February 2008 – Page 2 – David Bradley

Sciencebase Upgraded

UPDATE: Since I wrote this post back in February 2008, WordPress has gone through many changes, updates on Sciencebase are automated these days too, which is marvellous.

I finally upgraded the Sciencebase site to the very latest version of WordPress, it had been languishing at version 2.1.3 (can you believe it?) for far too long. There had not only been dozens of security upgrades since that version and the current version 2.3.3 but various new features that the site was not making full use of.

It was a post by Wayne Liew WayneLiewDot.com that persuaded me to do the necessary and his recommendation for using a plugin that automates that whole process was the tipping point I needed.

Having carried out the upgrade (more on the actual WordPress upgrade process here) and found only a few minor problems, like a disordered sidebar, a couple of out-of-date plugins and just one irrelevant dead plugin, and fixed those as best as I could, I figured it was time for a weekend break. So my wife and I headed off to the seaside, abandoned the children with their grandparents and took off with the dog for a well-earned break at an artsy country town on the Suffolk coast. (Photos will appear soon on the Sciencebase Flickr account). Hence this trivial and possibly pointless post.

Back with a more substantial science based post later this week.

Giving the Ghetto Blaster Retro Chic

iPod Ghetto Blaster

The ongoing quest for bigger, better, smaller, faster gadgets and other consumer products is not environmentally sustainable and must be replaced by an approach to design that builds on the products of contemporary mass-produced culture by re-working them for current desires. That is the simple message offered by Stuart Walker of the Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Canada, currently Co-Director of Imagination@Lancaster at Lancaster University, UK, writing in the current issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Design.

Walker points out that it is critical that we address issues of sustainability more substantially than has been done to date. The throwaway culture of the mp3 generation is not only filling landfills with mass-produced and almost disposable products, but wasting vast quantities of potentially recoverable materials, including precious metals. Moreover, the continued greed for novelty means that countless perfectly useful gadgets and other products are being discarded in favour of the next version much sooner than they need be given the robustness of many well-designed products today.

He adds that if design is to contribute to human culture in a more meaningful way then it has to move beyond the often shallow, style-based notions of product design that have become so prevalent over the last 50 years.

If the creation of new products is part of the problem rather than the solution to sustainability in a world of climate change, overburdened landfills and dwindling supplies of inexpensive mineral resources, then does the designer have a role if consumerist society were to desist from its quest for novelty?

“On the face of it, and within the conventional parameters of product design, it would seem that the answer would be no,” says Walker, “or at most, relatively little.” However, he suggests that a broadening of definitions of what design involves could lead to a new generation in design that exists not simply to create novel products but to use the creative skills of individuals to re-work old products.

Walker takes as a case in point the “old-fashioned” stereo radio-cassette player, which had its heyday in the ghetto blasters of the 1980s. Countless ghetto blasters will have hit landfills in the decades since and yet, with a little imagination, a once prized possession could become a new outlet for a portable mp3 player with a simple rewiring of the input circuitry.

Such re-purposing may not be fashionable, there is not at present any cachet nor retro-chic associated with the ghetto blaster as generation after generation of sleek touch-sensitive portable media gadgets hit the market month in, month out. And yet it would take only a few cultural innovators seeing the potential of this and other examples for rebuilding and repurposing to lead to a consumer tipping point in which such a primal approach to recycling became the height of fashion. Being an early adopter need not mean buying the latest gadget, it could simply mean repurposing an old one.

More information on Walker’s potentially revolutionary proposals can be found in “Extant objects: designing things as they are” Int. J. Sustainable Design, 2008, 1, pp 4-12

You can leave ideas for other potentially retro chic repurposed gadgets and products in the comment form below.

Did Your Doctor Inhale?

Cannabis red light - adapted from http://www.flickr.com/photos/aforero/434623972/

A survey of medical students in Brazil found that more than 80% use alcohol, while cannabis use is limited to about one in four, a quarter use solvents and just over 25% use tobacco. In contrast, less than three quarters of female medical students use alcohol, just under 15% use tobacco, about 10 percent use solvents, and tranquillizer use accounts for 7.5%.

The survey carried out using World Health Organisation criteria questioned 456 medical students across the grades. Details will appear in the March issue of the journal Addict Behav (2008, 33(3), pp 490-495) reported by the team of Dartiu Xavier Da Silveira in the Addiction Unit at the Federal University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Perhaps most intriguingly, the researchers found that it is usually only female medical students make the switch from illegal to legal drugs of abuse, whereas male students tend to alternate cannabis and solvents throughout college years, the researchers report.

“Interventions aiming to influence patterns of drug consumption among medical students must consider both gender differences and evolving patterns of substance use throughout a medical course,” the researchers conclude. In an earlier study (Addict Behav, 2007, 32(8), pp 1740-1744), they reported that “Living with parents or a companion appeared as a protective factor for the use of cannabis”. But, they also found that being male and taking part in sporting activities was often associated with both cannabis and solvent abuse.

In related research (Addict Behav, 2008, 33(3), pp 397-411), researchers at the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland College Park, investigated the prevalence of cannabis use disorders among more than 1200 first-year college students, aged 17 to 20. They found that a significant proportion of cannabis-using college students could be diagnosed as suffering from some kind of cannabis-related disorder. However, they add that even if there is no obvious disorder, many of the users are at serious risk of problems, including physical injuries, and commonly miss class.

In the light of such statistics, you really have to question those pleas of “I never inhaled, m’lud”, especially if it’s your doctor making them, and puts a different light on those “green” prescriptions GPs hand out advising us to live a healthier lifestyle, eat better, and get more exercise.

Who Do You Work For?

Wages

Getting the balance right between work and life is difficult, if not impossible, for many people. There are so many pressures on us pushing and pulling from countless directions. Multitasking has become the norm, but the act of juggling career, family, and social life and keeping all aspects circling through the air, never dropping anything, remains an unattainable goal. Perhaps it always was.

Maybe the few who succeed are happy 24/7, get plenty of sleep, have quality time with family and friends, and enjoy and are satisfied fully by their work and then there are the rest of us back here on planet earth with bills to pay, mouths to feed, and things to see and do.

Caroline Gatrell of the Management Learning and Leadership department and Cary Cooper in the Management School at Lancaster University, UK, point out in a recent research paper how work-life balance policies are important in controlling employee stress levels. They discuss the details of a study on work-life balance in the current issue of European Journal of International Management (2008, 2(1), 71-86).

They have investigated just how gender and body affect the way companies handle these policies. Their research shows that, despite advances in equality rules and regulations, there is a serious gap between the social expectations of professionally employed mothers and fathers. Men, they say are generally discouraged from working flexibly, while mothers who work long hours are repeatedly criticised.

Gatrell and Cooper argue that the pressure to organise work-life balance, according to embodied and gendered social norms, is a cause of stress to both fathers and mothers, this is no truer than among those employed at a managerial level. They concede that there is no standard family, never was, so that the problems of work-life balance may differ, depending on the social situation of the group under consideration.

They point out that the stresses and pressures may be very different for lone parents, same-sex relationships, and for workers with no children. Regardless, the lives of married and co-habiting men and women with children remain the focus of social policies on work-life balance, at least in those countries within the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), which includes the Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, UK, US, etc.

They ask, “Why does work-life balance matter to policy makers, and why might it matter to employers?” and explain how the concept of ‘work-life balance’ was originally developed as a result of government policies ‘aimed specifically at addressing the pressures attendant in combining work with family life’, particularly where both parents are in work. These work-life balance policies are usually associated with giving employees opportunities to work flexibly and were initially aimed at working mothers.

Flexibility might be interpreted in different ways by different people, bosses, or employees. “These could include the rearrangement of working times to suit individual needs, job-shares, or the undertaking at home of tasks which would previously have been associated with day-time, bodily presence, in the office,” the researchers explain.

However, “In practice, most employers interpret ‘flexibility’ in terms of giving some employees the opportunity to reduce working hours by working part time or fractionally.” This has ultimately led to a very narrow range of opportunities. “Perhaps employers’ narrow interpretation of flexibility is due, in part, to the possibility that the whole idea of work-life balance poses a problem for employers,” the researchers suggest. It is most likely that in a market-driven economy, employers will want to maximize profits and reduce costs. Inevitably, this would mean re-shaping ‘worker friendly’ polices to their advantage, which could quite possibly be at the expense of those staff for whom the policies were originally intended to help.

“The experiences of employed fathers and mothers is at odds with research which shows that men and women in professional and managerial roles seek to spend more time with families, especially when children are young, and find it stressful if this is hard to achieve. The link between long-hours-cultures, stress and unhealthy behaviour such as poor diet and increased alcohol consumption has been proven conclusively,” argue Gatrell and Cooper. Like I say, who do you work for?

Gatrell, C., & Cooper, C. (2008). Work-life balance: working for whom? European J. of International Management, 2 (1) DOI: 10.1504/EJIM.2008.016929

Six Degees of Separation

In the latter part of my university career I met someone from another part of the country who had taken an entirely different degree course at roughly the same time as me, but whom I’d never bumped into at university itself. In fact, it wasn’t until we both ended up working in a small town in the USA by sheer coincidence that we mat in the first place. What was odd though was that we seemed to know a lot of the same people. And, if we didn’t know the same people we knew people who knew them and so on.

At the time, neither of us had heard of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, or the whole concept of degrees of separation, idea. In fact this was 20 years ago and I don’t think that game had even been invented. We thought we’d stumbled on a new theory and began extrapolating wildly about how with just a few connections everyone in the world might be interconnected. This was at a time before even web 1.0 too, let alone web 2.0, so the whole idea of extensive online networking was yet to be born.

Anyway, we still keep in touch and are occasionally dumbfounded by the apparently supernatural connections that seem to crop up on a regular basis. For instance, my friend was chatting in a pub with a group of friends and some “new” people in the social circle a few years back. Conversation turned to travel, my friend mentioned her job in the USA, and one of the new people in the circle mentioned knowing someone who had done the same job, at roughly the same time. The new person my friend later related was my wife’s sister and those two are now best friends. A similar coincidence occurred to my own sister who met someone “new” to her social circle (again, in a pub, is there a theme here, do you think?) who turned out to know both me and my friend from some other place. I could go on…

Anyway, as many people will know this idea of everyone in the world being connected within so many friends, relatives, and acquaintances was already well known even 20 years ago and well before Kevin Bacon started acting. Seemingly, it was Guglielmo Marconi, developer of radio communication, who in his 1909 Nobel speech is thought to be the first person to suggest the magic number 6 (actually 5.83) as being somehow pertinent in connecting everyone together, although he was referring to a network of radio stations to provide global coverage.

In Stanley Milgram’s so-called “small world experiment”, he attempted to measure the connectivity of Americans to determine whether there was a separation factor. Although he never referred to the “six degrees of separation”, Milgram did discover that only a small number of connections is needed to interlink the entire population. It turns out that, as with a network, such as the World Wide Web, there are several large hubs, people or portals with a huge number of connections on which the connectivity of all those billions of websites and people hang.

It’s quite unlikely that without the advent of electronic communication, we would find the connectivity between all 6,647,380,082 people to be such a small number. I was musing on this subject while adding a new friend to my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. I have not been very active on LinkedIn and have just 31 connections on that online networking site. However, those 31 contacts have a total of 2700+ connections of their own, and if I move along the degrees of separation another notch, there would be 171,000+ contacts of contacts’ contacts. Just four degrees of separation would bring me into contact with almost 20 million people, five degrees would be almost 2 billion.

Within 6 degrees of separation I could connect with 200 billion people, which is obviously going to require at least one new address book. If you’ve got more LinkedIn contacts than my small cluster, just think how many people you could connect to…oh…wait a minute…

There is, however, a theory, well supported by anthropology, that our brains were wired by evolution to cope with a mere 150 close contacts. That’s 150 people you’d know and “love”. The theory may explain why hunter-gatherer villages topped out at around that population size, why certain groups, such as the Hutterites, split their communities once they reach this size, and have done for centuries, and maybe even why fighting groups work best at fewer than 200 members. You simply haven’t got the brain power to really care about more than that number of people, because you wouldn’t be able to keep track of all the relationships between the group members if there were more.

Maybe it’s time to trim down those friends lists if you’ve got several thousand twitter contacts. You can only really call close a limited number of people, according to this theory. That said, humans are still evolving, maybe there will be some reproductive advantage to having thousands of virtual friends should environmental pressures change in coming years. By the way, I’m yet to find a personal connection with Kevin Bacon.