ThinkingShift

I really like the writings of Steven Johnson and I blogged recently about his book Ghost Map, which I really enjoyed. So interesting to come across his new start-up venture outside.in - a website that Johnson says “is an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood...the site is ultimately about a new kind of experience. You sit at a computer and type in a street address, or a neighborhood name, or a zip code — perhaps for your own home area, perhaps for a place you’re visiting or interested in — and within seconds the screen gives you a glimpse of all the textured, real-world issues and conversations and news unfolding in the location you’ve entered.”

So you can find out the exact information you need coursing through the veins of the neighbourhood: crime data; gossip about new restaurants opening; news about the local school and so on. Great concept if you ask me and I could use it in my own area (Newcastle, Australia). Recently, my elderly mother has been extremely ill and we’ve had to find out information ranging from how to find a mobile hairdresser, to where to buy specific medical equipment and how to find aged-care. We’ve had to obtain this information from disparate sources; we’ve had to basically be mind-readers and know what questions to ask (because if you don’t ask, the information is not volunteered); we’ve had to be demanding sometimes to get what we need; we’ve had to know what Government Department deals with what service. To pull all this together,we’ve run around and visited (both physically and virtually) hospitals; local Government websites; medical centres; old age homes; I’ve even bailed up elderly ladies in homes to ask them how they get their hair done!

A concept like outside.in would clearly allow you to tap into the jumbled conversations of the neighbourhood in a single space, helping to unify content. As far as I can see, outside.in has been co-constructed with Johnson and bloggers in Brooklyn, NY, who blog about their local area. Using a simple tagging architecture for all posts - what/where/when - people can discover what is happening in their area; when it’s happening; and where it’s going on. Maps also help to contextualise neighbourhood knowledge - as you drag a map, the content changes. And it’s not just the latest and greatest news that’s posted because sometimes news stories and information remain active for many months. So if there’s a particular or controversial development project going on, for example, people can track the whole history of the project.

It’s really like participating within a community about your community, with content linked to physical spaces. Nice idea - wish we had it here, sure would have helped me aggregate disparate information in my area!

Being Australian, it’s great to report on a couple of stories about my country :)- if you’ve been to Australia, you’ll know what an exotic land of contrasts it is - harsh, burnt-orange tinged deserts; snowcapped mountains; Uluru; hopping marsupials generally given the moniker Skippy; unusual flora and fauna; and the world’s only egg laying, duck-billed mammal (the platypus). Australia’s outback (or Never-Never in the Aboriginal language; or Back of Beyond or Back O’Bourke in colloquial language), is an ecosystem that has evolved in isolation over millennia.

Professor Ron Quinn of Eskitis Institute for Cell and Molecular Therapies at Australia’s Griffith University is investigating whether the unique properties of Australian plants and marine animals can deliver a cure for cancer and other diseases. In the course of his work, the good professor has discovered 40 plants and 1500 marine animals previously unknown to science, which he hopes may be the key to developing medicines from natural products, which will be able to win the war against the horror diseases of cancer; cardiovascular disease; respiratory disease; and illnesses of the central nervous system.

Seems hard to believe when we think about our Chemical Age, but there are a number of pharmaceutical drugs derived from natural products - the breast cancer drug paclitaxel (TaxolTM), is derived from the stripped bark of the Pacific Yew tree and the cholesterol-lowering drug Lovastatin (AltocorTM) is derived from a fungus. And of course, folk medicine and alternative therapies take advantage of plants and herbs, so it’s good to see that scientists are investigating whether Australia’s exotic flora and fauna might just contain untapped natural sources for future medicines.

And you probably know that Australia is in the grip of a long-standing drought. And you probably also know that Western culture has largely ignored or ridiculed indigenous folk wisdom - and Australia is no exception. Australia’s indigenous people watch the red-tailed black cockatoo and the yellow wattle bush very closely - if the cockies are squawking away and wattle is blossoming, this equals rain. All things are naturally connected and generations of indigenous Australians have monitored the behaviour of animals and plants to inform their meteorological observations. The Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project hopes to harness indigenous peoples’ ancient understanding of weather patterns.

Similar to previous posts where I’ve talked about community mapping projects, Australia’s weather and seasons will be mapped according to indigenous knowledge. By studying clues in the landscape and from flora and fauna, the Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project will closely observe changing weather patterns in the face of climate change. In the Northern Territory, for example, the appearance of the elegant brolga crane signals the start of the monsoon season; when white breasted wood swallows are found together with mudlarks, this signals the beginnings of the wet and dry seasons in the Northeast Arnhem Land area.

Australia has four British-imported seasons: autumn (or Fall); winter; spring; and summer. Indigenous Australians, however, recognise up to seven distinct seasons - you can see the Aboriginal seasons here. This project will be a great way for indigenous knowledge to be showcased and complement scientific approaches.

Not sure if my American friends learn about Martin Waldseemueller or Amerigo Vespucci in school. But seems these two gentlemen might just be the founding fathers of the United States. “America’s Birth Certificate” is a 500 year old map that was the first to refer to America by name and also the first map to show the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific and Atlantic oceans as separate bodies of water.

Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer who made a number of voyages along the coast of South America shortly after Columbus and considered he had found the New World. Columbus of course thought he had bumped into Asia. Martin Waldseemueller was the German cleric and cartographer who produced the map, which has just been handed back to the United States by German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. Waldseemueller honoured Vespucci by referring to “Amerige, that is to say the land of Americus, or America, after the sagacious discoverer”.

1,000 copies of the map were once extant but this is the only known remaining copy. The most recent owner was a German prince who agreed in 2001 to sell the map to the Library of Congress for $US 10 million. Until now, the map has been listed as a German national treasure but the hand-over finally seals the deal.Vespucci Day doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as Columbus Day – but hey why not!

And here’s a test for ThinkingShift’s American readers - was the first permanent settlement of English America in Jamestown, Virginia or Plymouth, Massachusetts? if you answered Plymouth, you might just be wrong. Historical narratives are often rewritten to suit a context and this may have happened with Jamestown. More than 750,000 artefacts have just been uncovered from the 1607 Jamestown fort site, including a rather fabulous silver dolphin-shaped toothpick and the remains of tumbledown Elizabethan style houses complete with thatched roofs. Buttons from quality jackets show that settlers dressed like English gentry despite the heat and exhaustion that snuffed out many settlers.

Sadly, the Jamestown fort settlement turned out to be a fiasco, which may explain the site largely being ignored as America’s first permanent settlement. It had a dubious history: it was a commercial settlement with a charter to find gold, kick the Spanish out of North America and find a new route to the fabled riches of the Orient. As conditions for the settlers worsened, there were rumours of cannibalism. And Virginia was on the wrong side of the Civil War, with archaeologists finding a Confederate gun emplacement smack bang on top of the remains of the settlement.

In contrast, Plymouth was founded by the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620 and was devoted to religious freedom and Pilgrim ideals rather than slaves, tobacco and commercial profit.

So if you’re going to write history, which would you go for - cannibalism or purity? But at least the Jamestown curios are being exhibited in an Archaearium (very quaint name), which Queen Elizabeth II will view as she visits Jamestown to help celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in America.

In an earlier post, I highlighted the use of digital mapping software by Amazonian tribes who are mapping their forest homes and identifying areas threatened by deforestation due to logging. This post is an example of the opposite – indigenous communities being denied access to software and tools that would help them map their terrain and defend it from the onslaughts of greedy developers.

Tribes in South East Asia have been using a combination of navigation software, paints, yarn and cardboard to produce three-dimensional terrain models. Tribal elders record their mental maps of sacred territories and hunting grounds. As they gain expertise in mapping, the communities are introduced to Google Earth and GPS. This is clearly a mechanism for indigenous people to visualise and communicate their sense of space in community mapping projects.

Recently, the Higaunon people of the Philippines used cardboard and paints to build a 3D model of nearby Mount Kimangkil and this helped them to win an ancestral land title battle. And a Northern Philippines group built a model of another mountain and successfully petitioned Congress to have the area declared off limits to development.

But in a move that surely can only be an effort to deny the indigenous communities their land rights, the Philippines has done some legal fancy footwork and changed an existing law so that only officially recognised engineers can map and measure land. Anyone helping the tribes gets thrown into jail for 3 years.

By strange coincidence, the Government of Sarawak has followed suit. In the Malaysian state of Sarawak, the Rumah Nor community used high-tech mapping techniques to win a court case against a paper company that was encroaching on its territory. Following the court ruling, the Sarawak government altered legislation so that no land survey is acceptable unless conducted by professionals. This of course wipes out any community-based efforts at mapping terrain.

Sarawak now requires people to have a license from the Government and to be registered with the Land Surveyor’s Board, otherwise a person can be charged for illegal map-making. Somehow I can’t imagine indigenous people rushing down to the Land Surveyor’s Board to be registered.

An earlier post talked about the 1854 cholera outbreak in the Soho district of London and Dr John Snow’s efforts to identify the source of the outbreak. Spotting patterns in the clusters of death and sickness, Snow produced perhaps one of the first epidemiological maps. In a nice twist of fate, Who is Sick? is a modern day version of Snow’s work and a Google Maps mashup. The Who is Sick? blog says that the purpose of this new service is to “create a community contributed resource that (is) helpful to the public. We are on a mission to provide people shared information that can mutually help the community. Open Source, User Generated Content, Power to the People. Wisdom of Crowds.“

User-generated maps of sickness can be filtered by symptoms like runny noses; coughs; chicken pox etc. I decided to check out my fellow Sydneyites and see how many of us have gone down with flu. Here’s the Who is Sick? map for Sydney Australia. So far, 21 people have reported coughs (24%) and runny noses (24%). Users can post details of sicknesses including how many days they’ve had particular symptoms; there’s a discussion forum; and users can also receive alerts of outbreaks in their area.

Hot on the heels of a recent post, where I outlined future trends and the possibility that private health insurers may ultimately control our personal information, I wonder how Who is Sick? will evolve down the track. Seems like a great concept because normally to find out information about outbreaks of flu etc in your area, you watch TV (possibly in vain); you hear news of colleagues sniffling away at home; and you hope you don’t catch the latest bug. So Who is Sick? is potentially a great way for the citizenry to take control of health intelligence and it might even contribute to tracking down the source of an outbreak (although at the moment the service seems to be concentrating on colds and flu). But if you’re sniffling away tucked up in bed, you might not think to post details of your symptoms on the site. So its success will ultimately depend on whether people think it’s a useful service.

But is this Web 2.0 for the hypochondriacs amongst us?

I’m always on the hunt for useful resources to use in my work or University teaching and I’ve recently come across quite a bit of great stuff. First up, is an Educause ebook entitled Educating the Net Generation. Educause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The Net Generation has grown up with the Internet being a natural background of their lives and their learning style revolves around collaborative social and learning spaces, which allow them to learn by doing. Download the ebook here. Educause also has a great resource centre for Libraries and Technology.

Next up, I found Shambles, a site that is designed to support international school communities in 17 countries in South East Asia. The Web 2.0 area is a great central spot categorised into resources and links on social bookmarking and social networks, as well as stuff on mind and concept mapping and virtual learning environments. There’s also links to blogs in Asia; blogs by librarians; Web 2.0 Weird Stuff (ie fun links); and an online validator where you can find out if a site is really Web 2.0.

Over at Seed Wiki, I came across Teaching with Blogs. Really great to see the uptake of blogs in education by students and teachers. Check out the The Fischbowl, which is a blog for high school teachers focusing on 21st Century learning strategies; and here’s an example of a blog for high school journalism students.

Back in the Jurassic Park days of my career (1980s), I was a high school teacher - so seeing how social software is contributing to building networks of teachers and students makes me wish I was back teaching in high school!

Then I stumbled onto Worldprocessor, a multi-coloured microcosmos created by Ingo Gunther. Worldprocessor is a gallery of globes that depict our Earth visually in a socio and geo-political sense starting from 1988. Go here to check out some of the many visually stunning globes that depict current problems or invisible processes like refugee flows. Have a look at the globe showing the dark spread of pollution over our planet; the globe in the 17th Century; or where nuclear explosions have taken place since 1945 (scary). These visual globes are hauntingly beautiful, yet remind us that we occupy multiple worlds that constantly shift and change.

And finally, I came across the Global Ideas Bank, which aims to promote and disseminate good creative ideas to improve society and it encourages the public to generate these ideas and to participate in the problem-solving process. The Bank refers to ideas as social inventions: non-technological, non-product, non-gadget ideas for social change. So basically it’s an ideas network and democratic think-tank. And here’s an interesting idea: the problem is accessiblity of environmental businesses and information; and the social invention is the UK’s Green Search, but the rest of the world require green search engines. There’s also a Global Ideas blog.

Lots of great ideas and resources to keep us all going for awhile :)-

There are only five sertanistas left in Brazil. One of them recently said: “Everything dies at its own time. The forest dies, with it die the Indians, with them die the sertanistas”. Outnumbering the sertanistas is an assortment of characters in a sorry tale of diminishing rainforests, species loss and displaced people. Miners, cattle ranchers, loggers and global fast food chains encroach on virgin jungle and indigenous people.

Deep inside the steamy Amazon jungle is a closed world of elusive darting jaguars; huge anacondas; caimans hiding languidly in rivers, their eyes silently watching; and brightly-coloured parrots squawking from high in the trees. Sharing this world are tribes who have little or no knowledge of the “Western world” and are unaware that their ancestral territories and traditional ways of life could suddenly be destroyed by highways, cattle ranches and forest loss.

A sertanistas is a “backlands expert” with rich knowledge of remote Indian tribes. Like the great explorers, sertanistas carve their way through the verdant jungle and track down isolated tribes in need of protection. The sertanistas job is to divert development around tribal areas and they do this in the face of threats and violence from developers and the unpredictable actions of vulnerable Indian tribes.

The sertanistas are a dying breed. It has been 20 years since the last sertanista was hired and former sertanistas have retired or died. And so with them goes knowledge that is quickly fading from memory. Lost knowledge of the location of indigenous tribes; knowledge of the complex ecosystem that is the Amazon; knowledge about traditional ways of life; the secrets of life-saving medicinal plants; knowledge of diverse and fast disappearing local dialects.

One of the last remaining sertanistas is Sydney Ferreira Possuelo, a rugged 67-year old who has spent the last 20 years of his life discouraging contact with Indian tribes. Contact with the outside world often results in Indians ending up on the fringes of developed areas dependent on alcohol, prostitution or disease. Possuelo has incurred the wrath of developers who care little for the culture or dignity of remote tribes. Yet, he has been instrumental in having 11% of Brazil’s species-rich rainforest set aside and protected as exclusion zones. Possuelo occupies a land of tension in which indigenous people are scared and threatened and profiteers are aggressive and abusive of Earth’s abundance.

He is perhaps fighting a losing battle. Nearly 4 million indigenous people in 1,000 ethnic groups once lived in Brazil; today they number fewer than 734,000 in 220 tribes, having succumbed to disease, murder and cultural dislocation.

So it was with some interest that I read about Amazon Indians using Google Earth and GPS to produce a catalogue of their forest home. In conjunction with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) - a nonprofit organisation working with indigenous people to conserve biodiversity, health and culture in South American rainforests - local knowledge is combined with modern technology to map deforestation areas and identify where new mines or logging areas are popping up and infringing on protected areas. Indians have access through ACT offices to Google Earth and head out on foot to areas where images have highlighted development or deforestation.

The really interesting thing here is that the indigenous people map in six dimensions - longitude, latitude, altitude, historical context, sacred sites and spiritual or mythological sites - whereas Westerners map in three dimensions (latitude, longitude, altitude). And so the maps produced are a rich source of preserved knowledge. With meticulous detail, sources of diverse food are charted, along with the location of medicinal plants, and sites where animals have been seen, including mythological creatures with deep spiritual meaning.

The maps help to span generations. As elders die off, younger Indians, perhaps seduced by the Western style of living, are not listening to the long-cherished stories about how places were named or which medicinal plant is used for a particular ailment. In a story-telling project, tape recorders have been used to preserve some of the elders’ stories and pass on their knowledge.

Vasco van Roosmalen, ACT’s Brazil program director commented: “A common question from politicians and developers is ‘Why do so few Indians need so much land?”..when you can illustrate it with these detailed maps - showing that they are using it for all their various purposes - it’s a much more powerful argument than just having a blank map..”.

A recent Yahoo! News article talked about how Brazil will offer free satellite Internet connections to indigenous tribes in an effort to crack down on illegal logging. 150 small communities in the Amazon and other remote areas including Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands and its arid Northeast will benefit from this programme.

These are great efforts to preserve ancient cultures and their stories, but it’s surely a very fine balance - you have to wonder whether access to the internet and computers will further erode indigenous culture.

I spent Easter reading Steven Johnson’s book, The Ghost Map, which is the historical account of how London’s densely-packed Soho District battled a virulent outbreak of cholera in 1854 that eventually destroyed 50,000 lives in England and Wales. It’s the story of two men with local knowledge - Dr John Snow and Rev Henry Whitehead - who pitted themselves against the medical fraternity of the time who steadfastly believed that disease was miasmic in nature (thought to be caught from the noxious atmosphere swirling around urban areas). Both men, particularly John Snow, are remembered for their discovery that cholera is a water-borne disease.

The Ghost Map illuminates an ecosystem - the urban city - and shows how the spread of a virus, the rise of an industrial city, detective work and scientific enquiry became intertwined. On August 28, 1854, working-class mother, Sarah Lewis, tossed a bucket of soiled water into a cesspool behind her squalid living quarters. Unknown to Sarah Lewis and the rest of London, her baby was infected with the Vibrio cholerae bacterium and the tossed water was contaminated and made its way into the Broad Street communal drinking well. The deadliest outbreak of cholera in London’s history was triggered.

The Broad Street water pump was the local coffeehouse of its time: people gathered from far and wide to drink the sparkling, refreshing water and the deadly, silent bacterium insinuated itself throughout the urban ecosystem via innocent human transmitters. Cholera is easily cured by ingesting large amounts of fluid and electrolytes, but this solution was unknown in a Victorian London seized with the fear of not knowing when or how cholera would strike. Maybe avian flu will become the new cholera epidemic of the 21st Century.

Dr John Snow, a celebrated anaesthesiologist, who had attended the birth of one of Queen Victoria’s children, took a bird’s eye view of the city and produced a map that showed the cholera outbreak occurred in clusters, following a distinctive pattern and a story. Snow was able to ultimately demonstrate that the Broad Street pump was responsible for the outbreak. You can check out his 1854 map here. Snow’s work and his mapping of the disease laid the foundations for epidemiology and the beginnings of modern sewage and water filtration systems.

Snow’s map was a vivid visualisation of death. Dots on the map plotted information about the location of deaths and the communal water pumps were marked with crosses. A distinct cluster of dots appeared around the Broad Street water pump, illuminating the pump as the source of contamination.

Edward Tufte talks about Snow’s map here; and this is a link to the John Snow website, which has lots of interesting resources, including a series of maps of 19th Century London.

What I particularly liked about The Ghost Map is the discussion about the contemporary developing countries and the so-called shadow or squatter cities. These ecosystems are facing the same issues Victorian London faced: unstable growth; inadequate water supplies and sanitation; densely-packed populations. Johnson states that by 2030, it is possible that a quarter of humanity will be squatters, illegally occupying land and living without appropriate civic infrastructure. These rising, dense city networks may provide ideal conditions for cholera or avian flu to run rampant throughout.

The perils of density now mean that we may need to fear a pandemic on a global, not just a local or city scale.

I often check out Worldmapper - a collection of world maps that can be resized according to your subject interest. The maps dynamically change and are really fascinating examples of data visualisation. A cartogram is a map showing geographically, by shades or curves, statistics of various kinds.

So I decided to check out the subject areas that most interest me. Alas, no cartograms showing the penetration of knowledge management around the world, so onto other topics!

Here is the cartogram for forest loss. Worth noting that Worldmapper doesn’t refer to countries. They divide the globe into 12 regions. You can read about the colour codes they use for cartograms here. The bloated regions in the Forest Loss map demonstrate that between 1990 and 2000, 31% of forest loss occurred in South America (the Amazon by any odd chance?); 21% occurred in Asia Pacific; Africa lost 550,000 km² in the 1990s.

Here’s the cartogram for commuting time to work, with the world average being 40 minutes per day. But the Thai people spend 2 hours per day travelling to and from work. I’d better move to Thailand considering I spend 4 hours per day!

This cartogram shows the projected global wealth spread in 2015: check out China and Africa. And just in case you ever wondered how many people have been killed by volcanoes, look at this. Remind me to take Colombia off my list of holiday spots because of all the people killed by volcanoes between 1975 and 2000, 86% died in Colombia.