Most of us live in a city of some description. In fact, approximately 50% of the world is estimated to living in an urban city environment according to The United Nations’ State of the World’s Cities ‘06 – ‘07. That’s 3.3 billion people dispersed across the “471” urban cities. (An urban city has a population above 1 million). I have already talked about city migration, so I want to talk about what happens to the environment people live in. I’m not talking about the natural environment. I am referring to the man-made visible urban environment. I am of course talking about street art.

It is only natural that people want to make a mark on their environment. We decorate our inner walls with pictures, ornaments, and possessions. It is not surprising that the artists also decorate their outer urban environment with street art. I live in quite a densely populated area where if it wasn’t for the random street art, it would be a far duller place.

I decided to capture a small sample of the street art in my neighborhood. I restricted it down to a 2 block radius of my house. And here is what I got:

These Guys were in doing this piece just outside my house.

And this is a picture of the corner of our house!

]]> http://textbookhuman.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/inner-city-living-inner-city-art/feed/ 1 textbookhuman http://textbookhuman.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/faking-it/ http://textbookhuman.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/faking-it/#comments Tue, 22 Jan 2008 11:20:06 +0000 textbookhuman http://textbookhuman.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/faking-it/ ]]>

Your smile can be your most attractive feature. It doesn’t mater what the rest of you looks like, if you can spread a huge smile across your face, it will make observers feel warm. This is quite an attractive human trait. But does it matter if your smile is fake or not? The Textbook Human will grin, and bare the truth.

One amazing thing about people, is that we feel the emotions of other people. We do this via facial expressions, one form of non-verbal communication. So, our raw expression of happiness, joy and excitement through a smile, are perceived by other humans quite easily. And because most humans have such hard wired empathy, we also feel and experience the conveyed emotion. Psychologists call this “Affect Display”. Interestingly, this is why some people prefer to watch sport on TV. The close-ups of athletes faces during intense competition enables observers to feel the intensity of the moment. And, some Mimes have their Affect Display down to a fine art.

But how often have you faked it? Faked a big smile for a photo to pretend you were having a good time at that instant. Or faked amusement to a terrible joke so you could get along in the long run. Or used it to simply ’sell’ an idea to someone. I have, a lot.

What I want to know is if Faking it, is as successful as pulling out the real thing? To answer that, a person would have to ‘feel’ as if your smile was not 100%. Or even, know that you you were actually faking it. But the problem is that detecting a fake smile is not as easy as you may think. As a human we have become very, very good at this particular form of Affect Display, or non-verbal communication.

If you think you can detect a fake from a genuine smile, then please take this little test on the BBC Science and Nature site. It will ask you two preliminary questions, then you will be given the chance to test your skills. Link.

I scored a modest 13/20. I think a lot has to do with whether you know that person. And having a real 3D person helps to. But as the interesting end results state, we actually do use different muscles for real, and fake smiles. Genuine smiles, are generated by the unconscious brain after emotions are triggered by certain stimuli. Fake smiles are simply a communication trick, used by most people as a social tool.

I’m sure we have all heard this before. Apparently your brain can be considered as a muscle, that if not used frequently will slip away. Your brain will become weak, and soon you won’t be able to remember where you parked your car, what it looked like, or why you drove there in the first place.

Fortunately the “Brain Training Game” is here to help us maintain excellent memory, attention and spacial cognitive abilities! In fact, these Brain Games actually claim to improve these abilities in everyone. In other words, you play a game, you get smarter, play some more, and get smarter still.

Or do you?

Firstly, there is little scientific peer-reviewed proof. This is because whilst the idea is quite old, the Brain Training gimmick is actually still in it’s early growth stages. In November ‘07, The New York Times published figures reporting the brain-training market was worth just $2 million in 2005, but is now worth over $80 million. This is due to the launch of the hugely popular “Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training” Game. It was released on Nintendo DS, and is a nifty little package of quick draw maths, Sudoku, and reading exercises. It can then calculate your “Brain Age” based on the speed and accuracy of your responses. Effectively, the more you play, the younger your brain gets, moving safely away from retirement. It seams a bit outdated already, because the Sudoku craze is sort of over.

Since then, many people have come into the market. These range from thousands of free on-line games, that are simply re-packaged games off skill, to very expensive software suites. The Rolls Royce of the software suites is the “Posit Brain Fitness Program”. This program starts from $395.00 US, and goes to great lengths to explain the “science” behind the curtains. But is it just digital snake-oil?

Well, first the idea is quite sound. The brain training game, is simply very modern Brain Teaser. The earliest brain teasers dated back to Greek mathematician Archimedes who invented math problems for his peers to solve, for ‘fun’. And it is actually well documented in scientific studies that regular mental activity delays the onset of cognitive decline and dementia. Also, the “Use it or lose it” hypotheses has been tested in and was validated in 2006. The test ran between 1998 and 2004, where 1,884 healthy older adults, were put through an intensive 6-week program designed to train them on their memory, reasoning powers, and processing speed. Not only did the program work, but when the participants were re-tested 5 years later, the effects were still detectable. However, on the downside, there was no evidence that the training had any effect on the participants activities in the real world. (Subtext; Cracking the Expert Sudoku, will not help you in life).

We can also assume that Brain Training programs have never decreased a persons cognitive abilities. But, that logic is as poor as using anti wrinkle crème because it has never made anybody look older. So until they can scientifically prove that Brain Training Programs will actually improve your real world mental processing, I am going to stick to the free online brain teasers for now.

Oh and if you are wondering about a really good one, then simply have a crack at the the “GROW Games” on the eye maze site. Weird stuff.

Why am I talking about this subject in a blog focused on the human condition? Well this subject occurs because of two very human fallacies: Greed, and Human-Error. Also, today Citygroup wiped off $9.83bn US from its books, sending global stockmarkets into panic. And, it is going to get a lot worse.

You are going to need to bluff your way through this subject, so you don’t look like the person who only reads the sport pages.

And here it is

But.. if you want to read an utterly condensed version Textbook Human style:

Historically people who can’t afford to purchase a home get a loan from a bank. Banks can only afford to take on so much lending, because the had limited money. Also, banks would only lend out a certain percent of the loan, because offering 100% loans on houses was deemed far to risky. In recent years a new form of lending has emerged where Banks borrow from other large financial organisations in the Mortgage Bond Market. This type of loan is called a sub-prime loan.

Banks could take on customers who would never be able to traditionally afford a loan. It was also very profitable for banks, as they didn’t need to take on the risk, or have a large amount of ‘cash-in-the-bank’ from investors. A housing boom occurred, where the value of house increased by amazing amounts, making home-owners (or more correctly loan-owners) feel as if they were rich. This housing boom encouraged more and more people to get into the housing market, and banks became ‘loose’ with the credit-checks, and document requirements they required from customers, so they could secure more of the market. By 2005, 1 in 5 housing loans, were sub-prime loans.

The actual loan on offer was a “Balloon Loan”. This loan has fixed repayments for 2 years, then the interest rate drastically increases to the variable rate. Basically, people could not afford the repayments after 2 years years, and their repayments stopped. When this started happening on mass, banks could not repay their own loans. Also as a side note, the amount of houses now up for sale, and the lack of people able and available to purchase, caused a massive downturn in property value. Thus banks couldn’t simply sell the house and get the money back.

So these companies like Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and The Bank of America, that used to be the furnaces of the economy, are loosing money faster than a drunk gambler. These companies originally raised money from people who purchased Housing Bonds when the market was confident. However, it is estimated that these bonds are only worth 20% – 40% of their original value. To emphasise, that is a total loss between $4.08 – $5.44 trillion dollars. That’s going to really shit on the global stock exchange when these companies expose their books.

I don’t feel so bad for only renting anymore.

The earth can seem like such a big place sometimes. You can stand at the edge of an ocean and feel its vastness. In fact 70 percent of the earth is covered in ocean, and yet we have only explored 5% of it. In other words, 95% of the ocean has not been viewed by a single pair of human eyes. That’s quite a lot when we are spending so much time and money exploring the surface of Mars. The earth is huge, and we aren’t too interested in discovering a lot of it.

Then you bump into your best-friends mother while you are hunting for organic coffee in a back ally of another country. What are the odds of this happening? Why does the earth feel so small sometimes? Well that is because on the grander scale of things, earth is absolutely tiny. This video will demonstrate:

Quite humbling I think.

This is quite inconvenient information.

A quick bit of background is necessary. The Human Genome Project, and the scientific branch of Genomics has been lauded as “one of the more fundamental advances in human history”. This project was launched to sequence and map the entire Human Genome. In 2003 scientists had finished sequencing about 150,000 base pairs of corresponding nucleotides. The results were in, but the results were quite disappointing to all geneticists.

As it turns out, there are only approximately 25,000 genes in the human genome. This is about the same number found in grass.

It became quickly and painfully obvious that 25,000 genes could not describe all the traits and variations in the human species. However genes do act as brilliant markers for many diseases.

But.. that’s all old news.

We still know nothing about what fundamentally makes us different at a biological level. But that may change. A branch of biology called “Proteomics” is moving towards mapping the “Human Proteome”. The Human Proteome is simply a sequenced map of all Human Proteins.

Proteomics is seen as the next step in untangling the Human Species. But the task is far more complicated than mapping the Genome ever was. For starters, there are over 2 million different proteins with different functions, proteins do not stay in a constant state, and one of their differences is the Shape of the protein. This sounds simple enough, but when you consider you can drastically change the proteins in your body just by drinking a glass of wine for instance, the puzzle becomes apparent.

There are a few poorly funded groups that are organising co-operative research initiatives. However the irony is this; There was so much time and money invested into the Human Genome project, that it is still seen as the single key to unlocking the Human condition. The Human Genome is a well known brand that attracts more funding than the alternatives.

I think I’m going to take my misunderstood proteins to a marketing firm this weekend.

All of us have a few basic needs and one of those is a roof over our heads. As the world world grows, people in most have been migrating towards cities as they offer more opportunities and jobs. But even inside cities, people have this internal migration towards highly dense living arrangements.

Well these two building proposals will set new standards in a modern habitat.

CRYSTAL ISLAND – A 1500 ft. tall, ‘City within a city’ to be completed in Moscow.

X-SEED 4000 – A 13,000 ft. Manga-esque, Japanese utopian vision.

This type of building is known as an “Arcology“; Enormous habitats (hyper-structures) of extremely high human Population density. They are supposed to be self contained cities, housed within a single building. I thought that this type of thing only existed in William Gibsons reality.. but it is coming to a reality near you.

Hello world.

I am going to use this first post to lay out a quick framework for the direction of this Tumblelog. Firstly, a “Tumblelog” is less about what I have to say, and more about what the world is saying about itself. Wikipedia can carve out the definition in full if you are interested.

The Name:

A Textbook is a manual of instruction or a standard book in any branch of study.

And a Human is of course in reference to us. But specifically our aspects of humanity:

• Habitat

• Biology

• Psychology

• Culture

• Society

And the “Textbook Human” is simply a stereotypical human. A human with pervasive traits that fits the mold of humanity.

What I want to do, is make a web log of humans minor and major developments. I’m not going to report on history, but talk about the now, the new, and the future. I am not a professional, or a specialist. So that is why there is going to be minimal commentary from myself. I will let the information speak for itself, in true tumblelog fashion. I think it will be really interesting to capture this development.

Hopefully in time, I can holistically understand what it is to be a human today, or in the future.

We will see.