Christian Renaud's Blog

Clap that Circadian Rhythm

Since it's been a little while since I wrote something I pulled completely out of a dark orifice:

Circadian Rhythms, as many of you know, are cycles of biochemical and physiological processes in biological organisms.  In humans, these are a key influencer in how we sleep and how and when our organs function.  There are endogenous and exogenous factors that effect these rhythms, as anyone who recently returned from China can attest at 3am.

It turns out that your body is not all on the same timezone.  There are organs that do what they want, when they want, regardless of stimuli ('peripheral oscillators').  There are factors (called 'zeitgeibers') that influence other parts of your anatomy, like how sunlight on your skin alters melatonin production. Your body is not, as we say in my business, time-sync'd.

There is a fair bit of fascinating chronobiological research about this topic, which I am adding to my ever-infinite reading list.

But what if these endogenous factors are as susceptible to human evolution as other aspects of our growth?  Just as hair/eye color are immediately identifiable factors that you can genetically track, what if there are natural, innate, circadian rhythms and peripheral oscillators that you inherit through your genes as well?  What if your natural predisposition is being able to digest the foods indigenous to where certain of your ancestors were from?  What if your peak-learning-times were those shared by your European or Asian ancestors (and time sync'd to Europe or Asia instead of the Americas)?

For example, what if you are living in the United States, eating the high-fructose-corn-syrup-saturated diet so common here, while your body is genetically predisposed to eat a rustic, French country meal during Central European dining times?  What if you are perpetually walking around the states in non-peak mental-acuity, unless you venture to Europe on holiday, and suddenly find yourself on mental-overdrive?

I'm going to read all the chronobiological primers I can find and see if there is any research to affirm/disprove my premise above.  I ALWAYS feel like I am on some cognitive-hyperdrive while on Euro-travel, and definitely function better anywhere when I eat the cuisine of my Continental forebears.  I hope there's a reason other than that the United States just makes me slower.

Emerging Technology- Slide Presentation

Belatedly, but as promised, here is the SlideShare link to the Emerging Technology: 2020 presentation I delivered at the Emerging Technology Conference at ISU, as well as the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds conference at NDU.  I will provide an annotated one in the near future as well.

Emerging Technology 2020

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Good Karma or Bad Karma?

My current 'object of desire' is the absolutely gorgeous Fisker Karma.  Built by Fisker Coachbuild, and powered by a powerplant from Quantum Technologies, the Karma is an eco-geek's dream machine.  It is a plug-in-hybrid, which operates exclusively off of it's batteries, with a gasoline engine to power the electric plant in the event that the driven range exceeds 50 miles between charges.  If your commute is less than 25 miles in each direction, the gasoline engine never kicks on, and you end up with an effective 100MPG.  When you have returned home (or if you have an AC outlet at work), you plug it in and charge the batteries and you are ready to roll after work or the next morning.

The clever folks at Fisker Auto also have the option of a solar array on the roof of the car to keep the cabin (and batteries) cool during idle periods, thereby boosting the batteries' efficiency.  Rumor has it that there is also a garage-roof-solar-panel option with the car as well, to allow it to charge using solar while parked.  Of course, if you drive home from work in the evening, that doesnt give you much time to harness the sun to charge the battery unless you have some sort of fuel-cell that stored it up all day.

In my case, with two young children, it is the perfect pairing of exotic sportscar (it goes 0-60MPH in 5.8 seconds) and family sedan.  Granted, the estimated retail price is somewhere north of $80,000, so it is unlikely that my smarter-and-better-half will green-light the pre-order in these harsh macro-economic times.

Never one to be deterred, I set about trying to justify the value to myself (in preparation for the harder sell to my wife), and was surprised to discover some nasty facts about electric power in the United States that caused me to think twice about a plug-in hybrid. 

I'm going to lay out some data that I uncovered, and hope that some astute readers can point out the holes in my concerns, or new data, so I can justify this after-all:

I don't know how this slipped by me....

...but while in Amsterdam earlier this week, a colleague mentioned that Mal Burns and a number of researchers had recreated the (in)famous Milgram experiments using avatars instead of live actors.  Not surprisingly, the results:

...show that in spite of the fact that all participants knew for sure that neither the stranger nor the shocks were real, the participants who saw and heard her tended to respond to the situation at the subjective, behavioural and physiological levels as if it were real.

Byron Reeves at Stanford as well as Cynthia Brezeal at MIT have done prior work on human physiological responses to non-human interactions.  Given that avatars and robots play into our hard-wired evolutionary programming, I am pleasantly unsurprised to see the outcome of the research.

The Radiated Library

One of the organizations that I belong to is The Long Now Foundation, which is an eclectic group of thinkers focusing on, not surprisingly, the very long term. They have fascinating talks regularly (always on a Friday in San Francisco when I am just landing in Iowa from my week in San Jose, argh), and this month they featured a talk by Alex Wright on 'Mastering Information through the ages'. The podcast hasnt been posted at LongNow yet, but one of the excerpts from his talk was in regard to a Belgian gentleman by the name of Paul Otlet, who lived from 1868-1944. The YouTube video below is an illustration of some of his prognostications from around 1930. This reminds me of the first time I saw the work of Piet Mondrian....I enjoyed it immensely until I realized that he had painted it when my Norwegian forebears were still sleeping in trees in Northern Minnesota to avoid the wolves, at which point I enjoyed it even more.

I love this kind of foresight.

Primates, Swarm Behavior, and the Wisdom of Crowds

/Rant

On the short flight today I finally took the time to read the much-referenced National Geographic article on Swarm Behavior, which (uncharacteristically for N.G.) manages to intermingle stigmergy with Wikipedia.

I am going to don my best Asbestos suit for this one and go out on a thin flammable limb in saying that:

"SWARM BEHAVIOR AND THE WISDOM OF CROWDS ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT"

If you are reading this, the odds are strongly in favor of your ancestors having descended from primates of some species, which means that we have our own pecking order on how we figure out who is giving orders and who is taking them.  Who gets to mate with that pretty female over there?  Easy, the big silverback.....and woe betide the little ape who tries to bypass the pecking order.

I'm currently sitting in a frequent traveler lounge in Chicago O'Hare international airport.  In fact, I've been sitting in these lounges for so much of my life that I should be able to claim this as residence on my taxes.  It USED to be that you could walk into these lounges and the pecking order was clear.....the silverback CEO in the pinstripe, his #2 in the blue blazer and gray trousers, the #3 in the taupe suit with spiffy tie.  Then, about 15 years ago, a new species was introduced into the pecking order....the guy in the jeans with the $500 pen and leather journal.  He disturbed the explicit status regime because no one could place him in the pecking order.

Vignette- In 1996, I moved from Southern California to Northern California.  In SoCal, if you walked in to a fine mens clothier, you had better look the part already or no sales rep was going to take the time to come and speak with you.  I once waited 30 minutes for a sales rep to approach me at Fashion Island in Newport Beach because I had stopped on a whim while wearing jeans.  When I moved to NoCal, I strolled into Stanford shopping center in Palo Alto to pick up some new corporate armor and was pounced on by sales reps repeatedly, also while wearing jeans.  Why?  Because in Silicon Valley, that unshaven guy in jeans may be the recent community college dropout, or the recent dot-com multi-millionaire retiree.  It's better to err on the side of not ignoring him.

So what does this have to do with Swarm Intelligence, you may be asking yourself?  Exactly nothing.  That's my point.  We have a complex, hard-wired program of non-verbal cues and social behavior that underlie the structure of human interaction.  We don't sniff each other's privates to say hello, follow pheromone trails, or dance a jig to signify when we've found a new hive for the family unit.  We do unconsciously move (or not) when walking straight at other primates, we do defer to the silverback in the room and adjust the tone of the conversation when he/she enters, we do follow a complex program of picking the EXACTLY RIGHT urinal when confronted with a busy public restroom.

I agree with half of the article's argument that pervasive network connectivity and web 2.0 technologies allows us to engage in a public dialog and discourse on a scale unprecedented in human history.  This will be the killer application of the information superhighway that we all painstakingly built in the last two decades, just as the secondary commerce that arose from the highway systems worldwide was the real societal benefit, and not the highways themselves.

I disagree that this has anything to do with swarm behavior.  We may be clever primates and build tools and bots to leverage swarm behavior to forward our primate ends, but we can't deprogram millions of years of evolution and hard wiring and begin to act like networked honeybees, pigeons, or ants.

/Rant off

Santa Fe Wrap-up

After two days at the ARCS workshop at the Santa Fe Institute, as well as two more days at the annual Business Network meeting, my 'buffer is full', as we say in the computer business.  It was an excellent combination of specific/deep (ARCS) and broad (BusNet) meetings. 

All in all, my favorite presentations were those of Norman Johnson of LANL, and Martin Nowak of Harvard.  Dr. Johnson's presentation was entitled "Pandemics: The Emerging Threat, Biodefense & Biosecurity- Global View", and walked through the history of prior pandemics, the societal conditions that existed at those times, with the contrasting societal conditions now and the impact of a comparable pandemic.  It was a very effective and chilling augur of the coming pandemic(s).

Dr. Nowak of Harvard had an equally excellent presentation on cooperation.  He went through his slides quickly, walking through the five distinct modes of cooperation and the prisoner's dilemma.  He covered more material in his brief presentation than I have absorbed in >10 books on the subject.  If he had been a professor of mine in my undergraduate years, I would have quickly shifted my focus from business and computer science to evolutionary dynamics.

Hopefully, the Santa Fe Institute team will post the slides from the BusNet meeting soon, so I can update this post with links to those presentations.

I also was able to wrap up my last two days in Santa Fe with back-to-back morning runs, including a new personal record for the mile (10.06) as well as prolonged distance without stopping (about two miles).  I am glad, as I sit in the Frankfurt Airport, that I ran those days, as international travel provides a good opportunity for those tired muscles to heal up in preparation for some good runs in Nice and London this week. 

Going to head for my gate now, where it appears that the European air-travelers are equally unthrilled with the liquid/gel regulations that are causing travel delays worldwide.  More from the Cote d'Azur.