9 Apr 2008
0 CommentsScience Fairs, Social Media & Fads – The New Science for the 21st Century
Last week, my son Devin Howard (a Grade 12 student, pictured above) won a Gold Medal at Waterloo-Wellington Science and Engineering Fair, enabling him to go on to the Canada-Wide Science Fair, run by Youth Science Foundation, in May at the University of Ottawa.
His topic, for which he developed a computer model written in multi-agent, graphical modelling and simulation language called NetLogo, was to study the propagation of ideas such as fads or partisan political persuasion using some of the latest social graph theories. Last summer, at the acclaimed Shad Valley program at University of Calgary, he became interested in the topic of emergence. For those who are not familiar with this fascinating field, emergence can be defined as as “… the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”
From that springboard, he became interested in the way fads and other changes propagate through society, especially illustrated by recent books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. (An interesting footnote is that Gladwell, now based in New York City, grew up right around the corner in the small community of Elmira). Gladwell, a journalist by trade with a similar modus operandi to Don Tapscott, has done much to popularize a whole new area of science.
Devin’s project aimed to show how fads, political influence, religions and even diseases spread through society. Au courant terms such as tipping, connectors and mavens all arise from this new science which shows how a few key people can take a simple, and seemingly inconsequential idea or trend and turn it into a mass movement. As story-telling narrative it’s intoxicating, as a science it may well be one of the most exciting subject areas of this new century. And, beyond being a very proud father, I was struck by how much the area Devin chose to study sits right in the epicentre of our investment thesis at Verdexus.
Now, let’s drill a bit deeper to understand why this is so important. Malcolm Gladwell is a (very persuasive) popularizer of complicated and transformational ideas. By contrast, Duncan Watts, associate professor of Sociology at Columbia University and author of the 2003 book Six Degrees, is one of the academic pioneers who managed to fuse existing work in graph theory, psychology, sociology and physics into a new science of connectedness.
This new Science of Networks (covering social, biological and technological networks) is truly a post-millennial creation. In an age when we’ve moved beyond mere specialization, whole new research disciplines are synthesized from a set of discrete subject areas. Such fusion of formerly disparate knowlecdge areas is a key example of the Knowledge Integration referred to in Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat.
I can’t do justice to this field here, but to give a flavour, some key recent breakthroughs are:
- Duncan Watts shows that the connectedness of most social networks isn’t a Nomal Distribution as might be intuitively supposed, but instead is a Scale-Free Network exhibiting a Power-Law Distribution. The significance of this is that a few key Connectors can make (or break) the ability of the network to take over. Watts points to the Matthew Effect in which “well-connected nodes are more likely to attract new links, while poorly connected nodes are disproportionately likely to remain poor.”
- Furthermore, Watts describes Affiliation Networks, or “networks of overlapping cliques”. They are the new social networking version of clubs, but in scientific terms are Bipartite Networks, which are really fused version of networks of Actors and Groups.
- lastly, the concept of Social Currency has really re-defined the notion of brand in this new science.
As I mentioned, I’m just skimming the surface, but the net takeaway that really excites me, is how new some of this fundamental science is. Although the origins of the field may go back 50 or 100 years, many key findings are still a mere 6 or 8 years old. Furthermore, my sense is that this field is just beginning.
To put this into context, I started working with one of the first peer-to-peer, social networked contact systems with Ottawa-based GoodContacts (now acquired by Reunion) back in 2001 and a full 18 months before Plaxo was launched. When later social networks like LinkedIn came along, I remember asking why we hadn’t taken that approach. But, the truth was, that much of the enabling science hadn’t yet been formalized.
With that in mind, in this day of Facebook, Social Branding, Twitter, and the new social conferencing from iotum, I suspect that we are just in an early generation (Beta test?) of the Social Networking Revolution. Therefore, for human interactions with friends, sales, politics, and entertainment, stay tuned for Social 2.0 and beyond. Remember, social networking is not just a fad of college students and teenagers, but a fundamentally different way to optimizing human and social interactions.
20 May 2008
0 CommentsFinding Negawatts Right on your Doorstep
Big “boil the ocean” issues (with apologies for the corny metaphor) like Global Warming overwhelm many people with their scope, long time scale and difficulty to solve. Predictions that human activity, which has of late been increasingly generating Green House Gases (GHGs) which in turn accumulate in the atmosphere and, by changing the heat retention of the whole earth’s ecosystem, cause our average temperatures to warm up, are now almost universally accepted as fact rather than just scientific theory.
In response, socially responsible businesses and individuals have started to buy carbon offsets which seek to provide an alternative reduction elsewhere, equivalent to the actual carbon they the purchaser of the offset produces. While worthwhile, most offsets are, in fact, delivered via the CDM part of the Kyoto Protocol in the absence of more pervasive emissions trading schemes. CDM, short for Clean Development Mechanism, invests in programs in developing countries which reduce GHG emissions.
But, what about reducing our emissions here in Canada and the United States? I’d like to share a best kept secret, namely the Elora Centre for Environmental Excellence (ECEE), a charitable organization of which I am the Board Chair and co-founder. Without a lot of fanfare, this organization was an early innovator of home audits which were aimed at improving our residential housing stock and working to both educate and deliver greater energy efficiency for homes (as well as water and waste). Originally, we pioneered a “Green Home Visit” just for our small community of Elora, Ontario which our current Executive Director, Don Eaton had the vision develop into a nationwide home labelling system. Don’s vision was for all homes to receive simple label of energy efficiency, say on a scale of 0 (heating the outdoors) to 100 (heated only by the heat generated by the inhabitants) which would provide:
In the late 1990’s, Don was one of a group of experts who put this dream into reality, in the context of a Canadian federal government programme, called EnerGuide for Houses. The name “EnerGuide” was borrowed from a pre-existing and well-known Canadian government appliance labelling standard. Don Eaton became an icon of this program, by providing much of the initial training for hundreds and hundreds of Certified Energy Advisors over the years, through a national-wide environmental service organization, Green Communities Canada, of which ECEE is a founding member. Such is the level of Don’s expertise, that he’s been called to provide expert help in developing programmes in places like the UK and US.
EnerGuide for Houses grew quietly until May 2006, when the Stephen Harper government killed the program in what was clearly a partisan, and ill conceived, move. It was reinstated, as EcoAction for Houses last year, but only after the collateral damage of hundreds of trained Certified Home Evaluators being forced out of the system by the over 12 month funding chasm. But, that’s a story for another day …
To make a long story short, home efficiency from EcoEnergy programmes conducted just by ECEE (in the service area of southwestern Ontario shown on the map below) so far delivers 8 000 tonnes of GHG reduction per year over the about 16 000 homes we’ve audited. Taking into account the Canada-wide results, and remembering that the reductions are, in effect, permanent so each and every year the savings continue and fewer GHGs are emitted into our atmosphere.
Remember too that this is still an early adopter programme. Because the homeowner pays a relatively nominal sum, although mitigated by government funded homeowner rewards for energy reductions and other cross-subsidies, it is far from universal. The most advanced communities have an audit penetration of approximately 5% while many are far lower.
Studies in Canada and the US, show that residential energy is the source of just under one-quarter of our GHG production, with the rest being transportation, industry and agriculture. So, taking market penetration much higher, to 30% or 40%, would make a real difference as we see below.
It is instructive to correlate the above case study in real GHG reduction with an article in May 10, 2008 Economist, entitled The Elusive Negawatt, “If energy conservation both saves money and is good for the planet, why don’t people do more of it?” Some of the key points made in that article are:
If energy efficiency programmes are all goodness and light why aren’t they more pervasive? How do we get the production of negawatts beyond its early adopter stage?
It’s pretty clear that we need the right combination of committed governments, utilities and private sector partners working with environmental service organizations like ECEE that are providing the “real down in the trenches” work right at the homeowners doorstep. With such a tantalizing prize beckoning, let’s not wait too long to seize it.