Anyway, this phone, for lack of a better word, belongs to Steve, who is on the bridge, feeling generally depressed, but for the moment happy to be rid of his phone. It was a powerful gesture.

Steve got wired up only half a year ago, after everyone else had been wired up for years.

People used to ask: "Are you wired up?" That question was soon followed by: "Why aren't you wired up? Are you religious? Aren't you curious?" They looked at him suspiciously and you could hear them think: "he must be suppressing something. Definitely some sort of denial."

Getting wired up means having all sorts of sensors either implanted or attached to your clothes.

They're connected to your cell phone to monitor heart rate, temperature, the sound of your voice, the position of shoulders, hands and feet, chemicals in the blood and what not. These sensors have been around for decades, even small portable ones. Their first use was medical: monitoring health and medication, correcting bad posture and compensating all sorts of disabilities. They had also been used successfully in psychology: monitoring body language, metabolism and chemicals in the brain. Data was gathered from many patients over time, giving new insights into psychological disorders. But it only took off when some clever marketing guy, later to become yet another trillionaire, realized their combined potential for the consumer market. When people started using their game consoles to train their memories and concentration, he thought: "Maybe they'd like to know about their emotions." By then, sensors and software could read people like a book. This marketing whiz quickly teamed up with academic researchers and major producers of sensors. And suddenly there was this huge company selling "insight, one-ness and emotional connectivity." It started an industry of self-reflection, mood blogging, mood matching, real-time automated flirt coaching and some embarrassing employment relation strategies.

Steve, however, was reluctant. He didn't need any software to tell him how he felt. He was depressed. Three years after losing his job as a garbage collector to some smart-ass system, he was definitely depressed. But he was determined to handle it on his own, as he always had. Then Steve got even more depressed. When he finally decided to get help, he skipped the on-line forums and arranged a face-to-face talk with an old fashioned trained expert: R.L. Steinberg, MD, psychiatrist. Doctor Steinbergs first question to Steve was: "Are you wired up?"
- "No, I'm not," he sighed.
"Is there any particular reason you're not wired up?" At this point he used to express his concern about privacy and security, but that argument didn't seem to convince anyone anymore.
- "I don't need it. I know how I feel."
"I see. Of course self-reflection is the best tool. And I'm sure we canunderstand your situation by discussing it here. But some data would be very useful. You see, the way we see ourselves is often different from the way we actually behave. When a child is frustrated, it doesn't say 'I'm frustrated.' It just starts kicking things over. It needs to be taught then and there, by adults who understand this behavior, that what he is feeling is frustration and it can be expressed in different ways. Even adults have difficulty understanding their emotions at some point in their lives. They mostly need feedback from others, but they also gain insight into themselves from a higher perspective, so to say, from objective long-term observation of their behavior. It's no magic, but a usefultool."
-"I see."
"I suggest you get wired up without any interpretation software. You'll just get the sensors and leave the rest to me. All that software just oversimplifies everything anyway. We can look at some of the data during our meetings, if need be."

So Steve got wired up. He met doctor Steinberg every Tuesday and promised to follow his advice on exercise, sleep, diet, etc. But he couldn't get himself to actually do all those things. The meetings with doctor Steinberg, who confronted him with data to prove his lack of motivation, got more and more embarrassing. Eventually he stopped seeing him.

Instead, he downloaded the latest interpretation software.

During the installation he opted for 'brutally honest' instead of 'constructive' or 'positive'. Now he wasn't depressed. He was "lethargic, unconcentrated and easily agitated." "So be it," he thought to himself as he scrolled through the diagnosis on his cell phone. It also said "hungry". "Am I hungry? Well, come to think of it, I am." And he told his phone "I'd like to order a chicken curry, anywhere." It replied "Chicken curry has been ordered at Phonsawan, located ten minutes from here." His left shoe started vibrating, so he turned left. As he walked to Phonsawan restaurant for the first time in his life, he thought: "Funny how quickly you get used to this stuff. Three months ago, when my shoes first started vibrating, my first impulse was to kick them off. Now I'm not even aware of them. I just turn left or right because that's where I need to go." He read somewhere that shopping malls are installing vibrating floors just to lure customers into expensive stores. He even checked to see if it was a hoax. One site strongly denied these claims, but it seemed to be sponsored by the same shopping mall. That didn't have to mean anything though, because those ads are placed anywhere automatically, or so he thought. He didn't feel like digging any deeper. True or not, he decided vibrating floors in shopping malls were very unlikely. Right then, both his shoes vibrated shortly, indicating he had arrived at the restaurant, just as planned. He wasn't at some expensive store and this somehow proved his point.

The rest of the evening was spent eating curry, staring at the waitress, ordering beer, staring at the waitress and ordering one or two more beers while staring at the waitress. In the end Steve felt better than after any meeting with doctor Steinberg. As he walked out of the restaurant ...

Energy Research Council

MIT has established the Energy Research Council to spearhead efforts to address the world's mounting energy problems.

MIT President Susan Hockfield has announced the establishment of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), in line with the recommendations of an Institute-wide group of faculty convened in June 2005 to help MIT understand how best to tackle the world's energy crisis.

Hockfield thanked the members of the Energy Research Council (ERC) for articulating recommendations that will allow MIT, with its unique talents and capabilities, to address what she called "one of the most urgent challenges of our time."

Aging and chronic dege-nerative diseases are logic consequences of life. Our genes and our life style determine the pace at which we age and the individual health risks that come with aging. Modern molecular medicine offers options to use this knowledge, especially in view of individual health risk reduction (= pre-vention).

Evolution and gene-compatibility

Aging is a normal biological process. It is the logic consequence of the fact, that we can only exist and survive thanks to the use of the oxygen that we breath and thanks to the interaction between our genes and triggers coming from abroad (e.g. food). During the several million years of evolution of Homo sapiens, a delicate pattern of gene-environment interactions has developed that made our species so succesfull.

Succesfull (healthy) survival has a lot to do with “living up to your genes”, which means that there must be a certain degree of compatibility between the life-style pattern “dictated” by evolution and an individual´s life-style. It has become clear, that the dietary and life-style habits in the industrialised countries are far from “gene compatible”. The majority of today´s nutritional ingredients ingredients are “not known” to our genes, as is the lack of adequate physical activity. As a result, many body functions suffer from this incompatibilty, which is always characterised by the occurrence of chronic inflammatory processes.

Genetic individuality

Recent research from several disciplines (molecular biology, nutritional sciences, pharmacology) shows that the effects of identical external triggers (food, alcohol, pharmaceutical drugs etc.) can have widely varying effects on different individuals. It has been demonstrated that among the human population genes are present in variant forms. These variants have very small structural differences, for instance just one single nucleotide out of the several hundred nucleotides that form a gene.

Such variant forms (single nucleotide polymorphisms; SNP’s) give rise to proteins with a slightly different structure. A variant protein may work satisfactorily under normal conditions, but when it gets under pressure (for instance, in case of a chronic infection or during the metabolism of certain food components or medicaments), it might perform less adequately and cause an imbalance in the regulating mechanisms of the homeostatic “maintaining system” of the body. If not brought back ...

Read the full article in the Summit for the Future Report 2006!

You can listen to his presentation and download it as an mp3 file in our Jukebox

TOWARDS THE FUTURE

Building with earth has a great past, but also a promising future, especially in Auroville. It is definitely an appropriate, cost and energy-efficient, and eco-friendly technology which can promote a sustainable future. Obviously, one has to master the material the techniques so as to obtain the optimum possibilities for a harmonious, durable, agreeable and efficient architecture. One can note these advantages of earth as a building material:

• The earth is a local material, contributing to sustainable development.
• The production of the building components demands a lot of semi-skilled manpower.
• The technology is easily adaptable and transferable.
• The monetary and environmental costs are much lower than that of most other materials.
• The thermal comfort and vibratory atmosphere are very positive.

One has also to master the disadvantages of the material which, normally, are variations in the soil quality, and hence the block quality and the production of blocks on site. These reductive aspects can be underlined:

• Mechanical qualities are less regular.
• Sensible building details are required.
• The constraints of organizing and managing the production of one’s own building material on site.
  

Despite the possibilities and advantages offered by stabilised earth materials, building with earth in Auroville is still not the common practice. Either people don’t want to acknowledge the advantage of this material or they don’t want to get the burden to organise the block production on their site and manage everything themselves.

The generalised use in Auroville of compressed stabilised earth blocks and other earth techniques needs a centralised production of blocks and a coordinated management of resources – physical and human. This development step would insure a controlled and more regular quality of raw materials and finished products. This is one of the aims for the next years to come.

The challenge in front of us

How to realize architecture full of light, suppleness, simplicity, imagination and beauty with a heavy and formless mud? This is what we are trying to achieve in Auroville and what we are proposing to the World.

VDA Design Award Since 2005 the VDA Design Award is offered by the Verband der Automobilindustrie (VDA), Frankfurt (Main) and the German Design Council. The competition intends to energize younger people to argue more visionary with the subjects mobility and individual traffic. The competition is open to people all over the world and is aimed at students of all design areas and artistic disciplines i.e. industrial and product design, visual communication, interior design, architecture, art and media studies courses. All students who are registered for a specific course of study at university level or equivalent and who have not yet finished their studies are entitled to participate.

Some contributions:

Cross Media CEO Breakfast
September 27, 2006, 08:30 - 10:00
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the future of Business Meetings
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January 25, 2007, 18:30 - 21:15

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February 22, 2007, 18:30 - 21:15

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June 28, 2007, 18:30 - 21:15

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