At work

Making and drinking coffee was just about my favorite part of my old job.  Most of the things I didn't like about that job are gone, and the coffee part's gotten a lot better, too.  Certainly it doesn't get much fresher than this:



I've made of this coffeeshop my office, and spend half a day here whenever Felix is in school:

But what, you ask, am I doing here?  I'm working on an idea.  I am trying to figure out what might sit at the juncture of two burgeoning fields, self-measurement and participatory sensing.  And, having done so, I want to figure out how to make of that my work.

But what, you ask, the heck am I talking about?  This article in the New York Times, just out, explains the first term nicely.  In a nutshell, the superphones we're all carrying in our pockets are capable of measuring in excruciating detail our second-by-second movements, as well as recording a great deal about our activities and environments.  With their help, or that of more specialized instruments, it has become at least theoretically practical (and, to some at least, it is already desirable) to harvest and analyze a lot of hard data about ourselves with the avowed purpose of understanding and perhaps even improving our beings and lives.  Then there's participatory sensing, whereby those affected by a phenomenon are involved in measuring it, the idea being that better, more relevant, and more fine-grained data about that phenomenon may thereby be obtained.  Related.  Important.  Wide open.

But where, you ask, did this all come from?  It started in Amsterdam, soon after I moved to the Saxenburgerstraat, when I realized that me and all of the rest of the yuppies who were rapidly gentrifying that area of Oud-West between the Vondelpark and the Overtoom were allowing the presence of the one to blind us to the effects of the other:  while enjoying our views of that strip of green, we were all breathing the pollution coming from the strip of gray on the other side.  But how much pollution?  And how to make it clear to all of those yuppies, child-toting potential activists every one, that they were paying hundreds of thousands of euros to raise their offspring next to the air pollution equivalent of the A10?

Air pollution measurement, like much centralized data gathering, is typically done using a limited set of high-quality but expensive sensors placed at a limited number of locations for a limited period of time.  The data so generated is of high quality, but for a wide-spread, continuously variable phenomenon such as air pollution it is laughably incomplete:  we don't know in detail, in real-time, over the entire area of concern, and for an indefinite period, the pollution levels we are trying to measure.  And we certainly don't know exactly how polluted is the air going into each of our lungs.  I don't, and you don't, and because we don't it is altogether too easy to treat this as a non-localized problem in aggregate--in this area average life expectancy is diminished by so and so years, overall incidence of lung cancer is increased by X%--rather than my problem--where I live and work and play I encounter air pollution that results in my life being cut short by so and so many years, my chance of developing lung cancer being increased by X%.  And so we sit on our dakterras (that is, if we ever get it built) enjoying our view of the Vondelpark and giving nary a thought to the noxious air blowing over us from the traffic-snarled Overtoom, when we should be downstairs writing infuriated letters to our stadsdeel, or picketing Nuon, or otherwise being activists and protecting ourselves, our children, and our investments.

I want to motivate people appropriately.  I want to do this by enabling them in learning what their personal micro-environments are made up of.  I want to remind them that the aggregate issue is always composed of individuals, one of whom is you.  It's not enough to know that you are part of the problem/solution, you need to know exactly which part.  And with current technology you can.  And, using this same technology and at the same time, you can also help those who are already working on these problems by providing them with a lot of extra data of a type they are not otherwise in a position to collect.

That's what I think about here, at work, as I drink my coffee.  That, and how to make of this paying work that let's me stay here, drinking this coffee, forever.  Your input--criticism, ideas, consulting contracts--is, as always, very welcome.