Robert Paterson's Weblog

Numbers in Nature - Deep Structure

Dave and Piers have asked whether CA is merely trying to impose an aesthetic on the rest of us.

Here is a link to a superb site that explores the deep numeric and relational design that is found throughout nature. Great illustrations to support the text including a very solid piece on the human face.

Here is another site about Nature's Math - more great pics that support CA's ideas.

We know that nature's math is REAL and that it reflects life and that it generates it. So when we look at how we design organizations, at how we design commercial relationships, at how we design education it is less and less of a surprise to me that these institutions fail and make us all feel so bad.

Christopher Alexander - The 15 properties of life

This link will take you to an excellent summary of Christopher Alexander's thinking.

"They offer a view of a human-centered universe, a view of order, in which the soul, or human feeling, and the soul, play a central role. Here, experiments are not only conceivable in the abstract Cartesian mode, but a new class of experiments reveal the foundation of all matter, and all process, as being something which resides in human beings. Whether this something, which is demonstrated and used throughout the four books, is a new entity underlying matter, or what used to be called the “soul,” is left for the reader to decide.

About twenty years ago, I began to notice that objects and buildings which have life all have certain identifiable structural characteristics. The same geometric features keep showing up in them, again and again. Initially I began writing these characteristics down informally, and I began to "keep watch" on them.

What I did was straightforward and empirical. I simply looked at thousands and thousands of examples, comparing those which had more life with those that had less life. Whenever I looked at two examples, I could determine which one had greater "life" or greater wholeness, by asking which of them generated a greater wholeness in me. Thus, I did not impose on myself the modesty of judgment typical in a pluralistic society. I did not worry about "my" values compared with someone else's values. I simply identified those examples which had the greater wholeness, judging this by the degree of wholeness they induced in me, and assuming, with as much confidence as I felt to be real and reliable, that what I measured here would also be shared with others.

I asked myself this question: Can we find any structural features which tend to be present in the examples which have more life, and tend to be missing in the ones which have less life? In other words, can we find any recurrent geometrical structural features whose presence in things correlates with their degree of life? To find this out, it is necessary to make thousands and thousands of comparisons, to ask oneself constantly whether any features can be identified which correlate with the degree of wholeness which things have. This is what I did. For twenty years, I spent two or three hours a day looking at pairs of things--buildings, tiles, stones, windows, carpets, figures, carvings of flowers, paths. Seats, furniture, streets, paintings, fountains, doorways, arches, friezes--comparing them, and asking myself: Which one has more life? And then asking: What are the common features of the examples that have most life?

I managed to identify fifteen structural features which appear again and again in things which do have life. These are: 1. LEVELS OF SCALE, 2. STRONG CENTERS, 3. BOUNDARIES, 4. ALTERNATING REPETITION, 5. POSITIVE SPACE, 6. GOOD SHAPE, 7. LOCAL SYMMETRIES, 8. DEEP INTERLOCK AND AMBIGUITY, 9. CONTRAST, 10. GRADIENTS, II. ROUGHNESS, 12. ECHOES, 13. THE VOID, 14. SIMPLICITY AND INNER CALM, 15. NON-SEPARATENESS.

... The fifteen properties identify the character of living systems. The regions of space which can have this living character vary enormously. If we have a bowl, a picture, a building, a forest, a pathway in a temple, a bay window in a London house--and we see all fifteen properties repeating throughout again and again and again, there is a good chance we have a thing or place whose life is profound. Systems in space which have these fifteen properties to a strong degree will be alive, and the more these properties are present, the more the systems which contain them will tend to be alive.

These include most examples of natural living systems: a clump of grass in a swamp. They may include a medieval illuminated miniature; the window in the wonderful room at the Topkapi palace in Istanbul. They will also include, at a lower level, places or things which have more ordinary life. This may include the terrace outside your favorite gas station, a beer garden outside the Oetztal station in Austria. It may include the seaweed in a tidal fiat, even with a few cans and bottles lying there.

If we look at things which have a few of the fifteen properties, less densely packed, and not all of them, we often get some sort of living character, for instance, the stadium at Wrigley Field, a pair of roller skates, a toothbrush.

The things and systems in the world which are most dead the most image-laden buildings and artifacts, the most sterile housing projects, the most damaged ecological systems, the most poisoned streams--will have these properties to the least degree."

I am stunned by the power of this view. It causes me to consider a central question that I can ask in every situation in life - in my personal life, in where and how I live, in my work and in business or government - Does this choice enhance or degrade life?

100 Bloggers - Utility - Paradise Lost/Regained?

I am taking part in an experiment called 100 Bloggers - where a group works to understand what blogging means to them and hence to others. Many thanks to Jon Strande who is our shepherd.

One of my home work assignments is to answer a question of Dave Pollard's as to what is the utility of blogging. So here goes.

First some context. I have been reading the life work of the great architect Christopher Alexander - The Nature of Order. I will return to his thoughts in conclusion.

For me the utility of blogging is that it has helped me feel more alive and more human. This feeling of being alive is growing and I anticipate no foreseeable limit to the trajectory of awakening that I am experiencing.

1. My blog is my special space where I have been finding my voice. Maybe I had a voice when I was 6, but decades of "fitting in" to the expectations of my my family, of my school, of the corporate workplace caused me to lose it. I lost my voice so long ago that I forgot that I had one or what it sounded like. Like Dante I was lost in a dark wood. My true awakening began as I stated to blog. "In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was lost". This special space, so private and yet so public, encouraged my voice and teased it into world again. What was the force that acted on me? I think that it is the feedback that is part of the space. As my voice became more Rob and less Robert, other people began to notice and encouraged Rob to come out to play more often.

2. As my voice returned, I began to notice who and what gave me energy and also what drained it. I was drawn to certain people in the 'sphere. How strange that this process is the opposite of what happens in the physical world. In this other space, we get to know the personality before the person. In this space the engagement can be gentle. A comment here and there leads to a look at who has visited. Maybe over a year contact grows in intensity. Then you have to meet this person. You start with a phone call or better Skype with all its presence. I have heard of no one who when they have met, has been disappointed. Until now all my friends and colleagues have been drawn from the small circle of my physical space. School, my neighborhood, the workplace etc. Now, my friends are drawn from the world. The chance of a better match for friends, colleagues and lovers is a powerful utility. Every morning is a joy to me now as I drop by and connect to this band of brothers and sisters. As I look into the future, my heart sings in the knowledge that these relationships will only strengthen and thicken. As I get to know Rob and these others more, my deep loneliness, my fear of of my own death ebbs away.

3. A return to work as a function of community and fellowship as opposed to serfdom. What I am experiencing is a great coalescing of interlocking communities in the 'sphere who are finding ways to work with each other. And what work! Work that is about enhancing life, bringing back the human, putting the community as the end goal. Work as it always used to be - work that enriches the soul, the place and the person. Look at Dina in India who has been a pivotal influence post Tsunami. Look at how the marketers like Johnnie, Jennifer and Hugh are on the road to truth. I too have my circles here in Charlottetown with Jevon and with Will and Jarrod. Cyn and I are also working on a project. I look at at the learning world with Brian, Jeremy, Karina, Harold and Chris.

So many other groups are forming like planetary dust into new workspaces around a sun that is drawing out our lost humanity into the light again.

So for me, this is the utility of blogging - that it is recreating the lost world of a humanity that is connected to itself and hence to everything.

Back to my opening remark about Christopher Alexander. In summary, he believes that since the advent of the Enlightenment, that put reason on a pedestal, that the human race has closed down its ability to be an integral part of nature. We have lost the ability to connect what we see with what we feel. We live in a purely mechanistic world.

Alexander sees evidence of this in how space is designed. He shows the reader the difference between space that degrades life and space that enhances it. Space that enhances life has a whole to it. Inside this whole are energetic centres that support each other. It is beyond me to go further right now - have a look at his writing for your self. But what strikes me is that blogging is all about a space that enhances life.

Some of his words -

The structure I identify as the foundation of all order is also personal. As we learn to understand it, we shall see that our own feeling, the feeling of what it is to be a person, rooted, happy, alive in oneself, straightforward, and ordinary, is itself inextricably connected with order. 22.

Real life. .. is comfortable, rough around the edges, smooth as if it had been rubbed together. This kind of life is the ordinary life which is not connected to high art or fashion. It has nothing to do with images. It occurs most deeply when things are simply going well, where we are having a good time, or when we are experiencing joy or sorrow – when we experience the real. 38.

.. ordinary enough, or profound enough, to feel alive in some degree. .. they are alive because they are – as far as possible - concept free... They are vigorous and straightforward, where the soul of the maker has entered the thing – or where the ordinary processes of daily life, uncontaminated by ideas or notions of what to do, has unfolded in a way that we accept very easily. These things make us comfortable because we recognize them as genuine. 51.

The 'sphere is a giant, maybe limitless, fractal space that offers the most private and the most public expression. All is connected at all scales. The patterns are recursive. As each point touches another it enhances and supports the other. The Cartesian world is the opposite. It separates. It separates us from our selves. It makes all the other. Work and home are in opposition. Man is in opposition to man and to all of nature.

Blogging is integrative. It will have massive subversive effects on the world as we know it. It is already going to bring down the walls of the top down corporate world as the marketers (Johnnie, Hugh and the gang) see so clearly. It is bringing down the media state. It will bring down the walls of our education system. It will put relationships back at the centre of health. It will change our political system. It will leave no stone unturned of the institutional world.

At its time of pinnacle greatness, I hear its doom

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I am beginning to believe that the great utility of blogging is that it a small but immensely powerful tool that has the potential to redeem us. For surely it is not me alone who is lost in a dark wood but mankind?

Paradise is surely a lost world of integration. Adam and Eve took up reason and lost their essential relationship with how they felt. They, and we their children, lost our innate wisdom.

I wonder. What will this small tool do to our culture and our way of being and seeing in the world?

Your Summer Cottage Vacation on PEI

Yes its that time of year again when you ask yourself -"Where can I really relax? Where can we go and decompress this summer from our hectic life in the big city?""

Well, as many of my friends & family know, the answer is at our barn.

Here is the link to our updated Weblog site that will show you what to expect

Exponential Growth in Blogging

Jon Husband notes that it has taken only a month to grow from 5 - 6 million blogs and that the rate of new blogs has doubled from 15,000 a day to 30,000

PEI Potato Farmers Destroy or Give Away 68 Million KG of the 2004 Crop

The PEI Potato Board have announced a program to give away or destroy 68 million KG of last year's crop in an attempt to get better prices.

Like VLT's every year, you plant in the hope that this time it will be different. After all with the commitment in debt and equipment what else but fold can you do.

We are close to the end now

Blink and The Wisdom of Crowds

There is an excellent debate going on at Slate between Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki. Every day this week - an exchange between the cognition guys

Thanks to George Siemens

Blogging and education

Jeremy Hiebert has introduced me to Will Richardson
If education is important to you - Will is someone to add to your world

PEI's Education Crisis - The Well Curve perspective

The OECD ranked PEI last in Canada in educational attainment. The premier announced that he will form a task force to find out what is going on.

This is a plea to look beneath the surface.

Broadly in Canada, about 30-40% of kids fail to make it through school at all and a smaller fraction go on to post secondary. In any system with this much 'wastage' there has to be a systemic problem not solvable by tweaking or accusing teachers of not trying hard enough. Nor can we blame the kids as we tend to.

I think that the systemic issue is one of engagement.

Sitting quietly and receiving the "word" from the teacher as a passive process does not work any more in a world where kids are exposed to so many distractions. TV and fast food have a huge part to play in disconnecting kids from passive process. The roots of these influences are in the home. What we can control is what happens at school.

What happens at school is that we have system works for an ever smaller group of the whole. Over time, kids progressively get labeled as poor learners. This weeding process accelerates as the children pass up the system so that by grade 10 only a small group fit. We have a system that purports to serve all kids but in reality discards most by grade 10.

This image, devised by Daniel Pink of Free Agency fame has a clue for me as to where to look. It is called a Well Curve and is the value opposite of the Bell Curve.

The idea of the Well Curve is that the worst place to be in any system is in the middle. In a business context there is a market for cheap and cheerful and for luxury, but the middle ground is a nightmare. Follow the link for Daniel's excellent explanation. Snip:

The implications are huge: insurers, marketers, and policy-makers may be basing decisions on faulty premises about what is normal. They're assuming a vibrant center - Middle America, middlebrow tastes - when the action has migrated to the edges. The 180 from bell curve to well curve has turned their logic on its head.
Our school system is firmly rooted in the middle ground. What does this mean? It means that in the middle are only a few kids. Most of the kids are on the wings.

So if you are part of the large group of inquisitive kids on the left side of the curve - like my son James who left school aged 14 as a result - you feel oppressed by the boring droning and the forced silence of the pedagogy. You are penalized as trouble maker for asking questions or worse by questioning the authority of the teacher. Result - You act out or shut down.

If you are part of the other large group that is not at ease with symbolic thinking you inhabit the right hand side of the surve. Being a concrete and experienced based learner, you are turned off by the abstract and meaningless reliance on ideas that make no sense in the context of an active world. You too act out or shut down.

The result is that most of the kids and nearly all of the boys act out or shut down. What about the girls?

Generalization follows. Why are girls doing better than boys? Do you doubt that they are? Over 70% of freshman at UPEI this year are women! I think that an answer is to found in the differing world view of young men and young women. Girls are doing better than boys because they fit the system as we offer it better. Why? I think that it is because women have a powerful urge to fit in socially when they are young. Boys on the other hand have to find themselves as individuals more. They have to break away. Consequently they have a deep need to be physically active, to question and to feel relevance. This need does not fit the highly socially compliant culture of our school system. With no physical outlet to use up a lot of their energy boys cannot focus in such a passive system.

Boys need for engagement is evidenced by the powerful appeal of gaming. Gaming has overtaken action movies for boys. Why - because they have an innate desire to be involved actively and to be challenged. For boys, interactivity wins out over passivity. Challenge wins over ease. Anyone whose son skateboards or games knows the huge investment that their boy will put on his own volition into learning about something that he is engaged with.

Our fault is not our children it is how we "see" the process of learning at school.

Please I beg of you stop thinking about the tests and think about engagement.

"We can't do that" you say, "there are too many risks" The facts are clear - what we do now does not work. Doing what we do now harder will fail for sure.

On the other hand there is lots of evidence that when kids follow what they want to learn that they do well. I have one anecdotal story of my own. I am sure that you have similar stories your self. James gave up the formal school system and focused only on art. Is he now illiterate. No he is exceptionally literate. Does he have no math skills - no his are of a post grad level. Is he socially inept - no he is very attuned to how he affects the world. he got to this place by finding his bliss - for him it was art, and then adding in the other parts so that he could excels in his chosen field. Is he poor and dependent on his parents and the system? No he has been economically viable since he was 18.

Can we try an experiment? Can we set up one school on PEI where the kids can choose what they want to do and then we pile in and help them get there. It would be likely that such as school, would have a string bias towards the arts of all types. This does not have to be big at first. See it as a living experiment. Do we have a precedent? yes we do. PEI has a great music program. Question for Superintendent - how well do the music kids do compared to any other group? I bet you dinner Sandy at the place of your choice that they do better than most. I bet that we have more than anecdotal evidence that kids who are engaged somewhere will do well generally. We can build on a solid foundation of proven achievment in our own system

Simply working the system that does not work harder or tweaking it is a guarantee that we will not reverse the tide of misery and failure that our current system produces for so many.

Form follows function - More on Why an ePortfolio?

As the search for the best model for an ePortfolio tool gathers steam, I remain confused about what an ePortfolio is for. Should not function drive form?

Here is part of a comment that I dropped on Karina's excellent site at York

"I still don't understand the utility of an ePortfolio as something separate from my life. Have I missed something?

My old friend Paul Evans, the greatest project manager of all time, always used to push back at me when i fell in love with a new idea by asking me what it was meant to do.

His point that all great tools must have an objective and a utility. Have I missed the utility part of your search? If I have please forgive me but here goes my view of utility.

Who is it for?

1. If for an employer - I don't want to look at static data - That would just be a more lengthy CV. I am looking for an easy and safe way to find talent. If this is my aim then surely I want to see quickly evidence of the quality of the thinking and I would want to see the extent of the person's network.

So, using you as an example, imagine that I am a VP Academic of a university and I want to make progress in this sector. I would search Google for ePortfolio. Because you are blogging - you would rank highly. Google yourself - you are at the top of the search. Sign A that you might be worth a look. I would look at what you say and, as importantly, at who you are linked to.

Sign B I see that you are linked to many of the A list in the field. Now I read your blog more carefully and see that you are a major thought leader. You are now on my short list.

Why would I bother with a lesser process? Why would I wade though hundreds of ePortfolios to find my talent when Google will filter it out for me for me based on a real ranking? What would I look for drones who are only going through the paces?

2. For the learner. Learning comes not from explicit but from tacit learning. This is a problem with the formal system that gives credit based on ticking the box. But an employer wants to know more than whether I passed the course or read the book. The employer wants to know if I know.

Tacit learning can only arise from conversation. Regurgitating the last book I read does not cut it. Learning takes place in the context of a field. Universities are acutely aware of this - hence peer review etc. Every field has a boundary and to be any good, you have to have entered the field. Without public participation in the field you do not exist. You are not a player. So if I want to become expert in a field I have to have a talented group to exchange views within. If we can accept this as the basis of real learning as opposed to basic accreditation, then the tool must allow one entry to a field. So it has to be dynamic.

In this context then, a blogging format is ideal - as you are surely experiencing this process yourself as you explore the new field of ePortfolios. So by design, the tool has to be community based and conversationally dynamic.

Currency is critical today as fields move so fast. Only participation in a dynamic community can keep a learner and even an expert current. There is no field that can kept up with by passive reading anymore.

So if I was an employer - why would I find a static site with lists of minor achievements interesting? If I was a serious learner why would I pass up an opportunity to learn with others who share my passion and instead spend time pasting stuff into an album?

I think that the ePortfolio is right before our eyes. It is a modified blogging tool with a category fior our best stuff. The day to day aspect of it is the artists sketch book. The "best stuff" part of it is where we put the examples of our thinking that we are most proud of. Artists do this all the time. Visual artists sketch constantly. This is where they develop ideas. They then put this into a work. The work then goes out into the field and is adjudicated by the field.

The ideal tool would combine a dynamic conversation with a showcase for the best thoughts. It would not be a proprietary system that could own me. It would fit into the search world. This search criteria is vital and thus excludes all flash sites that are not picked up by Google.

What I suspect may be going on is a trendy search for a showcase for mediocrity. Is the real search for a tool to showcase the average student who plods there way through school? Is this only a fat CV that will end up like 98% of CV's of no import unread? Is the real search a way of packaging an accreditation system that focuses on the explicit and the static that has no value except to the accrediting body - the University?

What would be the utility other than selling software of such a quest? If I am wrong or you disagree - challenge me. But let's focus on the why before we work too hard on the what.