Ambient Orbs
By John Taylor; 2007 Dec 02, 2007, 10 Qawl, 164 BE
"What is not started today is never finished tomorrow." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Trying out our new iMac I made an unexpected discovery last night. The computer comes with a peculiar mouse called the "Mighty Mouse" that in typical minimalist Apple style has no buttons and only a tiny rolling ball in place of a scroll wheel. Anyway, I was on Google Maps checking out the location of our Baha'i Sunday Classes (they were canceled this morning due to inclement weather, which is why I am here writing instead of in
There bestrewn before my wondering eyes was a cityscape of vast proportions. A push of the knob and you could see roofs and cars frozen in time. I zoomed out, and since I could go anywhere I wanted I naturally wheeled over to Baha'u'llah's birthplace, Tihran. Here too was an endless city scene. I jumped in to the mid-east part of the city traveling Westward. I stumbled across a place I recognized, a park centered by that sloping modernist monument, Teheran's
With this computer revolution it is easy to become jaded, but what a glorious thing it is to have our entire planet at our fingertips like this! What a responsibility we have to protect it. Every morning when I sit down to write there are a thousand things I could talk about, the antics of children and family, the movies I have seen, whatever, but when I think of this beautiful planet that keeps us all alive I feel duty bound to pick out what might somehow conduce to well being on a planetary level.
One of the most important news items for a while was the announcement in
"... a $2-billion to $3-billion study of threats such as over-fishing and climate change to the oceans... A better network of satellites, tsunami monitors, drifting robotic probes or electronic tags on fish within a decade could also help lessen the impact of natural disasters, pollution or damaging algal blooms...
The sea mavens hope that by starting real time data feeds to events in the ocean and by showing them to the public, perhaps by putting them onto a marine cable television channel like the one that NASA has, that people would become more aware and concerned about their condition. Hey, why not hook it all in to Google Maps, so that it would be as interesting to explore the seas with your computer as it is now to "fly" over the surface of the continents?
This idea can be linked to another of the more important articles to come out lately, "Psst! You are wasting electricity; Desktop Orb Could Reform Energy Hogs," by Clive Thompson, which appeared in the August issue of Wired Magazine. This tells how a power company official charged with reducing waste electricity came across a gadget called the "Ambient Orb." He had tried everything from phone calls to angry emails to encourage clients to conserve electricity, but when he purchased and distributed an ambient orb to each of them it led immediately to a forty percent reduction.
How did a little non-crystal ball do that? Well, the ambient orb is designed to be synchronize with a data feed and it changes color as undesirable parameters worsen. It turns purple, for example, when your email box fills up, or when the chance of rain increases, or when you are using too much electricity. The article quotes the official as saying that the orb is not annoying like other reminders,
"It is non-intrusive. It has a relatively benign effect. But when you suddenly see your ball flashing red, you notice." (Wired, Issue 15.08, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-08/st_thompson)
Then users of the electricity orb chained themselves together to see how many tons of carbon they could collectively save from entering the atmosphere. These leveraged results were spectacular. The reason the orb is so effective is that, like prayer, it puts the invisible into plain sight.
"Electricity is invisible. That is why we waste so much of it in the home -- leaving rechargers permanently plugged in and electronic devices idling in power-slurping "sleep" modes. We can't see that our houses account for nearly a quarter of the nation's energy appetite; we don't know when the grid is nearing capacity and expensive to use."
The ambient orb is a return to the analog dial, only it uses digital inputs. It was called that because it takes what is termed "ambient information" and makes it available without putting humans into data overload. It has been used for monitoring stock portfolios to alert owners when the stock market is about to crash or go sky high.
"Studies showed that people were two to three times more likely to actively manage their investments, selling off deadbeat stocks and buying better-performing ones, when they used the Orb. This is the psychological paradox of ambient information: We're more likely to act on a subtle but continuously present message than an intermittent one we're forced to stare at... There's already solid evidence that feedback mechanisms can change eco-behavior. Think about how hybrid-car owners become obsessed with the dashboard display showing an on-the-fly calculation of gas mileage. The result? They change the way they drive, specifically trying to maximize mileage. It becomes a game, an enjoyable challenge, complete with quantifiable personal bests."
This author suggests what he calls an "even wilder idea," to put each person's daily energy consumption on their Facebook profile, or if one's waste of energy were broadcast to friends, so that the powerful psychological mechanisms of shame and social pressure would come into the equation. I guess you could do the same with lonely hearts advertisements, make it a condition that all of one's prospective lovers not be energy hogs.
Older readers of the Badi' Blog will recall that a few years ago I suggested that the same thing be done with states, that we have little orbs on the flags or shields of every city, province, state or nation, so that if, say, Canada commits an abuse of human rights it will literally show up as a blot on our flag, or national website, or whatever. Hey, what a radical idea, making human rights data as available as energy; maybe saving lives would get as trendy as now it is to care about energy waste... Anyway, the article points out that such devices are already being built,
"The design firm DIY Kyoto (as in Kyoto Protocol) recently began selling a device called the Wattson, which not only shows your energy usage but can also transmit the data to a Web site, letting you compare yourself with other Wattson users worldwide. In a Borg-like way, users can see how much they've collectively reduced their carbon impact."
I would love to see such colored orbs monitoring any number of other factors, such as crime and corruption. Who would not want to see an array of such orbs in city hall before they choose which neighborhood to move into? Or when buying food in a grocery store or restaurant, who would not like to see an orb responding to how many kilometers that food traveled to get here? The further an item of food has traveled the more garbage is pumped into the air to get it here. Needless to say, though, this is a kind of corruption too, only disguised by food and transport subsidies, which make distant, over-processed food appear cheaper. A food orb would really be measuring the same thing as a corruption orb, only it would cover legalized corruption.
Why would monitoring food be so good to make visible with an ambient orb? Let the British scientist and blogger Lucy Middleton explain why; she has the last word today.
"Every year humans are responsible for emitting a total of around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Of that, the average western European is responsible for 12 tonnes each. Food accounts for 2 of the 12 tonnes (more than the same person's emissions from flying, which add up to around 1.6 tonnes!). Although eating locally produced food does reduce food miles (the distance the food has travelled to get to your mouth) and hence CO2 emissions it's actually the growing and processing of food that is particularly energy expensive (e.g. manufacturing fertilisers and heating greenhouses).
"So if you really want to do your bit for the environment, then try to stick to locally grown food that's not been processed or packaged either (importing Spanish tomatoes may require less energy than heating a greenhouse in the UK!). And by doing so, you will save around 0.7 tonnes of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere. And to make an even bigger difference to your carbon footprint, go vegan and reduce your carbon footprint by a further tonne of CO2 (the food the animals eat is energy-expensive to grow). But if you love meat and milk too much to give it up, then try to make sure it's organic, as this will reduce your CO2 emissions by a similar amount. ... So, if you were vegan and ate only locally produced, unpackaged, unprocessed food -- you would reduce your yearly CO2 emissions from food by 1.7 tonnes, that's a whopping 85% of the carbon food bill."
(Eating your way to lower emissions,
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