dismiss a good Web site redesign- and Sigma Scan is certainly easier to use now than it was- I think we need to dive deeper into the user experience, and ask how people are actually using this information, and then ask how we can improve delivery of the content to better serve their needs in actual use contexts.

Leaning forward into the future

January 31, 2010 / / Comments Off on Leaning forward into the future

I'm not quite sure how much I can really do with this, but it feels like something I should experiment with in one of my workshops.

Just thinking about the past or future could literally move you. This mental time travel was revealed in a new study in which participants swayed backward when thinking of the past and forward with future thoughts…. The ability to subjectively travel through time, called chronesthesia, sets us apart from other animals, the researchers say. And now their results suggest our perceptions of time are tightly coupled with space.

"This is the first demonstration that when we think about time we physically move though space, whether that's engaged though areas of the brain or manifested throughout the whole body is an open question," said Lynden Miles of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Miles and Aberdeen colleagues Louise Nind and Neil Macrae fitted 20 participants with a motion sensor while they imagined future or past events. After just 15 seconds, participants who were recalling the past had swayed backward an average of about 0.07 inches (1.5 to 2 mm), while the future thinkers leaned forward about 0.1 inches (3 mm).

The question for me is, is this an effect that one can usefully exploit? I'm always thinking about how to tweak workshop designs to subtly (or not so subtly) encourage people to be more creative and future-oriented. Maybe putting paper spaces at a slight incline that encourages participants to lean forward a bit when they work on them?

Of course, all good scientific research requires a follow-up study.

Miles and his colleagues hope to study this same phenomenon in other cultures.

"We have a lot of language to suggest the future is in front of us and the past behind us," Miles said.

But in some other cultures, such as those who speak Aymara (an Amerindian language of the Andes), the future is described as being behind them with the past in front. If such individuals sway backward when thinking about future events, that might suggest this behavior is learned and a consequence of how people think and talk about time.

links for 2010-01-29

January 29, 2010 / / Comments Off on links for 2010-01-29
  • The world in 2020 - The IET
    "At the recent European Futurists Conference in Lucerne, Switzerland, E&T asked some leading futurologists for their prognosis for year 2020. Here’s what they had to say." Clive van Heerden argued that "our interaction with machines will inevitably need to become more ‘natural’ through the dramatic increase in the use of indirect channels of communication;" Ian Pearson, "lightweight sunglasses will use tiny lasers to write computer-generated imagery straight onto our retinas superimposing them on what we see in the real world;" Rohit Talwar sees the growth of "personal ecosystems;" Elina Hiltunen, "the emergence and connectivity of data everywhere and for every purpose;" Jose Luis Cordeiro, something close to AI.
    (tags: future 2020 forecasting)
  • Heikot signaalit- Weak signals
    "This is a blog about weak signals by which I mean strange things that exist today and that can tell about big trends in the future. By using weak signals we can try to anticipate and create the future. The writer of this blog, Elina Hiltunen, is a futurist and doing her doctoral thesis about weak signals."
    (tags: weaksignals future methodology)
  • Mendonca et al, "Venturing into the Wilderness: Preparing for Wild Cards in the Civil Aircraft and Asset-Management Industries," Long Range Planning 42:1 (2009)
    "We consider ways in which radically uncertain and disruptive events may be introduced into corporate decisionmaking structures. As a foresight concept, “wild cards” refer to trend-breaking/trend-creating events that are very hard or even impossible to anticipate, but that should nonetheless be expected in complex and fast-evolving environments. The discussion is grounded in the experience obtained in two strategic foresight projects carried out in two industries — civil aviation and investment banking. The unique strength of these cases is that they constitute concrete and rare examples of disclosed business foresight studies that, from the start, included an explicit wild card element. Most interestingly, both of these cases are analytically linked to the September 11 event, a severe instance of a wild card."
    (tags: future methodology wildcards)
  • Botterhuis et al, "Monitoring the future. Building an early warning system for the Dutch Ministry of Justice," Futures (2010)
    To determine the sustainability of the policy, an Early Warning System (EWS) has been developed for the Dutch Ministry of Justice. An EWS is used to monitor various developments and to place them within the perspective of future scenarios. Without actually predicting the future, this makes it possible to determine which scenario is the most relevant at any given moment, allowing the department to adapt its policies. Regular modifications to the EWS make it possible to monitor in the direction of which scenario society appears to be moving. This creates a path to the future with which the sustainability of (new) policies can be tested periodically.
    (tags: future weaksignals methodology)
  • Ilmola and Kuusi, "Filters of weak signals hinder foresight: Monitoring weak signals efficiently in corporate decision-making," Futures 38:8 (2006).
    "Already two decades ago strategy literature started a discussion on weak signals (H.I. Ansoff, Implanting Strategic Management, Prentice-Hall International, Englewood-Cliffs, NJ, 1984). Currently the weak signals approach is experiencing a renaissance in strategic planning but now either in the context of strategic flexibility or peripheral vision. In this paper we aim, firstly, to present theories describing filters that a weak signal has to pass in the strategy-creation process. Secondly, we present a construction for information filters in the strategy process and prove that the nature of objectives and the method used in environment scanning have a major impact on the outcome. Thirdly, we introduce an application that opens filters for weak signals in the strategy process and thus provides the organization with an opportunity for pro-active decision-making."
    (tags: weaksignals future methodology)
  • Mendonça, Pina e Cunha, Kaivo-oja, Ruff, "Wild cards, weak signals and organisational improvisation," Futures 36:2 (2004).
    "This paper addresses the need for reliable action guidelines which can be used by organisations in turbulent environments. Building on current conceptual and empirical research, we suggest an analytical approach to the management of surprising and potentially damaging events. In order to do so we propose the wild card management system. Wild cards refer to sudden and unique incidents that can constitute turning points in the evolution of a certain trend. As the first of the two components of such a wild card system, we advocate a weak signal methodology to take into account those wild cards that can be anticipated by scanning the decision environment. The second component, the nurture of improvisation capabilities, is designed to deal with unanticipated ongoing crises. This paper can be seen as part of a broader agenda on how to manage in conditions of continuous but unpredictable change."
    (tags: future methodology weaksignals forecasting)
  • Elina Hiltunen, "The future sign and its three dimensions," Futures 40:3 (April 2008).
    "Weak signals are current oddities, strange issues that are thought to be in key position in anticipating future changes in organizational environments. Scanning for them and using them in scenario work is thought to be successful for looking to the future. However, defining weak signals is problematic, and various authors term the concept differently. The debate about the characteristics of weak signals has been active especially in Finland. The article aims to develop a deeper theoretical understanding of weak signals. For this purpose, a semiotic approach, Peirce's triadic model of sign in particular, is used. The article introduces a new starting point for defining weak signals (signs) by using the novel concept future sign, which consists of three dimensions: the signal, the issue and the interpretation."
    (tags: weaksignals future methodology future2)
  • ScienceDirect - Futures : Futures signals sense-making framework (FSSF): A start-up tool to analyse and categorise weak signals, wild cards, drivers, trends and other types of information
    "This article introduces future signals sense-making framework (FSSF), an alternative philosophy towards weak signals, emerging issues, drivers, and trends, that is in contrast to the traditional single signal or path extrapolation approach. The philosophy of FSSF is based on the principles of environmental scanning and pattern management, which state that if there is a grand transformation process on the way or if there is a new emerging pattern or phenomenon, such a process will certainly be reflected in many different ways. Therefore, in this philosophy, futures knowledge is believed to be fragmented between various simultaneous and overlapping sources. Here, a researcher's task is to carry out a sufficient environmental scanning process and to cluster and sense how to create the emerging future through a pattern management process where FSSF plays a role as the first start-up tool."
    (tags: future weaksignals future2 methodology)
  • Pondering the Future Makes Us Lean Forward, Literally - Yahoo! News
    "Just thinking about the past or future could literally move you. This mental time travel was revealed in a new study in which participants swayed backward when thinking of the past and forward with future thoughts…. [These] results suggest our perceptions of time are tightly coupled with space. "This is the first demonstration that when we think about time we physically move though space, whether that's engaged though areas of the brain or manifested throughout the whole body is an open question," said Lynden Miles of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Miles and Aberdeen colleagues Louise Nind and Neil Macrae fitted 20 participants with a motion sensor while they imagined future or past events. After just 15 seconds, participants who were recalling the past had swayed backward an average of about 0.7 inches (1.5 to 2 mm), while the future thinkers leaned forward about 0.1 inches (3 mm)."
    (tags: future psychology ergonomics embodied_learning)
  • Weak Signals, Wild Cards
    "Weak Signals, Wild Cards is a commissioning project and exhibition by the participants of de Appel Curatorial Programme 08/09. Set in Amsterdam Noord, it invites ten artists and a number of speakers from other fields to react to the given plans for the area and conjure a set of alternative futures. The artists have created works for and from their envisioned future contexts, while the speakers will foretell their imagined futures of Amsterdam Noord, from the perspectives of their expertise. The title of this project uses two terms from futurology…."
    (tags: art future weaksignals)
  • Messages from the future | Forum For The Future
    What do new types of plastic, a recession-proof solar boom in California and resurgent UK regional accents have in common? Or high-street butchers, energy rationing and the emergence of a ‘recession generation’? They could all be ‘weak signals’ from the future – signs of what may be to come. If you’re into sustainable development and planning for the future, then weak signals are important.
    (tags: weaksignals sustainability future methodology)
  • Weak signals: how to track a changing horizon | Forum For The Future
    "Welcome to the study of ‘weak signals’ where both the bizarre and the seemingly mundane are tracked to give a glimpse as to what changes might lie unseen around the corner. The author William Gibson famously said: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”. In its simplest form, the study of weak signals is the search for those elements of the future that are indeed already with us – but have yet to be recognised as such, let alone adopted by mainstream society. Weak signals can range from small changes in behaviour and technology, to signs that a significant shift in a system might be imminent. Often it can just involve a hunch that something different is underway, rather than a clear indication of predictable change. An individual signal might make little sense at the time; it might require a number of other similar signals, or a creative leap to realise just what it could be pointing to."
    (tags: weaksignals future methodology)
  • Forum For The Future: Weak Signals Blog
    "…are ideas, trends, technologies or behaviour changes that are as yet unrecognised by mainstream society. They might have a big impact or they might disappear. We monitor them to help our partners challenge their assumptions about the future, navigate risk and seize new opportunities."
    (tags: future methodology weaksignals)

links for 2010-01-28

January 28, 2010 / / Comments Off on links for 2010-01-28
  • The Next Big Quake? | Foreign Policy
    It's not just the San Andreas we have to worry about: Foreign Policy highlights the New Madrid fault in the US South, as well as faults in Turkey, Pacific, Nepal, and Japan, as being particularly worrisome.
    (tags: disasters future)

links for 2010-01-27

January 27, 2010 / / Comments Off on links for 2010-01-27
  • Our Brains Weren’t Built for Facebook - Sara Libby - Ill Communication - True/Slant
    A "British anthropologist says he’s determined that cognitively, we can only handle 150 real friends at a time. Even when it comes to Facebook and other social networks, Robin Dunbar says, we only truly maintain communication with the magic 150. “Dunbar’s number,” according to the Times of London, originated in the 1990s when Dunbar’s research indicated that “the size of our neocortex — the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are.”"
    (tags: socialsoftware psychology sociology sociability facebook community)
  • Live from TEDxSoMa: Damon Horowitz, Aardvark | TEDxSoMa
    While technologies can take us further than ever before, it is always humanity that creates meaning. Words have meaning because we speak them, not because they exist. Even the most advanced AI algorithms today come down to pattern matching. They don’t know why we react differently to a story about earthquakes in Haiti than we do to a story about vacations in Haiti.

    Consider web search: you have some question in your head, and what you have to do is turn that question into keywords, find a browser, search through results, and extract information. It’s as though we’ve forgotten that a question is an invitation to a human experience. The amount of information in peoples’ heads dwarfs the amount of information in computers. So they started Aardvark — you send it a question, and Aardvark’s job is to find a person who can answer that question. They use AI not to replace people but to help connect people.

    (tags: socialsoftware knowledge web2.0)

Hello SFO- Oxford here I come!

January 23, 2010 / / 2 Comments

I’m in San Francisco International Airport, on my way to London. A lamentably quick trip, but always exciting to get across the pond.

For some reason the check-in line is REALLY slow. Fortunately I’m here with plenty of time.

image from http://askpang.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c74ed53ef0120a8036cdb970b-pi

links for 2010-01-22

January 22, 2010 / / Comments Off on links for 2010-01-22
  • China hits back at US over internet censorship | World news | guardian.co.uk
    US calls for greater internet freedom could damage bilateral ties, China warned today as it hit back at Hillary Clinton's critical speech. The US secretary of state yesterday portrayed tackling censorship as a new priority for American foreign policy and called on Beijing to conduct a full and open investigation of Google's claims of a China-originated cyber attack targeting the emails of human rights activists. "The US has criticised China's policies to administer the internet and insinuated that China restricts internet freedom," said foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu, in a statement published on the ministry's website. "This runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-US relations."
    (tags: censorship china google internet)
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