Monthly Archives: March 2012

Speaking for the Wind (part 2)

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In an earlier post, I outlined some fears I had about wind power, and other forms of renewable energy based on extracting energy from the planets circulatory systems.

This map shows you a historical snapshot of the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US, on 11th March 2012. Click on the image to see an animated historical or realtime wind map.

The interactive map to the left, shows beautifully the intricacies of real wind patterns. I’d encourage you to explore this real-time animation, where you can zoom into the detail of actual wind movements, or take a look at the entire land mass.

In a recent issue of New Scientist, there is a nice review of the issues we need to think about when considering renewable energy – refreshing to see a more holistic approach to energy consumption.

With regard to wind energy, the article highlights  a number of findings I missed in my earlier post:

Wind Speeds are Changing
It seems that we may already be having significant effect on the wind. Wind speeds over the oceans are increasing, while surface winds over Europe, Asia and North America have slowed by up to 15 per cent on average since 1979. That’s pretty significant.

Between 25-60% of the slowdown is thought to be due to changes in land use, with more vegetation and possibly more buildings making the terrain rougher (Nature Geoscience, vol 3, p 756).

What is stunning here is the degree of this change – globally – in just a few years. The wind is not immune to the effects of what we build and what we grow. While this research is not linked to the small amount of energy extracted by wind farms, this could change, and this change would be in addition to the man-made factors described above.

How much power do we need – how much can we get?
At the end of 2011, worldwide wind power generation capacity was just 0.2 TW, but it is growing exponentially. So while the energy we extract now, may not be significant compared to the total energy in the system (see below), it is growing fast and will need to in order to meet our global energy demands (see below).

Wind power: worldwide installed capacity (not actual power generation). GWEC, Global Wind Report Annual Market Update

At the moment mankind uses a little over 16TW of power for all our energy needs. World wide energy demand has been growing exponentially and predictably for the last 350 years. As an example take the figures for US total energy plotted on the logarithmic scale below (the straight line clearly shows a consistent exponential growth of total energy demand):

Total U.S. Energy consumption in all forms since 1650. The vertical scale is logarithmic, so that an exponential curve resulting from a constant growth rate appears as a straight line. The red line corresponds to an annual growth rate of 2.9%. Data source: EIA.

This exponential growth is unlikely to change, until population growth stabilises. More detailed analysis of global energy trends since the 1980′s confirm this trend  (see the interactive graph over here at CNN), or the graph below from the Economist.

Put these trends and facts together and you can see that not only do we presently have the ability to have dramatic effect on wind, speed and humidity distribution, but that in the near future our energy demands and technology will allow us to be able to extract a significant proportion of the available energy from a finite and delicate resource – with unpredictable results.

What do the models say?
There is considerable scientific controversy over how much energy would need to be withdrawn from the global system by Wind Power before it would have systemic effects. Based on actual measurements of wind speeds, there is 1700 TW of wind power at an altitude of 100 metres over land and sea. It has been estimated that between 72 and 170 TW of this total figure, could be extracted in a practical and cost-competitive manner.

  • A 2004 study by David Keith of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, suggested that the climatic effects of wind power might start to become apparent at a level of 2 TW.
  • On the other hand Modelling by Jacobson’s team suggests that extracting 11.5 TW of this wind power would reduce the kinetic energy of wind at 100 metres by less than 1 per cent. The effects on temperature and precipitation are so small they cannot be distinguished from natural variability, he says.

Axel Kleidon and Lee Miller of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, have argued (controversially), that extracting all the available wind power would produce big changes in temperature and precipitation. While they are not suggesting the world will warm overall, according to their model the local changes are comparable in magnitude to those associated with a doubling of CO2.

It gets even worse higher up
Wind speeds increase the higher you go. In the four jet streams that circle Earth more than 10 kilometres up, wind speeds of well over 100 kilometres per hour are typical.

Exploiting this energy will not be easy, not least because of the way the jet streams meander and change location, but several groups are developing ways to do it. Most involve tethered turbines or kites that turn generators on the ground.

According to some models, extracting really large quantities of energy from these jet streams (1000 TW or 50 times current demand), would have powerful effects, with mean surface temperatures falling by nearly 10 °C, and total rainfall decreased by about 35 per cent and sea ice cover doubled (Energies, vol 2, p 307).

Conclusion
What’s the moral of this story – for a story it is (the scientific facts are inconclusive)? Firstly, allow ourselves to be shocked by how little we know, and how little we spend in researching these things. The above research is a tiny fragment of overall research in this area (it is not fashionable on either side of the debate). It represents tiny groups of individuals with scant resources, trying to predict, model and quantify the impacts of policies that have been allowed to gain acceptance by large sections of the society, and impact national energy policies. Give these guys more money.

Secondly, it is to stop thinking in linear ways whether these be logical or emotional. Look at the systemic effects, and feedback loops. An intervention is not necessarily any better or worse for the environment if it is “natural” or “organic” – it is our linear thinking that is the danger, and our aesthetic judgments have not evolved to lead us to manage finite resources well.

This map shows you a historical snapshot of the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US, on 11th March 2012. Click on the image to see an animated historical or realtime wind map.

Bruno Latour says that science is an instrument that gives the environment a political voice. We need to listen to the environment, to respect its voice. The wind, like any natural resource it is delicate, yet can have fantastically powerful effects. I have no idea whether wind farms present any real danger to global circulatory systems, but I do know that we have not looked at it carefully enough, and that a true environmental conscience would force us to ask more serious questions before jumping to solutions that please our sensibilities.

We need to listen to the wind.

Token Involvement

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I once had a friend that was a little clumsy socially – he was a bright, motivated and interesting young man, and yet something bothered me about him. There was something wrong with the way he seemed to relate to people. One day (in a discussion about problems in the shared house in Bonnington Square London), someone put their finger on it:

He’s a “counter”

This story gets to the heart, of something I’ve been struggling with for years in terms of groups, society and alternative systems of cooperation. The perceived problem was that every time this young man engaged in some sort of social interaction he made a mental note of what he did for whom and when, only for this to come back months or years later. He was “counting” rather than giving freely, and this caused resentment and distrust.

Origins Game Fair 2011 - Cargo Noir

Today, during an email conversation about reputation and trust in online communities, the topic cam up again – TJ put it well:

Im still struggling with the concept of grading or valuing individuals — I think its counterproductive in certain ways.  The goal of fostering innovation and better social dynamics — specifically trust — is the goal… does ranking individuals help that happen?  still not sure I believe thats the case… knowing that your peers are grading you doesn’t instill more trust – it may actually have a polarizing effect on individuals….and in a world where smart teams are hard to find — you don’t want that to happen – you want people to be inspired and motivated — it doesn’t mean you have to coddle them… but it does mean that you understand the delicate nature of team / community structure and you create a framework that creates benefits to the power of people working together = Then you will get more people wanting to USE this system.

This mirrors my long held concern that any form of point, vote, or quantified incentive (the token), devalues the ethic of human action. People start counting points instead of instinctively, and naturally acting in accordance to deep rooted moral values. There are for instance, a number of people in the currency field that go over the top on the use of currencies, without any understating of the effects that monetising human value can have on ethical behaviour.

The Effectiveness of Informal Rules
Jimmy Wales gives a nice description of the social techniques used by Wikipedia editors to come to agreement over controversial topics. In the TED Talk below, he argues for allowing natural social structures to emerge based on transparency, dialogue and a core ethos – supported by software tools, but not using tools to replace the human factor. This is a sublte and indirect argument against the use of tokens or points systems to reward appropriate behaviour.

The Logical Sceptic
Dr Spock may object, and say that as long as the desired and appropriate behavior is in fact augmented, then the social objectives have been reached, and all the rest is nostalgic whining! This is actually quite a good argument – perhaps the real benefits of solving painful social problems, thoroughly outweighs our sentimental longing for a past that never really existed in the way we picture. In time the culture will adapt to the new rules, and begin to appreciate them for their benefits.

Reasons to be cheerful
However, despite all these good arguments, I believe that as long as we are thoughtful, it is possible to combine the best of these worlds. That is it is possible to combine the power and scaleability of token based incentives, and the richness and flexibility of social narrative.

What we need to do is take real care with regard to developing the culture of a group of players, and in the design of the interface they use. Here are some of the factors that I would argue we should use in designing alternative collective decision making forums:

  1. Time – give your systems time to evolve social norms
  2. Keep it physical – real space meetings help
  3. Ethos, branding, legal structure – you can do a lot with soft structures
  4. Interface Design – think of how people interact with the system. Tokens do not need to look like tokens.

The combination of the above is synergistic and really effective – I’d call this combination theatre. That is you can create rich narratives out of elements that may involve hard maths and structure, but this structure need not be a conscious part of the interaction of the users with the system.  Lets take a closer look at each of these elements.

Time
Time heals, and in the case of token games, time can remove the awkward and mechanical  nature of the interaction. It’s like riding a bicycle or any new activity involving the mastery of a complex series of physical or mental acts – the initial practice is artificial and mechanical, but through practice it becomes second nature allowing an entirely different form of conscious experience for the user.

In the case of token games, it can take years, but eventually a culture will begin to develop around the game. The way the interactions take place can be softened by a set of mannerisms, and ways of expressing the transactions involved. We can take as an example (and as a warning), the way in which business is conducted in various cultures. The rules may be the same, but the conscious experience and practice can vary greatly – an English gentleman does business according to set of values very different from a modern trader. The warning here is that just as time can allow the creation of such cultural norms, the game can also decay over time according to the logic of efficiency or “effective play”.

Keeping it Physical
My experience of working with real groups, and physical space, shows me that when people meet face-to-face – repeatedly – the nature of the interaction is shaped by far more than the pure rules of the game. You can see this also in some online communities, but it appears that the effect may be less here. Keeping a good solid chunk of real space physical interaction in the network can help keep things real.

In the context of democratic debate, creating a system which is based around a structure of small real space meetings or gatherings in physical space, and not one which is first and foremost an online debating chamber, is of importance here. There are many advantages to this, but one of the main ones is that it allows most of the actual human interaction to be playful, social, and rich in values which are harder to capture online or with any abstract points or token based systems.

These latter systems are useful to scale and network the values captured in face-to-face physical space interactions, but we should not confuse the network with the interface. First and foremost we need to base the information system on rich empathetic debate – if we don’t we are processing noise, and trying to approximate value using statistics. We have the technology now to allow richer input into the political system.

Ethos, branding, legal structure
It is possible to go a long way by ensuring a radical ethos is embedded in the legal structure and communicated via effective “branding”. The culture surrounding a currency, or symbol system can strongly shape the values associated with it and the way it is used – Time Banks are a good example of this.

The legal structure may seem to sit uneasily here, but there is no reason why we cannot encode the living values of the practice of the organisation in written constitution, especially if we link this to the technical management of day-to-day tasks. Indeed it is this more creative use of law that we can use to immunise the workings of the organisation against the tendency towards corruption of the organisations ethos.

The logic may be dark:  but the interface is beautiful
The internal workings of a system (its internal logic), may well be based on cold hard math, but that is not the only way for human beings to experience the whole. Organisms, including human beings, may in a deep sense be programmed by their DNA, but in our day-to-day interactions with them, we can still usefully use metaphor and narrative.

Similarly in game design there may be points, or some sort of symbolic logic  that is behind a given game feature (Honour for instance in a given domain in World of Warcraft), after all the software needs to do the maths – but the interface can present it in a way in which the perceived value is experiential and instinctive – no counting involved.  The same principles can be used to craft the way in which an institution or organisation works – maths behind the scenes, but rich interaction as the experience.

Obfuscation does not mean corrupt
Creating rich social interfaces to an underlying game logic, may be served by direct or indirect obfuscation of the underlying logic. It may in some circumstances be of value to make the underlying game mechanics unknowable to the participants. Usually transparency is the rule of the day, however there are times (as with a secret ballot), in which there is real moral value in not revealing too much. What counts (no pun intended), is that the control of the rules of the system lie with the users of the system, in a process which we can call bottom-up.

Essentially, there is a very rich set of techniques that we are only beginning to explore which allow us to interact with systems using higher and higher level languages – the range of these languages is infinite, and it is not too hard for us to see that it is within our means to craft them in terms that we find intuitive, rich in human values, and creative. Most of us have had bad experiences, in our dealings with bureaucracies, the law, and badly designed interfaces to systems of one kind or another, but we now have tools that enable us to fix this. We can consider this a problem of bad user experience design, not an inherent problem of using logic, incentives or tokens.