Processed

Water and Health

The New York Academy of Sciences recently published a multimedia report on a meeting they hosted with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health focusing on a range of issues at the intersection of water quality and health. Talks spanned global social, economic, and political trends, all the way down to the individual human cell. Topics discussed included the role of climate change in exacerbating cholera epidemics, threats to the U.S. water supply, high- and low-tech inventions for water treatment, and the implications of water shortages for economic development worldwide.

Perhaps the most gripping talk came from Erik Peterson at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, DC. His refrain throughout his talk was “In effect, we are on countdown.” As population rises, water reserves dry up, climate change proceeds, and progress on sanitation is slow in many parts of the world, all signs point to a crisis in many places in this century. This is not only a humanitarian issue, but could affect political stability, as populations will increasingly have few choices but to pursue water access aggressively. Currently, he argued, insufficient attention is being given to this issue at the policy level, either in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world. And these issues will not go away.

The eBriefing is now available on the New York Academy of Sciences website. I wrote the meeting summary, and you can also see a video interview I conducted with Peter Agre, in which he talks about several troubling examples of problems around the world related to water access. Audio and slides are also available from all of the talks, including Peterson's. It's really worth a look. See the eBriefing here.

Building a Smarter Building

This week the New York Academy of Sciences published a meeting report I wrote and produced covering a recent symposium on "smart" buildings. You can see it here. 

The basic idea behind smart buildings is that sensing devices such as photosensors, thermostats, and other more sophisticated gadgets are converging with increasingly powerful information technology, making it possible to use software to monitor a building's performance in realtime, diagnose problems, and ideally find ways to improve it. The idea is becoming increasingly attractive not just for economic reasons, but also within the context of green building. Because buildings consume a huge amount of the energy we use, finding ways to improve their efficiency is seen as an attractive way to work toward meeting carbon emissions goals.

One big concept that came up repeatedly over the course of the meeting was the importance of thinking about building systems holistically. As automated building management systems improve, they are becoming increasingly able to integrate discreet parts of the building's operation (heating, lighting, security, etc.) into a single comprehensive picture. Such approaches offer potential ways to deal with the proverbial New York City apartment that is so overheated in the wintertime a tenant has to open the windows, to take a crude example. It could also help to identify whether a malfunction in one part of a single system really has any effect on the system as a whole.

I was particularly interested in Gregory Provan's talk. Provan is a mathematician at University College Cork in Ireland, and uses mathematical models and machine learning approaches to glean insight into how well a building is performing. In an approach called "continuous commissioning" he begins modeling the building's performance parameters during its design. Later, as the structure is built, occupied, and renovated, data are recorded on an ongoing basis, and compared with the original projections to see when it isn't meeting those goals. Already machine learning algorithms can identify faults within a building when they spot fluctuations in the data. The future is in using this iterative approach to figure out ways to automate the process of improving how the building performs as a system, such that a computer could recommend solutions to inefficiencies in the way the building as a whole was planned.

There's also a very interesting talk from Stephen Samouhos, a graduate student at MIT. He comes from a family that owns a construction business, and so has an insider's perspective on how building owners, builders, and operators think. His basic message is that the technology is great and will become even better, but it won't become scalable until the folks in these parts of the industry can be convinced of the economic and practical value of more expensive, more-complicated-to-run systems. 

Jane Snowdon of IBM also gave a very nice overview of how some of the world's most powerful computers work, and how they could help managing individual buildings, but whole cities. She also touches on a very interesting point about information technology and its role in climate change. Although most of us don't think about it, computing consumes huge amounts of energy to enable us to do our Christmas shopping online. Finding ways to improve this requirement is something that the machines themselves are helping to do.

The eBriefing includes a more detailed  writeup, as well as multimedia of the speakers' lectures. Check it out.

The Glass Bees Featured in Sheepshead Bay Blog

Thank you to Samantha LoSapio and all of the folks at Sheepshead Bites for this review! This gives me increased confidence that we're onto something here. See the full article.

If you thought traffic was bad at the Sheepshead Bay Road bus stop, teeming with Kingsborough students late for their 9 a.m. class and exasperated espresso fiends tweeting about their frustration, wait until you have to push your way off the back of a gondola.

Oh, you heard right; we said gondola.

New York City’s own Atlantean harbingers in their own right, Christopher Williams and Jason Das of experimental musical project known as the Glass Bees, recently embarked on a morning-long acquisition of a variety of media taken or inspired by the southeastern coast of Brooklyn, including our very own Sheepshead Bay, to form a multimedia experience called Venice, Brooklyn...> Read more.

Also, as a side note, the New York Academy of Sciences has announced that they will be holding an event on December 2 looking at the findings of the New York Panel on Climate Change. Modeled on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the NPCC is looking closely at the potential implications of climate change for New York City and the region. The report will also be published as a volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Some Thoughts on Venice, Brooklyn

Venice, Brooklyn was a shotgun multimedia improvisation assembled and performed by the Glass Bees on September 20, 2009. Early that morning, Jason Das and I traveled to areas along the Atlantic coastline in southern Brooklyn, specifically visiting neighborhoods and marshland that scientists have predicted to be vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the coming decades. We visited Dead Horse Bay, Floyd Bennett Field, Gerritsen Beach, and Sheepshead Bay, documenting them with sound recorders, photographs, watercolor sketches, and video, and collecting objects we found there. Later that day, we presented an improvised performance in the front vestibule of Envoy Enterprises, a gallery in Chinatown, New York City. Our field recordings, visual footage, and physical detritus became the raw material for a sound collage and temporary installation. Amplified sound was broadcast into the street, and visitors were invited into the gallery to listen more closely on headphones. All materials and sounds we presented were gathered, created, displayed, performed, and disassembled within an 11-hour period.

In a formal sense, Venice, Brooklyn was a significant stage in the ongoing evolution of the Glass Bees. From our inception, a core goal has been to adapt and respond to the situations in which we find ourselves, improvising with the materials we have at hand. But although we first formed as a purely musical project, our approach to improvisation is increasingly open to experimentation in other registers. In this case, our perambulations early in the day were conducted in the spirit of the Situationist dérive. Our motions were an attempt to actively engage with the city, getting lost while discovering corners previously unknown to us, paying close attention to things typically unobserved, exposing hidden histories, and finding utility in objects that have no use. Although we set out that morning with a general sense of what we were looking for, what we returned with was largely accidental. Our installation in a gallery in Chinatown constituted an improvised, impressionistic remix of what we had experienced earlier in the day.

We developed this project in response to a call for proposals issued by the Conflux Festival. Conflux is a New York City-wide gathering of visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers, and the public, created to “investigate everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological, and social practice.” Our interest in climate change and its potential effects on the city came out of my work as a science editor. It’s been difficult to avoid thinking about this profoundly depressing issue, and our inability, at all levels of society, to properly reckon with it. For centuries, people up and down the Atlantic seashore have built their lives, their communities, their very dreams on the assumption that land is land, and sea is sea. But the line demarcating these two worlds is slowly crawling uphill, making the precautions we have engineered increasingly insufficient. It is now conceivable that someday the locations we visited could suffer a similar fate as New Orleans, or Venice, or Bangladesh, all of which are in the process of being submerged. What would be lost if these areas were inundated, we wondered, and how are people preparing?

 

Like the haul of some anachronistic anthropological excavation, the evidence we gathered in our fieldwork was largely quotidian, but often telling. The sounds we used during our performance at Envoy were sampled from field recordings of what we encountered—antique bottles washed up on the shore, dumped in the bay decades ago but mysteriously resurfaced as litter once again; a bristle-less hairbrush, corroded clean by the brackish water; a watchdog protecting its owner’s property; a young girl pulling a wagon; shortwave weather reports; and interviews with people we met along the way.  The photographs we took and the watercolors Jason painted were snapshots of life in these places—a row of houses and the canal in Gerritsen, advertisements for new harborfront condominiums at Sheepshead, a path through the marshland, a table of trophies, a pinwheel, a dilapidated barn.

An elderly woman who took interest in Jason’s sketching explained to us that Gerritsen Beach was initially developed as a small community of summer cottages, inaccessible in the winter and occupied during the hot weather. That people have since built out these cabins into larger, more permanent houses just a few feet above sea level suggests an indomitable impulse to claim the coast and its watery pleasures. It also speaks to what Columbia University climatologists Klaus Jacob, Vivien Gornitz, and Cynthia Rosenzweig once described, in a study of the potential effects of climate change for New York, as "littoral environments … caught between the twin pressures of development and increasing coastal hazards." Like the nearby Whitney Mill that years ago served as an industrial focal point of the area, this unique and charming neighborhood of narrow streets, short blocks, and dense housing could someday be abandoned, this time badly flooded or even swallowed by the ocean.

That day we also passed through coastal areas that remain sparsely developed, a buffer zone to mitigate the consequences of storms for the city’s inland settlements. Home to abandoned barracks and functional U.S. Marine and Coast Guard installations, these isolated areas also offer open spaces psychically far removed from the congestion just a few miles up Flatbush Avenue. At Floyd Bennett Field we found a miniature formula 1 race course for remote control car enthusiasts. When we approached holding our audio recorder, the organizer introduced himself, explaining that he’d been afraid we were from the Parks Department, recording decibel levels as evidence for a complaint against him. After reassuring him that we had no intention of causing problems, he told us about the troubles his club faces in finding a permanent place to enjoy their hobby. They’d been evicted form the Aviator Club when the former aircraft hangar was turned into a sports complex, and now made the best they could of an uneven patch of tarmack they’d claimed. As the cars hurtled around the course at startlingly high speeds, his story was one of displacement, of a small but enthusiastic community forced to relocate due to forces beyond their control.

With flood prediction maps in hand, it was not difficult to see that in the long term, the built environment around us was similarly provisional, temporary, and in the process of migration. Scientists now know that certain effects of climate change are irreversible and unavoidable, and governments and individuals will be forced to adapt to a new reality. If they don’t, places around the world including these outlying regions of New York will be endangered, and their residents will be uprooted for higher ground. Many of those places will have an even harder time coping.

In Manhattan, concrete and glass high-rises belie the fact that millions of people live here on islands, and that their settlements rest just feet above sea level. To us it seemed provocative, then, to bring peripheral areas into dialogue with Downtown. Models of the potential effects of severe storms in Manhattan predict that neighborhoods not far from the Envoy Enterprises storefront could also be inundated. Even moderate storms will have the power to render the city’s infrastructure useless, as occurred one morning in the summer of 2007, when an early morning downpour incapacitated the city’s subway system, leaving thousands of commuters with no choice but to hike miles to work. How are we preparing for a potentially far worse sequel? Could we do anything about it if we wanted to?

Fundamentally, the question of what investments and sacrifices we are willing to make to cope with the effects of climate change is a complicated calculus of risk assessment. With so much competing information and so many unknowns about the extent of climate change’s effects, how do we define a reasonable level of preparedness? Such questions are not new, and evidence of the ways in which we have answered them fill the space around us. This is a theme that the Glass Bees have explored before, and in this sense we see Venice, Brooklyn as part of an ongoing project begun in a July 2009 performance we held at Monkeytown, a venue in Brooklyn. There, we (along with sound artist Andrea Williams) improvised a soundtrack to a two-channel video projection created from footage gathered at Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Although today it is primarily a destination for weekend getaways to the beach, Sandy Hook has a long and rich military history, dating back to the nineteenth century, when bunkers were dug into the dunes to protect New York Harbor. The fortifications developed as technology evolved, eventually including a Nike missile installation erected in the 1950s to shield the city from Soviet bombers. All of these defenses eventually became obsolete and were abandoned.

No attack ever came against New York, but does that mean that these precautions were foolhardy? We will never know. Because the fossils of this era sit on a sandbar just a few hundred feet wide at some points, however, we might expect that nature’s invasion of the same terrain will have dramatic effects, and strategies against it will become increasingly difficult to devise. Can we live with this? How are we preparing for these changes? The very week that Venice, Brooklyn took place, world leaders met in the United Nations General Assembly, once again averring that something must be done to address climate change, but refusing to make concrete proposals about the measures everyone knows are needed. With a major climate change conference coming up in Copenhagen later this year, prospects are looking increasingly slim that the essential consensus needed to address this complicated, global issue will materialize.

In a small way, Venice, Brooklyn was an attempt to focus on the material reality of what is at risk. Data and statistics can seem abstract to the nonscientist, and it won’t be until people’s lives are impacted in concrete, physical ways that the full extent of the phenomenon will be understood.

Although the trends are clear, climatologists admit that the specific effects of climate change are difficult to predict. New York City will have no alternative but to improvise, to adapt to the changing environment in which we find ourselves...  perhaps not unlike a certain, transitory multimedia installation presented on a stoop in Chinatown.

Visit the Glass Bees for audio and video from this performance.

The Data Know

Another sign of the hidden untapped powers of the web surfaced last week. The New York Times reported that Google is developing methods of analyzing search data to track regional outbreaks of the flu. From the Times:

There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors.

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends.

The report was another symptom of what is becoming a much bigger story. In June, Wired editor Chris Anderson published a controversial polemic (more here) defining what he called the "Petabyte Age." He wrote:

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The lesson is that raw, digital data, of which there is now an overwhelming overabundance, contains information. The challenge is how to recognize and interpret the patterns hidden within it. Anderson's argument is that this approach could signal the end of the scientific method, which relies on hypothesis, testing, and reproducibility. In the Petabyte Age, he says, researchers are moving away from understanding things in a mechanistic way, and turning to statistics to provide models of how they work, even if the details remain inscrutable.

Reading the Times story reminded me of a conversation I recently had with Tony Jebara, a computer scientist at Columbia University who specializes in machine learning. (We'll be posting video of the interview on the redesigned New York Academy of Sciences' website, eventually.) His academic work has focused on computer vision and facial recognition, though in his extracurricular activities, he is also chief scientist and co-founder of Sense Networks.

Sense has developed a platform that collects data from GPS, WiFi positioning, cell phones, and RFID in real time. It then analyzes this information to predict things like consumer movements in shopping districts over the course of a day, or which bars in a city are most active on a particular night. The application could become a powerful tool for analyzing how communities function, purely on the basis of some very basic, anonymous information.

Such work provides a glimpse of the unique opportunities this new kind of science, made possible by the networks the web has created, could offer. The computer scientists behind Google Flu Trends beat epidemiologists to the punch with a search engine, based on the assumption that patterns that emerge from individuals' simplest activities mean something. And where questions about how communities behave would once have been answered by an anthropologist, we now have evidence of how automated algorithms can reveal group dynamics, based on the simple facts of people's most mundane, day-to-day actions.

Update on Recent Projects

Occupied with various vacations, home renovations, and childrearing duties I been delinquent in maintaining Processed. Here are some things I have been working on, though.

In an earlier post I briefly summarized a program on recent developments in neuroscience held in conjunction with the Aspen Ideas Festival. I recently completed production of the New York Academy of Sciences eBriefing on the event, and it’s available with open access at www.nyas.org/brain. In addition to some fine reporting by my colleague (and a gifted science writer) Alan Dove, we also posted complete slides/audio/video of the event, as well as a set of video interviews with the speakers and a printable e-book composed of transcripts edited for home consumption by yours truly. I’m thrilled with how it turned out, and you should visit to learn more about how to teach monkeys to play video games, why your brain waves are like an iceberg, and why that lesion in your prefrontal cortex is unlikely to keep you out of jail should you choose to murder your irritating neighbor.

My musical project, The Glass Bees, has been running for a bit over a year now, and continues to be very productive. To date we’ve posted 21 tracks for a total of approximately 120 minutes on our website, and Jason Das and I are quite happy with how things are going. Jason also just completed some housekeeping on the website to make it more attractive and to give you the chance to create a Glass Bees mastermix. You can also subscribe to our podcast to hear the latest tracks as soon as they are posted. If you need advice on where to start listening, try these recent favorites: Preface Introduction, Triumph, Thunder on the Prairie, I Shot the Serif, and Guitar Solo. All tracks are improvised live to a single stereo microphone and digital recorder. There are no overdubs and we try to edit as minimally as possible.

Until now The Glass Bees has been purely a studio/web project, with very little effort to actively cultivate an audience. We are slowly beginning to think that the time might be coming to go public. There is work to be done to set up a show, and maybe even to compile the recordings on CD. If you have a party coming up that will be attended by the types of people who can tolerate drones, loops, feedback, and unusual instruments, or if you know someone who organizes such affairs, drop us a line.

I’m also in the process adding a couple of blogrolls to the right column with links to recommended reading and listening, should you be interested. Please stay tuned.

Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One?

In an earlier post, I briefly described a New York Academy of Sciences conference exploring the interaction between biology and art. We have just launched an Academy eBriefing covering the event. In addition to a very nice written synopsis of the conference and the issues it raised by my colleague Alexis Clements, be sure to check out the multimedia page for a recording of an utterly genre-defining lecture by French curator and writer Jens Hauser and a fascinating video documentary showing artist Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest projects. There is also a brief but insightful interview with artist Laura Splan about the rationale behind using the tools of biotechnology as artistic media, and lots of links to related web sites, books, and artists.

Your Brain in Aspen

When the wealthy, the famous, and the beautiful weren’t listening to Bill Clinton and Karl Rove at the Aspen Ideas Festival two weekends ago, they were treated to a set of symposia featuring some top-flight neuroscientists and neuro-dilettantes. The goal of the sessions was to explore recent developments in our understanding of how the brain works, how differences in brain development make each of us unique, and the potential social ramifications of the increasingly undeniable realization that everything we experience happens in the chemical and electrical reactions taking place in the three pounds of wrinkled meat in our heads.

There seemed to be general consensus that the highpoint of the sessions was a presentation by Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neuroscientist now based at Duke University who has conducted some truly remarkable experiments to understand how the brain controls our physical movements. He and his colleagues have devised an interface that translates the firing of configurations of neurons in the monkey’s brain into physical motion. In a series of experiments, he first taught a monkey to play a simple video game using a joystick to move a cursor around a screen. By implanting a set of sensors in the monkey’s brain, he could determine which neurons fired as it performed various tasks. Next, he took the joystick away from the monkey, but connected the sensors to a robotic arm that held the joystick. When he put the monkey in front of the game again, the firing patterns in its brain were the same, enabling it to learn to manipulate the cursor and the robotic arm merely through its “thoughts.” Nicolelis’s discovery of how to create such an interface has enormous potential for everything from new types of prosthetic limbs, to robotics, to (I would imagine) defense industry technologies. His work is the stuff that cyborgs are made of.

The lecture series also featured two presentations discussing the potential ramifications of neuroscience for the practice of the law. As brain research and genetics increasingly show that there is a purely biological component to many of our thoughts and actions, it presents some difficult questions of personal responsibility. If it is discovered that particular types of development in the brain increase the likelihood of antisocial behavior, should an individual still be held responsible for his actions? If a brain scan can predict the possibility that an individual would be more likely than others to commit a crime, is it right to take preventative actions against him?

According to legal scholar and journalist Jeffrey Rosen, who published an article on the subject in a March 2007 issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, such questions are already being raised in the courtroom, and judges are increasingly being put in the uncomfortable position of needing to decide on scientific issues. Rosen argued for the pressing need for a public dialogue to reach a consensus on how best to reconcile neuroscience with constitutional law and legal precedent.  Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world’s most prominent cognitive neuroscientists, took up similar topics on Sunday. He recounted scientific findings showing the existence of a gap in mental processing between the moment when the brain commits to a decision and the moment when we become conscious of that decision. Such a construct could call into question the existence of the free will on which so much legal theory is based. Gazzaniga argued that even if neuroscience does produce the ability to predict whether a person is likely to commit a crime, however, the question of personal responsibility is ultimately a social, not a biological, one, meaning that, at least for the time being, it wouldn’t be correct to rely too heavily on the brain when making legal judgments.

I was also intrigued by a presentation from Marcus Raichle. Raichle is one of the most important researchers in the field of neuroimaging, and contributed to the invention of positron emission tomography. Following a general introduction to explain the history of brain imaging and how current methods work, he talked about the importance of studying the “intrinsic” functional activity of the brain instead of the “evoked” responses so often analyzed in neuroimaging. He likened the intrinsic activity to the large portion of an iceberg that floats below the ocean surface. Whereas much current practice is good at identifying the changes in brain activity associated with specific events, he proposed that researchers should be attending to the vast, unknown activity in the brain that remains constant, or that constitutes the noise in measured brain signals. His ideas point to the critical importance of a vast, complex world.

At the Academy we’ll be publishing an eBriefing on the conference soon, hopefully in August sometime, featuring a detailed meeting report, video, and recordings of all of the talks. Stay tuned. Thanks to the Academy and the Haseltine Foundation for allowing me to attend the festival, and to all of the speakers for being so friendly and helpful.

When Ideas Outstrip Reality

A recent play by Carl Djerassi, the inventor of the oral contraceptive, receives its U.S. debut next week at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Phallacy tells the story of an art historian who has bet her career on the authenticity of a statue believed to be crafted during the classical era, and explores her reactions when a chemist proves that it is a 16th-century copy.

In addition to being a tale of academic infighting and the prejudices of C.P. Snow's two cultures, Phallacy raises some interesting questions about the value we attach to artistic objects. How much does an artwork depend on its history and social context for its aesthetic value? And what does it mean when that context is the result of the narratives we've composed for ourselves, hobbled as they are with limitations in knowledge, unprovable approximations of truth, and the influences of our hopes and ambitions?

At times the play suggests that the humanities are particularly at fault for playing fast and loose with reality (cf. Alan Sokal), while the rigors of the scientific method give it a better claim to authority. But science is driven by its own hypotheses, and it, too, can be led astray. How, for example, might Djerassi's play shed light on recent scientific scandals like the case of Hwang Woo-Suk and his fabrication of claims to have created human embryonic stem cells by cloning? Or much-publicized hopes that string theory's efforts to reveal an elegant universe will turn out to be an accurate representation of reality, despite the lack of a single experimental test of its claims? Could these be cases in which aesthetics trumps objectivity, blinding researchers to a messier and more complicated truth? Hope is a powerful force, the play argues, and separating the world as it is from the world we desire can be can be a difficult task.

I've been drafted to moderate a panel discussion titled Falling in Love with Hypotheses following the matinee performance on Wednesday May 16, and I'm sure such matters will be among those on the table. The playwright will also be participating, along with Brian Schwartz, codirector of the CUNY Graduate Center's Science and the Arts program, and Roger Payne, an expert on whales and founder of the the Ocean Alliance. So come on down.

Update (5/18): Science Friday has posted a video clip of the play and footage of Carl Djerassi during the panel discussion.

For the Birds

I’m a little late on this, but an article on bird flight in Nature magazine arrived a couple of weeks ago in step with the change in season. The focus of the article was a study of how swifts adjust their wing configuration depending on the particular task facing them. (See some free coverage, including the spectacular cover image, at ScienceDaily) “Wing morphing” optimizes swifts to be able to make the sharp turns needed to chase insects or to glide while sleeping in the air. Engineering has always looked to birds for inspiration for flight, and projects are already underway to use this understanding of avian design for next-generation aircraft. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory has apparently already been working on morphing wing designs for fighter planes.

More birds: Herzog and DeMeuron’s bird’s nest brutalism in renderings for their 2008 Beijing Olympics stadium | Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center PATH station | birdsong as a model for human language acquisition | vintage automata that replicate the sound of singing birds | Wikipedia’s list of fictional birds | turning bird song into musical notation and modern composition.