Mind-Controlled Drones

Dear Future,

Please slow down and let me catch my breath. This is a $300 drone being mind-controlled, thanks to a team at the University of Minnesota. While the commands may be limited, it's still incredible!

Victory Gardens

We have been here before... and I'm imagining that we'll be here again.  When?  How?

During WWI & WWII, there was a national movement to grow food in yards and parks.  It was deemed a patriotic part of the war efforts.  I can imagine various ways our current agribusiness model might fail us as a society or become strained, returning us to a rather sudden demand for "victory gardens."

Over the last six years or so, I've seen how the South Bronx is increasingly embracing community and school gardens.  Of course, this city has a rich history with gardening and farmer's markets.  Meanwhile, our wider society is increasingly dependent on a centralized food industry where a handful of companies manage the entire production and distribution infrastructure.  Is our food system sustainable?

This question is compelling, for me, as both a citizen and as a fiction writer. 

Some historical links re: NYC's community gardens.

• History of the Operation GreenThumb and the Green Guerillas
• Brief History of the Grassroots Greening in NYC
• History of the Community Garden Movement & Farm Gardens
• History of NYC School Gardens
• Green Guerillas

These two books appear packed with historical information: City Bountiful and Avant Gardening.

How resilient are we as a society?

And now for a not-so-random hippy music connection:

Tripped the Bots Fantastic

This iphone-controlled hover-drone was for sale at a Barnes & Noble in Florida (July 2012).   It has a camera.

If you had asked my childhood-self what life would be like in 2013, I would have imagined a scene out of the Jetsons:  jetpacks, flying cars, sarcastic robots that clean my room.  Are we there yet? I wouldn't have been able to imagine Facebook and social networking.  I wouldn't have imagined a world where video games are a bigger industry than movies.

However... TacoCopter makes perfect sense!

Yes!  That's right, there is a business in San Francisco that will be delivering tacos using unmanned aerial drones.

Most of the media attention on drones involves military and police application, but how might the rest of us use it?  Imagine what farmers, scientists, and industries will be able to do with advanced UAVs.  Imagine what the medical and emergency response experts might do with this power.  Unfortunately, it's also not hard to imagine what the commercial media and paparazzi will do with drones.  We might expect years of legal and regulatory struggles ahead.  For now, the Federal policy is to keep commercial applications illegal.  Whether personal and commercial drone use evolves as illegal activity or as regulated activity, it's going to explode.

Hummingbird drones already exist.

What might this mean for our daily lives?  

How long until Siri can hover next to us?

Small, personal robots combined with increasingly networked, sophisticated lifestyle-oriented AI?  This is such a natural extension of today's technology that I believe it's only a matter of years before the air around us is buzzing with them.

I believe we're entering a new phase of lifestyle and entertainment technology that will evolve at the same pace as social networking and gamification.

What might the sidewalks of New York look like in 2050 or in 2100?  Today's engineers are doing truly inspiring things.  Who will make the first flying gaming console? (and if nobody thought of this yet, can you please cut me a check for coming up with the idea?)

Fascinated?  Follow groups like DIY drones and DronesForPeace.




MorpHex (imagine if this thing could also fly!)

Microdrones

Birds 

And now to share some random "background" music as I go back to writing... 

The Resilience of Play

Both in fiction and in reality, our stories often delve into recognizable themes of resilience.

The One World Futbol Project is sending indestructible soccer balls to children in the most dire situations around the planet.  It's not just an inspiring effort worthy of support, but it highlights the importance of play in the lives of all human beings.

This single effort plans to deliver 1.5 million soccer balls in the coming years.  Awesome!

Anaphora & Working Memory (reflection)

Are teens still "developing readers"?  Yes.

Rick Riordan kicked off an extremely popular series with The Lightning Thief.   Whatever critics might say, the truth remains that kids love his books.   He may not always provide the funniest jokes, but you can find him offering at least one joke on nearly every page.  Riordan spent years teaching teens.  When I read his stories, I sense an author that truly understands how to keep adolescent brains tickled and turning pages.

Let's forget questions of entertainment and just think about the concept of working memory.

Working memory is related to, but not the same as, short-term memory.  I think of working memory as the cognitive workbench where we sort, chunk, analyze, and classify information in the short-term.

Find somebody to challenge.

1. Say the following.

"I'm going to ask questions based on these letters & number pairs.   9-W, 3-T."
Ask: "What are the 2 letters?"
Ask: "What are the 2 numbers?"
Ask: "Can you list the letters in alphabetical order?"
Ask: "What are the original 2 pairs?"

Did they struggle?  Depending on their ability to visualize the original pairings, they may not reach a saturation point as they "work" with the bits of information from different angles.

2.   Step it up!

"7-D, 4-R, 2-Y, 6-E."
Ask: "What are the 4 letters?"
Ask: "What are the 4 numbers?"
Ask: "Can you repeat the letters in alphabetical?"
Ask: "What are the original 4 pairs?"

3.  Push them to their saturation limit and then have them challenge you!

Do you see how sorting and wrestling with even small amounts of information can become extremely taxing on our working memories?   Feel the frustration?  This is what basic reading is often like for many students.  Adolescents are still developing, cognitively.

What might this mean for writing?  

base image from theinformationarchives.com

I think we remember the stuff most directly tied to emotion and conflict, but how do we know when we've gone too far with detail?  What types of information saturate the brain the most?

Developing readers struggle to keep track of who, where, why, and whatever.  I remember Kate Garnett (Hunter College) talking about anaphora as a primary reading challenge for adolescent students.  Combine this with working memory issues, and we can easily see how average readers get lost within many stories.  They yawn and tap out.

In the most simple terms, writing that relies on lots of antecedents and contextual references can lose readers.  When I look at popular stories with middle-grade students, I don't see "dumbed down" writing.  I see writing that fully engages their hearts and minds.  Isn't that the optimal way for them to make progress as independent readers?  Do we want them to passionately read?

You know that deep, metaphoric passage we study in school?  It just made our 13 year-old reader put the book down.  He's dreaming about this girl in his class.   Now he just flipped on the television to enjoy 5th-generation MTV programming about teen girls who play video games.  Good luck getting him back to your deep inferences!  Do you want him as a reader?  I do.

When it comes to managing anaphora and working memory, here's my current approach:

• Slice my scenes up into smaller, focused, pre-chunked scenes.
• That.  Which.  I shall use them (i.e. keep the relative pronoun unless it's vernacular).
• Chunk paragraphs carefully.  Don't cross the antecedent beams in massive paragraphs with multiple subjects and glorious relative clauses set upon prepositional phrases dancing around whatever I'm trying to actually say.
• Do not rely on complex inferences in order to understand the story.   However, I believe developing readers enjoy inferences when loaded inside humor or strong emotional moments.  
• Boil down my exposition, connecting revealed information with conflict & emotion.
• Use a comical simile rather than the lyrical metaphor that I think is so incredibly awesome.
• Reinforce new ideas & information with context clues or repetition.  Keep it moving.
• Punch the important information with conflict, emotion, or dramatic conventions.

That's an approach, not a set of hard rules.  I hope I'm heading in the right direction!