It's been a while (almost 5 years) since I've participating in any sort of writing contest. I applied to the Access to Understanding contest where you have to summarise (abstract out) a scientific article. Curiously, the winning entry did the same article as I did :-)
I did not quite make the shortlist this time... I hope I'm not losing my magic touch! Anyway, here's my take:
Beat it!
I dare you to start listening to “Michael Jackson’s” song “Beat it” and resist its rhythm. Don’t tap your foot. Don’t drum your fingers. Don’t nod your head. It is hard to help it, and even if the beat does not invade your body, it still assails your mind. Our urge drives us to follow the rhythm, something we do effortlessly, almost unconsciously.
We cannot say that this capacity is uniquely human, as anyone surfing YouTube for “dancing parrots” can attest. However, it seems to be fairly rare in the animal kingdom. Clearly, being able to hear the beat helps when we are listening to music and let us to move in synchrony to music, maybe even dance. Importantly, our capacity to perceive and produce a predictable beat might even form the foundations of language itself, structuring the words we hear and the way we speak.
But how does our brain process the beat? Some very ancient brain structures appear to be key to beat perception. These are the basal ganglia, a conglomerate of deep brain structures that is located, you guessed it, at the base of the brain.
The putamen (pronounced pyu-tah-men) is a round subpart of the basal ganglia. It is named after its shape, Latin for the shell or husk of a fruit kernel. Previous studies have shown that this region becomes more active when people are listening to predictable beat sequences than non-beat sequences. However, what is unclear is whether the putamen is involved in finding the beat in the song, or in predicting how the beat will continue once it has been found.
Investigator, musician and TED speaker Jessica Grahn decided to answer this question together with James Rowe. To do so, they used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). This technique looks at how blood flow increases or decreases as brain regions that become more or less active. People of various musical backgrounds lay in the MRI scanner while listening to different beats. They heard sequences of sounds with either a predictable beat at different speeds, or similar sequences but without a predictable beat. Occasionally, after hearing a sequence, they had to press a button to say how well they could hear the beat.
Grahn and Rowe expected that the putamen predicts a sequence once the beat has been found. If so, the putamen should be more active when the next sequence is either the same, or at least has a similar speed, since the beat prediction does not change. If instead the putamen helps us find the beat, we should expect the opposite. It should become more active when the beat changes speed, as it would have to search again for the correct rhythm.
They found that people could easily distinguish beat and non-beat sequences. The participants clearly felt the beat, even when the speed of the sequences changed. Also, they found that the putamen was more responsive to beat sequences than non-beat sequences. Other brain areas were also activated by beat sequences, such as the supplementary motor area and left premotor cortex. These brain regions often act in concert with the basal ganglia, perhaps forming a conscious movement or body-based representation of the beat.
Non-beat sequences instead activated regions involved in precise timing, like cerebellum, and areas that are involved in difficult mental tasks, like parietal and inferior frontal cortex. These results were in line with Grahn's previous findings.
Critically, they also saw that the putamen was more active when the previous sequence was of a similar speed, compared to when it was faster or slower. This confirmed their suspicion that the putamen was engaged in predicting the beat, rather than finding it.
Curiously, they found that the putamen was similarly active in the first and second half of the experiment. Even though the sound sequences became more and more familiar, this did not change how the putamen reacted to them. Also, their findings were not related to musical expertise. Musical experts with more than 6 years of musical schooling did not engage the putamen any more or less than people with little or no training.
Why does this research matter, you might ask. If understanding our capacity to hear music is not enough, you should know that such research is key to understanding complex motor diseases. For instance, Parkinson’s disease affects the same beat-sensitive structures, the basal ganglia. Besides being unable to move fluidly, patients with Parkinson's also find it difficult to distinguish between different beats. But crucially, rhythm can have healing power. The power of the beat can restore movement to Parkinson's patients, who break free from their motionlessness when they hear music. If we are to beat the odds of brain disease, we'll need all help we can get.
Showing posts with label contest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label contest. Show all posts
Wednesday, 2 April 2014
Wednesday, 21 July 2010
Predicting the future: engineering and technology 30 years after...
In connection with my essays for the Bosch Technology Horizons Award, I've had a small article published in an industrial magazine called "Process & Control", published by "Connecting Industry" here. For the magazine and article itself, go here. Here's the published article and the original unabridged article:
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me a toast tonight, 1st of January 2040, to mark our passage into the decade of quantum photonics.
We've travelled far, having pushed micro-computing as far as it would go, compressing circuits into ever tighter spaces until we could compact the tangle no further. Cloud computing helped us weather the storm thereafter, doing away with the personal computer as we knew it, replacing workstations with terminals of limited personal power yet drawing infinite might from the collective cloud of processing power. But it was only in recent years that the promise of nano-computing came to fruition, and we started to bypass the limits of simple electronics.
Nanotubes and single electron transistors became the flesh and bone of the modern circuit. Instead of painstakingly crafting each organ of our creation, we delegated our jobs to workers far more capable. Nano-robots catalyzed the raw materials into intelligent matter: self-assembling chips whose properties fell down to the choosing of our minute workers. Machines were no longer rigid but transformed in shape, size and colour according to our needs and wants, from wristwatch to telephone to full-fledged computer.
Yet the past pales in comparison with where we stand today, at the dawn of a paradigm shift. The ghost in the machine, the electron has been superseded by the photon. We have harnessed it into our microchips, using its quantum power and velocity to multiply the speed of computation a myriad times. The photon's efficiency nearly eliminates the need for energy, which is harvested directly into our devices from the bountiful sunlight at our disposal, slowly yet surely weaning technology from our carbon addiction.
Discovery began with the light of Prometheus' fire, and to feed it we burned our world piece by piece. We can finally stop.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me a toast tonight, 1st of January 2040, to mark our passage into the decade of quantum photonics.
We've travelled far, having pushed micro-computing as far as it would go, compressing circuits into ever tighter spaces until we could compact the tangle no further. Cloud computing helped us weather the storm thereafter, doing away with the personal computer as we knew it, replacing workstations with terminals of limited personal power yet drawing infinite might from the collective cloud of processing power. But it was only in recent years that the promise of nano-computing came to fruition, and we started to bypass the limits of simple electronics.
Nanotubes and single electron transistors became the flesh and bone of the modern circuit. Instead of painstakingly crafting each organ of our creation, we delegated our jobs to workers far more capable. Nano-robots catalyzed the raw materials into intelligent matter: self-assembling chips whose properties fell down to the choosing of our minute workers. Machines were no longer rigid but transformed in shape, size and colour according to our needs and wants, from wristwatch to telephone to full-fledged computer.
Yet the past pales in comparison with where we stand today, at the dawn of a paradigm shift. The ghost in the machine, the electron has been superseded by the photon. We have harnessed it into our microchips, using its quantum power and velocity to multiply the speed of computation a myriad times. The photon's efficiency nearly eliminates the need for energy, which is harvested directly into our devices from the bountiful sunlight at our disposal, slowly yet surely weaning technology from our carbon addiction.
Discovery began with the light of Prometheus' fire, and to feed it we burned our world piece by piece. We can finally stop.
Wednesday, 26 August 2009
Max Perutz Science Writing Award 2009
Tonight I have been pleasantly surprised to have been awarded a Highly Commended prize at the Max Perutz Science Writing Award, sponsored by the MRC. I got to spend a lovely night in the Gherkin, where we drank good wine, ate delicious food and, thanks to the DJ, danced a bit of Tango! Thanks also to the MRC for organising a Master Class on writing with poet Lavinia Greenlaw and the Guardian's science journalist Alok Jha.
The essay below is considerably more down to earth and less philosophical than my previous entry, though I hope it still is able to convey my amazement at the phenomena we call vision and consciousness.
The essay below is considerably more down to earth and less philosophical than my previous entry, though I hope it still is able to convey my amazement at the phenomena we call vision and consciousness.
Memories of a brain cartographer
Look. The world before you seems simple. It almost appears as though, somewhere inside your head, a cinema projector displays what your eyes capture and interpret. But that's not how we function. Instead, your brain is a cartographer, housing on its cortex a multitude of sensory, mostly visual, maps. Like regular maps, brain maps are drawn in a continuous and fluid way. Just as neighbouring countries are placed adjacent on a map, neurones that respond to similar visual locations are also grouped together.
Depending on the task at hand, our brains pick the best map to get the job done. When we talk about the Earth, depending on the context we interpret it in terms of political, geographical or weather maps, each with its rules and highlights. Just like a map maker, the brain interprets the world surrounding us by simplifying it: it splits it into categories, uses landmarks, and traces frontiers.
Over a dozen maps have recently been found in humans, spread about the brain's cortex. Some maps detect the edges and corners that delineate the outlines of objects. Others only take heed of movement or colour. Another few just seem to predict where you'll soon lay your eyes. Still others are centred on where your eyes are pointed, or relate to the position of your head or hands.
So, that variety is fascinating, but what does this add to science? Well, much of current brain science focusses on labelling a particular brain region with some function. Research programmes often try to find the "centre" for, say, envy, face perception or motivation. Remarkably few have actually explored how the brain manages to map and co-ordinate itself, that is, how it actually works.
My research focusses on learning more about visual maps, especially how they interact with attention and memory. Both are central to actual perception; for example, as you read this line you "see" the ones above and below, but ignore them; and if you close your eyes you'll find it hard to recall items around the paper or screen you read this from.
To find visual maps I use an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner to obtain 3D images of brain activity through time, while volunteers perform a visual task. In one such task, participants look at a computer screen split into sectors, each sector filled with a pattern of waves changing in shape with time and disappearing. Their job is to pay attention to and then remember the patterns in some places while ignoring the rest. Then, I extract two different results. One contains the hot spots of activation during the attention and memory periods. The other, using a fairly new technique, finds chunks of brain where the pattern, not the general level, of activity, varies depending on the spatial location of stimulation.
In this way, I found that the occipital cortex, in the back of the head, showed much map-like activity when volunteers both paid attention to the visual stimuli and kept them active in memory. Interestingly, during the memory period the maps in occipital cortex were not active overall, but only subtly changed their pattern of activation. On the other hand, maps in parietal cortex, at the top and back of the brain, could be detected only during the attention period. Curiously, these same areas showed very high activation during memory, despite displaying no map-like responses.
The benefit of this increased knowledge becomes clear when we look at cases of brain damage that result in some form of visual deficit. Patients with blindsight are effectively blind, but can learn to navigate the environment. Visual neglect, on the other hand, affects attention such that patients can "see" but simply don't notice things happening in half of their visual field. Individuals with optic ataxia can describe how objects look, but find it impossible to interact with them. In contrast, those with visual agnosia are unable to name or describe objects, but can grasp them perfectly.
Many such syndromes can be better understood and treated if we know the precise properties of both the damaged and intact visual maps. We could guide rehabilitation by taking advantage of the plasticity of the brain. We might, thus, stimulate the activity of intact visual maps that communicate with the damaged ones, helping reactivate and regenerate them. This research hints at ways we might "encourage" brain cortexes to do this.
Even as my results add to our knowledge, though, they raise more questions. Why do brain areas sometimes act as maps and other times not? How do maps work when they are inactive? Much work remains to be done, but many benefits remain to be reaped. Still, one thing we can say for certain: there's much more to vision than meets the eye.
Look. The world before you seems simple. It almost appears as though, somewhere inside your head, a cinema projector displays what your eyes capture and interpret. But that's not how we function. Instead, your brain is a cartographer, housing on its cortex a multitude of sensory, mostly visual, maps. Like regular maps, brain maps are drawn in a continuous and fluid way. Just as neighbouring countries are placed adjacent on a map, neurones that respond to similar visual locations are also grouped together.
Depending on the task at hand, our brains pick the best map to get the job done. When we talk about the Earth, depending on the context we interpret it in terms of political, geographical or weather maps, each with its rules and highlights. Just like a map maker, the brain interprets the world surrounding us by simplifying it: it splits it into categories, uses landmarks, and traces frontiers.
Over a dozen maps have recently been found in humans, spread about the brain's cortex. Some maps detect the edges and corners that delineate the outlines of objects. Others only take heed of movement or colour. Another few just seem to predict where you'll soon lay your eyes. Still others are centred on where your eyes are pointed, or relate to the position of your head or hands.
So, that variety is fascinating, but what does this add to science? Well, much of current brain science focusses on labelling a particular brain region with some function. Research programmes often try to find the "centre" for, say, envy, face perception or motivation. Remarkably few have actually explored how the brain manages to map and co-ordinate itself, that is, how it actually works.
My research focusses on learning more about visual maps, especially how they interact with attention and memory. Both are central to actual perception; for example, as you read this line you "see" the ones above and below, but ignore them; and if you close your eyes you'll find it hard to recall items around the paper or screen you read this from.
To find visual maps I use an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner to obtain 3D images of brain activity through time, while volunteers perform a visual task. In one such task, participants look at a computer screen split into sectors, each sector filled with a pattern of waves changing in shape with time and disappearing. Their job is to pay attention to and then remember the patterns in some places while ignoring the rest. Then, I extract two different results. One contains the hot spots of activation during the attention and memory periods. The other, using a fairly new technique, finds chunks of brain where the pattern, not the general level, of activity, varies depending on the spatial location of stimulation.
In this way, I found that the occipital cortex, in the back of the head, showed much map-like activity when volunteers both paid attention to the visual stimuli and kept them active in memory. Interestingly, during the memory period the maps in occipital cortex were not active overall, but only subtly changed their pattern of activation. On the other hand, maps in parietal cortex, at the top and back of the brain, could be detected only during the attention period. Curiously, these same areas showed very high activation during memory, despite displaying no map-like responses.
The benefit of this increased knowledge becomes clear when we look at cases of brain damage that result in some form of visual deficit. Patients with blindsight are effectively blind, but can learn to navigate the environment. Visual neglect, on the other hand, affects attention such that patients can "see" but simply don't notice things happening in half of their visual field. Individuals with optic ataxia can describe how objects look, but find it impossible to interact with them. In contrast, those with visual agnosia are unable to name or describe objects, but can grasp them perfectly.
Many such syndromes can be better understood and treated if we know the precise properties of both the damaged and intact visual maps. We could guide rehabilitation by taking advantage of the plasticity of the brain. We might, thus, stimulate the activity of intact visual maps that communicate with the damaged ones, helping reactivate and regenerate them. This research hints at ways we might "encourage" brain cortexes to do this.
Even as my results add to our knowledge, though, they raise more questions. Why do brain areas sometimes act as maps and other times not? How do maps work when they are inactive? Much work remains to be done, but many benefits remain to be reaped. Still, one thing we can say for certain: there's much more to vision than meets the eye.
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Independent/Bosch Technology Horizons essay... third time lucky?
As a friend of mine said, "Its all getting a bit predictable!" after having previously won and being Highly Commended. Having written my third essay for the Independent/Bosch Technology Horizons Award, answering the question "How can technology and engineering provide innovative solutions to today's global challenges?", I have been one the 14 (out of 545 entries) short-listed students for the 2009 prize. I was happily surprised to find out that I won 2nd prize, meaning I've collected all 3! A pity for me, and a boon for the younger generation, it is that I'm now too old to participate in the contest again... I think. Stand by for next year ;-)
UPDATE: To read previous winning and 2nd place essays by the various contestants in recent years, check out the new Bosch Technology Horizons site!
UPDATE: To read previous winning and 2nd place essays by the various contestants in recent years, check out the new Bosch Technology Horizons site!
"Waste not want not
Climate change: our direst global challenge. The media preaches manifold solutions, including the well-worn emphasis on renewable energy sources and status quo approaches like "clean coal". Technology has endowed us with god-like powers of geoengineering: we can either help nature, by infusing iron into oceans to proliferate carbon-absorbing plankton, or bypass nature by floating lenses in space to reflect the Sun - a modern-day Perseus' shield.
This is all very well. But so long as it evades the underlying problem, our entire approach remains misguided. Climate change is one symptom of our society's affliction: its vampiric lust for energy. There's no denying that climate change must be prevented, but if we don't attack its root cause our efforts remain in vain. Here's where engineering comes in handy. It's not simply the tools it provides, but the philosophy it embodies. Engineering is all about efficiency - using just enough resources to solve a problem, and doing it well to boot. In recent years, researchers have realised we waste much of the extracted energy before using it. That's why an engineer's mindset is so beneficial to scientific research. Let's see how...
Even as we liberate the energy latent in light, wind and tides, much of it is lost. At times when the supply of generated energy exceeds the moment's demand, conventional batteries cannot effectively store the excess. Often the problem is that we store energy in an inefficient form. Think, "what is cheaper and simpler, my thermos or my laptop battery?" Terry Murphy, CEO of SolarReserve has put this simple idea to use in solar thermal plants, by storing energy as heat in molten salt until it is needed to create electricity. A similar approach, useful for wind turbines, is the use of flywheels which store rotational energy by increasing their speed of rotation, then release it back as they slow down.
Photovoltaic solar plants, however, can't afford these solutions, since they produce electricity directly. By way of solution, Donald Sadoway at MIT has developed a cheap and efficient liquid battery, in which energy is stored as metal ions, then freed when the ions fuse into an electrolyte. But perhaps the most promising method is one inspired by photosynthesis: professor Daniel Nocera of MIT has happened upon a holy grail of chemistry - an efficient catalyst to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, the latter of which can be burned to run our car or used in a fuel cell. Importantly, this process does not need a large infrastructure, so every household could manufacture its own fuel.
Speaking of households, new technologies will avoid waste here too. A breakthrough by MIT researchers Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder, speeds the tunnelling of lithium ions inside batteries. This means much higher speeds of recharging, allowing a mobile phone to charge within 10 seconds, and an electric car in 5 minutes. This simple development could effectively eliminate the energy waste from chargers being left on overtime.
A quite different solution is necessary for the PC, an energy hog in our age of constant Internet access. Companies like CherryPal propose a shift towards "cloud computing", where the bulk of processing power is distributed and accessed by many users from individual home terminals. These terminals are simple, integrated and ecological machines that avoid energy waste. However, their connection to the cloud can provide scalable processing power depending on our needs - from web browser to supercomputer.
Yet another way to conserve energy mirrors the thermos example described above. Recent improvements in the manufacture of aerogel, a powerful insulating material, mean it could be affordable enough for use in utilities, such as fridges and ovens, and even in construction. This means we could keep the right places in our houses cold and warm using far less energy. Given that buildings cause over a third of carbon emissions, this becomes a very attractive proposal.
Another big spender is lighting, since our addiction to incandescent bulbs burns one whole fifth of the energy we produce. LED bulbs, similar in usability to incandescents, use some 30 times less energy and have a lifespan 100 times longer, but their price has made them prohibitive. Until recently, that is: a new advance by Colin Humphreys of Cambridge University allows LEDs to be manufactured en masse on silicone wafers instead of the typical sapphire, at a fraction of the usual cost.
In the light of these advances, reducing our carbon footprint is a piece of cake: all we need is to learn how to slice our cake more thinly! When it comes to tackling the challenges ahead, the old proverb is right: "waste not, want not"."
Climate change: our direst global challenge. The media preaches manifold solutions, including the well-worn emphasis on renewable energy sources and status quo approaches like "clean coal". Technology has endowed us with god-like powers of geoengineering: we can either help nature, by infusing iron into oceans to proliferate carbon-absorbing plankton, or bypass nature by floating lenses in space to reflect the Sun - a modern-day Perseus' shield.
This is all very well. But so long as it evades the underlying problem, our entire approach remains misguided. Climate change is one symptom of our society's affliction: its vampiric lust for energy. There's no denying that climate change must be prevented, but if we don't attack its root cause our efforts remain in vain. Here's where engineering comes in handy. It's not simply the tools it provides, but the philosophy it embodies. Engineering is all about efficiency - using just enough resources to solve a problem, and doing it well to boot. In recent years, researchers have realised we waste much of the extracted energy before using it. That's why an engineer's mindset is so beneficial to scientific research. Let's see how...
Even as we liberate the energy latent in light, wind and tides, much of it is lost. At times when the supply of generated energy exceeds the moment's demand, conventional batteries cannot effectively store the excess. Often the problem is that we store energy in an inefficient form. Think, "what is cheaper and simpler, my thermos or my laptop battery?" Terry Murphy, CEO of SolarReserve has put this simple idea to use in solar thermal plants, by storing energy as heat in molten salt until it is needed to create electricity. A similar approach, useful for wind turbines, is the use of flywheels which store rotational energy by increasing their speed of rotation, then release it back as they slow down.
Photovoltaic solar plants, however, can't afford these solutions, since they produce electricity directly. By way of solution, Donald Sadoway at MIT has developed a cheap and efficient liquid battery, in which energy is stored as metal ions, then freed when the ions fuse into an electrolyte. But perhaps the most promising method is one inspired by photosynthesis: professor Daniel Nocera of MIT has happened upon a holy grail of chemistry - an efficient catalyst to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, the latter of which can be burned to run our car or used in a fuel cell. Importantly, this process does not need a large infrastructure, so every household could manufacture its own fuel.
Speaking of households, new technologies will avoid waste here too. A breakthrough by MIT researchers Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder, speeds the tunnelling of lithium ions inside batteries. This means much higher speeds of recharging, allowing a mobile phone to charge within 10 seconds, and an electric car in 5 minutes. This simple development could effectively eliminate the energy waste from chargers being left on overtime.
A quite different solution is necessary for the PC, an energy hog in our age of constant Internet access. Companies like CherryPal propose a shift towards "cloud computing", where the bulk of processing power is distributed and accessed by many users from individual home terminals. These terminals are simple, integrated and ecological machines that avoid energy waste. However, their connection to the cloud can provide scalable processing power depending on our needs - from web browser to supercomputer.
Yet another way to conserve energy mirrors the thermos example described above. Recent improvements in the manufacture of aerogel, a powerful insulating material, mean it could be affordable enough for use in utilities, such as fridges and ovens, and even in construction. This means we could keep the right places in our houses cold and warm using far less energy. Given that buildings cause over a third of carbon emissions, this becomes a very attractive proposal.
Another big spender is lighting, since our addiction to incandescent bulbs burns one whole fifth of the energy we produce. LED bulbs, similar in usability to incandescents, use some 30 times less energy and have a lifespan 100 times longer, but their price has made them prohibitive. Until recently, that is: a new advance by Colin Humphreys of Cambridge University allows LEDs to be manufactured en masse on silicone wafers instead of the typical sapphire, at a fraction of the usual cost.
In the light of these advances, reducing our carbon footprint is a piece of cake: all we need is to learn how to slice our cake more thinly! When it comes to tackling the challenges ahead, the old proverb is right: "waste not, want not"."
Friday, 20 February 2009
Not my fate!
This brief tale I wrote for the AbeBooks 1001-Word Short Story Competition:
Snowy grass cracked under bare feet. Frostbite was the least of his worries as he approached, one step after another, the stream and the verge of death. His right hand held a clot of blood, from which poured onto the snow steaming drops, bright and thick as rubies. In his left, he carried an even heavier weight: a black sack from which came foreign, muffled sounds of agony and anger. The keen pain in his gut grew clearer and his steps slower, but no more were needed. Exhaling a last rasping breath, he turned to gather momentum and threw the sack into the water. The expanding waves echoed the last beats of his heart, as he lay on the frozen shore...
Snowy grass cracked under bare feet. Frostbite was the least of his worries as he approached, one step after another, the stream and the verge of death. His right hand held a clot of blood, from which poured onto the snow steaming drops, bright and thick as rubies. In his left, he carried an even heavier weight: a black sack from which came foreign, muffled sounds of agony and anger. The keen pain in his gut grew clearer and his steps slower, but no more were needed. Exhaling a last rasping breath, he turned to gather momentum and threw the sack into the water. The expanding waves echoed the last beats of his heart, as he lay on the frozen shore...
“Not my fate!” gasped Tristan as he awoke from the dream that had haunted him since he returned from his voyage to Persia. During his travels, he had brought back a number of curious artifacts, but none stranger than the sculpture he chanced upon in one of the archaeological sites under his supervision. The statue depicted the head of an Arab, bearded and noble in countenance. The style was unlike any he had seen before, and most certainly unlike the Eastern art with which he'd become familiar. The sculptor had taken pains to etch every single wrinkle on the man’s face and to carve out an intricate web of hair within the man’s beard. The hardness of the stone made the artist’s skill and patience even more extraordinary, since Tristan had been unable even to scratch away a layer of dust to analyse the adamant material.
That morning was perhaps the hundredth time that Tristan examined the sculptured head. This time, his nerves betrayed him; his elbow toppled a cup of tea, which poured itself upon the table, the liquid surging under the severed, stone neck. As Tristan rummaged for tissues in his drawers, he missed the most brisk transformation. The stone absorbed the liquid like a sugar cube, turning into a dense white paste, underneath which a living, severed head lay hidden. It was the sound of speech which first alerted Tristan of this unannounced visitor. The head spoke in a strange dialect of Arabic, which Tristan could not even begin to comprehend. And yet, images slowly weaved themselves into existence within his mind as the Arab uttered his tale.
Tristan learned that before him were the scarce remnants of a man who had been ere known as the Sage Duban. His body could be restored with the aid of a mortal man, who would be rewarded with a gift beyond measure. Ink would be made to flow, fill Duban's veins again, congeal into flesh and bone, and the pulse of painted strokes would set his heart in motion. The pasted powder covering the Arab's head was all that was needed to transform ink into a living pigment.
Overcome by fevered curiosity, Tristan carefully scraped off an ounce of the paste from the Arab's hair, and cast it into his inkpot, twirling the mixture until it turned a sickly gray. As he dipped his plume into the thick paint, the image of the Arab, standing proud before an arabesque wall, filled his mind. His sketch started with the Arab's face, whose expression was taut with impatience. His pen followed his mind’s eye, building a solid body and clothing it with long, embroidered robes. As he traced the edged curve of the scimitar suspended from the Arab’s belt, the memory of his portentous dream returned to him: bright wounds bleeding into crimson snow.
If he was about to draw forth his own death, he began to ponder, he would not fall without a fight. As he finished drawing the sabre, he let his pen stray off course, adding a deep crack at the sword’s hilt. After he cast the final stroke, the paper beneath his pen lit ablaze, exuding a sallow smoke that filled the chamber for an instant and then condensed into the living substance of the Arab, standing proudly before him in the room.
Duban smiled as he spoke again in that eerie tongue, producing a curious looking pastille from within his robe, which he extended to Tristan. "Immortality” was the word reverberating in Tristan’s mind as he took the gift and cautiously chewed it.
With a satisfied grin, Duban rested his left hand on the hilt of his scimitar, but his expression was soon transfixed with pain as he felt the sharp trowel plunged into his abdomen by Tristan. He tumbled back, pulling at the hilt of his sword, but this snapped like a feeble twig as he tried to extract the blade from its sheath. Tristan laughed, proud to have outsmarted the cunning Arab and escaped death by his hand.
As Duban convulsed in agony, barely standing on hands and knees, Tristan approached him, bloody trowel still in hand, ready to finish the deed. "Fate is made" he thought as he grasped the Arab’s hair and twisted his head back to expose the neck. But before he could strike, a bright flash flew before Tristan’s face. The next thing he saw was Duban, holding the bare, curved blade in his bloodied right. Then the entire scene turned and twisted about Tristan as his head collapsed upon the floor, looking onto his own deadened body stretched beside him.
The Arab shouted curses as he slowly crawled about the room, but more than furious, his pained groans were confused and incredulous. “Betrayed!” was the dolorous sound resounding in Tristan’s head. To his own surprise, neither death nor darkness followed the excruciating throe of his beheading. He tried to scream, but only a groan left his lips.
The Arab finally disappeared from sight, but his steps returned. Before he knew it, Tristan’s hair was grasped by a moist hand and tossed into darkness. From within the sack, Tristan heard a door opening, followed by the crackling steps of the Arab upon frosted grass as they made for the river.
That morning was perhaps the hundredth time that Tristan examined the sculptured head. This time, his nerves betrayed him; his elbow toppled a cup of tea, which poured itself upon the table, the liquid surging under the severed, stone neck. As Tristan rummaged for tissues in his drawers, he missed the most brisk transformation. The stone absorbed the liquid like a sugar cube, turning into a dense white paste, underneath which a living, severed head lay hidden. It was the sound of speech which first alerted Tristan of this unannounced visitor. The head spoke in a strange dialect of Arabic, which Tristan could not even begin to comprehend. And yet, images slowly weaved themselves into existence within his mind as the Arab uttered his tale.
Tristan learned that before him were the scarce remnants of a man who had been ere known as the Sage Duban. His body could be restored with the aid of a mortal man, who would be rewarded with a gift beyond measure. Ink would be made to flow, fill Duban's veins again, congeal into flesh and bone, and the pulse of painted strokes would set his heart in motion. The pasted powder covering the Arab's head was all that was needed to transform ink into a living pigment.
Overcome by fevered curiosity, Tristan carefully scraped off an ounce of the paste from the Arab's hair, and cast it into his inkpot, twirling the mixture until it turned a sickly gray. As he dipped his plume into the thick paint, the image of the Arab, standing proud before an arabesque wall, filled his mind. His sketch started with the Arab's face, whose expression was taut with impatience. His pen followed his mind’s eye, building a solid body and clothing it with long, embroidered robes. As he traced the edged curve of the scimitar suspended from the Arab’s belt, the memory of his portentous dream returned to him: bright wounds bleeding into crimson snow.
If he was about to draw forth his own death, he began to ponder, he would not fall without a fight. As he finished drawing the sabre, he let his pen stray off course, adding a deep crack at the sword’s hilt. After he cast the final stroke, the paper beneath his pen lit ablaze, exuding a sallow smoke that filled the chamber for an instant and then condensed into the living substance of the Arab, standing proudly before him in the room.
Duban smiled as he spoke again in that eerie tongue, producing a curious looking pastille from within his robe, which he extended to Tristan. "Immortality” was the word reverberating in Tristan’s mind as he took the gift and cautiously chewed it.
With a satisfied grin, Duban rested his left hand on the hilt of his scimitar, but his expression was soon transfixed with pain as he felt the sharp trowel plunged into his abdomen by Tristan. He tumbled back, pulling at the hilt of his sword, but this snapped like a feeble twig as he tried to extract the blade from its sheath. Tristan laughed, proud to have outsmarted the cunning Arab and escaped death by his hand.
As Duban convulsed in agony, barely standing on hands and knees, Tristan approached him, bloody trowel still in hand, ready to finish the deed. "Fate is made" he thought as he grasped the Arab’s hair and twisted his head back to expose the neck. But before he could strike, a bright flash flew before Tristan’s face. The next thing he saw was Duban, holding the bare, curved blade in his bloodied right. Then the entire scene turned and twisted about Tristan as his head collapsed upon the floor, looking onto his own deadened body stretched beside him.
The Arab shouted curses as he slowly crawled about the room, but more than furious, his pained groans were confused and incredulous. “Betrayed!” was the dolorous sound resounding in Tristan’s head. To his own surprise, neither death nor darkness followed the excruciating throe of his beheading. He tried to scream, but only a groan left his lips.
The Arab finally disappeared from sight, but his steps returned. Before he knew it, Tristan’s hair was grasped by a moist hand and tossed into darkness. From within the sack, Tristan heard a door opening, followed by the crackling steps of the Arab upon frosted grass as they made for the river.
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
Symbian Essay Competition 2008
To my utter surprise, I have won the one competition I felt I had little chance to succeed in: the Symbian Essay Contest, whose motif this year was "the next wave of smartphone innovation: issues and opportunities with smartphone technologies". If you'd like to read the (abridged) answers by each of the 10 winners, including mine, take a soujourn to the Symbian site.
And if you're interested, here is my answer in full -- just click on the subheadings to show the text:
And if you're interested, here is my answer in full -- just click on the subheadings to show the text:
The smartphone of the future: A powerhouse or a mere terminal?
To foresee the future one must know the past
History always repeats itself, round and round it cycles, like a bike, to maintain its balance. This is no different for the evolution of computing generally, and smartphones specifically. In their early days, the functions of both computers and phones were accessed remotely: the actual machine in front of you was but one of many terminals, a transmitter of information from and to a "central executive". Eventually we began to forget our socialist roots, the "all for one and one for all" of the IT musketeers, and in the brashest spirit of capitalism we marked the advent of the personal computer (PC). While this let the average person have at their fingertips much of the power previously exclusive to the IT technician's caste, this step forward was also a step back: PCs were not initially designed as a lively hub of transport or a loud marketplace, but as an lonely, existential room for one where communication and collaboration were, if not impossible, then Hellish.
Eventually, the Internet opened up portholes in our tiny cubicles, helping us to see each other once more, but the walls remained solid, and electronic communication was as non-communist as ever. We sent each other letters and packages, passed photographs under each other's doors, sometimes we coughed and sneezed, infecting one other with our viruses and ailments, but this was as personal as things got since our doors were always locked, our lives tucked away, our keys held firmly fast to our chains. Despite the virtually endless potential and possibilities of the Web, the philosophy of physical ownership that brought technology to the masses ultimately forced us to constantly rely on the limited brainpower contained in the physical frames of the device at hand.
The modern smartphone has had a similar trajectory, where initial focus on the transmission of information shifted to a greater and greater emphasis on local capabilities. Here too, the motto of "bigger is better", instead of "simpler is better", has brought about much waste of our scarce resources: energy, materials and time, both for producer and consumer. The dream of the PC was necessary, but its scars upon the smartphone industry plague us up to this day with the its elder problems in communicating and sharing information easily and instinctively.
With the smartphone now in its teenage stage, its development is at a crossroads between growing out of the lap of its parents to become a unique mature product in its own right or to be more of the same. If it can leave the PC concept behind to embrace what we truly need as human beings, the SC, or social computer, it could become the hero that will help us return to our primeval state of sharing and socialization, if only in our IT world. This essay will build the skeleton of this mythical device, and help its shaky bones keep a balance between being a powerhouse and a terminal. Let us unveil the full potential of smartphones and thus make them more attractive for those who have not taken the leap. That includes me.
It's the features, stupid
Before smartphones can change the world, they must be bought, and like in the primeval days of the first PCs, the greatest problem in adoption is that they are simply too expensive. STOP. Yet expense is relative: smartphones are expensive for most not as much because their cost puts them out of reach of consumers, but because their usefulness does not yet justify their cost. Most buyers only ever use the peak of the iceberg, in terms of the features available, leaving the rest of the functionality hidden under the dark sea of user interface.
But this problem can't be solved by cramming more features in. In fact, the greatest problem facing smartphones today is the persistent focus on the quantity of features, rather than their quality and usability on a small platform. Let's be direct and frank: feature bloat approaches the proportions of Moby Dick: Telephones with dual cameras, double button-pads, infinite arrays of menus, settings, games and ring-tones, the latest, full-fledged version of Microsoft Word. And Excel. And PowerPoint. And widgets, gadgets and crapgets all tossed around the screen like toys in a sandbox.
To be successful, we must learn to follow a middle way between too many features and too few. Since "a little" and "a lot" mean different things to different people, the best way to achieve a balance is to endow the smartphone with modularity and customization, particularly in terms of software. The basic capabilities of the everyday phone provide a solid base to build on. On top of this foundation of calling, messaging, photography and web browsing we must erect the other features. Modularity empowers the users with choice, a commodity that is in short supply in the smartphone market as yet, and one that the consumer appreciates as much as "capability" or "potential".
It is easiest to achieve this on an open platform like Linux, rather than a purely proprietary one such as, say... Windows. For a developer, direct access to the code, makes it easier to use all the system's nuts and bolts and integrate an application with the rest of the OS. This transparency also allows programmers to find the most effective ways of injecting and drawing information from each program, helping interoperability and resulting in programs that can operate together seamlessly. For instance, if we want to build a photograph manager, we could add a module into the bundled photo taking software to add photos to a particular folder and upload them to a specific web album on the fly, as we take each shot. Or if we want to insert a map into our emails, we could construct a bridge between the map and the mailing applications. All this in turn will make the platform more attractive to consumers and help designers custom fit the software to the phone in question, adding or subtracting features as the hardware requires it, rendering the platform more versatile and opening up markets in a wider range of phones.
Don't misunderstand me. There's nothing wrong with a smartphone being able to serve many functions, in fact it is meant to, but these must be simple and clear to start with. Its core functions must be easily and directly accessible with extras built on top and around them, not stuck messily inside like the bones of the builders of the Great Wall of China. This modern, entropic tendency towards chaos and confusion makes smartphones simply too difficult to use for the 90% of people who just can't be bothered to learn to wade through the mess. You should not have to exert significant mental effort to take advantage of every single function: it's supposed to be a tool, not a mathematical problem! Instead, usage of the phone must be an extension of our own mind, as routine as daydreaming and as quick as our sight.
To help us reach "user interface Nirvana" we should keep a record of frequently used applications and make them easiest to access relative to the ones we never access. However, our needs vary from one environment to another and what is useful at one point in time can often get in the way of our experience at another point. Hence, the record we keep must be dynamic and flexible, such that application accessibility varies with respect to the context or modus operandi of the device. This environmental state can be chosen by the user or deduced by the smartphone by using info of time, location (GPS), previous and planned events, and even acceleration. The OS could even work autonomously depending on the occasion, an idea best illustrated with an example:
Oh dear, is it already 5pm? Ring a quick alarm to let you know that your husband is due to arrive and that your lover is due to leave, then launch the map application, zooming in on the house, indicating sensible escape routes ("No, not the balcony, Charles, we're on the 6th floor") or if that's too late, then use some of its gathered information to suggest a good excuse ("Oh dear, now you've ruined my surprise, and only days before your birthday. Rex, this is the party decorator").
Now seriously, context can be far more useful than simple convenience but help in matters of life and death, as demonstrated by smartphone programs like Life360. This app helps you keep track of the health of your close ones, alerting you about natural (and unnatural) disasters relevant to their location and yours. A panic button alerts others around you of your whereabouts and that you need help, a feature that can be activated automatically if the app deduces that you have suffered a traffic accident through the use of information from the accelerometers. Another program, cab4me, can call a taxi to your location regardless of where you are. CompareEverywhere lets you photograph bar codes to find out the price of, say, a DVD at the shop you are at compared to nearby stores and cites reviews to help you decide whether the laptop you're pondering to purchase is actually worth it.
The Web too will benefit from the smartphone's capabilities, making our surfing experience more streamlined and custom-fit to our personalities, helping us bypass "junk" content. The context information integrated in the phone itself can aid us when doing web searches, bringing results that are more relevant to our present location, the places we frequent, the services we use and the things we like and dislike. Here the smartphone has a distinct advantage over full-fledged computers, since they can be always with us, accumulating information about our personal and social habits.
The flesh in the machine
The endless pit of features in modern smartphones goes hand in hand with greater and greater hardware requirements. This, aside from frightening the wits out of the wallets of the most people, threaten to devour our paltry batteries in a matter of hours, rather than days, making our phones intelligent anchors: smart, but not really mobile. The hardware part of the solution comes in the shape of newer chip architectures, which rise up as faithful Spartans to meet the power challenge, providing more and more processing power per electron. These new chip architectures forbear the coming of ever more powerful phones, whether based on classical processor-on-motherboard designs, like the Silverthorne architecture of the Intel Atom, or comprising an all-inclusive system-on-a-chip, such as the NVidia Tegra. Yet we must not overload their capabilities given the trend of modern software to bloat faster than hardware can support it, needing more and more of those tired electrons as they complicate simple tasks. Remember that the Spartans did fail in the end and that Windows Vista "capable computers" are capable of little more than booting the system. We must learn from past mistakes and avoid the scenario where our smartphones, whose stuffed electronic minds slug on ever slower even now, lose the worth of their name.
On a more optimistic note, the rise of touchscreens gives each new generation of smartphones less reasons to possess any physical buttons, since virtually all their functions can be emulated as easily using software. This also results in more robust devices that can be taken anywhere, since there's less holes for dust and sand and rain to pass through. What is the need to a physical keypad if the dial conjures itself up on your screen when you start a call? Why do you need a keyboard if you can just as easily type on the display? Another advantage of touchscreen keyboards is that more information is available with respect to where a finger is relative to the key, allowing for far easier auto-correction than with physical keyboards, where the coarser grid of pressed keys provide the sole input. The one obstacle in the way of devices embracing this technology has been the common complaint that touchscreens, unlike keys, don't provide you with any feedback when you press them. Thankfully, new developments in haptics by Nokia will soon bring us the Haptikos touchscreen, which uses sensor pads under the screen to give you the same tactile response as a pressed button. So you see, now there's no excuse to go touchy-feely with smartphones.
Multi-touch screens multiply the fun, expanding the number of tasks that can be done with a flick of the wrist. Aside from already popular gestures like two finger scrolling and pinch zoom, there is much opportunity to add more complex gestures tied to particular applications. For example, in an Internet browser, we might rotate our index and thumb around each other to reload the page, or draw clockwise and counter-clockwise spirals to move forward and back. Alternatively, while using the camera app, these very same gestures might change the zoom of the lens and scroll through different photography modes. Gestures are an important step in making communication between humans and computers more language-like and intuitive, easing the use of smartphones and helping us spend more time taking advantage our smartphone capabilities and less time trying.
On the visual side Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED), the next likely screen technology, will enhance the experience of using a smartphone in several ways. Firstly, the reduction in power usage of an OLED screen compared to current LCDs means that larger screens will be less disadvantaged with respect to battery life, facilitating the transition to devices fully usable by touchscreen. Secondly, the improved picture quality is to be reckoned with, since it will make watching media on the device an enjoyable experience rather than a last resort. Finally, a less advertised advantage is that OLEDs don't require a backlight, which means that screens can do without a bezel. Imagine screens that literally occupy the entirety of the face of your, (now far thinner) smartphone. Thus, OLEDs are a match made in gadget heaven for touchscreen based smartphones.
The likely successor or competitor of OLEDs is electronic paper (e.g. eInk), which, like a chameleon, changes the pigmentation in it's electronic skin by modulating its reflectance, rather than emitting light of its own. The advantage of this is that the display needs no energy except when changing the picture, enhancing battery life even beyond that possible with OLED. e-paper is also far more readable in well lit environments and lets you easily read books from the screen, a feat not impossible, but rather torturous in practice on current smartphones.
Flexible displays will change the name of the game in terms of smartphone design, since their coupling with flexible hardware architectures can effectively enlarge a smartphone without changing its form factor. Imagine a touchscreen phone twice or thrice as wide as an average smartphone that can be folded along its vertical axis to be placed comfortably next to your ear or in your pocket. Fold it the other way to convert it into a dedicated photo-camera. Such tricks can be used to place smartphones in closer competition with devices like Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) and netbooks, with the added advantage of being far more versatile. The increase in the unfolded display size up to 9 inches would enable far more comfortable touch typing and Internet usability.
All roads lead to smartphone
Just as smartphones converge onto becoming computers in their own right, so do other devices converge into the smartphone, such that more and more separate gadgets are fused into one. Nobody wants to spend the money on and carry a bucketload of gadgets if a multi-featured device can do the job as well if not better than each specialized one. Also, since we virtually never use more than one item at once, it's far less wasteful to use the same materials, hardware and energy for all of these tasks than to fulfill each one separately. The more gadgets we build, the more valuable resources we effectively pour into our already overfilled landfills; like in Japan, where such dumping sites contain more precious metals than are consumed in a year globally.
We've seen cell phones take baby steps at becoming cameras, first tumbling, but progressively more and more successfully to the point that now they're about to become the main photography devices for most of us, hobbyists. This makes perfect sense, since the resolution of our cameras already exceeds the capacity of our vision, such that further increases in resolution, rather than improving the quality of our photos, merely allow us to enlarge them further and further. Let's face it, the pixel race is rendered useless, since who has the album- or wall space for 20 megapixel photographs?
Smartphones are also dipping their greedy fingers into the portable media player market. A vital advantage of smartphones over typical players is their inherent, painless programmability. If you'd like your iPod or Zune to play, say, open source Vorbis ogg files, you'll have to strap yourself in for a torturous weekend: Hacking your device, uninstalling its firmware and installing yours, all the while holding no warranty that this will work on your particular device and risking wrecking your gadget. In a smartphone, all you have to do is to go online and find an application that fulfills your needs and install it.
With the advent of recent hardware developments, not even emergent markets are safe from the smartphone menace. As mobile Internet experience improves, netbooks may find themselves redundant. Similarly, with screens that are larger and easier to read, electronic book readers may become absorbed into the smartphone. And as GPS becomes a standard feature, smartphones will become the map of choice in both your car and on foot, delineating routes and channelling traffic information to help you find your way, replacing Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) and Sat Navs.
In the not too distant future, smartphones will take the place of your wallet, your public transport card and perhaps even your keys and means of ID. The pervasive possession of mobile phones and the increasing ownership of smartphones create the chance to do what the plastic of our credit cards could never achieve: to liberate us from our dependency on physical currency. Thanks to Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, in the near future you will wave your phone in front of the till to buy your newspaper or give your phone to the waiter when the bill is due. In the airport, the passport checkpoint will be scanning your phone instead of your booklet. These steps, as well as convenient, will lead to better international security, as hardware encryption techniques become so sophisticated that illegal decryption and falsification becomes impracticably slow and uneconomic. This in conjunction with biometric identity tests will decrease the chances of our dark alleys resounding with a "your phone or your life", since stealing the phone won't allow one to draw any money from it, aside from perhaps selling it.
All these developments are leading to a future where devices are more convenient, economical, eco-friendly, secure and actually have a positive impact on quality of life. All this in turn makes smartphones more viable for the average consumer, particularly in developing markets where individuals cannot afford to buy more than one device for their needs. Wider adoption will also lead to a greater number of developers being available to build new applications, leading to more innovation and a growing advantage over more expensive and specialized devices in the market.
A walk in the clouds
Let us turn our attention to the issue of evaporating smartphone's capabilities into a computing cloud. One of the reasons why the realization of cloud computing will be unavoidable is because most people do not require their smartphones to be full fledged word processors nor to be permanent mail clients or agendas. Many such capabilities are already provided by the Internet, in the shape of web applications, such as lightweight online document processors and calendars. Instead of creating programs from scratch, a better strategy is to provide easy integration of these services with the phone, allowing them to run offline and store part of their information locally, while keeping the great bulk of it online. The smartphone thus becomes a vessel for the capabilities of the new Internet, rather than remaining anchored to and entangled in the old solid Web and rusty personal computing.
In a similar vein, a better way to save resources and speed up processing on programs local to the phone itself is to outsource the most processor intensive tasks. For instance, given a fast enough Internet connection, instead of using local resources to create complex graphics it would be feasible to use a nearby server to compute the most intensive operations and send the result back to the smartphone in the shape of images. This would let you use Photoshop without having to overload your own smartphone with complex matrix computations. Alternatively, imagine you need to quickly tell something to your boss, who is at this moment in an important company meeting and can't speak. It would be neat to simply speak your message into the phone and for it to be converted into a text message on the fly by a dedicated computer and sent on.
The importance of cloud computing is even greater for a possible market incursion into developing countries. Since these nations tend to have a far less advanced mobile infrastructure, this initiative will be aided by recent developments in the implementation of mesh networking. Projects like the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) intend to make the Internet available to everyone by turning each device into a transmitter, as well as receiver, of information. Using each active device in this way creates a solid interconnected infrastructure, effectively spreading the reach of the Internet and allowing technologies like VoIP (Voice over IP) to serve as a basis for mobile connectivity. Collaboration between such projects and smartphone companies has not merely economical benefits, but also demonstrates the social value of smartphones and their importance in helping people and communities.
In developed nations, the pervasive Internet connectivity afforded by the emergent technology of WiMAX will make high speed web access on the smartphone a reality. This development is vital not only for the endless possibilities of cloud computing to ripen, but also to render smartphones more popular and fashionable, therefore making them a "necessity" rather than a want or luxury. Then we can let Metcalfe's law do our work for us. This law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. The trick then, is to reach critical mass and speed in the market when the value of the platform is sufficient to attract the average user and create a domino effect, breaking the market barrier between early adoption and mass ownership.
Last, but certainly not least, we must remember that the original promise of mobile phones was social, one that is yet to be fulfilled. The spread of social networks has been a step in the right direction, but will never achieve its full potential if we only ever use them while sitting in our rooms, alone, chatting across a blank terminal, exchanging, at most, emoticons ;-) For social networking to be truly social, it must be as flexible as social interactions, being available on the go. This is where smartphones come into the stage. But also, we need our smartphones and its apps to interact with our social networks, using information not only about us, but also our close ones to help guide our decisions: What music should I get for my cousin? Will the girl I fancy like the film I invited her to see? Where can I take my grandfather for his birthday lunch that he's never been to? This last is something we can only achieve when our lives are built on cloud castles.
The meaning of life? Not 42
So, does the smartphone need to be a powerhouse or a mere terminal? I think it must be a little bit of both. In our age, web services are starting to replace the capabilities of installed programs. It's only logical that the transition to cloud computing should happen first in an inherently mobile device like the smartphone, paving a stairway to heaven for the rest of the computing industry. But at the same time, our smartphone must be powerful enough to be able to survive on its own two feet and be able to straddle the power of web services.
While at first sight most of this essay talks of developments aimed at the device proper, each prepares the ground for a steady transition to a distributed framework. Most applications we are likely to download or buy for our phones in the future will be based on the cloud, and the contextual information our phone is likely to gather will surely be interpreted in relation to our nearby electronic environment. Indeed, the main aim of hardware improvements is to make our smartphone a better receptacle for the web. And device convergence onto the smartphone is fuelled by the ease of both downloading and uploading content from a mobile device onto our home base anywhere, anytime.
In the end, the smartphone is set to become not a simple computer terminal, but a real enactive window into the world. That's a voyage we're lucky to witness!
Thursday, 16 October 2008
The other half of our Moon
My iambs always seem to feed on sorrow and memories past, but are meant well.
"These fleshy fruits about my beak,
have twisted, turned around in time,
to petal, sepal, arid spine,
and lastly listless, lifeless seed.
Within - no flesh, I fear, cut out
by blunt, by slavic, stumpy hand.
My florid tongue was but your land,
depleted, languished in my snout.
Two orbits bare, two shrivelled stars,
inside slain seas surge charcoaled isles:
Is quit the quiver of my eyes,
and Amor's arrow's but a scar.
Despite, each eve, waves plan their flight
from these their coves, to stony shores,
to lap the wounds and salt the sores.
Could keep them captive not tonight.
They tumble to Electra's tear
enwrapped in chain, swaggers a rent.
A "whoosh", Psyche erupts the dent,
her argent cord - impaling spear.
Bronze heart, subsister, knew not rust
until past pores your pasty dew
infested it, its warmth withdrew.
You taught it love can come with lust."
"These fleshy fruits about my beak,
have twisted, turned around in time,
to petal, sepal, arid spine,
and lastly listless, lifeless seed.
Within - no flesh, I fear, cut out
by blunt, by slavic, stumpy hand.
My florid tongue was but your land,
depleted, languished in my snout.
Two orbits bare, two shrivelled stars,
inside slain seas surge charcoaled isles:
Is quit the quiver of my eyes,
and Amor's arrow's but a scar.
Despite, each eve, waves plan their flight
from these their coves, to stony shores,
to lap the wounds and salt the sores.
Could keep them captive not tonight.
They tumble to Electra's tear
enwrapped in chain, swaggers a rent.
A "whoosh", Psyche erupts the dent,
her argent cord - impaling spear.
Bronze heart, subsister, knew not rust
until past pores your pasty dew
infested it, its warmth withdrew.
You taught it love can come with lust."
Wednesday, 15 October 2008
Nothing is whole or part, but thinking makes it so
And last not least, this essay I wrote for the Max Perutz Science Writing Award about my first fMRI project and its philosophical implications. The marriage made in Nirvana between Buddhist mysticism and science, a la Fritjof Capra...
Physics and Buddhism. These seemingly opposite ways of knowledge share one common denominator. The Buddhist doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda ("dependent origination") says that all within our universe is interconnected and interdependent, every apparent 'thing' depends on everything else, and ultimately on the universe as a whole. Similarly, Niels Bohr, a founding father of quantum physics, argued that "isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems."Naturally, if everything is interconnected, nothing is divided. Therefore separate objects cannot truly exist, it's the mind that creates them. Buddha realised this over two millennia before psychologists did, stating that "with Vijñāna as condition, Nāmarūpa arises". Vijñāna is "divided knowing", cognition; Nāmarūpa is "name and form" seen as one. Indeed, what is an object to our minds? It is but its form or features, and its name, a tag binding these together and separating them from the rest of the world.
Cognitive neuroscientists as myself are interested in the neural correlates of mental objects, their "name" and "form", since these help us understand how we structure our visual world, granting us insight into the nature of visual consciousness, the essence of experience. But you may ask, how can you argue that we construct the objects within our visual world if they appear so constant? Let me illustrate our mental malleability with an example:
As you contemplate this page, the very same image enters your eye, but what objects do you see? Now 'tis a paragraph, then a line, a word, a letter even, and if you focus clearly, the traces making up these letters become the objects of your awareness. And as you go back up in this hierarchy, what were once objects become parts thereof, and so on. Thus, a visual object has no objective reality, pardon the pun, but is a subjective matter dependent on occasion, task and mood.
My research is centred on finding, through visual short term memory tests combined with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), where within the brain we represent visual features and the cage encapsulating them into a single object. fMRI shows that they are kept somewhere in the parietal cortex at the top and back of our head, vital for organising our attention and perception of space. Indeed, it's this attention that is thought to bind features and assign them a tag, constructing objects we can perceive and play with in our mind.
To find where these two components of an object are held separate, I take advantage of an analogy of the above example: I show you a scene made up of coloured discs and ask you to remember them as groups of distinct coloured triangles or as one complex whole. The number of objects depends on how I ask you to remember the discs, since a set of features can only belong to one object at a time. Hence, by comparing brain activity related to memory for the very same discs either as an aggregated whole or a handful of parts, I can find the brain locus where features are glued into single items. Similarly, by changing the number of discs you must remember, I can alter the number of features independently from the number of objects, and locate where these features are kept.
But to what use can this knowledge be brought to bear?
Emerging brain imaging methods let us explore the topography and properties of visual maps in detail, allowing us to predict what a person sees from their brain activity and bringing us ever closer to reconstructing and viewing the content of our inner display. But to truly succeed at reading and comprehending perception we need to be able to image the spectator, the object making homunculus within.
This information can then help us better understand neural conditions arising from parietal brain damage, such as simultanagnosia, whose sufferers cannot perceive more than one object at a time, and often report illusory conjunctions by grouping disparate features into a single object.
The questions on our table are ancient, but the framework of cognitive neuroscience slowly unravels an opening in the thick unknown, promising to illuminate our ignorance and enlighten us. By learning how we structure our external world, we discover how our internal cosmos is built.
So what's the moral? Misquoting Hamlet, "Nothing is whole or part, but thinking makes it so"
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
Out of sight, out of mind
In these silent times, I've aught but some more essays to share with you. This one I submitted to the Daily Telegraph Science Writer contest:
Our eyes, windows to our soul, are not one-way streets. Our mental life, irrigated by our perception, depends on the images illuminating it. This simple metaphor for our vision, a matter more complex than our blunt portholes, sheds light on the mental condition of autism. We recognize people with autism by the trouble they show in socializing, their language deficiencies and their insistence on sameness and repetition. But a less well-known fact is that they see the world rather differently from the rest of us, a fact that can allow us to understand and aid them.
Sight starts in the eyes, as does the crux of the matter according to psychologists Kate Plaisted and Greg Davis. They argue the key to understanding this is the magnocellular (MC) system of cells in the retina. MC cells respond to coarse, global features, and brief changes in the visual fringe, making them vital in guiding attention to salient aspects of our surroundings. Dr's Plaisted and Davis have shown that these cells are less sensitive in autistic individuals, which can explain two outcomes related to the properties of these cells. Firstly, children with autism easily concentrate on the fine aspects of scenes, helping them to quickly spot slight changes and making them impervious to visual illusions; but have trouble grasping the gross context of a scene. Secondly, they find it hard to move their attention from one thing to the next, which explains their tendency toward reiteration.
Also, this MC deficit may cause a domino effect on social brain functions like face perception or imitation. We start watching faces in our infancy, an ability depending on our MC system, which directs our attention to the archetypal, gross t-shaped form of the human face. This focus seeds the growth of our adult abilities, and disturbing it mars our natural tendency to respond to social hints, resulting in severe social difficulties. Mark Johnson argues this MC system is also critical in adulthood, by helping us comprehend face expressions which cause global visual changes. Facial gestures are the physical twins of emotion, that very abstract concept that lets us make sense of not only our own, but also others' mental world.
The MC system also feeds into the so called dorsal visual stream in the brain that underlies such processes as perception of coherent motion, also impaired in autism. This in turn impairs our perception of other people's actions and our ability to imitate them. Indeed, in this dorsal stream, 'mirror neurons' respond to actions we see others do and those we make ourselves. This allows us to cross the frontier between self and other, not only in terms of imitating acts but also mental states, letting us understand others and share our happiness or pain with them. Hence, according to Marco Iacoboni and Mirella Dapretto, it is a deficit in this system that leads to problems in imitation and empathy in autism.
Lastly, autistic people don't perceive objects in the way we do. Sarah Grice showed that they don't show the same characteristic electrical brain activity when seeing illusory objects, like the Kanisza square (see above image), as normal individuals do. Instead, they respond like 6-month-old infants who can't yet integrate the display into a square, making their visual world fragmented, stopping them from seeing the forest from the trees. Crucially, since our interactions depend on the big picture - exuberant dancing and loud singing may make us the spirit of a party but will land us in detention if we try it at school during an exam - it's not surprising that an inability to judge context can be socially crippling.
So what if autism is all about vision, or lack thereof? Well, this understanding will hone our own foresight and help tackle the root problems in autism, letting us intervene sooner by using MC sensitivity as an early diagnostic tool. Our knowledge can also focus our intervention schemes at the visual problems and their developmental consequences, particularly since brain plasticity and flexibility is greatest in infancy. For instance, we could engage infants at risk in educational games that require quick shifts of attention and binding of features together. Or, perhaps, educate them to focus on and recognize faces and their expressions, even train their mirror neurons through imitative play. By learning how they see the world and how we can help them see ours, we can make life easier for these our children, the apples of our eyes.
Sight starts in the eyes, as does the crux of the matter according to psychologists Kate Plaisted and Greg Davis. They argue the key to understanding this is the magnocellular (MC) system of cells in the retina. MC cells respond to coarse, global features, and brief changes in the visual fringe, making them vital in guiding attention to salient aspects of our surroundings. Dr's Plaisted and Davis have shown that these cells are less sensitive in autistic individuals, which can explain two outcomes related to the properties of these cells. Firstly, children with autism easily concentrate on the fine aspects of scenes, helping them to quickly spot slight changes and making them impervious to visual illusions; but have trouble grasping the gross context of a scene. Secondly, they find it hard to move their attention from one thing to the next, which explains their tendency toward reiteration.
Also, this MC deficit may cause a domino effect on social brain functions like face perception or imitation. We start watching faces in our infancy, an ability depending on our MC system, which directs our attention to the archetypal, gross t-shaped form of the human face. This focus seeds the growth of our adult abilities, and disturbing it mars our natural tendency to respond to social hints, resulting in severe social difficulties. Mark Johnson argues this MC system is also critical in adulthood, by helping us comprehend face expressions which cause global visual changes. Facial gestures are the physical twins of emotion, that very abstract concept that lets us make sense of not only our own, but also others' mental world.
The MC system also feeds into the so called dorsal visual stream in the brain that underlies such processes as perception of coherent motion, also impaired in autism. This in turn impairs our perception of other people's actions and our ability to imitate them. Indeed, in this dorsal stream, 'mirror neurons' respond to actions we see others do and those we make ourselves. This allows us to cross the frontier between self and other, not only in terms of imitating acts but also mental states, letting us understand others and share our happiness or pain with them. Hence, according to Marco Iacoboni and Mirella Dapretto, it is a deficit in this system that leads to problems in imitation and empathy in autism.
Lastly, autistic people don't perceive objects in the way we do. Sarah Grice showed that they don't show the same characteristic electrical brain activity when seeing illusory objects, like the Kanisza square (see above image), as normal individuals do. Instead, they respond like 6-month-old infants who can't yet integrate the display into a square, making their visual world fragmented, stopping them from seeing the forest from the trees. Crucially, since our interactions depend on the big picture - exuberant dancing and loud singing may make us the spirit of a party but will land us in detention if we try it at school during an exam - it's not surprising that an inability to judge context can be socially crippling.
So what if autism is all about vision, or lack thereof? Well, this understanding will hone our own foresight and help tackle the root problems in autism, letting us intervene sooner by using MC sensitivity as an early diagnostic tool. Our knowledge can also focus our intervention schemes at the visual problems and their developmental consequences, particularly since brain plasticity and flexibility is greatest in infancy. For instance, we could engage infants at risk in educational games that require quick shifts of attention and binding of features together. Or, perhaps, educate them to focus on and recognize faces and their expressions, even train their mirror neurons through imitative play. By learning how they see the world and how we can help them see ours, we can make life easier for these our children, the apples of our eyes.
Monday, 18 August 2008
Piracy and brains... treasure maps!
Here's a little essay I entered into the essay competition hosted by the Wellcome Trust and New Scientist:
The legendary captain Rhodri Raven yells from quarterdeck to his trusty buccaneers: "Scoundrels, fetch me the Treasure Map! 'Tis torn to four pieces, they say, cast by the winds upon the Occipital Isle, about the Calcarine Fissure cleavin' it across." Forty pirates dash to set sail, fearing their chief's temper, one eager enough to cut another Calcarine across those imprudent enough to disobey. But there's a problem... each pirate returns bearing one piece of map. "The map, not maps, I said", Rhodri growls, "Hand me the real one!" Yet they all look real...
These metaphoric maps stand for the various brain areas involved in vision. They are topographically structured, reflecting the organisation of the visual field on our eyes' retina, resulting in "retinotopic" maps drawn upon our brain's cortex. Each map is broken in half across our brain, with our left hemisphere processing information from our right field and vice versa. Furthermore, some of these half-maps are further broken into sections representing the upper and lower quadrants of our vision, such that we end up with four pieces adding up to each single map.
Researchers have charted numerous cortical maps, by using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to explore brain activation in response to stimulation of different parts of the visual field. Sixteen whole visual maps stretch from the Calcarine sulcus, in the Occipital lobe, at the back of our brain, to our prefrontal cortex, appearing grouped into different clusters, as islands aggregate into archipelagos. Our captain's question is inevitable: which one of them is real indeed?
In fact, they are all real, resulting in a cardinal problem for visual neuroscientists, understanding how perception depends on each of them: Does each serve a distinct goal and, so to speak, lead to a different bounty? And how is their content integrated into our seemingly unitary perception, into one vision?
Indeed, we know that some of the earlier maps contain information about the details in our visual world, breaking it up into edges, colour and motion. But our perception is not merely an array of elements just as an essay is not a sac of letters but a collection of words, sentences and paragraphs linked together. Objects are to our vision what chapters are to a book, stanzas to a poem. But how does our brain write its visual verses?
A clue comes from a region in parietal cortex at the top and back of our head, the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), involved in the construction of visual objects from their component features. The IPS is active when we attend to objects or maintain them in our visual short-term memory (VSTM). VSTM is the equivalent of a mental sketchpad and perhaps the seat of our visual imagination, allowing us to perceive while seeing naught. Since regions in the parietal cortex have been found to be organised in a retinotopic manner, the question I pose in my research is whether the structure of the visual maps found there relates to our imagination and reminiscence.
To investigate this, I use a VSTM task where participants are asked to remember several objects in different places in their visual field. However, instead of only looking at the activity while these stimuli are presented, I'm interested in whether the visual objects maintained in VSTM by the IPS are organised in a retinotopic way. If this is the case, the IPS could be the critical locus of our conscious, object-based perception.
But what's the point? Take for instance research into so-called "mind-reading", which allows us to decipher the content of our mental display by analysing the complex patterns of activity in the early visual cortex. However, this merely tells us what we know already - the image entering our eyes, not what objects we construct and thus attend to. Instead, knowing the detailed progression of objects built and dismantled tells us what we actually perceive. This is particularly important in the study of patients suffering "locked-in" syndrome, since we could allow them to effectively communicate with us by using their "inner eye". The chance to open these patients' door to the outside world is one of the true treasures that visual maps lead to...
These metaphoric maps stand for the various brain areas involved in vision. They are topographically structured, reflecting the organisation of the visual field on our eyes' retina, resulting in "retinotopic" maps drawn upon our brain's cortex. Each map is broken in half across our brain, with our left hemisphere processing information from our right field and vice versa. Furthermore, some of these half-maps are further broken into sections representing the upper and lower quadrants of our vision, such that we end up with four pieces adding up to each single map.
Researchers have charted numerous cortical maps, by using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to explore brain activation in response to stimulation of different parts of the visual field. Sixteen whole visual maps stretch from the Calcarine sulcus, in the Occipital lobe, at the back of our brain, to our prefrontal cortex, appearing grouped into different clusters, as islands aggregate into archipelagos. Our captain's question is inevitable: which one of them is real indeed?
In fact, they are all real, resulting in a cardinal problem for visual neuroscientists, understanding how perception depends on each of them: Does each serve a distinct goal and, so to speak, lead to a different bounty? And how is their content integrated into our seemingly unitary perception, into one vision?
Indeed, we know that some of the earlier maps contain information about the details in our visual world, breaking it up into edges, colour and motion. But our perception is not merely an array of elements just as an essay is not a sac of letters but a collection of words, sentences and paragraphs linked together. Objects are to our vision what chapters are to a book, stanzas to a poem. But how does our brain write its visual verses?
A clue comes from a region in parietal cortex at the top and back of our head, the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), involved in the construction of visual objects from their component features. The IPS is active when we attend to objects or maintain them in our visual short-term memory (VSTM). VSTM is the equivalent of a mental sketchpad and perhaps the seat of our visual imagination, allowing us to perceive while seeing naught. Since regions in the parietal cortex have been found to be organised in a retinotopic manner, the question I pose in my research is whether the structure of the visual maps found there relates to our imagination and reminiscence.
To investigate this, I use a VSTM task where participants are asked to remember several objects in different places in their visual field. However, instead of only looking at the activity while these stimuli are presented, I'm interested in whether the visual objects maintained in VSTM by the IPS are organised in a retinotopic way. If this is the case, the IPS could be the critical locus of our conscious, object-based perception.
But what's the point? Take for instance research into so-called "mind-reading", which allows us to decipher the content of our mental display by analysing the complex patterns of activity in the early visual cortex. However, this merely tells us what we know already - the image entering our eyes, not what objects we construct and thus attend to. Instead, knowing the detailed progression of objects built and dismantled tells us what we actually perceive. This is particularly important in the study of patients suffering "locked-in" syndrome, since we could allow them to effectively communicate with us by using their "inner eye". The chance to open these patients' door to the outside world is one of the true treasures that visual maps lead to...
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
Independent/Bosch Technology Horizons essay... déjà vu?
I've tried my luck again. This time an essay on the way Technology and Engineering drive change in a country of my choice... It shall not be published in the Independent newspaper this time, but did not fall short of the shortlist, and even fetched a Highly Commended prize. I lay it here before you, a cheeky review of the redemption of a land many love to hate, in case you wish to read it:
"Speak of the devil
Harsh foreign policy, unhealthy relationship with science, bastion of the death penalty in the developed world, second worst polluter per capita and, never fear, greatest polluter overall! Can you hazard a guess as to the country in question?
In recent years the USA hasn't been a country one readily thinks of in relation to the word "change" (except perhaps "climate change") as it congeals into strict conservatism in almost all senses of the word. Almost. A citadel of change remains its saving grace, the 'balm in Gilead' that can clear away the black Raven upon our threshold, and help metamorphose our dying world into the zestful butterfly it deserves to be. A host of technological advances grown in the USA will be pivotal on the Eastern Front of our battle for a sustainable world.
One revolution borne out of these lands will change the pages of history, rather literally. In Massachusetts, the E Ink corporation has developed "e-paper", an electrophoretic display that works by shifting pigment particles, changing its reflective properties, and hence its colour. Crucially, electronic paper, unlike typical computer displays, emits no light nor needs any electricity to show the image, only to change it. Eye fatigue and energy use are thus reduced, crowning e-paper as paper's perfect replacement. Think of the interminable piles of paper we come across every day: newspapers, magazines, books, briefs, documents, instruction manuals, most of which we have only time to glance at before chucking away - the lifelines of our work and leisure are tautly bound to the death of countless trees. Yet readers based on e-paper, such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader, forecast the liberation from our arboreal shackles forever more.
But as we make the electronic switch, we must beware of our carbon footprint. Thankfully, today we see the edges of a flipping change in our IT mindset. For years we've felt in our flesh the undying urge toward ever more powerful machines, but today, the simplest of computers easily serve most of our needs. A host of Californian companies have taken the initiative to popularize computers on an unprecedented scale. Everex has introduced the gPC desktop and laptops like the gBook the Cloudbook, which are affordable and efficient by virtue of low wattage VIA processors and the less power-hungry Linux OS Ubuntu. Zonbu offers a similar deal, but in addition does away with a local hard drive, instead using a small flash memory device while storing most of the users' data online. NComputing goes a step further by marketing single computers that can power multiple users (up to 30 per unit), making public terminals far more efficient. The bottom line here is that a focus on efficiency and centralization can make technology available to anyone, whilst landing smoother rather than rougher on our environment.
But, you ask, how are you to power all this change? Bitter black gold, for all your green credentials? No, we need not get our hands dirty, as there's more than enough renewable energy to get by. Indeed, thanks to a number of US firms there has not been a better time for solar power, which is quickly striding forward in efficiency, availability, economy and, vitally, versatility. For instance, at the University of Delaware, Christina Honsberg and Allan Barnett have broken a record in solar efficiency, with 42.8% of solar energy transformed into electricity, by splitting light into different colour spectra and directing them to different materials that best absorb them. Peter Jiang at the University of Florida has used divine (or, rather, natural) inspiration by creating bumpy, moth eye-like solar panels that, unlike traditional silicon panels, reflect very little of the light projected onto them, making better use of its energy. Jin Zhang at UC Santa Cruz wants to use metal oxide nanoparticles and nanocrystals, “quantum dots”, to increase conversion efficiency through having electrical energy move more easily by hopping between quantum dots.
Easing the production of solar panels, Massachusetts firm Konarka is developing technology allowing us to print them on an inkjet printer, while in the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Somenath Mitra uses nanotechnology to design a solar panel material that can be painted onto any surface. Another company, Ausra, plans to place solar plants in direct contest with coal plants, by patching up the solar Achilles heel, inconstant availability, through storage of energy in the shape of hot steam, ready to be used instantly to create electricity. All this brings solar efficiency ever closer to the fated 1$/Watt, the magic number making solar power cheaper than coal.
Thus, technology can heal the ecological sins we have perpetrated - let's keep our faith and humbly embrace this saviour, harbinger of change, let her wash our oily hands."
Harsh foreign policy, unhealthy relationship with science, bastion of the death penalty in the developed world, second worst polluter per capita and, never fear, greatest polluter overall! Can you hazard a guess as to the country in question?
In recent years the USA hasn't been a country one readily thinks of in relation to the word "change" (except perhaps "climate change") as it congeals into strict conservatism in almost all senses of the word. Almost. A citadel of change remains its saving grace, the 'balm in Gilead' that can clear away the black Raven upon our threshold, and help metamorphose our dying world into the zestful butterfly it deserves to be. A host of technological advances grown in the USA will be pivotal on the Eastern Front of our battle for a sustainable world.
One revolution borne out of these lands will change the pages of history, rather literally. In Massachusetts, the E Ink corporation has developed "e-paper", an electrophoretic display that works by shifting pigment particles, changing its reflective properties, and hence its colour. Crucially, electronic paper, unlike typical computer displays, emits no light nor needs any electricity to show the image, only to change it. Eye fatigue and energy use are thus reduced, crowning e-paper as paper's perfect replacement. Think of the interminable piles of paper we come across every day: newspapers, magazines, books, briefs, documents, instruction manuals, most of which we have only time to glance at before chucking away - the lifelines of our work and leisure are tautly bound to the death of countless trees. Yet readers based on e-paper, such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader, forecast the liberation from our arboreal shackles forever more.
But as we make the electronic switch, we must beware of our carbon footprint. Thankfully, today we see the edges of a flipping change in our IT mindset. For years we've felt in our flesh the undying urge toward ever more powerful machines, but today, the simplest of computers easily serve most of our needs. A host of Californian companies have taken the initiative to popularize computers on an unprecedented scale. Everex has introduced the gPC desktop and laptops like the gBook the Cloudbook, which are affordable and efficient by virtue of low wattage VIA processors and the less power-hungry Linux OS Ubuntu. Zonbu offers a similar deal, but in addition does away with a local hard drive, instead using a small flash memory device while storing most of the users' data online. NComputing goes a step further by marketing single computers that can power multiple users (up to 30 per unit), making public terminals far more efficient. The bottom line here is that a focus on efficiency and centralization can make technology available to anyone, whilst landing smoother rather than rougher on our environment.
But, you ask, how are you to power all this change? Bitter black gold, for all your green credentials? No, we need not get our hands dirty, as there's more than enough renewable energy to get by. Indeed, thanks to a number of US firms there has not been a better time for solar power, which is quickly striding forward in efficiency, availability, economy and, vitally, versatility. For instance, at the University of Delaware, Christina Honsberg and Allan Barnett have broken a record in solar efficiency, with 42.8% of solar energy transformed into electricity, by splitting light into different colour spectra and directing them to different materials that best absorb them. Peter Jiang at the University of Florida has used divine (or, rather, natural) inspiration by creating bumpy, moth eye-like solar panels that, unlike traditional silicon panels, reflect very little of the light projected onto them, making better use of its energy. Jin Zhang at UC Santa Cruz wants to use metal oxide nanoparticles and nanocrystals, “quantum dots”, to increase conversion efficiency through having electrical energy move more easily by hopping between quantum dots.
Easing the production of solar panels, Massachusetts firm Konarka is developing technology allowing us to print them on an inkjet printer, while in the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Somenath Mitra uses nanotechnology to design a solar panel material that can be painted onto any surface. Another company, Ausra, plans to place solar plants in direct contest with coal plants, by patching up the solar Achilles heel, inconstant availability, through storage of energy in the shape of hot steam, ready to be used instantly to create electricity. All this brings solar efficiency ever closer to the fated 1$/Watt, the magic number making solar power cheaper than coal.
Thus, technology can heal the ecological sins we have perpetrated - let's keep our faith and humbly embrace this saviour, harbinger of change, let her wash our oily hands."
Monday, 16 June 2008
el Rey, el Acuario y la Mora
This little text, I wrote as an entry to a contest of microstories, and based it on an older tale of mine:
"Érase un viudo Rey cuya esposa dejó sólo un tirabuzón bronce, dentro del libro escarlata donde él trazaba su pasión, no con tinta, pero con sus yemas y hálito. Cada noche quemaba un pelo, intentando agostar su duelo, pero el mechón nunca menguó.
Una noche, saturado de sufrir, el Rey incinero tomo y trenza en su hogar. Esa mañana, junto al trono apareció un Acuario abarcando un pez áureo y cuarenta pescaditos plateados. A medida que el pez dorado tragaba a sus vecinos, el Rey conquistaba los suyos, hasta que declaró guerra con su última adversaria, una muda Princesa Mora. Él rechazó su hospitalidad, quemó puertas, rompió paredes y cuando ella, arrodillada, pidió merced, amputó y tomó consigo su negra cabellera como trofeo.
De vuelta al palacio vio al pez gualdo consumiendo su propio cuerpo, desapareciendo; y advirtió que de la bronce cabellera en su mano pendía un volumen carmesí."
"Érase un viudo Rey cuya esposa dejó sólo un tirabuzón bronce, dentro del libro escarlata donde él trazaba su pasión, no con tinta, pero con sus yemas y hálito. Cada noche quemaba un pelo, intentando agostar su duelo, pero el mechón nunca menguó.
Una noche, saturado de sufrir, el Rey incinero tomo y trenza en su hogar. Esa mañana, junto al trono apareció un Acuario abarcando un pez áureo y cuarenta pescaditos plateados. A medida que el pez dorado tragaba a sus vecinos, el Rey conquistaba los suyos, hasta que declaró guerra con su última adversaria, una muda Princesa Mora. Él rechazó su hospitalidad, quemó puertas, rompió paredes y cuando ella, arrodillada, pidió merced, amputó y tomó consigo su negra cabellera como trofeo.
De vuelta al palacio vio al pez gualdo consumiendo su propio cuerpo, desapareciendo; y advirtió que de la bronce cabellera en su mano pendía un volumen carmesí."
Wednesday, 18 July 2007
Independent/Bosch Technology Horizons essay
Recently, I have written an essay on the topic of Ecology and Technology, which is one of two to have been published in The Independent newspaper. If you are interested in how technology can help us curb our energy consumption the essay offers a review of some very promising developments soon to come. See it by clicking the link above, or read it here below, I would more than welcome any comments/arguments on it!
"The energy diet
We are living in a 'fat' world. In recent years, the figure of size in environmental discourse has come in the form of the 'Carbon Footprint'; as logic tells us, the size of the footprint corresponds to the size of the foot and the foot to the size of the being resting its weight on the world.
We live in a world where we, as a collective 'being', are expanding: we consume far beyond our necessity and give little back. With the help of emergent technologies, we must embark on an 'energy diet' consisting of three things: 'losing weight', 'eating less' and 'exercising'.
First, we must lose 'weight'. The weight of our means of transport - cars, buses, trains and planes - means that we spend much more energy in moving the vehicle than in moving ourselves. Here the obvious solution is, in fact, a viable one: make things lighter. The most important advance in transportation within the next few years will not be the development of electricity or hydrogen-based engines, but the production of lighter cars. Instead of shifting the carbon footprint from the consumer to the energy-producing industry (remember, hydrogen/electricity must come from somewhere!) we must make the actual energy use efficient.
This way of thinking results in the Hypercar: a modular car with a carbon-fiber body, a tiny engine and a fuel cell. Its modularity means it is easy to maintain; its engine makes it highly efficient (up to 200 miles per gallon) and consequently ecological; and its carbon-fiber body makes it safer for those in and outside the car, since it absorbs impact much better than steel. Taking the load off the road will go a considerable way to reducing the size of our collective 'mass' and the footprint it leaves in its wake.
But not all energy is used up in transport. In everyday life, we need to 'eat' less energy than we currently do. While it is crucial to limit energy waste by changing our lifestyle - turning off appliances and heating whenever possible - it is perhaps more important to change the objects of our consumption: making appliances themselves more energy efficient. As our use of electronic equipment continues to increase in line with technological advancement, we need more than energy efficient bulbs to make the cut - we need efficient electronics.
A benchmark for this has been set by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, whose laptop, designed for children in developing countries, consumes a mere 2 watts, including processor, memory and screen. Since these components are part of an increasing number of electronic appliances, this technology could be applied to televisions, phones, media players and computers, giving consumers both peace of mind and better performance.
But where does 'exercise' fit in all of this? We cannot expect to reach environmental sustainability if we don't find ways of making energy without burning carbon fuels. Solar energy, wind power and ground source heat pumps are becoming increasingly efficient in obtaining energy, but unless we reduce our energy requirements, there will not be enough provision to satisfy our energy hunger.
There is, however, one more resource that technology can help us regain. Redirecting the normal flow of energy in physical exercise, we can actually regain energy by burning calories. This shift would involve the manual production of electricity - using our bodies to make energy. The process has been realized by Potenco for the OLPC project, which has created a pull-string dynamo to power the computer; given its low energy consumption, this is very easy indeed.
By extension, rather than going to the gym and using electricity to power an exercise machine, we could instead use portable generators to transform the energy of our bodies, as we walk or run, into electricity to power an iPod.
Secondly, through advances made in the efficiency of converting biomass into liquid fuels capable of powering cars (think Back to the Future), we could even transform our homes into safe mini-powerplants by decoupling the engine of our Hypercar from its wheels. Biodegradable rubbish could be used to create electricity to be sold back to the grid or stored in a battery for later use.
In these self-sustaining models, it would be possible to generate power from unburnt calories. With an incentive to escape our sedentary lifestyles, we could not only reduce the contours of our physical and consumptory bodies (and, of course, their footprints), but radically improve their respective states of health."
"The energy diet
We are living in a 'fat' world. In recent years, the figure of size in environmental discourse has come in the form of the 'Carbon Footprint'; as logic tells us, the size of the footprint corresponds to the size of the foot and the foot to the size of the being resting its weight on the world.
We live in a world where we, as a collective 'being', are expanding: we consume far beyond our necessity and give little back. With the help of emergent technologies, we must embark on an 'energy diet' consisting of three things: 'losing weight', 'eating less' and 'exercising'.
First, we must lose 'weight'. The weight of our means of transport - cars, buses, trains and planes - means that we spend much more energy in moving the vehicle than in moving ourselves. Here the obvious solution is, in fact, a viable one: make things lighter. The most important advance in transportation within the next few years will not be the development of electricity or hydrogen-based engines, but the production of lighter cars. Instead of shifting the carbon footprint from the consumer to the energy-producing industry (remember, hydrogen/electricity must come from somewhere!) we must make the actual energy use efficient.
This way of thinking results in the Hypercar: a modular car with a carbon-fiber body, a tiny engine and a fuel cell. Its modularity means it is easy to maintain; its engine makes it highly efficient (up to 200 miles per gallon) and consequently ecological; and its carbon-fiber body makes it safer for those in and outside the car, since it absorbs impact much better than steel. Taking the load off the road will go a considerable way to reducing the size of our collective 'mass' and the footprint it leaves in its wake.
But not all energy is used up in transport. In everyday life, we need to 'eat' less energy than we currently do. While it is crucial to limit energy waste by changing our lifestyle - turning off appliances and heating whenever possible - it is perhaps more important to change the objects of our consumption: making appliances themselves more energy efficient. As our use of electronic equipment continues to increase in line with technological advancement, we need more than energy efficient bulbs to make the cut - we need efficient electronics.
A benchmark for this has been set by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, whose laptop, designed for children in developing countries, consumes a mere 2 watts, including processor, memory and screen. Since these components are part of an increasing number of electronic appliances, this technology could be applied to televisions, phones, media players and computers, giving consumers both peace of mind and better performance.
But where does 'exercise' fit in all of this? We cannot expect to reach environmental sustainability if we don't find ways of making energy without burning carbon fuels. Solar energy, wind power and ground source heat pumps are becoming increasingly efficient in obtaining energy, but unless we reduce our energy requirements, there will not be enough provision to satisfy our energy hunger.
There is, however, one more resource that technology can help us regain. Redirecting the normal flow of energy in physical exercise, we can actually regain energy by burning calories. This shift would involve the manual production of electricity - using our bodies to make energy. The process has been realized by Potenco for the OLPC project, which has created a pull-string dynamo to power the computer; given its low energy consumption, this is very easy indeed.
By extension, rather than going to the gym and using electricity to power an exercise machine, we could instead use portable generators to transform the energy of our bodies, as we walk or run, into electricity to power an iPod.
Secondly, through advances made in the efficiency of converting biomass into liquid fuels capable of powering cars (think Back to the Future), we could even transform our homes into safe mini-powerplants by decoupling the engine of our Hypercar from its wheels. Biodegradable rubbish could be used to create electricity to be sold back to the grid or stored in a battery for later use.
In these self-sustaining models, it would be possible to generate power from unburnt calories. With an incentive to escape our sedentary lifestyles, we could not only reduce the contours of our physical and consumptory bodies (and, of course, their footprints), but radically improve their respective states of health."
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