Philippa Kaur

By Simon Ings

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Book

Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and mapping desirable futures
Katy BörnerAdvertisement
MIT Press

MY LEAFY, fairly affluent corner of south London has a congestion problem, and to solve it, there is a plan to close certain roads. You can imagine the furore: the trunk of every kerbside tree sports a protest sign. How can shutting off roads improve traffic flows?
German mathematician Braess answered this question back in 1968, showing that adding a road to a network can actually increase travel times due to a boost in drivers using the same routes and therefore increasing traffic. Now a new book, Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and mapping desirable futures by Katy Börner, uses it as a fine example of how a mathematical model predicts and can be used to resolve a real-world problem.
This and more than 1300 other models, maps and forecasts are referenced in Börner’s latest atlas, the third to be derived from Indiana University’s travelling exhibit Places & Spaces: Mapping science.
Her first, Atlas of Science: Visualizing what we know revealed the power of maps in science, while the second, Atlas of Knowledge: Anyone can map, focused on visualisation. In her latest foray, Börner wants to show how models, maps and forecasts inform decision-making in education, science, technology and policy-making.
It is a well-structured, heavyweight argument, supported by descriptions of more than 300 applications. Some entries, like Bernard H. Porter’s Map of Physics of 1939, earn their place purely because of their beauty and the insights they offer. Mostly, though, Börner chooses models that were applied in practice and made a positive difference.
Her range is impressive. We begin at equations, revealing that Newton’s law of universal gravitation has been applied to human migration patterns, and move through the centuries. We tip a wink to Jacob Bernoulli’s 1713 book The Art of Conjecturing –which introduced probability theory – and James Clerk Maxwell’s 1868 paper “On governors”, which was an early nod towards cybernetics. Finally, we arrive at our current era of massive computation and ever-more complex model building.
It is here that interesting questions start to surface. To forecast the behaviour of complex systems, especially those that contain a human component, many current researchers reach for modelling (ABM) in which discrete autonomous agents interact with each other and with their common (digitally modelled) environment.
But, warns Börner, “ABMs in general have very few analytical tools by which they can be studied, and often no backward sensitivity analysis can be performed because of the large number of parameters and dynamical rules involved”. In other words, an ABM model offers us an exquisitely detailed forecast, but no clear way of knowing why the model has drawn the conclusions it has – a risky state of affairs, given that its data came from foible-ridden humans.
Her sumptuous, detailed book tackles issues of error and bias head-on, but she left me tugging at a different problem, represented by those irate protest signs smothering my neighbourhood.
In over 50 years since Braess’s research was published, reasonably wealthy, mostly well-educated people in comfortable surroundings have remained ignorant of how traffic flows work. So what are the chances that the rest of us, busy and preoccupied as we are, will ever really understand, or trust, the other models that increasingly dictate our civic life?
Börner argues that modelling data can counteract tribalism, misinformation, magical thinking, authoritarianism and demonisation. I can’t for the life of me see how. What happens when a model reaches such complexity that only an expert can understand it, or when even the expert can’t be sure why the forecast is saying what it is saying?
We have enough difficulty understanding climate forecasts, let alone explaining them. To apply these technologies to the civic realm begs a host of problems that are nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with whether anyone will listen.

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Are viruses alive? asks New York Times science columnist Carl Zimmer in this Royal Institution talk. Can viruses and other difficult to pin down microbes help us answer the question: what is life? Streaming live on 26 August at 7pm BST.

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The Nature Seed by Lucy Jones and Kenneth Greenway is a handy guide to raising adventurous, nature-loving children, full of fires, potions, foraging and make-believe. Discover the awe in a humble cracked pavement or your local park.
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Jamming the Signal is a live conversation at FACT Liverpool on 28 August from 2pm BST that asks whether social media and instant messaging can be used to effect meaningful change in an age of digital unrest. It will also be streamed online. More

New evidence reveals that Arabia was not a mere stopover for ancestral humans leaving Africa, but a lush homeland where they flourished and evolved

Humans

18 August 2021

By Michael Marshall

Andrea Ucini
THE Rub’ al-Khali is both desert and deserted – a landscape of reddish sand dunes that stretches as far as the eye can see. This hyper-arid region in the south-east of the Arabian peninsula is approximately the size of France. Parts of it often go an entire year without rain. Almost nobody lives there; its name means “empty quarter”.
The rest of Arabia is less environmentally extreme, but still a very tough place to live without air conditioning and other recent technologies. However, the peninsula wasn’t always so parched. A mere 8000 years ago, it was wet enough for there to have been many lakes. The same was true at intervals throughout the past million years, when rivers criss-crossed Arabia, forming green corridors where lush vegetation and wildlife flourished amid the sand dunes. For much of recent geological time, the peninsula was at least partly green.
Arabia’s verdant past is no mere factoid: it suggests that the region was habitable at times in the distant past. That realisation has prompted archaeologists to start looking for evidence of occupation by humans, their ancestors and their extinct relatives. In just a decade, they have found countless sites where these hominins lived, stretching hundreds of thousands of years into the past. Arabia, it seems, wasn’t a mere stopover for hominins as they moved out of Africa into the wider world. It was somewhere they settled for long stretches of time. Indeed, many researchers now think Arabia should be thought of as part of a “greater Africa”, and that the peninsula played an important role in human evolution and expansion across the world.
For … More

By James Urquhart

Dog food often contains grains – and may have done so for thousands of yearsJaromir Chalabala / Alamy Stock Photo
Dog diets often contain more starch than those of their carnivorous wolf ancestors, and an analysis of fossilised dog faeces helps explain how the animals made the dietary change. Long before their genomes adapted to their plant-rich chow, their gut microbiome gained a starch-digesting profile.
Due to their close association with humans, it is thought that dogs’ diets shifted to less meat and more carbohydrates when farming began – an idea that was supported by an archaeological analysis … More

By Jon O’Brien

Alma and Tom gradually become closer in this offbeat love storyChristine Fenzl
Film
I’m Your Man
Maria SchraderAdvertisement

CAN happiness flourish even when it is knowingly built on fabrication? Is perfection conducive to a healthy partnership? Can artificial and emotional intelligence truly coexist? Fresh from her Emmy-winning success with the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, Maria Schrader leaves such questions hanging in I’m Your Man, her fourth film.
Adapted from Emma Braslavsky’s short story Ich bin dein Mensch, this German-language tale stars Downton Abbey‘s Dan Stevens as Tom, the ideal life partner. He is a handsome sharp-dresser with blue eyes that could pierce a stone, a penchant for romantic gestures and a willingness to cater to every whim. He is also a humanoid robot.
Love in the time of algorithms has been explored in the Amazon anthology Soulmates and Netflix’s Osmosis and The One. However, the central coupling here is born out of necessity rather than a search for “the one”.
Academic Alma (Maren Eggert) has reluctantly agreed to house Tom in a three-week experiment, which will help finance her research. She is completely uninterested in sharing a bed, or even a conversation, with this apparent kindred spirit, created to make her happy. “Leaving me alone should be no problem at all,” she tells Tom, who can’t compute her disdain. “That’s what makes me happiest.”
I’m Your Man is a curiosity. You could call it a sci-fi rom, yet there is little if any sci-fi or, indeed, rom. The tech behind Tom comes into play just once when he briefly malfunctions, while the film’s Berlin setting is a near-future whose aesthetic is more soft pastels than dark dystopia.
Despite Tom’s best efforts to ignite a spark using the millions of data strands at his disposal, he is thwarted by a dismissive Alma at every turn. “Ninety-three per cent of German women dream of this,” he remarks, after running a candlelit bath, strewn with rose petals. “Guess which group I belong to,” comes the reply.
It is only when Tom tones down the programmed cliches and starts responding less, well, robotically that the iciness thaws. He senses the sadness behind Alma’s steely exterior, and his matter-of-fact, yet effective, probing renders their “couples counsellor” (Toni Erdmann‘s Sandra Hüller) obsolete. Before long, Alma surprises herself by defending Tom from a colleague with no sense of personal space.
If I’m Your Man had emerged from Hollywood, this would be the cue for wedding bells. But European arthouse tends to avoid wrapping things up neatly in a bow. Although she slowly succumbs to Tom’s attributes, both physical and mental, Alma always remains aware that she is being manipulated by his constant recalibration. Happily-ever-after never looks likely.
Still, the two stars ensure you remain invested in this relationship, wherever it leads. Eggert offsets Alma’s abrasiveness with a quiet vulnerability and compassion, particularly in the scenes with her cranky dad (Wolfgang Hübsch) who has dementia, which hint at her fear of ending up in a lonely state, too.
Meanwhile, Stevens is charm personified in a performance partly inspired by Cary Grant. His comic timing is exquisite, proving that his scene-stealing turn in last year’s Eurovision movie was no fluke.
Schrader has served up a new, if resolutely low-key, tragi-comic spin on the digital love story that combines depth, humour and, no matter how mechanical, heart.

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Your brain is exquisitely sensitive to your surroundings, tuning into external cues and distractions whether you like it or not. Understanding how this happens could change the way we work

Humans

11 August 2021

By Annie Murphy Paul

Objects we place in our workspace reinforce our sense of identityMelanie Acevedo/trunkarchive.com
IN THE summer of 2001, Sapna Cheryan was a new graduate interviewing for internships at tech firms in California’s Bay Area. At one company, she recalls, the workspace looked like a computer enthusiast’s basement hang-out, full of action figures and Nerf guns, with a soda-can model of the Golden Gate Bridge. To her, it seemed designed to promote an exclusive conception of the firm’s ideal employee. As a young woman of colour, she felt unwelcome, even alienated. She accepted a place at another company – one with a workspace that was bright and inviting.
Five years later, Cheryan’s next move was to Stanford University in California to start a PhD investigating how physical cues in our environment affect how we think and feel. She is among a growing number of psychologists and cognitive scientists whose research challenges the idea that the brain is like a computer. Computers are indifferent to their surroundings: a laptop works the same in a fluorescent-lit office or a leafy park. The same isn’t true of the human brain. In fact, Cheryan and others have found its performance to be exquisitely sensitive to the context in which it operates.
This research seems especially relevant right now. During the pandemic, many of us were abruptly forced to work and learn in different surroundings, and the effect of place on cognition came into sharp focus. As some of us return to offices and schools, we have an opportunity to reimagine these spaces in accordance with what researchers have … More