I was running an errand, taking a walk in the neighbourhood, and I started to wonder about the elements and compenents that made a lively, vibrant neighbourhood. Then I started to think - the neighbourhood community is like an ecosystem. People are the push-pull factors - they have needs, and businesses, public sectors - all of these are essentially species of organisms that try to trive in the ecology of people.
There are obviously a few needs people have. People need access to postal services to pay bills and other elements of everyday life, people need a place to eat, to shop as well. And then the other functions, such as library and community centres, and importantly, open spaces that allow people to come together and play. Also important is the night lighting conditions. Where to have lighting for maximum impact for security. If it's too dark, people don't want to go out much and this attracts criminals. A good neighbourhood is one that encompasses all of these for a vibrant neighbourhood, a vribant community, where needs are met, where people ca enjoy living in.
Poorly designed urban spaces on the other hand, are mono-function, they exist for a sole purpose such as to provide residential areas as a buffer for an industry or something like that - where there are minimal amenties for residences. It is kinda sad that my mum has to walk ten-twenty minutes to get to the closest grocery store.
What led to this thinking was also about the mushrooming of Internet cafes in the neighbourhood. Who are they really serving? These places are serving the maids and other workers who might have limited access to computing and information at home. Heck, there are tonnes of these places in Geylang, catering to sex workers and to the foreign workers who go there. Let's get real there about whats happening there. But then again, it is also fascinating to see how an ecosystem of services are sprouting up to meet the various needs, economic and otherwise.
And it's all organic growth, non-centralised, everyone just doing their own thing, and gradually, some kind of emergent phenomena occurs. woah. amazing how something from books can actually become real - or at least the realisation.
cool day.
Tuesday 29 April 2008
neighbourhood ecology
Sunday 27 April 2008
lifelink! Life rocks!
It'll be cool how the things we do, our hobbies, our friends, our studies, how they all interrelate together into this thing called our life. The ultimate life manager programme/software.
Iy's a pretty concept, but it'll take a lot to like add beef into it to make it into a reality.
Its the ultimate information management challenge, ain't it? To investigate how our lives connect?
lifelink!
I think about it, and possibilities surround us with every breath we breathe in. Serious. We can wallow in despair or think creatively. And now I realise that's so true. Might as well use the energy from despair to do something really creative.
Since I'm doing accounts for my dad, I can access the ecology of industries that my dad works in. Why not? That would be an interesting exercise.
Also, hobbies - my dad collects stamps. Why not organise his stamp collections and see where the connections lie? My dad somehow has NKorea stamps - wth! How did he get it? And then, there's his Dutch collection, British, Bangladeshi, Indian, Thai... It'll be another interesting project. Something I can do. And accessible...
Lifelinks! Life in the context of everything!
why connecting?
I'm getting this feeling all the time, to enable people to connect with information, to contextualise information to individuals, and contextualising the things they read into their lives. Like a life-mindmap. How everything in their life connects. And to make the tool that will allow people to do just that. And share this connections with their friends.
This is like so loopy, but I would like to think that I try to think of everything in the context of everything else. I like the self-referential theme, because it's really what I think about most often. Information in the context of my own life, my own life in the context of the information, and how the information that I come across everdyday, how that information makes sense within themselves in the whole ecology of ideas.
I think I need to read up slightly on Tony Buzan and Mindmapping.
Monday 21 April 2008
it doesn't get any more pessimistic than this...
The World's Future isn't as possibly as bright as I think it might be.
I fear that the future might be really be an apocalyptic one. I base this pessimism on the premise that we are not acting fast enough on issues of climate change and sustainable development. Actually, I would think that both issues are really intertwined, but I would actually put sustainable development on a higher priority, because it really ought to be that - the biggest priority right now in our civilisation. Of course, that is the coarse-graining kind of viewpoint. Sustainable development is the overarching idea that our human civilisation should be based upon. Its implementation will transform the way we view our lives, societies, industries, politics, economics and more. It requires both this coarse-grained idea, and the fine-grained details, how small revolutions in the way we live our lives will affect that bigger picture as whole.
I'm excited about technology and its revolutionary, transformative way it changes and upends the whole order of things and our lives. I think in a way, technology is really about serving human needs, and it has done so, albeit in sometimes destructive ways. It has only come to me only just then, that since technology is so human-centred, since it is a human process, the process of technological evolution is going to be highly dependent on human motivation. And that motivation is going to come in the form of economic incentives - laws and other social processes that might either promote or retard the development of technology.
But here's the scary thought. What if technology can't keep pace with our emissions? What if we don't have the political and global will to act on climate change? What if consequences far worse than those predicted come into reality?
This is the world that I fear, a world of droughts and storms, a world of scarcity, of strive and suffering. How would that world look like?
This writing is inspired by Mark Lynas' book called Six Degrees, where he illustrates what every degree rise in temperature would mean. He has done extensive research about how the weather patterns might change due to the warming effects, and what it means for the world.
I mean, we all hear about the degrees and the rises in temperature, and the rise in sea levels, but we hardly think about the actual human consequences and the fallout from rising temperatures. Similarly, we hear of economic contractions and we don't realise the loss of jobs, unemployment and the resulting ruptures in social fabric. But this time, changes in the climate corresponding from the rise in temperatures - this is about the ultimate rupture in human civilisation and the end to life on Earth.
There was a time when life nearly died on Earth. That mass extinction occurred about 220 million years ago, at the boundary of two geological time eras, the Permian and the Triassic, and as such, that mass extinction event is known today to scientists as the PT mass extinction event. That event wiped out 95 percent of all life on Earth, on land and in the seas. It was caused by a period of warming that released huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere.
We are doing something of the near-equivalent today. The warming that we are contributing into the planet might eventually be enough, within the century, to cause the release of huge amounts of methane gas into the atmosphere and cause the next major mass extinction event of the planet.
But I think before those events actually happen, mankind might have already wiped itself out from the strife caused on a warming planet. There might not be a man left to see the final death of life on Earth.
Climate change from warming is going to have disastrous effects to humanity if continue unabated. At current rates, the water sources of major cities in the world, whether Europe, Asia or American, might become depleted by the end of this century. In a world where water is scarce, don't expect people to die of thirst. People will take up arms and force water for themselves.
But not only that. Loss of water and drought is going to reduce water for agriculture and food. Without food, people will go hungry, and they will not wait to starve. Again, they will take up weapons and take food for themselves by force.
Is it that simple? Yes. It is essentially simple. But people will clothe their struggles for food and water with ideas of history and religion to complicate matters, and will use that justify total war as they see it. By then, people's hate and anger would have clouded their judgements so much, their quest for survival so strong, that by then, no amount of peace process will resolve peace in areas of conflict.
Countries with strong militaries will act to secure resources for their own country and leave out food and waters for others, and they will do so using both language and imageries to justify their actions.
By then, the links of globalization will be severed one by one, as regions of the world become insular and isolated. Countries will look inwards to themselves, impose authoritarian rule and impose heavy censorship. The Internet, so reliant on links, will wither. Countries will fight wars of utter destruction, design to kill, not to rule, simply because the leftover resources will not be enough to feed those in the invaded lands.
Its a new world of anarchy, a world in parched darkness, a world, nearing its end.
The climate crisis is the ultimate crisis for the entire human civilisation in our time.
Sunday 20 April 2008
Climate change and geopolitics
I think this is just a follow-on of the previous post about climate change and the ensuing conflicts that will arise - specifically, conflicts centred around dwindling resources that turn into political-military conflicts, ie, full scale war. In the ensuing decades to come, the world will lurch from war to war, as the globalization reverses and the world's regions become increasingly isolated from one another, except for a few refuge or safehavens, far from war or resource depletion - ecologically sustainable places. That world is scary. And unthinkable. Billions will die by the century's end. And the world will leave that century much poorer, and more importantly, irreversible. We won't be able to undo what we've wrought and mankind will eke on this depleted existence for the next few millenia - assuming we can survive this bottleneck at all.
So now the thing is, can we avoid the most grim of possibilities?
Saturday 19 April 2008
and i realised i just summarized two very big trends in the world
The two big trends that are ongoing. And there's a third.
1. The shifting of an American-centric world
2. The rise of environmental issues to the forefront, on par with security and economy.
3. The ongoing Web revolution and advancements of ICTs.
Heck, an entire book could be written about about any single one.
Personalised, Individual Information Networks
I hold many ideas in my head, and I would really love to see those ideas coming together in some tangentially-convergent kind of way. A way of looking at the sum of the ideas we are processing and for us ourselves individually to see how it makes sense for us.
This is the world where we make sense ourselves - no one can do it for us, and naturally, if you want to share it, you could. Its just plainly about self-discovery and self-exploration.
Its about the books and articles that I've read, the things I've written, to see how things connect with one another - to have a clearer picture of how I understand the world, and maybe the world itself.
Really fluffy, castles in the clouds kinda thing... but yeah, can't help it.
the green mood continues
Lately i've been on an environmentally-inclined mood, which means I'm looking everything through the perspective of sustainable development - politics, life, social, education... ok. It's not that all-encompassing but its a perspective I take on once in a while, and it cycles, evidently. Meanwhile, another phase is coming in, and its about geopolitics and the upcoming phase of a non-american centric world. Books like, Second World, End of Dreams, New Asian Hemisphere, Rivals, are all books about the new Asia-centric century and what it means for the new world.
I think part of my intellect life that is exciting is because I'm holding both geopolitical and environmental ideas at the same time, and I can say that right now, there isn't a lot of intersection between the two, which made me think of current affairs, journalists and the environment, two very different areas, and a chasm developing between the two. Its not very nice to see both worlds so segregated. There really ought to be a book that spans the two. And I think Thomas Friedman's new book in August is the first of its kind - finally, a current affairs book that talks about enviromnment like it does about terrorism, globalization and the like that have been appearing. I expect that in the months to come following the publication, more books of mixed topics will come into the market.
Thats a fairly standard idea. Nothing too revolutionary. But I'm betting that more books about the environment will hit mainstream into the opinion-makers world.
Friday 11 April 2008
green buildings
Wasn't too long ago I was rambling about green design, green homes and all. Look what Bahrain did for their World Trade Centres.
Why can't we do the same? Or scale the wind turbines for use on HDB rooftops?
the place for really crazy ideas
computers embedded into everyday life, when today's processing power is in the size of the wristwatch. what then?
the nature of the informational society is constantly revolutionary. things always change. by the second, by the hour.
creativity becomes nothing special, a trait taken for granted. everyone is creative.
manufacturing power democratized. nano-bio-tech democratized.
sometime in 2040?
dust-processing - literally, dust that has the processing power of today's supercomputer, using techniques we won't fully understand today.
i want to think of that society - how that will look like. but i can't. there's a barrier to being able to think like that.
hyper-individuals. innovation by the second.
when we figure out how to close our technical nutrient cycles.
some crazy kerfunky ideas.
Twitter is such a useful tool. Microblogging aside, its a great tool to keep track of the thoughts being generated as you surf the web. Kinda cool, to be able to record your mental state and ideas. The second best thing to a mental recorder embedded in the head.
Today I had a couple of really vague ideas, and they centre around the notion of an informational society - that unless society and its individuals actively take part in, and create information content, only then the society can make a move towards innovation. Its an ongoing information revolution, about how information - blog, videos, podcast and all, how all these things are changing the very fabric of our lives.
The other idea I had was that I realised that I'm really a connector. I think I wrote down somewhere, that I would like to know everything, but since thats impossible, I connect similar things together, like the TED presentations I like, the books I read, the websites I surf, and how all of these connect together, first within themselves, then with each other. Towards ever more convergences, no matter how tangential they seem to each other. That's my driving force for the term 'tanvergence'. haha. right.
Thursday 10 April 2008
Connecting everything
I love to connect information and organise them into something more coherent. So why am I still studying chemistry? Oh well. Maybe I'll end up minoring in computer science. Who knows?
As it turns out, I really am interested in Everything. So I can't study Everything, but I can study how Everything connects inside. Studying the connections - thats what I really want to do. But I don't want to do philosophy and such. Maybe that's why I'm studying Chemistry and Political Science - both are essentially academic subjects which explains how things connect together. In chemistry - how atoms bond together to form molecules, and then on to more complex structures, and in Political Science - how people come together to form complex societies and how these things are run.
Maybe thats how things connect in my life. Maybe.
a wonderful video by al gore.
i thought this was a nice video!
Its like what I've said and thought before. This thingy is a generational challenge.
'History has presented us with a choice.' 'A sense of generation mission.'
What people say of us a thousand years hence?
Tuesday 8 April 2008
introducing my wunderful projects
these are the projects that have been on my mind...
My wunderful projects
1. Combining Google Earth and Gapminder
Statistic mapped onto geographical data. Have seen Google Maps, not impressed by it. Lacks... interactivity.
Wanting users to know data only when they want to see it - leverages on the user's own curiosity.
2. OLPC in Singapore
-Bringing XO laptops to low-income families to help them escape poverty trap, then scaling it up to the entire country.
Meant to bridge digital divide in Singapore, and bring those lower-income families into the mainstream of Singapore society.
3. Bring ideas from TED, BIL, Seed, Edge, DLD to Singapore
Creating Singapore/regional set of Digerati (Edge people who have gone on to do a lot of other stuff), to propel region to a different phase of economic growth, intensely leveraging on technology.
To bring the ideas of these conferences to Singapore students to let them be aware of what actually goes on at the cutting edge.
4. Creating a geographically-based social networking site,
that deals heavily in maps, so you can literally see who loves near you. (Exists already, am told)
5. A social networking site that focuses on different areas of our lives, organising our relationships.
6. Networked HDB flats.
Integrating digital life with real life. For building better communities.
7. Digital control systems for construction? (a la Gundam, mechas, walkers)
8. Creating tools (digital or otherwise) that will enable the elderly to live more productive lives - a more concerted effort to work on GUIs and machines that will enable easier information input (better keyboards, mouses, Wii controllers)
9. A database of bus routes with pictures.
So that people will know exactly where they are going and match it with the landmarks they see.
10. Connecting people with blogs
Using blogs to connect people - creating a mapping of friend-blog networks.
We have never been this close to a turning point...
Perhaps in the attempt to bring some of these ideas, and in fact, through the implementation of some of these ideas, we might be able to form a network of people who are aware of the trends of the future, and work towards that future. We want to create a community of people who are also socially aware of the things going on in this world, who have a holistic mindset in dealing with the problems of our world.
carbon?? what carbon?
I was thinking about biofuels and all when something hit me. All of these biofuels and talk of utilizing methane and all, well, aren't they simply releasing carbon still?
And talking about biofuels - it doesn't look very green right now, especially the corn ethanol. And how biofuels have actually contributed to rising food prices, simply because agricultural land that was originally used for crops are now being devoted to fuel production. Which sucks for the rest of us. Meanwhile an agricultural crisis looms ahead for all of us, partly contributed by bad weather which might be man-made, and by bad policies, which are definitely man-made.
We will need to rethink the way we think of carbon and carbon fuels. The only way to lower carbon levels is really to close the carbon cycle effectively. Currently its simply a one way street - we burn the carbon, it goes into the atmosphere, and thats it. Obviously we need technologies to somehow recapture the carbon for its cycling through the entire ecosystem.
I think the best way to actually reduce carbon levels is simply to plant more trees, or seed more plankton in the ocean.
oh well.
We are really facing 2 problems - the global climate problem, and the sustainable development problem, of which I think the latter is actually a much more serious concern.
Sunday 6 April 2008
at the dinner table...
thoughts about the old world status quo and the birth pains of the new world.
Just as a starting thought, what if a dollar less on military spending today could actually mean 5 more bucks at the same rate in the future? What if the economic growth that results from investing more on education could actually result in more funds for the military in the future?
Investing in innovative, enriching, and empowering education would boost our economic growth so much, that it would result in more money to go around everywhere.
We should be thinking about an rearrangement of our government ministries, those that deal with strategic issues of people and development, and those about short-term acute-issues management. Short term 'tactical industries' would be defence, finance, manpower, interior affairs, trade and industry. Longer term 'strategic' ministries would be education, social, environment, community, development. With such a lensing or framework, it might change the way we look at budgeting. The more we spend on tactical ministries would mean less on strategic industries. This is obviously a dilemma that we face - how to balance short term needs with long term needs.
And I think we should be investing in disruptive asymmetrical military tactics. That means, more power projection capabilities. We might have less boots on the ground, but we'll leave one heck of a bootprint when we do. I think that should be our goal in mind. I think that conventional warfare as we think of it today, with armies and movements and tactics - that kind of conventional warfare is slowly changing, especially when even conventional warfare learns to fight like insurgents and guerillas.
Anyhow, on another note, every country is constantly racing against each other with regards to education and competitiveness. There is a new global construct that is being created. It's about the new forces of collaboration and cooperation vs the old forces of the status quo.
This new world would need more people in the basic sciences, and I'm looking at engineers who are working towards both innovative low-tech and high-tech solutions to the problems we face today, and to start thinking about creating and realising the possibilities of the future. The future is now, that better world is now. And we should start believing in it and in making it happen. Singapore has spent quite a lot of money already in the life sciences. Isn't it time we do a little bit of basic research in the other sciences as well? We need to move away from the money-oriented view when appropriating funds for research, and instead to think about the needs of the future. Our intermediate moves of IR and service orientation are but short-gap measures to the long term strategic problems that Singapore faces.
I'm thinking that Singapore is still stuck in the old world, and is only slowly trying to think of ways of how to get out of this old world. we have only just begun to explore the frontiers of this old world. I seriously think that we are not doing enough to empower students in this new age of creative work. This is a serious innovation gap with the future that we have to engage.
When I think about the more important trends going on in this world, I can only think in terms of the technological aspect - simply because it drives every other form of change in this world. And there are these two, that I think will shape the world in the decades to come. They are those of sustainability and collaborative, cooperative innovation. The future hereon will be one where everyone can create, and there'll be minimal barriers to stop people from creating. In fact, creating will probably be the only way to make a decent living in the future. And to do it in ways that'll be environmentally sustainable, and reduce our footprint. If Singapore can ride on these two things, I think it'll be largely set for another half-century.
If the young today are going to be the ones who will bear the consequences of the older generation, shouldn't they be the ones helming the dialogues, shouldn't the youth be the ones calling the shots on objectives and targets, instead of greying technocrats? Wouldn't it make more sense if the youths were the ones discussing the problems that they'll face? Its a weird weird world...