Hans-Peter Dürr (interview is in German) is an accomplished quantum physicist and explains how from that point of view, "Wirklichkeit" is a much better term than "reality". He then talks about how he fought in World War II, worked with Edward Teller and Werner Heisenberg and met Hannah Arendt, leading him to later engagements for peace, more sustainable communities and economies.

Jeremy Rifkin (talk is in english, with convenient subtitles), one generation yonger, is someone who runs think tanks, advises the EU on energy planning and sells books. His latest theme is the "empathic civilisation", and here he is invited at Google to explain it and the challenge it faces during the coming energy crisis. He uses the occasion to tell Google what role he thinks they should be playing. He introduces the empathy-entropy paradox we need to break: As mankind has widened the circle of empathy, the energy footprint became worse and worse.

When we use a common good, we cause the most expense and anger when we all use it at the same time. An idea that is now being tested in several places is to convince a small percentage of people to deviate their usage of the good from this popular time points. It is generally agreed that in many cases,  a change in the behaviour of very few people can already relieve a system of much pressure.

The current consensus seems to be that the system operator should pay people for that. If someone actually has the flexibility to deviate, the opportunity to earn or save money might make him actually identify and use it.

I see this in electricity markets, where demand peaks can maybe avoided by convincing a couple of devices to stop operating for a while and also in traffic management: The city of Utrecht plans to pay a commuter €4 per workday if he doesn't use the highway A2. They will have to devise some solutions where they film the numberplates of passing cars, but building new streets might be much more expensive (not to mention how much trafic jams hurt the economy and the mental wellbeing of commuters).

This can be a very effective way towards more efficient usage of common goods - but there are hurdles like the increasing hunger for usage data that comes along with it. Not many people will like that and we will need to talk about this. The good news is that if the mathematicians are correct, not everyones flexibility is needed.

Update: The Netherlands now plan to tax highway usage for everyone via satellite by 2012 (like the Germans already do for trucks). This system is more flexible, but also harder to accept.

On dutch motorways, the control system sometimes imposes tempolimits (say, 70 km/h or 50 km/h) on parts of the roads in order to prevent traffic jams further down the road. So the system knows about congestion problems in the vicinity of you, and might slow you down so you do not make a traffic jam out of it.

Recently some scientists modelled the problematic public transit system in Mexico city. Though buses run according to a plan, they sometimes stay in the stations longer (e.g. when a lot of people have to get in) and so they built up irregularities over a day, which ends up in a lot of buses being in one place and none in most others (this problem even has a name: "platooning"). They concluded that buses should just leave after a short time and not let all attending passengers board. Those passengers left out should take the next bus and overall, in the long run, everyone is better off because the whole system will run smoothly.

All this is true, but from the local viewpoint of the user of such a system, it feels wrong. I cursed when I rode on the dutch motorways and had to slow down for no reason that I could immediately apprehend. And it will definitely suck when a bus driver just leaves with you still standing right in front of the bus stop. We would hate those bus drivers.

I can tell from my own experience in understanding such systems (while researching them) that it would be hard to make everyone understand the situation. On the one hand, it's based on a lot of information and that information is decentralised - it is not all in the same place as a local observer. On the other hand, our brains are also bad at processing such abstract stuff like the platooning problem.

What to do? Would humans be happier with problematic systems, simply because they would feel more in control? Or can we evolve a system thinking in our culture that appreciates such complex, decentralised solutions? Maybe it would help to put out as much information as possible about how these systems work so that everyone can look it up herself. Maybe we'll need to go the extra mile and also visualise them really well. We should have graphically appealing real-time overviews of traffic situations (already in the making), public transports, elevators, electricity grid congestion and so on - for everyone to see and to discuss.

But I also think that in the end, not every optimisation procedure can actually be accepted - it needs at least to be understandable to stand a chance.

Neben dem Erzähler ist auch die Hauptfigur, Detektiv Brenner, eher so ein Drum-Herum-Typ, so daß es schon eine Kunst ist, wie dann später immer alles wieder zusammenkommt.

Dieser Roman spielt in Wien (schön, daß ich nun ein paar Ecken dort schon kannte), und zwar im testosterongeladenen Rettungsdienstmilieu. Da stecken sicher ein paar Wahrheiten drin...

• One important message is that societies are actually fragile and often collapse. Many seem to neglect that. Civilisation is not a one-way street uphill.
• It is actually filled with interesting facts about collapsing (Easter Island, Mayas, Greenland Norse, Rwanda, etc.) and successful (e.g. Japan) societies, as well as currently endangered (e.g Australia)
• Diamond has a 5-point framework to address the problems of societies, but here is an even shorter take-home message: Two types of choices have been crucial [for societies]: Whether they employed long-term planning and if they had the willingness to reconsider their core values.
• This book spent some time on the shelf because I found the introduction about Montana to fact-filled. If you read this, skip what you find boring. That's ok.
• Diamond gave a 16-minute TED-talk on this. Disregard the combover and that he didn't bring slides, he is a 70-year old-school professor :)

The challenges we face are likely to be threatening our economic growth model at its core. ...
The transition movement has some clear messages and a solid concept (I am anticipating the video of Rob Hopkins TED talk - notes are already here). This book, however, has several ingredients. Every chapter has its own message. It is more of a handbook for people who are about to start a transition movement in their community or, like me, just want to learn what they might expect from these people***.



* The time point where oil production peaks is hard to measure, even if its already over. In this book, they assume it will be 2010.

** The fifth only deals with UK-specific discussions, so I'm leaving that out here.

*** There is a transition initiative in De Pijp, Amsterdam. The question to me is: Will we be able to feed cities at all in the future? I should look at this book.

• Beinhocker first explains how, when and by who the traditional economic models were first developed.
• He then explains several concepts which have been on the radar of other sciences in the last decades (and that he is convinced all show how the traditional models of economics is flawed): dynamics, agents, networks, emergence, evolution and cooperation. This part didn't contain too much new things for me, but was written well I must say.
• Then, he goes on to define several design spaces that a new science, Complexity Economics, could make use of to formalise things. He says we should think about Physical Technologies, Social Technologies and Business Plans as three distinct ingredients. Then, Business Plans would make a good unit to be put under a selection pressure in an economic sense. Furthermore, several conditions should be discussed what constitutes economic activity. In the new light of complexity, he proposes as a starting point that every activity should be irreversible and entropy-lowering in order to be counted as an economic activity.
• In the end, Beinhocker lines out what the effects of such a new way of looking at our main activities could have on several parts of our doings. How businesses develop their strategies should evolve to a more adaptive mind-set. The structure of organisations should be affected on all levels and be less rigid in order to tap more of the brainpower of employees. This way, he claims, a company could have the advantage to emerge better abilites to tackle complexity and enable endurance and growth (though this claim is not made very clear). Maybe we could even come to smarte financial indices than we have today. Lastly, politics could finally set their left-right divide aside, as Complexitiy Economics wouldn't be "owned" by any side.

It is always interesting to see when someone tries to put pieces together. Then, of course, he mixes facts with wishful thinking and it can be hard to set those apart. Then again, this book is meant to provoke discussion and in addition, the cites a lot of serious research so it's not just him talking. Actually, he cites some really interesting papers, some of which I had a closer look on.

Let's close with Beinhockers first sentences in the book:

"As I write this, the field of economics is going through its most profound change in over a hundred years. (...) I also believe that just as biology became a true science in the twentieth century, so too will economics come into its own as a science in the twenty-first century."

We'll see about that but I hope he's right.

• How to combine variable settings in experiments
• How to store log files nicely
• How to plot nice graphs from those log files
• How to run these expensive computations on remote servers (e.g. university servers)

Now I have one solution for all of this and I am very happy with it:


The above bundle of tasks is universal to a lot of scientists that need to to run computational experiments. I myself will run into this over and over again.

It is a natural reflex of a software developer to build a good tool for this over time and this is what I did. While working on several projects during my Masters, the latest of which is my thesis, I developed scripts for all of these tasks and bundled them together so that you could now call it an application: Combex (Combinatorial Experimentor).

It has turned out to be very useful to me lately and I would like to share this tool with anyone who is interested (this is its home). There are a lot of things that could be even nicer (I already maintain a ticket list), so I welcome contributions.

Note that Combex lets you program whatever you want in whatever language you want, all it wants is that you write log files.

I will let the (sparse) documentation speak for itself and just throw in another screenshot which shows how it all nicely comes together: A (dummy) experiment gets chopped into several tasks and those are shipped to remote servers. I can nicely check if they are done. If so, I have Combex get the data and generate nice plots.

P.S. To talk about our process and find general, reproducible solutions seems to be a general trend in science, see e.g. myexperiment.org.

P.P.S. I am unaware of any other software that offers this task bundle, even if its commercial. Anyone knows software like that? I only found quite specialised approaches, but what I like about Combex is that it doesn't care what the hell your code is doing as long as you configure variables and log data. It is more of a very simple workflow with nice tools along the way. In principle, a lot of other software (say, statistical processing) could be hooked into this as needed.

P.P.S. I am still open to be convinced by a better name for this.

I will actually be a Phd student but do research in a predefined context - nowadays, a lot of Phd positions in the exact sciences are a mixture of research work and research exploration. An exciting part about this project is that it is about a very real challenge and there are many stakeholders involved whose views on the problem are important. I will do fundamental research on dynamic and adaptive multi-agent systems, but I will also be busy wearing the hats of different stakeholders and try to bring their view into the model.

[image via http://www.usgbc-centraltexas.org]

The project I'll be working on is called IDeaNed (Intelligent en Decentraal Management van Netwerken en Data, only dutch description so far). It deals with one of the big challenges we face in the next years - a redesign of our energy distribution networks.

As we begin to exit the age of fossil energy, energy will soon become a problem for us, not a cheap and abundant catalysator for progress. Now, as an AI researcher, I can't help out where it is most important - say, actually invent an effective renewable energy source or useful, longlasting batteries. But what we need for sure is a new energy infrastructure. There is already a term for this - the "Smart Grid"*.

Our existing energy networks are of an old, centralised design which is not suitable for the way we need to look at interconnected things. As the report "Grid 2.0" (PDF) puts it:

"It is hard to make the link between flicking a switch and the distant power station that made it possible to turn the light on.
(...)
Partly as a result of this lack of a feedback mechanism, and partly because of technological constraints, Grid 1.0 is surprisingly inefficient. Only around 40 per cent of primary energy input (coal or gas) used in power stations is converted into usable electricity, the rest is wasted heat. A further nine per cent is lost as the power moves through the transmission and distribution system. Then a further third is lost in our homes and offices because they are poorly insulated, not designed with energy in mind, and inhabited by people who do not see themselves as players in the energy game."

We need a network that is decentralised (can work with input from several local sources, not only big central plants, can communicate locally about sharing loads) and avoids efficieny problems in peak times. Such a net needs real-time price mechanisms and needs to accomodate a lot of players: customers want to use effectively, producers want to sell efficiently, governments want to distribute evenly **. Meanwhile, there is a real, non-abstract component: the network. Voltage capacities at different parts of different sub-networks dictate what is possible and what is expensive to do. A lot of these things change all the time. This can get very complex very fast.

What we'll be doing is modeling Multi-Agent systems in order to learn what good price mechanisms are and what good automisationable strategies of the local players could be. We will get input from another Phd student from Eindhoven supplying technical findings about the infrastructure and we'll work with companies in the dutch energy market (big players and consultancy agencies that  develop energy network simulation software). This highly integrated approach of designing scientific projects is a unique dutch approach and I am quite excited about it.

This topic is not only being picked up in the Netherlands. Big companies like GE or IBM are already promoting their competence in this topic which isn't even entirely understood yet.

They smell money in creating a market better targeted at our actual energy usage and in savings due to efficiency. This might be one of the rare cases where what they want and what society needs have a significant overlap. For instance, I recently learned that energy efficiency on the last mile is multiple times more effective than energy efficiency at creation time (due to all the energy losses by conversion or distance that already accumulate until the last mile). And it is easier to do.


* There might even emerge a bubble with all the money being thrown at this topic right now by governments, but I hope that in 4.5 years, when I finish this project, things will have come to terms, the crooks took their money and left or were thrown out and we know where to go.

** Especially when there is not enough. In a post-fossil world there may be "bad weeks" with few energy available. Or, in more grim scenarios, we'll have few energy at all times and almost none in "bad weeks". Making sure distribution can be fair is crucial and not as easy as it first sounds.

I remember that it started with a guy saying he is hetero, but works at a gay sex phone line to support his studies. If anyone wanted to know anything about it? People wanted. Some girls said she has epilepsy. Any questions? Sure.

Then, someone had the idea to make an own subreddit for these kinds of conversations (a reddit-style forum). It's called I am a .... Currently, it's pretty lively. Some people can be asked about being french or from Afghanistan, others have strange jobs like Lobbyists or are illegal Immigrants.

Typisch für Wahlöö ist ein gesellschaftlichs Endzeit/Stillstandszenario, in dem ein völlig abgestumpfter, aber dennoch brillianter Ermittler (Komissar Jensen) dem Verbrechen auf die Spur kommen muss. Typisch auch die Magenbeschwerden und der Schnapskonsum des Ermittlers, aber hier reiht sich Wahlöö ja in die Detektivromantradition der Jahrzehnte zuvor ein.

In diesem Szenario wurden die Medien gleichgeschaltet, stetig und folgerichtig im kapitalistischen System, zur Gewinnmaximierung. Es maximiert den Gewinn, wenn die Leute sich nicht wirklich aufregen, und somit gewinnt am Ende der Verlag alles, der konfliktloses Schreiben meistert. Der Verlag engagiert sogar die konfliktsuchenden Autoren, nur um durch ihre Arbeit herauszufinden, worüber man auf keinen Fall veröffentlichen sollte.

Das ist das Geheimnis der Sonderabteilung im 31. Stock, doch bis Kommissar Jensen das herausfindet, muss er noch vieles anderes über den Verlag lernen. Und woher die Bombendrohungen kommen, berkommt er auch erst am Ende heraus.

Ich finde diese Art, Kurzkrimi und Gesellschaftsscenario zu vermischen, sehr interessant (und das Scenario selber sollte natürlich vor dem Hintergrund des 45 Jahre zurückliegenden Veröffentlichungsdatums interpretiert werden). Leider trifft Jensen desöfteren jemanden, der ganz weit ausholen muss, damit der Leser die Zusammenhänge einer langwierigen gesellschaftlichen mitbekommt. Das ist wohl kaum anders hinzubekommen, wenn man nur 130 Seiten Zeit hat, aber mitunter etwas offensichtlich. Wahlöö wollte aber auch nicht den Literaturnobelpreis, sondern Diskussionen anstossen. Gelungen.