Urban Dynamics

 the palimpsest_east-west germany

A mathematical framework for understanding cities: Part social reactor, part network
Jun 20, 2013

New research by Santa Fe Institute Professor Luis Bettencourt suggests a city is something new in nature – a sort of social reactor that is part star and part network, he says.

"A city is first and foremost a social reactor," Bettencourt explains. "It works like a star, attracting people and accelerating social interaction and social outputs in a way that is analogous to how stars compress matter and burn brighter and faster the bigger they are."

Cities are also massive social networks, made not so much of people but more precisely of their contacts and interactions. These social interactions happen, in turn, inside other networks – social, spatial, and infrastructural – which together allow people, things, and information to meet across urban space.

Ultimately, cities achieve something very special as they grow. They balance the creation of larger and denser social webs that encourage people to learn, specialize, and depend on each other in new and deeper ways, with an increase in the extent and quality of infrastructure. Remarkably they do this in such a way that the level of effort each person must make to interact within these growing networks --does not need to grow--.

"The Origins of Scaling in Cities," L.M.A. Bettencourt, Santa Fe Institute
Science, 2013
Provided by Santa Fe Institute

Reading, Riting, Rithmetic

Big Datty

You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans' Movements
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
July 17, 2013
[full pdf]

GeoFencing
Law enforcement or private companies can construct a virtual fence around a designated geographical area, to identify each vehicle entering that space.

-For example, Tiburon, California has license plate readers monitoring its only two roads that leave the town.

Cyrus Favriar, Rich California Town Considers License Plate Readers For Entire City Limits, Ars Technica (Mar. 5, 2013)
Prime Communications, Corporate Overview, Public Records Responses, p. 3557 [pdf]
ELSAG North America, Geofencing Capabilities of the Mobile Plate Hunter-900, p. 1 (Sept. 14, 2011) [pdf]


License plate data are widely shared in California’s Bay Area through the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), although the full extent of sharing is not publicly known. According to a May 2012 document, this fusion center’s goal is to collect license plate information from approximately 22 police departments, and grant access to several more. NCRIC maintains a broad mandate for its use of license plate information — in addition to law enforcement, NCRIC maintains that it may use license plate information for the “protection of special events; protection of critical infrastructure; and responding and mapping the license plate landscape of critical events.”

County of San Mateo, NCRIC Answers to Questions Submitted from Potential Vendors, p. 2 (May 22, 2012), at pp. 22737-40. [pdf]


While police departments and government agencies argue that the data they collect will be used only for proper purposes, even the International Association of Chiefs of Police has recognized that pervasive surveillance can have negative chilling effects regardless of its purpose. As it has explained, “The risk is that individuals will become more cautious in the exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, and political participation because they consider themselves under constant surveillance.”

Psychologists have confirmed through multiple studies that people do in fact alter their behavior when they know they are being watched. In one such study, the mere presence of a poster of staring human eyes was enough to significantly change the participants’ behavior.

[but what does digital social media do to condition us on a mass-scale?]

International Association of Chiefs of Police, Privacy Impact Assessment Report for the Utilization of License Plate Readers, p. 13 (2009)
Sander van der Linden, How the Illusion of Being Observed Can Make You a Better Person, Sci. Am. (May 3, 2011)
M. Ryan Calo, People Can Be So Fake: A New Dimension to Privacy and Technology Scholarship, 114 Penn St. L. Rev. p. 809 (2010) [pdf]

[A problem with the 2013 NSA leaks (and, obviously, with the license plate readers mentioned herein), is that what could be perfectly benign, and potentially very beneficial to everyone (i.e. urban surveillance systems for use in 'smart cities'), becomes seriously suspicious. Something like the situation in the late 1960's, when many people were irresponsibly taking LSD and hurting themselves, an entire generation of scientists were stigmatized if they tried to do research using the drug. Today, and henceforth, the suspicion of the public will limit the studying and augmentation of urban information systems.]

exhibit A:
E-ZPass scanners track cars far away from toll plazas
Sept. 09, 2013

Art vs Science

How an Entirely New, Autistic Way of Thinking Powers Silicon Valley
Temple Grandin, Richard Panek, 05.23.13

Vincent van Gogh’s later paintings had all sorts of swirling, churning patterns in the sky — clouds and stars that he painted as if they were whirlpools of air and light. And, it turns out, that’s what they were! In 2006, physicists compared van Gogh’s patterns of turbulence with the mathematical formula for turbulence in liquids. The paintings date to the 1880s. The mathematical formula dates to the 1930s. Yet van Gogh’s turbulence in the sky provided an almost identical match for turbulence in liquid.

Even the seemingly random splashes of paint that Jackson Pollock dripped onto his canvases show that he had an intuitive sense of patterns in nature. In the 1990s, an Australian physicist, Richard Taylor, found that the paintings followed the mathematics of fractal geometry — a series of identical patterns at different scales, like nesting Russian dolls. The paintings date from the 1940s and 1950s. Fractal geometry dates from the 1970s. That same physicist discovered that he could even tell the difference between a genuine Pollock and a forgery by examining the work for fractal patterns.

To Drone or Not to Drone

Semantics is not a game.

Drone industry to journalists: Don't use the word 'drones'
Ben Wolfgang, Washington Times, 2013 Aug 14

Word Up

Brain Translation of Words:An fMRI decoding study of speech recognition
Joao Correia, Milene Bonte, Giancarlo Valente, Lars Hausfeld, Elia Formisano, Bernadette Jansma; Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, and Maastricht Brain Imaging Center (M-BIC), Maastricht, The Netherlands
Neurobiology of Language Conference; San Sebastian, Spain; October 2012

Wegman reading two books

How do we represent the meaning of words independent of the language we are listening to?

This fMRI study investigates the neural network of speech processing responsible for transforming sound to meaning, by exploring the semantic similarities between bilingual wordpairs. Eight native Dutch participants with high proficiency of English listened to four different nouns (animals), either spoken in Dutch or in English.

These nouns were presented in separate runs for each language while participants were asked to detect non-animal targets (11% of the trials) within a list of animal non-target items. Activity patterns elicited by these non-target stimuli was analyzed using Machine learning methods and multivariate classifiers.
Firstly, to identify brain regions generally involved in spoken word processing, we let the classifier discriminate between word pairs within the same language (e.g. bull vs. horse).

Secondly, to isolate language-independent semantic/conceptual representations in these regions, we assessed the ability of multivariate classifiers trained within one language (e.g. bull vs. horse) to generalize to the other language (e.g. the Dutch equivalents ‘stier’ vs. ‘paard’).

The results of our discrimination analysis show that word decoding involves a distributed network of brain regions consistent with the proposed ‘dual-stream model’ (Hickok and Poeppel, 2007). The results of our generalization analysis highlights a focal and specific role of a left anterior temporal area in semantic/concept decoding. Together, these distributed and focal brain activity patterns subserve the extraction of abstract semantic concepts from acoustically diverse English and Dutch words during bilingual speech comprehension.

note:
There is one major drawback to the process, which quashes any visions of a full-on real-time mind translation machine hitting stores anytime soon — the neural activity patterns differed slightly from person to person. Our neurons learn and identify in unique ways, and understanding these pathway patterns through machine learning would be a long process. “You would have to scan a person as they thought their way through a dictionary,” said Matt Davis of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. It would be difficult to translate a mind now without this concept map. However, we are only at the beginning of this line of study, and an algorithm could potentially be devised to aggregate hundreds of neural activity patterns to help indicate what the brain activity of an individual unable to communicate represents.
via

POST SCRIPT
Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach
H. Andrew Schwartz, Johannes C. Eichstaedt, Margaret L. Kern, Lukasz Dziurzynski, Stephanie M. Ramones, Megha Agrawal, Achal Shah, Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, Martin E. P. Seligman, Lyle H. Ungar
Sept. 25, 2013

We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. In our open-vocabulary technique, the data itself drives a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses. Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase ‘sick of’ and the word ‘depressed’), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insights (males use the possessive ‘my’ when mentioning their ‘wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ more often than females use ‘my’ with ‘husband’ or 'boyfriend’). To date, this represents the largest study, by an order of magnitude, of language and personality.
-via io9

Facts vs Values in Science

Science, performing some social hygiene:
(and using what else but climate change as the primary example)

Better scientific policy decisions start with knowing facts from values
phys.org, Aug 2013

When gathering public input on policy questions, scientists can speak with authority about facts, but must remember that everyone is an expert when it comes to values.

"Using climate change as an example, a scientist could say, 'The climate is changing.' That's a fact that can be checked," said Thomas Dietz, a member of the MSU Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS) and professor of sociology, environmental science and policy, and animal studies.

"But if a scientist says, 'We need to take these actions to halt climate change because it's affecting what people care about,' that's a value. And scientists have no more authority to speak about values than anyone else. Everyone is qualified to speak about values."

Bringing values and deliberation to science communication, Thomas Dietz, 2013
This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “The Science of Science Communication,” held May 21–22, 2012, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. The complete program and audio files of most presentations are available on the NAS Web site at www.nasonline.org/science-communication.

see also:
Anthropogenic Metadata on Climate Science
aka The Low-Hanging Fruit of Neuro-Pop in the Age of Big Datty
July 21, 2013

Collective Decision Making Fail

Field study shows group decision making not always the best
Aug 1, 2013, phys.org

team studies ants looking for a new nest:

The team noted that when one of the nests was obviously far superior to the other, both the colony as a whole, and individual ants more often chose the better option. What was surprising, however, was that individuals had a slightly better hit rate then the colony as a whole.

When a colony "decides" it needs a new nest, scout ants are sent out to find a new site. When one of the scout ants finds one it likes, it releases a chemical that attracts another of the colony members. If that member also likes the site it too will release a chemical attracting another ant and so on. The site that gets the most "votes" is the one eventually chosen by the colony. But, when a single ant is forced (by the researchers) to make a decision about which site to pick, it has to look at all the options and make a decision on its own—that takes more time than the multiple ant approach because in that scenario, individual ants only ever review one site—its more efficient. It's also more likely to lead to errors of course and that's why the colony as a whole tended to choose the wrong best site more often than the single ants—when the choice was obvious—who could make the decision without having to waste time thinking it over.

Ant colonies outperform individuals when a sensory discrimination task is difficult but not when it is easy, PNAS, Published online before print July 29, 2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1304917110
source