Tag Archives: Ted Talk

January 21, 2021 · 8:35 PM

Virtual Tour 4: Arboform, aka Liquid Wood

Our fourth outing together isn’t a museum, but a topical tour: Yesterday, I bought a hair comb when I went shopping; it looks like plastic, and it feels like plastic, but it is 100% biodegradable liquid wood. Having a curious mind, I came home and did a bit of research into the topic, so I thought I’d take you along on my discoveries.

Liquid wood, trademarked as Arboform, is a bioplastic made of natural ingredients, including lignin, which is the structural material found in plants and some algae, and cellulose, which is also a key structural component for green plants and algae as well as smaller organisms. The exact formula is a trade secret, of course, but the German inventors, Helmut Nägele and Jürgen Pfitzer, developed this thermoplastic in 1996, founded a company 2 years later, and in 2010 they won the European Inventor Award for their work.

Because of the properties that allow it to be melted and moulded like conventional plastic, its uses are limitless; but because it is made of natural ingredients, it is biodegradable – it can be disposed of in the ways wood could be, e.g. by burning or sawing, and will break down over time, as wood does. It may well transform the world of mass production and material sciences. What this product also does is use as a main ingredient a waste product from the paper-making industry – lignin.

The plastics industry created a huge problem that they never found a solution for, and they know it. But now, anything plastic can do, Arboform can do better. Literally. With more and more people trying to cut plastic out of their purchasing choices, this is the only logical solution to those who claim that plastic is the only alternative. Look around you right where you’re sitting: What plastic objects do you see? Speakers? Keyboard? A disinfectant bottle? Imagine every piece of plastic around you made from biodegradable products that, when you’re done with it, won’t harm the environment for hundreds of years afterward.

Below are a few examples of how it’s being used:

For a short tour of the factory, click the image below:

While Arboform can take care of the future, there is still the massive problem of the legacy of plastics that takes 10 minutes to drink a bottle of water out of, and 500 years to break down. There are other initiatives and efforts to clean up the environmental catastrophe; below are a few links if you’d like to learn more about the issue and how you can have an impact for the good.

No Plastic Waste

TED Talk: A radical plan to end plastic waste | Andrew Forrest

The Ocean Clean Up Project

Himalayan Life: Mountain Plastic Projects

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Filed under Articles, Nature, Science & Technology, Virtual Tours

Tagged as Andrew Forrest, Arboform, Catastrophe, Environmental Projects, German Technology, How To Help, Liquid Wood, No Plastic Waste, Ocean Clean Up, Plastic Cleanup, Science and Technology, Ted Talk, Virtual Tour

January 17, 2018 · 9:00 PM

Digital Echo Chambers

This article is longer than my usual blog, but please bear with me; the issues below affect all of us, and they are important to become aware of; after all, you can only keep an eye on something you see.

I watched a fascinating TED talk recently about an African American man, Theo E.J. Wilson, who went “undercover” online as a white supremacist. He did it in order to try and understand where some of the internet trolls who were attacking him were coming from, and to try and discover where they were getting their “information” and ideas from. His findings were insightful.

He discovered something that has become more and more obvious to me lately, and that is that we all live online in “digital echo chambers”. The definition of echo chamber is “A room or other enclosed space that is highly conducive to the production of echoes, particularly one that has been designed and built for this purpose. An insular communication space that is of no interest to outsiders or refuses their input.”

The echo chamber is harmless, though annoying, when it comes to shopping or interest feeds; but it can be catastrophic when it comes to life decisions and social or political views.

“If you surround yourself with voices that echo similar opinions to those you’re feeding out, they will be reinforced in your mind as mainstream, to the point that it can distort your perception of what is the general consensus.”

Alan Martin, Wired

Big Brother

The question growing in my mind is, am I telling algorithms online what I want to see/hear/learn, or visa versa? I’ll give a few examples of what I mean:

Sitting at my dining table chatting over a tea with a friend, our cell phones sat off to one side. We were chatting about holidays, and she spontaneously mentioned Mallorca (Spanish islands). The next time we looked online, we both had ads for Mallorca. This has happened many times – that a live conversation in a private home, with no online searches previously made, have resulted in ads, or articles popping up in suggestions; the conclusion is that Google is listening in on your life. If you don’t have your phone on airplane mode and your cameras blocked (I keep small post-its on both front and back cameras on my phones, as well as my laptop’s camera), chances are you’re giving away a lot more than you want to. If you tend to say your passwords out loud as you’re typing them in, you may be giving them away.

Facebook & co.

Facebook, theoretically a social media site to connect with your friends, in reality decides what it is you see, and whose activities you see in your feed. I haven’t been on Facebook regularly for several months now as I removed it from my home tabs on my browser; that one move has saved a lot of time otherwise being wasted! Now, when I look on Facebook, I literally see the home feed activities from only a handful of friends out of 300+; most of what I now see in my home feed is Facebook ads, FB suggestions, memories they’ve selected, and unrelated video stream suggestions. They’re trying to draw me in; but they’ve missed the memo that I’m only there for real connections with friends, and I intend to keep it that way. Maybe I should turn on my phone’s Wi-Fi and say that out loud… [Keep in mind that Facebook, or Amazon, or Google are not “they” as in human faces seeing your information; they are algorithms designed to harvest it.]

The more time you spend online, the clearer your digital fingerprint becomes; the more the algorithms know about your likes and interests, the more they will feed you just that information. The dark side of this is that, if someone has temptations in a particular area, they will be bombarded by tailor-made algorithmic choices, guiding them toward the thing they may be trying to avoid. A recent article in our local newspaper stated that, according to Netzsieger, a comparison portal, 25% of all searches online are related to pornography. Let that statistic sink in a moment.

.Com is not .Com

And were you aware of the fact that, if you are outside of the borders of the US, a certain monopolistic shopping portal beginning with “Amaz” has been discriminating against you? The prices you see are not the prices an American within the borders of the US are seeing. I found this out recently when I was running a sale on one of my books; the sales price was 99 cents; the usual price is $2.99. But when I went on (I am a registered kindle customer at .com) to see if the sale had begun, the only price I saw was $3.56. That’s nearly a 20% price increase; no sale in sight. When I asked them about it, they gave a fluff algorithmic answer, but did not address the real issue. And they never answered my question whether I, as author, am being paid commission on the higher price or not.

It makes me wonder what else they’re not telling me as both author and as customer, and what else they’ve been charging me more for (likely, everything) than if I lived within the borders of the US; as a result, I’ve taken my online shopping elsewhere. I will be doing further investigation into this, and if you do online shopping, I would recommend you do the same, and call them on the carpet about it – write complaint emails, and make your voices heard! Have friends in other countries check out the prices on the same website and product, and compare.

[Now I have another example of the digital eavesdropping: I’ve been typing up this article in my Word program on my laptop – not directly into the WordPress blog; when I went onto Google to refresh my memory about percentage calculation, I began typing in, “how to calculate” – and it filled in “percentage” – with NO previous such search on my part… they didn’t choose “exchange rate” or any other more common option of mine…]

Breaking Out

So, how can we break out of our digital echo chambers and mess with the results of algorithms? There are quite a few ways, actually: Below are a few links to articles about that very topic. I would encourage you to get informed, and put into action various methods to burst the digital bubble, and breathe in the fresh air outside your echo chamber.

Five Ways to Break Out of Your Online Echo Chamber

You can break out of your echo chamber – and here’s how

How To Break Out Of An Echo Chamber – Your Bubble

Escape the echo chamber: How to fix your Facebook News Feed

5 Super Easy Ways to Eliminate Your Echo Chamber

Fake news, echo chambers and filter bubbles: Under-researched and overhyped

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Filed under Articles, Musings, Research, Science & Technology, Videos

Tagged as Alan Martin, Algorithms, Amazon, Author, Big Brother, Digital Echo Chamber, Digital Fingerprints, Endurance Marketing, Facebook, Google, Highsnobeity, Huffington Post, Kindle, Links, Mashable, Politics, Price discrimination, Quote, Social Media, Ted Talk, The Conversation website, Theo E.J. Wilson

August 17, 2015 · 7:12 PM

Tricks for Writing Dialogue

I recently listened to a Ted Talk by British psychologist Elizabeth Stokoe, who analyses patterns, rhythms and wording in conversations. From her talk, I distilled a few interesting points that could be applied when writing a dialogue for fiction, and I’d like to share them with you:

Are you willing? If a person is given a sense of control or authority in the situation, they’re far more likely to cooperate. If you ask, “Do you want this service / action to happen?” you may draw a blank response; but if you ask that person, “Would you be willing to receive this service / be willing to see X happen?” you’re more likely to get a positive response.
How did you…? When you want to find out particular information from a person, how and when you ask for that information in the course of a conversation / dialogue greatly decreases or increases your chances of getting a positive response / reply. If rapport is first established, they are much more willing to reply.
Why did you / were you…? If an open-ended question is asked, target information may not come; but if a target-specific question is asked non-confrontationally, the desired information is more certain. “Why did you do X?” or “Where have you been?” are both confrontational, and the reaction will likely be evasive or defensive. But if you instead say, “I was wondering what your reasons for doing X were… could you explain?” or “I tried to reach you earlier, and was wondering where you were”, these are more likely to get a more positive response, or to solicit the information you’re searching for.
Any or Some? “Any” tends to elicit a negative response or a refusal, while “some” invites a more positive response. A simple example is, “Would you like any tea?” – this implies an unwillingness or a reluctance on the speaker’s part to provide, whereas, “Would you like some tea?” implies the assumption of a positive response, and is thus more likely to solicit an affirmative response. In both cases the person asked may want tea, but would be unwilling to coerce the one offering if they have the impression that the offer is made unwilling through the use of “any”.

When applying these ideas to writing a dialogue, a positive application will move your characters closer to a solution or resolution, whereas the negative application will lead them more toward miscommunication and conflict; depending on what you need to happen, you choose which way the dialogue takes your characters, and thus your readers.

Keep writing!