Categorization

Over the recent time, the association known as the Technate, has successfully organized it's first regular inter-organizational online meeting. As our timezones differ, organizing multiple organizations from around the world to meet online in real time is more difficult than it appears. None the less, the meeting was successfully held in the classic professional style that EOS has adopted for it's own meetings, combining with the practices of other Technate member organizations has resulted in a fairly organized experience, following an agenda and with a beginning and an end, which is key to making the meeting a productive one.

One of the ideas that was prominently presented on the meetings is the desire to get organized by structuring the Technate somehow. The decision to set up a board was discussed, along with the decision to start setting up functional sequences. Some discussion was made in favor of these and some against, until ultimately it was decided to set up a message board where the different sides could put up their arguments and discuss. In this blog, I wish to point out a lesson already learned by EOS, which is not yet properly documented elsewhere and is not the kind of thing to show up in discussion on a forum.

The problem is the desire to set up empty categories. It's a lesson we have learned on multiple fronts, from the structure of the old EOS website (known as NET at the time), to the layout of the RBEF's forum right down to completely practical things like the proposed organizational scheme for the now defunct Project Umbrella.

People like to plan, we do this because it's fun. It is not difficult for people within an organization to find the motivation to start planning ahead, while implementation may be a different story altogether, it seems extremely right to discuss ideas on how things shall be. This is why people like to read marketing catalogs, imagining how they would restructure their kitchen and make grand financial plans only to change them again tomorrow. And we don't like to hear that this may be a bad thing.

The problem with this is that other people respond poorly towards being managed and either being themselves or having their work pigeonholed into categories. It is also not necessarily productive to have things categorized in a specific way. We have learned trough past experiences that setting up brilliantly structured empty space for contributions to be made into can leave many of them empty and that this appearance of emptiness demotivates people from contributing or being productive.

I would ask everybody to accept this lesson and try to avoid making the same mistake. It is not simply an issue of setting up categories and changing them later when and if they prove inefficient, the very state of having categories set up in advance harms the community's productivity.

Now I am not saying that organization of content is wrong or irrelevant, but no matter how brilliant, it is wrong to expect other people to just drop by and conform to a structure that you have defined arbitrarily:

1. Be minimalistic about your categorization! If you don't know at this point how to categorize something, make a single category and then seperate it once there is already content to separate. Avoid making empty categories!
2. Don't plan highly involved formal structure in advance! In fact, unless it is explicitly required at that point, don't plan it at all. I believe this is one of the primary reasons Project Umbrella did not work out -- people saw the elaborate organizational scheme and ran the other way. EOS's own articles on groups, areas and sectors are a problem in similar ways.
3. Make systemic solutions! Don't plan how to categorize people, plan the means by which people will categorize themselves, if and when they feel it has become necessary.

And by this recognize that we all like to set up categories in advance. It feels right, but it can be counterproductive. Remember our goals!

LP,
Jure

Traditional medicine

People involved in recent discussion of traditional eastern medicine, have asked me, why do I choose a scientific approach. Me, personally. Is it because it is the only thing I know of? Not really. Is it because it was taught to me in school? No I don't care for what a system may impose on me. Is it because it's what the president recommends on television? No, I hate both of those things. Is it because I was poisoned with it from a young age? No, actually I was taught about traditional medicine before I started going to school.

What proponents of traditional eastern medicine perhaps do not realize, is that even us Westerners have traditional medicine of our own, which is passed down by generations trough our grandparents and taught to us before we are old enough to think of questioning it. Chamomile tea anyone? And yet when really in need, we first think to choose modern medicine. Why?

I will try to tell a story -- a true one, which may be easiest to relate to, because it seemed completely reasonable to a 12 year-old without much prior knowledge to make him biased towards a certain philosophy.

When I was young I was growing up with my grandmother, who was as all typical grandmothers a master of herbalism, botany and gossip. Every day she would teach me something new and interesting about plants, herbs and medicinal plants that I didn't know to think of before.

As I grew older I learned that sometimes, my grandmother would come by conclusions regarding what plants, herbs and medicinal plants do, based on inconsistent situations -- I would begin to see where she had concluded unreasonably, because she drew a pattern between two inconsistent situations. As I tried out things the way she had come by the conclusions, I upgraded her methodology to one which was more self-consistent: I would make sure that when I preformed an experiment I would only change one parameter at a time to see how it influenced the result. This, I later learned, was called the scientific method.

I have this excellent example of a favored plant: Sempervivum Tectorum, which is traditionally known to cure ear infections and ward off lightning, as taught by my grandmother. I had always loved the plant due to it's ease of cultivation. Coincidentally a neighbor was doing a thesis on the plant and determined that the plant sometimes lives in symbiosis with a fungi in it's leaves, which produces an antibiotic -- no doubt useful against ear infections; however this fungi while clearly visible by the length of the plant's leaves, was not necessarily present. Traditional medicine knew nothing of this distinction and the plant was no doubt used for ear infection even when it had no chance of being helpful. (As for it's lightning warding properties, it turns out that historically this was only applicable to straw roofs, where it is severely unlikely that the plant's presence would in any way influence a straw roof's combustibility or resistance to lightning, there is presently no way to test that as there are no more straw roofs to be found in the country.)

As time got by my grandmother, the master of gossip that she was, saw that my conclusions were as worthy of consideration as the other gossip that she had come by and grew to depend on it. Then one day, I remember, I had learned that my conclusion that because the runoff from potted plants was chemically unhealthy for humans, that it was thus also unhealthy for plants was backwards, as the nutrients contained in the runoff are beneficial to the plant and thus my recommendation to my grandmother had to be changed. My grandmother asked me if hadn't I previously stated the opposite? I answered: "I was wrong." As I learn more I find that: I was wrong. I openly admit that, yet does that mean that my recommendation is unreliable? She never stated what she thought of it, but she did continue to rely on my conclusions. And although I can be wrong, if I take everything I do know into account via a scientific method, and provide a recommendation based on that, it's still the best one we have.

As I look back I had hoped that I had converted my grandmother's witchcraft into science... Only to find later in my life that the process of developing new drugs is also known as witchcraft in the industry, due to the point that nobody really knows how to come by a cure that hasn't been invented yet, and they simply mix ingredients until they come up with something that cures the disease and doesn't kill the patient (of course it is a bit more sophisticated than that, my understanding is on the level of a research reactor control software developer, I am not a chemist).

I understand that the 15 year long process for drug development enforced by the system has been developed trough some sort of bloody trial and error in an attempt to leave behind as few dead as possible. A process that I understand is quite tedious to a researcher who is sure he had come up with a cure to a deadly disease and is being asked to hold onto it for 15 years until they can figure out if it's safe (and somehow pull out of the sky the funding for the equipment required to get it trough the process? Researchers are not normally good at funding issues). And a process which is called "short" by proponents of traditional medicine which had supposedly evolved over hundreds of years. Yet their request that skipping this particular process for whatever they come up with is somehow better for everybody is hardly convincing?! Don't you agree?

Why don't we play it safe in both cases? Why can't we have self-consistent methodology for traditional medicine as well? Why can't we see that sometimes traditional medicine is wrong? How is just believing the gossip, that produced traditional medicine blindly, reasonable? Is it because if we did the right thing with traditional medicine, what we would end up with is modern medicine? Like I did?

Think about that.

Occupy 2011

A quick report from the recent Occupy event in Slovenia.

Although the event itself was somehow ironic in being an political activity using centralist institutions (Facebook, Twitter) to passively protest against the political system and centralist institutions (the 1%); and thus perhaps clearly dysfunctional in attaining the goals to which it was aimed towards, many different groups attended from revolutionary syndicalists with megaphones, trough the Zeitgeist movement and Anonymous representatives, to guys jumping around with free hugs signs and people for the humane treatment of animals (for whatever reason).

The point that one of the promotional slogans "No political party represents us anymore" was not understood as a call against representative democracy, but rather as a statement of fact in the current Slovenian political paradigm, may have had something to do with the popularity of the event in Slovenia. Whether this is a temporary political situation, or an indication of systemic problems of representative democracy starting to show trough, is debatable.

Attendance was massive (around 4000 people crowded up the main city square in Ljubljana) and varied in age groups. There were many groups we were not previously acquainted with. The event reached the result of reminding us all that we are not alone in our efforts to make the world a better place by making systemic changes.

General media coverage appeared to be rather poor, with some media only reporting on the actions of exceedingly rare violent individuals on the otherwise peaceful and positive-spirited event. Some left wing magazines made ample note of the event though, calling it the "October revolution" only substituting the red for purple.

Even though most people seem to have been more interested in crowding around the people with the biggest sound amplifiers than adopting any of the progressive approaches adopted elsewhere, the event helped us renew our motivation to keep working. Perhaps later events of the type will encourage some groups to get better organized and yield more productive results like cooperation towards a goal.

LP,
Jure

Public understanding

You may have noticed many of the recent blogs by my colleague at EOS, Andrew Wallace, have been rather critical of people. Although I tend to avoid this form of public expression out of my respect for humanity, an example has been brought to my attention which provides an opportunity for interesting discussion.

This is Robert and as you can see from the picture he is a Scientist. Ever since he was a kid he wanted to be one, until the Internet provided him with a sufficiently gullible audience, to accept him as a certified nutritionist. On his blog he tells you the source of all disease is in the sourness of food, justifies this by defining the all of human cellular metabolism as an interaction between Hydrogen and Baking powder. His theories have circled the globe and nobody who has passed his Science around suspects there is anything wrong with his reasoning. After all, we all know that incorrect feeding habits are the source of all our health problems, right?

What is wrong here?

Let's look at history. Looking at the example of Scurvy, it appears that people feel a persistent need throughout history, to dumb down dietary problems beyond recognition. The Wikipedia article on Scurvy goes to describe how the cause of Scurvy as a dietary deficiency of then-unknown vitamin C was relatively well understood since antiquity, yet in the 18th century the British navy opted not to help it's people survive, in favor of a simpler explanation: that it was fresh vegetables or acids or even morale that cured Scurvy, which unfortunately for most sailors who afterwards died of Scurvy, was not the case.

...it was not until 1747 that James Lind formally proved that scurvy could be treated and prevented by supplementing the diet with citrus fruit such as limes or lemons, though not by other acids, in one of the earliest European clinical trials. This solution was not adopted by the Royal Navy until the 1790s, and the idea that any acid would suffice continued in Britain into the late 19th century...

Although a simple display of stupidity in a technical person's eye, the reasons why people opt for these incorrect explanations is no trivial matter. In an article that I and Raffael Kéménczy are co-authoring, myself covering the biology-themed problems and solutions and Raffael covering the social problematics; we will touch on some of the examples of such issues, analyze the data, the possible explanations and present some solutions. It is our understanding that these misconceptions present an important lesson, a failure in the scientific community to transfer knowledge into domestic use; and represents an important problem to be overcome in the quest to provide the highest quality of life for everyone, whilst maintaining personal freedom for all.

LP,
Jure

Cyberhorticulture

One of my hobbies the purpose of which is primarily to disconnect from the world of problems, is the creation of random pieces of art. As the skills I care to indulge in primarily cover technology and raising potted plants, any successful combination of all three suits my love of perfection.

These points however random are not entirely unrelated to the topic of Sustainability. Environmental sustainability is one of the more prominent aspects of it and in my attempts to create something meaningful out of combining horticulture with technology appear to exclusively produce systems with more closed nutrient cycles or better efficiency than plants as such normally provide.

Although the results of my work are somewhat embarrassingly trivial in function and appearance, they still might be noteworthy simply because they have actually been built and furthermore, do not require any particularly special skills or equipment to produce -- although I do have a little scientific and expert backing on the subjects, these are hobbies and I am an amateur learning along the way.

My first attempt at applying technology to horticulture was met with the realization that biological organisms are far superior in many areas to whatever advantage a mechanical implement I can easily build would provide -- for example hydroponics is a good mix of technology with horticulture, however the tubing and pump systems are a very poor delivery system compared to a mychorrizal network, furthermore there is nothing in hydroponics that actually produces nutrients -- they have to be extracted from oil and added to the cycling solution. As technology is more a method than the mechanical implements people usually envision when thinking of the word, the attempt was not a complete waste of time -- if I had not considered applying some artificial method to feed a plant nutrients more efficiently I would never have considered using mycorrhiza. A little bit of research later, I produced the near-perfect solar-powered nutrient-regenerating hybrid: A potted plant with clover, a touch of Rhizobium bacterium culture and some mychorriza inoculate in the same pot. The clover grows nodules to host the bacteria, which fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into fertilizer, which is transported via the mychorriza to the target plant. The entire process is powered entirely by compounds produced by the target plant and the clover, therefore by photosynthesis. It is however not perfect because it only provides nitrogen, no phosphate or other minerals. Fortunately my target plant seems quite happy with the nitrogen provided and is blooming all over the place even though it is provided only with plain water.

In my second attempt I have tried to cover a different area as well as arrive at a result which appears more dramatic. Using up some quartz crystal from my previous short-lived fascination with the electrical properties of the crystals of this common mineral, I had successfully and purely by inspiration arrived at a solution to the age-old problem of day and night. It turns out (as also proven by the very successful attempts of my colleague Andrew Wallace to grow plants in a hydroponic setting during the 24-hour daylight days in Umeå) that most plants do not mind having no nights (this in fact is not the case with some desert plants which have a special carbon-fixing mechanism to avoid having to breathe during the day when humidity might be lost -- however this is irrelevant to us because decorative and edible plants are nearly all not of this group). I had hijacked a decorative garden solar light, replaced the battery with something better, positioned the solar cells so they receive maximum exposure and attached it's white LED to the base of the crystal, which is planted in the middle of the pot. During the day, the plant receives normal daylight and solar cells charge the battery, at night the circuit switches on the LED which feeds the plant over night. It turns out, white LEDs (based on the orange-blue technology, rather than the RGB ones) cover the spectrum for photosynthesis quite well -- in case you have wondered how this can be when common grow lights are usually green, it turns out that plants are worst at using the green part of the spectrum, however if you have a light source with a broad spectrum of emission and cannot produce light from both ends of the spectrum (like LEDs can), a broad green (which is right in the middle of the two desired frequencies) covers both photosynthetic pigments better than other colored broad frequency sources of light. Using a green LED would thus be a blunder (LEDs are very narrow-frequency, especially the RGB ones) and blue/red or white LED grow lights as such should be much much more efficient than other grow lights.

On my future attempt I am contemplating two options, one is to create a bigger version of my 24-hour plant. One of the main criticisms I have received on my last attempt was that the single LED is probably not sufficient to affect anything. I have found some tape-attached LEDs in a local shop as well as meaner solar cells on Conrad, using some sticks and ties I plan to attach the LED tape either in a few loops or in a spiral around a taller plant (probably corn). the additional LEDs will probably require more solar cells and batteries and I will thus have to create the circuit myself (to handle more current and/or voltage).

However what I really want is to create a plant which is geared towards indoor use. My love of horticulture is encountering problems with my roommates who cannot understand that growing plants inevitably involves humidity and dirt. I can get away with it outdoors, however it would probably be considered completely unacceptable indoors -- as I do wish to have plants near to where I sleep I am thus looking towards making that perfect indoor plant -- with no inputs and no outputs. I don't have to say why such a pod would be interesting to people working in sustainability! A plastic pot and another transparent plastic pot over it -- sealed with silicone. If the batch is prepared with all the necessary nutrients and preloaded with all the relevant bacteria to recycle wastes produced by the plant (compost bacteria) it should be theoretically possible to maintain the sealed environment forever (or at least until the plant dies of old age). As photosynthesis tends to produce water in vapor form which cannot be immediately reused by the plant, two Peltier elements at the base of the pot should be able to provide the cool surface on which water can condense -- as this would also cool the container, a control circuit would use the opposite element to maintain temperature and should it still go off balance for external factors, it may use both elements to get the temperature back to proper levels. Unfortunately, Peltier elements require a lot of power and thus would require up to 12 solar modules, which is about 100 € of solar cells and also makes the unit cumbersome and completely impractical, so I am contemplating just using a power socket instead -- it is for indoor use after all.

While interesting, both ideas would require me to have some knowledge in electronics which I currently lack -- so this might take a while. Or I may end up producing something completely different.

Until then, there will still be my software development which is preformed during the work week. As a teaser: I am preparing a web-based community platform for bragging about your productivity and promoting the use of Energy Accounting. However until it is out of the Alpha stage, I will not provide any links.

LP,
Jure

Web 3.0

As Web 2.0 has been used as a bit of a buzzword used to mean almost anything from shiny graphics to website login-related technology, I thought I'd explain Web 3.0 a bit.

To understand Web 3.0 one must first understand the web 1.0 and 2.0. I assume everybody understands the Internet is a vast array of interconnected computers, the Web as such was not intended to directly represent this, instead the interconnectedness of the Web is describing the way websites link to one-another and you can come from one to the next without knowing their addresses beforehand. Furthermore the "versions" of the Web (1.0, 2.0 and 3.0) refer to different approaches to transfered content over the Internet; I will attempt to explain these.

First, meet Web 1.0.


Web 1.0, called simply the Web at the time, was the simple 1995 way of publishing content online, Geocities and the like if anyone can recall. Every person was free to make a website and show it to everybody else. If people wanted to respond in some way they had to make their own webpage and post their content there, again publishing this to everybody else. Content transfer was one-way, everybody was master of his own webpage and everybody else were just spectators.

As this proved too boring in the long run (people without technical skills didn't bother to make websites and so the Internet became reminiscent of a TV with 16 channels), Web 2.0 evolved:




This brave new Web 2.0 featured interactive websites where all users could post their own content. Just imagine the two red boxes above to be Wikipedia and Youtube, or Facebook. The Web suddenly stopped being a Web of Pages and became a Web of People, as content could travel freely from user to website to user in all directions. Each website grew with the community of people who frequent it to communicate with the others in the community.

As admirable as this level of information sharing might be, it has caused many of these websites to become closed communities, for example Wikipedia editors discourage linking to other, non-wikimedia wikis in articles and Facebook is completely closed to outside linking unless the visitor is also a member (out of "concern for your privacy", note the sarcasm).

The Web is no longer a Web. To fix this, Web 3.0 has been proposed:


This new Web 3.0 is an upgrade on Web 2.0. It implements protocols intended for websites to share information with eachother automatically, in effect linking the various communities into one large global Internet community. RSS is a classic example of a Web 3.0 technology, moderately useless to the visitor directly, but when integrated into other websites, enables live news feeds collected from multiple sites automatically, sharing news, content, pictures between communities instantly.

Web 3.0 is better, but it is not yet currently widespread. People have been working on Web 3.0 technologies for many years now and there are just as many concerns about it's safety as there was about Web 2.0 when the mainstream was Web 1.0. Progress is slow. If you want to help support Web 3.0 technology and own webservers, consider this:

The main attribute of Web 3.0 is sharing machine-readable content. Due to security, fairness and bandwidth concerns, the general consensus is the client machine should be the one requesting the content, which would be possible if the client's browsers would collect data from the different websites automatically using AJAX. Unfortunately cross-site scripting security concerns have blocked this! If your webserver offers content that you wish to share freely in true Web spirit, you should add "Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *" to your server headers ("Origin" refers to the location of the script that uses the data).

The commands to do this with the Apache web server are...

a2enmod headers

...to enable the Headers module in Apache, which allows you to add custom headers, and then add...

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"

...to your apache configuration file (/etc/apache2/apache2.conf). Restart Apache when done.

Website changes

Although much has been planned, progress is slow. The primary changes to report have been on the website.

We have been working on integrating our efforts more closely with our fellow organizations, beginning with RBOSE, which provide an excellent wiki as well as host an IRC and Mumble server for meetings. The idea is to pool resources on quality services where provided, avoid creating new resources where insufficient time and manpower is available to maintain them and still maintain a suitable level of independence in case something fails. In utilizing these criteria, XML based software appears ideal, allowing the sharing of content between sites without making them vulnerable to single-point failure. We have thus (as you might have already noticed) integrated our member blogs with our website and our facebook page using RSS. Further such integration with our fellow communities is planned (assuming SeqAdm receives suitable approval on this), making the EOS website alive and vibrant with interesting and constantly fresh content (much like for example this RBOSE page).

We have also been working with our colleagues at SeqRel to improve the usability of our website for new visitors. Article categories have been reimplemented (previously removed when re-branding from NET to EOS, for simplicity's sake) and the three links on the front page now lead directly to them, giving you a much better idea what we're all about. Multiple other minor changes have been implemented all over the site and we intend to keep on trying to make the site friendly, pretty and usable for our visitors.