Click here to view the embedded video.

Featuring a really broad array of eminent physics researchers, this film uses the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider as a case study for how funding basic science research leads to social progress. Although I am not predisposed to believing that all basic research is equal (I tend to think we need to prioritize our basic research funding based on our social goals and aspirations), I really appreciated that this film endeavors to explain to the general public how very abstract basic research can translate to technological innovations of great social importance.

Carole Sirovich, Agnes Mocsy, and me at Pratt’s Commencement ceremonies (photo by Agnes)

Pratt celebrated its 124th commencement ceremony at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday, May 14th, 2013. I always try to make it to graduation to honor the hard work of our graduating seniors. Although there are usually a few students graduating who I worked with closely, mostly I go to see the many students who took my classes to fulfill their math and science requirements walk across the stage.

These ceremonies can drag on, but this one seemed to flow pretty smoothly. The highlight for me was Kurt Andersen’s address to the graduating class. Andersen, a Pratt trustee and general media polymath, extolled the importance of maintaining one’s amateur spirit even upon entering the professional world. He explained how the word “amateur” — which simply means “lover of” — has gone from describing a passionate enthusiast to its current-day description of someone who is unskilled, naive, or clumsy. Andersen encouraged the class of 2013 to embrace the old definition of being an amateur, carrying the playful spirit of exploration for exploration’s sake into their professional lives. I sat their smiling, because coming to Pratt was pivotal in maintaining my own playfulness; it would have been easy for me to find myself in a narrow academic job that would have stunted my creative exploration of the diverse scientific topics I now call part of my scholarly world.

After commencement was over, I headed over to the Flameproof show. Featuring work from Fine Arts seniors whose studios had been destroyed by a fire in Pratt’s Main Building, the show was a great way to complete the day of celebration. It was inspiring to see how these students had striven to create new work out of the literal ashes of their Pratt careers.

Me with Quinn and graduating seniors Matt Black and Tony Wylen in front of Matt’s work at the Flameproof show.

Today I went to see Rhett’s final presentation of his thesis, “Leveling Up Leadership”. Rhett did extensive research on how turning important activities into a game (also called “gamifying”) could be used to foster the next generation of political leaders. Based on the completion of political “quests”, participants in Rhett’s “Lead Up” conceptual iPad application would be able to improve their overall scores for political leadership. The idea is interesting, as currently there are very few ways of assessing the integrity, effectiveness, and actual track record of political candidates.

I provided Rhett with a little editing help, and I was excited to play a very small part in his very interesting thesis project.

This is a really interesting piece because it suggests that the costs associated with properly disposing of human waste are beginning to incentivize municipalities to repurpose this waste as fertilizer. As this feature indicates, landfilling and (even worse) incineration have been in the past the cost-effective means of disposing of human waste. But these means of getting rid of this “waste” are pretty tragic, because they fail to reincorporate all the nutrients found in human waste back into our agricultural systems. This results in increased use of synthetic fertilizers, which depend on the consumption of methane and produce greenhouse gases during both their production and later use. In order to become a truly sustainable society, we need to recapture most of the nutrients lost in human waste — in particular nitrogen and phosphorus — and return these nutrients to our agricultural systems.

This piece does not go into the problem of nutrient pollution and eutrophication, which often result from the intentional or inadvertent release of treated or untreated human waste into waterways. My assumption is that as regulations become stricter and limit how much waste can be discharged in this manner, the economic incentive to recycle the nutrients found in human waste will become even greater. Regulations are thus potentially critical to making recycling a cost-effective means of waste disposal.

The goal of the survey is to get a sense of what the Pratt community already knows about its sustainability. Envirolutions plans to aggregate the data gathered in a way that can visually represent this snapshot of Pratt’s sustainability.

The gallery below captures the day’s activities:

This is the second feature-length book review that I have published in the past year; I expect one more to come out soon.

It is amazing to hear someone like Nowak say “God uses evolution to unfold the living world around us”. This is radical stuff for a theorist to say, as we generally try to understand properties and dynamics of systems rather than trying to understand their intent.

Envirolutions will also be tabling during Green Week on Thursday, March 28th to encourage members of the Pratt community to submit their ideas for how the Pratt campus could become more sustainable.

If you are interested in suggesting a place where Pratt could reduce its environmental footprint, leave a suggestion here.

I must confess that one of my media vices is sports radio, particularly when I am following a favored team and the real-life soap-opera-for-dudes that unfolds over the course of a sports season. This year I have taken an interest in the Brooklyn Nets, who are enjoying their inaugural season here in my home borough. Listening to Nets broadcasts on the radio, I have had plenty of occasion to listen to listen to some pretty ridiculous advertisements. Normally my approach to this kind of cultural deadweight is to ignore it, but this advertisement was beyond ignoring:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now if you only take this advertisement at face value, I hope you find it normatively repugnant. It suggests that is it okay to not make valuable contributions to society because someone else will do it. It mocks the kind of patriotism — implicitly defined as work that helps all — that might lead to important scientific breakthroughs in health and environmental sustainability. And it valorizes the hedonistic wallowing in endless television watching (as a “dedicated TV lover”), a great metaphor for being socially disengaged. Please, abhor this advertisement for these face-value atrocities.

But then step back for a second, and recognize what this advertisement has to say. Sure, it is a perfect example of what has now become an overused social trope: cynical, ironic celebration of self-involved behavior. But there’s more to it than just that: this advertisement presents a vision of how our societies are run, and it is a fascinating vision.

Our society as viewed by Roku advertising executives contains at least two kinds of people: inventors and consumers. The inventors work hard to make things that benefit other people and solve social problems. The consumers sit back and enjoy the fruits of this inventive work, contributing as little as they can. The inventors are talented, whereas the consumers are not all that talented (but at least they know it).

From an evolutionary perspective, such a society — if it was in fact composed of such distinctive behavioral types — would be pretty hard to explain. How could it be that such different phenotypes could be balanced in the same population, especially if one makes massive contributions to the good of the whole population and the other does not? One would expect one or the other phenotype to disappear. Either the inventors would be rewarded for their contributions and therefore eventually outcompete the consumers, or the consumers would successfully freeload on the efforts of the inventors and thereby drive them extinct (potentially followed by the extinction of the consumers if we accept the implication that they are generally inept). But for both types to exist seems hard to explain from an evolutionary perspective.

Scientists interested in social dynamics called this sort of behavioral diversity “social heterosis”, and it is common amongst social organisms. While one might expect that there is an ‘ideal’ behavioral profile for social organisms, often there is not: instead, we see that animal societies are composed of a mix of different individuals, each dealing with the challenges of social life with a different suite of behaviors. In no other social animal is this diversity more apparent than humans: we maintain incredible diversity in our capacity to perform different socially-relevant tasks. In fact, it often appears that we are quite specialized in what we can and cannot do well. What evolutionary mechanisms maintain this diversity?

This is a question that needs to be looked at more carefully, but I have a reasonable hypothesis: humans are behaviorally diverse because behaviorally diverse human societies are more successful. I know, I know, this verges on being a purely circular argument. But it is only ‘almost circular’ because I am saying that what works for societies as a whole impacts what works for individuals. To put it plainly, I think that group selection causes human societies to be diverse. Groups that contain a greater diversity of people are more likely to survive and reproduce than those that are less diverse, because modern economies require a great diversity of talents, abilities, and even motivations.

Which brings us back to our Roku-watching drones. I understand why this commercial wants to make its audience identify with a vision of most people as incapable and under-motivated: this is, after all, how you motivate folks to get excited about sitting on the couch for hours watching re-runs. But I think this commercial vision misinterprets the nature of human social diversity: in order for ‘big breakthroughs’ to happen in society, we also need a fair number of people who go to work everyday and do the things that keep society running. Maybe they come home exhausted and watch reruns. Maybe they follow their favorite sports team as an after-work diversion. Hey, maybe sometimes they even pursue their own curiosity. But our society needs all members to make a contribution, and you don’t have to “transplant a dolphin’s heart” in order to make society function; all those dolphin-heart-transplanting ‘geniuses’ need the everyday people just as much as we need those ‘geniuses’.

Will an hour of darkness give us the time to contemplate both the importance of ecosystem services and how our voracious energy consumption threatens those services? It is certainly worth a try.

Interesting that Horowitz discusses the same rationale for why the cell phone conversations of others are so much more annoying than other conversations, a topic I have discussed here.

THE UP-GOER FIVE TEXT EDITOR

Oh, and by the way the title of this post would not pass the up-goer five test!

Thanks to one of my Pratt students, Tony Wylen, for showing me this site.

This is a nice infographic showing that changes in policy can have a big impact on the sustainability of commerce. It is amazing how much efficiency improvements can lower ecological impacts.

The Chronicle of Higher Education “In Defense of the Credit Hour“

WNYC “Dogs of NYC”

Data sets like these, even flawed by their incompleteness (only 20% of dogs in New York City are registered) are fascinating. The human relationship with dogs has changed radically as we have urbanized as a species: I would suggest that the dominance of “toy” and “miniature” dogs reflected in the map below suggests that what we now ask from dogs has changed radically. Humans no longer need dogs to do work or to be protective (tougher neighborhoods dominated by pitbulls not withstanding), and instead needs dogs to stand in for offspring and/or social partners. The radical shifts in the social nature of human culture are reflected in our shifting relationship with dogs.