Environment and the Psychology of Behavior

Chapter 7 Culhane Relational Summary: Disasters, Toxic Hazards, and Pollution

2011-02-12T06:44:00.000-08:00

The assignment portfolio in our on-line class revolves around the creation of a "relational summary" for each chapter in the Bell, Greene, Fisher and Baum textbook "Environmental Psychology" and the ultimate creation of our own academic reference supported version of "eutopia" (the "good place").

This year, without being told where to start, the majority of our classmates chose to begin their personal exploration of Environmental Psychology through interpreting their relationships with Chapter 7: Disasters, Toxic Hazards and Pollution. It could be the result of a certain Zeitgeist -- with fictional films like 2012 suggesting to the superstitious and gullible that the clock is ticking before inevitable environmental destruction next year, and documentary evidence telling us that regardless of what some ancient Mayan calendar suggests, climate change, pollution and technological vulnerabilities will increase the number and intensity of potential disasters we experience on this earth during our lifetimes no matter what we believe, it is no wonder that given a choice most students will be attracted disproportionately to that part of the curriculum that might offer some answers or insights that can mitigate some of the fear and anxiety.

If you aren't told what you have to study, if the dictatorship model of education, wherein you spend hours learning about things you aren't quite sure are helpful to your personal situation simply because you fear getting "a bad grade", is suddenly transformed into a free election of information according to your own needs, wouldn't you choose to study things that address your immediate personal concerns rather than things merely prescribed by priests of education?

As in previous years I make no demand upon my students that we follow a certain order as we explore our relationships to the ideas in the textbook -- this is the age of Soja's Postmodern "Third Space" where linearity has less to offer the pedagogic environment than it ever had. In a non-linear world there are definite benefits to NOT "towing the line", and for all of us to be literally "on the same page" seems less and less productive. In fact, diversity of experience and opinion so enrich the class discussions that it is hard to remember why we thought following the curriculum from A to Z was either necessary or important. Even computer game designers and museum exhibit creators have realized that it is counterproductive to provide a sequential path toward the desired end-goal -- permitting free exploration in an environment replete with the necessary attraction gradients and exit gradients seems to remove many of the problems resulting from psychological satiation, boredom and fatigue (see Chapter 13: Work, Learning and Leisure Environments, page 453). There seems little question that once people have tasted the fruits of freedom and learned how to wayfind successfully in a free environment, they show little desire to go back to being told where to go, what to do and how to do it.

Free will and politically unconstrained choice are marvelous gifts and perhaps the greatest benefits of living in a democratic society. The mass protest jubilee we see unfolding in Tahrir (Liberation) Square underscores the importance we so human animals place on the freedom to choose and the risks we will take to get it.

Interestingly, from the perspective of Environmental Psychology, the tension between freedoms and dictates lies at the heart of disasters, toxic hazards and pollution.

Certainly it can be argued that people desire the freedom to live where ever they desire and that this often puts us directly in harm's way. To be told by the government "no, the coast of California is off limits because of the risk of earthquakes and the coast of Florida is off limits because of the risk of hurricanes" would rub most of us the wrong way. As free people we demand the right to assume our risks. Similarly people get infuriated by government actions that "take away" their assumed freedom to knowingly put themselves at risk because of toxic hazards (think of reactions against laws prohibiting smoking, drinking alcohol or taking recreational drugs).

But what about the freedom NOT to be harmed by OTHERS?

Certainly you would think that this would be the foundation of society and its freedoms. In fact the "Golden Rule" seems to speak exclusively of this: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" and its corollary "Don't do unto others what you would that they not do unto you."

The case of cigarette smoke is illustrative of how the right to no harm has been underplayed by powerful corporate interests while the rhetoric has been flipped around to make it seem as though we were talking about taking away the "freedoms" of smokers. Even the film "Thank You For Smoking" makes it appear as though what we were really concerned with was protecting smokers from themselves, and while Al Pacino's "The Insider", another film made around the same time about the cigarette industry, clearly demonstrates how the tobacco companies deliberately put toxins in their products that increase the addictive quality of the substance to smokers and non-smokers alike we come away thinking more about the impact on the smoker than the innocent bystander. Bell, on page 245 writes "For a number of years we have known that tars and nicotine can have major effects on the health of smokers". But most of us agree that what you do to your own body is really your concern. The no-smoking laws really have nothing to do with the impact of toxins on adults who have free choice. What the laws seek to protect is the freedom of those who are unwillingly subjected to unfreedoms: "There is now considerable evidence that nonsmokers breathing the air in a room where others are smoking may also suffer ill effects... passive smoking has also been described as a major cause of premature death (Goldman and Glantz, 1998)... the 1986 Surgeon General's report on involuntary smoking concludes that passive smoking can cause disease..."

I personally experience severe allergic reactions to the toxins in cigarette smoke, so until Germany and Egypt finally passed their Johnny Come Lately no smoking laws two years ago, going to restaurants and public places was absolute hell for me. But I could say nothing for years -- in fact I was treated as if my discomfort with being poisoned was actually creating some unfreedom for others.

The key to understanding environmentalism, as far as I'm concerned, is understanding what we can do to reduce "involuntary" harm. I personally have no problem with people trashing their own environments if they can confine the damage to their own bodies, homes or backyards. The premise of the NIMBY movement ("Not in My Backyard" see page 246) was supposed to bring to the fore "the age-old struggle between the welfare of the larger group and that of a small group" and give people the right to keep the pollutants and hazards caused by one group from harming another, particularly when the aggrieved party or parties did not agree to sacrifice any welfare for the gains that accrue to the risk taker (unfortunately NIMBYism has, like so many other movements, been twisted so that it only really favors the wealthy!).

And so it has been with nearly all environmental injustices -- the victims bear the burden and often had no rights to redress the situation. Whether it was dangers in the work environment, the home environment or the spaces in between, we were all told that we should shut up and put up, because the wealthy were profiting from the situation and the rest of us had no political clout.

I've written a song about it, called Talkin' Trash, that you can see here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04169rn8xK0

As history would have it, much of the modern environmental movement was actually born as part of the civil rights movements that reached a head in the 1960s (see http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_soul_of_the_environmental_movement for more on their intertwined histories). The freedoms and rights of blacks, women and other minorities included freedom from environmental injustices such as exposure to radiation, toxic chemicals and other pollutants, and protection from environmental deprivation such as loss of access to clean water, air and healthy food, arable land, sources of vital raw materials, safe shelter, biodiversity and other foundations of human security. As Bell points out on page 246 "the disadvantaged in society are thought to bear an unfair burden. Hazardous plants are rarely built near affluent communities but are instead more likely to be found in poorer areas in which minority groups are more likely to live... at times the circumstances surrounding the siting and remediation of environmental hazards arouse suspicion. For example, in 1979 in Houston, six out of eight incinerators were sited in African-American neighborhoods. "

But somehow the focus of "environmentalism" was quickly co-opted into a discourse about preserving primarily the scenic values of landscapes accessible primarily by wealthy whites. And once "the environment" came to be seen as primarily an upper middle class concern abstracted into debates over the rights of non-humans and their eco-systems (important as they are) it became nearly impossible to get broad consensus on policies to eliminate the core causes of harm and deprivation that lead to sustained poverty, suffering and deprivation. In fact such abstractions allowed the absurd "jobs vs. environment" debate to flourish as industry leaders, eager for the higher profits they knew could only be obtained by refusing to responsibly manage their production residuals, decided to fool the working class into accepting their negative externalities as the Faustian bargain paid to guarantee job security.

The environmental justice movement (Taylor, 2000, cited in Chapter 7 on page 247; the concept is introduced in Chapter 2 on page 31) sought to redress that separation and even used the term environmental racism "to describe the disproportionate exposure of minorities to environmental hazards (for a review, see Taylor, 1999). he tendency for hazards to be located in minority communities may be as much a matter of discrimination against lower socioeconomic status (SES) as well as membership in a minority group." (p.247).

However it is framed there is little doubt that the poor bear the greatest burden from environmental degradation, from disasters, toxic hazards and pollution. As we saw during Hurricane Katrina the wealthy can simply move away in most circumstances. Even when they lose houses and other physical assets, they are usually well compensated by insurance and can often retain or even improve their property values (as Bell states, "wealthier people may have the means to buy homes elsewhere, and less well-off residents may be able to afford housing only on sites whose value is depressed because they are located near toxic sites." What often happens is that a disaster or hazard makes it profitable for the wealthy to buy up large areas of land at very low cost, then make minor remediations and pass it on at a considerable profit to the low SES communities. Since less wealthy individuals tend to have poorer educational opportunities they are usually "insufficiently informed about the dangers to be as concerned as they should about hazards or where they are sited (e.g. Bullard, 1993; Taylor 1989, cited on page 247). This is what happened in 1970s leading to the Love Canal disaster, referred to by the EPA as "one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history" (http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/lovecanal/01.htm).   We also see this effect depicted in the true stories popularized in the Julia Roberts films "Erin Brokavitch" and "The Pelican Briefs".

To talk about "natural disasters" and "technological disasters" as though either were somehow inevitable seems to me to skirt the real issue of precisely who is suffering and precisely why. Living in Beverly Hills but working in the ghettoes of South Los Angeles during the 1994 Northridge Earthquake taught me a lot about environmental injustice.   For one thing, while we had 64 tragic casualties, the disproportionatley greater wealth of the U.S. and the building standards and low-density housing that such wealth permits made the impact of the quake relatively minor; similar quakes in the Near East and Asia claimed tens of thousands of lives. Second, the wealthier communities like mine were much much quicker to restore vital services such as electricity, gas, water, sewage and food delivery while it took many weeks to bring the poorer communities back on line.

While we may not be able to avoid being taken by surprise by as yet unpredictable events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, we can usually avoid an upleasant aftermath from such occurrences if we are willing to make health and safety top priorities and invest in the proper infrastructure and relief measures.

The field of "industrial ecology" teaches us that there really isn't any such thing as pollution -- pollution could be defined as "the right thing in the wrong place at the wrong time". In Industrial Ecology every output from one process becomes an input for another process (see http://www.is4ie.org/ for details).   In an properly designed industrial ecology system we find "robustness to disaster" just as in a healthy natural ecology system we find buffers built in to the system that prevent major catastrophes. I remember observing this on a visit to El Yunque Rain Forest when I went to present in Puerto Rico for the National Science Teachers Association. Where the rain forest had been cleared for logging or agriculture or development the 1992 Hurricane Andrew had tremendous impact, destroying land and homes and fisheries (diving on the coral reef we found it had been silted to death). But where the rain forest and mangroves had been left intact the hurricane caused very little damage. The ecosystem was able to absorb much of the damage and bounce back quickly.

This idea of "robustness" and "buffers" is being explored by natural scientists everywhere (see "The role of buffering capacities in stabilising coastal lagoon ecosystems" at
http://databases.eucc-d.de/plugins/projectsdb/project.php?show=274 for example) but can equally be applied to civilizations. Most famously, Wall Street trader and economist Nicolaus Taleb (author Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan) has been speaking extensively on how we can apply these concepts to our financial system (see http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/05/taleb_on_black_1.html) to avoid further "economic meltdowns" and other "black swan" disasters. The principles drawn from "natural ecosystems" and "industrial ecology" seem to work across the board.

Mostly it is a technical issue -- design systems resistant to fragility through built in redundancy and inherent checks and balances based on diversity and most deep disasters can be avoided.

But a lot of it comes down to morality -- in order to design and implement systems that are more disaster-proof than not, we have to build it in to the foundational ethics of our society. We have to care enough to invest so that doing no harm to others is a higher priority than profit maximization.

I believe that if we reframe the discourse of environmentalism to once again be in alignment with social justice we may find a common ground. And we may then find that most disasters can be avoided.

Chapter 14 Relational Summary: Changing Behavior to Save the Environment

2011-01-25T13:49:00.000-08:00

The night this course began I was staying at the elegant five star Fairmont Four Seasons Hotel in Hamburg planning a Spring Environmental Event with the head of marketing and the head of Engineering. This year, 2011, Hamburg has been elected the "green capital" of Europe, and a trip to the environmental information center next to the main train station explains why:
Hamburg is "burying" 35 kilometers of congested and noisy highway this year, taking a section of the busiest road that has separated two sections of the city for a generation and caused terrible air and noise pollution, and sticking it underground in a tunnel. Where the highway currently creates an eyesore and social barrier there will instead be parkland, cafes, bicycle paths and water features. In addition, Hamburg has inexpensive "for rent" bicycles all over the city and a network of vegetated bicycle paths that makes it one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world. Hamburg boasts 250,000 street trees and 180,000 more in parks and green spaces throughout the built environment. Special electric charging stations are being erected throughout the city for electric vehicles whose purchase are encouraged through government subsidies. The trains running through the city are already powered by 100% renewable energy from hydropower, wind, biogas and solar installations; even the once unsightly toxic landfill is now a biogas producing green hill of parkland covered with photovoltaics and windmills, demonstrating to the public that industrial ecology can turn all wastes into things of value. Even the Four Seasons luxury hotel boasts awards for its low energy LED chandeliers and room and hall lighting, its meticulous waste separation and its new computer controlled heat transfer system that moves hot air and water in the winter from places in the hotel where they are in excess to places where they are needed -- and does the same things for cold air and water in the summer.

How has Hamburg been able to do this when so many other post-industrial cities are laboring under their environmentally destructive legacies?

One reason is the strong history of the green party in Germany (the land where green political parties began). Instead of being a fringe thing, environmental consciousness is part of German pride. The other strong factor is that the citizens of Hamburg believe that environmental improvements are economic improvements. The Germans are known for their attention to efficiency and efficiency IS the essence of environmental technology -- waste and pollution and degradation are considered by many Germans as mere symptoms of badly designed systems.

Are the Germans unique in this? Can all of us change our behavior to save the environment?

In Environmental Psychology (5th edition), on page 478, Table 14-1 shows the "Relative Impact of Interventions to Save the Commons". The authors weigh the impacts of 9 factors that influence "environmentally sound behavior" and come up with the following table relating "factor" to "impact":

Social Attraction: 0.12; Group Identity 0.11; Trust 0.08; Moral Suasion .05; Structural Privatization .30; Communication .15 (according to one set of authors) .44 (according to another); Reinforcement Feedback .16, .19; Reward 0.09 (one group of authors) 0.17 (another group) 0.26 (yet another group of authors) Punishment 0.19 (one group) 0.40 (another group).

Obviously there is a lot of variance between different author's conclusions. Can these "impact" statistics be relied upon? The authors of Environmental Psychology state on page 494 in a section called "Individual Sacrifice and Commitment to Conservation":

A look at Table 14-1 suggests that appeals to pro-environmental action through moral suasion and altering social relations are relatively ineffective compared with interventions such as rewards and punishments that directly benefit or punish the individual.

But then they note,

While there is every reason to believe that appealing to self-interest motives is effective (e.g pocketing savings from energy conservation, free tokens for using mass transit, payments for recycling aluminum cans), there is a growing body of evidence that people's dedication to saving the environment can lead at least some to forgo selfish benefits, assume personal responsibility, and endure personal sacrifice in order to promote conservation of the enviornment (e.g. Geller, 1995; Kaiser & Shimoda, 1999; Werner & Makela, 1998). Those high in self-transcendant, biosphere oriented or ecocentric values and low in self-interest values do tend to have much more favorable attitudes toward preserving the environment and do report more environmentally friendly behavior.

I have a problem with both the impact studies and the conclusions of the author. It isn't that what is being studied or reported or theorized is not "true". It's that when we talk about attitudes toward "the environment" we aren't saying much at all because there is no such place. There is no such thing as "the environment", and the so called "impacts" are a moving target in a nebulous and ever changing landscape.

There is so much confusion about what constitutes "environmentally friendly behavior" that it is hard to know if people reporting their successes aren't merely parroting a particular zeitgeist, winning approval points for doing whatever is currently in fashion in their social group. If being "transcendent" is the "in-thing" (as it was temporarily in the late 1960s when the "environmental movement" began) then when it falls out of fashion and "self-interest" becomes popular (as it did in the 1980s during the era of Wall Street and Reaganomics) those same people suddenly become "anti-environmentalists". Yet ask them what they are doing and they will say, "I'm just being realistic" or "I'm going with the flow" or "look, don't blame me, I'm doing what I'm supposed to".

"Mother Culture" dictates the behavior of most people under the Bell Curve and the outliers are always outliers until the bell curve shifts. What we really want to know if we want to change behavior to "save the environment", in my opinion, are three things:

1) What shifts the bell curve?
2) Which environments are we trying to "save"?
3) Which environments do we actually want to "change".

Then we need to start applying what we know about shifting masses of behavior to targeted outcomes. The problem is we don't really have a clear idea about what we want to accomplish.

Is it better to replace all your old light bulbs with new, more efficient ones? It depends on the size of the effort. Some would argue (not me!) that by getting rid of old light bulbs that are perfectly good (even if energy wasteful) we add to the waste burden and consume more energy in the manufacturing of new bulbs (however efficient) than we save by keeping old lights burning. The same argument is made by some for automobiles. When I visited Havana and went around western Cuba I noticed that they had kept those old Plymouths and Chevrolets from the 1950's running and in great condition. It was like going back in time standing on a street corner in Cuba's capital city watching the parade of old vehicles. Is it really better to scrap all your old cars (which takes energy and creates waste) and manufacture millions of new cars, just because they are smaller and burn less gas? Some might argue no.

Of course there is a rational way out of this mess. It is called "life-cycle analysis" or LCA (see http://www.gdrc.org/uem/lca/life-cycle.html for a description and history). LCA takes a "cradle-to-grave" approach to every item and asks the question "from the moment you start bringing the resources together to make this thing to the moment it is thrown in the landfill, how much energy does it use -- to manufacture, transport, use and discard throughout its whole life cycle?"

Ecological Economists use LCA to make good side by side comparisons of products and processes and can help us decide when it is good to replace, when to reduce, when to re-use and when to recycle (the last three being the three R's of environmentalism, see http://www.reducereuserecycle.co.uk/).

Generally LCA produces great results. But LCA has been used improperly too -- for example when economists antagonistic to solar energy put out studies suggesting that solar panels consume more energy in their manufacture than they deliver during their useful life. It turns out that on deeper analysis they don't but the entire field of LCA for renewable technologies suffers from lack of transparency in calculations, poor methodology, use of outdated data and shifting horizons. As Katharine Myrans points out in her 2009 paper "Comparative Energy and Carbon Assessment of Three Green Technologies for a Toronto Roof" ( https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/18905/1/Myrans_Katharine_O_200911_MSc_thesis.pdf)

In general, improvements to the silicon process, as well as in accounting
methodologies, have led to significant decreases in energy inputs and carbon outputs over
time. However, because a large range of values continues to exist, even among the newest
studies, it was necessary for this study to conduct a basic process-chain analysis of
material and energy inputs into silicon panels to accurately determine carbon emissions.

And there is one of the most frustrating things about life cycle analysis and any kind of attempt to be an 'environmentally conscious consumer'. The sheer rate of technological change makes it impossible to really quantify any given technology's impact over the lifetime of the concept. Can we really say that driving cars is "bad"? What if all those cars were electric and powered, like the trains of Hamburg, with 100% renewable, clean energy? And what if we all used Amory Lovins Hypercar concept (see http://www.hypercars.com/) and each car was its own mobile power station. (Amory Lovins runs the Rocky Mountain Institute, the green think tank mentioned on p. 499 of Environmental Psychology). Might we not have an obligation to unplug our car from our houses (where they charged overnight from the energy produced from last night's kitchen garbage) and drive our cars over to our workplace and plug them in again to help power the building? Wouldn't any employee who didn't bring his hypercar to the office be accused of "not doing his share to help the environment"? Like many things, what makes something "bad" is not the object itself but what it does to the health of and well being of others.

More useful to me are rather mundane questions that any 3 year old understands:
"By doing what you are doing are you hurting anybody else?"
"Is there a way to do what you want without making somebody else suffer?"
"If there is, why aren't you doing it the nice way."

For me environmental improvements are all about "playing nice". Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute (http://www.rmi.org/rmi/) is cited in our textbook for his work helping industry profits by going green.

For example... the U.S. Post Office in Reno, Nevada spent $300,000 in lighting improvements and saved $50,000 per year in energy costs -- enough to recover the investment in 6 years. A major discount retail chain built an environmentally friendly store in Lawrence, Kansas, which used natural lighting through skylights on one side of the store; cash register sales where twice as high on the naturally lighted side of the store. A major manufacturer "greened" up a new building to drastically cut energy use and found that worker absenteeism fell 15% and productivity rose 15%, more than making up for the increased cost of the building (RMI, 1994, quoted on p. 499).

So if going green saves money and increases profits, what is all the fuss about?

Well, in parts of Germany like Hamburg there isn't much fuss. The families that live in and run businesses in Hamburg have been there for centuries and they don't want to go anywhere. It is THEIR environment. So it has very little to do with saving THE environment -- they are investing in and recouping the profits from saving THEIR environment. Is this transcendence or self-interest? Or both?
But in many places in America business is run like a Casino, as I have written in previous posts. People are in to "get rich quick". And when you are trying to get rich quick you don't play nice. Like locusts, you want to swarm in, take as much as you can, and get out. To hell with "the environment" in the place you are raping and pillaging. As marauding armies have known for millenia, this strategy is all about sacking the village and moving on; leave it to the survivors to put things back together. But it isn't just wanton destruction by an army of insensitive miners or loggers or developers that leads to terrible environmental degradation. The sum total impact of each of us, refusing to consider the impact of our behavior on others (because, hell, we can always move to Florida when the Bronx gets too messed up, right?) creates the mess too.

So we get back to the "Tragedy of the Commons".

Platt (1973) conceptualized the commons dilemma as a type of social trap. Platt described three such categories of social traps, each of which is relevant to environmentally destructive behavior. The commons type of trap, or individual good-collective bad trap, involves a group competing for a valued resource, such that destructive behavior by one participant has minor impact on the whole, but if all engage in the same individual behavior, the impact on the commons is disastrous. The one-person trap, or self-trap, involves a disastrous consequence to one person. Typical of these traps is addiction to drugs or food The momentary pleasures of the present have disastrous consequences in the long run. The third type is the missing hero trap. Whereas the commons trap and self-trap involve unfortunate actions that we take, the missing hero trap involves an action that we fail to take, such as refusing to help someone in need or failing to warn others of the toxicity of a substance with which they work. (p. 475).

We are all caught in such social traps, and the real problem for me is that we fall into these traps no matter what we think of the mythical place called "the environment". Each of us really wants the best environment we can have around us, but is trapped into harming both our internal and external environments, and those of our loved ones and friends and neighbors, and even people and other creatures thousands of miles away, through the little actions we take.

Figuring out how to live without harming another is part of what this life journey is about, and one very good reason for getting an education. We may not have all the answers yet, but one thing for me is certain, whether we live in Germany or the U.S. or anywhere else -- we can no longer be part of the missing hero trap. There are some things we can all agree to do now to play nice and stop hurting others. So let's start doing them.

Find the hero -- in YOU.

Backing up your blogs

2010-12-31T08:56:00.000-08:00

Here is what you type in to the URL when you want to back up all your old blog posts!

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=1000

Go to your dashboard and check how many posts you have, and change the number 1000 in this url to the number of blogposts you have.

Welcome Mercy On-line Students, 2009

2009-02-15T07:35:00.000-08:00

Hi Class,

Here is a blogspace for us to further our discussions of Environment and the Psychology of Behavior in a public forum. It is a place where we can post pictures and youtube videos and invite the world to interact with us.

We will start with posts of the google map terrain pictures of your environments, which will appear below as you send them to me.

Once all the images are posted we can engage in comparative analysis of the landscape features that shape our behavior.

Picture number one, below, is my immediate home environment, where the home office of our Verein (NGO) "Solar CITIES" is located . You can see that we are quite close to both a major autobahn (so we can hear the rush of traffic) and a huge railroad network. We are also a half hour walk from downtown Essen (left side of the picture) which is a pedestrian only shopping zone. This makes a big difference to our psychological health, because we don't have to drive and when we get downtown there is always a festive atmosphere without the roar and rush of traffic and its associated smells, smoke and dangers.

Picture number two is of Pelham Parkway in the Bronx -- one of you lives there!
Notice how U.S. cities are generally laid out in a rectangular grid pattern, while older European cities are more "organic", with curving or radial streets coming out of various centers. Most European cities are built around railroad terminals and pedestrian zones, most modern American cities around highway off-ramps. How does this affect our perceptions? Do straight roads "straight-jacket" our thinking? Do they help us organize our thoughts and rationalize our world?

Picture 3 is of Utica, NewYork, where another of you lives.

Picture 4 depicts Chappaqua. One of you works there at one of three jobs. The countryside has a more organic transit form, usually following natural contours of hills, valleys and water features.

Figure 5 is of Yorktown Heights, where that person resides.

Image 6 is of Armonk, where that same person goes for a second job.

Picture 7 is Mahopac, the third location of her employment.

Picture 8 is of Cortland Manor, where one of our fellow students moved after living in the Bronx. Clearly there are differences! But how did they affect her behavior?

Picture 9 is of the Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry Campus. I lived most of my life in the Draper Lane apartments across the Mercy Woods from the campus. From this image it is obvious how little of the forest is left since the developers destroyed it to build the Landing and the Fireman's housing.

Picture 11 is one student's home in Poughkeepsie:

Picture 12 is the distance and route that one of our students has to take to get from home (A) just to get to the college bookstore (B)! It appears, at least, to be a scenic drive along the river, but the map gives no indication how bad traffic might be!

A.L.'s new neighborhood, in Coop City, the Bronx where eagles fly by the window:

A.L.s old neighborhood, in Marble Hill. Note that in both cases she has been living in a RIPARIAN environment (a river environment) quite close to the water. Given that most human civilizations evolved by rivers, how might this affect your psychology? Does real estate next to the river command a higher price? Does it appreciate in value faster? How is such real estate doing in today's housing crisis? Why is living next to a river considered by people to be worth paying a premium? When does living next to a river become undesirable?

On leaving the Earth and its Cycles Behind

2008-06-26T01:10:00.000-07:00

January 6, 2005

I reject the natural cycles of biology. And rejecting them may be quintessentially human -- our most defining characteristic.
Our special (speci-al; read "species-all") hallmark is our absence of oestrus and our year-long month-long sexual receptivity (c.f. Jared Diamond's "Why Sex is Fun") shared by almost no other animals in the world. It is hypothesized that our ability (willingness, longing?) to have sex all the time, even when it could be considered wasted effort (in reproductive terms) is an adaptation to maintain and secure the pair bond for the difficult task of rearing a large brained, slow-maturing offspring. Sex keeps the couple together through hard times and ensures fidelity. By rejecting the natural menstrual cycle and seasonal cycle as rulers of sexual activity, humans have been able to evolve to a level of consciousness and intelligence and physical prowess far exceeding the millions of other life forms with whom we share this planet.

I suspect that to continue evolving progressively we must divorce ourselves even further from the cycles of this planet.

In defense of ignoring our environment

Our disdain for recycling and ecology may stem from this "progressive evolutionary instinct." Our world-wide adoption of eschatological religions with linear story lines and our overall rejection of recycling religions (i.e. circular, cyclical religions) may also stem from the same urge. We don't want to be ruled by the ebb and flow, rise and fall, incarnation-decomposition-reincarnation rhythms of this lonely little planet. We don't want to be ruled by the slow trickle of solar radiation and its limited rate of income (or at least capture by fellow life forms who can do 3 % conversion at best). The 10% rule of energy transfer up the trophic levels infuriates us. We want it all and always!

Wearing beards as a recidivist trait

Men shave their beards in "advanced" societies, and enforce their growth in "backward" societies. The Taliban and Bin Ladens of the world are seen as recidivist, anchored by ancient books and old rhythms. Beards are what happen in the 'natural' life and death cycle. Beards show age, reveal experience, signal the transfers of power that occur through the life cycle. We free ourselves from that cycle when we shave, holdingon desperately to our species' special neoteny.

It is said (Desmond Morris, E.O. Wilson, Jared Diamond et al.) that we differ from chimpanzees in that we retain some fetal characteristics into adulthood. It is implied that the genetic switches that make us different from our closest relatives were merely time dilation switches in development (ontogeny) that carried into phylogeny (see Stephen J. Gould ; I think it is in Aldous Huxley's "Ape and Essence" where an idea is put forward that a man allowed to live several hundred years eventually turns into an ape! Or was that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Creeping Man"?)

If we are aware that to be human is to stay young -- to perch perpetually at the starting line, at the opening salvo of every natural cycle in some eternal spring, then it makes sense to rail against every autumn, to fight the winter of our soul, to fight senescence in every way.

We must get out of harmony with "nature".

The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one can not live in a cradle forever."
-Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

William E. Burrows, in "The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth" makes an eloquent case for creating an ARC on the Moon, an archive or "backup drive" of civilization to preserve our history and values for when the earth is impacted by another asteroid collision (or other large magnitude disaster). He goes further in urging us to backup civilization throughout our solar system to increase the odds of this fragile phenomenon -- intelligent life -- surviving the myriad catastrophes that can (and will) occur in our pocket of space.

An argument can be made that just as the moon (and the "moon-strual" cycle) no longer rule our sexual appetites we must lot let the sun (or our orbit around it) rule any of our behavior. Those deadly yearly cycles must be conquered. Very soon we will (by choice or necessity) leave this earth, this moon, this sun. We will abandon this solar system and its infernal, eternal cycles. Our evolution into a space faring civilization demands it. To suggest otherwise is to condemn us (and any intelligent organisms who follow in our footsteps) to extinction. The philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard was quite adamant about this in the arguments he laid out in his "Post-modern Fable".

We will need our individual members to live for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. We will need to delay reproduction for hundreds of years.
AND THIS WILL BE NOTHING NEW!

Conforming to another Fable:

It is recorded in Genesis -- the most widespread creation myth of our species -- that our progenitors lived almost a thousand years (950 in the case of Noah) and often delayed reproduction until many hundreds of years had passed (as many as 500 in Noah's case; his father Lamech had him at 182). This is of course if we take the Bible literally (some who believe in the Bible do not and have other more terrestrial explanations for the numbers)

But taken at face value, longevity and neoteny are in the Bible. (Bible thumpers will be delighted to hear this! So come on religious folk, get behind this space faring initiative!)
According to the Bible (don't you love the implicit authority in that phrase?) we lived for nearly a thousand years when we first came to this planet and our current 120 year "limit" was only imposed on us when we decided to stay and mingle our genes with some of the locals (dying young was partially a punishment for the "the sons of God" interbreeding with the "daughters of men" -- this allegedly angered God).

Well, now that we are leaving, we no longer need the limit.

Being adapted to the Earth and its cycles can be seen as the curse we inherited when we left Eden (clearly a land without cycles of life and death, birth and senescence, predators and prey, winter and summer) and mingled space-faring genes with planet-bound genes. We must now decouple ourselves from this planet's rhythms if we are to gain purchase in space.

I use biblical fables metaphorically, but I wouldn't be the first person to connect the influence of the Genesis myth to our attitudes toward our environment and role in it. UCLA History Professor Lynne White Jr. wrote The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis in Science 155: 1203-1207.

As Eric Doyle argues in "Ecology and the Canticle of Brother Sun" ( an analysis of St. Francis of Assissi's "Canticle of Brother Sun" and how Franciscan thinking can be used to help us deal with our ecological crisis),

"In an article published in March 1967, Professor Lynn White of the University of California, argued that the historical roots of the ecological crisis can be traced to the traditional Christian view of man’s dominion over nature.’ Professor White maintained that because the roots of the trouble are largely religious, the remedy must be essentially religious".(p. 392)

Turning to Genesis and other long-preserved creation myths is not an untenable way to mobilize humankind toward measures that would preserve creation, and Burrow's idea of creating a (Noah's) Archive of civilization and the living heritage of the Earth in space is not without precedent in our religious history.

What is complex about using religion and eschatology to deal with our ecological predicament is that it involves so many contradictions, chief among them the question of whether we should be trying to adapt to the earth and its limitations or transcend them. And if we attempt to transcend, what becomes of the other life forms with whom we share this planet?

One argument says,

"Hooray for the indifference of people to their environment! Bravo if you disdain "nature" per se! You are ready to blast off this earth!"

I am no environmentalist. I am a space man.

I was born a year after the Russians put the first man in space and watched the first man walk on the moon in the Summer of '69 when I was in the second grade. My view of the earth was always the one looking down FROM space -- put that image in a child's head when he is little and it is hard not to think of oneself as separate from the home planet. The famous "earth from space" image reproduced in thousands of books and posters cannot help but give us the feeling that we are aliens, for when we learned Geography and Geology in School we were introduced to the 3rd Rock from the Sun the way an extra-terrestrial child would be - from outside. That's how I grew up.

As a space-man, I want to understand each planet I visit and know what resources there can sustain us. But like any good traveler and conscientious visitor or polite houseguest I want to leave the resource cycles of each place intact so that it will still be here next time I visit and will be available to other visitors (utilitarian argument) and because it has its own intrinsic worth (spiritual argument).

In my space capsule it is like being in the garden of Eden from which I came. It is a land of perpetual spring where I am forever young.

I frolic and play and carry on like an eternal child.

My wife Sybille has a recurrent dream that is perhaps about the same theme. In her dream she is running on a track and her mother insists she leave the race and come sit and drink tea with her. She does so, but is upset and annoyed. As well she should be. In the extended neoteny hypothesis it should be the elders who join us on the track not the other way around. They should not be allowed to drag us into their earthly grave, slow us down, force us to adapt to their rhythms of decay. We reject our elders because they want us to stop running, to change phase, to "grow up". They want us to fulfill their expectations that we reproduce their departing genes because they have no faith that there is anywhere else to go. They are stuck on earth. They are preachers of stagnation. And as long as we are merely "running around in circles" (as Sybille is when she runs on the race track) what argument do we have?

But when we are racing for the stars, all this will change.

No more stopping for the "long dark tea-time of the soul". No more "pause that refreshes" -- no quittin' time for dying and recycling. We are taking our CHON (our CHON'PS -- so as not to forget the Phosphorous and Sulfur) off this "God forsaken little planet". It will be a net drain on resources, but don't worry those of you who choose to remain behind; the next meteor strike or asteroid collision will return plenty!

The Great Leap Forward

All of this will become clear when humanity discovers evidence of astrobiology - of extraterrestrial life. It should have happened on January 14th 2005 (8 days from when this essay was first written) with the first surface probe of Titan, the moon of Saturn, but all we got were confirmations of hydrocarbon seas. It could happen any day now with the results of the Phoenix lander's analysis of Martian soil. But so far all we have are confirmations of water ice.
Recently we have learned that the building blocks of DNA are of extraterrestrial origin.

Once we do confirm exobiology - life out there -- the race to space will begin in earnest.

The human genome project (and the genome projects of other species), along with stem cell research, will give our neotonic tendencies their due. We will achieve relative "immortality". God will speak to those who have ears to hear ("you are close to the tree of life -- now go reclaim Eden"). And we will move out in the journey of a thousand years.

By the year 3000 we should no longer be reckoning by years, which are silly solar revolutions, and will reckon time in linear, not circular distances.

No more cycles.

Men and women will choose reproduction without ovulation -- sex will be a form of play, keeping people bonded for the long and challenging journey ahead.

We have been working through the consequences of consequence-free sex for 30 years or more. Stuck on Earth it wreaked emotional and social havoc, but in space, until our worlds are bigger than a tin can, it will serve us well.

We had to go through "overpopulation" (and deliberate migration to cramped apartments in unnatural settings) to get adjusted to the challenges of space travel, or at least this is what our descendants will claim in hindsight. What does it matter if it is true or not? Did the hand know that it was "meant" to evolve into the chiropteran wing of the bat? Would it ever admit it? Yet if bats could speak they would claim they had to have hands at some point in their evolution in order to have wings. The insects among you will disagree, but the birds will chirp in their teleological approval, more or less!)

The Muslim Spacemen will claim Ramadan was an exercise to help decouple us from the daily cycles of consumption and that God knew that we needed the discipline of fasting to make the journey through the vast desert in the sky.

Christian spacemen of Catholic origin will claim a 40 day Lent necessary for crossing interstellar resource-poor spaces.

Etc.

We are preparing for a journey.

So back to our species' unique sexual problems:

In space, the female cannot dictate the the amount of sexual activity based on her "cycles". If she did, we would only have sex in the fall or early winter (in seasonal climates) or 9 months away from the most favorable times of the year for child birth and survival. When we did come together it would be like it is for other animals -- only for three days during the month. But in extra-terrestrial space there are no seasons, no days or nights, no calendars to reckon things by.

We may have started that out behaving like most other animals, but apparently the human male didn't conform to the usual pattern for very long. Almost all other animal males simply lose interest in their females during the times they aren't receptive, and many actively avoid them.

In the classic Red Deer of Rum studies done by TH Clutton Brock et al. they talked about "Sexually antagonistic genetic variation for fitness in red deer (Nature, 447: 1107-1110. [PDF]); In his seminal 1982 book "Red deer: Behaviour and ecology of two sexes" (University of Chicago Press, Chicago) TH Cluton Brock made the argument that for many mammals males and females are, for all intents and purposes, two different species for most of the year (in terms of behavior and niche exploitation).

When I was at Harvard, Professor Mark Leighton gave all of us in Biological Anthropology a host of examples of primates that show similar divergence between the sexes in their behavioral ecology. In species that maintain the sex drive for most of the year, when many males find their mates unreceptive but there are other receptive females in the population, they simply choose another sex partner. Therein begins the patterns of promiscuity that so upset those of us with big brains, long memories and the ability to feel jealousy.

Animals (like Gibbons and many bird species) that face resource constraints (where resources are patchy in distribution and need defense) tend to evolve monogamy.

Human males who maintained monogamy in resource challenged areas (for example during migrations), usually facing conditions where other females weren't available, pressed for extended receptivity in their mates. Female mutants who had the trait for ever-present desire obviously out-competed their more reticent competitors, hung on to their males for longer periods of time, earned their mate's devotion and secured their defense and resource provision, and thus passed on the trait to more offspring.

We ended up evolving the largest brained creature on the planet (relative to body mass), changing the biology of the species, and making the males and females of our species more similar than most others.

Monogamy and constant sex within the pair bond are the hallmark of our evolution. To get back in sync with female bio-rhythms is to make a major step backwards. It forces men to at least "think" promiscuously (coveting neighbor's wives, for example, and committing "adultery in the heart" if not de facto), it weakens the pair bond and degenerates us (literally, back to genetic patterns of our distant ancestors).

Simply look at the standard behavior pattern: Boy and Girl meet, get attracted and excited, have constant sex on a many-times daily basis until Girl gets pregnant. After childbirth, when the female is receptive again, the cycle begins anew. Eventually the couple reaches its reproductive limit. They continue to engage in intimate behavior to keep the pair bond strong for the duration of child rearing. Once all the children have been weaned and there is no evolutionary pressure to stay together, the sex life of most couples begins to wane (in many cases a loss of interest in sex can happen much earlier; allegedly it is the female who loses interest in constant sex, having passed through that seasonal biological phase of the cycle). Without sex, the relationship usually starts to get tense, fights break out without the irrational salve of ecstasy to bring the pair back together, and pretty soon the couple either break up or lose their ability to cooperate effectively. Old age and a decrease in the hormones of libido are often to blame for a decrease in sexual interest, but there is also the disease of senescence which erases secondary sex characteristics and their ability to stimulate. Unfortunately the female is the one to suffer the most from discrimination that results from this, as many older men begin to seek sexual companionship from "younger women", often causing much suffering in their former mates (as we all know, in a male dominated society, the men, who may well have lost their sex appeal, trade status, power and wealth -- i.e. resources -- for sexual gratification).

Either way we, as a species, must face up to the effect sex has on our ability to get along and the effects of aging on sex. And we must wonder what our libidinous tendencies will do to our prospects for survival in a changing environment.

When we start gong into space in earnest and cannot use procreation as our excuse for sex during long journeys (wherein having an increasing population would create severe resource problems), couples will need to be completely free of cyclical thinking in order to maintain harmony. They will have to be free of cycles that go beyond ignoring outdated concepts like "day and night" and "spring and autumn" and equally ignore ideas like "the spring of youth" and "the autumn of our lives". In journeys that will last hundreds to thousands of years, our attitudes toward age and the feeling that "for everything there is a time and a season" will have to be reconsidered, and probably re-engineered. Along with our bodies.

We will have to forget about Nature and stop behaving according to our "nature" -- the human nature that evolved in harmony with the cycles and rhythms of the Planet Earth.

In fact everything we did and all the traits we evolved during our relatively short tenure on the planet Earth (ca 100,000 years?) to stay adapted to our relatively unchanging environment (+/- a few ice ages) will have to be reconsidered in the light of the challenges we will face in outer space. They will also have to be reconsidered in light of the challenges we will face as the earth's environment changes so quickly and radically (due to both anthropogenic and non-human causes).

Either way, we will have to think about what pieces of human nature to preserve and which to discard.

I think it is time we started a serious global dialog about this. The Environment is Changing and with it the Psychology of Our Behavior.

Technophobia

2008-02-26T14:03:00.000-08:00

Here is a passage from "Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema" (Edited by Annette Kuhn) that leads a chapter called "Technophobia" by Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner:

"Science fiction films concerning fears of machines or of technology usually negatively affirm such social values as freedom, individualism, and the family. In the 1970s films, technology was frequently a metaphor for everything that threatened 'natural' social arrangements, and conservative values associated with nature were generally mobilized as antidotes to that threat. But technophobic films are also the site where the metaphor of nature which sustains those values can be most saliently deconstructed. From a conservative perspective, technology represents artifice as oppsed to nature, the mechanical as opposed to the spontaneous, the regulated as opposed to the free, an equalizer as opposed to a promoter of individual distinction, equality triumphant as opposed to liberty, democratic levelling as opposed to hierarchy derived from individual superiority. Most important for the conservative individualistic critique, it represents modernity, the triumph of radical change over traditional social institutions. Those institutions are legitimated by being endowed with the aura of nature, and technology represents the possiblity that nature might be reconstructable, not the bedrock of unchanging authority that conservative discourse requires. Indeed, as the figure for artificial construction, technology represents the possibility that such discursive figures as 'nature' (and the ideal of free immediacy that it connotes) might merely be constructs, artificial devices, metaphors designed to legitimate inequality by positing a false ground of authority for unjust social institutions.

" The significance of technology thus exceeds simple questions of mechanics. It is usually a crucial ideological figure. Indeed, as the possibility of reconstructing institutions conservatives declare to be part of nature, technology represents everything that threatens the grounding of conservative social authority and everything that ideology is designed to neutralize. It should not be surprising, then, that this era should witness the development of a strain of films that portray technology negatively, usually from a conservative perspective."(pp. 58-59)

It should also not be surprising that authoritarian regimes dominate in "backwards countries" and that dictatorships suppress the introduction of and mass education of technological foundations.

Narrative themes as driving factors in people's behavior

2007-11-24T03:18:00.000-08:00

Dr. Hind Rassam Culhane, psychology professor and chair of the Social Sciences department at Mercy College (a.k.a. my mother) sent me an article from the New York Times (May 22, 2007) called "This is Your Life (and How You Tell It) by Benedict Carey. It has resonance for this course, so I thought I should link you to it and put its conclusions into perspective for "Environment and the Psychology of Behavior".

The upshot of the article (which draws for Dan McAdams 2006 book "The Redemptive Self" is that narrative themes (some of them claimed to be distinctly "American" such as narratives of "emancipation or atonement, of Horatio Alger advancement, of epiphany and second chances") have a profound effect on how we cope with our environments and their challenges. Narrative themes, suggests McAdams, "guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future".

The article quotes research that confirms something we have talked about in this course: that facts are better remembered when constructed into a storyline, and that the storyline imbues those facts with meaning that can drastically affect how we interpret and use the facts.
"Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction" says Carey, echoing something we learned at Harvard freshman year when discussing Carl Sagan's "Dragon's of Eden": human brains are pattern generators. We see patterns in nature, even when they are technically absent (as in the constellations of the stars and the shapes we see in clouds); these patterns are organized into stories (Astrology is full of them) and we use these story narrative "tropes" (see Hayden White's 1978 "Tropics of Discourse" for more on this) to frame how we should behave.

None of this is new, but as usual in science, it is worth noting when research begins to statistically confirm our assumptions. (One might even lament the burden of the scientist in having to confirm what is to many obvious; Daniel Kehlmann has Alexander von Humboldt do exactly that on page 250 of his excellent docudramatic historical fiction "Measuring the World":

"Hastily Humboldt assured him that he had only said one should not overestimate the achievements of a scientist, a researcher was not a creator, he didn't invent anything, he didn't conquer lands, he didn't produce bounty, he neither sowed nor did he reap, and he would be followed by others, and still others, who would know more and then even more until finally everything was just swallowed up again..." )

I often reflect on this irritating and ego-demolishing truth as I continue my survey on hot water demand and use in historic and informal poor communities in Cairo -- how many hundreds of rat infested, crumbling, garbage filled households must I interview simply to prove with statistical rigor that the urban poor are suffering from the lack of environmental amenities that every human should have to be able to progress? But this is how science works -- relentless, slow and exacting.

And here I can link the two projects together -- my thesis and the article by Benedict Carey:
I think that a large part of the problem in development, and a crucial explanatory factor as to why the urban poor are suffering so much, is that they are victims of a debilitating narrative trope. While my own research is too limited to take note of the stories my subjects tell of themselves (I am doing a micro-economic survey in Urban Planning, not a psychological study of the participants), I am quite sure that if somebody were to follow up on my research they would find that many among the urban poor, particularly in Cairo and generally in third world countries, lack a coherent story that points toward victory in their struggle for well-being.

This I cannot prove statistically with my research, but anecdotally it is becoming clear that the urban poor of Cairo (and I saw it among the urban poor of Los Angeles during the decade I spent working there, and among the urban poor of Guatemala and Indonesia whom I worked with for the better part of another decade) have a story they tell about themselves that puts them invariably in the first person, as victims of moods and behavior problems that have become interpreted "as part of their own behavior, rather than a villain to be defeated... to them, therapy [is] part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle" (Carey, page 3). If Carey's interpretation of the Jonathan Adler's psychology studies (presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology) is correct, when people frame their story as "one of victorious battle" ( ' I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own' says Adler), they tend to do better at overcoming adversity.

So what has happened to the Egyptians? You can read the economist Galil Amin's excellent books "Whatever Happened to the Egyptians" and "Whatever Else Happened to the Egyptians", and get a historical perspective, then add to it Adler's insights (quoted in Carey): "so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption" rather than otherwise good "scenes usually tainted by some dark detail."

In my view what has happened to the urban poor is that the fight has been knocked out of them. Their civic leaders and reformers, they are taught from a young age, were all killed, imprisoned, exiled or humiliated. The true Jihad -- the fight to conquer one's inner demons and emerge victorious as a civic-minded citizen -- has been warped and rewritten as a narrative about doing violence to "outside demons". In this way the poor face only two uncomfortable choices -- wallow in ineffective and self-defeating despair, or join some horrible movement where terror is the only outlet available to make your story be heard. Neither are palatable to the majority, but slipping into self-defeat is much easier, and a gentler way to go down. Most people, particularly in the slums, prefer and take the gentler path, despite everything you see and read in the media.

So how do we put the pluck back into people so that they can take care of themselves and pull themselves out of poverty?

I think that we must truly consider how narrative themes drive people's behavior toward their environmental challenges. I think we must consider that narrative themes, or tropes ARE part of the environment. And we must work to help people reconstruct those narratives so that they can tell stories about themselves that are, in the end, triumphant.

This is why, when I am working with my Zabaleen garbage recycling friends, I introduce them at conferences and to the media as "the heroes of Egypt -- the hopeful giants of the new age of recycling, who can turn one man's garbage into anothers gold". I urge them not to be ashamed to be working in "garbage", and ask that my picture be taken with the pigs in the pig waste, which we will turn into biogas, with the goats who are turning city trash into milk and cheese, with the donkey carts that release no net CO2 into our dangerously warming atmosphere, with the piles of dirty plastic that we are turning into solar hot water collectors.

The story has a happy ending. It is up to us to frame it that way for those who are living it.

The End of Nature, Nature's End, PhotoModeler, Sketchup for Google Earth: How do they relate?

2007-09-20T06:38:00.000-07:00

I am sitting at my desk reading the product tour for a software package called PhotoModeler ("Meauring and Modeling the Real World") and I can't help thinking about a Whitley Streiber/James Kunetka thriller I read years ago called "Nature's End" (Schwarzer Horizont in German) and about how all this relates to Bill McKibben's "The End of Nature" which Professor Susanna Hecht assigned us in our urban planning classes at UCLA back at the turn of the century (did nature end with the millenium?).

If I recall Nature's End properly (I read it at the beginning of the 90's) it begins with hero John Sinclair using 3d modeling/animation/simulation software to reconstruct the many possible paths a crime could have followed so that the jury can decide which seems the most plausible. It would seem that Photomodeler sotware is beginning to be used in exactly this fashion. On their own website Eos Systems, the creator of Photomodeler, states,

" PhotoModeler software is used extensively by police, investigators, and forensics firms worldwide. Using photographs or video images taken at the scene, PhotoModeler helps to extract accurate 3D measurements and models quickly and easily, allowing you to analyze and measure crime and accident scenes long after the incident has taken place! ... PhotoModeler has capabilities to help solve even the most advanced accident reconstruction cases."

What is interesting to me is that Streiber writes books of fiction as "simulations" or "models" of events that either have happened, but where it is difficult to establish the true facts surrounding the events (e.g. alien encounters -- a kind of "accident reconstruction case") or could happen (e.g. the kind of future environmental disasters that formed the basis of the Roland Emmerich film "The Day After Tomorrow, inspired by Whitley Streiber and Art Bell's Prophetic "The Coming Global Superstorm", later novelized by Streiber himself.) But while the "1 dimensional" linear narratives found in books can do a decent job of laying out possible paths in a sequential, or serial fashion, and films can do a nice job of fleshing out those paths with rich graphics, real-time interactive 3D simulations based on actual physics and measurement can create the most compelling cases for any given scenario.

This is where a combination of Photomodeler and Google Earth Sketchup and some as yet unchosen Game Engine (like the Havoc Physics Engine, which is not free, or the Blender Game Engine, which is) can produce the desired outcome suggested by Bill McKibben in "The End of Nature".

In his book McKibben offers us two choices (as Led Zeppelin sang in Stairway to Heaven, "yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run... there's still time to change the road you're on"). McKibben says we can take the path he calls "The Defiant Reflex" using our technology to macromanage and micromanage the environment so as to reduce its negative effects on us as it degrades, or we can take "The Humble Approach" whereby we give up our dream of "control".

The idea behind our Solar Cities Political Ecology Alternate Reality Game is that we should be able to use software like Photomodeler, Sketchup, Google Earth and Blender to create the kind of simulations John Sinclair could use to defeat dangerous fanatics (like Gupta Singh and George W.) and play them out in the court of humanity in front of an international jury of connected minds who can rationally and democratically vote on and thus choose the paths we take into the future.

I personally believe that McKibben's binary logic is flawed and that both "The Defiant Reflex" and "The Humble Approach" can work in tandem. In fact I think that they will see-saw back and forth, as our greater control over and understanding of the political and environmental ecology of the earth help us lose our fear and give us more confidence in devolving some of our control (if not all of it) to the collective intelligence of the God-Earth-Mind system. Call it "Gaia" or call it "Hive Intelligence" or "Swarm Intelligence", or simply call it "The Invisible Hand" tempered with "Moral Sentiments"; the idea is that we didn't create this system, this earth, this universe, it created us, and we can trust it to do its job of creating and nurturing living systems once we understand where it functions and where it fails (for us!) and how to tweak it, when necessary (as all living beings do) , to try and avoid suffering and extinction.

Perhaps "The Defiant Path" will lead inexorably to "The Humble Approach", much as Marx predicted that Capitalism was a necessary phase on the journey to communal harmony through an "inevitable" socialism. I think the jury is still out on that -- but of course all of these eschatological theories contain deep epistemological flaws in that they all involve definitive "end points" -- a flaw echoed in book titles such as "The End of Nature" and "Nature's End", to say nothing of Fukuyama's "The End of History".

The point today, class, is that a tool such as Photomodeler, and other technologies that let anybody, anywhere easily reconstruct the past or make predictions of the future based on easily obtainable physical evidence in the present, CAN be used for social and environmental good, if we will only orient our thinking that way, and contribute actively to the collective task at hand.

"Avatars are really just points of view made flesh"...

2007-09-19T09:19:00.000-07:00

Interacting in Google Earth: Creating a "Political Ecology Alternate Reality Game" -- The Sky's the Limit!

2007-09-19T03:11:00.000-07:00

"Good morning class! It's a bright sunny day with a mild breeze here in Essen, Germany; perfect for taking a run down by the Baldeneye See. I would love to show you the locks along the river that have made transporting goods so cost efficient for the past couple of centuries that "land-locked" areas like Westphalia have been able to prosper long before the Autobahn and other highway systems transformed our landscape and environment.

"Of course, this is an on-line course and you are in places as far away as Texas and North Carolina and Dobbs Ferry, New York, and I don't have time to put together a video for the class like I did when we visited the Zeche Zollverein coal mine to discuss how air quality has affected psychology since Germany switched to natural gas.

"So what to do? We talked at the beginning of the class about using Second Life as a way to meet and explore environments in 3 Dimensions and interact in real time. The problem, of course, is that Second Life is a fictitious environment, so while it offers many simulation possibilities, it can't help us with historical or contemporary spatial geography.

"Now, however, in researching ways to create our "Political Ecology Alternate Reality Game", I have stumbled upon the good news that we may soon be able to use Google Earth as our "realistic" version of Second Life.

First, there was the discovery that Google Earth already has a built in flight-simulator. Type Ctrl + Alt + A (Win) or Open Apple Key-option-A (Mac) and you can choose between F16 fighter plane or an SR22 Propellor plane. Then you can select any airport in the world for your take-offs and landings, or start in the air and fly anywhere on the known earth from right above your favorite location. With so many Google Sketchup models beginning to turn Google Earth into a truly 3D landscape, Google Earth is quickly becoming the best flight simulation game out there! Marco Gallota gives great examples and pics on his blog.
Folks reacting to Marco's enthusiasm on Digg.com have predicted that we will soon be able to use Google Earth as a hyper realistic virtual gaming environment, replete with user controllable avatars. This would be perfect for the development of our "serious" gaming -- the Solar Cities Political Ecology ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that was inspired by Buckminster Fuller's World Game.

There are already tools that are making more personal interaction with Google Earth possible. One that I downloaded last night, called "Unype" , created by (and you will like this as Mercy College students!) New York's own Murat Aktihanoglu. Murat is not affiliated with Google but offers his excellent program for free in the best cyberpunk spirit (remember the cyberpunk motto is "information longs to be free!"). Clearly Murat is an aficianado of Neil Stephenson's seminal novel "Snow Crash" (which inspired Second Life) as the avatar he created for Unype in Google Earth for his tutorial is named "Hiro Protagonist"!

Murat's brilliant program allows a "multi-user Google Earth Environment" and works in tandem with Facebook and Skype. When you launch these three programs simultaneously, the Keyhole Mark Up language file generated (yes, that is what .KML really means, in case you forgot -- though I have encouraged you to think of it as a "coordinate markup language") lets you see where your facebook friends are in Google Earth, lets you coordinate your actions via Skype (here is the tutorial) and moves your avatar around their Google Earth (and vice versa) as you explore Google Earth locations on your screen. That way you can follow people down paths and yes, I could take you on a tour of the Locks in the Baldeneysee river!

Due to limitations in the Google API (not in Unype allegedly) the avatars are static 3D meshes (no moving feet or arms or faces, but fully skinned and texture mapped) and they don't move freely -- there is a lag, so they kind of "hop" around the screen every few seconds as you move your cursor. It ends up feeling a bit like playing a protracted game of chess.

In time, however, we can expect the Google API to improve once they see how useful Mr. Aktihanoglu's app is (we know from on-line gaming that bandwidth is not necessarily the issue).

How soon can we expect Google Earth to take on the true characteristics of an on-line game experience and thus be useful for creating our Political Ecology ARG? Rumors are flying, but there is a hopeful site with encouraging news called Ogle Earth that keeps you updated about all developments in virtual earth technology. They inform us that Google Earth is already working with Chinese developers to come up with true avatars for Google Earth, and that part of what is driving this seems to be healthy competition with Bill Gates' Virtual Earth technology.

Apparently everybody wants to make a real world version of Second Life that lets virtual shopping interface with real shopping (try it, then buy it). Our hope in this Environment and the Psychology of Behavior class, and at Solar Cities, is that the potential of using these GUI's for social and environmental justice is not lost on the developer community! Bill and Melinda Gate's foundation does great things in Africa, for example, and with the advent of the "hundred dollar laptop" -- IF the computer designers to skimp on the processing power -- it should be possible for even the poorest among us to participate in the redesign and improvement of our communites.

In a few weeks, when I have finished creating some of the buildings and "green technologies" for the slums of Cairo, you will be able to download the .KMZ files (zipped forms of .KML files) of our field work locations from solarcities.eu (which is very much still under construction) and install Unype and Skype and register on Facebook and we will take a "class field trip" to the poorest sections of Cairo, Egypt, and take a look at our development efforts in Darb El Ahmar with the Muslim craftspeople community of Medieval Cairo and Manshiyat Nasser with Coptic Christian Zabaleen garbage recycling community.

From this tour (an analogue in virtual reality of the tour we took Professor Randall Crane and his 25 graduate students of Urban Planning from UCLA last year) you may find yourself inspired to come and work with us or to contribute some of your ideas for sustainable development on-line.

The idea, of course, is to turn Game Development into a vehicle for Sustainable Development!

And now, with Google Sky giving us the possibility to actually leave the Earth and explore the heavens, we may even be able to further Pat Friedrich's excellent class project, and virtually terraform Mars!

It seems that as we develop our political ecology Alternate Reality game using Google Earth, the Sky's the limit!!

The Solar Cities ARG concept

2007-09-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

Solar Cities: Founders: T.H. Culhane (California, New York, Iraq, Egypt, Germany) Dr. Sybille Frütel Culhane (Germany, Iraq, Egypt), Board of Directors: Andy Posner(California, Rhode Island, Russia), Michelle Finnel (America), Ahmed Khalifa (Egypt, Germany, Kenya), Neda Pouryekta (Iran, Germany, Kenya) , Frank DiMassa (Italy, Northern California)

(Note: This page gives you access to the .KMZ files we are creating for Darb El Ahmar and Manshiyat Nasser's Solar Cities ARG project (described below). For access to Google 3D Warehouse components useful in making your own solar city, click here.)

It all started in 1961, the year Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to leave the gravity well of earth and went into space. Buckminster Fuller proposed the creation of The World Game" (a.k.a. "The World Peace Game") as the core curriculum for Souther Illinois University.
Bucky's visionary idea was ""make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone."
The idea behind Fuller's World Game was to find an alternative to War Games (already being modeled on computers by specialists isolated from the public) and put our collective intelligence to use for social and environmental welfare.

Finally the technology has caught up with Buckminster Fuller's vision. Our idea at Solar Cities is for enthusiasts of sustainable development and renewable energy to help create our part of the game, and make it competitive not only with military planner's War Games, but with all the time-consuming video games siphoning off so much of the publics' problem solving genius.

Our goal is not to replicate the great work being done elsewhere, but to enhance and extend it by creating game modules dealing specifically with the local microeconomic realities and individual and household needs issues pertaining to the communities in which we work.
It is hoped that others will jump on board, mod and model such games for their neighborhoods and areas of interest, and that little by little we will fill in the gaps.
This section, very much under construction, will allow visitors to access .kml files (archived as zipped .kmz files) that can be used with Google Earth.
The goal is to work together to create a unique data visualization tool for the areas where Solar Cities is working so that local citizens, planners, policy makers and global participants can envision and virtually experience the current urban Cairo environment (circa 2007), propose and make necessary and desired changes, simulate, view and even role play the results, and then make recommendations for real world changes.

Ultimately we hope that this site will act as a kind of "WIKI" for sustainable development. We hope to create an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) in which participants use their collective intelligence to solve real world problems.
The "game" would combine familiar elements of SimCity4 and The Sims 2 but would use the simulations merely to model and role play alternate realities that that, once agreed upon, could be truly implemented.

The hook of the game would be that "the system" or "the machine" would be programmed with A.I. following the logic of the dominant modernist, capitalist paradigm that seems to drive so much of the real economy.

"Players" would get to pit themselves against "the machine" or "the system", struggling to introduce a post-modern ("both-and" as opposed to "either-or") and post-capitalist ("profit is no longer a zero-sum game") paradigm that the A.I. avatars (and possibly other real life players) would find antithetical to their worldview.

The A.I. in the game would endeavor to vigorously fight any moves toward "sustainable development" and "environmental and social justice" that upset the status quo.

Players would have to negotiate their way around hostile agents representing industry, government, local and international business, and threatened community members.

Winning the game would involve working toward win-win situations that satisfy both the "idealists" playing the game, and the programmed paradigm posing as "realism".

The first step in this game is developing the game itself. To do so, we first have to create a digital, 3D Darb-Al Ahmar Muslim Craftsperson community and Manshiyat Nasser Zabaleen Christian Community.

This virtual community needs real household attribute data -- all the socioeconomic indicators (poverty level, income, infrastructure, access to credit, family size, gender distribution etc.) that would allow us to model a faithful representation of the actual communities.

An interface needs to be designed that allows for friendly data visualization (see SimCity 4 for some ideas).

Once we have created the community AS IT IS, with reliable data, we then need to develop a game engine that allows us to interact with and manipulate variables in the community.

The game data would have to be updatable as real changes occur in the real community.

Players would try to introduce and create renewable energy technologies, training centers, workshops, small business opportunities and the like (as in The Sims 2 "Open For Business" expansion pack), and see how these things affect the community when played out.

Ideas that game out as producing "Pareto Optimality" would be shared by players with real life planners and policy makers.

Ideas that seem to cause too much conflict and disruptions would be red-flagged and saved for analysis to get better ideas of why given attempts to improve the community don't work.

While all of this is very ambitious, the first stage would be simply creating KML files for use with Google Earth that allow the overlay of 3D architecture, photographs and attribute tables of local infrastructure and demographic information.

As a first step, and an invitation for others to get involved, I am posting my progressively evolving KML files here:

Click here to download Solar Cities first attempt to create buildings with solar panels in Google Sketchup

This file is only 186 KB

Click here to download the KMZ file of Solar Cities first attempts to map infrastructure in Darb El Ahmar

This is a 9 MB file that has two CAD base maps created by the AKTC showing water and electric services, with Google Earth pins (posts) making them clickable in Google Earh.

Using these files is very simple. Simply download the .kmz files, double click on them and they should launch Google Earth and take you right to the location. Alternately, you can download the files in a folder, then click and drag them into the left sidebar in Google Earth.

Here is a first attempt at creating a 3D view of Building 72 with the home built solar hot water system on top.
The view is looking from Darb Al Ahmar West to Al Azhar park and you can see the Muqattam Hills in the background.

Here is a crowded view of the data from above:

Here is a closeup of the map with overlays:

What is needed now are posts showing the building numbers, so we can tie (geocode) survey information with real locations.

If you have map data about innercity Cairo you would like to contribute to this project, please contact us at thculhane@gmail.com

The Last Mimzy: Connecting to Future Environments

2007-09-14T02:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my wife was in a funk after reading Der Spiegel -- Germany's version of Time or Newsweek magazine. She was legitimately worried about the future of our world and there was nothing I could say that would banish the fears that so many articles on military interventionism, weapons buildup, terrorism, police-state security techniques, climate change, biodiversity extinction, nuclear reactor building and other horror stories force our psyches to well up.

We looked at pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope in The Universe: 365 Days by Nemiroff and Bonnell to gain some perspective. Then we sang Monty Python's "The Universe Song" from The Meaning of Life, and that helped just a bit (here are the lyrics in case you have forgotten:

THE UNIVERSE SONG, from Monty Python's THE MEANING OF LIFE

"Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, and things seem hard
or tough.
and people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
and you feel that you've had quite enouuuuuuuuugh...

Just
re-
member that your standing on a planet that's evolving,
and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour...
That's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned,
the sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day.
in an outer spiral-arm at forty thousand miles an hour
of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars,
it's a hundred thousand lightyears side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand lightyears thick,
but out by us it's just three thousand lightyears wide.
We're thirty thousand lightyears from galactic central point,
we go 'round every two hundred million years.
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions,
in this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whiz.
As fast as it can go, that's the speed of light you know;
twelve million miles a minute, that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when your feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'cause there's bugger-all down here on earth!"

That kind of cheered us up for about 10 minutes, and then we listened to Harry Nilsson's heart wrenching version of John Lennon's song "Isolation":

"People say we got it made don't they know we're so afriad
Isolation
we're afraid to be alone, everbody got to have a home
Isolation

Just a boy and a little girl
trying to change the whole wide world
Isolation

All the world is a little town
everybody trying to put us down
Isolation

I don't expect you to understand
after you caused so much pain
But the again you're not to blame
your just a human, a victim of the insane

We're afraid of everyone, afraid of the sun
Isolation

The Sun will never disappear
but the world my not have many years
Isolation"

Again we found some comfort in the perpective that we are just mere humans, victims of the insane, and it is fear that makes us make such big mistakes, and isolation that keeps us from using our collective intelligence to make things better.

And Lennon was right: we are afraid of the sun. Afraid of the Urspring of all life on earth. Afraid of the ultimate source of energy that, if properly utilized, could get us safely out of this fossil fuel and nuclear fuel melodrama that taints our would-be, could-be technotopia. (He was wrong, of course, that the Sun will never disappear, but one can take poetic liscence with the term "never" when the time line is on the order of billions of years...)

Still, the songs and the photo tour of the universe weren't enough to improve our psychology. What we needed was an immersion experience in an environment that could stimulate more of our senses and stitch the inputs together into a narrative that would create a feeling of lasting hope.

Thus we found ourselves at the Cinemaxx in Essen in an otherwise completely empty theatre watching the afternoon kidee matinee of "Mimzy, Meine Freunde aus der Zukunft" (English title: "The Last Mimzy").

The premise of the film is that both environmental and cultural schadestoffe (pollutants)are threatening the future of the human race and the only solution is for the people of the 22nd century (or was it later?) to send probes and time-travel communication technology to the early 21st century to get a sample of unadulterated DNA (assumedly mitochondrial as well as nucleus-borne) from a little girl to help heal our distant descendants.

Somehow the film acted as a release trigger for many pent up and frustrated emotions. In the simplicity and innocence of the two child protagonists and their willingness to go out of their way to help unseen future generations we found reason for hope -- hope that maybe the little things we do can have a profound positive effect on the future, and certainly hope that if such a beautiful film embracing cosmic perspectives can be made and released, we are not so alone here today.

In effect the film gave us both a universal perspective and banished our feelings of isolation.

Properly constructed story environments can do that; this is the magic of the film medium.

But when we got back and started thinking about constructing our Environmental ARG (Alternate Reality Game) for connecting the people of today to the possible future environments our children and grandchildren will have to inhabit, we found that the "Mimzy Concept" (people from degraded futures reaching back in time to warn us and seek our help) actually turns out to be the premise of one of the first "serious alternate reality games". Apparently there is a (fictional?) company called "Temporalkinephonics" that (in the game?) is run by former MIT grad students who have invented a type of telephone that spontaneously started receiving "calls" from the future.

The premise of the game, as stated in the "Tomorrow Calling Elevator Pitch" by Jim Wolff and Andrew Sides is that we can further develop Turner and
Morrison's experience (2005) of creating an ARG as a pedagogic tool (see Suit Keen Renovator: alternate reality design, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 123 Proceedings of the second Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment). Tomorrow Calling uses the fictional idea of people from a degraded 2085 world environment trying to contact people in the present to actually help avert climate change and loss of biodiversity and environmental services in the "real world". People can actually "play their way to solutions".

As Wolff and Sides (2007) point out, movies (like The Last Mimzy -- and this would apply to Monty Python's Meaning of Life and songs by our favorite artists) may be great at providing some perspective and emotional discharge, but they are passive experiences and cannot really engage us in meaningful problem solving.

What is needed are experiences where we get to BE the little girl who receives a Mimzy from the future, or to be Mrs. Brown taken on a tour of the vast universe. Instead of living vicariously through a linear narrative depicting the lives of our heroes, we need to become the heroes -- safely and in a controllable environment, however filled with adventure and challenge -- and try out our collective critical thinking skills for problem solving.

Wolf and Sides, with their temporalkinephonics "Tomorrow Calling" narrative, may just be creating such an experience. They hope that the ARG will encourage a greater use of digital earth and data visualization technologies and put them into more common use. The onus then is placed on the rest of us to develop even more such ARGs, and incorporate the Data Visualization tools that Hans Rosling's Gapminder Organization has developed and is making available to the public.

To end this blog, you should know that while the works of art andfiction we treated ourselves to helped give us the courage to face the day, Sybille and I ended the evening by watching the following "real" movie of Hans Rosling demonstrating gapminder technologies. The fact that the REAL DATA shows hopeful future trends, and that it can be seen so dynamically through his animations, is what gave us the real hope that let us sleep peacefully last night.

I encourage you to watch it here:

The Problemis not Ignorance, it is Preconceived Ideas

2007-09-13T14:24:00.000-07:00

Obliged to Play: Using alternate reality games to improve our environments

2007-09-13T12:03:00.000-07:00

As a Biological Anthropology major at Harvard I learned that PLAY was serious business. When I was in high school my father had often quoted Mark Twain as saying "work is anything a body is obliged to do; play is anything a body is not obliged to do", and I took that to heart. But at Harvard, studying sociobiology and evolutionary biology and ethology with E.O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould and Burt Holldobler, among others, I came to learn that large brained animals, in fact, were obliged to play, and that play had evolved and was encoded in our genes (and those of other mammals and of birds; the jury may still be out on fish)because it confers fitness advantages over those animals that do not play.

We know now that play and games among young animals, are serious precursors for survival in the adult stage. They are serious adaptations, so serious in fact, that it can be argued that not playing is maladaptive to the point of being life threatening.

The book "Primates in the Classroom" by J. Gary Bernhard; 1988 (an analysis of the sociobiology that makes most schools so maladaptive) points out that play is important for child development, critical thinking and broad learning, and that the failure of most education systems may be the way they discourage productive play.

Many parents and teachers, by contrast, are concerned about the time their children spend playing "mere games" and today, with the advent of realistic simulations of 3d environments that seem to inspire "obsession" among those who play them, there is deep concern that children are "losing touch with reality" and are somehow being harmed by their desire to "play" in this new medium. After all, if people are spending their time learning to adapt to virtual reality, how well will they fare when faced with the "true reality"?

This may be where ARG's can play a profound role. ARG's are "Alternate Reality Games". They can be distinguished from "mere" virtual reality games in that they make use of all realities and all media that the human animal can perceive and interact with using her five senses.

An ARG makes potential use of computer-based audio, video, text, internet, web and 3D virtual environments, of sms, telephony, television, books, magazine, comic books, films, theater and concert experiences, libraries, local and foreign travel experiences and social networks... in short, every possible medium and environment from which information and experience can be garnered and through which puzzles and problems can be solved, insights discovered and connections made.

I won't go into the history of ARG's except to note with irony that one of the first was apparently a tie-in to the Steven Spielberg film "A.I." and the point of the game was to help the fictional robot child find his way home. People around the world became so obsessed with helping the distressed android that they went out of their way to engage in collective problem solving with complete strangers.

Today, with the gap between the rich and the poor widening and the number of urban homeless people and homeless international refugees fleeing war and environmental devastation, it would be nice to think that we could harness this kind of obsessive energy and turn game playing into the collective construction of a true "alternate reality". Hopefully it would be a better reality.

Since games model the real world and give us a chance to safely role play alternate behaviors in response to simulated environments, it would be advantageous (and adaptive, I believe) if we could use the physics engines and other game developer tools to simulate areas of the world where the poor live and suffer and where their environment has become unliveably degraded, and let people -- both those who "have-not" and those who have the means to help -- role play the difficulties of life in those areas and then collectively work toward alternate reality solutions.

Throughout such a "sustainable development ARG" the "players" could experiment with solutions to intransigent social, political, infrastructural and environmental problems, and then, in order to "win" the game, could vote on the most appropriate and hopeful solutions.

In this way a properly designed "environmental ARG" or "social change ARG" could become a new force in democracy and participatory planning.

My idea is not wholly new nor untested. Already plans are in development for "serious ARGs" (which will hopefully be as fun and engaging to play as they are important) and many of them can be found at the Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Here are a couple of quotes from their site for definition:

"These games (which are usually free to play) often have a specific goal of not only involving the player with the story and/or fictional characters but of connecting them to the real world and to each other. Many game puzzles can be solved only by the collaborative efforts of multiple players, sometimes requiring one or more players to get up from their computers to go outside to find clues or other planted assets in the real world..."...an obsession-inspiring genre that blends real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online community...

"These games are an intensely complicated series of puzzles involving coded Web sites, real-world clues like the newspaper advertisements, phone calls in the middle of the night from game characters and more. That blend of real-world activities and a dramatic storyline has proven irresistible to many."

Wouldn't it be nice if we had a plethora of games out there that taught proper environmental science, technology and development theory, helped us solve the "intensely complicated series of puzzles" involved in protecting biodiversity and ending poverty, and actual became irresistible to many?

One such game is fortunately already under development. It is called "Tomorrow Calling" which challenges players to evaluate what it will be like living in an environmentally challenged world. It is linked to another deep ARG called "World Without Oil" which uses Youtube videos, blogs and personal websites to create an environment of truth telling through the eyes of the everyday citizen as the backdrop for the game. It poses the question "how will we survive in a world without oil". By playing through the game the hope is that we will use our swarm intelligence to find answers.

My wife, Sybille Culhane, and I, T.H. Culhane along with our colleagues Andy Posner and Michelle Finnel, are now working on our own Environmental ARG, to be set primarily in the slums of Cairo Egypt and the jungles of Central America, inviting players to help solve both urban and rural development problems by playing through the deeply imbricated connections between city and countryside.

The first step in our ARG is the creation of 3D virtual environments that model the historic slum neighborhoods and informal settlements of inner city Cairo and the rainforest villages of northern Guatemala, and to that end we are begining to learn Google Sketchup so that we can make these environments available as .kml files to be integrated into Google Earth. On these kml maps we are beggining to plot infrastructure information, such as the presence or absence of water pipes, electric substations and transformers, renewable energy systems, rooftop gardens, sewage connections and treatment plants, and microeconomic data such as preference information on the demand for hot water, solar thermal systems, photovoltaics, and other public and private goods that policy makers could help provide better access to if they knew what was going on at the household level.

The game, ultimately connected with a fully immersive and interactive experience (perhaps built as a Half-Life Mod using the Havoc Physics Engine?) would theoretically take you into the houses and huts and give you the chance to interact with the people and learn their needs and difficulties. Armed with this knowledge the game would then allow you and others to mod the environment, much as one does in The Sims 2 and SimCity 4, and see if you can help make these parts of the world better.

One of the goals of the project is to take advantage of and introduce new Data Visualization Tools that finally are making it easier to wrap our minds around difficult concepts and the significance of large and complex data sets. In particular we are inspired by the tools Hans Rosling presenting at the TED conference in a paper called "Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen".

At this point we are in the planning stages, and we invite any students, professors or other citizens of our global commonwealth to participate!

1008 - 1037 Responses to student improvements and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, i.e. DON'T PANIC !

2007-09-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

Message no. 1008[Branch from no. 952] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:37pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary

Indeed Daniella, Architecture is a powerful tool to control the mind as you have said. Read about the work of the architect known as LE CORBUSIER and you will see how he wanted to use architecture to control the public. His style is still used to that effect today, and many people find it hideous (although his original work was rather inspired!).

Le Corbusier's most famous line is "A House is a Machine to Live in" -- he would have never understood your mother's love of the baked clay look of the paint in her room -- he would have prefered a dining room that got people to efficiently consume their nutrients as quickly as possible and then get back to work. His attitude made a lot of cafeteria designers go for ugly functionalism that creates a higher turn over.

Nice summary!

Message no. 1010[Branch from no. 964] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:40pm Subject: Re: summary

Glad to see how a personal experience with the correctional system has influenced your thoughts about utopia. I also now feel that we must eliminate abuse from all systems -- punishment is not a way to prevent crime, in fact it breeds it!

Message no. 1026[Branch from no. 1013] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 5:25am Subject: Re: chapter 7-janita

That is so true Danilea, and the trick of learning and giving yourself a powerful education as a life long learner is to find a way to relate EVERYTHING to your own life history. It seems hard at first (what is my relationship to statistical mechanics, or stained glass making, for example?) but it turns out that if you dig a little bit, you will find you are related to everything.

Personally I believe this is because we are all the creation of the one and only loving God, and thus we are all connected. Learning is about finding those connections.

As written in THE HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY:

"...since every piece of matter in the Universe is in someway affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every Galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake."

You may also be familiar with the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" which shows that we are all connected to everybody else by an average of six other people (six degrees of separation). This also applies to every TOPIC in the world. Once you find your connection, away you go! You can write, muse, talk for hours....

It is all about relating to yourself, isn't it?

Glad you have made that discovery!

Message no. 1027[Branch from no. 1014] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 5:34am Subject: Re: Summary

Your story about the effect of changing the conditions of the bar you worked in are inspiring! I will use this anecdote in my future discussions about how environment affects behavior. Thanks for that incredible piece of evidence!

That is what makes these relational summaries so valuable -- you add your own data to an ever growing pool of data that can be used to make society a better place! You see, you can make a real difference, just by reporting your experiences in a context.

Now you may get an idea for why I conduct the course the way I do -- I am doing research, and your relational summaries are, in effect, survey responses. The "questions" in my survey are the topics in the chapters, the answers are what you report about your experiences. This way the entire class acts as a giant laboratory for environment and the psychology of behavior! I have learned, from you guys, how changing the atmosphere of a bar affects business, about how chaning the environment in a hospital or old age home affects the people within them etc...

Thanks!

Message no. 1028[Branch from no. 987] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 5:47am Subject: Re: relational summary

Keep turning those lights off Daniela!! I do the same thing! It is an ethic we must all adopt! And I loved your story about the ticket for the Chicken McNuggets litter -- I will tell this to people here in Cairo. The other night, just outside the McDonald's drive through, a man and his friends were about to throw their entire bag of trash out the window at my feet. I glared at the man and he thought better of it. So instead he drove a hundred feet down the road, then stopped and threw the whole bag into a garden and then sped off! Wish I had the ability to write a ticket, or that the police (who were standing right there doing nothing, as usual) cared!

In fact, Egypt could raise a lot of money fining polluters and litterers!

Thanks for the insights in your summary!

Message no. 1037[Branch from no. 1032] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 4:14pm Subject: Re: Chapter 2 redo-

This was great Janita! I really enjoyed how you linked the chapter to the development of your son and to your own dawning awareness of how your behavior impacted others and your environment. Well done!

989 - 1005 Responses to student improvements

2007-09-07T13:15:00.000-07:00

Message no. 989[Branch from no. 986] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, May 17, 2007 4:13pm Subject: Re: Daniela Final Part II

Glad you are enjoying it Daniela!

Your final is almost there. As with Adrienne's I need you now to list, not just summarize, the results of your survey questions along with each person's consumption patterns so we can see what correlates with what. Then your analysis will be more targetted and not just a general summary. In other words, since you suggest that AGE is related somehow to consumption and size of family is too, let us know how old person one and person two and person three etc. are, and let us know the size of their families and all that good stuff. That way we can draw our own conclusions and see if they match yours? Capisce?

A little more detail and we're there Daniela! Go for it!

Good first stab!

Message no. 991[Branch from no. 974] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 18, 2007 5:39am Subject: Re: chap 10- Janita

This summary is one of the best you have posted Janita -- just as you felt connected to the passage in the book, we feel connected to you and your experiences and the psychology of your behavior through your writing about your insights. And that is the point of these relational summaries. If you could insert a bit more of "YOU" into the other summaries, even at this late date, it would make a world of difference and make it easier to grade well. You know, inject a bit of your personality into the other summaries, as you have done this one. The others are so dry -- as if they were mere restatements of what the book said, which we have all read. What we have been interested in in this class is YOU -- how you relate to the ideas in the book, how your personal environment affects your behavior and how you were affected by what you learned! And by the way, having grown up in inner city Chicago on the south side, Playgrounds for me were just as you described them -- safe places where everyone looked after one another and interacted. In fact, even in those times of tension and crime, my parents thought it safe to let us go to the playground alone. As you say times have changed! I agree we should bring the playground standard back to society.

Message no. 1004[Branch from no. 938] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 4:52pm Subject: Re: chapter 3-

Janita -- to get credit for these summaries remember they have to be RELATIONAL -- that is RELATED TO YOUR LIFE AND EXPERIENCES! Otherwise they appear to just be cut and paste factoids from some book or website.

You MUST (and this applies to any of you who have written summaries that are mere summaries, without personal info and without quotes and page numbers so we can SEE what you have copied) go back and insert the personal information and the reference pages and quotes or IT DOESN'T COUNT!!

This is the time to do it ... open all your relational summaries, re-read them and ask yourselves "does this document show others HOW I RELATE TO THE IDEAS IN THE TEXT?"

DO NOT be afraid to be personal. You count. You matter. Your psychology is important. Stop thinking that learning is about facts. It is about how you integrate facts into your daily life. It is about YOU YOU YOU.

No go for it!

Message no. 1005[Branch from no. 939] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:24pm Subject: Re: chapter 5

This is a very good relational summary Janita! It is very much what I am looking for in all of your summaries -- a personal relationship with the material. You know, as a trained nurse, that personal relationships can make all the difference in the life and death of a patient! We need to be personal in our relationship with everything and everyone we touch -- authentic in our engagement.

Thanks for showing me the level of interaction you can achieve with a subject when you feel related to it!

Message no. 1006[Branch from no. 958] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:27pm Subject: Re: chapter 7

Again you have done a nice job on this one Janita, and again I think it is because the topic relates so closely to your nursing experience. It was a pleasure reading about your insights into the trauma nurses suffer doing their job and dealing with disasters! It certainly opened my eyes!

Message no. 1007[Branch from no. 931] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:30pm Subject: Re: Summary

I liked this summary Dana. I realized that I am a "hugger" and wondered about my effect on people who feel invaded by this behavior. I think I am comfortable in the Middle East and Mediterranean cultures because they are very tactile. Strange that I should marry a German though... hmmm...

983 988 nature vs. environment

2007-09-07T13:14:00.001-07:00

Message no. 983[Branch from no. 978] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:37pm Subject: Re: Final pt.2...Varshawn

I like the way you set up your survey Varshawn, with the multiple choice answers. It makes it much easier to formalize and code the data for analysis!

I agree with your conclusions (similar to Adrienne's and Michelles) but don't get too pessimistic -- the turning point is near I think! Reading the book "Critical Mass" by Phillip Ball, which I have mentioned often, convinces me that things will change for the better even without most people being aware!

Anyway, now that you have got your data, just follow the same recommendation I gave Adrienne and Michelle -- list ALL your data so we know which person said what and can correlate it with their consumption, and analyse by pointing those correlations out to us and you have a winner!

Thanks!

Message no. 988[Branch from no. 985] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, May 17, 2007 4:07pm Subject: A job well done!

Consider yourself done with the final Adrienne -- you've done a tremendous A class job! This will set the standard for others to follow.

Looking at your data, I agree that the variables don't seem to have much explanatory value -- in fact the two values that you talk about but which are not specifically in your questionnaire -- income and the lavishness of lifestyle -- seem to have the most explanatory strength -- it does indeed appear that those who have the most money do the most consuming (which makes some sense) and are the most wasteful (because they can afford to be?). Interestingly, they are the one's who could do the most good (because they could immediately afford clean efficient technologies that are too expensive for others of more modest means). Unfortunately, most of my rich friends and relatives are the first to tell me that "solar is too expensive" (for example) -- I once told a rich friend in Malibu that I had installed a solar electric system on my apartment roof in L.A. for $7000 dollars on my teachers salary of 28,000 a year. He said that was way too expensive for him, but later that afternoon told us about his trip to Canada and Las Vegas the previous weekend where he had a great time - he rented a private jet to get to the Hockey game in Canada, then flew into Vegas to gamble -- the weekend cost him 50,000 dollars! Hmmmm. Values....

Interesting you should note that people consider "nature" and "environment" different things -- of course for the rich "nature" is usually preserved at some resort somewhere, and the environment of the rich is kept clean and healthy by gardeners and service staff... they are different things...

Anyway, no need to belabor the points -- you have done a marvelous job of pulling your data together and starting down the road to a serious scientific analysis. Thanks for spending the extra time! Hope you enjoyed this as much as I did!

Cheers and congratulations,

Professor T.

981 982 Peer Review

2007-09-07T13:13:00.000-07:00

Message no. 981[Branch from no. 969] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:29pm Subject: Re: Final

Thanks for your patience and mutual assistance group! My computer is on the fritz again, so it is great to know I can count on you guys to help each other toward clarity. Please take a look at Adriennes final and my response to see how you can create the "perfect final". As for when it is due, this week is a good time! We need to get grades in next week! I don't mind you polishing things us over the weekend though, in light of my comments!

Enjoy, and keep helping and inspiring each other!

Message no. 982[Branch from no. 972] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:33pm Subject: Re: final part 2

Yes, it is an eye opener, isn't it Michelle!

As with Adrienne's post, can I urge you to give us all the raw data and tie your analysis to correlations that we can also see? This is what science is about -- PEER REVIEW. We must not only share our conclusions, but HOW we derived our conclusions. Otherwise scientists could just make up figures and tell us things like "video games lead to violence" or "the death penalty deters crime". In fact many bad scientists have done just that, but it is wrong to do. Good scientists present their data so the rest of us can see if we agree with the conclusions or if we see some other pattern in the data.

The idea is to lead us through the data and tell us why you think it proves what you think it does.

Cool?

Do that and you will have a great final!

Thanks!

980 Almost perfect Final!

2007-09-07T13:12:00.002-07:00

Message no. 980[Branch from no. 970] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:26pm Subject: Re: Final Adrienne

Hi Adrienne,

Wow! This is an almost perfect final! I say "almost" because there is one piece missing that makes all the difference in science -- the raw data from which we can correlate the variables and look for co-variates. That is a fancy way of saying we need to know WHICH of the people you surveyed answered which questions so we can look for a link between, say, the person who said that "yes" they were a nature lover and the number of planets they use and their carbon footprint. If we don't do that, the data doesn't help us understand how environment and the psychology of behavior are related. Do you see what I mean?

So, for example, we would like to know if Person #7 used 3.6 planets, and person #3 used 12.9 ( a big range, as you have pointed out!), what did person #7 say about loving nature, about awareness of the five simple things they could do, and how did person #3 answer those questions? Where did they live? We should know this about each person. The data should look like this, for example:

Person #7 Food 2.6 Mobility 0.7 Shelter 1.2 Goods 2 Total 6.5 3.6 Planets

Survey for person #7: 1. Do you live in the U.S. or the Middle East? Mid East 2. Do you commute more that 10 miles to work one way? No, I walk to work. 3. Would you say that you live a stressful lifestyle? No, I live off of the fruit trees in my garden. 4. Do you have children? Yes, and they do all the composting. 5. Are you a nature lover? Definitely. 6. Are you able to identify more that one stress reliever other than drugs/alcohol? Gardening does it for me! 7. Do you have a college education? Yes. Undergraduate only. 8. Are you very concerned about the condition of our world? (i.e. global warming, quality of our food supply and water supply, clean air, the environment etc.) Very! 9. Do you consider yourself religious or spiritual? La illah allah illa allah! 10. Are you aware of approximately 5 simple things that you are doing to protect our environment? Yes, I use a fan instead of an airconditioner, I eat local produce, the meat comes from my neighbor's sheep, I take public transportation, we use the bath water to irrigate the fruit trees and use the sheep droppings to make biogas for the stove.

Person #3 Food 4.9 Mobility 0.7 Shelter 26.7 Goods 24.9 Total 57 12.9 planets

Survey: 1. Do you live in the U.S. or the Middle East?

U.S., Florida 2. Do you commute more that 10 miles to work one way? 150 miles each way 3. Would you say that you live a stressful lifestyle? Always! 4. Do you have children? Three 5. Are you a nature lover? Only on T.V. -- Discovery Channel 6. Are you able to identify more that one stress reliever other than drugs/alcohol? If I could, I'd go hunting. 7. Do you have a college education? Multiple degrees, up to M.D. 8. Are you very concerned about the condition of our world? (i.e. global warming, quality of our food supply and water supply, clean air, the environment etc.) Global warming is a myth - Michael Chrichton said so in a book I read on an airplane to golf in a resort in Malaysia. 9. Do you consider yourself religious or spiritual? Not particularly 10. Are you aware of approximately 5 simple things that you are doing to protect our environment? I take out the garbage on sunday, and pay my greens fees to the country club...

Note that I have obviously made up these answers according to stereotype assumptions that may have nothing to do with consumption!! Your actual data contradicts my stereotypes - you said that ALL claim to have stressful lives and that all claim to be religious. Thus those two areas are probably NOT covariates with consumption, as my stereotype answers would suggest. That makes us wonder "is there anything that truly differs between the low and high consumers"?

Can you give us the real answers for Persons #1 through #10, so we can see what patterns jump out, if any? And then, in your analysis, make reference to those specific values -- as you do, but so that we can see what the facts are and what your interpretation is. For example, you mentioned that the Florida doctor consumes the most, but that your brother in law in Saudi Arabia also is a high consumer, and you said that they have relatively similar incomes. The conclusion that one could draw from this (though it is most likely very wrong!) is that "hot climates make people big consumers." We would have to have a data point from someone in a cold climate and a medium climate to test this hypothesis.

Anyway, your job is not to do all of that, because this is an introduction to the methodology, not a Ph.D. thesis! But you are so close to having what I consider a PERFECT final I would love it if you could just give us that raw data and refer to it in your analysis, and with that you will be a model for the rest of the class and a contributor to the exciting and ever growing library of human knowledge!

Thanks Adrienne, well done!

950 Multitudes in the Valley of Decisions

2007-09-07T13:12:00.001-07:00

Message no. 950[Branch from no. 946] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 11, 2007 4:10pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary

What a fun summary Dawn (though it ends kind of abruptly, wouldn't you say... we kind of expected a summary to the summary, a "and they all lived happily ever after" tag at the end... some conclusion...

Your metaphors (the dog choker, and the "where's Waldo"for example) are great, and you paint great imagery.

Also, thanks for bringing new perspective to the idea of why people don't leave home even if it is dangerous. I think I go a bit overboard trying to paint people as rational, and you helped me see the powerful emotions that come into play when considering one's territory or home environment.

I think in terms of the way an environment controls our behavior we have to ask what our behavior would be like without the context of an environment to constrain it. What is freedom without an environment to act in? Don't environments help determine how we want to behave? Joshua Epstein (2001) quoted in Phillip Ball's chapter "Multitudes in the Valley of Decision" (p. 295 of Critical Mass) "When I'd had my coffee this morning and went upstairs to get dressed for work, I never considered being a nudist for the day. When I got into my car to drive to work, it never crossed my mind to drive on the left. And when I joined my colleagues at lunch, I did not consider eating my salad bare handed; without a thought I used a fork." The author also quotes Karl Mannheim from 1936 saying, "Only in a quite limited sense does the individual create out of himself the mode of speech and thought we attribute to him. He speaks the language of his group; he thinks in the manner in which the group thinks."

I think one of the tensions in our modern society is that we are uncertain to which group we belong. We are aware of a pluricultural potential for behavior and it is hard to design for so many cultural norms. At some point though, we do conform to what we each consider normal. I think our dogs do too -- I observe that many animals, particularly pack animals like dogs, do not exhibit a free range of behaviors but "choke" themselves into postures of dominance and submission and "appropriate behavior" depending on the social environment around them.

Your thoughts?

949 Clarification of the Survey

2007-09-07T13:08:00.001-07:00

Message no. 949 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 11, 2007 3:55pm Subject: Coming up with the survey

Hi Class,

Varshawn sent me an email asking for clarification on the surveys. Here is my answer:

Yes, you come up with your own surveys -- pick the questions from the eco and carbon footprint websites you find most useful and will use and add to them your own questions about lifestyle that can help explain why people have the footprints they have. You then plug the information into the footprint calculators to get values for your friends and then try to explain the similarities and differences by the answers you get to your other questions.

For example, I put my father's footprint information in, and I found out his lifestyle would take 3.5 planets if everybody else lived like him, and I put in my uncle's info and found that he would need 8 planets. Now I want to know what the underlying differences are that affect their different behaviors. Yes I know that my cousin drives a gas guzzler and has a huge house and eats steak everyday and my father has a hybrid car. Okay. That went into the calculator. But what explains why my cousin is such an energy hog? Is it their beliefs, their jobs, their incomes, what?

It turns out , for one thing, that my uncle lives in the Midwest where there is no public transportation, where there is a tradition of having big trucks, where beef cattle are raised, and where real estate is cheap enough for middle class people to have big houses. So even though their incomes are the same, location helps explain the differences in their consumption. Also, interestingly, though my Dad grew up in the Midwest, my Dad saw Bambi as a kid and decided he didn't want to kill animals, and he moved to New York to be a writer, while his brother became a hunter and likes that "everything big is better" macho tradition. These things describe a possible "psychology of behavior" and that is what this course is about. See what I mean?

You should speculate on these things based on the questions you ask in your survey. As Philip Ball says in Critical Mass (page 296) "Not even the most ardent supporter of individualism could reasonably claim that our choices are truly independent. How in a society flooded with mass advertising, can we hope to make decisions free from the influences of our environment."

You might ask the question "how much television do you watch a day" or "do you shop at Best Buy" and see if people who watch alot of television have a larger or smaller footprint, or if people who answer yes to shopping at Best Buy have a larger or smaller footprint.

How you EXPLAIN the data you get is where you can have fun and be creative!!!

Mark Twain said, "there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics!". You may find, in your tiny data set, that out of 10 people you survey, 8 have an above average footprint and they just also happen to all love Alanis Morrisette (if that was one of your questions!). Does that mean that listening to Alanis Morrisette makes you consume more? Yikes, Alanis would hate that, because she is on a "green" campaign. But your data might show that! How would you explain the psychology?

It may be that listening to Alanis has NOTHING to do with consumption, but it was a case of the roll of the dice that your data shows a correlation! Remember CORRELATIONS ARE NOT REGRESSIONS, i.e., they aren't statistically significant. For example, as our textbook says, people who ate ice cream in one study were found to be involved in violent crimes. Does that mean that ice cream causes violent crimes? No, it just turned out that the crimes were influenced by a heat wave, and the heat wave also made people eat ice cream.

The fun of environment and the psychology of behavior is trying to figure out what causes what!

You don't have to come up with the survey all by yourself by the way == you can share ideas and develop it with other class mates!

See what you come up with!

927 937 947 Responses to students

2007-09-07T13:07:00.001-07:00

Message no. 927[Branch from no. 911] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 5:02pm Subject: Re: Relational Summ...Varshawn

What is your theory about your co-workers -- what is making them anxious? And how does maintaining space help reduce that anxiety? Or is it that lack of personal space is what is making them anxious? What are the spatial characteristics of your work environment? How can you set up an experiment to test your theory?

Message no. 937[Branch from no. 932] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, May 10, 2007 2:29pm Subject: Re: Summary

Dana, can you elaborate on this summary? All -- Remember we need at least three quotes from the book with page numbers and three outside references, and the summary should relate to you and your life experience and observations. This is the criteria I have to use for evaluating now that grade time is coming up! Thanks!

Message no. 947[Branch from no. 941] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 11, 2007 3:39pm Subject: Re: Varshawn...Part 1

Yeah, the Japanese calculator is pretty confusing and lousy == thanks to Michelle we have much better calculators to use now! But at least you got a sense, I hope, that people are doing this all over the world now -- one day soon responsible citizens may be asked to balance their carbon budget the way we now balance our checkbooks == trying to be carbon neutral or carbon negative may be the next status quest! ("How low can ya go!?" People may ask each other)

Message no. 948[Branch from no. 945] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 11, 2007 3:41pm Subject: Re: Dana Boothroyd

Thanks for sharing the new climate calculator Dana -- much better than the Japan site I found. I think that one is best suited for the electrical appliances found in Toy Story and used by Buzz Lightyear: To infinity, and beyond! :)

925 926 Environmental Justice

2007-09-07T13:06:00.001-07:00

Message no. 925[Branch from no. 914] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 4:55pm Subject: Re: relational summary

Thanks for the links to hazards affecting rivers in New York! Hard to keep up with all the things criminal businesses and negligent people get away with that affects innocent unaware people.

I don't any longer agree that "we don't learn our lesson" though. I think what happens more often is that people do learn the lesson -- and move away from the places where disasters occur and many try to stop doing the things that are dangerous. I think what happens, however, is that population pressure, lack of alternatives and business incentives provide a never ending stream of newcomers who can be duped into living in bad and dangerous conditions and areas. The safe property is bought up by the rich and the dangerous areas are offered at low rates to anybody who is willing to trade the risk of dying in a disaster or through toxic exposre for the risk of dying of poverty. For this reason you will notice that, for example, when California had our earthquake in 1994 64 people died, while in Turkey many many thousands died. Disasters and poverty go hand in hand, and we tend to look at the poor as if they were a homogeneous mass. In fact individual poor families try desperately to get out of dangerous places and often succeed when they can find an opportunity. But there are so many poor people with even less opportunity that others immediately move in again. It is rarely the same people.

For this reason we have a movement in the world called "The Environmental Justice" movement. It says that people are trapped into being victims, not that they don't learn from other's mistakes.

I believe that there is a propoganda that makes us believe that "we" are all to blame, as if human beings were just stupid and flawed and keep on doing dumb things. This obscures the fact that criminal behavior by developers and speculators is putting enormous numbers of people at risk.

Our job should be to put a face on individual families and see how hard most people struggle to do the right thing. I'm proud of the human race; I'm just suspicious of the very few who control the wealth and the media.

Message no. 926[Branch from no. 912] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 4:59pm Subject: Re: Varshawn...Relational Summ...

I think you are right Varshawn -- asthma seems to be telling us that our immune systems are overwhelmed by the toxins and particulate matter in the air.

924 Every act of creation is preceeded by an act of destruction

2007-09-07T13:05:00.000-07:00

Message no. 924[Branch from no. 916] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 4:43pm Subject: Re: relational summary

You are right Dawn -- the cycles of life and death and decay, of fire and flood, are necessary for life overall to persist. As the Greeks said, "every act of creation is preceeded by an act of destruction." Still, this time destruction is happening on a different scale -- one unprecedented except for the 5 times in our past when we had mass extinctions. It is like the idea that we need to tear muscle to build muscle, but if we rip our arm off, no muscle can grow again. A question of rate and scale and scope.

As for dating in the future -- I don't see any reason why we would have to wear face masks and tanks indoors -- but you did remind me of a wedding I witnessed underwater in Hawaii in a lava cathedral 50 feet deep. The bride was in white gown that flowed like the fins of a delicate fish in the current, and the groom was in a tuxedo, but they had face masks and scuba tanks on. It was wild!

923 It's the End of the World as we Know It, and I could use a drink!

2007-09-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

Message no. 923[Branch from no. 913] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 4:36pm Subject: Re: Varshawn....relational summary

Glad to see how your awareness of the intricacies of the global warming process is growing Varshawn!

It is an immensely complicated and dangerous situation, as you have pointed out. What is so very very sad is that Newsweek magazine last month released a cover story article trying to explain "the pros and cons of global warming". (See Newsweek International, 04/16/2007 . PROS of global warming?!!! I found the article sick, because yes, it acknowleged that millions of people would die in Africa and other poor continents, but it said that we should look on the bright side -- ski resort operators can convert their snowless resorts into spas and casinos, and even though the Mediterranean Beaches will be underwater along with coastal cities, beachgoers can now party on the beaches of the Baltic sea and other formerly frigid waters! It said that agriculture would fail in Brazil and Spain, but take heart! We can grow wine grapes in Alaska and Siberia!! So we never have to go a day without Chianti!

And they said that when the ice caps melt we will find it easier to drill for oil!! They actually said that! Gee, that way we never have to stop using the messy cancer causing stuff!

It is the most egregious example of how out of touch our media and political machine is with the state of the world when all over the world Newsweek is telling people "the party won't stop for the rich and famous just because the rest of the world will be suffering so badly!" Look on the bright side, right? Every dark cloud has a silver mining for the rich!

As our text book points out, at some level increased heat can lead to agression, and at another level it can lead to apathy. What such environmental determinism doesn't explain is how the partying greedy rich, in their air conditioned luxury cars and yachts and villas, can do such violence to the world and what makes them, no matter what the temperature, create a climate of lies and distortions so that they can continue to commit acts of agression against the rest of humanity. By telling the world that Global Warming isn't such a bad thing after all, because wine growers, resort operators and oil companies will still make a profit, Newsweek and other arms of the propaganda machine are acting in the most agressive way I can think of. Do they hope that the rest of us will either be hot enough that we will kill ourselves or so hot we will sit back and vegetate?

Did you guys see that article? What do you think?

Update, September 5, 2007:

A German television program on global warming made the same outrageous argument -- First they showed the dire consequences of Global Warming, then they showed excellent footage on how to insulate your home (conservation of energy and resources is the least expensive and most effective fix we can do!) but then they had a segment on "the bright side" of global warming, interviewing a Scandanavian who has started his own winery because the temperature just doesn't get low enough to freeze the grapes. All I can think of is the title of my friend Professor Scott Sherman's excellent environmental thriller: "It's the end of the world (as we know it) and I could use a drink!"

922 A Doll's House

2007-09-07T12:57:00.002-07:00

Message no. 922[Branch from no. 920] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 3:58pm Subject: A doll's House

That was an immensely enjoyable and entertaining relational summary Dawn!! I loved the way you went from Barbie to Gerbil cages and showed the tension between our desire to play Creator and the desire of marketers to get us to copy their designs and product placements.

The gap between designer and client becomes easy to understand when you start thinking of your chinchilla or gerbils as the clients -- do we design for what they really want or for what we think would make the coolest "doll house" for our little pets (furry mobile Barbie's essentially). A playground for our personal manipulation, as you say.

During the 4 years I worked for the L.A. Zoo I was fascinated by the way zoo designers created exhibits not to please the animals but to please the public or, worse, to please the cleaning staff (making it easy to sanitize). It was on one of my many trips to the Frankfurt zoo in Germany that the director of the Zoo took me to the new Tiger exhibit and showed me that they had eliminated the concrete and tile floors and replaced everything with many feet of soil, humus and wood chips. It was an indoor exhibit. The director said, "the cleaning staff screamed, but it works much better. Now the organic material of the floor of the exhibit absorbs the urine and the feces and bacterial action breaks it down. I ask the staff to go in and rake and shovel and take some of it away for compost -- but the thing is the Tigers are happy -- like house cats they scratch and bury their waste the natural way and they play in the dirt and wood chips and the exhibit is actually much cleaner!

The same technique was used in the new Polar Bear exhibit at San Diego Zoo where the staff told me "it used to be we would paint concrete blocks white to look like ice flows, and tint the water blue so it would seem like an "arctic" place. But the polar bears hated it, and they weren't fooled -- this is southern California! Now we let them play in dirt and grass and leaves and flower beds and we tell the public "this is what Polar Bears do in the summer" which is true. Why should they suffer because we want to pretend California is Alaska?"

Planning for the client is indeed very important!

Good job on your summary! Keep up the fun writing!

921 Sites for Carbon Calculators

2007-09-07T12:57:00.001-07:00

Message no. 921[Branch from no. 910] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 7, 2007 3:43pm Subject: Re: sites for carbon calculators

Good sleuth work Michelle! Now we are cookin'! Some of you have got a start figuring out how many planets we would need to live as you do, which should really make you think about what we might need to make your eutopias real for all also. Tough huh?

Has anybody played with the numbers to see how we would all have to live in order to fit on just one planet? Give it a try!

The carbon footprint is a difficult measure, and I see the Japanese calculator is giving infinity for some people, so I am glad you found some other carbon calculators for us, Michelle!

In modelling the world we need as many different models as possible since each one of them is bound to be oversimplified or to contain flawed assumptions and these throw the results off. Bravo for finding more models.

907 The Tree of Knowledge

2007-09-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

Message no. 907[Branch from no. 903] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 4, 2007 2:25pm Subject: Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

It is scary, isn't it Dawn! Awareness always is -- maybe that is why God warned us not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Always fills me with shame... but it is too late, and now ignorance cannot lead back to bliss, so we must strive on and learn ever more! :)

I don't know if country people consume more or less than city people in the U.S.... good question. One could argue that transportation needs are greater with the longer distances in the country and this uses a lot of resources (both getting the stuff yourself and shipping the stuff out to the stores there). One reason for cities of course was that by concentrating resources in one place you lower the transaction costs and increase efficiency. But of course, cities are no longer near the sources of resources as they once were. We have long since consumed the forests and mines and fisheries and fields of good soil that used to surround cities. So now our resources come from the "country". Theoretically it should be better to live near the resources, and for this reason people in third world countries who live in the "countryside" still consume less than people in the city. But in the U.S. that may not be true, because resources first have to go to the city to be processed and then get shipped BACK to the countryside to be used. In fact very few of us in advanced countries who live "in the country" live close to the land at all. Rather, we are almost like living in space stations orbiting the city, but at a distance so we can pretend we are in the country, while tied to the economics of the urban sphere.

Thanks for being the first to take the plunge and start investigating how many earth's you use!

906 Talkin' Trash: A Melodic-Mnemonic Song About the Value of Garbage

2007-09-07T12:28:00.002-07:00

Message no. 906 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 4, 2007 2:00pm Subject: A song about pollution

Hi class,

Speaking of Disasters, Toxic Hazards and Pollution, I just finished writing this song about pollution called "Talkin' Trash" for the upcoming documentary film "Recycle Circus", part of the trilogy of documentaries about our Circus Guy Musical Goodwill Ambassador Program. Check out http://greenheadmedia.org/pages/documentary.html if you want to see the first documentary, Solar Circus, and parts of the second documentary, Water Circus.

In a week or so I will hopefully finish a demo recording (a scratch version) for you to hear. Meanwhile, here are the chords and lyrics (any musicians among you?).

Talkin’ Trash c 2007 T.H. Culhane Cairo, Egypt

(Bb6/F arpeggio to F#7/E arpeggio twice)

(Bb6/F) Look beyond the garbage in the (Gm) streets to find the (Gm7/F) garbage in your (F#7/E) mind… Then (Bb6/F) rise above your prejudice of (Em7b5) class to see there’s treasures there to (Ebmaj7) find… (Ebmaj7/C) in (Gm9 pull off )garbage… (Ebmaj7b5 pull off) in garbage… (Gm9 pull off to Ebmaj7b5 pull off)

(Bb) Everyone is told (Everyone is told) (Bb/A) that one man’s garbage is another’s gold But (Gm) why’re we never told (why’re we never told) (Gm/F) that one man’s gold creates another’s (Cm) garbage? (Ebmaj7) (F#7/E)

(Bb) Lies are often told (Lies are always told) (Bb/A) If they obscure the facts they think our hand will fold (Gm) We’ve got to lay it on the table’n BOLD (Gm/F) that “Pollution is always someone else’s (Cm) profit”… (Ebmaj7b5 pull off) (They’re makin’ lots of money off it…)

Dm / Cm / Dm / Cm / (with cello)

(Dm) (spoken): “It’s a fundamental idea in economics that surplus value creates profit. If that (C#m) surplus can no (Cm) longer be extracted from labor then it must come from the externalization of production residuals – what we call (C#m) “garbage”. (Dm) This means to both the firm and the family that ‘negative externalities’ must never be paid for, (Cm) must never be accounted for, must (Cm) always be thrown into, dumped into, someone else’s back yard…” (Gm pull off)

(sung): (Dm) When we gonna learn (when we gonna learn) That one man’s gold creates a-(C#m) nother’s (Cm) garbage? It’s an adage we recycle, we reverse the lesson that we all earn our (Dm) Livings from a dustbin from a trash heap of worn ideas (C#m) gleaned from (Cm) garbage (Cm!)that one’s man’s trash can be another’s gold obscures the (Cm!) darker story that’s never told (Ebm!) For all that glitters, new or old, is (Ebm!) in the mind, spun into gold by (B!) those who learned “sell high, buy low”, the dogma (B/A) behind the status quo is (Bb) garbage… (F#7/E) just garbage… (Bb) (F#7/E)

And it’s (Gm) more than mere frustration without (F) point-source (Cm) separation we (Gm) enforce immiseration having (F) no appreciation (Cm) that there’s a (Gm) downstream side relation to it (F) all… (Cm)

There (Gm) persists a sad delusion that the (F) problem of (Cm) pollution can be (Gm) solved by mere dilution – but that’s (F) not the right (Cm) solution and there’s (Gm) still too much confusion about it (F) all… (Cm) We’re now (Gm) plagued by concentrations, (F) caused by bio-accumulation (Cm) for many (Gm) toxins simply don’t disperse at (F) all (Cm)

(Ebm) There’s two spheres in which we should operate One well established, one inchoate (B) An ecosphere and a technosphere put organics there, inorganics here (B/A) this industrial ecology’s the (Bb) way… (F#7/E) to…

(Bb6/F) Look beyond the garbage in the (Gm) streets to find the garbage in your (F#7/E) mind Then (Bb6/F) rise above the blindness of your (Em7b5) past to see the profits men have (Ebmaj7) mined… (Ebmaj7/C) from (Gm pull off) garbage… from (Ebmaj7b5 pull off) garbage… It’s all (Gm pull off) garbage… (Ebmaj7b5 pull off) garbage… We’re talkin’ TRASH… Bb5 A5 Gm6/9 !!! Bb5 A5 Gm6/9 !!!

905 Connections

2007-09-07T12:28:00.001-07:00

Message no. 905[Branch from no. 904] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 4, 2007 1:55pm Subject: Re: Summary

Connections, that is what drives the world -- starting from fundamental particles (superstrings? quarks, gluons, bosons, mesons... protons, neutrons, electrons, the four major forces, from gravity to electromagnetism, all the way up to molecular interactions and ecosystems and societies -- everything is connected, as Dana's summary makes manifest.

Some call this "the butterfly effect". One thing affects another. But we ain't seen nothin' yet! Since energy ultimately drives all affairs, just wait until the prices of fossil fuels really start reflecting their relative scarcity. Since all transportation relies on them, as does heating and cooling and electricity production and packaging and fertilizers and pesticides and construction materials and and and.... the price of everything will rise.

The solution: invest all the money we have NOW, while things are cheap, in technologies that capture renewable energy resources (sun, wind, water, biomass, biogas) and stop waiting, hoping prices will go down. They won't. Not until we are decoupled from fossil fuels. Then prices will of course go down. But now we must invest and invest quickly. It won't just be mattresses that will rise in price, but even the price of a good nights sleep, knowing we can make it through tomorrow...

Keep those connections in mind -- anticipate the relations and we will do fine!

902 Chapter 10 Debates: Red Mars vs. Green Mars, Should we Terraform?

2007-09-07T12:26:00.002-07:00

Message no. 902[Branch from no. 884] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 2:46pm Subject: Re: Patricia Friedrichs Chapter 10 The City Relational Summary

This is a good point Dawn, and it goes to the heart of the "Red Mars vs. Green Mars" debate. The trouble with worrying about whether we will do the same thing on Mars is that Mars lost its atmosphere and its oceans many many hundreds of millions of years ago. It is now a desolate and inhospitable planet. In order to make it habitable for biological life forms we will have to TERRAFORM the planet from a lifeless red planet into a lush green one.

There are those who think this is "messing with Nature" and who are opposed to us doing this. They say to leave Mars as it is. But as it is, Mars is incapable of sustaining life of any kind, much less human.

If we meddle with Mars' environment and make it green, would this be "destroying" its environment? Can you destroy a dead planet by bringing it to life?

Now suppose we did terraform Mars and bring back its oceans and atmosphere and put life on Mars. Would we destroy that life too, the way we are doing earth's life?

This is a tricky question but most economists think the answer is no. Remember the "Tragedy of the Commons" argument in your textbook? The argument was that we are destroying the earth's environment because we don't really agree on how much it is worth. The air and the sea that belong to all are being polluted because this is how companies make profits -- if they had to pay to properly recycle the chemicals and waste they produce they would lose money. So they dump them into "the commons", expecting the rest of us to pay the costs in terms of our health and sanity.

There are two basic ways of making a profit in this economy. The first is to extract "surplus value" from labor. That means that I pay you 5 bucks and hour to make, say, tables, that I sell for 20 bucks, and I pocket the 15. If you join a union and demand a pay raise to 7.50 an hour plus benefits equaling 7.50, I suddenly lose profits, but I can still make 5 bucks off of you each hour. At this point, though, I decide to fire you and replace you with a machine that makes 4 tables an hour instead of one, and I lose money until I have paid off my investment in the machine, but after that I start making a profit again. The problem is, soon all my competitors buy machines like mine and the prices of tables go down. Now I am stuck because the prices of machines are the same for me and my competitors, and machines get more expensive as they get more complicated. So I have to search for another way to extract surplus value. I can't get it from the machine -- if I don't maintain the machine properly it will break. In the old days of slavery and before labor laws I could work my human laborer until he or she collapsed or died and then simply hire somebody else. As long as there was a rising population of poor people in need of a job I had an "unlimited reserve army of labor" (as Karl Marx called the working class). But once I have automated I can't do that -- new machines don't come cheap and don't come knocking on my door looking for work.

So what do I do as a capitalist? In order to maintain profits I use my second option: I pollute. I get my profits by refusing to clean up after myself. I don't pay for recycling or dealing with poisonous wastes, I simply dump them in someone else's backyard.

This is the problem with the world today (well, one of the big problems). The industrial age has driven businesses to use environmental polluting as one of the two ways it makes a profit, and has driven the others to favor overpopulation as the other. You see, to make a profit you either need to throw things away without paying to clean up your mess, or you need a huge army of reserve labor (the poor). So in industrialized countries you manufacture and then pollute by dumping wherever you can, and in underdeveloped countries you encourage policies that lead to overpopulation so there will always be plenty of cheap labor around that you can exploit.

On Mars it should be different -- since it will be governments and companies that build the life support systems they will know exactly how much they cost and who owns what. And since the population will be low for the first 100 generations labor won't be cheap. So it is unlikely that anyone will dump toxic waste or mess up the life support system, and it will be difficult for one group to exploit another because if they get any group mad enough they COULD use terrorism to destroy the life support systems as revenge.

In the effort to colonize space it is more likely that people will develop ways to be cooperative and to make life fluorish rather than destroy it. If we don't, of course, we will die long before we even start building a habitat on Mars or any other planet.

the problem with the earth is that we inherited this lovely planet without truly understanding how precious she is!

I'd love to hear what you think about these scenarios. Plausible?

901 The 29th Day

2007-09-07T12:26:00.001-07:00

Message no. 901[Branch from no. 892] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 2:26pm Subject: Re: Pat Friedrichs Relational summary

Nicely argued Pat.

Surely we WILL one day find the human race extinct (or rather, something will, since if we are extinct we won't be around to find anything! :)) The question is, will our offspring be able to evolve into something better adapted for the world to come, or will the extinction take our genetic line by surprise and simply hurl it into a dead end? If it does, will some other animal evolve self-reflective intelligence?

It always makes me feel lonely to think that we are the only truly self reflective and communicative and creative beings in the solar system, and that therefore the fate of intelligent life depends on us! David Brin writes a lot about the evolution of intelligent machines and the enhancement of intelligent in other animals and his speculations give me some hope. But you are quite right in extrapolating this trend of destructive population growth into the future.

Paul Ehrlich, in his classic book "The Population Bomb" and his subsequent books, argued that at the current rate of expansion there would be, in a few thousand years, more people than there are stars. This is the trouble with geometric growth.

Lester Brown wrote a book called "The 29th day" in which he asked the question, "if you place a Lily pad in an empty pond and it divides to become two lily pads the second day, and 4 lily pads the third day, and 8 lily pads the fourth day, and you know that the Lily pond will be completely filled with Lily Pads on the 30th day, on which day will the pond be half full?"

The answer, of course, is the 29th day.

Brown suggested, back in the 1980s when there were only about 4 billion of us on the planet, that the earth was already half full. He said it was our 29th day.

Ecological footprint analysis shows us how many earth's it would take for all 6.5 billion of us to live the way you or I do. For my lifestyle it seems it is about 4 earths. However, if we switch to renewable energy and recycle and compost, we might get down to the Egyptian average (1.5 earths) or to the African average (about 1) without any loss in quality of lifestyle. Once we do that, of course, it will still mean we can't grow any more (if it takes 1 planet earth to sustain all 6.5 billion of us we certainly can't grow without others being less well off or killing ourselves -- this is called "Pareto Optimality").

So we will still have to look for other planets if we want the dream of an ever increasing quality of life and an ever increasing population.

Will we then fill up the entire universe, as Ehrlich predicted?

Or will we use virtual reality to increase our quality of life without increasing our consumption?

These are deep deep ideas for us to speculate on.

Thanks for bringing up these heuristic, if troubling, notions!

900 Anticipation is making me crazy

2007-09-07T12:25:00.002-07:00

Message no. 900[Branch from no. 886] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 2:13pm Subject: Re: Relational Summ.....Varshawn

Yes, I think being mentally prepared does have a profound impact on the way we experience things. Anticipation helps us cope by allowing us to mentally rehearse responses. I think this is one reason I find such pleasure in movies about the future or in video games about the future -- even when the theme is disasters or threats, I feel I can prepare myself, and this illusion of potential control gives me some solace.

However, Baum and Greenburgh's study seems to say the opposite of what you and I describe -- they seem to show that anticipating crowding creates greater stress. Perhaps this is true when you have to get ready for an unpleasant experience that is not only unavoidable but which you know will not give you any control at all. In that case imagining the future discomfort can merely add to your stress, because you in effect have to go through the stress at least twice. This may be why most of us don't really want to know when or how we are going to die. If it is unavoidable and it isn't pleasant, some experiences are better off taking us by surprise, huh?

899 The Day After Tomorrow: What Global Warming Brings

2007-09-07T12:25:00.001-07:00

Message no. 899[Branch from no. 867] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 2:03pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary

Thanks for sharing your fears and nightmares and the uncomfortable truths of disasters in this excellent summary Daniela! Sorry to hear the chapter brought back bad memories! I imagine you would not enjoy movies like "The Day After Tomorrow" where floods and tidal waves cause havoc!

I am indeed sorry to hear about the asbestos problem you are now facing at home, and about the radiation induced problem affecting your boyfriend's relatives. It does get discouraging, doesn't it? My only way of dealing with these things is to try to learn as much as possible about potential threats, to try and prepare as much as possible so that problems don't turn into disasters (I do this by asking "what is it that would really make the situation bad -- is there a way to keep having food, clean water, shelter, light, warmth and the ability to dispose of sewage if the city breaks down... can I prepare for this...?).

I also thank God that we live on a planet like the Earth that has a magnetosphere and an ozone shield to keep us relatively well protected from meteors and cosmic radiation, and is filled with ecologies of diverse life forms who give us air to breathe and purify the water and decompose our wastes, making them fertilizer. It could be much worse, and we are so lucky, really! Imagine if we had to rely on our machines and technology to keep us safe and alive! Then every time there was a breakdown we would have a real disaster!

I worry mostly for those brave people who will live off the earth and for those who will try to survive on the earth after the ecosystem has collapsed. We have grown accustomed to being subsidized by a really gentle and benign planet that has always taken care of our needs so that we can consider an occasional storm or tidal wave "a disaster". There isn't another place as peaceful as the Earth in the entire solar system, and there hasn't been a time in the earth's history when things were so good (imagine living during one of the many ice ages!).

We shall see what global warming brings...

898 The Value of Speculative Fiction

2007-09-07T12:24:00.000-07:00

Message no. 898[Branch from no. 847] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 1:38pm Subject: Re: Pat Friedrichs Relational summary

Nice blend of personal and planetary perspectives Pat. My wife and I are also "downgading" our living space -- moving next month from a spacious three bedroom apartment in the expatriot suburb of Maadi into a refurbished tiny two bedroom apartment in the slum area of Darb El Ahmar where our work is. Since the rent is 7 times lower than what we pay here we think it is worth it, even though it means "going native" and leaving the relatively uncrowded streets of the foreigners area to cope with the stresses of dense Egyptian life. The advantage is that we won't have to ride on the crowded metro or in traffic to get to work -- that means much less stress. And the beautiful Al-Azhar park is 5 minutes away -- the first park built in Cairo in a hundred years. We decided that the illusion of living a good life in the foreign community is shattered by the high prices and the loss in time and comfort getting in and out of the inner city. Also, since two buildings are being built next to ours, there is constant construction noise and noise from delivery trucks at 2 am that wake us up.

At some point you have to think, "Am I really getting what I pay for, or am I just getting the illusion?" While very few foreigners move into the Egyptian slum areas, we are fortunate to find a place that we can afford that will probably give us a higher quality life than in the so called ritzy areas. No doubt in a few years others will discover these little pockets and the prices will go up -- this always happens. But for now we think we are making the right decision, even though it cost us 1,350 dollars to have the interior of the little apartment refurbished.

As for travelling to other planets, I am reading two collections of short stories that I highly highly recommend to all of you:

The first is Beyond Flesh, which speaks to your reflections on crowding in cyberspace,

and the second is "The River of Time" by David Brin http://www.davidbrin.com/storycollections.html#river

Sometimes the best way to approach an issue, such as personal space and territoriality, is to test your theories by taking them to their logical conclusion. This is the value of speculative fiction!

897 Ecological Footprint Calculators

2007-09-07T12:23:00.002-07:00

Message no. 897[Branch from no. 896] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 1:25pm Subject: Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

Interestingly, by using the calculator at http://www.metric-conversions.org/cgi-bin/util/convert.cgi I find that the English site saying I emit 7.9 Tonnes of CO2 a year is equivalent to 7900 kg; the Japanese website says I put out about 8100 kg per year, so that is close.

Still, the assumptions of the models are quite quite different...

Remember to do conversions if you are using different units!

896 Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

2007-09-07T12:23:00.001-07:00

Message no. 896[Branch from no. 895] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 1:20pm Subject: Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

An addendum:

If you click on the attached photographs you will see that one website suggested it would take 2.2 earth's to support people like me, while the more detailed analysis suggested it would take 6.8 earths! That is a big difference, and shows you how the models differ. In the first model, the assumption was that I lived in England (they didn't give any alternative). In the second I got to pick my country and I picked Cairo. So already the models are different. Relative to an Egyptian I use an enormous amount of space and resources. For consistency, I should have picked England for both, I suppose. Try it different ways, and always RECORD WHAT YOU DID. That way we can look for explanations for the results!

You will notice that my CO2 output is huge too, even though I only checked watching TV for two hours a day and put my car use (which is taxis in Cairo) at 5 km a day, with an average of 5 km per liter (I did this based on the idea that there are approximately 4 liters in a gallon of gas, and I figured the taxis here aren't very efficient, maybe getting 15 miles to the gallon. 20 miles is about 32 kilometers. 15 miles is 24 km. So a car getting 15 miles to the gallon would equal a car getting 24 kilometers every 4 liters or so, so that would be about 6 km per liter. So I put down 5.

The carbon calculator is for Japanese. For some reason it is easy to find ecological footprint calculators for Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, but very hard to find them for the U.S.!!

Isn't that interesting!!

Have fun with all this and see what you come up with.

A good web based conversion calculator is here: http://www.metric-conversions.org/cgi-bin/util/convert.cgi

Okay, since I know it will take between 2.2 and 6.8 planets to support people like me, I'm going to go look through my telescope and see if there are any out there besides Mars we can terraform. Patricia already has Mars, but maybe we can negotiate a real estate deal... :)

895 Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

2007-09-07T12:17:00.002-07:00

Message no. 895[Branch from no. 893] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 12:52pm Subject: Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

Thanks for asking Pat!

1) First, read this:

http://www.gdrc.org/uem/footprints/index.html

You can click on many of the documents and reports and calculators to get a really good overview of the ecological footprint approach.

2) Then, take this brief quiz (around 3 minutes) and write down the results from the simple calculator. Report to us how many "earths" it would take to survive if all of us lived like you:

http://www.bestfootforward.com/carbonlife.htm

3) Next, fill in this survey and write down the results (takes 5 -10 minutes). See how they compare with what you got from the simpler calculator above. How many earth's will it take according to them?

http://www.earthday.net/footprint/index.asp#

4) Finally, if you have a windows based machine, see if you can download and use this ecological footprint calculator (try the version that includes Java VM)

See what it comes up with and compare.

5) Now, calculate your CARBON footprint from electronic appliances from this calculator and write down the results. It is one thing to know how many earth's we would need to accomodate a population of clones of you, it is another to know just how much you are contributing to global warming.

http://www.gdrc.org/uem/co2-cal/co2-calculator.html

6) Read the following information on ecological footprint methodology.

http://www.rprogress.org/newprojects/ecolFoot/faq/index.shtml#housing1

7) Then do a web search for another web based ecological footprint or carbon footprint calculator that I haven't listed and try it out. The Australians and the New Zealanders and the British have great calculators you can try (don't worry that you aren't living there!) Compare the results you get.

8) Share all the results and discoveries with the rest of us in posts.

You should see that each calculator gives different results because they use different ASSUMPTIONS about how our behavior affects our environment and vice versa.

To do good science we need REPLICABILITY and REPEATABILITY and we need to be able to make comparisons. There is no one TRUE value, so we have to estimate.

Step one of the final project is to get as accurate an estimate of your ecological footprint (including carbon footprint) as possible. This can only be done by trying out as many different calculators as possible and then taking the AVERAGE of all the values you get.

As usual we start with our rule of threes -- to get reliable results we need to repeat the experiment at least three times. The more times you repeat the experiment, the better the results.

Once we know how many earth's you need, living as you are now living, and how much carbon you produce, we can go on to part two of the assignment, which is to survey at least 10 of your friends, relatives and acquaintainces. Our survey, however, will include other information not found in the carbon and ecological footprint calculator, such as income and awareness of environmental problems. We will seek to correlate the behaviors that are asked about on the ecological and carbon footprint calculators with variables such as wealth, housing situation, education, and awareness of environmental issues. This way we can see IF ENVIRONMENT AFFECTS THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BEHAVIOR in any predictable way.

Once we have done that, we will have reached the end of this introduction to the field of Environmental Psychology, for we will have done real statistical science, proving or disproving the hypothesis that there is a correlation between environment and psychology.

Neat, huh?

So for this week, let's see how your ecological and carbon footprints measure up!

P.S. I'll be in the Sinai desert for the next three days, so I will give detailed instructions on the survey part of this over the weekend.

The Professor

889 The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

2007-09-07T12:17:00.001-07:00

Message no. 889 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, April 28, 2007 5:18pm Subject: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

Hi guys,

Thanks for your patience with me as I construct our final project! As some of you have pointed out, our chapter options are dwindling, and by now we should all have done a relational summary for each of the 14 chapters in the book, and created a Midterm Eutopia.

The final project should reflect what we've learned through this process, and it should also give us a first attempt at doing some real environmental psychology science.

Science, as you know, is about testing hypotheses through empirical research. That means we try to prove things by gathering data.

If you recall our early chapters, because there are ethical issues involved in conducting experiments on human beings, we tend to use surveys to get information from people.

What I propose for the final project is the following assignment, following the message in Chapter 14, broken into two steps:

Assignment Title: Getting into Hot Water to Get us Out of Hot Water!

Synopsis: Global Warming is considered the greatest environmental threat facing humanity today, forcing behavioral choices upon us that our parents and grandparents generations gave little thought too. Whether we choose to change our personal lifestyle earlier or later , every one of us will be forced to change at some point. This assignment helps us investigate how we can begin to take personal steps out of Global Warming's threat by exploring our ecological footprint, what it takes to reduce that footprint and how we compare with our friends and neighbors.

Part I: Calculate your ecological footprint using the website calculators presented earlier in the course (I will refresh them for you soon). Figure out which part of your consumption pattern contributes the most to global warming.

Part II: Send a survey to at least ten of your friends, family or colleagues (which I will help you prepare) that will help you to get data on their average energy consumption and their willingness to change some of their behavioral patterns.

We will then pool the data and see what trends emerge, and see how close we are to the kind of change our eutopias demand!

In the next couple of days I will send you a copy of a survey I have prepared looking at home energy use for the largest producer of greenhouse houses you produce: the energy required to heat water. Then you can add your own questions to that survey format and throw it back to us. Once we have agreed on all the questions we want in the survey, we will each send it out to the people we know and hope to get at least 10 responses each.

I will clarify more in the next couple of days. For now -- get on the web and start calculating your ecological footprint!

Cool?

Looking forward to doing some science with you all !

Professor T

877 884 887 888 Chapter 10; The City: Relational Summaries

2007-09-07T12:14:00.002-07:00

Message no. 877[Branch from no. 839] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, April 26, 2007 11:01am Subject: Re: Relational Summary

Wonderfully creative approach to writing a summary of the City -- thanks for the links, the pictures , the film references , the song lyrics and the discussion of "poetry". Hope you had as much fun creating this colorful interactive summary as I did reading it!

Message no. 884[Branch from no. 728] Posted by DAWN WRIGHT (dparker3) on Friday, April 27, 2007 3:31pm Subject: Re: Patricia Friedrichs Chapter 10 The City Relational Summary

"Say we do develop ways to survive on Mars, aren't we going to create problems there like we did on earth? Are we creating a band-aid effect without actually fixing the original problem. It's kind of like drugs, they treat the symptoms, not the cause."

Message no. 887[Branch from no. 881] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, April 28, 2007 4:49pm Subject: Re: Relational Summ.....Varshawn

My wife and I really enjoyed the film "The Pursuit of Happyness" with Will Smith -- based on a true story. It shows the value of not judging somebody who is homeless and giving people a chance to develop their fullest potential. Thanks for your enlightening points -- you are right, chance plays a huge element. In the book "Critical Mass, How one thing leads to another" by Philip Ball he points out that despite the faith economists put in economic models chance seems to play the biggest role in whether or not people or firms succeed or fail.

Message no. 888[Branch from no. 879] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, April 28, 2007 5:02pm Subject: Re: Adrienne Chapter 9

Adrienne, that was great of you to bring up the Palestinian refugee camps -- my wife and I did a tour of refugee camps in Palestine last summer, and I had toured several times in years previous, and they are as you describe. Most of America has very little concept of the misery the Palestinians have to endure every day, so it was great to have you relate their situation to this chapter! Shukran!

My memories of Jones Beach are a little different from yours -- in high school we would drive out there after midnight on a winters night, park in front of the empty beach and put on pink floyd tapes and watch the sun rise. For us it was an environment of solitude to "get away from it all". The difference in our Jones Beach experiences reminds me of something Bill Mollison said in his book on Permaculture "sometimes the best thing to do when you see a crowd going in one direction is to go exactly opposite". I often wonder, though, if, as the world gets more and more crowded and we still continue to try to avoid crowds, we will find that even winter nights at Jones Beach will be packed like Sardines... will there be any such thing as "off peak"? I notice that here in Cairo there is rarely any time that the streets aren't crowded. The same is true of public buses in Los Angeles -- even at 2 in the morning on the Wilshire Line you can't get a seat, and often can't even get on the bus.

This is known as "latent capacity" in Urban Planning circles, and it explains why it is useless to build more freeways to try and solve the traffic problem -- the more roads you build the quicker they fill.

876 The human element of caring: Seeing the homeless as just like us

2007-09-07T12:14:00.001-07:00

Message no. 876[Branch from no. 858] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, April 26, 2007 10:59am Subject: Re: Relational Summ.....Varshawn

Hi Varshawn,

I really appreciated your empathetic approach to the issue of homelessness and for emphasizing the difficulties people in the city face that we may never know. I find many people far too critical of the homeless, always blaming the victim or tossing it off as, "well, they are usually drug addicts or drunks" as if that justifies their condition, instead of empathizing with the history that might have produced such despair. I am also an emotional person and my heart goes out to every suffering person as if they were me. The Paul McCartney song "Well it could happen to you..." runs through my brain all the time, and the haunting adage "many of us are just one paycheck away from being homeless." Fortunes are made and lost, and often it is sheer luck or chance that we got through the scrapes we did and are comfortable.

Thanks for bringing that very human element of caring and being an advocated of those less fortunate into your analysis!

875 RATE

2007-09-07T12:13:00.004-07:00

Message no. 875[Branch from no. 837] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, April 26, 2007 10:52am Subject: RATE

Dawn you have once again introduced some very very interested heuristic concepts into the discussion. The most valuable of them, in my view, is your recognition of the concept of RATE. As you point out, it matters very very much HOW FAST or HOW SLOW we are able to proceed with certain processes. When you ask, "How fast can we expect to recycle waste? How fast will plants and animals grow to feed the swarms?" you are hitting upon the most important issue in environmental science -- obviously if we had infinite time our wastes would degrade to safe levels, and our resources would regenerate. The problem with overpopulation is primarily a rate problem -- relative to the speed at which biological and geological processes can occur, we are overburdening the ecosystem and our own nervous systems. Whether the waste is physical or the burden is emotional, overpopulation interferes with our ability to process the negative stimuli and find balance again.

If we think "rate or reaction" everytime we percieve a problem, and try to figure out how to solve the problem within the time and energy budget constraints imposed on us, we may see solutions more clearly.

Thanks for bringing the concept of rate into all of this!

874 Lost in a Sea of Information

2007-09-07T12:13:00.003-07:00

Message no. 874[Branch from no. 872] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, April 26, 2007 10:22am Subject: Lost in a sea of information

Dawn you are quite right -- with the explosion of information it becomes impossible for even the most highly ambitious and educated person to stay abreast of the news and filter out what is true from what is sheer propaganda and disinformation. It becomes a war of influence, and the richest companies and their "spin doctors" can influence public opinion through a barrage of confusing messages, half truths and even outright lies. One only has to watch the X-files to see how this can be done effectively. The truth is out there, but as you point out, it is hard for us to discover what it is, even if we can read.

For this reason I put my faith in the scientific method and empirical verification of sound theory. People can tell me certain things don't work or do work and I check with theory and experience to see if the claims are accurate. You are right, it is so much about all of us reading, it is knowing how to decipher the facts and figure out whether we are getting a snow job or not. We must teach and learn "critical thinking" and "media literacy".

Have you ever seen the film "Wag the Dog" with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman? It is about how the media can be used to spin the truth. Take a look at it -- you will enjoy it! (You might also like the film Network with Faye Dunaway, where people get fed up with television and say "I'm sick and tired of the lies and I'm not going to take it anymore.")

873 The Language of Space

2007-09-07T12:13:00.001-07:00

Message no. 873[Branch from no. 845] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, April 25, 2007 4:55pm Subject: Re: Relational Summ..Varshawn

Glad this chapter caught your attention Varshawn, and thanks for the insights-- you are quite right in your analysis of archetecural determinism, and as you may have figured out, I am a big believer in it. The best description of the phenomena I have read is in the chapter on "The Language of Space" in the book "Critical Mass" by Philip Ball. He says, in response to the idea that designers don't often design with the occupants comfort in mind, "there is more to all this than poor planning. Urban design... is political. "The nineteenth century dreams of a social order, in which the benefits of capitalism are retained through the creation of a quiescent working class, are dreamed in a strongly spatial form." IN other words, urban communities were redesigned in the Victorian age to reproduce and reinforce social hierarchies... Urbanization tended to increase and diversify people's interactions up until the time when new templates for planning were introduced during the Industrial REvolution. Whether consciously or not, these templates reduced social encounters and fragmented communities, discouraging collective activity and keeping people passive under an imposed authority. High-rise blocks, for example, pack living spaces together densely while reducing the frequency of encounters that generate a sense of social solidarity. "It is wrong to say that high-rise estates are unsuccessful... for their unmanifest purposes of community reduction they are extremely successful." (page 140)

This is the same argument I used when I was a teacher in the ghetto. The newspapers would say "our schools are failing". I would say, "Our schools are succeeding in doing what they were really designed to do -- to keep the "working class" poorly educated so they will consume without thinking, work at jobs that nobody likes without questioning the futility and waste of their human genius and prescious time making somebody else rich, and fight wars they barely understand without questioning the leadership." In doing this our public school are supremely successful.

Notice that most public schools in the inner city are surrounded by barbed wire fence, and have security guards like a jail. Is this to keep people out or to lock people in? Another example of architectural determinism?

I'd love to hear you ideas about this!

Good summary!

868 Pursuing Perfection

2007-09-07T12:12:00.002-07:00

Message no. 868[Branch from no. 862] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 10:55am Subject: Pursuing perfection

Well said, Michelle. As you state, since the makers of technology are not perfect, it would be impossible for the product to be perfect. Now we get to a curious theological question: If the technology (i.e., the world of useful objects or "tools") is imperfect because the "maker" (humanity) is imperfect, is humanity thus imperfect because OUR maker (God) is imperfect?

The thought upsets us, because we are taught to think of God as perfect. We then assume that God's creation must be perfect. Many so-called environmentalists claim we should "go back to nature" because they think that "nature" is perfect becuase it was created by a perfect God. This would imply that only we humans are flawed and imperfect (which then begs the question of why God would create only one "mistake", and why He would make a mistake at all if He is "perfect". We talk about original sin as a mistake of Adam and Eve, which got them thrown out of the "perfect" eutopia of Eden -- after which they came into the "imperfect" world of earthly nature. From the perspective of Genesis, then, the earth is not perfect. So it would seem that God created imperfect people and an imperfect world of plants and animals and geology for them to struggle through their imperfections.

A scientific analysis of "nature" reveals many imperfections, despite the beauty with which ecological systems work. It turns out that STATISTICALLY SPEAKING ONLY can we say that nature works very well -- it has fostered life on this lonely little planet and sustained it for 3.5 billion years, which is amazing, but it could be wiped out or driven into extinction at any moment by many forces -- asteroids, meteors, population explosions of pests or predators or parasites or diseases, wars, weapons, climate change etc. The only perfect paradise exists in our imaginations and in Heaven.

The IDEA of perfection, in my belief, comes from a Perfect God whose perfection is manifesting only at the scale of the entire universe, where every equation balances out in perfect symmetry. But in local pockets of the universe, like our galaxy, the equations are unbalanced. There are localities filled with life and localities filled with emptiness. There are hot spots and cold spots. There are places of joy and places of sorrow. Add them all together and you get the perfect sum: A UNI-VERSE -- a "single story" (by definition, UNI - one, VERSE - story).

With our minds we can perceive the IDEA of perfection and struggle to realize it on earth (eutopia). But we must know from the beginning that it is unacheiveable. AT BEST we can create moments in time and history in certain places (such as you have been describing in your assignments) that feel "perfect" on a local level. But we can't create perfection for everyone and everything and for all time. Not with the tiny corner of the universe we inhabit and its fragmented bits of matter and energy. No, perfection is not acheivable here on this smallish worldly scale. The idea belongs only to God, and can only be manifested on an even smaller personal scale -- you build your own eutopia for as long as you can maintain it. When you vanish, the ebb and flow of matter and energy will consume it and subsume it and recycle all its parts and another being will have to come and struggle to rebuild our monuments to the idea of perfection.

That is how I see it.

For support of this idea, I encourage you to read the astrophysics/philosophy book "The Life of the Cosmos" by physicist Lee Smolin (see here for quotes: http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Physics-Lee-Smolin.htm)

866 I Profess: Etymology and linguistics and the war of words...

2007-09-07T12:12:00.001-07:00

Message no. 866[Branch from no. 857] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 10:23am Subject:

Thanks Pat! As a professor I try to remain clear and aware of what the rights and obligations of our profession is. To do that I try to return to the ROOT of the words we use to define ourselves and our behaviors, because language is what separates us from the other animals, and in language we have the seeds of civilization.

PROFESSOR and PROFESSION both come from the word "TO PROFESS". Here is a string of definitions for the word:

pro·fess (pr-fs, pr-) v. pro·fessed, pro·fess·ing, pro·fess·es v.tr. 1. To affirm openly; declare or claim: "a physics major [who] professes to be a stickler when it comes to data" Gina Maranto. 2. To make a pretense of; pretend: "top officials who were deeply involved with the arms sales but later professed ignorance of them" David Johnston. 3. a. To practice as a profession or claim knowledge of: profess medicine. b. To teach (a subject) as a professor: profess literature. 4. To affirm belief in: profess Catholicism. 5. To receive into a religious order or congregation. v.intr. 1. To make an open affirmation. 2. To take the vows of a religious order or congregation.

Note that definition 1 in both the transitive and intransitive verb categories equate professing with affirming openly, which means stating your convictions or beliefs. Definition three says "claiming knowledge" before "teaching". Only definition 2 is negative: "to pretend".

My fear is that many so called professors and professions involve people who are mere pretenders. I believe that we have an obligation to live up to our claims to knowledge. What is more, I think that, given the origins of universities as quasi-mystical places where the professors were usually priests who had "professed" vows to a congregation (v intr definition 2), we also carry the historical burden of having to reveal TRUTH through our "professions".

We "profess" to care, we "profess" to give support, so we are obligated to do so, in my view. Otherwise we can not claim to be "profess-ors". A professor is someone who professes. If we don't live up to our professions (which are like "confessions" -- think CONFESS, CONFESSOR, CONFESSION) than we are liars.

What is interesting to me is that by "professing" we create mental environments and draw cognitive maps for students who then must decide how to behave in the imaginary world of ideas we have constructed and professed. These environments have profound effects on the psychology of behavior.

I appreciate your constant feedback and support in my efforts to create a healthy and productive learning environment, and hope that all are benefitting from the eutopian construct I am striving to build with you all!

Sincerely,

The Professor

861 Fantasies of Control: The problem with those who want to "master" their environment

2007-09-07T12:11:00.001-07:00

Message no. 861[Branch from no. 850] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 23, 2007 6:58pm Subject: Re: weather

Chilling thoughts aren't they? The purpose, if it is true, would be to fulfill fantasies of control, as we were talking about in the posts on technophilia and technophobia. People have wanted to control the weather and natural events since we first mastered the creation and use of fire.

The other night my wife and I watched the German film "Der Untergang" ("The downfall") about Hitler's last days in the bunker in Berlin just before World War II ended. It shows him on his 50th birthday in the bunker and how he and Evan Braun cowardly committed suicide when it was clear Germany would lose the war, rather than face the consequences of their actions, as did the Goebbels (family of his right hand man) who first poisoned their five children (!) not wanting them to live in a world they could not control.

What was clear from the film was that Hitler and his Nazi party cronies were intoxicated with the fantasy of control. The wanted a world of harsh discipline and Hitler said, as the German civilians were being slaughtered by the Russian army when some of his generals said "we must surrender, our people are all dying" -- "they don't deserve any better. If they can't survive, they are weak and deserve to die. It is the law of the jungle. If our dream of controlling the world can not be fulfilled then we are worthless." Hitler saw the German people (and people everywhere else) as mere pawns on his chessboard. It didn't matter to him how many of his own "civilians" died for him to express his vision.

Hitler was obsessed by control, and his party put the idea of controlling every aspect of life on the top of the governments agenda. Unfortunately this power lust was not confined to the Nazis, and it infects people in all societies and regimes everywhere. It is as Lord Acton said a century ago, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely!"

Power is about control. Have no doubt that in the search for the ultimate weapon of control even rulers in a "democratic" society will consider innocent individuals expendable.

However, we can take heart in the fact that an informed citizenry in a democratic countrycan bring about positive change. As Jefferson said, ""An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.. . . The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe." So knowing about what our corporations and governments are doing is key to bringing eutopia to our earth!

860 Technophilia/Technophobia II

2007-09-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

Message no. 860[Branch from no. 849] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 23, 2007 6:41pm Subject: Re: Technophilia/Technophobia II

Yeah, Pat, I know what you mean -- our fear of lack of control got us to invent technologies to help us take control, but since the universe is ultimately not ours to control, when the very things we create to give us the illusion of control fail, they infuriate and frighten us because they thus defy the very purpose we created them for, making us feel more helpless than ever. It is like a betrayal.

The more I study statistical mechanics the more I believe that the "law of large numbers" is on our side (i.e. life persists overall) but that we, as individuals, must learn to give up our fantasies of control and have faith that there is a larger plan that we have the privilege to participate in and should not fight too hard against.

I keep telling myself "we didn't create any of this, and we certainly didn't create ourselves, so why should we think we should be in charge?" Sometimes that helps put things in perspective for me. But it is hard!!

843 Passing Out Violence in our Environment

2007-09-07T12:08:00.002-07:00

Message no. 843[Branch from no. 836] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 6:37pm Subject: Re: Keep on truckin'!

Adrienne, your emotions about the Virginia Tech shooting really affected me, making me think about how I fled Los Angeles for years ago when two men tried to shoot me and that I came to Egypt partially to find a relatively safe place with few drugs or alcohol or guns where I could continue my work among the poor without feeling threatened everyday. Of course, as we see, obviously it isn't only in the poor communities where violence strikes with such constantly (and we can suspect that the resource hoarding and exploitive practices of the rich, and the constant marginalization that people suffer as they try desperately to climb the supposed "ladder of success" and to get social approval foster the conditions for disatisfaction that lead to violence . The violence rampant in America is a systemic illness that spreads for complex reasons. At least here in Egypt it can seem a far off bad dream.

Now that you have me thinking of how we might end violence and suffering I thought I might share with you an email I wrote to Janita, who is back on line with us after suffering severe computer problems and being out of the loop for a while. I share it because she asked if she can still "pass" the class, and I think you might all enjoy knowing that I think the whole system of "grades" and "passing" and "failing" is part of the systemic violence that destroys our society. The very notion that somebody can "fail" in the self-initiated effort to learn about the world, or that some outsider can "judge" success or failure in learning, is absurd to me. The idea that we use vocabulary like "pass" -- which conjures up the travel passes issued (rarely!) by Israeli soldiers to Palestinians, or that the Nazi's issued to Jews on occasion (while incarcerating the rest) is offensive, don't you think? The issuance of a Pass-port, by nature, suggests somebody is trying to control your movement and your growth. What I love now about visiting my wife's family in Germany, is that the whole EU is now one big country of countries, and we can drive or take the train from Germany to Belgium, to France, to Spain, to Italy without ever having to show a passport! It is beautiful!

What right do we have to "Pass" somebody, as if we were the border guard standing between college and freedom to pursue happiness? Is my job to examine your documents and decide who gets to "pass" through the gate into "the real world" of opportunity and who has to "stay behind" and slavishly work for minimum wage or in a job they hate?

Yick.

This attitude of passing and failing people seems to me to lie somewhere near the root of the world's problems with violence and dissatisfaction and hatred and intolerance. Every gang kid in L.A. I taught who had history with violence also had a history with someone "failing" him. Every gang kid I succeeded with grew in confidence because we abolished the very concept of "passing and failing" and focussed only on self-awareness and growth. It taught me a powerful lesson: screw the grades and focus on building relationships and consensus and community!

So here is what I wrote to Janita (hope you don't mind me repeating it for the class -- our eutopian community -- Janita! They are your support group, and the real audience for your work, not me!)

Hi Janita -- glad to know you are alive and kickin'!!

Here is my philosophy of life as it relates to your situation: we each have an obligation to learn everything we can about the operation of the world and focus our efforts on using that knowledge to "paying it forward" and making the world a better place for our children and grandchildren. I don't care much for institutions and man-made rules that get in the way of those pursuits so I reward people when I have institutional backing for making the effort to improve their surroundings for those who come later.

The only deadlines that concern me are the ones currently threatening humanity -- global warming, nuclear energy and weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, poverty and suffering, extinction of God's creation, cruelty and abuse to those who cannot fend for themselves... you know what I'm talking about. The climate change clock is ticking, as I said in a video I posted to our class, and the fuse on certain social time bombs are growing short. I believe we have obligations to do as much as we can as quickly as possible to solve world problems and end suffering.

When you share with us the way that you have been internalizing the information you've been learning from reading the text, from exploring outside and web reading, and from processing all that with your own experiences and insights, your love of life and your hopes, dreams and ambitions, and when you integrate that into a presentation of how you would use that information to make the world a better place (your eutopia!), I consider that you have fulfilled your obligations to the rest of us and our planet. So I reward that.

The short answer is, "YES", of course you can still pass at this point! There is enough "punishment" in the world for us hard working souls who were not advantaged with the wealth stolen from the many to make the few rich. I'm not going to penalize anybody because of the digital divide -- I'm lucky enough here in Egypt that I was able to somewhat repair my computer power supply or I wouldn't be on line tonight! I know where you are coming from!

The important thing is that you are doing the work, and we all look forward to your posts when you upload it. Just make sure you get everything to us with sufficient time for me and others to read it all and respond -- part of the course grade is about interaction!! I'm sure the others will welcome your return to "THE GREAT CONVERSATION".

So don't ever get discouraged!

Welcome back to our eutopia!

834 Cooperative Males, Competitive Females?

2007-09-07T12:08:00.001-07:00

Message no. 834[Branch from no. 821] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:36pm Subject: Re: relational summary

I agree with you from my own experience Michelle -- I find that crowds of males can be very cooperative and at times I am more worried about being in a crowd of women. It depends on the goal the men are pursuing. Men are socialized to be cooperative in packs for hunting and for waging war or playing group sports. So, if we think we are part of the same tribe, crowds can make us more helpful. I have read that women are less prone to bond in crowds because over evolutionary time they had to compete for access to males who had control over resources, whereas men had to cooperate in order to go out and get the resources. The equation completely changes though, once the competition is over a woman. Once this happens men will destroy each other!! Isn't that what Shakespeare's Othello is all about? :)

833 Man Eating Bugs

2007-09-07T12:07:00.001-07:00

Message no. 833[Branch from no. 832] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:31pm Subject: Man Eating Bugs

Just in case you thought I was crazy -- some cookbooks you might consider!

832 Keeping your personal space personal

2007-09-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

Message no. 832[Branch from no. 823] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:28pm Subject: Re: I chose this because

I have a particular and peculiar way of getting rid of people if they pester me when I want to be alone -- I drag them into my vision of eutopia so enthusiastically that they have no choice but to either engage me in the thing that I am obsessed about or get as far away as possible as quickly as possible! What I mean is that rather than them hijacking my mind, I try to hijack theirs!

A good example that I have done many times: At home in L.A. years ago telephone salespeople from AT and T would call up to ask me if I wanted to switch my service. Immediately I would say, "does your company donate money to social or environmental causes like Working Assets does?" They would say, "excuse me, sir"? And I would launch into a tirade about corporate responsibility and the need for any company to give back to the community and would state that if they would like I could send them brochures and examples and perhaps they could switch THEIR telephone provider.

One time a street preacher started accosting me about how we were all sinners and how I should repent and be saved. I immediately jumped into a conversation about why, if he were saved, he was so worried about the rest of us and why he was screaming and yelling and getting mad. I said, "shouldn't we be good role models for what it means to be saved? Why don't we pray together." And you know what? We did!

Other times, like on airplanes, when I don't want to talk, and I'm reading a book and somebody starts talking to me for their own sake of just talking, I turn the conversation to the book I'm reading and start showing them passages that really interest me. Sometimes (but rarely) they get into it, and we have a great conversation. Most times they feel overwhelmed (as you can imagine, now that you know me!) and they quickly get absorbed in something else and want to avoid bothering me again.

It is about defending your personal space in a nonthreatening way, I think. If you feel you are being invaded, use the Akido technique in martial arts and use the agressors energy against them. It is, after all, their energy, not yours. You just want to be left alone.

So what I normally do I don't consider a bad thing, it is a defensive posture, maintaining your personal space by KEEPING IT YOURS.

This may not work so well for women, as men may take it as a come on if a woman responds to the provocation, but then again, many men are intimidated easily and will back down if the woman holds her own ground with what is on her mind and doesn't let the man dominate the conversation. Usually the man will retreat.

On one occasion this led to an interesting result: Walking through a forest in Germany years ago, I started talking to a woman( a friend of a friend whom I did not know) who was in a contemplative mood and thus in no mood to talk. Rather than be rude or tell me she didn't want to talk, she used the presence of an inchworm hanging from a tree to immediately started talking about her fascination with eating insects. She later told me that she did this often to men to get them to think she was weird and leave her alone, but I didn't know that at the time. So I responded by telling her about my various trips to places in Borneo, China and Mexico where insects are on the menu and then invited her, if she ever came to Los Angeles, to have dinner with me at a great Thai restuarant where they serve delicious fried water bugs and crickets.

At this point she was intrigued and we talked for hours. We ended up dating for a year and she did, in fact, come to L.A. several times where we went to that Thai restaurant and to a great Mexican restaurant for chapulines con queso (grasshoppers and cheese).

So you never know what will happen if you defend your personal space....!

831 Chapter 7 Volcanoes and other "natural" disasters

2007-09-07T12:04:00.002-07:00

Message no. 831[Branch from no. 828] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:09pm Subject: Re: Pat Friedrichs chapter7 Relational summary

Thanks for the link to one of my favorite websites, http://space.com, the sister website to http://livescience.com. After reading the article on vulcanism on mars, though, I have to say I wouldn't worry too much about volcanic activity raining on your eutopian parade -- seems the youngest activity is at least a million years ago, and more likely 3 to 10 million, and if it is active it would be "one every 10,000 years or so". Given that people still build houses around Mt. St. Helens (which erupted in 1980, remember?) I shouldn't worry about Mars volcanoes! Might rather worry about Volcanoes in Los Angeles (Have you seen the Tommy Lee Jones film, "Volcano" about just that? Great flick, which I think about every time I pass the La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Blvd on my way to UCLA from the L.A. Eco Village!

Have you seen Dante's Peak, with Pierce Brosnan?

That is another fun "volcano destroys real estate on the west coast so don't build here" movie!

Speaking of carbon dioxide, did you know that navy divers use "oxygen rebreathers" or CO2 scrubbers that chemically bind with and remove CO2 from the air we breathe? They will be no doubt necessary on Mars. Usually what happens is that we pass out from a surfeit (too much) CO2 before we run out of oxygen. A Co2 scrubber removes the CO2 we breathe out so we can go on breathing the air until all the oxygen is gone. Here is a website that you might get some good facts from your Mars colony from:

http://www.frogdiver.com/scrubber.html

As ever, I enjoyed your post!

830 Ecological Buffers and Ecological Services

2007-09-07T12:04:00.001-07:00

Message no. 830[Branch from no. 819] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 5:54pm Subject: Re: chapter 7 Adrienne

I was under the impression that the major damage was not done by Katrina itself but by the levee bursting, which was the effect of very poor planning and criminal negligence on the part of politicians. Years ago, in 1991 I think it was, I was presenting at a National Science Teacher onference in Puerto Rico and we visited what was left of the El Yunque rainforest. From the top of the hill we could see down to the ocean -- where once there had been forest and then mangrove to the waters edge there was instead development and farmland. Sadly we could see that Hurricane Hugo had devastated much of the coastline and inland areas. Our guides told us "in the past hurricanes would hit Puerto Rico, but the reefs and mangroves and forest would soften the impact so we didn't really worry too much. Now with all the deforestation there is no longer any ECOLOGICAL BUFFER to soften the blows. So every hurricane is a disaster, leading to erosion, floods, landslides and other chaos."

We then scuba dived on what was left of the reef. It was all but dead because the silt and sand from the runoff and landslides had buried it.

That was the first time I had heard the concept of "ecological buffering". Now I know how important it is in land use planning. Did you know that most floods can be completely prevented by simply keeping the tops of mountains and hills forested? It is part of watershed management. The tree cover and root systems keep the water in place and keep its flow rate slow. We call these ECOLOGICAL SERVICES.

It is as though nature were a service provider, taking care of our needs for very little money. What economists are doing now is trying to convince the public to pay attention to the dollar value of ECOLOGICAL SERVICES. This way, if a company wants to, say, remove a forest, they have to pay the cost of what that forest provides in terms of flood protection. It turns out to be cheaper to keep the forest.

I think that sometime this century enough people will understand the value of ecological services and include them in planning. This will probably happen, unfortunately, after most have been destroyed and had to be rebuilt at full cost. Once we have a spreadsheet of the costs of reforesting an area to prevent floods, and compare it to the cost of building flood control channels, we will see that Frederick Law Olmsted and his son were right in their crusades to plan our riparian development (development around bodies of water) better!

I certainly don't think disasters are inevitable!

And think of this for fun: If we invest in solar heating and electric infrastructure now, while we have surplus energy in the form of oil to make capital investments in equipment and building, do you think even the next ice age would be disastrous, given that even on the coldest days solar heating and electricity work great?

Optimistic I remain!

829 Keep on Truckin': Designing Environments we Desire

2007-09-07T12:03:00.001-07:00

Message no. 829[Branch from no. 822] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, April 15, 2007 5:39pm Subject: Keep on truckin'!

You keep on adding to it and I'll keep visiting! That's the spirit -- the true eutopian spirit -- eutopia is ALWAYS a work in progress. Like any attempt at perfection -- which, as you've pointed out, is an impossible state in this world -- we never truly get there but the striving keeps us alive and fulfilled. What I like best about visiting the eutopian experiments you guys create is they always show me what humanity wants most and what we feel is impeding us from getting there. The more I learn, the more I see that it is NOT impossible, and the more hopeful I get, because we all seem to want the same things -- just in different measures and at different times. This means that we can DESIGN environments that give us all that we desire if we are clever enough about it, don't you think?

I think that these days, with virtual reality and a sophisticated understanding of psychology, we can even satisfy the people who seem to crave power and violence or have sadistic streaks and "cure" them of their ability to inflict harm on others or on our environments.

I like your message of finding peace on earth -- though I think a perfect eutopia is impossible, I think the goal of peace is actually achievable. I think we will always have some measure of local violence (which can be prevented from getting out of hand by good design and enforcement) but I think that larger regional or global conflicts can be eliminated once the profit motive and reward system for weapons manufacture and sale and use is gone.

I read yesterday that Syria is having secret talks with Israel and they may be close to a peace agreement. Wouldn't that be nice?

Anyway, please do keep adding and adding, and I'll keep visiting and visiting, as, I'm sure, will many many others!

The prof.

817 Using My Space for the Midterm

2007-09-07T12:02:00.001-07:00

Message no. 817[Branch from no. 772] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 5:14pm Subject: Re: Midterm-Daniela Vitiello

Hi Daniela!

I have posted kudos and a two thumbs up reaction to your wonderful use of myspace to inform us about "your place", your eutopia, as a reply to your blog on your blog. Let me know if it came through!

Well done!!

Sincerely,

Professor Culhane

812 Weather in a Sate of Fear

2007-09-07T11:35:00.000-07:00

Message no. 812[Branch from no. 799] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 6:36pm Subject: Re: weather

I am no geophysicist, but after I read Michael Chrichton's poorly written thriller "State of Fear" (which is the worst attempt to convince the public that global warming isn't real) I started wondering if people could trigger earthquakes and tsunami's themselves, using some powerful technology. A little websearching revealed that rather than fictional "envirowackos" (as in Chrichton's book) trying to do this, our government has been working on such weapons for the past 40 years. The one that gets the most attention these days is the HAARP project (the weapon is located up in Alaska I think -- sorry Dawn!)

When we were in Italy in 2005 on a Mercy College Faculty trip around the time of the big Tsunami, one of the professors in the Psych department said to me as we crossed the Ponte Vecchio bridge in Florence -- "some people believe the tsunami was caused by a test of the HAARP weapon." I didn't know what he meant at the time, but I remembered it after I read "State of Fear" and now I am curious.

Here is a website that talks about it, and the book "Angels Don't Play this HAARP: Advances in Tesla Technology"

http://www.haarp.net/

Which one of you wrote that post many weeks ago talking about TESLA? Another connection to that discussion and to our discussion of technology and disaster?

Hmmmm...

A Tale of Two Monitors: Getting an external monitor to work with Bootcamp on a MacBook Pro

2007-09-07T06:23:00.000-07:00

Having two monitors is a must for the kind of data visualization we are working on in this class.

If you are doing urban and environmental planning, creating architecture and landscapes in Google Sketchup, working with Google Earth and Google Maps, doing video editing, working with photoshop and other multi-media programs, or creating a thesis or other professional looking document using MikTeX, you really want to have at least two screens at your disposal.

For example, using Final Cut Pro or other video production software, or using DVD Studio Pro, you want to have one screen displaying your sequences and timelines and bins, and have another screen for showing your video. Similarly, when writing your dissertation using MikTeX or LaTeX, you want to have one screen available for writing your text and markup language codes, and another for viewing the compiled document as it will appear.

Much of the work we do in this "Environment and the Psychology of Behavior"class involves exploring virtual environments on a computer screen. A computer screen? Let's make that "several computer screens". What you really need to explore and create environments on a computer is more "Lebensraum" --more room to live, work and play. Just as we have a need for increased access to real estate in the real world when we want to explore or create, we have a need for increased real estate to move around in the virtual world. (Would that be "virtual estate"?).

The larger the better.

Since I am still at Ph.D. student, however, I share the student dilemma of having no money. Following Moore's law (roughly paraphrased as "every two years performance doubles and prices halve") I went down to Medion (a wholesale electronics market here in Essen, Germany) and bought a 17" Flat Pro Technology (Flat Screen) monitor for 119 Euro, ignoring the 19" monitor that cost twice as much. The idea is, save the extra 100 Euro and buy the larger better monitor next year, increasing your real estate size to three screens, or, better yet, giving your older second monitor to the needy!

The Medion monitor worked fine with the Mac OSX, but when I rebooted into Windows XP it would start out mirroring the Windows XP bootscreen, showing that it received a signal, and then it would suddenly go black, saying "Kein Signale" (No Signal). I went to this forum to look for a solution:

http://forums.macnn.com/104/alternative-operating-systems/291840/bootcamp-external-monitor-on-macbook-pro/

There I found all sorts of people having the same problems and lots of attempts to work around it. One thing they kept saying was to go to your ATI control panel and try to fix it from there. I couldn't, for the life of me, find any ATI control panel. I tried downloading one from a site and it kept crashing.

For the longest time I have been unable to use an external monitor with my MacBook Pro in Windows XP mode using Bootcamp and it has been driving me nuts. Today, however, it seems that I have solved the problem, and I want to pass the solution on to you if you are facing similar problems.

It seems that ATI finally has posted bootcamp drivers! Go here:

http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/mac/bootcamp-xp.html

When you get there, you will see this:

Apple Boot Camp XP Software Graphics Drivers

Download Link	File Size	Version	Date Posted	Package Includes
Display Driver 1 of 2	11.6MB	8.353	May 3, 2007	Display Driver
Catalyst Control Center 2 of 2	9.8MB	8.353	May 3, 2007	Catalyst Control Center

Download both the Display driver and the Catalyst Control Center (CCC) and install them. Then plug in your external monitor, reboot and when you XP is running go to Programs\CatalystControlCenter and click on the CCC program file. The CCC wizard will ask you how you want to configure your monitors and, presto, your external monitor should work!

The next step is configuring your monitors. I use CCC Advanced. I keep my larger external monitor to my right, so monitor 1 is generally the laptop screen, while monitor displays the big movies and things. This is fine for working with programs like Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro and MikTeX and others that let you move the windows around, but it doesn't help for game play. When you start games in full screen mode they tend to play on the primary monitor.

To get around this and make the games appear on the larger external monitor, go into ATI Catalyst Control Center and, in Graphics Settings (left hand tab) click on the Displays Manager. What you want to do is to change the order in the Desktop and Display Setup. You want Desktop 1 (on the left) to be your external monitor and Desktop 2 (on the right) to be your laptop. To do this, first notice the display boxes on the right (blue boxes with numbers 1 and 2 in them on a grey field). Click and drag Display 2 and put it to the left of Display 1. This tells your computer that you are going to want monitor 2 (the non primary monitor where the game WON'T play) to be to the left of the monitor that shows the game (in my case, the laptop is going to be reassigned to Display 2, and the large external monitor is going to be reassigned to Display 1 so I can play my games on the bigger screen).

Now, to reassign monitors, right click on the icon in the Desktop 1 window (the one that shows colored computer monitors in it. You will notice when you hover over it that the cursor changes into a little mouse icon with a grey blinking right mouse button telling you to press that). Select "Swap Displays: Maintain Per-Display Mode Settings". The screens will go all funky black with blocks and lines through it as it adjusts and then it will appear as if your primary monitor is now the external monitor and your extended monitor is the laptop monitor.

Your mouse should move from left to right and right to left as if you were on one big monitor. Now you can keep a document with instructions open on your laptop screen and keep a document you are writing open on your laptop screen while your game plays on the bigger screen to the right. Naturally you can't use your laptop screen while the game is playing, but you can toggle out of the game easily by using the Alt-Tab buttons, and return to your game the same way!

This way you can explore virtual environments in the game and keep returning to your open document to record your insights and how the virtual environments affect the psychology of your behavior!

Hope that helps!

Goodnight, and good luck!

Getting rid of false spyware remover messages

2007-09-07T03:46:00.000-07:00

I don't know which is more annoying: trying to drive along the beautiful beaches in Chapters 7 (Highway 17), 8 (Sandtraps), and 9 (Nova Prospekt) of Half Life 2 without getting attacked by the persistent and aggressive antlions that infected the earth after being transported from Xen by the portal storms or trying to do your homework on your PC without being attacked by persistent popup messages telling you your system has been infected and needs YET ANOTHER spyware cleaner!

In the case of Half-Life 2, even going into God mode doesn't restore your tranquility -- the antlions can't kill you anymore, but they still pester you until you go crazy! (BTW - to enter God mode you need to bring up the console and enter cheat mode. Instructions are here: http://cheats.gamespy.com/pc-cheats/half-life/). In the case of using your computer for *serious* work, even having an anti-virus like Avira or programs like "AdAware" "Spyware Blaster", "Spybot - Search and Destroy" don't seem to help. All they do is make trying to fix your computer FEEL like you are playing a video game, searching for and destroying malware as though it was a nest of antlions.

The problem with trying to eradicate malware from your computer is that it can take up every bit as much time as a detailed first-person-shooter, but with none of the cool graphics.

For the past two days my computer hasn't given me much leisure time, let alone peace of mind, as every two minutes or less a false "security message" pops up on my screen telling me that "windows has detected an internet attack attempt" or that "Trojan.W32.Looksky has been detected on your computer". A little red x appears down at on the right on my task bar, and occasionally the entire screen goes horribly red with a message that my security has been compromised. Scary stuff. Forget even trying to get serious real work done -- you can't even play Resident Evil 4 because just as you are about to shoot the infectious parasite that has emerged from the back of your nemesis in the boss battle, a popup parasite telling you your PCs security has been compromised emerges from the background process and kills the game! The metaphorical implications are chilling!

The Parasite Popup takes you to a website that promises a cure. Be warned: IT IS A TRAP!

The "solution" is supposed to be that if I pay attention to these "security alerts" and click on them, whatever "munificent" protector (the great and terrible Oz?) is running behind the curtain will take me to the website of a benign company whose software will "automatically" clean my system of the infection. It will try todownload "cleansurf" or "spyaxe" or some other "helpful" program.

Turns out its a scam! The only thing threatening my computer is the supposed spyware cleaning software company itself! And the more you do battle with the infection by means of their tools, the more infected your system gets. I'll take antlions any day over this nightmare!

So what to do?

For the time being my problem seems solved thanks to a retired IT director who goes by the handle "MFDnNC Distinguished Member" from Piedmont North Carolina (that's the NC) who posts his valuable advice for the rest of us in the big wide world on Tech Support Guy forum:

http://forums.techguy.org/malware-removal-hijackthis-logs/618395-solved-trojan-w32-looksky-do.html

MFDnNC suggested using SDFix.exe. Here are his instructions:

Download http://downloads.andymanchesta.com/R...ools/SDFix.exe and save it to your Desktop.

Double click SDFix.exe and it will extract the files to %systemdrive%
(Drive that contains the Windows Directory, typically C:\SDFix)

Please then reboot your computer in Safe Mode by doing the following :
· Restart your computer
· After hearing your computer beep once during startup, but before the Windows icon appears, tap the F8 key continually;
· Instead of Windows loading as normal, the Advanced Options Menu should appear;
· Select the first option, to run Windows in Safe Mode, then press Enter.
· Choose your usual account.
· Open the extracted SDFix folder and double click RunThis.bat to start the script.
· Type Y to begin the cleanup process.
· It will remove any Trojan Services and Registry Entries that it finds then prompt you to press any key to Reboot.
· Press any Key and it will restart the PC.
· When the PC restarts the Fixtool will run again and complete the removal process then display Finished, press any key to end the script and load your desktop icons.
· Once the desktop icons load the SDFix report will open on screen and also save into the SDFix folder as Report.txt
(Report.txt will also be copied to Clipboard ready for posting back on the forum).
· Finally paste the contents of the Report.txt back on the forum with a new HijackThis log"

I did what he says, and it seems to have worked! Hurrah! Thanks to MFDnNC's advice my computer seems to be malware free at this moment! Still, I'm nervous... will it happen again? How long will this halcyon period last?

I feel like Robert Neville in Richard Matheson's "I am Legend" , "the last man on earth" waiting for night to fall and for the zombie vampires to attack again. For now, the infection is "cured", but my computer still feels a lot like London in Twenty Eight Weeks Later -- someone on the inside (it could be your loving wife!) could be an infected carrier. Oh, she may appear healthy enough, but in her blood the parasite stirs...

We will see how long it is before the plague of popups and security alerts begins again...

For now though, it is back to hunting antlions... (I know what you are thinking: "Get a life!" ... well, at least a half-life!)

(P.S. Other sites that may help you if you have similar problems are: http://www.spywaredb.com/remove-spyaxe/
http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-37190-Your-computer-is-infected-Windows-has-detected-spyware-infection.html)

811 Technophilia/Technophobia II

2007-09-06T11:06:00.001-07:00

Message no. 811[Branch from no. 810] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 6:13pm Subject: Re: Technophilia/Technophobia II

Another thought about our love/hate relationship with technology:

Just as I wrote in my reply to Adrienne about "Thirdspace" perspectives (the spatial perspective) there is a technique many of us in sustainable development use to think differently about technology.

First we take the word etymologically by its roots -- "Techne" means "art". By this we (and the Greeks who coined the word) generally mean something that was "manufactured" or created by "man". Interestingly the word "Man" also is found in "Manual" and in the French word "Main" which means "HAND". Thus, technology is anything that involves the hand.

This makes sense: one of the things that separates us (and our primate cousins) from the other animals is the fact that we have hands. Hands enables us to use "tools" which is the other word for "technology". Nowadays we distinguish between "hand tools" (low technology) and "machine tools" (high technology), but all that means is that we have found ways to create tools that can be used to use other tools. There is little difference conceptually between computers and digging sticks. Once an animal starts using a tool it has crossed a threshold into the use of technology.

We primates aren't the only ones to use tools. Besides the famous cases of chimpanzees in the wild creating termite sticks and sponges, we know that crows and other birds use sticks and stones to open things and sea otters use rocks to break open abalone shells.

What is fascinating is when you stop thinking about "tools" as things apart from the body and start seeing the world through these eyes: HANDS ARE TOOLS. HANDS ARE TECHNOLOGY. And so are beaks and claws and teeth and feet.

Once you see the world through this optic your fear of technology goes away I've found (unless you have an equally healthy fear and respect for the naked hand! Do you remember the old commercial for Jinzu knives where the man says, "In Japan, the hand is considered a lethal weapon... but not against this tomato!!!"? Did you ever watch the show "Kung Fu" -- the whole Karate phenomenon is predicated on an understanding that the human body is a technology that can be used to further our goals and protect ourselves. Thus, in Japanese, Karate means "Empty Hand" (Kara -- Empty, Te -- Hand).

The fact that a spirit can make a body move is fascinating -- if we are indeed avatars filled with holy spirits then we are their "technology".

I guess what I am saying is that technology is not the thing to fear -- it is merely the physical world that acts in the world. The old adage "guns don't kill people, people kill people" comes to mind -- but you should know that I am an advocate of many forms of gun control because I also recognize that some tools are too potentially dangerous to be left around in the hands of people who aren't responsible.

Where does that leave us? Well, I think that if we think of all objects and every part of our bodies as technology we can see clearer when a technology can be used to control us or can get out of control, because we can analyze how it is linked to the psychology of behavior.

And here is where I will end this post: I suggest to you that TECHNOLOGY IS THE ENVIRONMENT. THE ENVIRONMENT IS TECHNOLOGY. And that environment includes your body, not just the things that surround it. Your body is the environment of your mind and spirit. The rest is just an extension of that ever widening space that ultimately includes every object in the universe. So it is really all about "Environment and the Psychology of Behavior" isn't it? :)