Gestalt Internet search, connecting the silos

The Internet contains an increasingly vast amount of information from many sources created from many different perspectives. The freedom with which anyone can add content to the Internet gives rise to incredible richness covering many aspects of every topic. This same freedom, necessarily largely disorganized, also makes accessing the information and understanding which sources are objective or related and providing different views extremely difficult. There are many silos of information content generation, management, and aggregation.

Silobreaker is a combination of search and aggregation that attempts to make sense of the cacophony of discourse by automatically trawling the Internet and combining related information into a newspaper style that provides a single place where different aspects of news such as people, comment, geography, are collected together to provide a more rounded view of each topic.

The site is created automatically by robots that continuously search the web looking for related content and combining them into articles that can be searched. As well as using traditional search techniques it uses emerging semantic web technology to attempt to identify content that is related even though it was originally created in separate silos. The aim, to provide a way of accessing the increasingly complex heaps of independent blog posts, news articles, research papers...

The site also provides a semantic search that will find topics related to the one you are interested in. This example shows topics automatically discovered as related to Sustainability:

This is one of a number of attempts at making the process of sharing knowledge in a way it can be easily accessed more sustainable, reducing the risk of an increasingly disconnected set of different perspectives on the same topic and building a more complete picture of what we know, think, or claim.

Urgent Evoke - Sustaining ideation events

Some problems seem so intractable they just won't lie down.
How do you keep the ideas coming when each idea for improving the situation seems to produce more problems?

The World Bank Institute in conjunction with infoDev, and the Korean Trust Fund on ICT created a social networking game - Urgent Evoke to allow thousands of people to collaborate not just on developing ideas, but expanding on the problem via blogging of text, images, and video around core themes or "evokations" that you can then invite others to participate in. Turning problem solving into a game where everyone can take part and evoke responses from others by sharing their problems... and their ideas about potential solutions... makes problem solving both interactive and much more engaging. This infoDev article summarises some of their successes.


The Evoke leader board on global giving for the last evoke event shows the kinds of challenges people are struggling against and additionally provides a means for people to donate to support the individual initiatives emerging to combat those challenges.


For example, Organism is planned as a non-profit website fostering collaboration, where internet users can develop concepts into working projects for the greater good. Their perspective:


"The world is rife with challenges exceeding the capacity of any single person to solve. With 1.6 billion internet users world wide, digital collaborative networks have been seen as a potent solution for the last decade. Networks have been started, yet not one has attained widespread popularity. We have identified four components essential to a collaborative network's success, and determined that the absence of two or more elements has been the cause of every failed attempt."


Their aim is to "solve the worlds problems by catalyzing collaboration among the 1.6 billion internet users"... something to keep an eye on.

Is money sustainable as the primary means of measuring wealth?

The answer to this question will seem obvious and yet we disagree.

In this recent article from the Guardian posted by Felicity Lawrence entitled 'Big Business Clear Winner in Asparagus Industry', the implication being that if there is a clear winner then there must also be a clear loser, in this case the local people of Peru's Ica Valley, the promise of wealth in the form of money has resulted in depletion of the natural water resources to the extent that any wealth that did exist in terms of land on which you could live has rapidly been eroded.

Everything is connected, as we know. Pull one string and all sorts of things move that you hadn't anticipated... well, in some cases perhaps people have anticipated but their desire, focus, priority is elsewhere.

The Peruvian Asparagus industry, created to serve those wealthy countries who like to eat asparagus out of season, with the help of loans from the world bank, have managed to participate in an 'asparagus economy' in which $0.70 of each $1 spent on Asparagus ends up in US supermarket pockets, whilst much of the remaining $0.30 goes to buy seed and fertiliser from the US, the local profit still being higher than without an industry in cash terms.... but now look at the relative wealth in terms of the sustainability of the environment. Water was diverted from the Ica river to sustain the Asparagus farms. The water is being consumed at a drastically higher rate than previously, upsetting the balance of the ecosystem and causing other indigenous farms, crops, herds, to fail.

The two forms of wealth are directly coupled. The GDP of Peru has gone up due to the amount of money changing hands in the Asparagus economy and the amount of water available for sustaining other agriculture and other life has gone down to the extent that many have been driven from the area.

There can be no one measure of wealth. Any such measure, to be a successful measure would have to balance many factors. The way in which these factors would have to be balanced would vary depending by region - some areas are wealthy in water, others in minerals, and so on - hence the local value of those things, the actual value - not the market value, is different. Clearly water is more valuable than gold in some places as you simply die if you don't get enough of it and it really is that scarce. So there can be no single measure of wealth as to increase that - to increase GDP is to deplete some other resources, which are consumed in the conversion of various other kinds of wealth into GDP. The formula for determining the impact on local communities - on humanity in that region is different per region.

There are no two ways about it; we need to remain vigilant, and aware of the consequences of our actions; we have to keep our eye on the accelerator, and the clutch, and the break, and check what we are towing doesn't topple over as we go around the bend... we can't just look at weather we are going faster than anyone else. Its senseless.


There is a natural laziness in us that leads to band wagon behaviour, and grasping at simplicity - like using GDP or cash as a means of testing "whether you are going to be okay".... when actually what we need to consider is different for all of us for many reasons, and especially in areas where the environment is harsh.

We need to keep our eye on many more factors and recognise wealth in different forms if we are to avoid destroying true wealth in terms of local resources that contribute to a sustainable ecosystem in favour of virtual, made up, forms of wealth like money.

It seems to me that greater consideration needs to be given by organisations like the world bank to consider not just the money economy, or the related asparagus economy, but also the water economy, the energy economy, the carbon economy, ... the sustainability economy.

One Laptop Per Child

Situation

Western kids sit on sofas watching cartoons about destruction on 42" televisions. Education is often taken for granted and their expectation is that society will look after them. It does this by building tanks and GPS guided missiles, spending most of its money on defence. In poorer parts of the world children are hungry or suffering from diseases that could easily have been prevented for the want of a little education. Many don't even have electricity or the ability to share ideas and successes about how to create a better world.

Problem

How sustainable is a human race that rushes ahead in one part of the world developing high tech and luxury living with hollywood movies exaggerating and provoking people to ever greater excesses and the primary feeling towards other parts of the world being one of fear when other parts of the world struggle with basics like sanitation and agriculture, let alone even having basic infrastructure like electricity or computers to enable sharing of ideas and collaboration in education for solving community problems?

Implication

Whilst the potential for greatness and achievement are squandered by those that are privileged, fear ironically seeming to be proportional to wealth, and depression taking over where a lackadaisical attitude reveals no challenges in life, others are deprived of even the basics of education and whilst seeming incredibly happy and hopeful in many cases by comparison, they are severely disadvantaged and removed from being able to contribute to that greater achievement we could all be sharing in. The ability to contribute to a sustainable global human social dynamic is being denied almost every young person despite the well accepted fact that it is the children, the next generation of thinkers, that will be the ones that will create change. Ability to create positive change is massively impacted by conditioning and awareness of the broader situation and its implications. A globally shared awareness is key to creating a sustainable humanity.

Need

Fundamental educational needs are failing to be met. In the richer parts of the world a woeful lack of awareness and laziness created by a bratitude born of ignorance stifles imagination and creativity whilst in poorer locations basic education relating to health and agriculture must be improved. Whilst the specific areas of education differ (from awareness of the wider world and how different your position is to others, to basic knowledge about disease and agriculture), there is a common need for inspiration and excitement in education. Only when children are able to see the nature of the world in which they live and understand the potential roles they could play in that can they really experience life "in the real world" and come to conclusions about who they want to become and how they will make their life worthwhile. Anyone put in such a position would feel gratitude and want to share the same privileges with others.

Solution

There are many ongoing activities in the world chipping away at different parts of this challenge. The one we are going to talk about here is a charity called One Laptop Per Child. Their aim is to put a laptop in the hands of all children all over the world. They have over 1.5 million laptops already deployed to various countries including Peru, Uganda, Uruguay, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and many others.

The XO laptops suitable for use anywhere, where there may be little or no electricity and where the environment may be too harsh for a normal laptop to operate reliably have been created to run from solar power

They have a wiki for collaboration in deploying these laptops and providing electricity and internet connectivity; a significant challenge in such wildly differing environments. Here is a world map of deployments. Its an impressive achievement. There are also projects running in the UK and North America.

An open software environment that can be developed by the open source community as well as by the teachers and kids themselves has been created in the guise of Sugar running on fedora linux. Sugar comes with many pre-installed educational applications called activities. Its provided by Sugar Labs and has its own development wiki where people can contribute activities to the growing list. This list currently include a physics simulation programs (that really is child's play), turtle graphics, puzzles, ebook readers, various kinds of programming activities that have been made very simple, colourful and appealing even to the extent that software programs look like jigsaw puzzles that you fit together to get the turtle to move around the screen drawing geometric shapes. Many more sugar activities are available for download. Sugar comes pre-installed on the XO and is also freely available for anyone to run on their PC or Mac. Various formats are available with Sugar on a Stick being the most portable - boot your computer from the memory stick. Its also possible to run Sugar on virtual machines like VMWare, VirtualBox and Parallels Desktop for Windows or Mac.

Core to this endeavour are a constructionist approach that leads to a focus on providing opportunity for self learning fueled by curiosity rather than setting an agenda for what should be learnt alongside providing the capabilities for collaboration. The XO laptops all have long range wifi for connecting to the internet but even if no internet infrastructure or wifi router are available, the XO laptops still automatically discover other XO laptops that are nearby and form a mesh so they can all communicate. This mesh can span up to 12 miles, with laptops between distant children acting as go-betweens. One of the core applications on the XO lets you see who is in your neighbourhood. You can talk with them by typing or using audio, every XO has a webcam too. You can also share any application so you can collaborate on drawing a picture or solving a problem or even reading a book.



You may think food is more important than laptops. The point is that the right kind of technology can massively amplify the effectiveness of not just education but also of social development. Knowledge about how to fish is more valuable than fish and an environment where you can create knowledge for yourself fuelled by your own curiosity and unfettered access to world knowledge is even more valuable. There are plenty of YouTube videos about this. These two sum up the mission nicely:
OLPC Mission Part 1
OLPC Mission Part 2

What do you think will be the consequences of connecting all children of the world together in a collaborative mesh of laptops over the internet? What do you think tomorrow could look like? For the most part kids ask pretty basic, and wise questions - and try and find answers to the questions the adults gave up on long ago. They typically don't pussy foot around either... sounds like the kind of change we need on this planet.

Carbon Quilt

Carbon Quilt is a prototype visualisation tool designed by Carbon Visuals Ltd to raise awareness of the impact of carbon emissions by showing the size of a carbon footprint that otherwise would be invisible. In an attempt to overcome the "out of sight, out of mind" syndrome and raise awareness of the 80 million tonnes of CO2 put into the atmosphere every year, they came up with the concept of the Carbon Quilt to show the depth of emissions that would cover the earth if all the CO2 settled at ground level. This can then be divided up into "patches" to show how much different countries or activities contribute.


As well as the "visualiser" tool that you can use to explore the carbon impact around the world, Carbon Visuals provide a number of services and have a number of other visualisations and interactive tools showing the carbon footprint of various installations or activities.

This depiction of the CO2 emitted by Stoke Newington School every year is the result of a project where pupils explored compelling ways of depicting the carbon footprint of the school. This image shows the depth of CO2 generated in a year if it were all placed in an area the size of a nearby park that everyone knows.

See their flickr photo stream for more.

This visualisation shows the annual carbon quilt produced by the UK in one year; an area significantly bigger than the UK itself. As Carbon Visuals explain "The carbon quilt is the layer of carbon dioxide made up of the whole world's emissions. In 2006, we emitted enough carbon dioxide to form a layer 31 mm deep, so the depth of the quilt over a timescale of a year is 31 mm. The emissions for a day make a layer one 365th as deep. Patches reveal particular contributions to the whole world's emissions. Their areas vary, but their depth is always the same as the whole layer - the quilt depth."


Visit the carbon quilt gallery on their website for more visualisation examples in both image and video form.


This video on YouTube is particularly striking and shows a real time animation of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2006 (957 tonnes per second) in terms of filling the space occupied by the UN Building in New York every half a second.

If you are interested in Carbon Quilt and have ideas of your own, why not visit their feedback forum, see what others are thinking and share your thoughts?

Visualising World Statistics

A new way to look at the world is provided by Mapping Worlds. Select the statistic you are interested in and it resizes the countries to be in proportion. For a dynamic map of the States of the USA take a look here: show.mappingworlds.com/usa/
Use the animated map below to visualise the worlds resources and other statistics from coal or oil reserves to population to CO2 emissions to GDP.

You need flash installed to get the above map to work. If you haven't got flash you can see the statistics for CO2 emissions below:

Trading Carbon Offsets for a Brighter Planet

Once governments realised the need to reduce carbon emissions they then had to face the fact that in many industries, organisations would simply be unable to reduce their emissions sufficiently without suffering a massive impact on their efficiency or profitability. The consequent impact on the economy would be unacceptable. A means was needed to create a transition from the current state of industry where carbon emissions were unregulated and unacceptably high to a future state where carbon emissions are controlled and within acceptable limits.

Various concepts and workarounds have come about because of the inability of industry to quickly reduce its carbon footprint to within acceptable limits. Recognising the potential impact on the economy of forcing businesses to conform to carbon footprint regulation, a trading vehicle was established in the form of carbon offsets to enable organisations to increase the amount of carbon dioxide or equivalent they are permitted to emit. Organisations that cannot meet the levels of carbon emissions deemed acceptable for their size can buy carbon offsets to make up the difference.

One carbon offset represents the reduction of one metric ton of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases. The money spent on carbon offsets is invested in renewable energy programmes. The challenge with such a marketplace is to make the cost to organisations buying carbon offsets enough to sustain a renewable energy programme that could make products and services available to enable those organisations to reduce their carbon footprint in the future. The carbon trading market is a transitional vehicle permitting organisations to contribute to a common fund to target greener and renewable energy, ultimately removing the need for the market at some point in the future.

There are two markets in which carbon offsets can be traded, the compliance market described above, and the voluntary market. The voluntary market enables anyone to offset their personal carbon footprint or the carbon footprint of others by making a donation. For example, many airlines permit customers to tick a box to donate an additional amount equivalent to the carbon footprint generated by their flight. Other organisations, like Brighter Planet, provide various tools to manage your footprint including a tool for calculating your personal footprint and credit cards that result in a contribution towards renewable energy projects with each purchase. Their website includes a long list of personal actions you can take to reduce your carbon footprint. The same organisation runs a scheme whereby if you raise awareness in this area, they will donate to the carbon offset fund on your behalf.

You can click on this badge to find out more and contribute in this way yourself: