Missing the gap (day 112)

Yesterday I listened to a Stanford lecture on depression.  It was a link from the Open Culture blog (which I highly recommend).   The lecture was an hour long and fairly engaging but throughout I couldn't shake the feeling that the facts we currently hold to be true are in fact quite brittle.  He kept saying "it's not a matter of just getting over it...there are real physical obstacles, physiological changes...".   The experiential gap there is so massive that it's really hard to believe him.   I cannot picture a mental state that I couldn't affect by doing something different...however small.  I can't imagine not being able to bootstrap myself out of a situation.  It's almost like in hearing his presentation I lost touch with the idea of free will (which I know is a problematic concept but let's just say free will with a very small f).  Surely there remains in a depressed person a small gap where something different could happen?   It seems that the manipulation of neurotransmitters is a pretty coarse tool, and not a sustainable one.   It seems that by saying 'it's not their fault, they can't do anything about it' we confirm the helplessness they feel.  The professor in the lecture anticipates my reaction and says we would never say something like that about a diabetes patient.  He has a point except he's relying on an arbitrary definition of disease.   There are lots of diseases that weren't diseases just 5 years ago - especially diseases of the mind or behaviour.  To be clear, I have no qualifications to be saying anything categorical about depression.  I just want to believe in personal agency for change and I'm suspicious of the language we use around depression.

The same applies to alcoholism.  The accepted fact is that an addict is an addict for life, there are recovering addicts but they can never take a drink again because they can't control it.  They appeal to a higher power, etc, etc.   I know it is useful to draw a strict boundary between drinking and not drinking, to help break the habit.  But is it sacrilegious to think an alcoholic could ever return to normal social drinking patterns?  It seems so.   A quick search on google points to circular definitions - "if you are able to go back to social drinking, you were not an alcoholic to begin with".  It's suspicious.  Again I have no deep knowledge in this area, just wondering how something can be such a one way street.

On the other hand, lately there's been lots of talk about the plasticity of the brain and how much we can change.  We've come a long way from the story that was around when I was young when neurons died every day and were never regenerated.  Every day you became less smart.  At least now we know that the brain is a bit more resilient than that.   So how does one resolve the plasticity with the unequivocal statements of inability to change?

A song for this post.

Embarrassing nudge (day 111)

I started the self-surveillance project almost a month ago now.   At some point I was telling someone about it and they asked if I was also taking a picture of myself every 15 minutes.  I had thought about it but decided against it because I thought it was a bit tacky to include pics of myself in an art context.  But after talking with this person, I reconsidered.  I reasoned that one can never be too rich or have too much data.  So last week I started taking pictures of myself on the macbook, the only one of my computers with a built-in camera that could easily be coaxed into taking the picture. 

This experiment has not been good for my self-esteem.  But it may be good for modesty.   Almost none of the shots are flattering.  In almost all of them I'm looking absent-minded, bored, or just unhealthy.  Granted, some of this is from the camera angle and the bad lighting but still looking at a computer is not the most embodied experience, and it shows.  The best pics were when I was watching a TEDxSV talk...I think there was some sort of performance that I was really enjoying.  There were also some pretty intense pics when I was updating my web site profile.

But here is the upshot of all this.  Knowing that the camera will spring to action every 15 minutes, I've become more conscious of my body.  By virtue of seeing shot after embarassing shot, I've trained myself at least a little bit to stay present -- an unexpected benefit from an unlikely source.

And now to conquer some of my fear...here is an example of an embarrassing shot.  It's not the worst.  I'm not that advanced yet.  The next shot is one of the intense ones.

A song for this post.

Identity maintenance (day 110)

It's getting late for a long post.  I spent a little bit of time tonight updating my page at the new Emily Carr website.  It's actually a pretty cool website that functions sort of like a social network and allows some nice linkages based on tags.    I don't think I've seen any school sites that well integrated.  It'll be great to see how it evolves.   I still have lots of work to do to make my page shine.  It's a start.

A song for this post.

Who thought it first (day 109)

I wonder about ideas and who they belong to.  I've been listening to talks from the TEDxSV symposium and I can't help but be impressed with the insights and talents of some of the speakers/performers.   Today I also scanned the Top Ten Products of 2009, many of them having to do with social networking, idea spreading, the cloud, and so on.  I also listened to Spark talk about copyright legislation.  We are becoming very good at knowledge spreading and with that, there seems to be an anxiety about acknowledgment and reward.  The cold fact is that the larger the spread of an idea, the more likely it is to be appropriated.

But I'm also interested in where the ideas that eventually spread like crazy come from.  Because when we are talking in the hive we are thinking collectively, bouncing ideas around to see what sticks.  No different than brainstorming in a physical group in concept, but quite different in possibilities because of the sheer numbers involved and the potential reach of a sticky idea.  The issue is that even though the hive may have produced the idea, the authorship remains important.  Authorship is what gets people paid and promoted.  Having been in the academic world for a while I see the anxiety of authorship, I sometimes personally feel it.  I see people getting included or cut out,  getting scooped, getting copied, getting cited.  When information is free as is mostly the case with academic works, authorship is currency.

Obviously there many shades of grey in what I'm talking about here but in a general sense I wonder about what will happen to authorship in the future.  I wonder if the performance of information spreading will become more important.  We see this trend already with 'star' bloggers and tweeters.  We probably also see it with TED speakers that are chosen based on their ability to perform in front of an audience.  There may be someone out there with deeper knowledge of the subject but without the ability to perform that knowledge for half entertainment and half edification.

If authorship fades in favour of performance, then we are faced with the same problem as the recording industry:  who pays the knowledge producers, the ones that are not necessarily performing the knowledge?  When authorship becomes separated from the means of spreading the product, there is a problem of credit distribution.   This gets even more complicated when authorship is muddled by the means of production as is the case for mash-ups and other collage type of activities, not to mention the hive thinking by sharing.

I have no solutions or even predictions for any of this, just observations.  I see individuality being eroded for the benefit of the collective.  At the same time I see performance gaining some ground.   These are contrasting trends.  Their co-existence is of interest to me.

A song for this post.

Sleep before snow (day 108)

Just a quick post today.  I have to go to bed so I am at least partially awake for the defense tomorrow.  This student may have an advantage for having scheduled a morning defense with me as external.

So they said snow and everyone get excited.  I got excited.  But there is no snow, just rain.  I was so hoping to wake up to a quiet snow covered city.  Maybe next week.

I'll end with a video of the wearable technology I'm going to hear about tomorrow morning:



A song for this post.

Tale of an inefficient review (day 107)

I spent the day reading a thesis today.  I'm an external on a MSc defense on Tuesday.  I'll read it again tomorrow and formulate some questions.   As I was reading I wondered how I could be more efficient at making notes on what I was reading and formulating questions from the notes.  Also wondered how the system could in turn be useful for the student when revisions are necessary.

I prefer reading the thesis on paper and make notes in the margins.  I would prefer the notes be stored electronically with appropriate context.   I don't really want to stop reading to open up my computer and type so perhaps an e-book type of idea would work.  Adobe has done lots of work on a system for review and annotation of documents but I can't say I've ever used it officially.  I've left tons of comments on grad student papers submitted to me as pdf but I haven't enabled a shared review of any kind.   I think it would be useful for my students to dialogue back and forth on the comments.   It's like all the pieces of the puzzle are around but they are just not integrated. 

Ideally, the thesis would be submitted to me on an e-reader with a stylus and could write my comments in the margins.  The review would be shared with the student and other committee members but only after the defense is finished.  While the defense is going on, I would have easy access to my comments (visual list) and could modify them based on the student's input and the input of the other committee members.  After the defense she can look at my comments and ask me more questions.  Each time I open up my e-reader I could see comments that are awaiting a reply.   This would be my ideal situation.  As it is, she will do the same thing that I did: take 3 paper copies with her and flip through to consolidate and address each point.  This is tedious and it may actually miss some crucial points like sections of the thesis that were flagged individually by all committee members for slightly different reasons...pointing to a general problem with the section.  Add to this the fact that I used a black pen to make my comments (should have used red!) and her revision task will not be as efficient as it could be.

A song for this point.

A collective cozy (day 106)

I feel Christmas less than I used to.  Every year it feels a little more arbitrary than the year before.  I watch the lights go up and hear the peripheral chatter about gift buying.  The cards trickle in.  The party invites beep into my inbox.   Most of it feels like someone else's concern.   Despite feeling it less, I do love this time of year.  Especially right after school ends when there is a quiet anticipation of the silence in the city on Christmas day.   For a few days there is a collective relaxing that I really appreciate.  When it's ok not to check email because we've collectively agreed that business can wait.  It's a magical time but it has nothing to do with the usual descriptors of christmas.  It's a magical time because culturally we're taking time to look around.

January 1st marks the end of the magic but the start of a slightly different direction -- sometimes subtle but always hopeful.  It's hard for me to imagine that feeling of renewal right now.  Like many people who are tied to an academic schedule, this time just before the Christmas break is frantic and a bit hazy from the accumulated exhaustion.  It's like seeing the finish line accentuates the tired but also triggers a kind of third wind.  I am curious how it will feel on January 1st.

I'm looking forward to taking some time to work on my projects and read some books.  I might even do nothing for a couple of days.  Let it snow...

A song for this post.

What does online feel like (day 105)

I had an interesting discussion with Miles today about what the feeling of being online.  I've been thinking about this a lot lately because of my self-surveillance project that snaps a picture of my desktop every 15 minutes on all 3 of my screens if they are active (and sometimes my iPhone too, though that is not automatic).   I've now collected close to 500 screenshots and looking at them in a fast (10 screenshots/second) sequence it doesn't even get close to the feeling of being online.  I'm going to investigate varying the duration of each frame by random amounts and see how that changes things.  I've added a bit of blur to the movie for privacy but here is what the movie for one my screens looks like for now:


226 screenshots (test) from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.

The feeling of being online is hard to describe.  It's not embodied but it can feel vast and rich.  It sometimes feels social but sometimes anxious.  Much of my time is spent processing the information that is coming at me (the social network as recommendation engine).   Making decisions about this information seems to be the source of a low grade anxiety stemming from a reluctance to spend time and the fear of missing out (FOMO).  There are moments of relaxation into a time commitment such as watching a show, scanning family albums, or programming an application.  There are quick smiles like interesting pictures in twitter.  There are lots of interruptions, little blips and popups.  Email anxiety is never far but seems to ebb and flow depending on time of day and how much the physical world needs my attention.  There is a both a satisfaction to answering email and an anxiety about the conversation progressing too quickly from there.  There are moments of boredom when there is not enough will to separate from the online but not enough interest to continue (the feed has slowed and the stand-bys are exhausted).  There is definitely a feeling of being in the flow of information but it is usually interrupted by having to click or type which brings me back to the screen.  A bit like being into a novel and someone asking you a question about work.

The more I think about it the more the rhythm seems to be important.  I'll see about adding different timings.   I also thought about doing a character recognition scan which would give me a data set to maybe assign an emotional 'score' to an image (many of my screenshots are mostly text).  Either way I'd like to play around with adding an emotional curve which can then be mapped the lung breathing pattern.

A song for this post.

Empty bookcases one day (day 103)

e-ink had been just over the horizon for so long it seemed like it would never get here.  But here we are at Christmas time with more e-readers than we can shake a paper-cut finger at.   I read a lot but so far the urge to get an e-reader registers at about a 2 on the gadget Richter scale.   First off, the Kindle is gimped in Canada because we can't download over 3G (who decided that?  I dunno...but it smells suspiciously like a BRT downer...)  What's the use of a reader without a connection?   The Nook is a possibility but it's not out yet.  The Sony reader is out but it also has no connectivity (by design, that one).  But it does have a stylus for notes.  Then there is the mythical Apple tablet which may make a miraculous appearance next year.  As always, the urge to commit is hampered by the imminent.  My wish list for an e-reader:

• easy on the eyes, good in the day and night.
  
• some cue about how much I've read, how much is left
• a nice page-turning feel or something completely different than page turning...either way something to cover the length of the book with some sense of context within the book.  This may have to do with book design more than interface, or maybe both.   Maintaining contextual awareness without the physical cue of the book is an interesting design problem.
• annotation for reviewing papers, and making marginal notes.  A way to add voice annotation. 
• good interface for browsing annotations, including a group's annotation if need be.
  
• wireless connection
• ability to lend and borrow books
• good collection browsing...ability to browse my friends' collections
  
• durable and light
• private
• open
  
• interoperability with my other devices
  
• color (though I'll deal with b&w for now if the above features are there)
• video (though I'll deal with static for now if the above features are there)
  

I do love the smell of paper and the feel of a book but I'm quite willing to trade them in for the benefits of e-reading.   I sure won't miss moving boxes of books.

A song for this post.

The phone is smarter than its carrier (day 102)

I think today is a rant day.   The best rant topic is cell phone companies.   Have I already ranted about this?  Probably.  I'm convinced that whoever runs Bell, Rogers and Telus (BRT) are just not passionate about the cell phone business.  They're big and got fat on another technology.   They are just not that hungry.  Add to this the fact that we have a sleepy CRTC that got fat on the crumbs dropped by BRT and you get a public that is getting extorted for the sin of wanting a smart phone.    I have limited data to back any of this up.  I have no idea to what extent the CRTC is getting lobbied.  I have no idea how hard it is to run a cell phone network.  Intuitively, though, it seems that having a smart phone shouldn't be an automatic $90/month.   And even if the profit margin wasn't %30 (I do have a news report to back that up), surely a mandatory 3 year contract is just over the top arrogance for a market that has almost no competition.  Before the smart phone,  you could refuse the contract, buy the phone and get yourself on a month to month plan.  With the iPhone (for example),  there is no good way around the contract.  Even if you buy the phone full price, you still need a contract to get on a data plan.   The iPhone is not very useful without a data plan.  I find the whole idea of a contract offensive.   Being tied to a company means they have stripped you of a pretty fundamental power as a consumer - the power to walk away if the service sucks or if the price is too high.  Not only am I not getting the service I want, I have to pay to switch.  Injury+insult.  A further insult comes when I realize that the phone I bought is useless on another company's network unless I commit the illegal act of 'unlocking' the phone.  That's even if I paid full price.  If I complain about my indentured servitude,  I suspect their internal dialogue is a version of "Oh well, I see you're still with us for another two years...oh you're still talking?".    They have a steady stream of new contracts that basically means they don't have to innovate to keep people around.  The consumer feedback loop is sluggish at best.   It's a lazy approach to business.  With so few players in the market, don't tell me they need contracts to stabilize their business.  Even gyms have done away with contracts.  I suspect if contracts were declared unacceptable business practice, prices would come down and service would go up.  I don't know what the CRTC should be doing, but this seems like pretty easy pickings for some great PR. 

A song for this post.

Inside/Outside awareness (day 101)

I created another test of the lungs breathing.  The breathing pattern is the calm breathing that I had worked out with the egg.  The videos are the same two videos of the pelicans and garden.  One video plays on the lungs and the other on the trachea and bronchi.  The lungs fade out at the top of the in breath and fade back in at the bottom of the out breath.  The video slows down at the in breath and goes to normal speed at the out breath.


I was trying to emulate a feeling I have when I meditate of the out breath being a little anxious with only a slight pause at the top, and the out breath feeling more relaxed with an extended pause before the next in breath.  In that pause there is lots of space and a feeling of being more aware of the outside.  This is why I ended up with the fade in at the bottom of the out breath.  I initially had tried it the other way (fade in at in breath) but it somehow didn't work. 


The next step is to get the video to slowly come in to the trachea/bronchi as the breath comes in.  I have to write a small shade to do this.  I'm hoping to have some time tomorrow.


Here is a video.  Unfortunately it's only 2 minutes long.  It's really  nice to keep breathing with the lungs.  Very calming.  Next time I'll make the video loop.  It's too late right now to rectify that little oversight.



fade out lung test from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.


A song for this post.

But I don't want to know (day 100)

Michael Boyce tweeted "i resent knowing about tiger woods without even trying to know about tiger woods".  So well put.   In talking with some friends at a party last night we figured that the metaphor is of the information superhighway super crowded with billboards.  You can't help but be assaulted with drive-by celebrity trivia.   But in this case, the Tiger Woods story I think was more of a celebrity crash where we were implicated as implicit if not complicit rubberneckers.  You see, Tiger crashed from a great height.  He wasn't exactly a jumper...more of a tight-rope walker that we watched with fascination waiting for the stumble.  Even those that weren't watching couldn't help but overhear the story of the one that fell from a great height.

There's not much I can do about celebrity drive-by's but I do improve the scenery by using a firefox plug-in called Add-Art.  It replaced ads with art.  After I first installed it, I sort of forgot about it.  I still catch myself thinking things like 'what IS that?' when I see a piece of art where an ad should be.  It's such a strange thing to be seeing that it catches my eye almost every time.  I highly recommend it.

No I'm not linking to Tiger Woods.

A song for this post.

When can you move in (day 98)

Sometimes you get what you wish for but time has passed and you don't want it anymore.  That happened to me today.  I think it did anyway.  I will re-evaluate my degree of want in the morning when I've had time to contemplate my future with or without the thing that has come.   The 'road not taken' situation is so hard.  This one is particularly hard because this crossroad has come up before and at the time I wanted to take the path that is now offered but it was denied.   Priorities change and the heart warms to the current situation.  It's harder to change when it's not necessary.  It's always best not to resent choice but at this very moment I wish this situation had come up about six months ago.

A song for this post.

Google waved and people craned their neck to see (day 97)

Google Wave made a splash.  It broke on the beach of cloud tools.   It was a private beach though everyone could see something was going on from the parking lot.  Soon there were paparazzi posting unauthorized pictures, and who you knew became something to be evaluated and mined.   This has happened before.  I remember not having a gmail address.  I remember who did.  I remember how I became in.  How early was I into the wave?  What number was I?  I want to know but much like my Francis Bacon degree of separation (2),  I wonder what such a number really buys me besides social anxiety.  Soon everyone will be in the wave and we'll all be wondering what we're supposed to be doing.

I don't think I've ever opened a tool that confused me as much as Google Wave did at first glance.  It really stumped me.  The feeling was uncanny...like familiar and foreign at the same time and mixed with a unsatisfied anticipation.  I clicked and felt really lonely.  I added some people to my wave.  I said some mundane things like 'what is this for'?  I forgot about it.  I read a report about it.  I came back to it.  There were more people so it felt less crazy to say something less mundane.

I've now figured out that Google Wave is a sort of mix of email,wiki, google docs, and IM.  It's a mix of synchronous and asynchronous.   It may be a replacement for email but the average wave message seems to have more commitment than the average email.  There seems to be more purpose to the wave and more community.  There also seems to be more longevity to the conversations.   So maybe the workflow is that you 'move' email conversations to the wave when they become too complex for email and you need more collaborative authoring.  

The best part is that it's a protocol so it can be reskinned.

A song for this post.

Breathe with the egg (day 96)

I've started to animate spheres stretched into egg shapes (as stand-ins for lungs).   They breathe.  I'm trying to simulate regular breath, calm breath, excited breath, anxious breath, and so on.  So far I've got calm breath down I think.  I'll post a video soon.  It's an interesting process.  I tweak the animation curves and breathe with the egg.  I keep breathing with the egg and notice how I'm feeling.  Sometimes I end up out of breath and feeling like I need to breathe more often or more deeply.  Sometimes I feel I have to get up and do something.  Sometimes I feel light-headed.  Sometimes I even feel good.  It's an interesting process.

Just looking at the eggs breathe makes me think that we might want to consider a more stylized model for the lungs.  Not necessarily cartoony but maybe something with more personality.  I'm not sure which would be more effective.  Certainly the anatomical look of the current lungs gives a kind of visceral feeling.  Something would be lost with a more drawn look.   May be worth a try though. 

A song for this post.

No matter what, I want cleaner air (day 95)

I came across an article in the BBC talking about the new role of science in the democratic process.  It's a well written article with lots of insightful comments about the possibility of science becoming corrupted when faced with a high stake issue like climate change.   We've had separation of church and state for good reasons and it's worked out well.   But we don't have separation of business and science.  Maybe we should.  Perhaps all science should be publicly funded.  The issue is further compounded because predictions coming out of climatology are easily attacked on the basis of potential biases from the choice of data sets and methodologies.  It's too easy for factions to form on the basis of beliefs in a particular set of ingredients to the complex system.   Add to this observers which have a stake in shopping for the right climate change answer and you have an explosive mix which leads one's belief (or not) in climate change to be treated as a religion.  It's a sad state of affairs and it points to the general fear around what we we might have to change about our lifestyle to be kinder to the environment, to breathe easier.  Seems to me no matter why or if the climate is changing, we stand to gain a lot from decreasing pollution.  Unfortunately lots of money has been made on the fast pace enabled by oil.  Many have been successful with the current system and understandably want no change.  But we go faster than anything else, to our detriment.  We forgot the rhythm of the earth.

A song for this post.