Notes to self ... - Page 2 of 5

My first look at the print version of Future Rising

Post author By Andrew Maynard
Post date August 9, 2020

It’s still a couple of months before Future Rising hits the streets, but … drumroll … I’ve just received my author copies of the book!

As anyone who’s had their book published knows, that initial unboxing and the moment you see for the first time what your book looks and feels like is a mix of excitement and dread. Will you love your book, or will you hate it? And will the first thing you see be that error that slipped between multiple editorial cracks?

Thankfully, the print version of Future Rising looks fantastic! This is an eminently pocketable and browsable book; it’s a book you can carry around and dip into, or just as easily spend a couple of hours burying yourself in.

I’m now more excited than ever for its release on October!

And just for posterity, here’s the unboxing video — which, bizarrely was banned by YouTube:

Responsible Innovation

Responsible Innovation — Seventeen Haiku

Post author By Andrew Maynard
Post date August 6, 2020

A few years ago I collaborated with Michelle Kasprzak and a bunch of colleagues at the University of Michigan on a book of haiku, where the common theme was responsible technological innovation.

The haiku came out of a workshop where we brought together a group of people from an eclectic set of disciplinary backgrounds to grapple with the meaning of “responsible innovation” in today’s increasingly complex world.

At the end of the workshop, rather than produce yet another boring report that no-one would read, we decided to pool our combined scholarly and creative minds and come up with a series of haiku that reflected the complexities and nuances of our ideas.

And just because we could, we arranged these in a haiku format – seventeen seventeen-syllable haiku on responsible innovation!

As well as reading the published book here, you can also download it as a PDF, or follow along as they are posted on Instagram.

Risk

Risk and the search for life on Mars

Post author By Andrew Maynard
Post date July 31, 2020

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover onboard launches from Space Launch Complex 41. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

I’ve just posted a new(ish) piece on Medium to coincide with the launch of the Mars 2020 mission, that takes a risk innovation look at the search for life on the Red Planet.

It’s newish as the original was published in the journal Astrobiology a couple of years ago. The new version here has been tweaked a little.

Read it here:

Life on Mars, Astrobiology, and Thinking Differently about Risk

As the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover sets out on its seven month voyage to Mars in the hope of finding signs of life, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the nature of risk in our search for extraterrestrial life.

Medium/Edge of Innovation, July 30, 2020

Tags mars, Mars 2020, Perseverance

Health

How long do aerosols stay airborne?

Post author By Andrew Maynard
Post date July 17, 2020
3 Comments on How long do aerosols stay airborne?

Just how long do SAR CoV-2 containing aerosols stay airborne once released into the air?

It’s an increasingly important question as the relevance of airborne transmission of novel coronavirus becomes apparent. Yet despite the science of aerosol dynamics being very well established, it’s surprising just how hard it is to find clear and understandable information on the settling rate of airborne particles.

This became very apparent to me when searching for a simple plot of settling velocity versus particle size that indicates just how slow or fast exhaled COVID-containing aerosols might stick around. I may be missing something but, apart from a bunch of old and quite technical plots and diagrams, there was pretty much nothing.

So I dug into my old aerosol files and created some!

Tags COVID

General

Now on Instagram …

Post author By Andrew Maynard
Post date July 16, 2020

So I decided to grasp the nettle and set up an instagram account that’s focused on my work wearing my author hat – I’m at @literallyandrewmaynard (I must confess I “borrowed” the naming concept, but I rather like the play on words!).

Embarrassingly, I discovered in the process that I’ve set up – and promptly forgotten about – two other Instagram accounts over the past several years. Fingers crossed I’ll be more diligent this time round!

Tags Instagram

Future Review

Reviewing Hank Green’s “A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor”

Post author By Andrew Maynard
Post date July 8, 2020

(a copy of my Amazon.com review of the book)

Hank Green’s A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor — a sequel to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing — is a unique and thought-provoking commentary on power, the internet, fame-culture, and tech-bro worship, all wrapped up in a complex, fast-paced story that uniquely captures the zeitgeist of today’s social media-obsessed world. I suspect that it will divide readers, leaving some absolutely loving it (especially those who already gravitate toward Green’s work and ideas), some frustrated, and some just plain confused. But none of this takes away from the importance of what Green has created here.

On its surface, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is a fast-paced story of alien tech and complicated people in a complex society that will appeal to readers who are immersed in todays social media culture. But the story is just the start. Green’s book is very much a medium through which he explores important questions around power, responsibility, and autonomy, and through which he both reveals the things that keep him up at night (I suspect – I’m speculating), and his thoughts on building a better future.

Communication

Some Personal Twitter Rules of Thumb

Post author By Andrew Maynard
Post date July 6, 2020

I do not like what Twitter has become. Yet much as I’d like to wash my hands of the platform, this is easier said than done. As someone who’s work involves communicating and engaging across boundaries, Twitter, for all its flaws, is somewhere I still need to be — even though this sucks sometimes!

With this in mind, I thought I’d try something new and develop a set of personal Twitter “rules of thumb” to help me stay sane and productive on the platform and, quite frankly, help me navigate the fine line between Twitter burnout, and acting like a Twitter jerk!

Tags Twitter

Films from the Future

Just for the heck of it … The Moviegoer’s Guide to the Future podcast!

Post author By Andrew Maynard
Post date July 1, 2020

Just for the heck of it, a couple of weeks ago I laid down a few opening episodes of a new podcast based on Films from the Future — The Moviegoer’s Guide to the Future podcast.

Apart from enjoying the process of making audio recordings (much more so than creating videos, which is way more hard work), I was interested to see if there’s any interest at all in a serialization of the book on a podcast.

Responsible Innovation Risk Technology Innovation

The risks and ethics of facial recognition tech

Post author By Andrew Maynard
Post date July 1, 2020

There’s a new Risk Bites video up on the risks and ethics of facial recognition technologies:

This is an increasingly important topic as hardware and compute capabilities make it increasingly easy to scan faces and connect their owners with a growing array of information, insights and inferences — not all of which are ethical, just, or accurate!

Health Risk

Notes on estimating personal risk of contracting COVID19 while attending class (updated)

Post author By Andrew Maynard
Post date June 28, 2020
2 Comments on Notes on estimating personal risk of contracting COVID19 while attending class (updated)

NOTE: This article was originally posted on June 28, but has since been substantially modified as I realized the initial analysis underestimated personal risk substantially. This version provides more information on the risk calculation approach taken — please treat with caution though, and let me know if you come across anything that doesn’t look right!

If you’re a student or instructor facing the prospect of in-person classes in the fall, and worrying about what the risks are of being infected by COVID19 as a result, you’re not alone.

Like many, I’ve been grappling with the potential risks of in-person teaching in the light of COVID119, and wondering just how effective measures being discussed are going to be.

Most universities are working hard to reduce the risks through measures like temperature screening, mask-usage, reduced occupancy and hybrid in-person/online teaching models. Yet without a clear sense of where these measures are backed up by evidence, I find myself finding it hard to get a good feel for what the personal risks might be.

And that’s speaking as a person who studies risk for a living!

Paying attention to ventilation in classrooms

One factor in particular that has been bothering me, coming in part from many years studying and leading research on aerosol exposure, is the rate at which potentially contaminated air in enclosed spaces is replaced with clean air, and how this in turn impacts potential risk. And as a result, I’ve been pleased to see a growing body of preliminary research looking at just this — including a recent pre-print on medRxiv from Dr.Shelly Miller at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her colleagues, on COVID19 transmission associated with the Skagit Valley Chorale superspreading event.