Archive for science
May 20, 2011 at 8:44 PM · Filed under design ecology, futures, narration, preferences, public health, science, symbolic systems
The CDC’s done a really smart thing. They lied. They created an entirely “unscientific” risk to respond to a completely “scientific” human bias. The CDC provided an emergency management and disaster preparedness plan in case of a Zombie Apocalypse. This says two things to me: 1) the CDC is serious enough in its priorities to ignore the boundary work that usually goes on in science organizations that tries to keep culture and science separate, and 2) they understand that human bias often impedes our ability to prepare for more “rational” risks.
So I would call this a media coup – especially if (as I suspect) there was a huge spike in visits to their site since the story crashed the server. I’m sure it helped that some people are actually predicting a zombie apocalypse this weekend.
What I like about this is the acknowledgment that people are interested in fiction at least as much as they are in reality. As a scientist or policy maker in disaster management, it’s worth recognizing that people aren’t going to respond or think a certain way just because it makes the most rational sense. Zombies may make more sense because they tap into deeper fears and hopes and long-held narratives that are embedded in our cultural fabric.
post-normal science
Humans have all sorts of biases, and instead of assuming that people are going to just believe elements of science based on their rationality, we ought to start mixing the science with some more compelling narration. This may be a good indicator of its practical value of working with a paradigm of post-normal science.
Post-normal science is typically characterized by cases where facts are uncertain or contested and values are in dispute. Because so much of science and its applications relies on us to make rational choices, and yet we often don’t, there’s a case to be made that the transition of new scientific meaning from discovery to practice is post-normal because it is highly influenced by our
cognitive biases.
Using zombies to carry the more important message of preparedness – and the specific steps to take – is way more important than the reality of a zombie apocalypse. Then again, better safe than sorry!
Evolutionary biologists take note!
February 3, 2010 at 9:59 AM · Filed under critical theory, interdisciplinary, making it public, narration, science, semantics, teaching and learning
There is a fantastic series of podcasts produced by the CBC a few years back. The podcasts interviews many noted historians, philosophers, sociologists, and scientists to help distill what science is, how it’s claims to knowledge and facts are produced, and what many of the critical themes and questions are that science has to wrestle with including objectivity, fallacies of “historicity-turned-relativism”, and others.
Many influential authors contribute including: Richard Lewontin, Peter Gallison, Lorraine Daston, Steven Shapin, Bruno Latour, and James Lovelock..among many others.
You can download all the podcasts here:
http://castroller.com/podcasts/inrecentyears?page=1
February 1, 2010 at 12:19 AM · Filed under community interaction design, digital design, interdisciplinary, proposals, science, teaching and learning, technology
After ManU went up 2-0 against Arsenal I started browsing and commenting on the submissions to this year’s Digital Media and Learning Competition that the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC run each year.
Some observations:
- Lots of games and game-like labs in the mix.
- Art/Sci is now officially mainstream.
- Climate and Sustainability are BIG social issue themes in the sci/tech proposals.
- Lots of brands in the mix (Exploratorium, National Park Service, xlabs, Media Lab, Eyebeam, etc)
But after culling through them for an hour and a half, I think I got a good sampling of the 800 or so submissions to the Learning Labs track. Here are a few that seemed interesting, relevant and promising….to things I’m interested in..
ENERGY & CLIMATE ADAPTATION
Empowering Collaboration between Students and Vulnerable Communities in Three Degrees’ Real-World Climate Justice Seminar
Energy Game
The Wild Life Virtual Barnyard… Saving The Planet One Climate Cartoon At A Time!
Powerhouse: A Social Game That Teaches Players About Energy Efficiency
Climate Changers: An MMO virtual lab game to save a planet
Young People Take the VITAL SIGNS of Climate Change, Build Scientific Habits of Mind
Disadvantaged Youth Exploring Sustainable Energy Collaboratively Through Video Games
Pooling Resources Project [Prp]
OUTLIERS
EpiLab: Student-led epidemiology and public health surveillance in a global network of high school classrooms
HowStuffisMade & HowitcanChange: participatory platform to change the most toxic of global human activities.
Hackteria
WATER
On the H2O Case
Dry Land, Grey Water, Green Future: Interactive STEM Learning Through Gathering and Visualizing Environmental Data
Water Case Studies: Exploring Social History and Environmental Impact to Create Collaborative Solutions
June 20, 2008 at 4:21 AM · Filed under bioinformatics, community interaction design, design ecology, ecoregionalism, science
The Owl Project is a community space for interacting with owls in their natural habitat. I stumbled across it while visiting the MIT Media Lab. It is part of the Ecology Media group that “explores the potential of computational media as access point to natural systems and global ecology”.
Try exploring the aviary to hear some owl sounds!
The Owl Project
June 16, 2008 at 9:31 AM · Filed under boundary objects, community interaction design, interdisciplinary, making it public, maps, network entrepreneurship, science, teaching and learning, technology, visual culture, visualization
This is a nice compilation of resources assembled for a course entitled MAPPING CONTROVERSIES in MIT’s STS program. The course focuses “…on developing aptitudes for combining multiple ways of knowing: textual interpretation, intensive search in heterogeneous databases, and design tasks; all of which point to the invention of new tools of representation for an increasingly complex environment.
Sounds fun.
Addendum: you can also view an explanatory video about Mapping Controversies, narrated by Bruno Latour
April 7, 2008 at 2:39 PM · Filed under biology, design ecology, heterarchy, interaction, relational aesthetics, science
I’m reading a book entitled, When Species Meet, by Donna Haraway. She’s one of my favorite authors, not only because of her subject matter, the relationships between ourselves and other organisms, science, and the stories we use to create meaning for how we act in the world, but because her literary style mixes the meanings of words and maintains her constantly questioning presence in the text.
Potamopyrgus antipodarum under the dissecting scope
In the third chapter of the book, she handles suffering, particularly of organisms in highly-constructed laboratory settings, with great care. By pointing out that we are always linked to killing in one form or another, the questions she raises is not if we do it at all, but rather how we approach, encounter, and leave those organisms that we are inextricably bound to.
My favorite passage from that third chapter is the one in which she asks some of her colleagues in the biological sciences how they demonstrate concern for the organisms in the lab as part of their practice. This is a question very close to home for me because it describes so much about my own motivations for doing science in the lab, how ‘reliable’ data are produced, and what kinds of practices can result.
I’m reminded of that famous quote from Barbara McClintock, also the title of Evelyn Fox Keller’s book, that emphasizes how “Getting a Feeling for the Organism” inserts itself so profoundly into daily scientific practice. This is empathy, yes, but the question Haraway asks is how we learn to recognize and therefore intervene in existing situations to show concern and enact strategies for care.
I think back to my own experiences in the lab, or rather, a temperature-controlled cool room. Others had brought snails back from a mountainous lake region in the southern hemisphere, and I was responsible for their care. These snails happened to be an invasive species in the U.S., requiring an extra level of containment to keep them, their offspring, and the parasites out of the regional ecosystem. My relationship with them meant creating the best possible environment for their growth and reproduction. They were, in effect, prisoners (although escape did have a potentially huge payoff). My role in their care meant feeding, finding and installing balanced spectrum lighting to mimic the ambient wavelengths, bringing in local plants to help filter the water in a huge freshwater ecosystem, making sure the water kept moving, installing irrigation systems to distribute a constant flow across many individual containers, adding sterilized rocks to the containers to allow for micronutrients, bacteria and other microorganisms, and even keeping fish and crayfish in the main tank to help condition and scavenge the water. For me, all of these technologies were about care. For one thing we couldn’t maintain the relationship these snails had with their parasites in the lab because we thought they just weren’t being taken care of well enough. There was this very important relationship, then, between how we cared for these snails and how and what kind of data we could collect about their own tight relationship with the parasites they came with.
For design, I’m thinking of how we script care. How can it be made obligatory as part of the function of a service, object, or process? How is it that we find connections and feel compelled to spend our time and energies attempting to make an environment or artifact more comfortable for another? How are we able to recognize what matters in this equation, especially when there are so many possibilities to misinterpret or just plain get it wrong. I suppose we look for signs of health, reproduction, and activity as indicators that we are on the right track. In doing so we create synergies between ourselves and others. By designing for their comfort, we link our vigor and theirs.
June 13, 2007 at 8:38 AM · Filed under complex systems, Design, network entrepreneurship, science, teaching and learning
Gregory Bateson defines information as “a difference that makes a difference” (1).
This is why the framing, point of view, or perspective of information is important. Perspective is what allows us to take things into account and recognize for whom these differences matter.
Bateson’s words ideas came to mind as I recently read a news report (2) about a social science study investigating the impact of interdisciplinary education on the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math). For a while now, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has supported interdisciplinary graduate education programs. I had the fortunate opportunity to participate as an affiliate of the Evolution, Development, and Genomics IGERT while studying at Indiana University. There is a wide diversity of programs ranging from the aforementioned Evo-Devo program to focused efforts in Complex Systems and Invasive Species Biology and Policy, for example.
My experience with the IGERT at IU was extremely enriching, but I would never have described it as interdisciplinary, per se. The difference I recognized was the attention that evolutionary biologists gave to developmental variation as a source of novelty and the recognition of developmental biologists that a handful of gene-expression profiles was not enough to characterize the variation in a population. I always wondered if there were any truly unique perspectives involved in the mixing of evolution, development an genomics or if it was really about the integration of tools to expand the explanatory power of evolution and genetics.
In the Nature article, Amanda Haag describes the social experiment in which students were organized into two experimental groups based on their functional role (natural science, policy analyst, etc), their stage of education, and those that had received training in an interdisciplinary framework and those that had traditional disciplinary graduate training. A number of smaller sub-groups were then formed based on the charrette model (3) to solve a specific problem. Apparently, the charrette process is used extensively in urban planning and other disciplines that frequently require the involvement of multiple stakeholders. Not surprisingly, the term is thought to come from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the nineteenth century. Contrast this model of design process with Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature in which he sets out to establish the context for political ecology in the practice of science and policy-making.
The observation that stood out in Haag’s article was that, “To everyone’s surprise, students tackled the problem similarly, irrespective of whether they had interdisciplinary or traditional training.”
The researchers conducting the study have yet to analyze the results, but from my perspective this observation would not be surprising. For one thing, these aren’t very heterogeneous groups. Each of the functional roles maintains that science has the fundamental explanatory power. That’s a pretty specific perspective. Also, what is the real difference in graduate training that occurs through a program like IGERT? Are different perspectives really encountered, or are similar perspectives reinforced by integrating individuals that share the same perspective but use different heuristics and interpretations? Given that the groups are trying to solve problems based on the intersection of human activities and ecosystem services, these could easily be classified as difficult problems that may also require frameworks other than science and policy-making.
I should back up a bit and provide some more background.
I’ve been reading The Difference by Scott Page (5) along with the Complex Systems interdisciplinary workshop here at the University of Michigan. Page is a Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics, and his book discusses how “the power of diversity creates better groups, firms, schools, and societies.”
Page’s main argument and finding is that diversity in mental models (aka cognitive approaches) is the premiere source of diversity’s benefit to problem solving.
In order to get to this result, Page categorizes people’s cognitive toolbox into four functional frameworks: perspectives, heuristics, interpretations, and predictive models.
Perspectives are “how we see things…[and]…a map from reality to an internal language such that each distinct object, situation, problem, or event gets mapped to a unique word.” One might easily say that artists frequently contribute different perspectives. Keep in mind that we don’t necessarily have to rely on verbal mappings of perspective.
A heuristic is “a rule applied to an existing solution represented in a perspective that generates a new (and hopefully better) solution or a new set of possible solutions.” I tend to think of these as behaviors. It might entail finding a new idea or solution by simply looking across the aisle in a library after searching for a specific book. This chance operation depends partly on the Dewey decimal system, the layout of the library, and the subject of your initial search.
Interpretations are mappings “from objects, situations, problems, and events to words. In an interpretation, one word can mean many objects.” What’s the difference between a perspective and an interpretation? Using Page’s approach, identifying each of these components (perspectives, heuristics, interpretations, and predictive models) as components of the cognitive toolbox is a perspective. Using predictive models to classify the differences among disciplines is an example of how interpretations can be used. How the interpretation is structured and/or relevant depends on our goal (more on that later).
A predictive model is “an interpretation together with a prediction for each set or category created by the interpretation.” Predicting if an organism is a member of a is a member of particular species might be a good example. One perspective might view genetics as having something to do with species definitions and thus say that certain gene sequences will be able to predict its species. Another perspective might perspective might say that genetics is not involved. In this case, one interpretation might simply say that morphology will predict the species. The non-genetic perspective might also say that the a species is classified depending on whether it was embalmed, trained, a suckling pig, a mermaid, fabulous, a stray dog, or other (6).
Page took all of these tools into account when developing a mathematical proof to show how these differences matter for the problem-solving capacities of groups.
Though I’m only through chapter six, here is what I understand about Page’s results.
The main feature thus far is that one shouldn’t rely on standardized measures of ability alone. In fact, diversity in groups trumps the ability of homogeneous groups. In order for this to happen, a few necessary conditions and assumptions are needed.
One condition is that the problem needs to be sufficiently difficult such that no single member can solve it by themselves. That individuals share the same, similar, or synergistic goals is an important factor in determining a group’s success. Many social problems fall into the category of “difficult” including those that the grad students were faced with in the social science experiment.
Another condition is that each of the problem solvers has some ability to solve the problem. This is where some of my concerns begin. In the book, Page argues that problem solvers in a group cannot create overly rugged landscapes. By this he means that individuals in a group must contribute perspectives that contain knowledge of the causes of X problem. In this sense, he is keeping the perspectives among group members constant while allowing the heuristics and/or interpretations to be the mechanisms of diversity. This is an important assumption and one that has important consequences for interdisciplinary policy.
Page states clearly that this result shows that chemists will not benefit from having a poet or other humanist join them in the lab. I personally think he shouldn’t have been so categorical about this conclusion, given the examples he used (designing products, curing diseases, and improving our educational system). The opportunity for someone to contribute knowledge depends on the problem and its definition. If it is too specific a problem, then perhaps only those with extremely specialized knowledge can contribute. However, the very difficult problems he cites are the product of many different perspectives and causes. Should teachers and educational administrators be the only individuals contributing knowledge about the causes of educational inequity? What about educational standards? In order for the benefits of diverse perspectives to be realized, they must, as Bergson points out, be taken into account. After all, these perspectives may be the differences that matter for a positive solution.
Another one of Page’s assumptions is that people with the same perspective are able to communicate clearly, or, conversely, that people with different perspectives are unable to communicate. This is due to the one-to-one mapping of idea and word that Page’s definition of perspective entails. What happens when we don’t share the same perspective and can still communicate? One might describe this as empathy–i.e. recognizing another’s perspective. It might also be the product of a translator that can provide the mapping between perspectives. If these situations exist (and I know that they do), it is likely that people with wildly different perspectives have contributions that will amplify the beneficial effects of diversity.
All of this is why, when I read the Nature article, I was not surprised that the different groups used similar tactics to solve the problems. The question to ask is at what threshold is there difference enough to create diversity in group perspectives. If we have this diversity among perspectives, are we also confident that the group is addressing the same problem? This may be dependent on some form of communication and/or translation that can bridge perspectives.
“Bridges” is a term used by Diana Rhoten (7) to describe researchers that have many cross-disciplinary connections. She contrasts this with “hubs” which describes researchers with the most overall connections. One could therefore hypothesize that a bridge is much more likely to translate across disciplines or perspectives. This is not dissimilar to Burt’s descriptions of network entrepreneurs as individuals that span structural holes (8). Structural holes separate nonredundant sources of information, and entrepreneurs that span these holes recombine these sources in such a way that makes each of these sources valuable to the other. So if we start to ask what interdisciplinary graduate training is providing, we could focus on those policy efforts that remix differences in perspectives, interpretations, heuristics, and/or predictive models. Which is most likely to be the difference that makes a difference? I’ll put my money on groups that bring together wide arrays of perspectives with individuals that can negotiate, translate and broker these differences to solve difficult problems.
- Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press.
- Haag, A. Environmental science: A testing experience. Nature, Volume 443, Issue 7109, pp. 265-267 (2006).
- More on charrettes from wikipedia
- Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press.
- Page, S. The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools,and Societies. Princeton University Press 2007.
- See Jorge Luis Borges’ Chinese Encyclopedia in Foucault, M. Les mots et les choses, Paris: Gallimard, 1966 (The Order of Things, New York: Vintage, 1973).
- Rhoten , D. (2003) A Multi-Method Analysis of the Social and Technical Conditions for Interdisciplinary Collaboration. The Hybrid Vigor Institute. San Francisco, CA http://hybridvigor.org
- Burt, R. Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital (Oxford University Press, 2005).
June 7, 2007 at 9:37 AM · Filed under Design, interdisciplinary, science
A paper on the relationship between designers (including artists), scientists, and engineers came across my desk this morning. Having read it, I think it stimulates a few interesting thoughts worth commenting on.
The authors make a comparison between interdisciplinary collaboration an an Unreal Tournament. If you aren’t familiar with Unreal, I think it’s a multiplayer video game. Based on the content of the game, the metaphor is slightly militaristic and seems to have come in part from some conflict that transpired at a meeting of academics and practitioners at a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) conference.
Militaristic metaphors aside, some of the more interesting ideas in the paper include a model of how reality differs for different individuals and/or paradigms.
Given a reality at time t1, science in the positivistic paradigm observes and analyzes particular phenomena in this reality, makes proper abstractions, and tries to predict similar phenomena for reality at time t2. To preserve a stable reality [reality(t1) = reality(t2)], science in the positivistic paradigm has to operate under the essential assumption that model and theory are not a part of realit{ [{model, theory} ∉ {reality}].
Their main research question was whether the different paradigms of designers, engineers and scientists do indeed lead to different views on reality. Qualitatively this doesn’t seem too different from measures in social science of how closely different observers agree in their observations (e.g. Krippendorf’s alpha)
Their result was negative in the sense that no difference was observed in the views of reality across disciplines. They attribute this to high heterogeneity among the participants. Instead they base their discussion on the positive relationship they observed between education and profession (that makes sense). They conclude that engineers are the binding element between designers and scientists while the interaction between designers and scientists is small. They base this conclusion on a theoretical, visual model for which they provide no empirical evidence. The question is certainly interesting and perhaps testable, but it remains speculation. Who was actually involved in brokering a peace a the meeting? In the HCI field, who mediates and translates between the disciplines?
They go on with a recommendation that,
Perhaps an overhaul of our education systems, to include more diverse courses, is required in order to obtain increased cooperation between disciplines.
It’s not necessarily more diversity in organizational structure that’s needed; it’s just the opposite. If the problem is the lack of collaborative ability, then perhaps the educational system should become more integrated with courses shared and coordinated by diverse individuals and mental models–rather than a greater diversification of the educational system itself (of course I’m coming at this from the U.S. perspective; the authors are from the Netherlands). For an explanation of why this is so, see Scott Page’s book.
Bartneck, C., & Rauterberg, M. (2007). HCI Reality – An ‘Unreal Tournament’? International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 65(8), 737-743.
June 7, 2007 at 9:07 AM · Filed under Design, interdisciplinary, science
I have been trying to identify potential obstacles to the union of design and scientific methods. One problem may be the hijacking of design and related fields by theists that believe the world has been “designed” by a supernatural force whose processes mirror those of humans. This may be very problematic for practitioners whose goal is to bring design-based education and strategy to the development, implementation, and communication of scientific research.
My profile at design21 lists me as a design biologist (following Dori’s lead). I can see how the science community might misinterpret this to be an indicator that I hold a theistic perspective on the development and organization of living things. It couldn’t be further from the case. Having been trained as an evolutionary biologist, I would hope that anyone thinking this could go beyond and critically recognize the trees for the forest.
Is this a naming issue? Intelligent design proponents have made a conscious effort to rebrand creationism using terminology that is much more secular. How can we make this apparent for people that may not immediately recognize the distinctions between design that is human-derived, design attributed to a theistic cause, and scientific processes. There is an interesting hybridization going on here that has both positive and negative connotations. These are different things, but there is the potential to confuse the two mixtures of science and design for religious reasons and the union of science and design for better decision-making.
April 7, 2007 at 4:57 PM · Filed under art, events, science, teaching and learning
Via ART-SCI Chicago
The Unquantifiable Measurement – Negotiations Between Science & Art (4/9)
A talk by Jan-Henrik Andersen
Monday April 9th 2007, 4:10pm
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112 S. Michigan Building, room 1307
The lecture seeks to identify and discuss how to access the workspace between art and science. Which possibilities lie in this space, which approaches are available to artists and designers, and how to negotiate the very premises that supports both terms? Each aspires to their own version of truth about the human condition – whether we’re talking about ecologies, identities or the space we’re bound to share. The lecture will discuss the possibility of creating connections between the two terms, and how to retain the very premises of each without violating for example the logic and verifiability of science, and the creative freedom of art.
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