IdeaFestival

Humanitarian design finalists for Curry Stone Prize announced

The five finalists for the $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize have been announced and will be recognized at the 11th International Venice Architecture Biennale. The finalists are:

• Shawn Frayne, inventor of the Windbelt, the world's first non-turbine wind-powered generator.
• Wes Janz, architect and associate professor at Ball State University, Indiana, whose work is inspired by the ingenuity of slum dwellers who build shelters from scavenged materials.
• MMA Architects principals, Luyanda Mphahlwa and Mphethi Morojele, who designed an energy-efficient home made using timber and sandbags for infill for a Cape Town family that costs just $6,900.
• Marjetica Potrc, an artist and architect whose "dry toilet" design, which converts human waste to fertilizer, is now used in barrios in Caracas, Venezuela.
• Antonio Scarponi, an architect whose project, "Dreaming Wall," cast text messages on a wall in Milan, uses technology and design to "jam" conventional social orders and illuminate the socio-political lines that unite and divide us.

The winner will be announced at IF on September 25th. A quick look around turned up more on the finalists here.

Wayne

Storing memories: Building the two-wheeled brain

This is a first as far as I know. Researchers at the University of Reading have created a primitive biological brain from artificially cultured biological neurons and connected it to a diminutive two-wheeled robot. The goal? To understand how the brain stores specific information and how recall functions. Roland Piquepaille:

'The robot’s biological brain is made up of cultured neurons which are placed onto a multi electrode array (MEA). The MEA is a dish with approximately 60 electrodes which pick up the electrical signals generated by the cells. This is then used to drive the movement of the robot. Every time the robot nears an object, signals are directed to stimulate the brain by means of the electrodes. In response, the brain’s output is used to drive the wheels of the robot, left and right, so that it moves around in an attempt to avoid hitting objects. The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer, its sole means of control is from its own brain.'

By studying how memories are processed, researchers hope, among many other things, to understand how people afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease might be helped.

The University of Reading's School of System's Engineering has the original news, a picture of the robot and a video interview with the researchers. As might be expected, the post on Piquepaille's blog has drawn over 70 comments.

Wayne

Metamaterials: not quite X-ray glasses

Noting that forthcoming issues of Nature and Science will report recent laboratory successes, the London Times writes that invisible products based on metamaterial science are a little closer to reality.

According to Wikipedia, metamaterials gain their properties from their molecular structures rather than directly from their composition, as in textiles. London Times:

[University of California Berkeley's] Xiang Zhang, the leader of the researchers, said: 'In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock.' An observer looking at the cloaked object would then see light from behind it – making it seem to disappear.

Expressing doubt that the research will result in practical applications anytime soon, Popular Mechanics reaches for the reference any young boy who ever frequented the back pages of the Marvel universe will get.

Wayne

Magicians: Neurologists!

Proving once again that innovation can come from anywhere, the conjunction between magic and neuroscience has of late been quite productive. Boston Globe:

In the past year... a few researchers have begun to realize that magic represents... a deep and untapped store of knowledge about the human mind.

At a major conference last year in Las Vegas, in a scientific paper published last week and another due out this week, psychologists have argued that magicians, in their age-old quest for better ways to fool people, have been engaging in cutting-edge, if informal, research into how we see and comprehend the world around us. Just as studying the mechanisms of disease reveals the workings of our body's defenses, these psychologists believe that studying the ways a talented magician can short-circuit our perceptual system will allow us to better grasp how the system is put together.

'I think magicians and cognitive neuroscientists are getting at similar questions, but while neuroscientists have been looking at this for a few decades, magicians have been looking at this for centuries, millennia probably,' says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute and coauthor of one of the studies, published online last week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 'What magicians do is light-years ahead in terms of sophistication and the power of these techniques.' (hyperlink added)

If you're interested in experiencing that short-circuited perception for yourself, catch Teller, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September. Individual and all-access passes are available now.

Wayne

At the end of theory you'll find lots and lots of data

In its efforts to create a web-based "word processor for data," Swivel, as I've mentioned before, is on a mission to improve our collective numerical literacy, or our numeracy.

As missions go I think it's pretty cool.

For example, posting only two rules, it recently completed a business edition of its hosted software, permitting companies to manipulate and share their data in new ways. The rules? If you make your uploaded available to the public, Swivel is free. If want to keep it private and secure, you can pay. It actively shares tips for hacking its graphs. Journalists are making increasing of public data to make stories more compelling.

But if you like, as I definitely do, the conceptual bottom line, Swivel is simply taking advantage of what Wired recently called an end to theory. Raising the public's statistical literacy is one smart way to explore a new frontier. Wired:

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right....

Speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past March, Peter Norvig, Google's research director, offered an update to [statistician] George Box's maxim [that 'all models are wrong, but some are useful']: 'All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.'

Wayne

"Experience" the 21c Museum Hotel at IF

The hometown newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, published a terrific article over the weekend on Louisville's, 21c, a unique museum and hotel, which shows that downtown revitalization is more than the sum of steel and glass.

To build outside the box you have to create experiences.

21c is a 'You've just got to see this!' experience. It's attractive not only for those of us just an hour's drive away, but also for celebrities including Harrison Ford and Julie Andrews, who have been spotted checking out the cuisine and culture in recent weeks. Wanting to revitalize Louisville's downtown, and to create a venue for expanding galleries where contemporary works of art could be displayed, Brown and Wilson gathered a team of experts to help deliver their brainchild into the world in early 2006. Now, they're expanding with a similar project in Austin, Texas, and are looking at possibilities even further afield, in Japan and Croatia....

Lexington's vice mayor, Jim Gray, whose company was involved in the renovation and planning, says: '21c utilized historic Main Street buildings and adapted them in a modern and creative way. But it's more than a building. It represents the experience economy and fully leverages Louisville's history and urban setting. Through the art museum, it brings in everyday citizens through its changing exhibits. Through the hotel and restaurant, it invites locals and visitors to engage each other in a significant and dynamic way.'

Collaborating with renowned garden designer and Kentucky native Jon Carloftis, 21c also installed an organic rooftop at the hotel recently. Sourcing fresh local produce now means "going upstairs," according Carloftis.

When you're in Louisville for the IdeaFestival in September, be sure to check out 21c. It's unlike anything you've ever felt.

Wayne

Wikipedia: experience economy

Habituated: can Proctor & Gamble make us better people?

Can habits be manufactured? In the "Warning - Habits May be Good for You," one social scientist, now Director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, turns to private industry to learn marketing techniques that will save lives.

'There are fundamental public health problems, like hand washing with soap, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits,' Dr. Curtis said. 'We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically.'

The companies that Dr. Curtis turned to — Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever — had invested hundreds of millions of dollars finding the subtle cues in consumers’ lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find that many of the products we use every day — chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks, antiperspirants, colognes, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins — are results of manufactured habits. A century ago, few people regularly brushed their teeth multiple times a day. Today, because of canny advertising and public health campaigns, many Americans habitually give their pearly whites a cavity-preventing scrub twice a day, often with Colgate, Crest or one of the other brands advertising that no morning is complete without a minty-fresh mouth.

Seeing this article reminded me that some choice, while never perfectly free, can be made better.

Wayne

"The opposite of play is not work, it's depression"

Making it her goal to make sure a game designer wins a Nobel Prize by 2032, Jane McGonigal is a well known designer herself, and is studying how virtual worlds and gaming can be used for serious play to solve, perhaps, a few real world problems. Games and their outcomes - play, focus, life-in-the-moment - are increasingly seen as important in their own right, methodologies and taxonomies are being explored, and their application to health care and business communications are being discussed.

Play is big.

McGonigal has a long list of game projects to her credit, most recently winning an award at SXSW for best alternative reality game for "World without Oil," and will be at the IdeaFestival in September. All-access pass are currently on sale.

My favorite quote from her web site is this one: "the opposite of play is not work, it's depression." It also goes to the question of what motivates little scientists.

Wayne

Flying to Alpha Centauri

Some big ideas sometimes come with pretty long timeline. In a post "Alpha Centauri and the Long Haul," Paul Gilster puts star travel in interesting context, pointing out that buildings like the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople the Pantheon in Rome have been around for at least 1,400 years, about what time it would take to get to Alpha Centauri using improved existing technology. Interesting thought, that.

The star - actually a triple system - was captured recently by Cassini off the bow of Saturn's rings. Click image for a much better view of two of the three stars. 

Wayne

How things end

I was thinking.

Ends are the emotionally satisfying conclusions in a play or story.

Great ends often mark great films. Paul Simon says there are 50 ways to bring an end to a relationship.

Most people believe the ends don't justify the means, yet curiously good endings can make the interlude bearable.

"The end" is often associated with the ripeness of time, action and purpose. Current philosophy of biology is debating to what extent discussion of an organism's teleology, or purpose, "is unavoidable, or is simply a shorthand for ideas that can ultimately be spelled out non-teleologically."

In evolutionary biology, endings ensure that the best of life can go forward. So while it codes for an end, death is also a species improvement strategy.

The arrow of time, suggests that time moves in one direction to many, many ends. One quantum theory suggests that time is retrocausal, which means it doesn't end. If so, time can be rerun and its effect observed before cause.

The end can also mark the logical consequence of a premise or the something for which an event took place, which raises an interesting question. In magic the logical consequence isn't. How does magic have an end?

And speaking of logical consequence, Kurt Gödel demonstrated that incomplete systems can be whole, but whole systems can never be completely logical.

Ends can have normative values. Wordnet suggests that "end" might also be the part you are expected to play, as in "he held up his end."

Good design brings its subject matter to a satisfying ending. Good ends must to some degree be experienced.

Interestingly, the "end" may not even necessarily be so: an end can also mean "remnant," an historically consequential idea with deep roots in the monotheistic traditions.

It can also mark a transition, or the beginning of something new, or signify the conclusion of one blog post.

Now can be an end.

Wayne