ComplexEvo blog

Mental Health In Academia

2020-11-07T00:00:00+01:00

What and Why

Science in general, and especially the academic "industry" can be very tough on your mind. After having advised many MSc and PhD students, talking to colleagues and going through some interesting experiences myself, I created a list of "things to keep in mind". I would normally use it during the startup phase of a MSc thesis. After seeing what COVID has done to my mental health and that of people around me, I decided to gather those thoughts into a somewhat coherent lecture. The result is below, a lecture give to the "Research Frontiers" course of the TPM graduate school at TU Delft. Hope this is useful to you as well. It sure did help me.

As an important disclaimer: While the content have been reviewed for basic sanity by psychologists, I am not one myself. Please ask for professional help if you recognize things I talk about, and do not use this material for self-diagnosis or whatever.

Video and slides

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Slides

Resources

Here are the links presented in the resources page. They are all pointing at local resources in the region.

Wood and aluminium coffee table

2020-01-30T00:00:00+01:00

Finished table

The construction process

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Oil futures clock

2019-03-11T00:00:00+01:00

What?

A "clock" showing the current, near-real time price of 1 month oil futures. The point is to get a feeling for the dynamics of the oil futures price, not the exact value. The clocks hand is , of course, a plastic dino, even though according to XKCD there are only homeopathic amounts of dinosaurs in plastics.

It is set in its natural habitat near the map of the Port of Rotterdam, directly above the BPs and SHELLs oil storage area.

Video of the clock in action, setting a price around 48 $/barrel. Your browser does not support the video tag.

Why?

Because we can, I guess? But slightly more seriously, this is the second installment of the "Making the invisible socio-technical systems around you visible" theme. The first part was the Grid balance lamp showing the very dynamic nature of the high-voltage electricity transport grid. Oil price is another one of those abstract things that everybody talks about, but is quite had to get a sense of. Crude Oil is still the lifeblood of our civilization. Roughly 95% of the global production goes into energy production as fuels. The rest is used to chemicals, plastics etc. It therefore an extremely important resource that dominates global geopolitics. Its price reflects traders expectations about the future, based on demand changes and political tensions. It is also extensively gamed using various energy derivatives

I am interested in the expectations about the future that are signaled through oil price, and do not care about people playing with fictional money. Therefore I decide to focus on the oil futures price instead. Oil futures are "a standardized forward contract, a legal agreement to buy or sell something at a predetermined price at a specified time in the future" While they are not immune to gaming, they do offer a slightly more realistic perspective on future expectations, as they are contracts for actual transactions.

How?

Overview

A python script reads the JSON from the web, and posts the price to a MQTT server operating at Revspace. The microcontroller in the clock is subscribed to the MQTT feed, and upon reception of a message sets the clock in the right position. The clock is a stepper motor, with start and end switch. It has a known number of steps between them, and scales the position of the dial, scaled from 0 to 50. The three LEDs display the current price range,

0-50 $/barrel - Green
50-100 $/barrel - Green, Orange
100-150 $/barrel -Green, Orange, Red

The dial is a shortened door handle, attached to the motor axis, and a plastic toy dinosaurus is tiewrapped to the handle. The face is the top 10cm of a 60 l engine oil drum, with the necessary holes drilled for the motor mount, axis and LEDs. The whole thing runs on 24V, which is stepped down to 5V for the micro controller. The motor is locking, which is also supported by the controller. However, it makes a slight but very annoying while, which makes it unsuitable for placement in an office. Therefore a highside power switch is added, and the software turns the controller and motor on/off when needed. This also cuts the power consumption significantly. The worm-gearing is so strong that you would more likely break the gear before turning the motor, so no problem with the light dial sagging.

Data

CME group offers delayed market information for free.

Every 15 minutes an updated oil futures quotes data
The same data is available as a JSON file

Alternatively, Quandl offers other interesting oil data as well :

Daily price of OPEC Crude Oil basket

Hardware component list

The back of the clock, with all the gory innards exposed.

The following components are present:

The wiring is a mess, but quite simple. Power enters, is connected to the high-end switch, controlled by the microcontroller, which is powered by the stepdown converter. LEDS and motor are wired as expected, as are the end switches, which are NO, and close to ground. Observe the logic level converter on the protoboard. It is necessary as the EPS8266 delivers 3.3 V on the pins, and the motor controller requires 5V for its logic.

The top of the oil barrel that will become the face of the clock, with the end switch holes drilled

The stepper motors and the worm gear assembly. I bought two, the left one came with incorrectly toothed internal gear. To my great surprise the seller was very responsive and sent a replacement quickly.

The end switches, fixed using unholy amounts of hot-glue. This is a relatively fragile setup, as the position of the dinos head has to be precise, in order to press the end switch.

I spent quite some time thinking about how to connect a stiff right angle dial to the clock. I was massively overing it, when I noticed a door handle laying on the free-stuff table. And the shaft diameter matched perfectly! A few holes a two tie-wraps later, we have a dino-dial!

Software

The code is in my small projects github repository. The Python code parses the JSON, and posts the data to internal Revspace MQTT server](https://revspace.nl/Mqtt), which is then exposed publicly. The arduino C++ script subscribes to this feed and then converts the price to location and LED status.

If you made it this far through the blog post, you are awesome (or bored), so you deserve a kitten performing quality control:

Saw Bowl II

2019-03-09T00:00:00+01:00

Someone wrecked another circular saw blade at the hackerspace. I grabbed it before it was thrown out, and made a second bowl out of it. You can find the fist one here

The finished bowl.

Polished with a steel brush, teeth are sanded, the whole thing is coated in beeswax.

Preparation and pre-treatment

Starting out with the old sawblade, drawing out the sections that will help with the raising process.

The blade is made out of hardened high-carbon tool steel. It is HARD and quite brittle. Next to having to use a lot of force to forge it, there is a high chance it will break while being deformed. Before we can sensibly forge it, it must be annealed, by heating it above its curie temperature, and slowly cooling it. This removes the tamper, and makes the metal soft(er). Also, a glass bottle for some experimental slumping, because why not.

Yep, there we are...

Camera can still not focus properly due to lots and lots of IR radiation coming off the oven. Notice the scaled and grubby surface.

Some lovely macros of the surface after annealing.

Forging

The first heat, getting up to forging temperature the first time.

Fire, fire, fire !

In order to raise the bowl the classic way, I had manufactured a ball anvil.

The inner ring raised. We continue in concentric circles, untill the bowl is formed.

After two evenings of work, checking the shape and planning future shaping.

Evening 3 commencing.

It is becoming difficult to hold in the fire, so some support is added.

More sweet closeups of various things one finds in the coal ash. Cokes cooked out of coal, bits of molten metal and salt deposits.

Some action shots, day 4

Another check of the shape.

Getting there, but still not how I want it.

Day 6, getting ready for final shaping and finish.

Done with cleaning and sanding of the edges.

Thanks to Damnlie here is me on fire!

Duurzaamheid en Systeem Denken voor de basischool

2018-12-20T00:00:00+01:00

Systeem denken en Duurzaamheid

Duurzaamheid is een eigenschap van de wereld die alleen kan worden begrepen (en bereikt) als we in staat zijn om de samenhang, interactie en dynamoek van de wereld om ons heen te begrijpen. Dit is lastig stof, maar als je vanaf jonge leeftijd aan wordt blootgesteld, is het prima te snappen. Daarom heb ik een pakket aan lesstof gemaakt gericht op Groep 8 van de basis school. Dit is mijn eerste poging om dat te doen, en er kan heel veel aan verbeterd worden.

De eerste test is zeel positief. Recentelijk heb ik in groep 8 van basisschool De Kyckert in Wateringen 2 uur les over gegeven. Was enorm leuk, zeer enthousiaste kinderen en leerkracht, en naar verluid hebben ze nog dagen er over gehad. Ik was zeer positief verrast hoeveel ze er van hebben opgepikt.

Pakket bestaat uit discussies, spelletjes, videos, rondrennen en nadenken.

Kern boodschap en achtergrond

Gezien dat ik al heel lang onderzoek doe in duurzaamheid, is het voor mij lastig te bepalen wat algemene kennis is, en wat niet. Daarom aantal links naar begrippen die in de kern van de lespakket zitten. Links zijn naar de Engelse wikipedia, want ze zijn veel completer dan de Nederlandse versie.

Duurzaamheid
- Voor eeuwig met z’n allen het leuk hebben. Een wereld maken waar iedereen op de aarde het goed heeft en de natuur niet kapot gaat
Negatieve externaliteiten
- Er gebeuren dingen die eigenlijk niemand wil, maar we hebben niet altijd de mogelijkheid om wat aan te doen.
Dynamische interacties
- Alles heeft invloed op alles, ook als je dat niet gelijk kan zien. Voorbeeld is de klassieker Lotka–Volterra vergelijking. Lees goed de informatie bij de Wolf Sheep Predation" model van NetLogo. Die legt het goed uit.
Tragedy of the commons
- We moeten samenwerken om dit goed te doen, maar dat is lastig als de wereld van iedereen is, en dus van niemand. Voor iedereen afzonderlijk is het slimste als je zo veel mogelijk pakt als je kan. Maar voor ons allemaal is dat heel slecht.
Prisoners Dillemma
- Vaak loont het op korte termijn om niet mee te doen met afspraken. Veel samenwerking en afspraken nodig om dit te voorkomen.
Emergent gedrag
- Alles hangt aan elkaar vast, en over tijd, al je handelingen hebben effect. Dus wat je doet is belangrijk, en je kan een beter wereld maken door dagelijks goede dingen te doen en er over met anderen te praten.

Randvoorwaarden

~26 8ste groep kinderen, 11-12 jaar ~ 5 groepjes voor de oefeningen
2 uur totaal, max 20 minuten per keer, ivm aandachtsboog
Veel spel en beweging, afgewisseld met inhoud/visuele elementen

/publications/SysteemdenkenEnDuurzaamheid/

Materialen

Lesmaterialen
- Presentatie slides PDF odp Voor odp/odt files heb je LibreOffice is gratis, en Open Source, en je kan die hier downloaden Microsoft Office kan ze in principe ook openen, maar mogelijk is de opmaak raar.
- Script voor de les PDF, odt
- NetLogo model AmazonesenRiddersTegenMonsters
- In dit zip bestand kan je alle nodige bestanden bij elkaar vinden en in een keer downloaden.
Een scherm / projector voor de slides
Computer met NetLogo. Gratis en open source simulatie programma, die je hier kan downloaden
Hoepel spel
- 2 hoepels
- 2 volwassenen
Voor visserij spel
- Een leuke ondoorzichtige emmer/bak
- "Bootjes"
- Briefjes / post-its en plastic bootjes / bakjes
- gevouwen papieren bootjes waar je op kan schrijven
- Potloden
- Hoop muntjes/fiches/stukjes van iets. Glazen knikker zijn perfect en goedkoop
- Bakjes per tafel/groep die een boot moet voorstellen
- Optioneel : blauwe kleed/plastic sheet als zee, die over de emmer/bak kan
Ruimte waar de leerlingen rond kunnen lopen. Klaslokaal waar tafels opzijgeschoven zijn is perfect.

Gebruiksrechten

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Ofwel, je mag er mee doen wat je wil, inclusief geld mee verdienen, zolang je aangeeft waar het vandaan komt, en het op hetzelfde manier deelt met anderen.

Tweeting for @NL_wetenschap

2018-12-17T00:00:00+01:00

A while back, Rosanne Hertzberger posted a tweet wondering why the dutch science community does not have a community account in order to provide a glimpse into the fucntioning of academia from the trenches. I fully agreed, and a few weeks later an email appeared asking whether the people who positively reacted would like to do this. So here we are! Follow the stories @NL_Wetenschap

Tweets by NL_Wetenschap

Thoughts on co-evolution of technology and society

2018-10-20T00:00:00+02:00

The discussion so far

Involved were :

I have lightly edited the tweets to include readable link and format them nicer, no changes were made to the content.

RM : "Coming from an engineering background, I have identified memetics / generalized Darwinism / Universal Darwinism as relevant fields and topics, but have not found a singe talk about it. (...) I understood that these views are considered obsolete and wrong."

JW : The core of this analysis, the absence of both material culture and of any idea of evolution in CES, is I think excellent. The direction, sustainability, is more towards Darwin's pigeon breeding than natural selection, and in itself admirable; purposive rather than descriptive

IN: Do we have models/theories within CE that describe how this reflexivity influences evolution, while co-occuring with natural selection? Can we even meaningfully talk about "natural" selection in culture? Tech is normative and purposive, even if side effects are unintentional

JW “Reflexivity” is part of a dualist analysis with a mystical agent "mind". An evolutionary analysis, based on eg

would look only at the environment at whatever scale to identify factors of selection.

The case is simple. A webweaving spider is in obligate symbiosis with its web, its extended phenotype. Homo is the same, its obligate symbiont being the technosphere. The evo environment of the homo organism is the technosphere, and of the technosphere is the hom organism.

RM Ok, everything evolves in some environment. And what next? What if you're interested in real-life phenomena where there are many spiders, one big web, many ways of improving or destroying the web? And you're interested in the prediction of the specific situation? Not simple.

JW Its usually one spider, one web, iterated a million times with infinitesimal variation, selection by environment outside spider and web, and prediction plays no part in it

RM E.g. state policy. It consists of many documents that are replicated (because of the continuity of law most of regulations are preserved in subsequent laws). The set of all law rules written in all enactments is like the state DNA. It's constantly evolving. Thousands of spiders.

JW Trying to account for the evo if "state policy" is like trying to account for the evo of the biome of the African continent. Best start with the evo of a tilapia species, or the holes in violins

RM But if you're interested in the explanation of sociotechnical systems evolution now, then it's natural that you'll start with a theory which uses coarse-grained concepts and leaves places for future explanations of lower-level mechanisms ("black boxes").

I guess the interesting remarks about "artificial selection" could be found in analyses of the evolution of domesticated animals. But it's not the highest level of the reflexivity-driven evolution.

JW A blogpost Evolution as a black box The blogpost summarizes the rest of the discussion between JW and MW, no need to reproduce it here

IN excellent! Great and very interesting discussion, thanks for the summary. I'm writing up a reaction...stay tuned :)

So, here is the promised reaction

I am heavily influenced by Steven Pinkers paper The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language The auto-catalytic process of information moving through media physical reality / technology -> human thought & language -> physical reality / technology makes a lot of sense to me.

Natural / artificial is I believe a artificial split, as technology is something that human "naturally do". So

Coming from Complex Adaptive System perspective, there is a continuum of embedded emergent processes. By emergent I mean many entities interacting with each other over time creating/growing novel system level patterns. An emergent pattern can not be caused by / is not ontained in properties of a single entity alone. As Kevin Kelly likes to say, "More is different" This pattern can itself be considered an entity, that interacts with its constituent elements, creating reflexive downward causation or other with other patterns creating, over time, yet more emergent patterns.

Sufficient interactions of "quantum physics" emerges into atoms. Sufficient interaction of atoms emerges into "chemistry". Sufficient interaction of chemistry self organizes and emerges biochemistry / biology. Biochemistry is the first moment we have sufficiently complex structures and mechanisms to allow information to be stored, varied and replicated. Evolution is fundamentally an informational process, as Dennet argues in "Darwins Dangerous idea". Lots of biology happened to evolve minds, which collectively emerged culture. Culture (through social learning etc) emerges technology, as a way to increase its own fitness, by modifying its own physical and social environment, being its own self-directed, purposeful and normative fitness landscape. Of course, this coupled fitness landscape changes continuously.

A auto-catalytic process start when culture produces technology that allows us to store, replicate and vary social, technical and biological information. Technology here is very broadly conceived, being physical, such as making fire or a CPU, or "social" technology such as language or flood insurance.

Technology allows us to continually increase the efficiency of mass /energy flows from/to nature to and within technosphere, and information flows within society, creating more "culture" by growing more population(biomass), culture(ehm... memespehre?) and civilisation (technomass), which in turn increase the speed / efficiency and so on. This, I would argue, is why so many technologist are so obsessed with the notion of Singularity, as it is a logical consequence of this thought. I also do believe that they suffer from techno-fix, and forget pesky notions like second law of thermodynamics and planetary boundaries, which are becoming very clear in the form of global warming and the impending resource crisis.

Throghts on The evolution of an ancient technology paper

After this rant, I went and read the excellent The evolution of an ancient technology paper. Hoping that it will move the discussion further, here are some of my notes and thoughts on how it relates to the discussion above.

"Considered in the most general sense, technology consists of knowledge about how to modify our environment, passed from one generation to the next." Nice, comment to my heart as an engineer. We also like to thik of engineering as "Action under uncertainty, while solving areal problem" That problem is usually a modification of the physical world.

"All six of the studies that we drew upon for our analysis report the same basic pattern of transmission: weaving-related practices are passed inter-generationally (‘vertically’), primarily from mother to daughter, and to a lesser extent between other female weavers within the community." This to me seems like a nice example of field bias, from anthropologists/archaeologists perspective. Nothing wrong with it, but it does mean that this can be studied this way in "primitive" societies with "primitive" technologies, that can be understood/conceptualised within a single person. My (and probably authors) assumption here is that a weaver also knows how to make a loom. Is that so?

Also, there seems to be a mix of both technology and its design (i.e. weaving as a capability, and associated loom design) vs products that are made by it, changes is designs, patterns, colors. Of course some patterns are only possible on some looms, and not all materials / pigments are available everywhere.

What happens when nobody knows or even can know, how to build the technology alone? E.g. the (I pencil)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil], or The Toaster Project When technology under study is manufactured by the global supply chains what would be horizontal and what would be vertical transfer? I see no reason why it should not be there, but how do we talk about it?

"The phylogeny of looms that we have deduced here does not support the notion that technological change has an inherent ‘direction’. Technological progress (increased complexity) is not inevitable. "

I would think that this is just an artefact of the limited scope ( mainly in time) as they consider societies in relatively stable periods, The speed of cultural and technological change in "old" societies was much more slower than today, so that the tech did not have to change to support the rest / much more limited co-evolution. Today is very different, internet is 30~40 year old, depending on how you count)

"Some of the issues related to the transmission of cultural information were discussed by Pocklington and Best [40, p. 81], who argued that the ‘units of selection’ of culture are ‘the largest units of socially transmitted information that reliably and repeatedly withstand transmission’ and that these must be ascertained empirically rather than deduced a priori, a conclusion that our work supports."

Very interesting, as authors note, when we do not have noise channels, or at least channels with low noise, we can copy blueprints, CAD files, operational parameters perfectly, and in theory anyone could make a naptha cracker. However, the resources needed are staggering,what is takes a corporation, an "AI", to do successfully.

Also, they nice make a good point about simplification, caused by lack of resources! Note here the difference between functional and structural simplicity. In tech, many functionally simple devices require a highly complex system to operate (light switch, ordering a pizza with an app)

"The degree to which ‘content bias’ operates, and hence the degree to which innovations from outside the community are adopted, seems to depend on the type of information and its place and importance within the weaving tradition. As noted, weavers are reluctant to make changes in looms or technique, which seems to be linked to the complexity of this information and the difficulty of transmitting it intact. Errors are costly, and the rewards of invention are uncertain. By contrast, new types of commercial yarn and dyes, particularly for daily use clothing, can be adopted relatively easily, since they tend to simplify the weaving process. Their adoption may also be linked to a different mode of transmission (peer-to-peer) and to competitive pressures within the community, particularly between young, unmarried women, since clothing is highly visible and communicates status."

Biases, from Boyd and Richerson are an relevant notion to encode the normative /purposefulness of cultural evolution. Especially if we can identify the mechanisms that drive the evolution of biases themselves. This to me directly signifies the fucntional vs structural simplicity. Innovations that provide the same or better functional simplicity ( modern yarn, rather than a existing yarn) are picked up / selected for easily. Structural complexity is hard, new loom, or new yarn making process. So the more fundamental a technology is, the more difficult it is to innovate ? As it imacts so many things, or as it requires so many complex inputs?

Finally, authors present a interesting classification of parts of technology. 1. the skills and knowledge of weavers; 2. tools (looms and other equipment); 3. templates (heirloom textiles, pattern samplers, pattern storage devices used on some looms); and 4. domesticates (plants and animals, used as sources of fibres and dyes)._

Interesting. I would classify this slightly differently, and maybe more generically : 1. skill and knowledge needed to operate technology 2. skill and knowledge needed to design/build technology ( we don't need the templates) 3. tool - the physical assets /device 4. resources - both for producing the tech and its consumables

My question, related to sustainability transitions, CE etc would be, how various functions /needs are fulfilled, and why one options is selected above the other, when they seem equivalent, e.g. For example, a choice between a naphta fired naphta cracker or electricity powered naphta cracker. It is "of course" an economics, business decisions, but what is cheap, what is acceptable is a societal decision, and evolves over time. Of course, various alternatives must be invented, and available at scale, before they can be taken up in the transition. I suspect that the general mechanisms are the same between traditional/primitive tech, but the way it works today is (at least superficially) so different than the apprenticeship and rituals of weaving.

I very much welcome your comments and inputs, espeially if I am wrong or have missed existing literature! Please contact me via twitter or send me an email

Reflections on Cultural Evolution and link to systems engineering

2018-10-13T00:00:00+02:00

Disclaimer

The core observations this article is based on were written during and immediately after the CES2017, but the article has been written almost a year later after a lot of thinking, some reading of literature and producing a simulation model on object based learning. Many of the points I make might be due to just this one particular conference, with its accidental composition, the sessions I went to etc, and reflect my ignorance rather than the state of the field.

Introduction

I consider myself a complex systems engineer / industrial ecologist that has a fair but high-level understanding of social sciences, policy analysis and management, without being an expert in them. The work I do with decision makers at companies or governments are directly aimed at influencing their actions towards a more sophisticated understanding of the systems they are part of and responsible for. Ultimately, the decisions these people take lead to multi-billion investments in industrial facilities, infrastructure systems and market & governance designs. My goal is to decrease the unsustainability of systems they are deciding upon, and help them to avoid the "obviously and no-so-obviously stupid" policies, decisions and actions, based on insights from complex adaptive systems, evolutionary thinking and based on models and simulation.

During my interactions with these stakeholders, I see all the time that group-based social learning takes place during meeting, workshops and daily practice. It is shaped and influenced by the physical state of the environment and the involved assets, various external (geo)political, economic and institutional developments, by power structures within and between companies, and even the gender composition of teams involved in the discussion. While I do not have a deep grasp of CE subtleties, I do observe many issues that I learned about from the CES 2017 and reading afterwards.

I will attempt to structure my reflection and thoughts about opportunities this along the lines of :

Great
Surprising
Confusing
Opportunities
Future

I hope this is useful to those active in the CE field, by providing a necessarily subjective and partial perspective from the outside and that these ideas will promote interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Great

In general, I had a great and mind-blowing time at the CES 2017. Not just the organization, venue and the city. The contents and the community were great, witnessed by the fact that I submitted 3 abstracts, one of which made it, and am coming back for more!

Open minded

I found a open minded, relatively diverse and very friendly community, fantastic gender balance, awareness of other cultures, background and needs of less privileged people. This really puts all other communities I take part in to shame.

Empirical and quantitative

The amount of experimental and empirical work going on is impressive. I am thoroughly cured of my "bunch of social scientists talking to each other" prejudice. The SESHAT database, language phylogenies and databases are really impressive both technically as in scope and ambition, as are experiments in how learning happens in human and animal groups.

Institutions

We seem to have a shared understanding of the roles of institutions and norms, even though we treat them a bit more mechanistically. This makes me very happy, as it confirms that we are really onto something with MAIA and the way we systematically model institutions.

Modelling

Quite some models and simulations, Agent Based, statistical and various new modeling techniques, as well as lots of geeky statistical analysis.

Sustainability

Presence of a clear call to action, through The Evolution institute and the shared sense of urgency to fix the planet. This greatly resonates with me, and is in line with developments in fields like Industrial Ecology, Transition Management and many others

The Surprising

A number of things really surprised me, and probably says more about my expectations than the field, but anyway.

What is learning, and what is learned?

The most surprising observation is the degree to which it seems to be uncertainty and inconsistency about what and how is learned, given that various forms of learning seems to be the key mechanism behind Cultural Evolution. After some reading, it is clear to me just how complex this issues is, and that there is indeed a wide array of understandings on what and how learning happens. Yet, as an engineer, I am used to more precise and delineated problem definitions.

No memetics, Universal Darwinism

I came to CES looking for a informational basis of socio-technical evolution, but i found mainly talk about learning. Coming from an engineering background, I have identified memetics / generalized Darwinism / Universal Darwinism as relevant fields and topics, but have not found a singe talk about it. Is is simply not a thing, is it completely wrong or is it so fundamental/basic that nobody bothers talking about it? From informal conversations I understood that these views are considered obsolete and wrong. This is a new thing for me and made me reconsider how I approach modelling the transitions / evolution in and of industrial systems

No phylogeny of technology

It seems that nobody has created a proper phylogeny of technology, which do exist for languages and linguistic evolution. I believe such a phylogeny would greatly aid the discussions on how things are learned over time and between cultures. In one talk someone presented a puzzle of how south asian island communities adopted a particular roofing material in a particular order (if I recall correctly), and to me it seemed obvious that it had to do with the order at which certain technologies were invented, as some technology has to be perfected, before the next level of tech becomes possible. Something along the lines of you can not really use materials that have to be nailed into place, if you are unable to produce metal nails. I do understand that some of these material, technological dependencies are obvious to an engineer, but are unknown to a linguist or anthropologist.

KISS focus in modelling

Modelling that I have seen is focused on "simple", elegant, minimal (often statistical) or mathematical models. Most, if not all what I had seen follows the KISS (Keep it simple) approach, rather the KIDS (keep it descriptive) approaches that is default in my world. Somehow, give the tremendous richness of empirical evidence, narratives and mental models of how things work, I was expecting all of those details in simulations. Whether this comes from potentially limited software engineering skills, or from a methodological focus to reduce things to the essential core, I can not tell.

The "I never knew it existed!"

I am very happy to have learned about Multi Level Group Selection, and the degree how those ideas are developed. For the first time I learned that "Industrial/Organisational anthropology" is a thing and that is exceptionally useful for my modelling efforts. Talking to people involved with it further reinforced my belief that this is indeed a very specific skill and mindset and I must involve experts pro-actively.

The Confusing

There are a number of aspects that I do not understand about the field, or at least the conversations that were taking place.

Confusing vocabulary

There seems to be a case of wonderfully overlapping vocabularies between the CE and engineering / environmental sciences. It took me almost two days and several conversations to realise what "affordances" were and that "ecology" means the technical /physical context, such as infrastructures, technology, and is not specific to the the bio-geo-chemical environment. I am also sure that a lot of the vocabulary "we" use are equally confusing.

Limited future orientation

All the work seemed to be focused on either the past, or the now, with basically no discussions about possible future directions society might take, the boundary conditions and societal rules of engagement that are likely, desirable or undesirable. Given that a number of prominent researchers loudly and actively advocate rising to the sustainability challenge, this is very surprising. It seems that forecasting / back-casting thinking, adaptive transition pathways, common in my areas is absent. Is simulating cultural evolution identify potential futures and explore impacts of various interventions a not done thing, or is just nobody doing it yet? I am not sure if my models on futures would be considered CE, as they do not have explicit informational basis for changes (ala memetics) but they do often containing learning and adaptive agents. Would our endogenous emergent policy or endogenous emergent institutional simulations be considered CE? Does it matter?

Academic outlets

Where to publish work about modeling, industrial systems, social learning in models and practice, so that I can reach this community? I have seen mentions of evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, archeology etc journals, but they seem way too far off this topic.

Opportunities

There is a great opportunity for combining insight from CE and engineering and environmental fields. Technology and the physical domain were not an active part of conversations at CES2017, as far as I could see. Whether this is a problem depends of course entirely of who is looking, and what you want to achieve. In my view, if we want CE to become a practical guideline for "saving the civilization" from the sustainability crisis, we must explicitly consider these. But I can imagine that many scholars in the field may not subscribe to this perception of the field.

As CE is focused on learning, it perceives the world from an informational perspective. Information does not follow conservation laws, as mass and energy does, since it can be created and destructed, copied forever, mutated etc. Explicitly building in the relation between a non-conserving, weakly spatially bound information, and strictly conserving and very local mass and energy in CE models must surely lead to better science in all involved domains.

The physical world, such as ecosystems, resources, etc provide very real limitations to CE. I expected that talks on "material culture" would deal with these things, but that turned out to be yet another vocabulary confusions. Culture, in its broad and narrow sense, directly impacts the physical world through individual and collective consumption. These impacts can be direct and provide fast feedback, such as habitat loss or arable land erosion around a rural community. Sometimes, they take very long time to materialize, as is the case with climate change. But both slow and fast feedback loops affect the speed and direction of CE, but in very different ways, and may be very related to the technical, and physical environmental context.

Furthermore, and probably as a consequence of the previous, it seems that discussions on the role of technology are limited. I have heard talks about technology as informational traits, which I fully agree with, but they seemed to neglect that tech is very often a physical thing, bound my mass, energy, limited by availability of other technology.

Also, I have not seen any talk about industrial systems or infrastructures, while these are essential physical contexts for CE. Technical systems form a coupled fitness landscapes with the rest of the culture, limit to what is can do, and give a lot of path dependency to society.

Finally, as this is my engineering bias speaking, I have seen limited orientation on action, such as actively influencing and shaping CE, focus being on analysis. While this is the classical science vs engineering debate, I do feel that the CE community has tremendous amount of actionable insight to offer.

I believe strongly that in science "one mans garbage is other mans gold" and that the CE community is not completely aware of its potential in application. I believe many of, what would be considered basic or trivial insights would be mind-blowing in other fields. Case in point was a young PhD student talking about her work on how religion influences choice, and demonstrating empirical experimental evidence on how this influence works. She remarked towards the end of her talk "Oh, this is not applied or useful at all, my knowledge is fun but useless" In the meantime, in the back of the room my mind is reeling with possibilities of using these, to me new and incredibly powerful insights, in shaping the evolution of industrial systems during the energy transition.

The Future

Things I would love to see at and after CES2018 is the start of a deep conversation between this field, the (systems) engineers and environmental scientists. I believe we engineers are the hands and feet of CE, but are generally oblivious of the evolutionary context and the social systems subtleties. Also, I would like to see a much deeper integration of environmental sciences, linking the social practices, culture etc to the (changes of) environmental impacts/ global cycles. I believe modelling and simulation can act as a bridge. But that will be my next post.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the insights and advice of Taylor Davis, who has helped me navigate and make sense of a completely new field.

I very much welcome feedback on this piece, and hope to see you all at CES2018!

Pentagram pendant

2018-10-06T00:00:00+02:00

For a friend I created this pendant / medallion, that is meant to held in the hand. Choice of symbol is significant to the person, so I went with it.

Made for a friend, size customized to their her palm exactly. Symbol is significant for them, and gives them emotional support when stressed. Made from waste mild steel, coated in beeswax.

The first cut from the salvaged stock.

Burn baby, burn...

Ready for the first strike.

Shape is slowly coming together. Aiming for a gentle flattened oval that feels nice and heavy in the hand

Ready with chiseling the symbol. Aaargh, the chisel moved slightly between two strikes, adding the extra groove at the top. Let's just call it a happy little accident that adds character.

After it has cooled. Feels right, even though it is meant for much smaller hands. Lines accentuated with a marker. Ready for final surface polish and wax coat.

Grid Ballance Lamp

2018-10-04T00:00:00+02:00

Watt and Why

Because the power grid around is a dynamic, adaptive socio-technical system, that we are completely unaware of most of the time.

We are tracking the amount of regulating capacity in MW that TenneT has dispatched in the last minute for grind ballancing. This power is automatically dispatched using load frequency control (LFC). The primary metric TenneT is monitoring is the frequency in the grid. It must be 50 Hz, and is allowed to deviate by max 1%.

Below is a real time measurement of electricity frequency measured at Revspace

If you are a generator of consumer of more than 60 MW, the Dutch electricity law ( 5.1.1.1a.1 Netcode elektriciteit ) specifies that you must take part in LFC system. Each 15 minutes, you must provide a bid to TenneT, specifying how many MW at which price you would be willing to provide into the grid or stop withdrawing from it. You must provide 7% of this power per minute, and your reaction time is max 30 seconds. Source

For more details on the data, see the TenneT site

The lamp uses the natural spectrum as an indicator,

with green being in balance, and towards Violet when there is a need to input power into the system, and towards Red when power is withheld from the system. The maximum value is +/- 250 MW, after which the lamp pulses with the final color.

Hardware

A generic Wemos D1 mini ESP2866 micro-controller close. I like RobotDyn as a source, as they seem to have somewhat less crappy build quality than average.
An ancient load lamp, with a broken filament.
5 NeoPixel clones LEDs, with a sk9822 driver chip.
a random powerbank

Wiring diagram coming soon.

Software

The raw XML source of data
Software is on github
There is a verion for HTTPS and MQTT, depending what works for you.

Making the OHM2013 LART

2018-04-10T00:00:00+02:00

The creation of the L0ser Attitude Readjustment Tool (LART), handed out to the OHM 2013 orga.