A premise of Joseph Giacomin’s new book Thermal is that global warming is hard to ignore when you view the world through thermal eyes.
Hard, but not impossible, to ignore. We humans are skilful evaders of uncomfortable truths.
The premise of the author’s reseach group at Brunel University in the UK, Perception Enhancement Systems, is that leveraging our sensory systems through the use of advanced technology can enhance our understanding.
Our dilemma is this: although technologically-enhanced images can, potentially, enhance our understanding, human behaviour is more complicated. Misleading ‘gut instincts’, and personal associations and biases, can be more influential than perceived facts in influencing our energy habits.
It emerged at Garrison Institute’s climate, mind and behavior conference last year that enhanced perceptual tools are only part of the answer.
We also need to draw on knowledge emerging from behavioral and neuro-economics, and cognitive science research. Researchers in those domains – often in a businesss, not environmental context -are investigating ways to steer individual and group decision making.
As this writer has discovered, too, in exploring the relationship between metrics and aesthetics, it is not a simple matter of cause [an evocative image] and effect [changed behaviour].
This is not to diminish the affective power of some images in Thermal. There are *so* many things we do not see – for example, the contribution of chldren to global warming….
Besides, I also learned in the pages of Thermal pages that the average street light or home lamp emits less than three percent of the inputted energy in the form of light, with nearly all the rest ending up as heat.
Technical note [from the author’s website]: These 20×240 pixel JPEG images were shot using a 60 Hz thermal imaging camera; it is similar in appearance to a camcorder. Pseudocolour is used to indicate the variations in temperature – bright red-orange for the hottest temperature and dark blue for the coolest.
From Eds & Meds, to Farms and Watersheds
The skyline of Pittsburgh, once America’s Steel City, is now dominated by towers belonging to two local giants of ‘Eds & Meds’ – education, and healthcare. Does this mean the city has successfully grown itself a resilient new economy?
If architectural bravura was an indicator, the answer would be yes. The older tower [above] which looks like something out of Batman, is the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. The brutal black one [below] is the HQ of UPMC, an $8 billion healthcare colossus. The black tower, says its main tenant, is ‘tangible evidence of Pittsburgh’s transformation into an international center of medicine, technology and education’.
UPMC, which runs 20 hospitals in the Pittsburgh area, and has 48,000 workers, is by far the city’s largest employer. Across the US, only Boston has a higher proportion of health workers.
Their sheer size makes some people in the city nervous that Eds &Meds might be economic bubbles, and that their dizzy rates of growth – in prices, as much as in jobs – might be unsustainable.
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