Summing, reviewing and thoughts to the future

This the final post of the project. I've been thinking about how I was going to end this now for quite a while. My opinion changed over the 4 months I want to reflect on this in useful way about how this happened. The second thing I want to do in this final post is cast an eye on the future briefly and to comment on how my current thoughts about all this reflect back on to the topic.

So, I've decided to accomplish these two aims first) by looking at my changing word use of the course of writing and second) by looking at some research in the journals and the news this week.

1) My words

To chart my themes in this blog I've just looked at all 12,946 words of it. It shows some unexpected results.

To start with I've counted up how many times I used each word and ranked them. Aside from the common pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions ( I've written the word 'the' 751 times) the top words are:

Data ~ 105

 Technology ~ 58

Information ~ 49

Environment, Environmental ~47

System(s) ~45

Internet ~40

Example ~34

Things ~34

Post ~ 28

Time ~26

Computational ~ 24

All these words would be expected right? I don't think these results show anything particularly surprising.  But as all these words appear many, many more times than once per entry, I thought it would be interesting to look at how their use changed over time as a means to chart the progression of the blog. These results are interesting. 

The graph of their use looks like this:

So to start with its kind of interesting to see that the while the themes of 'data' and 'technology' both follow the same trend, i.e. they both come and go every 2 posts or so rising every time they peak, they are exactly out of phase with each other the whole way through. Why would this be? Well, it certainly means that I have confronted these two topics separately. They are definitely separate topics but they are connected. So this lends me to thinking that my approach could have been better. These data reflect one of my main conclusions reached in this blog: data is more important that the technology used to collect it. What I mean by that is data comes first, or least it should do. Before implementing any system, for example active control of natural or environmental systems or passive observation, what you're going to get out of it needs to be considered. It then it needs to be considered again during technological development and again after implementation.  More on this below.

Another observation is that its surprising the internet is not mentioned more, as at the outset of writing this blog I would have imagined that this would be a really central theme. Of course, this could be down to my negligence but I think that its reflecting something else entirely. From doing this project, it has become increasing clear to me that using computational technology does not, in fact should not, go hand in hand with connecting all these systems up. I think these systems need to remain to a certain degree geographically specific.

This data also reflects my belief that I have somewhat neglected the environmental connection more than I should have. If I had sketched out what I would hope these lines would look like at the start of the project in October I would have put 'Environment' up there level with 'Technology'. Both of these words I would have expected to appear higher than 'Data', which is somewhat of a surprise winner. Appearing almost double the amount of times of the second most common word, it is clear that knowledge (inclusive of both the words 'Data' and 'Information') is far and away the most important point that to emerge here. I suggest that this is for two reasons. Firstly, as much as the ability to put in the systems I've been talking about here is important, the ability to USE them properly and responsibly is far more important. This is derived from data. I think this conclusion too belongs to the growing conversation that people are having that we shouldn't just do things because we can, particularly with respect to technology. Possibilities and effects, adverse and beneficial, need to be discussed. Secondly, I believe it reflects the possible uses of these technologies as well. Just as these computation systems are useful for active control over Nature, for example flows of rivers etc, they are equally as useful for observing Nature (and our interactions with it). This is perhaps something that is overlooked in often flippant pieces discussing civilisation's magnificent ability 'to do engineering'. 

Finally, I'm really happy to notice that I have been able to consistently fill my posts with examples to illustrate my explorations and discussions. At the same time, I'm somewhat embarrassed that the word 'post' appeared so consistently throughout. Its making me think that I have been overly self-aware of the whole blog writing experience, and that this might have held be back somewhat.

Having looked at what I've been writing about, I want to end by looking at what people are writting about right now and whether what I've been exploring has any relevance all at. Happily it turns out it does! Simply looking at published pieces in Nature this week confirms this.


2) The Thoughts of Others

The first piece listed is an Editorial entitled 'Data Sharing will pay dividends'. In discussing data sharing in the pharmaceutical industry it highlights one of the major issues - access, availability and ownership. This complements one of the conclusions of this blog in that it states: the more data the better and furthermore the more people who have access to the more data the better. Ultimately this is one part of the much broader debate into how the internet actually exists and interacts with global capitalism and nation states. Another part of the same debate would be the current privacy debates. The sharing of information is shaping the current intellectual and political landscape.

The second thing to catch the eye is a new piece on using massive amounts of data to recognize photos and speech, deep-learning computers are taking a big step towards true artificial intelligence. What better follow up to the aforementioned conclusion could one ask for? One need not say more!

Also reported is that a swarm of satellites set to deliver close to real-time imagery of swaths of the planet.  This signals a huge change in satellite technology, this is the first civilian project to do anything of this sort. This shows that computational technology of the sort that isn't just 'personal technology' like iphones etc. is coming to the civilian world and this will change things again. A second coming of the technological revolution.

3) My final word

So, these two analyses are cause for celebration. I've been talking about things that really matter and can only increase being so. I've even managed to come to some of the same conclusions as people who have been thinking about this for decades!

I've really enjoyed this project, its given me a great opportunity of look at research and writing in a huge number of different areas and link them all together. I've had fun toying with bits of code to supplement my reading. The final thing I want to saying is this.......

As I mentioned last time after tackling this topic for four months I discovered a journal called Environmental Technology only last week. I been reading some of its papers. Clearly 'Computational Technology' is a tiny subset of 'Technology'. The title of the first paper to catch my eye is 'The effect of heterotrophic growth on autotrophic nitrogen removal in a granular sludge reactor', a somewhat different topic than that which we've been dealing with here.

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The code I used to do the word counting etc. is up here ~ http://herculescyborgcode.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/word-frequencies_3837.html. To repeat the same thing just save all posts into separate .txt files named in numerical order in a directory with this code saved as frequencies.py - go to this directory and type 'python frequencies.py' at the command line. Of course, you would want to change your key words though to suit your subject matter.

'technology' has become so profoundly useless

I've come to the last two posts (maybe) in the blog. It seems only right to review what I set out to achieve. This was (is):

          1) To explore computational technology as a means to fix the environmental problems caused by the industrial revolution.

          2) To explore what these technologies are and how they work.

I also should explicitly state one of things I didn't try to do, namely:

To explore the environmental problems that need fixing

Why didn't I do this? Well because it is well past the day that human impact on environment change became accepted as fact. Having written the posts I have, I now realise that perhaps I have not talked about the link between and technology and nature as much as I could have. So, in these (potentially) last two post I want to remedy my neglect of the environmental link and sum up my position.

In an attempt to understand why I found it difficult to make this link more I turned to the history of the discussion of technology.

In a long, paper/essay like entry in the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy (SEP) on the 'Philosophy of Techology' the SEP notes that it wasn't until the late twentieth century that philosophers seriously began considering the 'ethics of technology', that is to say take and discuss perspectives on the phenomenon and its relation to others. I, as someone who is far from an expert of philosophy, found this surprising given the range and depth of topics subject to consideration by thinkers in the field. The SEP proposes that this late development is a result of societal consensus that advancing technology was simply a positive thing. It gives us many possibilities and enables us to do more things, and this is a good thing of course.

As someone who has spent more time studying the Environment than the philosophical can easily understand this. Although human technology has been having undesirable consequences on the environment (on spatial and temporal scales of mensionable significance) for a long time -- perhaps as early as the the Neolithic revolution, certainly as early as our first use of fossil fuels that occurred in tenth century Chinese iron smelting industry (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNell: 2007) -- we're only just discussing it and systematically studying it!

Additionally, although there was a profound absence of actual formal and intellectual assessment on technology an alternative was had in the form in propagating tropes in myth, art and literature. For example, it was clearly understood that technology can be put to bad use or lead humans to hubris - see here (kinda):

The SEP says that this way of understanding it, i.e. as having no innate positive or negative quality, is known at the 'neutrality thesis'. A number of heavy weight twentieth century philosophers disputed this into disrepute. So, in the last 50 years or so, the scope and agenda of the ethics of technology has grown massively. People have begun to talk about it variously as a social activity, a cultural phenomenon, a professional activity and a cognitive activity.

The coincidence of this increase in talk in the ivory tower about the meaning of technology, the studying of its environmental consequences and rise of technology is at once amazing and unsurprising. 

In search of a more detailed answer to the question: what held this debate in philosophy back from technology so? - my reading lead me to Schummer's (2001) paper titled Aristotle on Technology and Nature. He inadvertently provides some satisfying answers. He says that any view that philosophers historically had of technology came out of one of three theses, (the paper discusses whether or not they can be attributed to Aristotle, hence the 'inadvertently'). 

1) Technology imitates nature, such that there is no place for authentic human creativity. 

2) Technology in supplementing and completing nature fulfills but the inherent aims of nature. 

3) There is an ontological hiatus between natural things and artifacts such that technology cannot reproduce or change natural things.

 
I would be lying if I said I understood what an 'ontological hiatus between natural things and artifacts' was but for my purposes its not important. Schummer nicely illustrates one of my closing points to this blog. This is that 'technology' as a term has become so profoundly useless. For the whole of this blog, as one always should, I've tried to avoid talking in meaningless generalities but it is only really now that I am realizing how much of one the word 'technology' itself is. This is what has held back Philosophy for many years, even now it seems that philosophical transactions are dominated by discussion of what it actually means rather than what it is doing. If very early on people had talked about specific practices, ideas, creations, or groups thereof perhaps Philosophy as a discipline would be further ahead in this area and would have provided Geography with the impetus for investigating anthropogenic impact on environmental change sooner *.

So, whilst I would never, of course!, ever, want to blame one of the inadequacies of this blog upon the neglectfulness of over two thousand years worth of philosophers and other thinkers besides, let alone the inadequacies of language itself, this sure has made my task hard.

This is therefore one of my concluding thoughts of this blog. We all need to stop talking about technology and be more specific. After all, can 3D printing really be discussed under the same term as environmental monitoring and smart roads?

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In my post next week I'll try to pull everything to draw some other meaningful conclusions.

Annoyingly, but at the same time luckily, while put finishing this (penultimate) post I've discovered a journal called Environmental Technology. After writing this blog for over 4 months, the countless internet searches I've done, papers, articles, blog posts I've read and videos I've watched only now do I learn about this. For sure I'll be using this to write my next post. 

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Its also more than probable that Geography wasn't ready for it anyway being stuck in deep thoughts and studies of regionalisms and being busy being the 'Imperial science' that it was. These are also explanations why Geography couldn't bring this about itself.