Central planning in a complex world

If the world is too complex to allow for long range planning, what should central management be spending its time doing?

As all the parts of the world, on many scales, start colliding and interacting, we now find ourselves inside what scientists would call a "complex adaptive system."

In that kind of world, nothing works the way you think it will, and everything has "unintended consequences" or "unforeseen side-effects." So, we might think that long-range central planning is impossible.

As usual, we're both right and wrong, and the situation is, well, "complex" and nuanced, and depends on what you mean by "planning."

Certainly "central planning" as practiced by Stalin in the Soviet Union or Mao in China ran into many unintended side effects, of the kind where millions of people died because the plans didn't seem to relate to reality on the ground.

But, today, with advanced supercomputers and high-speed global communications, now we can do central planning, right? Nope. Before the problem was too little information. We zoomed right past the sweet spot of "just the right amount" of information, and now we're deep into "too much information!" and heading deeper at an ever faster rate.

So, yes, we could deliver the equivalent of a moving van full of 3-inch binders to a small leadership committee every day, and ask them to read that, digest it, and plan based on it -- but I think the problem is obvious. That will simply never work. There is not enough "bandwidth," regardless how "smart" those people are , even to read that much new information, let along digest it well enough to grasp the implications in "real-time."

All technology is doing is further swamping the system, and that will never get better.

Actually, it's getting worse, because of the problem I've talked about before that information is "context-sensitive" -- that is, the meaning of some "fact" is really only evident if you understand the context of the observation of that "fact. " You can't just snip a fact out of context, slide it over to a central place, and expect it to mean the same thing there that it meant in context.

We all are familiar with this problem, yet, socially, we keep on pretending that it is some sort of local breakdown and that this is not a universal law. The problem is that it is a universal law. Information is not only context dependent -- it gets worse. Information is basically "fractal", like an evergreen where every branch, if looked at by itself, is the same shape as the tree, and each of its branches is the same shape, etc. There is, in other words, an infinite amount of information buried behind every detail, and under every rock, and in every "can of worms."

To try to "consolidate" this information and avoid the "moving van" of binders, each level of management "condenses" the information and "simplifies it." That process, alas, is "lossy", meaning, frankly, it doesn't work most of the time. What gets lost in translation are the key "details" that seem unimportant but that add up to changing the entire conclusion and outcome.

So, this cannot be fixed by having "even smarter" people at the top of this pyramid of information distortion. By the time information gets to the "war room" all the relevant detail has been stripped out by well-meaning intermediaries. And, you can't skip the middle because the volume of detail is too much to handle, again regardless how smart you are.

So, what to do? The only way to deal with this is to realize that the concept of central planning and central "control" is fatally flawed, and to push decision making outward, and delegate it down to as close to the decision as possible, where it still makes sense.

So, we find in The Toyota Way, an emphasis on Genchi Genbutsu, or "go down and look for yourself, because whatever they told you is going on left out something important that will change your decision once you see it."

This is not because the people "at the top" are not smart -- it's because "smart" doesn't matter if you were handed the wrong problem to work on, and the wrong facts about it to use.

It is what is known as a "system problem" and it is "structural." It will not go away with better information processing. The details cannot always be ignored. In fact, most of the time the details matter. Information is not "compressible" on the huge scale we're trying to operate on these days.

So, again, what to do? If central planners cannot plan actions, there is still one thing they can do, and that is to plan processes that, when distributed out, will result in coherent and successful action.

(Actually I think it's even one more step removed, and the best they can do is to plan processes that will lead to emergence of local processes that when carried out locally, times a billion, will result in correct and coherent action - even in the total absence of a "central plan." )

This is the problem that Computer Science is dealing with today, under the handle "emergent computing" or "evolutionary computing" or "swarm computing" or some such thing. This is the problem IBM has to solve for the "operating system" for their supercomputer (Big Blue?) that is really 860,000 computers consulting with each other about what each of them should do next.

So, the literature and research on this topic is buried in Computer Science, where managers and policy makers seldom tread.

The key take-away message, though, is that the problem for today, as viewed by Complex Systems people and Computer Scientists, is how to develop, discover, or evolve processes that lead to processes that lead to coherent adaptive action of the whole swarm.

Interestingly, as I understand it, that is largely the central focus as well of the Baha'i Faith, which focuses on finding what processes lead to the emergence of locally relevant decision-making processes that still combine and work together instead of fragmenting so that the whole thing hangs together with central unity and yet the power of local eyes dealing with local issues, while percolating larger issues upwards and getting guidance on those downward.

This is the exact same focus that the Institute of Medicine has realized needs to be done to make health care safer, as described in "Crossing the Quality Chasm" -- local teams, which they call "microsystems", have to be realized and empowered to be self-managing based on real-time local information and feedback -- while, at the same time, still participating in larger scale coherence that can follow patients and patient care as it crosses from one such team to the next.

And, this is the same focus that Public Health has, as I learned at Johns Hopkins over the last few years. Aid and support for any group, whether teen-smokers in some rich suburb, or indigenous people in some remote country, has to be "culturally relevant" and rooted in local action, or it will suffer "tissue rejection" and be thrown out as soon as the intervention is over.

Central planning can realize there is, say, a problem with malaria that crosses teams, cultures, and nation-state boundaries - but the action has to be locally meaningful and sensible and fit with what else is going on locally, or it cannot work. Solutions cannot be imposed from above, as those that attempt to do so keep on discovering. Too much information is lost at the top.

I think these seemingly disparate groups need to pool their notes and cross-fertilize each other's thinking, because this is all the same problem surfacing in different places, manifesting itself in different worlds.

I guess if no one else is going to do that, or has already, it's time for me to start a "Wiki" so everyone can hang their fragment of knowledge on that framework and we can start to see what it adds up to, and where someone else has already solved that part of the problem.

Wade
(rainbow photo by me, on Flickr)

Active strength through emergent synthesis

My recent post on "active strength" really isn't complete without a mention of what astronomers are doing now to boost their ability to see farther into space and detect even larger structures.

As the picture shows, many radio telescopes (the satellite dish-shaped things) are often used simultaneously to get a better view.

But, something almost magic is going on here that you can't see from the picture. If you simply collected and added up the signals from each dish, and you had, say 100 dishes, you'd end up with a picture with the same crummy resolution one dish has, but 100 times as bright. So, you could see dim objects you couldn't see before, but you absolutely cannot see any more fine structure than you could before. The picture is, effectively, still blurry. You have, effectively, a pinhole camera where the pinhole is the size of the dish.

A law known as Bracewell's Law says that it doesn't matter how many images you take and add up, you can't get better resolution with many images than you can get with one image. (There's an exception, of course, for "hyper-resolution" that I'll talk about sometime.)

To get a less blurry picture, you need to resolve details. However, Bracewell's law prevents you from resolving details finer than the ratio of the wavelength you are using to the diameter of the dish.

But, there's another sort of exception. If you spread out some dishes as in the picture, and you do the right thing mathematically, you can get as good resolution as if you had a dish with a diameter equal to the distance between the farthest separated dishes. So, with one dish in Arizona, and another in England, the effective diameter is 8,000 kilometers or so.

The process is called "aperture synthesis", and I had a more technical prior post on it here.

The points relevant to active strength and social constructs where people work as one are these:

• If we work together we can see way better than if we work separately
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• All of us have a larger "diameter" than the largest single one of us, hands down.
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• The more distance there is between our dishes, the better we can resolve ambiguity in what we're looking at. (Effectively, "diversity" helps, and the more axes and larger distance we can get, the better.)

Working together doesn't mean just working separately and pooling our data. It means, in some very specific sense, "working as one". The difference is the difference between incoherent light (normal light) and a powerful laser beam (coherent light). We humans need to be "coherent" and that's a very special meaning of the concept "united" or "unity."

If we can pull it off, our power goes up from some number "N" which is the number of us, to something like N-squared, a much larger number. And here's the astounding thing - no single molecule in a laser is doing any more work than it did when the light was incoherent -- all that changed is that the radiation is synchronized and coherent. The power results simply from changing the timing of what we do, not from doing something harder.

A small change in synchronization or timing can make an orchestra sound terrible, and a small change can make it sound fantastic. Same instruments, same sounds, just a slight change in how the parts relate to the whole.

Or, for a sports team, it helps to have great individual players, but it helps more to have teamwork that "clicks" so everyone suddenly starts acting as one completely coherent player spread out over many people. That's the few seconds of a 3 hour game that makes the three hours worth while to watch. It's why some coaches don't want "great individuals" but want "great team players." An activated, coherent team will always be more powerful than the "best individual" on it or on the opposing team.

Coherent unity is a winning strategy.

This is basically the magic behind The Toyota Way. By stabilizing what everyone does so it's known by others, visible, and fully predictable, and by forcing everyone to be aware of what everyone else is doing, that last 1 percent can be crossed and everyone can suddenly see with hyper-resolution eyes and think with an aperture-synthesis brain the size of the whole workforce. It only works if individuals are willing to let the team be larger than their own egos, which can be a problem in some cultures.

So, we should set our sights on more than just "working together", and aim for the much more powerful goal of "working as one." This is part of why "unity in diversity" is such a powerful concept, way more so than you'd think.

Mathematically, this is much more powerful than the "invisible hand of Adam Smith" trying to select the "best individual" so that individual can lead the pack or find the way the rest of us can try to emulate. Competition and "survival of the fittest" "rugged individual" strategies result in fragmentation and getting stronger individuals, yes, clearly, but at the cost of weaker teams.

Unfortunately, we're at a point in social evolution where the team matters more than the individual now.

So, we end up with some very fine companies being thwarted by a state government, say, that cannot get its act together and manage the state, or by a county government that cannot get its act together and manage the county.

There is a backlash by some very bright individuals and their families at social obstacles everyone else presents to their brightness being "all it can be." The reality is that unharnessed individuals going off on their own for their own benefit is not the kind of creativity we are most in need of right now. That's not where it's breaking.

I discuss this in my post "Houston, we have another problem!" and showed this diagram. The basic message is this. It doesn't matter how smart we can make one person. One person is like "one dish" in radio telescopes. Take any person and make them a million times smarter, and the complexity of social problems that 6 billion people can produce, in real time, is still vastly larger than that person will ever comprehend. There is only one "algorithm" that keeps up with "everyone" with their N-factorial interactions, and that is "everyone" in a coherent effort to work together.

Compared to the size of the problem, even a person with an IQ of a million is effectively an ant trying to comprehend quantum mechanics. This startling idea really hasn't sunk in yet. This will never "go back" to the way it was, the old days, where one person could "know it all" and "rule the world." We have an educational system trying to produce individual smart people and what we need is an educational system that produces collectively smart teams. The curves have crossed forever:

So, the Arecibo radio telescoe, with a 1000-foot diameter dish, is not being funded because the days of huge single "RAMBO" type solutions are over, replaced by networks of individuals where the network is the key to the power. No single "dish" will ever compete again.

IBM stopped trying to make super "CPU's" years ago, and their new "supercomputer", as everyone's, is really a network of 860,000 smaller cpu's, and the key to it (what a surprise!) is how well the smaller cpu's can figure out for themselves what to do and how to do it, without being programmed or controlled by some "master cpu". The "operating system" is the key.

This isn't theory. This is practice. We have a school system designed to develop leaders for 19th century industry, in a 21st century world. We don't need a 20% fix or even a 50% improvement in "productivity" or "teaching skills" or "scores on the GRE."

What we need is a complete transformation of the whole point and purpose of education. Now that no one can know everything, what few things is it just critical that we all know? I think "how to work together" is in that short list.

The paradox is this. Great individuals aren't of value unless they can work together as one in teams. That requires solving how anyone can work together in teams. Once we solve that, we don't need "supermen" individuals any more, because a network made up of just a lot of regular people cooperating will end up being more powerful.

The power is in the network, not in the individuals in the network. Or, more precisely, the power emerges through the network, but is way more powerful than the network.

But, this is not a "team" like that used by ants or bees or termite communities. Those are built from individuals who are entirely inflexible, and the whole structure is rigid to the point of being brittle. If the world changes outside the range of motion of the hive to adapt, the hive will die. Applied to humans, that's the tyranny model.

Humans are, we hope, a much higher-level creature than ants. What we need to strive for is a higher-order community more like Air-Traffic Control, where we have enough imposed and accepted order that we don't run into or damage each other, but beyond that we have flexibility to adapt locally to whatever is going on. Instead of "rigid strength" we seek "active strength".

That picture describes, once again, something that looks like "unity in diversity", with "independent investigation of the truth". It seeks harmony but not homogeneity, unity but not uniformity. The overall structure is not rigid, but can learn and adapt and change as the environment changes or the problem we are all addressing changes.

So, if we collectively decided that we wanted to get some roots down on other planets around other stars, we might take on one shape that is superbly good for solving interstellar travel. But we would be "transformers" as a society, and could flexibly change our overall shape to meet the needs. The flexibility is crucial, because the creativity of such a structure will be enormous, so we will polish off problems that have been here for millenia, before lunch, and then move on from there. Like an airplane picking up speed, we'd need to start tucking in our wings as we get to the speed of sound, and being air-tight as we got above the atmosphere and switchted to rocket power, etc.

No rigid hierarchy or structure would work for that, but neither would the chaos of anarchy -- we need an adaptive, flexible core network that helps us hold on to a certain shape at a certain time, and then, when it is the right time, to let go of that shape again and move on to something else.

As societies, we've managed to get the "hold on to this shape" part down, but we're not very good yet at "now let go of that and move on." The only "let go" we're generally familiar with is disruptive and revolutionary, or anarchy. Like the ants, we've build some corporate and social structures that were fantastically good solutions to problems we had 200 years ago. Or, like Southeast Michigan, we've build a social structure that worked fine 50 years ago.

Our problem now is that it's not 50 years ago, it's not 200 years ago, it's now. This is a new world, and "the cheese has moved." We don't have very much experience figuring out which parts of our culture are crucial to hang on to , and which parts are in the way and we need to let go of. And, that is made complex because the value of things needs to be assessed over hundreds of years, not over 3 months, or we'll miss the point of some structure and "throw out the baby with the bathwater."

That's where we are today. Disruptive external pressures are demanding that we adapt and transform the way we live and our social structures to new realities, and we have very little personal experience with that magnitude of change, let alone that rate of change. In China, cities like Shanghai have experienced 1000 years of growth in one generation and are a little dizzy from the altitude change and need time to adjust. This is totally new. Change has never come this fast. In 1500, kings could take weeks or years deciding what do to; now the world changes in 12 minutes.

So we are doing what physics does all the time, "searching for invariants of the motion". Amid all the apparent chaos, what are the few things that need to say the same? What can we release our death-grip on, and what should we hold on to even tighter? Where have we mistaken "positions" for "interests" and gotten stuck on some local maximum and missed the big picture?

That's where we need "active strength", and enough trust to let go a little bit and see if things get better or worse, and prepare to be surprised.

For Islam and Christianity and Judaism, the challenge today is to disentangle what is degeneration from what is regeneration, to block the first and embrace the second. These are decisions we need all of us to grapple with, not just a few of us.

As a recent post discussed, evangelical Christianity is struggling with this right now. In the Mideast, everyone is struggling with this right now - modernism versus tradition, chaos versus order, new versus old, what to hang on to and fight to the death to defend, and what it's OK to let go of now, finally, since that storm is over and now the wind is from a different direction and the challenges are different.

As with any active structure or building, the parts may need to shift "positions" in order to keep on doing a good job of the interests of keeping the building upright as the winds shift direction and velocity. It's the same task, the same goal, but new ways of accomplishing it.

It's the task of technology not to replace humans and cultures in this sense-making, but to enable them to do it faster and better, dropping less on the way. Even technology is falling into its own wake, with the support of advanced bookkeeping yielding to support of social collaboration and redefining entirely the purpose and values of "I.T." We've moved from "data processing" to "word processing" to "image processing" and are getting beyond "content processing" into the realm of "context processing". We're getting beyond information and into living and dynamic social wisdom. We're getting beyond what someone said to why they said it and who they are, anyway, and how come they never call anymore?

It's a new day.

Wade

Sources of Active Strength

Science is just beginning to get some insight into a phenomenon called "active strength", where the strength of a system of parts isn't "in" the parts, or "in" the way they are connected, but "in" the way they dynamically change pressure on each other in response to some external stress. A thin Wikipedia article on Active Structures with one links is here.

This concept is subtle, but is as important to understand as the concepts of "dynamic stability" and "dynamic control", which also seem to our intuition that they shouldn't work, but do, and, in fact, they work superbly. You need to understand these concepts to really get the difference between rigor and rigidity. We want structures we build to be rigorous and not fall down, but that turns out to mean they have to be somewhat flexible, and cannot be rigid. (There are no Oak trees in hurricane country, only palm trees that bend with the wind.)

There are whole institutes that study "Active Materials", such as the "Active Materials Lab" at UCLA. What becomes really fascinating is when active materials are ocmbined to make active structures. See, for example the "Active Structures Lab" in Brussels.

One example of an active structure is your bones. I worked at the Biomechanics Lab of the VA Hospital in Cleveland at Wade Park, helping design artificial hip joints, long ago. Researcher had assumed that bone was, you know, dead stuff like steel, so they had measured how strong it was, which was mostly what I did with my lathe and Instron machine. Then, they designed artificial joints based on that data. The joints mostly either bent or broke. Oops.

It turns out that bone is an active material, and is piezo-electric. When it is under stress, the body sends electrical signals to the bone that cause it to shift shape slightly, but enough to make it much stronger for that instant stress. This trick lets the body have it both ways -- light bones, so we can move, but really strong exactly when and where strength is needed.

It's as if the door to weakness is guarded by some sort of "pong" paddle that simply moves back and forth to block incoming hockey pucks, without requiring that the door be "solid" or even there most of the time. If you go look for a "door", you won't find it. It's like your "lap" -- only there sometimes. It's like a bridge that is mostly empty space except for a little bit just under your car that is extra strong and moves along like a shadow under you.

We don't know how many other places this design pattern is used in nature, but I suspect it is quite a few, because it is very efficient and economical. You get both strength and lightness.

Tall buildings and some other buildings are now being built with active strength concepts and they actually change shape and pressure to deal with high winds coming from one side or the other. Really tall buildings now have a huge weight at the top, that can glide in any direction, that is driven by hydraulic pistons and counteracts vibrations and sway in the wind.

So there are books like "Vibration Control of Active Structures" that examine how to use these techniques to damp out waves and vibrations which otherwise would weaken or shatter the structure.

The theory carries over just as well into dynamic information structures in computing, and dynamic social structures that could weaken or collapse, that we want to make extremely strong even though they are sparse and thin and lightweight. Even "control", viewed in the right dimensions, is an entity that we want to "hold together" and not "fall part" or "lose the center", but we want control by management or government to be as "light" and "sparse" as possible to get the job done.

For example, the US Air Traffic Control system is designed to keep planes from running into each other, but within those constraints, pilots can do pretty much whatever they want to. Pilots can say - "No, that doesn't work for me. How about this instead" and get different clearances. It's the pilots that can see out the window and know what's going on in the plane and weather around them, not the "controllers". This is another example of a hybrid vertical loop, where the controllers issue "orders" and "clearances" and yet the pilots can give information that changes the "orders". It is actually run from the bottom up, and just consolidated from the top down. Controllers only redirect traffic when they are force to by weather, for example - they never tell you that you don't want to fly to Miami, you should think about flying to Memphis this time of year.

So, what would an active-strength social structure look and act like? How could you recognize one if you saw it? How could you see where active-strength would help.

Well, for one thing, if you try to push it over, it will rally and push back on you, not crumble and flee. In war, some cultures are incredibly strong at fighting back in spirit as well as in body. Whatever this active spirit is, it is the key to their strength, and war strategists focus primarily on how to break the spirit of the opponent, because the military collapse always follows from that.

So, the flip side of that is figuring out what it takes to make our own spirit strong.

This "spirit" thing or concept is important. Whatever a "spirit" is, in this sense, it describes what holds the team together against all odds and keeps it running at or beyond its capacity.
"Team spirit" is more real in terms of changing outcomes than just certain color clothes and cheers.

Similarly, doctors know that some patients have a "strong spirit" and can survive trauma or burdens that would simply kill patients with "weak spirit." Many doctors have seen at least one patient simply decide to "let go" and proceed to die. What's that about? It's also really frustrating because the strong spirited patients tend to complain a lot and are a "lot of trouble" for the nurses.

People have the capacity to be very strong together, but they don't always use it. It's hard to understand, and you can't "see" whatever it is we call "spirit" directly, and yet it seems to be a word that has a scientifically measurable outcome. I'm using the term "spirit" here more like the active sense of something, not like a "ghost".

One thing is clear - opponents or people with no spirit simply crumble and crumple under pressure or duress. Whatever this spirit thing is, it affects biomedical outcomes as well as social-level outcomes, in measurable ways.

Further reading :
A Wiki on "active architecture" you can participate in is here. Active Architecture in the meaning of a building aware of and responsive to its occupants is here.

A much more technical look at the subject would be "An Active Architecture Approach to Dynamic System Co-evolution" by Morrison, et. al., which is about the conceptual "architecture" of the information structures that happen inside computers - and how to make they adaptive and dynamic and capable of learning and evolving but not collapsing.

Christian evangelicals moving to this world

A long piece on the Christian Evangelical movement's change in direction is in todays' New York Times Magazine:

Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical pastors — including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and Bill Hybels — are pushing the movement and its theology in new directions.

There are many related ways to characterize the split: a push to better this world as well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus’ teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality.

However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty — problems, unlike abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right compete to present the best answers.

Ever since they broke with the mainline Protestant churches nearly 100 years ago, the hallmark of evangelicals theology has been a vision of modern society as a sinking ship, sliding toward depravity and sin. For evangelicals, the altar call was the only life raft — a chance to accept Jesus Christ, rebirth and salvation. Falwell, Dobson and their generation saw their political activism as essentially defensive, fighting to keep traditional moral codes in place so their children could have a chance at the raft.

But many younger evangelicals — and some old-timers — take a less fatalistic view. For them, the born-again experience of accepting Jesus is just the beginning. What follows is a long-term process of “spiritual formation” that involves applying his teachings in the here and now. They do not see society as a moribund vessel. They talk more about a biblical imperative to fix up the ship by contributing to the betterment of their communities and the world. They support traditional charities but also public policies that address health care, race, poverty and the environment.

Older evangelical traditionalists like Prof. David Wells of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary near Boston argue that the newer approaches represent a “capitulation” to the broader culture — similar to the capitulation that in his view led the mainline churches into decline. Proponents of the new evangelicalism, on the other hand, say their broader agenda reflects a frustration with the scarce victories in the culture war and revulsion at the moral entanglements of partisan alliances (Abu Ghraib, Jack Abramoff).

Scot McKnight, an evangelical theologian at North Park University in Chicago, said, “It is the biggest change in the evangelical movement at the end of the 20th century, a new kind of Christian social conscience.”

Feeling the power of the Lord

There is an external supply of organizational power and coping "energy" available to us, every day, that is way more than we come into the day with. I think too many people today are trying to drive on their starter engines, and running down their batteries, aside from not having much power for hills.

A standard "gasoline powered" car has two entirely different engine systems. One uses gasoline to store energy and has pistons and spark-plugs and can produce more power than 100 horses, sometimes much more. It can move the car 400 miles or more, and then needs to be "refilled" (at $3 a gallon).




The other engine system uses a "battery" to store energy, has a small electric motor, and can produce enough power to "turn over" the big engine and power the spark plugs and run the fuel pump long enough that the BIG engine "starts", at least on warm days when we didn't leave the interior lights on all night.

Then, a side job of the big engine, as it is running, is to recharge the small engine's battery for "next time."

Even jet planes that can cross the ocean generally use some guy with a small engine to come up and plug in to start up their huge turbine engines, that you can hear revving up to speed on electricity and then finally "catching" with a roar as the jet fuel takes over the job.

It actually is possible, at least on a car with manual transmission, to "drive on the starter engine", although it is really hard on that engine. If you're stuck on the railroad tracks in such a car, and you have time, you could put the car in first gear and just turn the key and the starter engine would move the car 30 feet or so before it would run out of power. Don't try it because it will probably require you get a new starter engine, and getting out of the car and running is usually faster and much safer, although it requires getting a new car.

Here's the problem, though. As a metaphor, today, people seem to have forgotten that there is a BIG engine in their cars, and everyone is trying to "drive on the starter engine" all day. Science, unhelpfully, teaches that you don't need a BIG engine to explain why a car can move. (It doesn't address whether such motion explains everything in society, and kind of punts on that question for now, until there is way more computing power)

But, we do see people running out of energy half way through their day. Call it "depression" or "Yuppie flu" or "chronic fatigue syndrome", and "treat" it with ever larger amounts of prescription drugs and caffeine, but it seems to be getting worse, nationally, at an alarming rate. It takes more an more people to "run" an organization, or nation, which produces less and less, even if it runs the people to exhaustion and discards them and gets a constant stream of new people as a business model.

That's what you get if you drive on the starter engine, or try to run you life on your own brain and body and mind. Some motion, then it runs out, and it's really hard on the car.

The alternative is captured in the slogan to the orphanage Boys Town, namely,

He's not heavy father, he's my brother!

There is an alternative power supply here, provided free, fully wireless, available to anyone who subscribes to it. There is a BIG engine you can tap into. That engine does not get tired before the end of the day. Even listening to the song of the same name boosts your energy.

The metaphysical religion model says, in my words, that the purpose of our own energy and free will is to be good starter engines, and every day get ourselves realigned with God and "plug into" the power of God's love to motivate, guide, and empower our actions all day.

The result, if done correctly, is to end up the day tired in some ways, but flush with overflowing success and filled with more energy than at the start of the day.

We're leaves of the tree, and our energy needs to be used to twist and turn ourselves in prayer until we capture the external sunlight fully, which will cause things to happen, energy to appear as if it came "out of the light", recharging us and powering the tree, as well as the flow systems the tree has to make us bigger and healthier and stronger.

If we notice we are running low on energy, the wrong thing to do is to curl into a tight roll and try to "conserve" what we have. That will never work.

Yet those who wait for the LORD Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary.
(NAS Bible, Isaiah 40:31).

The tragedy of our day is that science is so busy trying to prove that God doesn't exist that it has few resources left over that can be turned to looking at why some people manage to get plugged into this power source and spend their days inspired, and how the rest of us can tap into that.

I think their problem is that they are looking for "the power within" and, well, it's not inside the box, it's outside the box. And, it's not there all the time, but requires a rather nuanced alignment and entrainment action on the part of our "receiver" so we pick up the energy beam and respond to it in a phase-lock loop. It's kind of like the submarine communication systems that starts with a low-power broad beam laser looking for a satellite, and when it finds it suddenly focuses the laser on an intense pulse mode exactly at the target so none is lose to the sides.

If you take it into the lab, there is no wire, no loop, no energy being transferred, nothing to see here. The problem is the "taking it into the lab" step. But if you go out and look at some people in action, inspired by the Spirit, you can only gasp in awe.

What we need help with is the alignment step, this "prayer" thing and "submission" thing doesn't always work very well, and we "fall off" the wagon.

I replaced the starter engine of my car today
Uploaded by Michiel2005 on Flickr.
Small Block (Engine) Originally uploaded by Lost America
Battery by by Planet Tyler
Jumpstart by by Old Shoe Woman
Worn out by by Avid Maxfan
Leaves by Shakespearesmonkey
Friendly Friday (bird) Uploaded by Ollie_girl
Little help from my friends uploaded by frankie.farkle

Baha'i social and economic development

UN-NYC

For reflection, here's a comment from the Office of Social and Economic Development at the Baha'i World Center, from "The Evolution of Institutional Capacity for Social and Economic Development".

Baha'i social and economic development focuses on increasing the capacity of the friends to make decisions about the spiritual and material progress of their communities and then implement them.

While such development activities provide services that lead to a visible improvement in some aspect of life, their ultimate success is measured by the degrees to which they enhance the ability to address issues of development at increasingly higher levels of complexity and effectiveness.

This applies not only to individuals and communities but also to institutions. As development efforts grow, organizational structures should evolve to meet new challenges and opportunities.

And, this from a Letter of October 20, 1983, from the Universal House of Justice to the Baha'is of the World:

The steps to be taken must necessarily begin in the Baha'i Community itself, with the friends endeavoring, through their application of spiritual principles, their rectitude of conduct and the practice of the art of consultation, to uplift themselves and thus become self-sufficient and self-reliant....

Progress in the development field will largely depend on natural stirrings at the grassroots, and it should receive its driving force from those sources than from an imposition of plans and programs from the top....

... All can share; all can participate in the joint enterprise of applying more systematically the principles of the faith to upraising the quality of human life. The key to success is unity in spirit and in action.

And from the 1993 "Baha'i Social and Economic Development:Prospects for the Future",

Activities in the development field should be viewed as a reinforcement of the teaching work, as a greater manifestation of faith in action. ...

Development projects in themselves offer great opportunities to the friends to become involved in the life of society...

Openness to collaboration with people of capacity and leaders of thought concerned with issues of progress and willingness and ability to invite them to participate in applying the Teaching to specific problems, have to be created at all levels ...

The observations made in the previous section suggest the gradual establishment in each national community of channels ... to achieve material progress for themselves and their people.

...to have relevance ... it must, in all cases carry out its projects in collaboration with the responsible administrative institutions.

(credit: UN SED meeting originally uploaded by fozia25 ... click photo for to
go to flickr for a better view and set of photos.).

Village scene
Uploaded to flickr by carf

Detroit Mercy Hospitals scene by hollyziggy

How do we get anywhere?

Dances with Penguins - 2
Originally uploaded by Fotomom

Isn't there some tool that we could use so that our meetings always get us a little closer to where we want to go?

If we're going to get anywhere, we need to learn how to talk to each other. That's a conclusion I keep coming back to. With all these people, why can't we solve our own problems?

So, I come back to the side-point Professor Gary Olson made in class one day. He said that white-boards were proven to be very useful for making meetings get somewhere, but he hardly ever saw faculty or administrators use one when they met.

This is on top of arriving without a clear agenda, and working without minutes being taken of what was said.

Well, that's curious. Why is that? I mean, white-boards are really useful in removing ambiguity and bringing issues to the front where they can be seen by everyone. They help you leave the meeting with a common understanding of what was agreed to and a clear picture of what steps who is taking next.

So, I have to suppose that faculty and administrators prefer to keep issues hidden, prefer to avoid revealing conflict, and are happy to let everyone go off with their own misconceptions of what was decided and who is doing what next. And, I guess, it's OK in their minds that people who weren't at the meeting are now missing part of the picture and walking around misinformed.

So, let's start the "Five Whys" process and see if we can figure out what it would take to overcome this apparent social dysfunction.

So far we have:

• We have major social problems that aren't being dealt with, locally, at a department or corporate level, regionally, statewide, and nationally, or being dealt with way too late to be effective
  
• which is partly because: people don't get anywhere when they meet
• which is partly because: they don't use obvious tools like agendas, white-boards, and minutes
• which is partly because: those tools remove ambiguity which clarifies areas of conflict which is disruptive and unpleasant
• which is partly because: people aren't good at dealing with conflict so they avoid it.
• which is partly because: what?

I think part of the reason people have trouble dealing with conflict is that they don't think of it as "apparent conflict" and assume that it is "real conflict."

Because they think it's "real" conflict, they also think that the only way to survive is to "win", which means that everyone else must "lose", so they hardly want to be open and honest about their motivations. Most people also assume that everyone else is just like them, so they assume the same reasoning and motivations are behind what everyone else is doing as well.

We get some guidance from the superb book "Getting To Yes", which is about techniques that let the Soviet Union and the US negotiate during the cold war, when they hated and mistrusted each other.

The authors use the example of an orange that two kids are fighting over. Each wants the orange and "needs it" and "must have it."

On investigation of what they would do with it if they got it, one wanted to squeeze it and get the juice to drink, and the other needed the outside rind for some class project.

So, it turns out the "it" they were fighting over wasn't ever made clear enough to reveal that there were two "its" and one orange could satisfy both needs.

So, one problem the authors found is that people tend to jump to conclusions about what they think is the "only way" to do something that could "possibly" work. The conclusions are wrong, but are based on unstated or even unrealized assumptions or different life experience.

When the people can back off of their "positions" ( "I must have that orange!") and go back upstream a step to their "interests" ("I need orange juice!") new solutions suddenly appear to what was an "unsolvable problem."

If you keep on tracking back upwards one step after another, you end up coming back to basic needs, that people need to survive, to eat, to have clothing and shelter, etc. I think any negotiation has to start with the assumption that the goal in life is not the annihilation of the other party (which would be a position), but to figure out how to proceed so that the other party doesn't pose an on-going threat of annihilating me (an understandable and predictable interest.)

Many international conflicts are generated by the belief that the only way the other party will stop being a threat is if it is annihilated entirely, and that there are no other possible solutions to reducing the threat.

I'll look at other properties of rational ways to deal with conflict in other posts. Where I wanted to get in this one was to follow the chain of causality upstream far enough to see hope along one axis. So far, we've found that many of the reasons to avoid discussing conflict and actually resolving it are based in misunderstanding, unspoken assumptions, leaps of judgment about the "only way" something can happen, and perhaps hidden assumptions that the "only way" to reduce a threat to myself is to sabotage or eliminate someone else.

The humility required is being willing to accept that it is possible that somewhere you have leaped to some conclusion and leaped right past another solution you didn't see.

The belief required is being willing to accept that your own survival does not automatically require the elimination of someone else.

In other circles, maybe the realization is that your own wealth, empowerment, and happiness does not automatically demand dis-empowering everyone else. There may be other ways to survive and thrive and be legitimately happy and wealthy.

In fact, as I'll discuss in other posts, both health and wealth are bio-social constructs and if everyone else died, the wealth would be worth nothing and physiological and mental health would be impossible. And, just like our body doesn't have a "super-cell" that all the other cells bow down to and "obey", the planet doesn't need a "super-man" that all other men bow down to and obey. The whole concept of domination is fatally flawed, and has no biological or natural analog. Ecosystems can't make themselves subservient to one component, and the emergent power is so much larger than any component's individual power that subservience would make no sense. There is no "best" part of a mutually-dependent ecosystem.

(credits - photo Dances with Penguins, by Fotomom,
click on it to go to that site on Flickr., "dinner time" penguin photo by
Uploaded by c-basser on Flickr)

When you come back to me again

CANOTIER A MONTJEAN SUR LA LOIRE (FRANCE)
Originally uploaded by boccacinofoto

Raining down, against the wind
I'm reaching out 'til we reach the circle's end
When you come back to me again
And again I see my yesterday's in front of me
Unfolding like a mystery
You're changing all that is and used to be.

Garth Brooks
"When you come back to me"
from the movie Frequency
(Dennis Quaid, fighting fires across 3 generations)

Comment: one of the properties of closed loops is that the past, present, and future become entwined with each other.

All three become so aware of each other and so responsive that they start moving as one.

Because there is so much stored energy, these systems can change almost instantly, as one small event or piece of information suddenly transforms and changes everything that went "before" into something entirely different and "closes the loop."

It's like the way the energy on a guitar string all goes into a higher harmonic if you just touch it at the right spot and produce a "grace note".

The truth is, our intuition about this is truly terrible. The most important lesson is not just that it can happen, but that there is always the possibility of spectacular success just in the darkest hour when it appears all has been lost.

Like the M.C. Escher staircases, we go full-loop and discover we came out above, instead of below, where we started. Like our own body's muscles -- we have to "use them up" to wake up the next day and find they came back stronger than before.

A lot of life is like that.

The future is not what it used to be.
And by changing our future, we can change the meaning of our past, which changes our future even more.

The end of our exploring (T. S. Eliot)
T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

(credits: carousel by somerslea , Image of our neighbor in space, M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) from Wikipedia. )

What is public health?

What is "public health" anyway?

One way to look at life is the clinical approach: we see a new stream of urban gunshot victims coming into the Emergency Room, and decide to do things like:

• Expand the ER
• Add staff
• Develop a specialty in treating gunshot wounds
• Improve communications between the ambulance and ER

Public health, on the other hand, goes "upstream". We look at that situation and ask "Why are there so many gunshot victims suddenly?" We leave the ER and go look at what is going on in society that is resulting in all these shootings.

Then we ask the annoying question that parents and teachers often discouraged, "Why?", five time more after that to get to the root-cause, and find a place we can intervene that has "leverage". The problems often spring from culture, beliefs, society, industry, economics, and other issues. Unless those are fixed, we're just fixing symptoms and the root problem may get worse.

The illness we are treating is the tendency of society's members to shoot each other, not the wounds themselves. The point is that if we can put out the fire, it will stop the smoke.

These days, the problems hospitals have are more often too many patients, not too few, and the interests of public health and clinical health coincide. If half as many people got shot, or got sick, then the hospitals would have capacity to deal with the others more promptly, and get rid of 3 month delays for surgery. There would be room to treat those we currently leave in the gutter, figuratively or literally, as a society. It would be a win-win.

The current president of the American Medical Association has a specialty in preventive medicine, and understands this overlap -- which has not always been true in the past.

Which one is more important? They're both more important, just on different scales. Life has different levels, and a good solution to a problem will address them all. We need clinical doctors to fix individuals, and public health to fix societies. They both matter.

It doesn't matter which end of the boat we're in has a hole in it -- we need to fix the hole. Right now, there are holes at both ends.

Wade

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject

"At the very least it is hoped that this little book may serve as a warning to those who read it, thus helping to counter the headlong rush into Systemism that characterizes our age...

SYSTEMISM n. 1. The state of mindless belief in Systems; the belief that Systems can be made to function to achieve desired goals. 2. The state of being immersed in Systems; the state of being a Systems-person."

(John Gall, "Systemantics - How Systems Really Work and How they Fail.)

Gall, continues

Systems-functions are not the result of human intransigence. We take it as given that people are generally doing the very best they know how. Our point, repeatedly stressed in this text, is that Systems operate according to Laws of Nature, and that Laws of Nature are not suspended to accommodate our human shortcomings. There is no alternative but to learning How Systems Work... Whoever does not study the Laws of Systemantics and learn them that way is destined to learn them the hard way...

S. Freud, in his great work on the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, directed attention to the lapses, failures, and mishaps resulting from forces operating within the individual. We, on the other hand, are interested in those lapses, failures, and mishaps that are attributable to the (mal)functioning of the Systems surrounding the individual, within which the individual is immersed, and with which he or she must interact and attempt to cope in everyday life.

Specifically, we are interested, not in the process of forgetting to mail a letter, but in the Post Office Box that is too full to accept the letter.

...

And like those lapses followed up by Freud, these lapses have a way of eluding us, of disappearing from our consciousness once the painful event is over. Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject.

...

When Memory is thus deliberately frustrated in its basic task of protecting us from too much awareness, we see what we had hitherto failed to notice: that malfunction is the rule and flawless operation the exception.

...

The advent of the Computer Revolution merely provides new opportunities for errors at levels of complexity and grandiosity not previously attainable.

...

The world may largely consist of Fuzzy Systems, but fuzzy thinking is definitely not the way to Cope with them, let alone to Prevail.

Comment - John Gall's book is, in my mind, one of the most delightful and yet profound books on "Systems" ever written. I have made a point to reread it at least once every year since 1975, and to buy copies for all my staff and friends at the slightest excuse.

Based, presumably, on his experiences as a physician at the University of Michigan, be captures with humor the best attitude any of us can hope for to take and use to frame the indelicate problem of "systems" in our lives, or, God forbid, systems we are part of and partly responsible for.

A very brief sampling of his summary rules is here. Wikipedia has many more, but I heartily recommend the trip to Amazon to get the latest updated version of his wit and wisdom.

Some of his Rules:

REALITY IS MORE COMPLEX THAN IT SEEMS.

Under precisely controlled experimental conditions,a test animal will behave as it damn well pleases.

THINGS AREN'T WORKING VERY WELL (and never did).

SYSTEMS IN GENERAL WORK POORLY OR NOT AT ALL.

(The behavior is often an unexpected way of failing.)

NEW SYSTEMS MEAN NEW PROBLEMS.

SYSTEMS TEND TO EXPAND TO FILL THE KNOWN UNIVERSE.

THE SYSTEM ALWAYS FIGHTS BACK.

THE OLD SYSTEM IS NOW THE NEW PROBLEM.

A LARGE SYSTEM, PRODUCED BY EXPANDING THE DIMENSIONS OF A SMALLER SYSTEM,
DOES NOT BEHAVE LIKE THE SMALLER SYSTEM.

TO THOSE WITHIN A SYSTEM, THE OUTSIDE REALITY TENDS TO PALE AND DISAPPEAR.

THE CHART IS NOT THE PATIENT.

Unfortunately, this slogan with its humanistic implications, turned out to be misleading. The nurses were neither attending the patients nor making notations in the charts. They were in the hospital auditorium, taking a course in Interdisciplinary Function. (The art of correlating one's own professional activities more and more with those of other professionals, while actually doing less and less. )

"In cold fact, a SYSTEM is building ships, and the SYSTEM is the shipbuilder."

PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING.

THE SYSTEM ITSELF DOES NOT DO WHAT IT SAYS IT IS DOING.

and, "Closely related to Orwellian Newspeak and Doublethink, The confusion of Input and Output."

A giant program to Conquer Cancer is begun. At the end of five years, cancer has not been conquered, but one thousand research papers have been published. In addition, one million copies of a pamphlet entitled "You and the War Against Cancer" have been distributed. These publications will absolutely be regarded as Output rather than Input. The cancerous multiplication of paperwork will not be regarded as a malignancy.

[previously published 9/5/06 in my prior weblog ; photo is from my own Ann Arbor photos. ].

How long does it take to change a culture?

We have ways out that we don't see.

Our whole world is like the scene near the start of the movie Labyrinth where our heroine and a worm are walking down a seemingly endless pathway around the castle, and she finally blurts out "There's no door!" and the worm corrects her and says "Yes, they're everywhere! There's one right there. You're just not seeing them." Then her vision "clicks into place" and she finds the door, no problem.

As they say, "Some things you have to believe to see."

There is hope.

This is the consistent message that various religions of the world have tried to embody, that commerce in the form of "The Toyota Way" or "Making the Impossible Possible" teaches, and that, at last, science is starting to catch up and understand and accept as legitimate, as it gets enough computer power to model the feedback loops involved.

While we tend to think of "culture" as being a huge, almost unchangeable rock or "supertanker we're trying to turn", in point of fact it can change overnight.

Did you ever have this happen to you? There's a person you knew a long time and had pretty fixed view of, and then you find out something you never knew about them or about their life or past, and it changes everything in an instant? Suddenly you realize you'd been misinterpreting them all that time, just to see things "in a new light"?

This, dear friends, is the kind of "new light" that we need to understand the workings of, and get a lot more of.

We tend to rush on by and not pause to realize, "Whoa. That's exactly what I need."

In fact, we need to start manufacturing "new light" bulbs and lay out a power grid for making them shine, or maybe even a wireless broadcast power system would be better -- the cellphone model not land-line model.

Please slow down your reading and "reflect" on this for a moment. I'm not talking about magic or mysticism or "Kum-bay-ya by the fire" here - I'm just talking about exactly the same kind of sudden realization that all of us have had and can relate to.

We could call it a "magic moment", but it is only amazing in impact. We usually spend zero seconds reflecting on exactly how a complete transformation of our thinking can occur in 1 second. It is kind of surprising, isn't it?

What is called "one-time learning" is the same way. We tend to think of learning as something that is hard, requires buying expensive textbooks, going to class, studying for hours or weeks, taking exams, and maybe we get and maybe we don't. But take a 4 year old child somewhere where they get a cookie, and see if they remember that fact the next time they are in that neighborhood. Of course they do. Effortless, one-time learning. No study required. No memorization of facts. It just goes in and stays.

I've heard "true art" described as a way of making a person experience something that has the effect that they never see the world the same way again after that.

Actually, this is pretty much the meaning of the word "repent" in the Christian Bible, to re-think something in a dramatic new way, to re-conceptualize it, to re-frame it, to "turn and be saved." It's not magic or I don't know what, it's just an "Oh, my God!" moment of realization of something that was always there that you were blipping.

And as soon as perception changes, behavior follows along and changes. The "impossible" becomes "possible." Everything is somehow different, in a new light.

If you dig under the covers in "The Toyota Way", it is clear that the end point, the goal of all the fancy tools and techniques, is actually just to get to a new way of seeing things and seeing each other. They use the term "philosophy" and say the whole way is based on it. To me, that word smacks of years of academic study and Ph.D's and makes the concept seem almost impossible.

So, I'm going to apply the Toyota Way to itself, to thinking about the whole process of transforming ourselves to the Toyota Way, and ask "Why do we imagine it should take years or decades of struggle to accomplish?"

I don't think it does.

I think we could do it in an afternoon, if we drill down and figure out what it is that we're not seeing that we need to see, and how to make that a vivid one-time-learning, flash of realization experience - with every camera flash in the whole company going off at the same second.

Flash. Realization. Exact "same" world, and yet, suddenly, in an instant, entirely different.

I mean, Toyota looked at US auto companies struggling to convert assembly lines from one model to another in 6 weeks, and asked "Why can't we do that in 6 minutes?" and realized they could, and now they do. The barrier was all in their heads. Some things you have to believe to see.

Now that we have a whole new technology of incredibly realistic, life-size 3-D simulation virtual worlds, you'd think we should be able to script whatever interactive experience we want someone to have, and do the whole thing in under an hour, tops.

This requires challenging the "common wisdom" that the Toyota Way involves some kind of magic learning that cannot be described and only can be pointed to indirectly that takes years and years of labor to grasp.

Well, that's what some high priests of yoga said about certain physiological control they had learned to do, and it did take them decades, thank you, to do it the old way, but we can do it in 5 minutes with biofeedback now. It's 2007, not 207.

I recall Tony Robbins mentions in one of his self-help books that someone asks him how long it takes to change a deeply embedded belief or behavior, and he responds "How long do you want it to take? We can change that this afternoon."


We don't really have the luxury of taking another generation to turn around the economy of Southeast Michigan. We need something we can do in "months" not "decades". A lot of people need help. A lot of businesses need help. The edge is way too close for comfort.

If we can just focus on how "new light" works, it becomes possible.


Wade

(Image of a self-assembling tower crane adding a new section to its own top as it grows is from "How Science Works"; "Friends forever" image is by the author.)

Audio illusions of endless strange loops - mp3

Boing Boing notes three interesting "audio illusions"
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, April 17, 2007 2:23 PM
permalink Mighty Optical Illustions has three interesting audio files that play tricks on your ears.

(MP3) - This is a recording of Shepard's paradox synthesized by Jean-Claude Risset. Pairs of chords sound as if they are advancing up the scale, but in fact the starting pair of chords is the same as the finishing pair. If you loop this sample seamlessly then it should be impossible to tell where the sample begins and ends.

Falling bells (MP3) - This is a recording of a paradox where bells sound as if they are falling through space. As they fall their pitch seems to be getting lower, but in fact the pitch gets higher. If you loop this sample you will clearly see the pitch jump back down when the sample repeats. This reveals that the start pitch is obviously much lower than the finishing pitch.

Quickening Beat (MP3) - This recording is subtle. A drum beat sounds as if it is quickening in tempo, but the starting tempo is the same as this finishing tempo.

Link

At top - a classic optical illusion showing how "helpful" our eyes are at "correcting" what comes in to fit their mental model of how life should be and report it to you that way.

The dark gray square at the top was made by simply cutting out a section of the "light" gray square in the "shadow", and pasting it up in the white background area.

Your eyes "auto-correct" it for you to account for the "shadow."

I know this seems hard to believe, so do this" print out the picture, get a pair of scissors, and cut out the square in the shadow and slide it over to the edge,where it magically "changes color" and becomes dark. As you slide it "into" and "out of " the "shadow", the same square changes shade right in front of you.

This is just one of the thousands of things your perceptual system is doing to be "helpful" to you, including altering the way you perceive people around you, so that they fit your mental model of how things "should" be.

The same effect is at work if you're deep into depression, when your mind is "helpfully" coloring everything around you "depressing" before it shows it to you.

That's what makes prejudice or bias or depression so hard to detect and treat - they seem so "obvious" and "external" that you can't figure out that your eyes changed reality before they showed it to you.

Unfortunately, we use that same visual system for thinking and for seeing, so it also "helpfully" twists our thinking around to help us see what it "knows" it is we're "supposed" to be seeing.

Who is sick? User generated maps of community

( From Boing Boing) Tired of waiting three weeks for the official and reliable CDC figures on a state-wide level? Now you can get (and make) a local community real-time map of who has what. We have no idea yet how accurate this will be and what biases this sort of data collection will bring, but it is free and fast and may ultimately help people plan and cut down disease transmission by changing people's plans. Or it could be hijacked and just cause trouble. As with any web-2 empowered user tool, it will take some settling time (and a server upgrade or two!)

I have a suspicion that the creators of the site will be learning some lessons soon, if they don't know, on how informative or politically helpful/volatile this kind of information can be.
Who Is Sick? user-generated epidemiology map
Posted by David Pescovitz, April 19, 2007 8:04 PM

Who Is Sick? is a new Web service that provide a sense of your community's health by enabling people who live there to share information about the local spread of diseases. You can anonymously post your own sickness information and use the Google Maps interface to search and filter sicknesses by symptoms, sex, age, and, of course, location. It's also interesting to look at the percentage breakdown of symptoms--like runny nose, cough, or stomach ache--in a particular area. The concept is something like a modern day version of the famous map that Dr. John Snow and Henry Whitehead created to track the spread of Cholera through London in 1854, a tale beautifully told in Steven Johnson's book The Ghost Map .
From the Who Is Sick? blog: (Which seems to be overwhelmed with hits at the moment).

Mr. Science talks about people and the Light

Sometimes things are better than they seem. Sometimes they're worse. Actually, we can't see very well is what the problem is.

In fact, if you remember Miss Furgis's 4th grade science class, or maybe the club last week, there's stuff like light except you can't see it. Ultraviolet light is mostly invisible, until it hits something that glows in it, then it's really neat and spooky. Infrared light is invisible but can let your camera focus or spot an intruder's glow and set off an alarm.

So "ultraviolet" means simply "beyond violet" or, higher than blue. "Infrared" means lower than red. If you take the rainbow and extend it, these are colors you can almost see, but not quite - just like sounds some people can hear but you can't.


OK, ace. Pop quiz. How many colors are there you can't see?

a) Sorry, I was talking on IM. What was the question?
b) Two - infrared and the other one you just said.
c) Most of them - I can barely see through these Foster Grant shades
d) About a thousand
e) More than a million


The answer is (e) - more than a million. There are more than a million colors, as distinct as red and blue and green and yellow, that we can't see. We can't see most colors. These eyeball things we have only see a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the world and we are stone cold blind to the rest of it.

It's like the world is in vivid color, all around us, and we barely see black and white and a few shades of gray. The rest of it we can only take on faith.

(The picture of the "electromagnetic spectrum" on the left is from Wikipedia here. Or you can just click on the image to enlarge it.)


OK, so big whoop. We all knew that. (Well, sort of. We all used to know that and forgot it as soon as the quiz was over.)

Yep. You knew it, but you never really figured out what it means to you as a person.

What it means is that you actually can't see most of what is going on right around you, let alone farther away.

Back in my astrophysics days, I took classes from Frank Drake (who now runs the SETI Institute and used to run the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo). Frank said that every time astronomers looked at the sky in a new part of the spectrum, they didn't just see things they knew about, they found entirely new things going on that no one had ever suspected before.

The sky, in other words, is BIG. So is LIFE. It has room for millions of things to be going on right around you that you, mercifully, cannot see, so you can focus on the few you can handle, and even those are sometimes too much. You don't have to see radio waves and get blinded every time someone turns on their cell phone. You aren't blinded by turning on the microwave. It's good, in a way.

But it's also good to remember that there is a whole world around us we're blind to, given these frail human bodies we occupy.

The same thing is true of sounds -- there is a whole universe of sounds too low or too high for our human ears to hear. Dogs can hear sounds that we don't even know are there, like "dog whistles." Some kids have ring-tones on their phones that are high enough pitch that no adult can hear them, only other kids.

The same thing is true of anything that's a wave, or acts like a wave, which is an amazing number of things all by itself.

There's a book out, I forget the title, on REALLY BIG THINGS like supertankers and the huge building they build the space shuttle rocket in.

REALLY BIG THINGS do not act like smaller things, just made larger, but have entirely new properties, and this keeps on surprising engineers, who by now should know better.

For example, supertankers and NASA's vehicle assembly building are large enough to have weather INSIDE them. They can have clouds and even rain inside.

The story that really caught my attention in that book, though, was of a huge ship docked somewhere on a calm day that suddenly started rocking, faster and faster, and ripped the pier it was attached to into shreds before they could stop it.

What was that about? It turns out that the ocean doesn't just have waves of sizes we "see", the ones up to 100 feet or so, but it just keeps on going, like the spectrum. There are waves of every size. The really long ones are so long and such a low frequency (like 2 beats a day), we perceive them with a new name as "tides". But there are waves that are a half-mile or kilometer long that we don't have names for too. Some days, the seas are calm in that frequency range, and other days it's busy. We don't see them at all. If we're in a tiny little sailboat the sea rises so slowly and goes down so slowly over a minute or so it's just invisible to us.

But, if you're a ship thats the same length as the waves, you can get into "resonance" where you pick up that energy and concentrate it and amplify it. The results can be astounding.

Here's another famous resonance: YouTube color video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge ripping itself to shreds on a windy but not stormy day.

Now, nifty video, nice science, but so what? The so what is a realization that there are events and waves all around us that only become "visible" as we build larger and larger social structures. The power in those waves may be enormous, even though, to our human eyes, there is nothing at all there.

Could be destructive power. Could be something we could harness for cheap free energy. Could be enormous creative power. Whatever it is, we would never be able to see it directly with our own eyes. We can only discover it is there by building a "resonant structure" of the same frequency, perhaps on purpose, perhaps by accident, that will act as a receiver and pick up the broadcast power on that frequency.


Interesting, isn't it? Even science is surprised by what it finds when it looks in a new place. We've never built planetary sized social structures that were tightly linked electronically before. We don't actually know what they'll reveal.


(photo credits and links:
Image of Ishihara color-blindness test plate from Wikipedia
Image of the Very Large Array radio telescope, at top of post, from Wikipedia - the same instrument featured in Carl Sagan's movie Contact with Jodie Foster.
Image of our neighbor in space, M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) from Wikipedia. )