Good morning and welcome both here in the room and following the event online via the Scottish Parliament's Facebook page to our event, Climate Change in Scotland 2050 Visions. It's great to be able to use technology to be able to bring this debate on climate change to a wider audience than that able to attend in person. This event is to mark climate week, a week for Scottish organisations to raise awareness of and inspire action on climate change. We're delighted to be joined by three Scottish creative thinkers who will take us through their visions of Scotland in 2050 from a climate change perspective, providing a different take on the debate compared to the usual voices. Once the three speakers are finished, we'll have a short time for questions from the audience, so please store up your questions for that point. We'll also take questions via the Twitter feed. Please tweet us at scottparall using the hashtag scottclimateqs. So, let me introduce our panel firstly, Mandy Haggath, who lives in a coastal wooded croft in Ascent in the north-west Highlands and works as a freelance writer and researcher. She's been awarded two Scottish Art Council Writers Bursaries and a Creative Scotland Artist Award, and it has won and been shorted for several poetry competitions. In the summer of 2013, she was the poet in residence in the Royal Botanic Gardens and I hope she's going to bring together her creative work, writing skills and her vision for 2050. Our second speaker resides a little closer to here. He currently works at Edinburgh University teaching and carrying out research in the areas of Christian ethics, ecology and religious ethics and economy and ethics. He's published 12 books and over 70 academic papers and has a keen interest in the ethics of climate justice, Professor Michael Northcord. Our final speaker will be from Scotland's 2050 climate group, Scotland's Youth Climate Group, which is a collection of young professionals across the country who all share a commitment to climate change mitigation and adaptation and accelerating Scotland's transition to a low-carbon economy. Sarah Knight has recently graduated with an MSc in ecological economics from the University of Edinburgh. She's currently working as a research analyst for an environmental consultancy, working on a project to raise environmental awareness within the oil and gas sector. Welcome to you all. Can I ask you, Mandy, to begin? Thank you very much, Graham. Thank you all very much for coming so early in the morning. I'm going to read you a few poems, starting with the very big and moving to the very small of climate change. I want to begin by reflecting on the fact that the climate has been changing since the earth was created and is in flux, but that, of course, the impacts of humans are changing the nature of that change. I'm going to begin by asking you to imagine the end of the last ice age. For me, an interesting thought is the fact that when the climate does change as we can look at the patterns from geology, sometimes it changes very rapidly indeed, and perhaps the impacts of our unprecedented change in CO2 levels might also trigger very, very rapid changes of this sort. Imagine the land covered in ice almost to the top of the mountains. Imagine the peaks of Cunyag, islands of rock in a sea of ice. Imagine it sparkling under stars, freezing in the night cold, crackling into crispness. Imagine the moon in a blue sky looking down on all that white. Imagine it thawing by morning, south faces softening. Imagine the sun burning through fog, melting its edges, weakening its hold on the land. Imagine warm wind gnawing at westerly slopes, corroding crystals. Imagine trickles of melting, a gurgle of bubbles in cracks, an insistent rub of fluid, widening slivers of sliding, slumping, slush. Imagine the collapse, an afternoon thunder of mountainside ice slides, a roar as trickles merge into torrents. Imagine the ice in motion, seething down to the coast, dragged west by gravity to the Atlantic ocean. Imagine how it would ground and scour, groan and crack. Imagine stones grabbed from crags and grasped from corners, loosened, freed, tumbling, snatched back by earth in erratic ways and places. Imagine water working its way under, lubricating the lower surface, loosening its grip, sending it, slipping along. Imagine it carving, icebergs teetering off into ocean journeys, glacial offspring doomed to a life of sea melt. Imagine great chunks of chill swept into the heaving sea. Imagine it wasting away, watering down, sweating and winnowing, drifting into wet breath. Imagine the smell of drying ground. Imagine the first signs of life, green moulds, algal scum, filaments of moss, a frond of lichen. Imagine the first windblown grass seed germinating in that spring of springs. Imagine the first bird. What I hope doesn't happen as a result of climate change is that we lose these guys. Polar bear. Low angled sun gleams through claret leaves and caribou lichens pale green in the first skiff of snow. A frozen hare watches the flight of a falcon and spruce fingers point where the winds will blow. Tamarack needles flutter and flurries of snowbuntings dart over flaming jade, bronze and copperleaved willow. Photographers get set to lie, to freeze frame your world, starched ice-bleached arctic, whitewashing your rainbow. Here you lie in the forest, a snoozing sumo wrestler under trees barely able to hold up the sky so heavy with snow. That was the polar bear I saw in the woods and I'm kind of worried that there might be less and less of the ice for the polar bears to live on. I'm very motivated by forests. I work a lot on forests and I think one of the issues that we really need to not forget about in the climate change debate is the massive importance of forests as carbon sinks globally and the ability that we have and the responsibility we have in this country to restore forests as much as possible to sequester carbon. But it's actually we need to remember that about 90% of all the forest products that we use in this country are coming from other people's forests, a rustle of leaves, good books and toilet rolls, felling ancient trees. I'll read another forest poem just a reminder of that. Some are dark hearts full of secrets of enslavement. Some dry and dangerous. Some alternately fly infested and freezing. Some damp and frail. But all spirit rich. Homes to folk with leaves in their eyes and mushrooms in their pockets. Who dream of chasing animals among branching shadows. For whom the future is a tree root that presses open rocks of the past. With whom all stems intertwine. In whom all saps and bloods and rivers mingle. Under whose power a single bud becomes an eye, a wing, a soul. Becomes the whole breathing planet. And I'll finish with one thought which is probably no matter what happens will still have these guys. Midges. A column of dancing midges winds like a single mosquito. Looking up each swarm member is bodyless movement etch a sketching on the sky. Two land stand. One little 12-legged trestle table. We know so little of the world. It's grey smudges. It's inscrutable stillness. Thank you, Mandy. Can I now invite Professor Michael Nautacott to make a contribution? Thanks very much again. It's great to have so many people here this area in the morning on such an inspiring topic because thinking about the future in hopeful ways I think is potentially very inspiring and I think one of the things we need in the climate change debate is visions of how doing the right thing by Mother Earth will also be good for us as a species and the species we share our country with. So my first sense when I think about Scotland 2050 is a hopeful one. Scotland committed itself to an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in this Parliament in the 2010 Climate Change Act. We are on target to deliver the intended emissions reductions by 2020, not least because of Scotland's success in capturing wind into the national grid. I use on my little phone here an app from Noah, not so I'm Noah in the Bible, I'm Professor of Religion and Ethics but Noah is the North American Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and they're a particularly wonderful app which can show you wind, rain, storms, hurricanes, whatever's coming at you and if you look at it every day it's quite evident that Scotland is one of the windiest places on earth and this particular capital is the windiest capital on earth of any nation. So it's a huge resource for us, we have great potential as a nation in renewable power and it's one of my great regrets that the English Government under David Cameron made the really extraordinary decision to limit the capacity of Scotland to add further onshore wind power to the national grid and to the UK's targets on greenhouse gas emissions because of course wind is our most valuable and economically viable form of indigenous power. There may be a bit of gas we can frack from under the ground though I'm opposed to fracking myself but we're an incredibly crowded island 65 million people, most of them crammed into the space below the tweed and the Solway Firth and if we start fracking in areas where people live so intensely the dangers of and risk to water pollution are extremely significant. So my feeling is that wind is very much part of the future and I feel very hopeful whenever I see a wind turbine and I was very I'm very pleased to see I'm starting to see letters in the daily telegraph from the times from engineers and others saying the same sorts of things. David Cameron said in the British Parliament that people don't like wind but something like 70-80% of people are now saying when they see a wind turbine they feel hopeful. Wind turbines are about doing the right thing by mother earth and by one another because wind is now the cheapest form of power from scratch, from commissioning to delivery in the United Kingdom, not the most expensive. If we consider also the climate effects of burning other sorts of fuel so I'm very hopeful that we will have a country which will be not 80% of fossil fuels by 2050 but 100%. I hope that we'll be contributing to the net global greenhouse gas emission reductions by producing not 100% of our energy but 120% or 150% and exporting it down to possibly by that stage another nation. I hope that we'll all be in the European Union again by then as well as perhaps separate members. So that's a little bit of my hope but alongside energy we also need to look at land. Huge areas of Scotland are owned by a very small number of people. We've never had a revolution in this country and so we've never had land reform as almost all of our European neighbours have. I used to live in Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia. All of these countries had land reform after the Second World War and as a result they became some of the most successful economies on earth because land reform redistributes the assets to the ordinary people and makes the wealth of the nation. We're sitting here in Adam Smith's room, makes the wealth of the nation available to the people. Alongside wind, land is a signal and underutilised asset of this nation of ours and to address our climate responsibilities one of the things we have to do is to get an active economy going again which is sustainable, which creates jobs locally, doesn't rely on huge amounts of shipping and by plane and so on bringing for example 90% of timber products in from around the world. So another of my hopes for the future is that we start to build buildings in this country in Scotland made of Scottish materials for example engineered wood grown in Scottish forests. That would of course mean that we would need to break up the biggest states. We would need mainly to end and I would love to see it the use of large areas of upland for sport by very rich people and to vote that land again to forests as most upland is devoted in mainland Europe. I've just come back from Vermont. Many Scots went to Vermont and cut the trees down and put sheep on the land. They then went west and the trees have grown back. There is now a huge forest industry in Vermont and it's a very important part of the economy of Vermont. So I'm also hopeful about the possibility that we will really genuinely reforest Scotland in the next 40 years, but we will also need land reform much more radical than we've had thus far in order to do that. Now the third area I think that we really need to think about in terms of climate change is our diet. We know that more than a third of greenhouse gas emissions comes from the food economy. We also know that Scotland imports a huge amount of food and not only from south of the border, but from other parts of the world. I travel perhaps more than it's good for the climate, but I do a lot of research in other countries and I was recently in South Korea. They've got all kinds of problems, as you know right now, in terms of security, but because of the situation that I've been in between Japan and China and now Japan and China are North Korea, they are incredibly resilient and self-reliant people and they grow all their own food. A lot of it is grown under tunnels. Now in South Korea the tunnels are to protect the food from the heat. As a grower myself here in Scotland I have an acre of vegetable land garden in the middle of the Baklua estate over in Dumfriesshire. Obviously the issues here are protecting food from cold rabbits pigeons and various other things that we gardeners have to face up to in the countryside, but it can be done. I therefore also expect that by 2050 we will look at the environment around our cities, competing differently to how we do now, rather more like Ebenezer Howard, imagine the garden city. I would love to see the whole of the central belt covered in vegetables, vegetable growing and vegetable gardens in cycle paths between the vegetable gardens and the city so people at weekends instead of feeling the need to fly to Prague or something would get on their bicycles with their children safely not encountering vehicles on their way and go out into the gardens where the city is producing its own food and teach their children about caring for the earth. It's completely possible that vision. It's not at all a pipe dream but it could only happen if we reform our land and tax system and in particular bring back land value tax into this country. We hugely under use the greatest resource other than wind that I've just already spoken of in this country in Scotland and that is land. The Dutch have a great deal less land than we do in Scotland and far less per person. They're the second largest agricultural exporters in the world. It's absolutely amazing what they do with the land they have and Scotland could be the largest agricultural exporter in the world. We have five million people on a land area the size of England and most of it is not used for growing food. Now you might say to me oh but it's it's difficult land to use. Well they're polytunals they're not terribly beautiful but they can be made to look better but if we really devoted ourselves as a nation to becoming self-sufficient in food, in fuel and in fibre which and here that the trees are so important fibre being for clothing and construction we would I think not just have got to zero net emissions we would have created a much more just and sustainable nation filled with jobs for migrants who will need to move to Scotland by 2050 because other parts of the world by then will be uninhabitable and Scotland's climate actually is going to get better because of climate change. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. Last but not least, Sarah Knight. So hello. When I was preparing for this session, I was sitting in my favourite cafe in Stockbridge having coffee and I thought about the title of 2050 vision and I thought it's really hard to imagine day in my life in 2050 so that's 33 years time, I'll be 59 years old, I'm sprouting several grey hairs and probably really worrying about the prospect of working for an extra 30 years because my pension has been ruined and I was flicking through the news app on my phone trying to think of ideas and I thought well what might this day exactly as I'm doing look in 2050? Well first of all my coffee would be a luxury good because coffee production is going to go down by 88% due to climate change by 2050 and then I thought about this potential headlines that would be coming up on my phone and I've picked out certain headlines which are based on certain projections that are happening just now. So there's been another extreme case of flooding as headline one. This doesn't come as a shock to me as this is quite a norm around the world just now. Areas which would have before had a 1% chance of having flooding every 100 years are now having extreme floods every 10 years or so. Headline two, fisheries lose another 10 billion dollars this year. Again this doesn't come as a shock as this has been happening every year. This is affecting livelihoods especially in developing countries and threatening food security. Headline three, the global economy loses more than 3.5% of its GDP. Again I'm not shocked by this, this has been happening every year for the last 20 years leading up to 2050 and with some countries losing as much as 11% of their GDP. And the last headline which is one I'm really really optimistic about is that Scotland finally wins a sick nation's rugby. So I'm sure I don't have to sit and tell everyone here the potential bad things that are going to be happening in the situation where we don't have any behavioural change and we work as business as usual. On a more civic level which might affect Scotland quite badly, there might be a certain level of a fractured society with a lot of blame being put on those who are currently in power in 2050 which is going to be my generation. Although this seems like a very pessimistic vision, it is a potential vision that I have if we don't change the way we live just now. And it's action now that we at the 2050 climate group whom I'm talking on behalf of today are working towards achieving. We are a youth-run charity with the aim of engaging, educating and empowering the future leaders in order to develop their skills and take action on climate change now. And one of the key ways we do this is through our young leaders development programme. So this falls in really well with the theme of today as it's trying to basically carve your way through into making your own 2050 visions become a reality. And through our programme we're trying to make a social movement. So through a series of modules and engagement events, we give our young leaders the skills and knowledge in order to lead their own movements. And this could be just personal changes to their habits or going to their local supermarket to ask for them to change a certain behaviour, approaching a policymaker to ask them to make more ambitious climate change policies or in starting up your own business. And the list goes on, but it's essentially about giving them the confidence to do something they may have otherwise felt unable to do, thinking of somebody further up and workable to do or I'm too young to make a big difference. So eventually our vision is that instead of ambitious climate change action being seen as a bit radical, it's going to be seen as a new norm. And this new normal means something different to everyone, but I see it as Scotland being a fair and very forward thinking and hopefully zero carbon country. And in order to get to these future visions you have to talk more about the plans and the process of getting there. So if you look up the definition of a vision that's not being able to tell the future, it's more about being able to have the foresight in order to plan for making your own future. So a few weeks ago, before getting told about this talk, I was chatting to my dad and he's quite old. He's born in 1937 in Edinburgh during World War II and I was asking him to describe just everyday habits of everyone. And he was essentially saying that every single person's behaviour and habits completely changed because of the war effort. So whether you were directly involved in the war, say volunteering or in the local armed forces, or whether you're completely disengaged and not interested at all, your habits had to change in order to survive. And this ranged from trying to grow your own food and being really, really careful with the amount of resources you had, which has also helped through the dig for victory movement. And this made me realise that this is probably the level of mobilisation we need in order to fight against climate change. So whether you're interested in the topic or you work in the topic or you don't really care at all, your habits and your actions do need to change and they need to change now. So it does seem quite like a hefty and sometimes quite daunting thought, the level of behavioural change that we need today. But it has happened and it has happened quite recently, quite successfully in Scotland. And one example is the 5p plastic charge for plastic bags. This is very simple and very effective, with bag usage going down by 95 per cent. And maybe this might suggest that Scottish people are a little bit stingy, but it also created a very rapid change in the way people saw a consequence of their actions. So whether or not you cared about the amount of plastic in the world, you were forced to change your habits. So climate change-related behaviour, behavioural change, I believe, is very achievable. People in my generation are going to be in positions of power by 2050, so running governments and heads of businesses and things. So in order to run a low carbon and sustainable economy in country, we need to have the skills and knowledge now in order to shape that future. So I don't really have much of a vision exactly how Scotland's going to look, but more about how it's going to be run. That every decision made, whether it's governmental, personal or business, will have climate change at the forefront of the decision making. So hopefully when I'm 59 and reflecting back on my old favourite cafe in Stockbridge about this talk, I'll be reading through my news headlines and seeing more positive headlines, or at least one's not quite so dramatic as I've read it before. Although I do hope that the one about the drug be does eventually come true. Thank you. Can I thank all of our speakers, as well as making thought-provoking contributions? All of these were succinct. MSPs in the room, please note. We now move to questions. The questions can be directed at all of the panellists or individual panellists, as you wish. I'm going to take questions from the floor in a moment, but we're going to start with one of the questions that's been received via Twitter. Yeah, so this question has come in from Twitter from Thomas McEwen. What should young people's priorities be if they want to positively affect climate change in the future? Sarah, do you wish to kick off? I suppose just trying to get, I mean, it depends what they mean by priorities on this line of work, but I suppose trying to get as much opportunities potentially within this work to try and get on, you know, to have more of a decision-based role. So that can be, you know, we encourage people to ask their employers to ask if they can be on the board, for example, or to be included in decision making things. In terms of priorities, I suppose being, well, you can get in touch with our charity and we can tell them all about it. And just, you know, there's loads and loads of opportunities out there and it's very, I say it, is like for youth to be engaged in stuff, it's very important to have a really fun and quite social kind of network as well with it. So it's probably about seeking out a good support network in order to take actions as well. Professor Northcott, how important are young people in driving a response to climate change? I think they're very important. I think this is why Michael Gove tried to stop them learning about climate change in school.  And so he tried to get it off the curriculum in England and Wales. Why? And the same is happening in the United States. They're privatising schools in the United States in order to stop children being taught to care for the environment, in order to stop children being taught about climate science. So some people have got it, that if you teach children what adults are doing to the earth, it will change things eventually. It's hugely important to teach the next generation, but we have to teach them hopefully. For example, engage them in the way we run our primary and secondary schools in environmental change in the very buildings in which they're working and living. So if you just teach them bad news and don't give them ways to engage, as Sarah has also been saying, then you don't spread hope, you spread fear, and that's the last thing we want to do. We need to say, as I was trying to say in my little talk, that there is an upside to this. We can't live better with each other and the earth. We can join them up. I completely agree with what Michael Scott said. The first priority is to keep talking about it. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, discuss with everybody as much as possible. But absolutely, love the earth, find ways in which you can get that sense of pleasure from doing the right thing. I acknowledge all those little things that you do every day when you turn down the paper cup and feel good about it. We do have a roving mic, so if anyone at the back of the room wishes to ask a question, just indicate, but can I invite the first question from the audience? Gentleman at the back of the room. Hello, Michael. I'm from Creative Commons Scotland. I guess that it's been acknowledged by this event, but how important do you think that creative thinkers are in terms of bringing climate change to the fore and inspiring people to take action for a sustainable future? Mindy? I've moved through my life from my... I've got a PhD in artificial intelligence, and I used to think that there were technological answers to the problems that we face, and I reached a conclusion that although there may be technological aspects to the solutions that we need, we ultimately need to engage our hearts and our souls as well as our minds in tackling these problems. I think that it's only through having the full spectrum of society, including the creative end of the spectrum, engaged in these issues that we can really make progress. There's a wonderful book by a man called Amitav Ghosh called The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable, and he is a novelist, first and foremost, a brilliant novelist, but he wrote this book, and it's a passionate, beautifully written book, because he felt that it was very important for creative people to think about this problem and why we're not... we're doing, as he feels, so little about it. So I think it's great when we have an immaculomate of a novel called Sola a few years ago. I think it's terribly important that all aspects of the culture, and that includes religious thinkers as well, are engaged on this issue because, of course, quite all the difficulty with climate change and with accepting it is cultural. We've been trained for two, three hundred years, not least by Adam Smith, to think of the earth as a stable background for making money for wealth, for jobs, for growth, and what climate science is teaching us is it's not a stable background. It's actually in the mix with us. We are constantly interacting with this planet, and what we do is changing the planet, but this is very counterintuitive because, for hundreds of years, the culture has taught us something else, so we do need cultural change and new creative thinking across all disciplines, not only in the natural sciences and the economics and renewable energy, to think through the implications. A lot of the resistance, I think, is in the realm of culture. People feel it can't be true because the story of most people's lives has been about progress, it's been about fossil fuels, it's been about energy, it's been about economic growth, and it's brought wonderful things to most people on this planet to this point in time. As people think, well, it can't be true that things are going to get worse, surely they're just going to carry on getting better. We have to reimagine the way we think about the human project to really cope with climate change science. John Scott, MSP, has a question for us. John. Thank you, Graham. I'm interested in Professor Northcott's vision of central Scotland being covered in vegetable plots and cycle paths, and I have to declare an interest as a farmer. Given that central Scotland is 85 per cent less favoured areas, which he will know is a European designation regarding its ability to produce food in other words, a less favoured area, what does he see as the practical and cost-efficient route to achieving this, as he assumes that the generation of farmers before, of which I am one, knew absolutely nothing? Well, as you will know, farmers have been promised European Union subsidies at the present level until just 2022, both here and in England. I was speaking at an event down in England with a number of farmers on Sunday, including the NFU representatives. Of course, farmers are all extremely concerned about what's going to happen in 2022. From my perspective, I have to admit that as an economic student, as a teenager, I thought that joining Europe was a mistake because of the common agricultural policy. I was opposed to joining Europe. I'm certainly opposed to leaving it now. We've completely integrated our economy with Europe for the last 40 years, including our food economy. The fact of the matter is that, reacquiring, as we will do, either in London or Scotland—and I'm hopeful that it will be in Scotland—the power to shape food growing and the landscape more significantly in the future than we can at present, without the mediation of Brussels and the CAP, we will be able to direct subsidies far more effectively, it seems to me, to achieve both food self-sufficiency, or as I like to talk about it, food sovereignty here in Scotland, and reforesting of much more of our upland area, and conservation and preservation of sites of very special interest, including aesthetic and landscape values. I see no real conflict there. Quite a lot of the land in Scotland right now, in terms of arable land, is devoted to animal feed and to raising animals. I think another part of the issue that we may have to face up to is a huge amount of current public subsidies, as I understand it. You may probably know more about this than I do, but as I understand it, if you look at the direction of subsidies right now, quite a lot of them go towards animal feed production and animal production, rather less of them go to horticulture. It seems to me that, since we now know that the consumption of vegetables and fruit is hugely beneficial to the human population relative to the consumption of meat and dairy products, we could both reduce our health bill, increase biodiversity and increase our self-sufficiency in horticulture by redirecting the subsidy from animal production towards vegetable and fruit production. Emma Harper Thank you. I have a quick question. Sarah Boyle mentioned the 5p bag charge reduced bags by 95 per cent. What would you consider to be the next 5p bag charge equivalent that should be introduced as a deposit return? Is it paying for your to-go coffee cup? What would you suggest? Yes, tax paper cups. Disposable cups get rid of them. We don't need them. Take any measure that you can possibly make to get rid of disposable cups, please. Whether they are paper or plastic or any other material, we should be re-using. There are wonderful schemes, for example, in Germany, where whole cities are coming together to create municipal cup libraries—for want of a better word—that people can get a reusable cup on the go and then take it back to somewhere else. They are just city-wide pools of cups circulating. It particularly cups because of the paper cups and the coatings, which make them completely unrecyclable. They are a nightmare. I think that people genuinely don't really like them either. They don't like creating all of that waste. It's clear that there are some chains that don't get me started on this. I've made the point. There's probably greater resistance being expressed currently to DRS than there perhaps was to the plastic bag charge. How do we overcome that? I'm not entirely sure in terms of an answer, because in some way I don't think it should be enforced. The FIPI bag is absolutely enforced. There are reusable coffee cups, and it's become a habit of people of my age to use them all the time, but that's not enforced. It is more of a habit change rather than spreading the word and spreading the importance of it. If you enforce it, people will become a little bit resistant to it. The plastic bag thing is supposed to have a reusable coffee cup, so you have to then go and spend £10 on it. To some people, that's just a little bit—at the time—seems a bit more expensive. So if there's some way of giving one Tupperware and one free fork and one free cup to every household, then instead of plastic bins as well. We're not made of plastic. I support this Scottish Government's stated intention to put a deposit on every bottle sold in this country. I think this is absolutely essential. I often visit beaches, I love the coast, and very often when I do that I pick up a plastic bag, and I fill the plastic bag with plastic items, and you can fill dozens of them on many of our beaches. It's a tragedy. We're filling the ocean with plastic, and we've got to stop. The best way to do this is to create value in the product that's being currently thrown away. You put five or ten p on every bottle blasts, plastic and tin, and you create a resource that is then reused. Everybody's invested in it. It's not a fine. In the same way as a plastic bag is a fine, but it will encourage recycling of that product much more than we are seeing at the moment. Another question from Twitter. Yeah, it's actually from Facebook, from somebody called Jeff W Justice, and he's asking Maggie Haggith, Mandy Haggith. As a writer, how do you feel that climate change will change language itself and the art of language? Wow, what an interesting question. That's a really difficult question. Well, at the moment, I think one of the things that is quite frightening about the whole climate change debate is the ugliness of a lot of the language that is used. There's an awful lot of nasty, long-word jargon terms like mitigation and stuff that are kind of off-putting. I would hope that we'll move through that to a phase where we start inventing new and more fun language to get at the feel-good side of making the changes that are making the world better. That's one thing. I guess that we're going to need all sorts of new terms for the kind of landscapes that used to be inhabited and become flooded and so forth. I'm not sure that that's a very good answer to the question, but it's an interesting question. Thank you. Thank you. I'll ponder it. Can I turn this to the audience? Richard Dixon at the back. Thanks very much. I'm from Friends of the Earth Scotland. We had some very interesting announcements in the programme for government two weeks ago, so some big policies, which will make a difference on climate emissions. That's great. A consultation finishes this week on what new climate targets we should set, and that's not so promising, so they're not as ambitious as they should be in terms of the Paris agreement. Graham Day's committee will have quite a job in strengthening those, but I wanted to ask the panel from your 2050 seat. What do you want to look back on and remember Scotland for? What was Scotland's contribution to global efforts on climate change? I think that we're going that way anyway, but for Scotland to be the very first country to make a really vast movement in terms of climate change, we are leading the way in certain policies and the way we live in things. It's maybe to potentially be the first country to get a certain carbon reduction. As you were saying, the new climate change bill isn't necessarily as ambitious as it should be, but that doesn't mean that we're not necessarily going to achieve more ambitious targets. I see that Scotland being one of the first countries to do something fun and really forward thinking. The UK climate change committee has indicated that it would be happy with the target that the Scottish Government is setting. What makes you say that we need to go further? Is it realistic to go further, Professor? I think that it is realistic, but the trouble is that, when you say the word realistic, it means money. If you look at the principal areas where emissions are emanating from in the Scottish economy, it's still the housing stock and offices, mainly heating. We don't need so much cooling here. It's a vehicular transportation, livestock. It does seem to me that we could set ourselves a target of 100 per cent zero emissions by 2050. We might be one of the first nations, I think, globally to achieve that. We're only going to do that with more ambition than perhaps we have shown thus far. Having said that, I think that the 2010 act was hugely ambitious. It was achieved that target in part because so many people from across Scotland came to this Parliament and said they wanted a more ambitious act than was originally proposed. I think that one of Scotland's contributions is to show that having a devolved Parliament and devolving energy and climate policy makes possible a more ambitious target. It shows democracy works when we're talking about care for the earth. I think that it's realistic. For me, my great concern about the way we approach this or have tended to approach this in the UK as a whole is that we use energy pricing to discourage the use of energy as a way of reducing emissions alongside putting new kinds of energy into the grid and so on. What this does, of course, is to punish the poorest, most of whom are living in houses that don't belong to them. Private landlords, for example, have very few duties to ensure those houses are well insulated because currently we don't impose those sorts of duties significantly on private landlords. I think that that's my understanding up to now. I think that we need urgently, I think, to address the state of the nation's housing stock more aptly than even we have been doing thus far. That would link what I think is another part of Scotland's contribution to the global ethics of climate change, which is climate justice and reducing emissions. If the way we go about pricing energy forces people in the poorest communities to make choices every day between heating their houses and going out and buying food, then we haven't got climate justice in Scotland. But Sarah referenced earlier the possibility that asking people to purchase a reusable coffee cup might be problematic. If one accepts that, wouldn't there be far greater resistance, if one of the measures required to achieve the ambitions that Friends of the Earth are looking for around emissions, was that everyone had to replace their central heating boilers, for example? It seems to me that most homeowners, given the right kind of access to finance and having equity in their homes, won't find that difficult. Therefore, I don't think that is a huge problem. Low-income people do not buy boilers. They have boilers bought for them, and they are normally extremely inefficient because they are heating inefficient building stock. I don't think that the boiler change issue is really a justice issue. I think that the problem is how we regulate the housing stock, particularly the rental housing stock in Scotland. I agree with a lot of what Michael Scott said about climate justice. We need to look back on a Scotland that treated climate change not just as an environmental issue, but also as a social and economic issue. It has become the first country that demonstrates that climate-friendly energy production is an economic boon to the country and manages it in that way. The social justice issues not only within our own society but globally are taken into account. The people who are adversely affected, whether they are on low-lying islands or in the Sunderbands being flooded or whether they are up in the Arctic, take responsibility for the historical impact of our emissions over the past industrial revolution. It would be great if people could look back and say that there was a generation who understood the concept of resilience and actively tried to manage society to be more resilient in the face of the changes that are inevitable and to help the rest of the world to be resilient in that way. We can do a lot in terms of thinking only about mitigation measures. Ultimately, there are billions of people in the world for whom the historical impact of the emissions that we have already put out is going to cause and are already causing disasters that we need to take responsibility for and help other people to become resilient. We have another question from Twitter from Jerry McGee. Can Scotland operate in the oil and gas sector and still do our bit for climate change? I will be careful about what I say because this is obviously going on Facebook. From the people who I spoke to in the oil and gas industry, they want to. It is a lot of people's jobs and livelihood. It brings a lot of money for Scotland, but I do not think that it is about running the oil companies as they are. It is about making them an oil energy company. Just now, the oil and renewables are separate, whereas they should come together. There is a lot of transferable skills and engineers who go down the rigs and win farms. It is about not going against them, but allowing those companies. There is a lot of money there that we could utilise for our benefit for renewable energy. Do you see a transition period moving away from oil and gas? Yes. Professor. I have to confess that my father worked for Shell for many years and he paid my school fees. I always feel I need to own up to that in public when I am talking about climate change. I know a little bit from the insight about the oil and gas industry. One thing that I do remember clearly from conversations around the family dining table about oil is the price of oil and the close relationship between the price of oil and the viability of any oil fields. The marginal cost, so that is the cost of getting a barrel of oil out of the ground in Saudi Arabia, I am told, is about $5. The marginal cost of getting a barrel of oil out of the North Sea, even in terms of the infrastructure needed to achieve that, and the energy as well, the energy cost, is over $50. Currently, as we all know, there isn't a huge case for new exploration in the North Sea. That is a sad thing for the North East of Scotland, because the economy of the North East of Scotland is hugely dependent on my industry, but the North East of Scotland is changing and will continue to change. The other issue, it seems to me, is that there is a problem with economies that become over-dependent on one resource, one primary commodity. There is an argument that Scotland's economy has up to now been rather skewed by being quite dependent upon oil and gas. It is very notable that the famous white paper, which made the case for independence before the Scottish referendum, whose part of the case was based upon the oil and gas industry and that resource. Of course, Alex Salmond is himself a believer and has something of a background in oil economics. I do not think that that is the future of Scotland. As I said to you already, I think that the most valuable assets of Scotland are its people, its land, its wind, its coastline, its beauty. It is brilliant ideas and creativity of this nation and its democracy, and its commitment to social justice. I do not think that oil and gas is the future of Scotland. I think that it is the past. That is a controversial view, but that is my view. If we just take the easy oil that is left on the planet, and much of that is in Saudi Arabia and there is quite a lot still in Iraq, if we just take out the easy oil, we are still looking at two, three degrees of climate change. Why would we want to go after the difficult oil? Saudi Arabia is pumping fast because it knows in the future that oil price will be devalued by the whole issue of the unburnability of oil, which of course Mark Carney here on the United Kingdom has already highlighted as a problem for the UK stock exchange. I am afraid that the oil and gas industry will continue to decline, particularly if the Saudis keep pumping as they are, which they show that they are trying to change that. Mandy? No. Okay, but the chart's chart. Keep it in the ground. Okay, thank you. Put your job and go and work on renewables. Okay, Victoria, many other questions from? Yes, so from Alan Clark. Food buying needs to change. No more strawberries from Argentina in December. Why is this encouraged rather than discouraged? Mandy, do you want to go first? Yes, and I'm looking very guiltily at the piece of water that's melon on my plate. Very good point, I agree.


Hello, good afternoon and thank you very much indeed for joining us at today's lunchtime lecture. Today we're having a Data as Culture lunchtime lecture. Data as Culture is the contemporary art programme for the Open Data Institute. I'm Hannah Redler and I'm the Associate Curator in Residence and I run the programme with Julie Freeman, who's an artist and the art associate. But we're really delighted to invite Giles Lane from Poboskis. We've known and collaborated with Giles for a very, very long time, way beyond the point where me or Julie started working with the Open Data Institute. And Giles is an artist who's been exploring the impact of digital technologies, network technologies, participatory practice and all manner of intersecting things for a very long time through his organisation Poboskis. The project I've invited him to speak to us about today is a project that completely changed my perception of what data is and might be and what it might mean to individuals. But I'm not going to give the game away. I hope that you'll join me in warmly welcoming Giles Lane. Thank you Hannah. Thank you very much for inviting me and it's very nice to see you all here. I'm going to talk today about a concept that I call data manifestation and in particular how I believe it can add a really significant dimension to the way we make meaning from data and I specifically mean digital data, digital data sets. As Hannah said, I run an organisation called Poboskis which is a non-profit artist led creative studios, how we've described it for quite some time. Essentially that means we're not really like other arts organisations and we're not really a consultancy and we're not really an agency with a little sort of a smersh of all of these different things. We have, over the last 22 years, since we founded, worked in a number of different disciplines. We've done an awful lot of collaborative work across different sectors whether collaborating with government, with lots and lots of different universities and different disciplines within academic fields. But also we do a lot of work at the community level, often bridging right the way across from highly localised and specific communities right up to larger entities like institutions, industries and governments. So I'm going to talk today, as I said, about data manifestation and just to give you a little background to this, it kind of emerged out of a long series of projects exploring the way that we use and conceive of emerging digital technologies and in specific, I'm referring to network technologies as part of that, in social life. So back in 2002, 2003, we set up a project called Urban Tapestries which was a very early attempt to think what the addition of geographic data to what we think of as content, so films, videos, text, photographs, how that would change the way that we would inhabit urban space in particular. That particular project, we built our own system, we collaborated with the Ordnance Survey to use a high-level mapping layer and we began to experiment with the very, very first smartphones which predated iPhones and what have you by about five years. And from that, we wanted to explore what actually happens when people are able to interact in a kind of live and dynamic way with the urban environment to be able to layer information and also access information that is there behind the scenes. So we did some experiments beyond that initial project. So over five years between 2004 and 2009, we had a research programme called Social Tapestries which expanded beyond the original project and took us into working with specific communities, housing communities, communities around public spaces. And we began to experiment with different forms of interaction with the environment. One of the projects we did quite early on was with the artist and engineer Natalie Jeremy Jenco and we had originally, back in 2001, commissioned her to produce a project she called Feral Robots and we adapted that and added it into the Urban Tapestries platform that we had created and we looked at what could people do if they were able to sense in their own environment different kinds of pollutants and then add that to the kinds of data that the national statistics or other local authorities could provide at a highly localised level and then add to that the local knowledge that people who lived in the area would be able to overlay. So we were kind of very much interested in this idea of data, both data created but also data sensed. And from that we began to kind of experiment with, at those days there wasn't really any open urban data. Essentially we were scraping PDF files on the national statistics website to get ward level and below data to add into these kinds of things. We did another project about a year or two later in 2007 called SNOUT where we created carnival costumes that had sensors but also they had displays on them as well and we did a sort of a mock carnival through the streets of Shoreditch engaging with thinking about what we could detect on the street but also relating that to community forums. There's a lot of community forums where people particularly in built up urban areas are concerned about the impact of pollution. Often these are in the poorest districts where there's all kinds of deprivation. So we were interested in what can we do, how can we explore these things, how can we make sense of the world around us. As we were doing these things, often what we find with digital technologies is that the experiences themselves are quite ephemeral. So we go along and we take part in a festival, we take part in some interactive element and the interaction is very momentary and you come away with it and you sort of have a memory of it but it's very hard to attack. We did some collaborations with some other research organisations and one of the things we noticed was where people are building interactive digital systems, for instance in zoos and museums, people would sort of wander around, they would collect things but nobody ever went back to the highly personalised web pages or websites of their visit that were created. So we thought this was kind of interesting and we started to think about this and in our own projects which involved digital interactions we started to make things. This is probably 2008, 2009. We did a project called Sensory Threads where we again designed a wearable set of sensors that a group of people went out and the sensors were sensitive to each other and as they went through the different sensors that each of the four people had detected different things about the urban environment and then relayed that to a piece of software which generated a live audio track. That was also uploaded to another system and that system was then replayed in a different format in an environment, a museum exhibition setting environment. One of the things we found was that the experience was interesting and people liked the sound but they wanted something more tangible. So as part of that we built a little printer that printed out a representation, a visualisation of their journey and the sense of readings that they encountered. We found this really simple little thing helped people recapture and remember their experience in a much more tangible way. From this we began thinking about what can we do more? How can we push this further? How can we take this idea of the tangible souvenir of an ephemeral digital experience and turn it into something much more profound? How can we start to think about the different data sets that we're beginning to interact with in a more profound way? That led me to think about the relationship we have to the world as individuals, as human beings. So the question that I would pose as I sort of slowly move into the project I'm going to focus on is how do we know? How do we know what we know? And how do we make meaning from what we know? And the answer to this is really quite simple. It's about the interaction of our senses with the various stimuli that come into them from the external world and how this is processed by our consciousness and then woven together with our memories and our emotions. This is what roots us to the world. It also helps us to make meaning of everything that we experience. So we began to think, could we begin to apply this to some of the data sets that we were interacting with? Could we perhaps investigate data in new ways? Not just visually as most data is represented but with all the senses that the human body has. So what I'd like to say about this concept of the human sensorium as separate to the way that we normally think of making sense of information is that it has a high complexity. It's a system of extremely high complexity and entanglement. If you think about these kinds of issues you think about the way that our different senses all interact with each other. They're not separate systems, they're part of a whole. It's very difficult to disentangle them and I think this is a key kind of concept. What it does that I think is extremely profound and has really interesting implications for our contemporary society and the way in which data driven systems based on algorithms are increasingly coming to make decisions for us is that this system of the human sensorium produces judgments that are based on multiple factors and also multiple dimensions that all work together. This is very, very different from the kind of way computer models that take data in from one and spit out a decision at the other end. I think it's qualitatively different. So, just as an example of that, think about... think about eating something. Think about eating something and you find it delicious. What is it that makes it delicious? Is it just the taste? It's also the smell, it might be the texture.  It might be the way it feels in your mouth. Sometimes it might evoke a memory or it might produce an emotion. Occasionally, to add in a little bit of proust, it might even induce a momentary sense of disruption of your balance. This can then of course lead to all kinds of things which have nothing to do with the data. This is part of the human condition. My sense is, I don't think we are anywhere near the kinds of systems, computer systems, algorithms that could replicate that kind of complexity. And I think as long as we are designing systems which produce decisions for us that are not based on these kind of complex, entangled human judgment, we're really doing ourselves a disservice. So, there's another aspect to this which I think is also worth thinking about. And coming to this place and this space from the frame of art and being an artist, I would say that art and aesthetics are a very critical way to begin to think about this, this form of complexity. So for instance, when you encounter a work of art, it's the work itself, it's the experience of the work itself, sorry, that determines your aesthetic reaction to that work. Now that reaction, it could be one of awe, it could be one of delight, it could be revulsion or even indifference, but it is the encounter that determines your aesthetic experience. This is, of course, driven by very many complex factors as well. So, materials of the work, the lighting, colour, scale, your own memory, and your emotions. This is all part of the aesthetic experience. And there can be no right or wrong aesthetic experience, there's just difference. And in the realm of art history, the discussion around aesthetics is about the different qualities that different people perceive. So, there's no right, there's no wrong. I think this is a really important framing that we need to think about in terms of the way that we use data and the way that we understand data as well. From that, one of the things my sort of thesis is that much of the data that we're currently capturing through digital systems that's recorded, that's analysed, and then is used to make in inferential decision-making systems, it's principally driven from a visual perspective. So if you think about the spreadsheets, the programming, every way that the systems designers, the systems programmers are thinking about it is done from a visual interface. And we're constantly talking about visualising data, but we don't have many other ways of interacting with that data. You know, spreadsheets, graphs, animations, these are all the ways we're most familiar of thinking about analysing the data that are coming in. There are a few cases of sonic representations, and there have been passingly few, but there have been some rare examples of haptic interfaces. But on the whole, pretty much everything is based on a visual relationship. But of course, not all of our experiences are visual. And my proposition is that, as I said earlier, if we fail to encompass a more rounded, more inclusive set of the whole human sensorium, then we're really missing a great deal of potential in meaning-making. So, to dive in a bit further. Back in 2012, we were commissioned as part of a public art programme in Cambridge to collaborate with some scientists at Philips who have a small research lab in the Science Centre, the Science Park. We were asked by the scientists at Philips as part of this collaboration to think about a particular problem that we were concerned about. Philips is a big player in telehealth. Telehealth is a system or a set of platforms and technologies that are about embedding the homes of people with very serious illnesses with different kinds of sensors, relaying that information live to medical professionals and creating an interactive interface between them. So they were very heavily involved in this middleware area. And as of interest, they started to think about what would happen if we took some of those elements and applied them to people who aren't seriously ill, people who think of themselves as sort of nominally healthy, so probably all of us in this room. And there had been a burgeoning kind of industry growing up in the last couple of years before that. Obviously Fitbit, FuelBand, these different kinds of health tracking devices. But what we were kind of made privy to at that very beginning of 2012 and these statistics weren't generally known at the time, but something like between, I think, I'll try and remember the statistics, but essentially something in the order of 90% of all of the devices went silent after about a month. So these, expensive toys that people were buying, usually at Christmas and birthdays as people want to work off the little gup that they've acquired over the festive season.  This is well known with early technologies. But they were thinking, well, this is a real issue because if the personalised tools for gathering the data aren't engaging ordinary people, where is the possibility of any kind of future health benefit from actually gathering data about ourselves? So we began to think about this from the perspective of a kind of an artistic intervention. And our kind of first feeling about it was there's something really obvious here. There's something really obvious about what's going on, which is that how does a graph relate to the story of my life? If I'm looking at a graph every day, how do I connect to that? And I couldn't personally make any kind of connection to it. So we started to think about how do people mark change? How do they mark difference? How do they create mnemonic triggers for themselves that have meaning? And this is often done with objects. I mean, we're a highly tactile, material-based species. We like things. Just looking at the room here, as I always do when I give these talks, everybody is wearing something different. And you're wearing those things because you like the material, you like the feel of it on your skin, you like the way it looks. These are very different things to thinking about an abstract visualisation of the self. Humans are not, in many ways, always concerned with the abstract. We like things. We like stuff. So we began to think about different ways that we could mark the relationship that we have to the data that we might be collecting about our own lives and how we could begin to build a different kind of relationship to that since it was very, very clear that looking at a graph of how many steps you've walked or what your heartbeat was on a phone or a laptop simply wasn't attractive to people. So, as I've said, we saw this as being about the narrative of the self. How do you erupt data into the narrative of the self such that it has a kind of a tactility and a stickiness or a glue to it that is actually going to engage people with thinking about the relationship between what they do and where they want to be? So we began to look at the different things that people have, wedding rings, jewellery. But another thing we found is that there are an awful lot of people who have very, what appear to be quite random objects that hold significance and meaning for them. One of the classic ones I found was a pebble from a beach. I've met an awful number of men of a certain age who quite often, not every day, but perhaps on a regular basis carry a pebble on a beach and it's usually something to do with teaching a child swimming. But it acts as a marker and it takes them back to that place and it connects them to the narrative of who they are and who they want to be, who they think they are. So we began to think about how could we replicate that kind of level of mnemonic trigger, that level of meaning that people inject into a thing and carry around with them. And what we did was we built a series of simple data loggers that connected to a range of different sensors all off the shelf components. We collected, just within the team in the studio, it's about three or four people, we just collected a range of different data patterns over a week. Some of them were digital data, some of them were observed data as well. Step count was one, pulse rate, sleep patterns, blood pressure and other kinds of stress factors. And then we also mapped things like journey times for work or travelling to work. And then we began to think about how we could fold them all together and first of present that data in a way that it can interact with itself. So how we could begin to turn that into something that would create a tangible outcome at the end. So my colleague, Stefan Coopers, developed an algorithm that we could use. And we began thinking about how we would be able to flow a range of different data types into an algorithmic model and then from that generate some kind of shape in three dimensions. At that time we were thinking very much around 3D printing and access to 3D printers. So this was also partly thinking about a model for what might happen say 10 or 15 years into the future. And in the same way that the desktop publishing revolution of the late 1980s eventually fed through to the fact almost everybody has an inkjet printer at home or access to one very quickly. I think things like 3D printers are quite likely to be extremely accessible within 10 to 15 years. So we got a little stuck around thinking about the form that this 3D printed object derived from digital data would take and we began to look to nature for inspiration. And at that moment we realised that the maths and the geometries of shells would offer us an extraordinary complex range of expression of data in a 3D format. So what I'm now going to show is just a few of the examples that we generated from this very early project. So we collected, I'm trying to remember how many shells we did. I think we printed over 50 shells or generated over 50 shell models. Initially it all printed in standard sort of 3D printed in standard laser centred nylon. And then over time we selected a number of them and explored working in different materials. So these ones, this is silver. This one's been printed in glazed ceramic. There's one in glass and there's a couple in various different polymers. And we were interested also in the nature of scale. The scale of an object, how big does it have to be or how small does it have to be to have meaning and what does the scale or the size of the object do in terms of its affordance as a meaning-making object. And then also the different qualities of materials. So all these things have a very different feeling to them and they make us think and respond and reflect to the object in different ways. What I'm going to do beyond this is actually let me just move to the next one. So you can see images of one of the shells, in fact this one here that was printed in silver. So you can see along the z-axis is the average pulse. This was I think about a week's worth of data. I think this is even my data. The length of the shell is determined by the average pulse rate of my heart. The surface pattern scaling, so the depth of the ridges on the surface is determined by the quality and length of sleep. And then here you can see the growth segments is controlled by the number of steps. So again how much I did or didn't walk over a week would affect that. We did some measures of anxiety to think about growth disturbances. So whether or not it feels... Of course there's another element to this which is printing in slightly different materials gives you different surface resolutions. So the silver tends to be smoother but if you printed it in say a more... a material where you can have greater resolution you'd see more difference there. And finally we also did some measuring of air pollution. And this affects the scaling and the length of disturbances. Yes. We did a... We used a... Yeah. Yeah, a sweat. The name of the sensors has just gone out of my... Yes. GSV, Galvanic Skin Response. Yeah, so we used that to kind of take a measure of anxiety. I mean the point was we were using off the shelf things rather than looking at highly customized sensors. And that's one of the ways that we often work is to look at what's available and work rather than get too detailed and access things which are too far from the ordinary public. Essentially most of what we do is about inspiring other people to kind of replicate our work and build on it. Yes. Is there any extra environmental data? Did you only do the pollution or did you like to other... other environmental data like temperature, humidity? Not for this one, not for this one. Yeah, sure. So for this particular project we didn't... we didn't test other... we only had a small range of sensors which are the ones I mentioned before, sleep, pattern, GSV. But none of the others. I'll just go through the next bit. So what I'm going to talk about is some work we've done more recently with Birkbeck College. We've been collaborating with a colleague of mine and collaborator for many years, Professor George Roussos. And George is one of the academics leading a research project into Parkinson's disease and they're designing a very simple way for people with Parkinson's to collect information about their experience of Parkinson's. And Stefan who designed the algorithms for these is currently doing a PhD there so we've been applying some of the work we did before with this particular project. So this project is called Cloud UDPRS if you want to go and look it up. And as I said it's about mapping the wide variation of symptoms that people who have Parkinson's experience. If you don't know Parkinson's is a disease which encompasses a high variability of symptoms and you'd think this ought to imply a high personalisation of medical care and the management regimes for their illness. But, and this is the key thing, care management is determined upon a scale called the universal Parkinson's disease rating scale. This is derived from around about 70 different factors of motor performance against which an individual Parkinson's patient is classified against. Now these factors themselves are collapsed into a single summary statistic so you know a 1 to 100 number and this is used to then assign treatment for patients according to where they lie on the scale. Now this can be a very effective mechanism to communicate the multiple dimensions of Parkinson's disease as a linear scale of progression. So obviously people near a 100 have got a much higher incidence of Parkinson's symptoms and people lower down have got a lower incidence. But because of the enormous variation it's common for people with very very different symptoms to score similarly on the scale and yet they require very different treatment and care. Now one of the things that we've been looking at in a particular way of allying data manifestation with the Birkbeck's working kind of analysing the rating scale is to think about how important it could be in the future for people to express the uniqueness of an individual's experience of a very complex illness like Parkinson's. It would be very important for the individual in terms of personal dignity but also it would be extremely useful as a tool to convey the wide variations in an easily appreciable manner to policy makers. So this is one of the reasons where we think it's more than just kind of interesting pretty stuff. It actually could have a really direct function. So what I'm going to show you here I'm afraid the image isn't terribly good but I've got a few others. What I'm going to show you here is four shells that we generated about three months ago. From four individuals who have taken part in this trial and contributed their data to this and what these four shells do is they show you just taking three data sources they show the extreme variability on people who I think from my understanding are relatively similar on the UDPRS scale. I believe so. Something like that, it would be something like that. I don't have that information because that would be too much data for me to have because this is obviously personal by data. But the relationships you can see I've got the four examples printed at a slightly larger scale here and by all means when we finish come up and have a feel. Essentially what we did was we mapped the tremor in left hand to the length of the shell spiral so long length or compressed. The overall growth of the shell i.e. its volume is related or mapped to their left leg agility and one of the other tests which is called two target finger tapping again on the left hand side with left hand side data for this particular trial this is mapped to the frequency of the ridges on the outside of the shells. So you can begin to see for people who are scoring similarly on the scale that's going to assign them treatment there's actually high variability in the difference of their experience. You think that's just three out of 70 different factors that could be analysed in this way. So we can begin to add many many more data sets into this and add increasing complexity to the growth patterns of the shells things like the number and increment of rotations ripples in the curve and the sweep twists additional twists could be used and then we can also begin to look at adding additional geometric entities onto the shell surface so shell surface deformation could also be driven by additional data sets that could be bumps, nodules, spines those kinds of things. As I said also we only dealt with some three data sources from the left hand side of a patient but because there is a significant difference between the left and right hand side of the body we could begin in future to think about quoting what you might think of as a clam shell so two shells together to look at the difference between say what a patient experiences on their left and on their right hand side So with just three things we've been able to demonstrate a really high differentiation and individuation between four different people So as I said you know the thing to think is well how useful is this what can we really do with this kind of technique My feeling is we're living at a time where there is so much data we're swimming in ever increasing amounts of data from all different sources whether it's automatic sensing data from systems and products and services around us to the data we're generating from our activities and our bodies How do we make sense of this we're constantly being told that it's overwhelming us but is that because we're mainly using a very very narrow band of our sensory capabilities to actually try to make sense of this stuff and if we begin to expand it out we can look at other ways of stimulating the senses there's at least 11 major senses that the average human being has sometimes people think of that up to 19 and I heard as much as 28 but if we begin to think about how we can use a much more complex arrangement of these senses then I think there's an enormous amount of potential in rethinking what data is what it means to us and how we can begin to make sense of it in the future I'll stop for that Hello Hello Great presentation Giles I wasn't quite clear at the end when you were talking about the final thing you were talking about with the four shells that you degenerated Do those Would those have any function or any role in the medical process in terms of like say the doctors like supposing each patient had a shell and the doctor picked up the shell for the patient that was like sitting in front of them in their consulting office and sort of could get a kind of idea from the shell of that the sort of base condition of their patient Are you thinking of some role like that that could be directly used for? One of the difficulties that a lot of people for instance with Parkinson's face when they say or someone says I've got Parkinson's what does that mean and what does it mean to other people so having a way one of the things we've found is people having something they can actually show and say well my experience of this disease feels like this and it's qualitatively different to what another person with Parkinson's might feel so there's that element the ability to communicate some sense of what the feeling of a condition is there's another aspect to that again that we would like to look at but it's quite tricky which would be is there stuff being collected in the data that because we're looking at it only from a visual sense in terms of the graph and the pattern of visualising the data collected from somebody with an illness are there patterns that we're missing because we're only looking at it from a visual perspective so this is one of the questions that we would like to ask in a future project exploring with clinicians to think about might there be ways to perceive different patterns because if we're only looking at data on a screen perhaps there are things we're missing it's very hard to tell then again you've also got to be thinking about what you're collecting in the first place but yes there's another aspect also to the issue in terms of having something that you could take to a physician and have a discussion with them about your condition so I mean we were imagining excuse me I'm going to sneeze in a minute excuse me we were imagining that you might produce these every month or every three months essentially curate an exhibition of your experience whatever it was whether it was just your general health or something more specific and that could then be you'd be able to over time see the changes actually made manifest in an object so that becomes a way of thinking about how the long term patterns which are very hard for us to perceive particularly with digital technologies it's all about the now moment and the speed of progression of things we don't have very many digital technologies that are particularly good at showing long term patterns or revealing long term patterns though I don't see why we couldn't actually deliver that but having something which you could look to over a period of time could be a very interesting way of thinking about the relationship between yourself and your experience there's one other little aspect that I'm going to mention beyond that which we began to think about as we began exploring this idea we began to talk about this idea and present it I presented this at a data ethics symposium at the Alan Turing Institute a few months ago there were quite a few cyber security people there and people involved in medical ethics and one of the things that people got very excited about is this idea that you could carry highly sensitive medical data around with you in a form that nobody else would understand other than you and a physician who you would be able to have a discussion with to interpret the object so we're talking about this idea of data veiling that you could veil you could carry your information with you in a fairly secure format because it would be almost impossible to reverse engineer back to the original data that generated any of these objects and that could be another kind of profound way of changing our relationship to data I just wanted to because you're doing something that I'm very fascinated with biofeedback with how we relate to our environment and how we relate to ourselves so I'm wondering if there's any scope would there be any scope with using that data as a live feedback to the body of the patient so I mean if my hand is trembling I'm realising for a lot of Parkinson people we actually not realise that it's trembling they have a way of getting a feedback from that from that data that goes your hand is trembling be aware of it I mean not with this because this is a slow process because obviously we have to collect the data first then we have to clean the data and then it has to be fed through into the this project is called Lifestream so the Lifestreams process so it's not a dynamic thing it's more about in a sense creating a snapshot of a period of time and often this is data that's collected over a week or a month what you might like to do is look at the project which is called Cloud UDPRS and I think it's UDPRS.net but we can sort out the link because they've developed Buckbeck and their partners have developed a smartphone app which I think it does not quite 20 of the factors so we're using data from that so you can test yourself and that's where the data has been derived from for this set of shells alright so you use that app to collect the data and that's an experimental app to actually give people with Parkinson's the ability to measure themselves along some I think slightly less than 20 of the 70 main factors used in the rating scale alright that's great thank you you're welcome are there any other questions for Giles? well on here no you said at one point about when people are using Fitbits and stuff like that there's all this data being gathered but people don't often return to the place to look at their data and I think it made me consider why a lot of those organisations have failed on that point and often those big those devices are made because they want to cull vast amounts of data from the big population to use either in medical research or in social to understand how we work and what to sell us and so I think that maybe that's why that gap they're not actually interested in us improving our own health perhaps you're right when back in 2012 when we started this project when we were told unofficially that I think around about 90% of devices after a short time like a month or so were basically going offline the first question was how do they know and the obvious thing was the devices reported back to the manufacturers now they didn't reveal this till 2013 halfway through the year these devices have already been on the market for a couple of years so essentially if you bought a Fitbit or any of those kinds of devices they were reporting back to the manufacturers your data but they didn't bother to tell anybody that they were doing this and I think as you say that throws up enormous questions around why the devices were being made for whom, for whose benefit and again I think it presents real issues in terms of thinking well are we getting the devices we really want or are really useful to us or are we actually sleepwalking into essentially being producers of data for somebody else's benefit and essentially I think by one of the roles of artists is often to challenge and question this thing I mean we're often at the forefront of kind of hacking together and building things that don't really do what they're intended to do and a phrase that I rather like in this is creative misuse I like to think that what we often we're doing is we look at the the technologies, the tools that are being provided you know they're being made and manufactured because someone wants to make a profit somewhere and that's not necessarily a bad thing that's just an observation of the world around us people that's how our world operates but I think we've got to question these things all the time and there is room and space in our society to challenge and to play with these things and to disrupt the flows that otherwise I think begin to really hem people in and tramle us in very tight ways so for me this isn't really about creating products that people would sell I mean lots of people say oh I'd love to have a shell it would be so nice but actually that's not really the point the point is to think about how do we expand our senses how do we explore the range of our capabilities and our capacities to interact with the world interact with the systems that we're creating in the world and feel that we have agency at the end of the day all the work I'm interested about is about feeling empowered it's about feeling you have agency and that you're not locked into somebody else's system this is of course extremely appropriate given our current situation socially and politically but I think this is the role that artists offer not all artists but people who work in this kind of way this is still a visual representation of data it's a tactile one as well you can come and feel them can you give some idea of what order of... in which order, which other senses could you use and which one would be the next ones to try well if you think about the way that we interact with the world everything is, if you can see everything is visual there's very little that is entirely invisible there are some things obviously smell is something that we don't tend to see but one of the aspects about a three-dimensional object is we don't just feel it and we don't just look at it we also have a spatio perceptual relationship to it so that's to do with our kinetic sense and our balance sense of balance and proprioception which is the relationship we have to things around us which tell us where we are in the world so all of these things no matter how big or small they are once they become an object they operate on multiple sensory levels in a way that a visualisation on a screen simply doesn't you don't have a spatial relationship to the data on a screen you're not able to use your sense of proprioception you can't really use... you can't have a tactile relationship to the data if it's represented on a screen these are all the ways in which I think this does something quite qualitatively different there are a few other people over the years who have experimented with smell and combining different chemicals to produce smells which create a sensory environment that you can relate to different forms of information I think somebody even produced a smell generator quite recently which could be hooked up to different data sets I can't remember the name of the project off hand but I think these are beginning to be ways in which we can think of... what would it be like to be able to move through an environment perhaps where it might be a room that we decide to fill with different capabilities so you change for instance air pressure years ago I did a project where we were trying to... it was about abnormal... the difference between normal and abnormal brain development and we were trying to give people who were able-bodied a sense of what it might be like to have their senses disrupted so we had hot and cold zones we had quadrophonic sound which changed your sense of... and we also put the floor on a slant so you moved into an environment where your normal capacity and it was dark that was the other thing so you couldn't really see and there was a range of different ways that we disrupted people's senses interestingly enough an awful lot of people found it a really comforting environment to be in which was the opposite of what we anticipated but I think if you can begin to... think about the complexity of the way our bodies are able to interpret enormous amounts of stimuli coming in from the outside it gives us an incredibly rich way of thinking about if we're overwhelmed with data then perhaps we just need to put the data into another form that we can interact with it on a much more complex way and not be afraid of having to collapse everything down into what we call summary statistics On that note Giles, thank you very much indeed Thank you everyone


Our system of writing numbers is base 10 and positional. It's base 10 because each named unit, 1, 10, 100,000, and so on, is 10 times the magnitude of the proceeding, and positional because the value of a symbol is based on its location within the written number. A workable positional system requires a symbol indicating the absence of an order of magnitude. In other words, a symbol for zero. One problem with tracing the early history of our system is that there are two different zero symbols. The first is used to indicate the absence of a quantity. And in the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy used an open circle to indicate such absences, but Ptolemy's number system was not positional. Now, our modern zero symbol first appeared in the work of Pengala in 150 BC. But again, in Pengala's work, the symbol, which he refers to as sunya or void, is used as a marker without any numerical value. So when did our positional zero emerge? To answer that, it helps to consider a key problem before the invention of printing. How do you communicate an idea? One solution, poetry. So I'm going to mangle the Sanskrit pronunciation here, so bear with me. In Ptolemy, the Yavanajataka of Svujitvaja used an object numeral system to express numbers. In this system, a numerical amount was represented by an object that evoked the amount. For example, moon could mean one since there's one moon. Seriously?  That's no moon. Well, okay, earth also could mean one. Eyes could mean two since most people have two eyes. Lim could mean six since the six parts of the Vedas are referred to as limbs. Teeth could mean 32 and so on. The value of a symbol depended on its place in the phrase with each position having ten times the value of the proceeding. For example, we might determine the value moon, eye, limb, moon. So we should read this as follows. Moon is one. Eye is two. But since it's in the second place, its value is ten times as great, so it represents twenty. Lim, remember, there are six limbs of the Vedas, that's six. But since it's a third word, it's ten times ten, a hundred times as great, six hundred. And again, moon is one. But as the fourth word, it's a thousand times as great, and represents one thousand. Now, it's important to note that the smallest order of magnitude is first. And so, more familiarly, we'd read this number as one thousand, six hundred, twenty, one. One intriguing feature is Spujit Vajra's use of words like void, or sky, or dot. And he's using these to correspond to the absence of an order of magnitude. Void, nothing, sky, wide open nothing. For example, moon, sky, eyes would be one, nothing, two hundred, or what we might call two hundred one. We see a variation of this approach in the work of Aryabhata, who replaced the object names with arbitrary consonants in his Aryabhatiya. Vowels could be interpolated to allow the word to be read. For example, the digits, six, three, three, three, five, seven, seven, five, could be associated with certain consonants. And to make the word readable, we'll interpolate some vowels, so we get the word kaya-gei-ni-su-khleur. And this would be, or as we would read it. And the clearest early evidence of a positional-based tense system comes from Ramagukta, who lived about a hundred years after Aryabhata. Translating from the Sanskrit, Ramagukta refers to the number four zeros, thirty-two, four, which would be zero, zero, zero, zero, thirty-two, four, which we would read as our modern number. Note that the thirty-two here is actually thirty-two ten-thousands, so four ends up at the millions place.