226 Don't Panic

Message no. 226[Branch from no. 219] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, February 4, 2007 6:33pm Subject: Re: Confused, Also!!

Hi Varshawn! As the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy says, “Don’t panic!”  I'll try to explain vat zee blog eez! (Actually, it may be easier for one of your classmates who is new to blogs but successfully created one for the class to answer your question, because when you are as familiar with them as I am it is hard to know where the confusion is – you know how the best people to explain something are the one’s who are just learning it? This is why I don’t believe in education ruled by “experts” and why I like peer education. The expert should be there like a coach or a guide or a ship captain to correct our course, but learning occurs best by doing and sharing discovery as we explore what are new environments to us.)

To tie this discussion into our study of cognitive maps, Imagine, for example, that you were trying to explain to somebody how to get to your house. Who do you think would do a better job – you, who have travelled the route so many times that you can do it with your eyes closed, and hence tend to ignore the salient wayfinding cues (see page 88 of our text for more on that!) or somebody who just learned how to get there, somebody who tried it a couple times and got lost, and is now keen on describing each and every landmark along the way!?

So hey class, chime in, and give Varshawn a hand will ya?! 

Here is my attempt to explain it though: A BLOG is a web page you can easily create to share your ideas and photographs without having to know how to make a web page. The word “blog” means a “web log”. And a “log” in this case is like “Captain’s Log” on Star Trek, not something you put on the fire!

Here is how Wikipedia describes it: “A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media. The term "blog" is derived from "Web log." "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.“ (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog).

We should all get very familiar with Wikipedia. Bookmark http://en.wikipedia.org/ and use it often, all the time. You will note that Adrienne used it in her relational summary (remember, though, if you are going to use wikpedia, you must quote it, as i have done here. also note that wikipedia is NOT PEER REVIEWED, meaning there is no way of being sure what it says is verified or truthful. For this reason academic writing discourages using Wikipedia as a real source, and in the future, as we improve our relational summaries, we will not use Wikipedia as one of our minimum of three sources, since it is not a valid source. It is okay to reference it, but we just have to keep in mind it is not an authoritative source!)

To make your blog, why not click on the following, and let it guide you through the easy steps: http://blogspot.com There are other places to post blogs, but I find this very friendly and easy, as apparently have others in the course!

Anyway V, don’t get overwhelmed! I’m hip to what you are going through, so I’m extra cool when it comes to getting up to speed. Having a baby and raising it well is one of the most important things we do in life, and education is supposed to support and enhance that experience. Please keep in mind that as far as I’m concerned ALL OF YOUR FAMILY LIVES COME FIRST! The course is meant to make your family life easier, not harder.

So let’s support one another, hey? This kind of education IS MUCH DIFFERENT, as you say, and that is why it SHOULD BE BETTER! Just as Dawn scanned the first chapter of the text for us, I’m sure somebody would scan the second if it is necessary; all ya gotta do is ask! And THANKS for sharing these concerns – it gives us a clearer idea of your environment and how it influences the psychology of your behavior! And isn’t that what it is all about!? Now all we gotta do is relate the challenges we are going through in life to the formal theories and ideas and vocabulary found in our textbook and we will be shining! In this way you will all walk away with a meaningful degree and people will say, “dang, that person is mighty well educated, and helpful too... they seem to really know what they are talking about. I kin trust them to help solve my problems too and make the world a better place!”. THAT, in my opinion, is the goal of our learning environment!

The capitan

225 Famous Quotations

Message no. 225[Branch from no. 220] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, February 4, 2007 6:02pm Subject: Famous Quotations!

Hi Adrienne et al. ! (et al. is academic speak for “and all”),

Adrienne this is is exactly the idea! If I can just tweak it a little, let me push for quotations in quotation marks. This is a general note for all of you: Remember to have at least three quotes in the relational summary, and put them IN QUOTES. Then give us the page number they came from. Everything we write in academia that is not our own original writing has to be in quotes!! You are providing the reader with a text map of thought and the reader always needs to know which ideas are uniquely yours (i.e. can only be found in your head) and which belong to others (i.e. can be found in their books or articles or speeches or thoughts). This means that when we provide a link to a website, if any of what we write in our relational summary is somebody else’s words (pulled from the website for example) they must also be in quotes. With websites it is hard to give a page number, and probably not necessary since we can do a “search and find” but we have to know the URL and we need to know what came from the site and what is your original contribution. So put everything you cut and paste or copy in QUOTES! Okay?

As you know, what we are working toward is relational summaries that tell us all HOW YOU RELATE TO THE TEXT AND ITS IDEAS. It is about YOU. So we use the quotes to support our own insights and observations. Remember that we all have the book (or soon will! Don’t worry Varshawn!) so the relational summaries are not summaries of what the book said. They are connections between the book and our own lives and environments.

You all are beginning to get the hang of it, so keep reading and writing.

ALSO, PLEASE COMMENT ON YOUR FELLOW STUDENTS RELATIONAL SUMMARIES, AND HELP EACH OTHER OUT. This is a safe place to grow, and what you want to do is to let your fellows know if the “mental maps” they created in their writings help you understand what they experienced and what they see in their head. All maps are attempts to communicate one persons environment to another person so that we can navigate together.

And here is the point: WRITING IS A MAP of a MENTAL ENVIRONMENT!

Hope that made sense! If not, I need to redraw my map!

T

224 Text is an environment!

Message no. 224[Branch from no. 218] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, February 4, 2007 5:49pm Subject: Text is an environment

Hi Michelle and all,

Michelle, like Daniela's summary, yours is great and 90% there. It also merely lacks the linkages to outside readings. I would also try to give page numbers when you quote or relate an idea so that we can all find the source material if we need or want to. That is what academic writing is all about.

You may have wondered why academics, like the author of your book, always write the names of the authors and the years they wrote or came up with ideas in quotes right after they say something. For example, on page 43 the authors say "... the Kaplans conclude that humans have a fondness for environments that provide rapid, comprehensible information". Scenes that exhibit both may offer prospect and refuge (Appleton 1975, Greenbie 1982). "

What the authors have done is to provide US with a mental map of the subject that "provides rapid, comprehensible information". Now, if I want to know more about the ideas of prospect and refuge I can immediately go to the back of the book , to page 518, and see that Appleton wrote a book called “The Experience of Landscape” in 1975, and, on page 544, I learn that Greenbie wrote an article called “The Landscape of Social Sybols” in a magazine (a journal) called “Landscape Research”, Volume 7, pages 2 through 6. Now, armed with that information, I can go to the library, or to Amazon.com or to an online academic book and article provider, like JSTOR, and get my hands on the original articles.

Those articles, in turn, will contain their own roadmap, telling me where those authors got THEIR ideas and so on and so on. Eventually we can trace our way back to the very first article or book or author who mentioned the idea we are studying. Sometimes it goes all the way back to Aristotle!!!

So referenceing is very important!!! It makes what we learn legible, and makes information rapid and comprehensible.

Do you see how providing references is like a MAP? It isn’t graphic, but it provides directions. In that way it keeps us from getting lost.

TEXT IS A TWO DIMENSIONAL LANDSCAPE. Like any landscape, it can be intimidating. So giving us links, and giving us page numbers and references to authors, you give us PROSPECT and REFUGE. PROSPECT because we get “an open, unobstructed view of the environment (p.43)” (in this case we get a chance to see where the information came from and who is out there studying it). REFUGE because our ideas are SAFE! We can HIDE behind the authorities and take shelter in their expertise. By quoting our sources and referring to them, we are backed up and don’t stand alone. We can claim things like “Disneyland has better parking lots than the shopping mall because it reminds you where you are parked among all the thousands of cars by knowing you were parked near Bambi or Mickey Mouse, and each area looks unique” and then say “this is supported by what the Kaplans say: “People are attracted to scenes in which human abilities to process information are stimulated and in which this processing will be succesful” (Bell, 2005, p. 43)

Now people may disagree with you, but you can take refuge in the fact that the Kaplans would probably be on your side!

I would like everyone in the class to learn to see how text is a landscape, how it is an environment, and, since we are using text to communicate with each other, try to create a text environment that provides refuge, prospect, coherence, legibility, complexity and yes, even mystery! (see table 2-1!)

Capice? Cool! Keep writing!

223 Chapter 1: The rule of 3

Message no. 223[Branch from no. 222] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, February 4, 2007 5:30pm Subject: Re: Ch. 1

Hi Daniela and all! Daniela, your first relational summary is 90% there! I like the way you are relating the quotes and ideas from the book to your personal experiences. By letting us know the pages of the text you are pulling the ideas from you are giving us a COGNITIVE MAP of the book as it relates to your life and insights. That is exactly what I want.

Now all you need is to provide linkages to outside reading, to support material. That will make your relational summaries perfect!

Remember, all, that the way I am asking you to construct these summaries is to give me at least three quotes from the book and at least three links to outside readings so that we can explore the ideas further. All good things come in threes, they say , the “holy trinity” of education.

I follow the “minimum of three” idea also so that we conform to Mercy’s evaluation policies. Mercy asks that we log in and post writings in the discussion area at least 3 times a week. And there are at least three major assignments for grades. Mine, of course, are the relational summaries, the midterm multimedia project and the final experimental study. Think “3” as you work and you can’t go wrong. Double it to 6 and you are a hero!

Keep up the good work and go beyond!

215-216, 128 Relational summaries

Message no. 215[Branch from no. 209] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, February 3, 2007 5:37pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary

Hi all -- Adrienne has made a good start here swimming in these unfamiliar waters, but to get to shore, Adreinne you've got to really link your thoughts to quotes from the text book and also to outside readings. I suggest you all check out Patricia's Relational summaries for chapter 1 and chapter 2 (which I think are even better than the models I posted in the course content area!) and use them as your guide. She liberally uses quotes from the book, relates them to her observations and provides links to outside readings.

As time goes on, if we all help each other, we will converge on a style and a method that will make these not only fun and enlightening to read, but a pleasure to write and informative to all. Keep up the good work, and keep upping the ante!

Message no. 216[Branch from no. 209] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, February 3, 2007 5:42pm Subject: Glossary poetry

Thanks for being the first to answer my query about the intro to my post Adrienne --

yes, the words all came from the glossary and what I tried to do was to take every single vocabulary word in the D section and use them creatively but correctly in a single sentence (or, at least, in a single paragraph!).

My English teacher at Dobbs Ferry High School, Jack Holly, made us do that every week with our vocabulary lists and I found it to be a delightful exercise. It really made me learn those words and concepts because I had to think so outside the box by staying in the box (of one sentence or one paragraph).

I provided that as an example of an offbeat way to do a 'relational summary". I simply related all the words from two pages of the glossary in the text book to each other, stringing them together to create meaning. Try it sometime, you guys! Message no. 217 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, February 3, 2007 5:57pm Subject: Relational Summary Chapter 1 Pat Friedrichs

Subject: Relational Summary Chapter 1 Pat Friedrichs Message no. 128 Author: PATRICIA FRIEDRICHS (pwakeman) Date: Saturday, January 27, 2007 1:28pm

Patricia Friedrichs Environmental Psychology Assignment 3 week 1 relational study of the first chapter

Ok, I start with page one which explains that our environment “provides us with basic needs, is modified by our actions and contains natural and built surroundings. Affordances are possibilities allowed or provided by the environment and helps determine our behavior.” I automatically thought about my home and my ability to take online classes. A week ago a sketchpad and colored pencils were laid out around my room and desk area. This week my computer is consistently on and the sketchpad is replaced with textbooks and notebooks. The computer and books are affordances in my environment that allow me to go to school online. On Tuesday, I still didn’t have all my books and this affected my mood. I was worried and concerned about falling behind, bur then on Wednesday, I received my books and my mood changed to excitement about reading and learning new things.

Right now, even in Texas it is cold and the weather helps me to appreciate not having to go out to class. Also, even though gas prices are dropping, I am happy that I do not have to financially find gas money to attend class. I have built my classroom setting in my dining area. One wall was perfect for the computer desk. The wall is an affordance in my environment. However my environment has one major flaw and that upsets my mood at times and my learning process. That is the desk area is directly connected to the living area where the TV is located. When my children are the noise in my built classroom setting makes it intolerable to study and work. I then must move to my room, which does not have a computer and thereby limits me to hand written assignments, until I can get back to the computer, and reading. This can sometimes be frustrating, especially if my children are using the computer also for schoolwork and I cannot get back on when I need to work. The apartment is small and when the three of us share one living space, we often interfere with each other’s personal space and tasks.

When the book spoke of the experiment about crowded living conditions it made me think of my own crowded space. The apartment complex I live in has tight quarters outside and we must all share the space. There are only 4 working washing machines and 4 dryers for over 100 people. This creates a competition in the laundry room. Where we must determine the most appropriate time to do laundry. This is a problem focused experimental design on how to resolve the issue of limited laundry issues and its influence on behavior. This is a link to public use laundries in apt complexes. Brightening up the laundry- More prefer to use laundry room for economical reasons http://www.housingfinance.com/housingreferencecenter/Laundry_Room.html We could do an observation about how many residents use the laundry room at any given time of day. But you would be sitting there for 7 days and nights recording data. As the book suggested, cameras would be more efficient.

Now I read on more in the chapter and they mention simulated environments and I think of my secondary virtual classroom, where I fell connected t classmates and instructors even though we never meet. In this case, my instructor can travel anywhere in the world and not skip a beat in teaching our lesson. Here is a link to the history and advantages of the virtual classroom. http://www.und.ac.za/users/clarke/rto/vt2.html

Then I enter a third environment, which is Second Life. Here I can accomplish more than I can in my real life. I already have a house and new car and clothing and it was all-free. I am content as I walk around, meeting people and completing tutorial tasks. I have a choice whether I want to stay in the help land or move on to the game. Right now, I choose to stay and explore the help land a little more. However, in my real environment I am getting a little frustrated because I must use the keyboard to move around. I cannot afford a game pad yet, so my virtual environment is a little slower, and harder to use. This doesn’t differ much from my real environment where I have to use a cane. I am handicapped so to speak in both settings. However, when I can afford it I will get the game pad. Here you will find a survey that someone did regarding keyboard use vs. controller game pads. My frustration with the keyboard might come from inexperience using the keyboard for gaming and also the lag in my computer. The following link you may have to copy and paste into the address bar- for some reason Webct won't hyperlink the whole address.

http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message? board.id=NonGameplay&message.id=421373

Once I do get a game pad this affordance will allow me to travel more efficiently in my virtual environment. This means to me that there is a correlation between device used and level of frustration in real time environments.

In heading back to my laundry room as part of my understanding of experimental design, there is another factor to take into consideration. Whether or not someone is using just the washer or just the dryers because they may have the other in their apartment. Someone might own a washing machine and bring their clothes only to dry them. Also whether a person uses the machines regularly or is just using them because their machine just broke and they are waiting on a replacement. These are confounding effects that would change the outcome. Therefore the problem would have to be more specific.

Then, I began to think about how to perform an experimental design in my Virtual World. How could I get statistics? Well maybe I could open a store and sell 2 similar products such as a convertible car vs. a regular closed car and see which one sells more in the virtual world. As the book mentioned, experiments have been done using simulators that model everyday driving conditions as well as experiments of flying. An experiment could be to test how long a pilot can fly a plane before fatigue and poor judgment occur.

In this type of study participants are aware they are being studies and most likely signed an informed consent. In contrast do my laundry room participants have to be made aware of being in an experiment? Would being informed change their behavior? I don’t think it would. No matter whether someone is keeping track of people using the machines, the bottom line is that they still need to do their laundry. Secondly, they would not have to do anything else but wash their clothes, which is there task anyway. The results would indicate good times when the machines are available. If I wanted to I could just set time limits on the experiment such as between the hours of 6am- 10 pm. Once the results are known, it might change peoples laundering habits resulting in a change of affordances available in the environment.

This all goes in line with the book, which states, “ that our behavior is affected by the environment as much as the environment is affected by our behavior.”

Pat

214 Utility company propaganda: Greenwashing

Message no. 214[Branch from no. 210] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, February 3, 2007 5:27pm Subject: Re: hope you can read this

Yep, I read it. Thanks for posting this piece of propaganda so we can all see it. Wow.

They are very clever. Especially the part about how they want to test these new wind farms. Bravo for them for bringing wind energy into the mix -- we use it in Germany all the time and the wind farms are inspirational and beautiful (you can see our California windfarms in my video "Ben and Joe's electric adventure Part I") http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JvXINEpJ68.

But shame on them for "playing the green card" while proposing this proposterous scenario demanding more huge power lines. Yes, wind should be a part of the portfolio, but they are completely missing the point (or obscuring it) when they act as if extending the grid is the solution. Their comparison with the highway system is a good one, and shows their near sighted mentality. Yes, highways are congested. The solution is not to build more highways (especially after telling us that latent demand is rising all the time). The new highways will, by their own logic, be clogged again in just a few years! In the transportation sector the solution is to REDESIGN how we do transportation (public transit, use of segway people movers, regional provision of goods and services, multi use real estate, rejuvenated robust downtown areas that decrease need for driving to shopping malls, etc. )

CHAPTERS 11, 12 and 13 in your text deal with the issue of design dynamics and the design cycle (see page 391). A responsible utility would not tell us "we considered all alternatives" as if they are mommy and daddy telling little children about why they have to divorce or why the family has to regrettably move, they would treat us as ADULTS and discuss all the alternatives. I find their tone patronizing and insulting as well as misleading.

Your text reminds us "As a student of psychology, one thing you may have learned about problem solving is that it is not rational. We know that humans generally fall far short of the optimal solution to a problem, accepting instead soltuions that satisfice-- that is, solutions that are "good enough" (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989; Simon, 1960.) (p. 391)

Since I have my masters in urban planning, I know how these people work, and how they want to play on your irrational fears and your trust in the "experts". In a democratic society you deserve FULL INFORMATION of all the design alternatives.

In the energy sector the solution is also to redesign how we generate and deliver our energy. Decentralization and Distributed Energy are not even mentioned in this silly letter -- and it appears to me that the motives may be driven by the army’s military facility at Fort Belmir doubling in size, adding 22,000 new employees. Great. This is another scare tactic, isn’t it? Think about it: Now, if we criticize the Dominion and Allegheny Energy project, we will appear “unpatriotic” given that we are “at war”. Fears of the misuse of the “homeland security act” will inhibit many people from criticizing the electrification project when really the army knows better – the army is one branch of the goverment that is working hard on decentralized distributed energy. Why? Because the army cannot function if its power supplies can be interrupted. For this reason army bases are usually self-sufficient – they are supposed to provide their own power and use the latest greatest technologies (if not, what is that bloated military budget for?). As a case in point, a friend of ours has a camoflauge foldable solar panel developed for the army (http://globalsolar.com/military.htm) ; we used it in Egypt and we bought and brought the non-military unit to demonstrate in Israel and Palestine ( http://store.altenergystore.com/Solar-Electric-Panels/Foldable-Solar-Panels/Global-Solar-Cigs-Technology/Global-Solar-P3-15-15W-12V-Portable-Power-Pack-Black/p4397/. ) The military is also heavily invested in new fuel cell technologies, particularly the wonderful new Franklin Fuel Cell (http://www.franklinfuelcells.com/Market.htm) that can run cleanly and silently on every possible fuel from diesel to kerosene to gasoline to natural gas to alcohol to vegetable oil to hydrogen, producing electricity and heat. See http://www.fctec.com/. So it is ridiculous for Dominion and Allegheny to provide power for an army base unless it has no strategic significance at all, and if that is so, then we don’t need to support it any way. The military is making lots of money these days and one way to justify the profits is to build things. Well, let them build their own power plants on site. On-site generation is the future of power production anyway, since it eliminates transmission losses (which can be as much as 10 percent), costs of construction, resource and material waste and the possibility of blackouts!

When the letter says “Imagine what it would be like on a hot August afternoon when the thermometer reads 100 degrees and traffic lights, office elevators and air conditioners stop working” it reads to me like BLACKMAIL. I just spent a day in Los Angeles visiting the Debs Park Audubon Center, a short walk from the Gold Line Metro to Pasadena from China Town.

http://maps.google.de/maps?f=q&hl=de&q=4235+Monterey+Rd,+Los+Angeles,+CA,+USA&ie=UTF8&z=15&ll=34.097129,-118.190403&spn=0.015779,0.043259&t=k&om=1

The entire facility is powered by a combination of solar electric panels and solar thermal vaccum tube technology that provide SOLAR AIR CONDITIONING. That’s right, solar air conditioning. The hotter it gets outside, the cooler the building gets inside. I met with the designer, Les Hamasaki and he took me on an engineering tour of the facility to explain how it works.

You can read about it here: http://www.californiasolarcenter.org/solareclips/2004.02/20040210-10.html and here: http://www.eco-now.net/earthday.html

Now I ask you, if Debs Park’s Audubon center has plenty of electricity and air conditioning on hot August afternoons when the thermometer reads 100 degrees, and they are not connected to the Los Angeles Electric company grid, why can’t Northern Virginia residents have the same luxury? Why not?

No, this letter is full of obscurantist techniques. They are clever but I hope the American public is more clever than the utilities. Shame on them.

Again, thanks so much for sharing this!!!

Thoughts on an ever expanding population

In Paul Ehrlich's classic tome "The Population Bomb" he calculates that if human beings keep reproducing at this exponential rate we will not only completely fill the earth, but in not too many generations (read the book for the number or use this website, http://members.optusnet.com.au/exponentialist/DoublingMech.htm , to help you do the math) humans would outnumber the stars themselves. Talk about the big crunch!

We all know that the population has to come down is we are to have even a modest amount of Lebensraum and leave enough for the ecosystem services that support us (to say nothing about preserving biodiversity for its own sake, but I'm assuming the majority of you are anthropocentric in your outlook and think that cats and dogs and parakeets and houseplants and a nice garden with some trees and petunias are about as much biodiversity as you need, so I'm appealing to your survival instinct here... Go see "Evan Almighty" if you want a better sense of how little people -- particularly Hollywood film-makers, understand the real "flood" of extinctions threatening our planet!)

Anyway, I wondered how the "population bomb" arguments would sound to a race of sophisticated androids (I prefer android to "robot" since "robot" is Russian for "worker" and suggests slavishness. I think androids would agree with me -- as do, apparently, the authors of the game "Syberia" wherein the hotel owner tells the woman in the first scene of gameplay "they (the wind up toy creatures) prefer the name "automatons". They don't like "robot".)

Let us start our thought experiment first by considering whether we would worry about an "overpopulation" of computers in the sense of overcrowding and consumption of resources.

In the 1940s and 50s, when the only computers around were huge and wasteful, if somebody had said that one day we would have a billion computers on the planet we would have had to worry if the earth could sustain that many of the machines. According to http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa060298.htm

"The ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. It covered 1800 square feet (167 square meters) of floor space, weighed 30 tons, consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power. There was even a rumor that when turned on the ENIAC caused the city of Philadelphia to experience brownouts, however, this was first reported incorrectly by the Philadelphia Bulletin in 1946 and since then has become an urban myth."

Imagine what would happen if the population of ENIAC computers had risen to the current population of laptop and desktop computers! At 167 square meters per computer and 160 KW of power there would be more than brownouts! Biodiversity would be wiped out and there would be no energy for civilization. It would be almost as bad asthe nightmare scenarios depicted in The Matrix and the Terminator series!

Fortunately, computers have make a quantum leap in reducing both size and power consumption (my laptop fits in... well... my lap, while it consumes a mere 22 watts, which I can supply using the 30 watt foldable CIGS (copper indium gallium di-selenide) solar panel that I carry in the laptop case! So there is no population crisis with computers in sight -- they keep getting smaller and more powerful while using less and less power!

Now, to continue our thought experiment, suppose that we succeed in creating cost-effective high performance androids in the near future (Asimo and Wakamura and the humanoid robots like domestic servant Valerie on show here at http://www.androidworld.com are the harbingers of this new race of beings). Given that androids can take advantage of the economies of scale and Fordist mass production techniques that made the Industrial Revolution produce so much surplus so quickly that we faced an underconsumption crises that helped create The Great Depression, should we fear an android population bomb?

If Moore's Law for computers is followed by androids, we should expect that in a very short period of time they would get smaller and more efficient -- each new generation of android consuming fewer resources and taking up less space while becoming ever more powerful and capable.

HOW MANY ANGELS CAN DANCE ON THE HEAD OF A PIN?

The idea of overpopulation crises depends on a static definition of the populating entity. We tend to believe that human beings will always be the same size, take up the same amount of space and consume the same amount of energy and resources (or more, according to ecological footprint analysis and what it tells us about affluent people!)

So, according to
Ehrlich's famous IPAT equation , where environmental impact (I) is the product of three terms: 1) population (P); 2) affluence (A); and 3) technology (T), if the term P always implies a certain level of consumption, and affluence makes that level rise, it is easy to see that even when technology (T) improves and reduces per capita consumption, a population crisis can still occurr simply because of the base line value of P.

(BTW: Here is a site that allows you to do sustainability modeling according to IPAT logic: http://ipat-s.kb-creative.net/)

In addition, one of the assumptions of the IPAT model was that technology, no matter how efficient, when created using mass production techniques, inevitably leads to greater environmental impact, for one reason because easier living conditions encourage further growth of P (assumedly the easier it is to survive, the more children humanity will produce, the demographic shift notwithstanding) and because more efficient technology allows people to exploit natural resources much quicker and thus beyond natural replacement rates. Remember that in the classic environmental debate,
"Ehrlich and John Holdren identified population size and growth as the most urgent IPAT factor, whereas Barry Commoner argued that post-World War II production technologies were the dominant reason for environmental degradation." see http://www.eoearth.org/article/IPAT_equation)

But what about the post-modern cyborg technologies of the 21st century? Could they not factor into this equation? Is it not possible that humans will soon discover that they, like computers and androids, could themselves become ever smaller and more efficient? I don't mean our technology, I mean us, ourselves!

We know that over evolutionary time organisms change size in accordance with their environmental conditions. Felines have ranged in size from tiny house cats to massive sabertooth tigers, there were giant sloths roaming through Los Angeles thousands of years ago (visit the La Brea Tar Pits museum to see!) and there are today small sloths in the jungles of Brazil.


Horses were once so small they were eaten by birds! And of course there are today pygmy hippopotami and pygmy elephants and pygmy humans, to say nothing of the dwarves and midgets among us (many of whom, like George Rollins and Pidge and Michu, the smallest man on earth, I lived and performed with when I was with Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus in 1975 and 1976).

So there is nothing in evolutionary biology to stop humans from becoming ever smaller. And with biotechnology we can become ever more efficient (think of camels and other desert organisms when you worry about our dwindling fresh water resources). With a combination of biotech and cybertech we may even be able to push the limits in both of these directions, literally creating the Lilliputian society that Jonathan Swift envisaged in Gulliver's Travels.

One contemporary author has already predicted such a future. In the speculative fiction collection "Beyond Flesh" I found Robert Reed's "Winemaster", about a group of people who have created nano-populations of themselves in nano-cities called "Nests" into which they download their consciousness. Although it never appeared clear to me why the government would be so hell bent on wiping out these inoffensive liliputians (whose entire societies can be carried around in a briefcase) Robert Reed's scenario for fitting a burgeoning population on a degraded planet may be the best answer to the Population Bomb ever conceived.

Of course, playing games like SimCity 4 and The Sims 2, and then viewing films such as Roland Emerich's excellent sleeper "The 13th Floor" one wonders if we will need to create physicalized versions of the creatures into which we wish to download our consciousness. After all, if space and consumption are an issue, what better solution is there than to replace ourselves with creatures made of pure electrons or pulses of photons dancing around tiny circuit connections that constitute the entire universe.

What? You say we ALREADY are mere electromagnetic waves?

What floor are you on? The 13th, perhaps?

Nunc,
T.H.



P.S. If anybody out there wants to read Winemaster, here is how you can find it:

Robert Reed. Winemaster.
Originally in : Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1999

Transmutations have enabled people to download themselves and retreat to small Nests. Those left behind increasingly resent the elite, and a threat and an opportunity have to be faced by those elite.


found in: Beyond Flesh ed. Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois (Ace 0-441-00999-9, Dec 2002, $6.50, 260 + xi, pb, cover by Jan Franz); SF anthology of ten stories of human life without the limitations of the flesh. Authors include Poul Anderson, Greg Egan, and Paul J. McAuley.

• ix • Preface • Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois • pr
• 1 • Call Me Joe • Poul Anderson • nv Astounding Apr ’57
• 46 • Learning to Be Me • Greg Egan • ss Interzone #37 ’90
• 66 • Pretty Boy Crossover • Pat Cadigan • ss IASFM Jan ’86
• 80 • Ancient Engines • Michael Swanwick • ss Asimov’s Feb ’99
• 91 • Winemaster • Robert Reed • nv F&SF Jul ’99
• 122 • More Adventures on Other Planets • Michael Cassutt • nv Sci Fiction website Jan 10, 2001
• 147 • Nevermore • Ian R. MacLeod • nv Dying for It, ed. Gardner R. Dozois, HarperPrism, 1997
• 178 • Approaching Perimelasma • Geoffrey A. Landis • nv Asimov’s Jan ’98
• 211 • The Gravity Mine [Manifold] • Stephen Baxter • ss Asimov’s Apr, 2000
• 222 • Reef • Paul J. McAuley • nv Skylife, ed. Gregory Benford & George Zebrowski, Harcourt, 2000