Rising Wisely

This article by Dr. Eswaran Subrahmanian, one of our  Distinguished Research Fellows has also been published as an interview by DNA (can be accessed as of 3rd March, 2010).

People die jumping out of the windows; exit doors are locked; the fire engine does not have long enough ladders; pedestrian onlookers and car-based onlookers prevent rescue vehicles to get to the scene. A fire in Bangalore building, terrorist attack in Mumbai, another attack in Pune and on it goes. Are Indian cities or towns prepared for handling such emergencies? The resounding answer is no! Our own investigation of several Malls in Bangalore confirmed that many exit doors were locked and a simple assessment made it clear that a small fire incident could lead to major casualties. The Carlton Fire was just the tip of an iceberg of the kind of damage that we could observe in other buildings or areas in the city.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

After every incident, our officials insist that they have all the emergency plans laid out on paper. Yet, inadequate responses are seen over and over. It is almost as if we do not want to learn and ask how we can do better to save lives and property. Are we doomed to assume that this is the nature of doing business in Indian cities, so that we accept this risk as an act of God and hence nothing can be done?

A fundamental issue in emergency and disaster management is that we must have the assets required, placed at the right place for them to be available, and have trained people, not some dusty procedures in a bureaucrat’s office. We need a command and control structure that can be created on demand to be able to mobilize people and resources, along with citizen volunteers, to take control of the situation immediately to facilitate other services. None of these facilities are in place, few practice drills are done, and the buildings are not inspected for safety violations. No one is really responsible, and the community is not able to mobilize itself and often presents an obstacle in itself. If these practices are not designed and executed in a training and learning mode by the civic bodies of the society, we are doomed to have many more Carlton Towers and even worse things ahead. How do we proceed and who should be responsible?

The responsibility is always put squarely on the shoulder of the building owner and with a broad brush, the local government entities. Government entities have different scopes of authority and generally haven’t coordinated with each other in planning and training for these problems. As in Mumbai, in Bangalore the authorities did not know who was in charge and who should take action first and when. The public does not co-operate as it blocks streets and the car drivers run ahead of ambulances to get ahead, not giving way to emergency vehicles. The tragedy of the commons is enacted everyday and is visible in the forms of deaths, injury and damage to property. Our IT firms are busy building security systems for somewhere else, designing other building management systems with sprinklers, but we cannot assure safety and security our buildings here. Apparently our corporate friends and civic personnel value their own lives less than those they serve abroad. This raises the question of whether we are only capable of building things to foreign customers’ needs and specifications, but have very little respect and understanding of our needs here in India. Internalizing the understanding of public space and good by all is one of the first steps towards this effort.

The solutions for addressing many of these problems are relatively simple if only we are willing to cooperate and acknowledge deficiencies of the current system to address them. One can use common sense in reviewing and enforcing fire code procedures in buildings in the city. For example, doors in malls and most buildings open inwards in India; elsewhere they open outwards. The simple reason is that the crowd will rush out and a door opening inward will lead to aggravating a potential stampede. Fire escape routes in a building can have doors that allow you to go to the fire stairwell and exit freely, yet not to be able to walk into any floor from the fire stairwell without some control. This is at the building level. Technologies to serve maps to the responders of all buildings in the city with details of fire escapes and fire extinguishers that can be retrieved over a cell phone are available. Bangalore’s sister city, San Francisco, is embarking on such a project of creating a database of all major buildings in the city through a co-operative council with representation from all walks of society for use in emergency and disaster management. As “IT City”, it is time we use technology wisely to enhance the safety of the citizens of this city.

Many information technology aids can be created and used for monitoring and simulation of events, social behavior, training using games and mock scenarios, to manage logistics and inventory of assets integrated with latest communication technology including cell phones to educate, communicate, to manage crowds and traffic. The possibilities are endless but it requires co-operation from a diversity of citizens, corporations, all parts of government in a long and sustained effort using multiple means to create a safe city. The problem is not solvable piecemeal without the right assets, training and civic responsibility in spite of all well meaning documents. The IT city should be committed as a civic duty to being an exemplar for India; to show how people of the city, working with technology, policies and practices, can make all of our lives safer and better.

After writing yesterday’s post on psychology and climate change at my blog semeiotica, I stumbled upon this article from the journal Ecological Economics entitled, “The art of the cognitive war to save the planet”.

The article details the proposition that our adaptive capacity–to respond to environmental feedback–to learn–is structured by the double bind, a concept coined by Gregory Bateson. A double bind is when an individual receives conflicting messages (intransitivity of preferences?) that disallows action on their part because responding to either message means being in conflict with the other. Wikipedia has a more detailed description here, but Bateson’s articulation of the concept can be found in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (2000, University of Chicago Press).

The author’s argument is that sustainability, or human-environment interactions that respond dynamically to each other, is constrained because beliefs about oneself and the community are increasingly biased towards individual level sustainability for two reasons. First, individual safety is increasingly linked to individual performance. Second, alienation from environmental feedback loops means that an amplification of uncertainty is taking place resulting many more belief ‘nodes’ about systems level relationships. This amplification results in greater propensity for conflict to develop between an individual’s assessment of the environment/system and their own well-being.

The task they outline is manifold–having many forms and elements. It means developing a shared cognitive base from which to develop mental models for collective action. The goal of a shared cognitive base is to help connect system level safety ideals to individual level belief nodes They argue that to do this requires “simple messages with the potential to shape individual belief systems”. Excessive information is to be avoided, while everyone should have access to the building blocks of conceptual blends that synthesize complex information.

The authors, Antal and Hukkinen, argue that more direct and influential injunctions should be exchanged to help reframe the context towards systems-individual linkages–not just individual. Thus an injunction, “Become a vegetarian” becomes the positive injunctive norm, “Become a vegetarian to maintain the status quo” and then makes more sense in terms of promoting sustainable behavior when coupled with a positive injunctive future norm, “Become a vegetarian so our civilization can survive.” This tactic seems similar to one described in the book Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein, Penguin Books, 2009) where they describe some forms of social nudges based on experiments in judgment and decision making.

Thaler and Sunstein describe how some forms of social nudges unfold. These include:

1. Increasing compliance when one is informed that others are complying–i.e. drawing public attention to what others are doing.
2. Emphasize the positive injunctive norm encourages behavior that helps maintain the commons. (e.g. “Please don’t do this in order to keep it this way.”)
3. Show what the norm actually is, as opposed the the perceived norm.
4. Small encouragements or discouragements can maintain or induce new norms.

The example of the positive injunctive norm seems to be what Antal and Hukkinen are advocating, but with a touch more bite.

Their case lies in creating cognitively accessible links between systems status and individual experience. An example of this might be an electricity brownout linked to CO2 accumulation or perhaps a full blackout each time species diversity is degraded.

Their conclusion that ICT services are needed to help these links form is predictable. Systems like smart grids, early warning systems, and other membership and signaling tools are appropriate, but the burning question is how to implement them in society where the tools themselves do not reflect the normative values.

One scenario I had after reading this is a case where an electrical power generation company that is responsible for supplying the city creates more direct informational links with its consumers. Neighborhoods in the city already experience frequent and irregular cuts in supply. Engineers, particularly in energy, tend to focus on maintaining supply based on certain assumptions. Sometimes we don’t always know what those assumptions are. Smart grids have been identified as a solution bridging consumption and supply (albeit from a supply perspective), but what if there was a more jugaad solution?

I am hereby coining the term Ener-geets™ to describe a form of information transfer between energy consumers and energy suppliers. Let’s say consumption is pretty high. It’s hot. Everyone has fans running, AND the big cricket match is on. Power suppliers have decisions to make in order to maintain a consistent supply, but what if they could provide realtime feedback to their customers that threshold levels were being reached and if their behavior didn’t change, they might loose the ability to follow the cricket match to its conclusion.

Cut the normal means of feedback out for the time being (an energy bill or brownout) and allow the power operator to send a message, perhaps in the form a tweet (from Twitter), to everyone following those tweets. Potential overshoots to the grid capacity could be avoided. But then, this would go against established channels of information flow and place a great deal of responsibility in the power operator’s hands–er..mobile phone.

To connect the feedback loop, individual consumers could also be sending messages, informing of power cuts, potential spikes in use (a festival perhaps), or other changes or observations about consumption at the individual level.

You start to get the picture. Now, how do we do it?

For personal feedback looping (not including the energy company) here one option that allows you to visualize and share your changes in consumption.

Still, I think the bigger and better question is how we link consumers to systems level perspectives that are currently only know to those in the power industry. Any thoughts?

Ref: Miklos Antal, Janne I. Hukkinen, The art of the cognitive war to save the planet, Ecological Economics, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 3 February 2010, ISSN 0921-8009, DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.01.002.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VDY-4Y9HP0Y-2/2/8effb7b70d90787bc2250323ffeef134)
Keywords: Human-environment interaction; Belief systems; Environmental strategy; Climate change communication; Cognitive studies

One thing we are trying to get our head around here in the Next Generation Infrastructure project group is the links between mobility, livelihood and shelter.

Part of the challenge is gathering and representing data on slums in Bangalore which collected and maintained by numerous organizations.

Below is a map that shows the location of slums throughout Bangalore and the governmental organizations who are in charge of maintaining those areas.

This experiment gives a whole new meaning to “Bio-Computing.”

Talented and dedicated engineers spent countless hours designing Japan’s rail system to be one of the world’s most efficient. Could have just asked a slime mold.

When presented with oat flakes arranged in the pattern of Japanese cities around Tokyo, brainless, single-celled slime molds construct networks of nutrient-channeling tubes that are strikingly similar to the layout of the Japanese rail system, researchers from Japan and England report Jan. 22 in Science. A new model based on the simple rules of the slime mold’s behavior may lead to the design of more efficient, adaptable networks, the team contends. Read More at Wired. Read the Abstract in Science.

What I like about this story is the use of a technology and non-intuitive way. We spend a lot of time here at CSTEP creating models of complex dynamic systems, often employing agent based models which have so many interacting parts that there are often “surprising and unexpected results.”

In this case, a team of researchers set up and executed what could be described as a “analog computing program”. Obviously, if one wanted to change the parameters after the initial run, it is a bit more costly than simply changing a parameter in a piece of digital code. On the other hand, there may be some advantages to creating predictive and descriptive non-linear models using biological agents. I am particularly interested in what the programmers at CSTEP think.

Mission Objectives

• Install the S6 Truss. You are tasked with installing the fourth starboard Integrated Truss Segment (S6). Trusses are essential to the continuation of the International Space Station because they form the backbone of the station.
• Unfurl the S6 Solar Arrays. The space station’s main source of energy comes from three of the four large photovoltaic arrays currently on the station, sometimes referred to as the Solar Array Wings (SAW). Can you assemble the fourth set of solar arrays to the station?
• Ride the Robotic Arm. There’s a tear in the solar array! Can you ride the robotic arm then use the clamps to fix the tear?
• Retrieve Your Tools. You have used a lot of tools to do your repair work. Now many of them are scattered in space. How many of them can you retrieve before heading back to the airlock?

Play the Game!

SOMETIMES it’s nice to be able to track your activity and find patterns that you can use to become more effective or just to discover something new about yourself.  This is a nice system that doesn’t interfere too much in the daily patterns of use that many of us at CSTEP are probably engaged in.  This setup allows you to add instances and tags to what you have done, consumed, observed, or worked on.  Try it out  and let me know if it makes tracing your time any easier…

1. Get a Twitter account (http://www.twitter.com)
2. Install the twitter bar add-on for firefox browser (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4664)
3. Follow @yfd on Twitter (go to http://www.twitter.com/yfd while signed in and click ‘follow’ underneath the icon)
4. Sign in to your.flowingdata with Twitter (click this link)
5. Start recording data (via direct messages) following a few simple guidelines

how to send data to yourflowingdata:

twitter bar allows you to post directly to twitter from your address bar in firefox
you can send logs of your activity to yourflowingdata by simply typing into the address bar:

d yfd youractivityhere time unit

d means direct message to yfd (yourflowingdata)
this means it goes directly to your yfd account and not to your twitter feed

more examples:

d yfd mango game 2 hr
d yfd solarpv 3.5 hr
d yfd disastermanagement at 20:00
d yfd energyefficiency at 11:00pm
d yfd dinner at 11pm
It’s also worth knowing that you can edit timestamps whenever you want in your action log.

read more @ your.flowingdata here:
http://your.flowingdata.com/guide/#tweeting_data

the elegance is you can add time use info directly to your browser without interrupting your surfing..enjoy

There is a great article in yesterday’s New York Times about how GIS and other visualization tools, including just plain-old creative vision, can revolutionize the understanding and use of space and architecture in cities.

The post is by Allison Arieff, who also writes for GOOD. GOOD brings together some great writing and insight (not to mention info graphics) from the world of technology, sustainability and media. GOOD is an integrated media platform for people who want to live well and do good. Simple enough.

Check it out–if only for this post in the category of “The New Ideal” which looks at an emerging domestic model for solar power.

Urbanized Area in color.

Source: Bangalore Development Authority. “Bangalore Master Plan 2015. Volume 1: Vision Document”, pg. 12. 2007.

ReBlogged from Information Aesthetics: where form follows data.

Inspired by the Ars Electronica Golden Nica-winning Nuage Vert project, Pixelache, an informally organised network of electronic art festivals, and Helsingin Energia, one of the largest energy companies in Finland, are collaborating to produce artworks related to the collective energy consumption in the Helsinki area. [Read more at Infostethics...]