Category Archives: Soapbox

Gadget stress

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2d543f31-6f09-43ba-875c-c2d5d3bd0cebWe went to the last night of ‘Twelfth Night’ on Saturday at the new, or rather completely rebuilt, Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. It was tremendous entertainment with songs and dance, Shakespearean comedy with a Scouse accent and an exciting start with Viola and the captain of the wrecked ship surging, dripping wet, onto the stage from what looked like a broken mirror lying on the floor but turned out to be a pool of water. Especially exciting for those sitting in the front row, since the Everyman is a theatre in the round and the front row probably got wet! They certainly had stage hands mopping up around their feet at the end of the scene.

I was amazed at the interval to see people on their smart phones and tablets. Maybe they were communicating their excitement about the production on social media but perhaps more likely they were desperate to find out what had been going on in the world and who had sent them messages. For me, time ‘off the grid’, disconnected from the electronic world is precious and to be protected but many people find it hard to disconnect and appear addicted. Our gadgets pander to our tendencies to be workaholics and to socialize.

Dr R. Thara, Director of the Schizophrenia Research Foundation in an interview reported in a piece by T.M. Luhrmann entitled ‘A great depression?’ in the NYT on March 25th, 2014 said “Gadgets. All these gadgets. Nobody thinks for themselves anymore.” We are certainly at risk of having no time to think for ourselves but the risk from our gadgets is more insidious because access to everyone else’s life via social media and professional networks can end up making our own life look dull and potentially depressing. Of course, most of us conspire in creating this false image by only telling the world about the good things that are happening in our lives.

It is better to pick up a good novel if we want to relax and find out more about ourselves. see my post entitled ‘Reading Offline’ on March 19th, 2014.

Reading offline

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138-3816_IMGDavid Mikics, writing in the New York Times, reports recent research suggests that reading books is an important aspect of coming to know who we are.  It is a private experience that is best done without distractions, i.e. all of your attention capacity is employed on the book [see my post entitled ‘Silence is golden‘ on January 14th, 2014 for more on attention capacity].  Our brains can achieve a much deeper level of thought and engagement when they are focussed on a single task without distractions.  This just does not happen when reading on-line because there are too many distractions.  Some research has shown that office-workers are distracted every three minutes and that it takes about 20 minutes to achieve a high level of engagement in a task.  So it is easy to see the attraction for bosses of replacing white-collar workers by smart machines [see my post entitled ‘Smart Machines‘ on February 26th, 2014].

But David Mikics suggests that reading a novel is important for deeper reasons associated with learning lessons about humanity that are not available elsewhere.  Novels take us on a journey with another self and allow us to look into people’s inner lives.  None of this can be achieved reading short blogs or watching short videos on-line and is perhaps why reading a good novel on holiday is such a cathartic and popular activity.

But don’t stop reading my blog instead click the ‘follow’ button if you have not already and then you can be distracted every Wednesday!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/a-focus-on-distraction.html

Emergent inequality

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115-1547_IMGI wrote a few weeks ago about my visit to a conference on high-performance computing and big data [see ‘Mining Data‘ on February 12th, 2014].  We are able to use high performance computers to create simulations of complex engineering systems before we embark on the usual costly, and sometimes catastrophic, construction of the real system.  Some complex systems exhibit emergent behaviour, meaning that although we understand and can model the individual components when we connect them together the system behaves a new and unexpected manner, which is why it is good practice to simulate a system before building it.  Manuel Delanda has written eloquently on the topic of emergence in simulations in The Emergence of Synthetic Reason.  I encourage my first year thermodynamics students to read at least the first chapter which an amazing tour-de-force that ranges effortless from spontaneous flows of energy at the molecular level to the formation of thunderstorm systems.

Nature has many systems that could be described as emergent at some level or other.  For instance, the ants in an anthill go about their simple interactions but have no idea about how the anthill works or, perhaps more amazingly, the rafts that an ant colony can form using their bodies during a flood, as shown in recent research by Jessica Purcell and her co-workers at the University of Lausanne. With the exception of the queen, there is no leader in an anthill and all of the ants appear to be equal.  The same is not true in human society where currently 1% of the population own nearly half of the world’s wealth.

Seven out of ten people live in a country where inequality has increased in the last 30 years according to a recent Oxfam report.  This is bad news for everyone, including the wealthy because Richard Wilson and Kate Pickett have shown that in developed countries, there is a correlation between the incidences of mental illnesses and the level of income difference between the rich and poor.  A more recent study of the US found that depression was more common in states with greater income inequality, after taking account of age, income and educational differences.   Wilson and Pickett conclude that we become less nice and less happy people in more unequal societies regardless of our position in the social spectrum.

Sources:

http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/10/09/creditsuisse-wealth-idINL6N0HZ0MD20131009

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/how-inequality-hollows-out-the-soul/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/01/income-inequality-depression_n_4190926.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/winnie-byanyima/a-plan-for-tackling-inequ_b_4768096.html

Floods: an everyday example

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floodingI wrote this post before going to the concert at the Philharmonic Hall which inspired the post on February 5th [Rhapsody in Blue].  So, this post is not quite as timely as planned originally but it is still raining frequently here and the Somerset levels remain flooded.

Since before Christmas news bulletins in the US and UK have been dominated by reports of extreme weather events.  Earlier this month the sea on the south coast of the England swept away a substantial length of the main railway line between London and the South-West of the country.  Large areas of the south of the UK have been flooded by storms that rolled across the Atlantic having first caused disruption in North America.  There seems to be plenty of everyday evidence from these events that our climate is changing and this appears to have been confirmed by the Chief Scientist at the UK Metrological Office.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated ‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.  The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.’  They go on to say ‘It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century’.  Despite these assertions, our governments have been unable to make significant progress towards limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.  The delegations from most of the developed countries walked out of talks at the Warsaw climate conference last November, followed by representatives from the Green groups and NGOs the next day.  As a consequence, Kofi Annan [Climate crisis: Who will act? in International NYT  November 25, 2013] has called for a global grass-roots movement to tackle climate change and its consequences.  We need to act as individuals whenever we can to reduce global warming and mitigate its impact both directly in our personal and professional lives and indirectly by lobbying our political and industrial/commercial leaders.

In the UK, politicians and the media are beginning to talk about the need for engineers to protect us against flooding and some engineers are responding by highlighting that the cost will be very high and that if climate change continues then we will have consider abandoning some areas.

At a simpler level, those us working in the classroom can use the flooded roads and overwhelmed drainage systems to create topical, and perhaps increasingly everyday, examples focused on flow in drainage ditches, gutters etc., as in the lesson plan below.

5EplanNoF10_open_channel_flow

See also the Everyday Examples page on this blog for more lesson plans and more background on Everyday Examples.