vantage points

It was the second time that I observed someone secretly taking a picture of their counterpart in a train. Let me sketch the situation for you (augmented the topview on mobile, excuse the mobile-ness of it):

While he stared downwards into his mobile phone I witnessed how she simulated typing on her phone while slowly tilting the angle into a position to take a shot of him that covers the upper half of his body. Then she tilted the phone backwards, switched to WhatsApp and sent the picture to someone. A short line of writing follows from her. First I thought they know each other and she would actually send this to him with a line saying something like “this is how you look while looking into your phone”. But he didn’t look up after she pressed send. He could be playing cool and not show any mimic response and reply on WhatsApp? But she put her phone away and looked into a newspaper so I ruled out that possibility. My next (and still the one I hold as most likely) scenario was that she texted a girlfriend of hers to show her taste in men (he was good looking) or even hoping for flirt-encouragement that she couldn’t source out of her own? Or was he a movie star, some famous person? A bit later I saw them exchanging a few words and swapping some pages of newspaper. So apparently they had already, or have now, some newspaper-sharing thing going on. So do they know each other? I still don’t know. Maybe they are siblings and she actually sent the picture to his girlfriend, who also is a good friend of hers, saying something like “look how cute your darling looks”? But the looks they traded (I could only see his face though from my vantage point) while the newspaper-sharing thing was going on, indicated more a polite stranger-warmth to me than anything more close.

Well, I had to leave the train without being able to collect more hints. For a short moment i even considered going over there and telling him what she did – after all it’s a serious breach of privacy isn’t it? But well, of course i didn’t do that.

In the next trail of thoughts i found myself wondering; what if I was observed while observing? There is one vantage point from the exit area that I could imagine that would allow to observe both her phone, him and me looking into that direction. And then in the next cabin someone could be observing the guy in the exit area observing me while i observe the woman who secretly takes a picture of her counterpart… and so on. One could picture a chain of observers observing observers through the whole train. What might be the maximum alignment of that kind that you have already been a part of? Maybe you’ve even been the cause of a 3-degree-deep observation tree-graph?? 3 in direct observation, 2 in 2nd degree and 4 in 3rd degree? What the heck!

Oh, the other situation of that kind was in Berlin. The young punk girl was clearly aiming to capture the sneaker-ish shoes of her Chinese male counterpart.

The next time i really hope to witness how the photo-taker in such a moment accidentally has the flash on…

Why am i sharing this? I don’t quite know – it’s one of this situations where one can tease many thoughts out… and i find it irritating how little awareness many people have who else might have a vantage point on their little screens in public spaces. Unless of course one does not mind to be observed while secretly taking pictures of others? Or is it me? should i have looked away from the screen, pretending not to witness this?
Google glasses is gonna kick off that debate on grand scale… oh my!

Maybe it’s a man/hunter-thing to have that spacial awareness of who might also be watching your target or threaten that which you protect? But well, that might be too profane an explanation… :)

Should I ever be tasked with collecting “special scenes to put people in to see their reaction or inquire into their reflections afterwards” for a secret service, ethics committee, recruiting agency or anthropology research; the scene above would definitely be among them.

creating Lego instructions with a 5yr-old

Conversation with Samuel (5) during uncle-duty today:

S: We have so many Lego bricks but no building-instructions :(
Me: That’s true. Well, what do you think about making instructions ourselves based on those amazing vehicles you created there?
S: Mmh, how do you mean?
Me: You could use drawings and writing to explain every step of your building-process.
S: But I can’t write that well yet.
Me: I can write for you, no problem.
S: (thinks long…) Uncle Beni?
Me: Yes?
S: Can you please go and get some paper?

And the next hour we spent immersed in creating Lego-instructions for vehicles and creatures Samuel invented on the spot.
Quickly he understood the concept of drawing a graphical model from the three basic angles (front, side, top) step by step and labeling the parts precisely. It is important to think which perspective to choose and how many new pieces to add in one instruction step. We must think ahead how well we, or someone else, might comprehend these instructions when reversing the process at some point; building based on instructions instead of creating instructions based on a building.
We drew both and I wrote. I was so enjoying how he really got a handle on this abstract idea of representing something in a way it can be reproduced later. After we finished the first set of instructions (for a dragon… sort of) I told him that we could now deconstruct (=smash) the real model because we can reproduce infinitely many based on these instructions – he was clearly amazed at this point.

I love these moments of witnessing a new pattern fall into place in a child’s mind. It is so fulfilling to create and hold a space for that to happen…
I think if I ever become a dad I would not only document these situations thoroughly if they emerge but actually map out crucial cognitive patterns and strategically create learning spaces for them.
Well, I guess that is to some degree what pedagogy is there for isn’t it. Steiner, Montessori and others must have vividly imagined the spaces and tools for a young mind to develop and thrive…

automated feedback through emo-logging

I think that in the near future the body-logging trend will also encompass emotions (or is it already?). The nike fuelband could (easily?) be equipped with sensors for skin moisture and heartbeat (which together can be used to measure stress-level) and thus be enabled to log your stress-level throughout the day.

Now imagine someone writes a piece of software that makes sense of those logged emotions in the following way: activities and social encounters are mapped against the emotional curves of people. If for instance everyone would get very stressed when i say hello to them at work (random example) - this would show up as spike in the emo-log of those people. If this very effect would show up repeatedly this is an important piece of feedback that could be presented to me in an anonymized way like this: “70% of the people you greeted in the last month showed a reaction of above-average stress” (of course the sensors and algorithms would need to make sure it’s “negative” stress – and not wild euphoria for instance).

To give me a fair chance to work on myself with this automated feedback it wouldn’t be shared with anyone else just yet. If it happens over longer periods of times though the visibility of this automated feedback would be opened to the HR person.

Automated feedback-systems vs. taking responsibility of giving feedback face to face? Surely tricky ethical implications. But it seems rather unavoidable to me that things like that will be tested if/when the emo-component enters the logging-trend and when there’ll be the first IFTTT for data-sense-making algorithms…

a dog on the escalator

Today i was queueing on an escalator behind a man with his dog. This rather little creature was a very curious and lively one. Full of enthusiasm it inspected it’s immediate surrounding – a space that hasn’t been there when they entered the escalator. Stairs that folded up offer so many angles and corners all of a sudden – and then there are my peculiar pairs of feet behind the ones of his boss. He seemed like soaking in this new space intensely through his sensory options at hand, clearly at the highest rate processible for his little brain. In my minds eye i saw the millions of neurons firing to map this new little corner of the world, i saw the calories he was burning by inspecting so intensely, i saw the little body accomodating himself into this space as a temporary habitat. He would be ready to go to heaven on this escalator now, he has his spot – he wouldn’t be surprised if the world from now on is nothing but this escalator (surely with an awakening desire for food soon though).
And then…? We reached the top. It was just a few seconds and a few insecure steps and then the escalator was history. Completely gone. Never was there. New territory ahead to explore. His mind was full with nothing but his little escalator-space a second ago but now he ejected that memory immediately and moved on. His body-language clearly told this.
This might indeed be a rather mundane observation, but it drew a long-lasting smile on my face for some reason.
What kind of escalator one might be on without knowing how long this “temporary space” lasts? What is the time-limit of a “temporary space” anyway? Compared with a life-time? Accommodating onself in a rather well planned and encapsulated niche? Ready to move on as swiftly, elegantly and unattached as that dog leaving the escalator? Ready to recycle those neuronal clusters as soon as they become irrelevant – pulling the most salient aspects from the experience and leaving the rest? …

the query is the new content

I look forward to see facebook graph search coming and settling into user behaviour. I think it will start “educating” users in their search-behaviour in a new way. I would imagine once it’s rolled out we’ll see quite some posts where users share formulations of search queries. A well-put query is not just a filter, it becomes content in itself. Of course it is still just a filter but it will be perceived as a pattern, a lens, a magnet to catch certain particles. Queries will become attractors that in turn stimulate the creation of content that will match the query. The first small effect of that will be that millions of users will polish up their profile, their likes, their photo comments, geo-taggs and so on – simply to be found in the right queries.
In the early days of networking hardly anyone could imagine how much the graph of connection is worth. But it turns out that knowing who is connected to who is worth real money – and a lot of that. Pure knowledge about connectivity has become content in itself.
In days of Instagram, Pinterest and alike, people are (overly?) aware of their self-branding through being a unique filter of the internet. “This is me” because i like this and post about that. There is enough stuff online so that simply by choosing from the existing stuff i can make very clear statements about who i am (or at least as who i want to be perceived).

I’d venture the thesis that the “next level” of this is to show how you derive meaning out of your filter. What do you do with it. What’s your “lense” through the internet worth. What can i learn when looking through your “eyes” into the vastness of omnipresent information. What good does your composition of queries/filters yield when i apply it on my stuff.
This is, i believe, what facebook graph search will kick into motion as a learning curve on grand scale.

In Excel you can tick filter-criteria until you only have one result left. The same can be done as a thought experiment reversed. Pick any one golden piece of information and think how the search query would need to look like to find this within an ocean of other stuff. It is this two-way bouncing as a thought experiment,  from the query to the result and from a result to (a possible) query, that helps getting your teeth into the subject.
A bit like the game of starting with an answer and then coming up with possible questions that fit to that answer. Once you’re getting into this it liberates quite some creativity in my experience as domain jumping analogies will flood your awareness almost inevitably. Depending on the level of the answers abstraction an almost infinite amount of questions in various domains could fit.

But then again, one must not loose sight of the utter importance of salient information. An “ocean of stuff” is only good as a step towards a more salient representation of it.
Improving the speed and ways of communicating and sharing (and the ability to store anything) has no effect on the value of the content that is travelling in those ever-improving channels.

vulnerable for wishful thinking

I email todo’s and notes to myself – recently i happened to grow a little thread (with myself) that collected the following moments of observations. I’d like to compose a blogpost for them and close with some reflections what they might reveal :)

 

Leaking coffee

Early in the morning i sat in a S-Bahn heading towards Munich. The S-Bahn design is such that each seating-cluster of four has a trash bin mounted under the window – the top surface of which is often used to place small things on during the journey. As on most mornings i got myself a coffee to go. Before placing it on the trash bin i noticed that apparently there was a major coffee leak happening earlier this morning or yesterday; the surface was half-covered with coffee-rings and dried coffee-lakes. After considering the hygienic risks i decided to place my cup on top of the mess anyway. After all, i can drink while holding the cup’s body and won’t have to touch the bottom again – once finished i’ll just tilt it over into the trash.
So far so good… the interestingness started when i noticed fresh coffee at the bottom of my cup after a while – that means it must have started leaking! I found this to be hilarious as this is the first time i got a leaking coffee-to-go cup. There must be bad coffee-cup karma around this trash-bin?? The dried coffee must have inspired my fresh coffee inside to crawl outside through the cardboard and unite in molecular romance??
I decided to leave the molecules to their flirt and just keep drinking as if nothing were. I was aware that there is a “open bridge” for potential bacteria from the dried coffee landscape to enter the intimate inside of my coffee cup and from there into the even more intimate inside of my stomach – however, i rendered it unlikely because the direction of flow was outwards. And also – if i were to catch some sort of sickness from this – it must have been caffeinated destiny, or no??
When i left the S-Bahn i trashed my cup and had a last look at the coffee mess. I noticed how my guilt-feeling expanded from the comparably little pollution i added to what was already there. How strange – i built emotional ownership over the whole coffee-trash-bin-situation… anyway, it would have been unfair to take this chance for profound coffee-mediation away from the next traveler, so i left it as it was.

 

Zoom trap

My math professor showed something on the wall by the means of a projector. It happened to coincide that he made a window smaller at the same time that he said something with a low volume. My perception interpreted the togetherness of these events – the image getting smaller as well as the lower voice – as me being physically further away than before. I must have zoomed myself a bit a away from the scenery?? Am i still in the 4th row of the auditorium? Yes i am.

 

Wishing for her gaze

Stopping on the pedestrian path at the red light i am noticing a woman to my left who shows all signs of an attractive women – but only from diagonally behind because she was looking along the street to the left. Eager to see her face to complete my attractiveness-scan i computed through different scenarios how to achieve that. Then i saw a car coming from the left – in that moment i knew she would “mimic the movement” of the car passing in front of her by looking to the right. Of course i did not know for sure but i must have both encountered and embodied such situations before where a daydreaming look to one side is changed to the other side by a passing vehicle without the person really realising it – more of an unconscious pattern of kinetic congruence with the environment?
Well, it worked – and indeed she looked gorgeous :) Of course i was too shy to say anything.

 

Sleep infection

As always the train home was very full. When an old lady came in i chose to offer her my place – gratefully she accepted. So now i was standing. Because of the position i was at i had around 20 sitting people facing me. Because i was really tired i closed my eyes and supported my head with one hand, the elbow resting on the seat next to me. It must have looked unusually cozy for someone standing in a train – but i really was in a cozy self-cuddly-kinda mode. After a while i opened my eyes again and almost burst into laughter - almost all of the people facing me had also closed their eyes and heads have fallen on their owner’s chests. I must have been an incredibly inspiring role model?? A view over my back to the other half of the wagon convinced me further of my sleep-inspiring skills as not even half of the people there had their eyes closed. I felt amused and touched by this contagious sleepiness amongst strangers that i contributed to.

 

Remembrance countdown

I was typing something and couldn’t remember a specific word that i was about to write… starring out of the window i tried to remember. I tried to recall all possible association pathways that are likely to lead into the valley at whose bottom i will find that word.  At some point i felt the memory condensing – an “inner blurry memory-smell”. Seconds later i knew that the memory will be back in a fraction of a second and i started moving my hands back to the keyboard. By the time they reached it, the memory was back and i was able to type the word. The most interesting point here was the short period of time between full confidence of remembrance and the actual remembrance.

 

- - – -

 

So, what about this little stories? Quite different they are. What fascinated me enough to note them down is that they are in a category of situations that are highly vulnerable for wishful thinking in their interpretations.
I could have easily thought that the bad coffee karma is upon me and that this is a signal to stop drinking coffee. And yes, i might not be a bad idea to reduce my coffee consumption – but to tie that to this experience is definitely possible but not at all logical. It can only and very well be taken as symbolic. That is the crucial difference.
Same with the zoom trap; i could have interpreted this as a reminder to not drift off in my mind and pay attention – i could have seen this as a message sent by my “learning god(ess)”. And again, that wouldn’t be bad – it is just important to distinguish the symbolic meaning i might attribute to the experience and the actual causal chain and combination of events that caused my mind to reach a state vulnerable for a multitude of explanations.
I might be tempted to think i attracted the gaze of the woman with my pure will. What happened though was that i saw the likelihood of an event based on previous observations and attentiveness on own experience. That it coincided with a wish i had in that exact moment did not influence anything of what happened outside of my mind. Imagine i’d have not been attentive to the whole car-passing-thing, then i would really think it was my pure will that made her look my way? And i would go on telling that story and build a fan-club around me…
When i “inspired” the others to close their eyes – this is just what might have happened. No further proof or disproof possible. No magic stranger-love that i exuded right into everyones heart.
The last story of condensing memory might suggest something external that takes my thoughts and gently guides them to their destination. Certainly a lovely thought and unfortunately for most people more attractive than looking to the way the matter of the brain is organised as a graph and how navigation in that graph takes place.

When events are happening aside from statistical average in a way our perception is tricked – it is so easy to see symbols after symbols. We have such a weakness for them. A symbol is a hundred times more worth in gossip-currency and life-story-currency and self-affirmation-currency and giving-away-responsibility-currency than a causal explanation of what happened. Knowledge is more expensive than gossip, magic and opinions. But it does pay back.

P.S.: While i was writing the last paragraph my keyboard must have had a glitch. The delete-key did not release and i had to watch a whole paragraph getting deleted in front of me before the key released seconds later – as if a ghost would want to stop me from writing?? Luckily there is the apple+z command to restore the writing and luckily i can distinguish causality and symbolic meaning.

data sense-making tool-pool

Finding out about enloop.com makes me think that this is only impressive at this point in time.
I would imagine that in a few years this will only be one of many subsets of something larger and more comprehensive. There will be something like app stores for automated data-sense-making. You’ll be able to puzzle together your specific sense-making suite (one of which would encompass all of what enloop currently does) and you’ll be able to share your suite (as a filter, combination and parametrized version of all possible tools) for others to build on.
Meta-tools will be made. One might for example take as input a financial report and a human-professionally written business plan based on that financial report – the output will be the best and most salient approximation of this humanly made expert-mapping, expressed as a subset of the data-sense-making pool. Then you’d be able to see how your business plan (based on your numbers) looks like through automated mappings that mimic the work of famous business plan person 1 compared to famous business plan person 2…

The concrete domain-specific applications of a larger, more comprehensive and universal abstraction are getting explored long before the abstraction itself is being made workable for a multitude of domains at once. Scalability of patterns. Eating many apples before discovering the apple tree.