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Tim Foresman: It's always tough to live through those introductions, but those were kind words
and thank you very much. Is everybody can hear me ok with this? Yes? Thumbs up there.
Alright. Appreciate that very much, always good, thumbs up. I had the pleasure of getting
a certificate from Marshall Road State School today from about 500 kids that I spoke to
this morning, so they are a tough audience, I promise you, they are a tough audience.
And at one level, and I saw this when I was pulling out my computer, I thought "The reason
they're a tough audience is because the things we talk about, they saw "Oh it's going to
be the kids, the future, right?", and you're looking at them, and you can't tell them lies,
and you got to say "Hey, what are we going to do for you guys and girls?" and so it puts
a lot of responsibility on you". You guys, it's over with for you all, right, but those
kids it's important. So, that sometimes drives me in my own motivation and the things I do,
and I, let's see, let me, I've got to learn to use the machine here to make sure that
I'm going the right way. So, I hope you like the weather I brought
with me, it's been great and I really enjoy coming down here, what a garden spot, literally,
and it's been a great pleasure. Again, I want to, Dr Mackinnons, thanks to spatial industry
business association, those people helped work with QAT to bring me here and to share.
Some of my thoughts and feelings, and experiences I've had, and what's important I think is
you're seeing a team between industry and academia, and that's an important partnership.
Now Kofi Annan, he was my boss when I was in the United Nations and I had the job as
the Chief Environmental Scientist for the United Nations Environment program, which
was a pretty heady job for me, very big responsibility and you'll see that woven into some of these
issues. So I'm a happy guy but that was a sobering experience, and Kofi Annan said "For
us to get ourselves into the right section of the world in the future, we're going to
have to develop type 2 partnerships." Does anybody know what type 2 partnerships are?
Oh boy, so, not only are you going to hear some talks today you're going to learn things,
which is always a good thing on a campus. Type 2 partnerships is business, academia,
government and citizens, the four horsemen, ok. And I agree. And you say "Well, where
does that exist?" and you're going to find that it doesn't exist very many places, so
we did a survey around the world and tried to find that for the 2002 world summit on
sustainability and we went "This is interesting, the ingredients for a success in sustainability
we think we understand, and when we look around for who's cooking it up, wasn't happening".
That's the other reason I'm very excited to be here, invitation of Dean Betts and others,
the campus, Bob Owen and others, and Siva, is that they got it and they said "That's
what we want to put together", and I've just came off of the Premier Newman's assistant
meeting Zoe Wilson. Guess what? She likes that idea too, and she thinks that that's
where we should be going, and she says that that's where your premier wants to go as well.
So we've got a lot of people aligned to do some of the things, the reason I'm setting
you up with some positive thoughts is cause I'm going to share some other information
with you in a minute. First, I've been around a little while, and was blessed to be at the
front-end of the geospatial world and got into that when I was in graduate school, found
out about spatial information and was using computers, and of course like a lot people
got out of college and said "Hey, I want a job". Well, guess what, there was no such
thing. So I started my own company. And so I suffered, if anybody's ever done their own
company they know, so I suffered and struggled while Steve Jobs and those other guys were
making millions, I pulled through but I got recognized by some major organizations including
the US Department of Defence and many others and ended up leading a lot of the work that
I've done starting in the late 70s. So, I ended up, wrote a book on the history of GIS
for anybody who wants to see how it really came about. I've worked on things like "If
we've got this planet Earth and we've got some challenges, how are we going to solve
it?" so I got involved with, if you will, an operating system for our planet and the
potential for us to get there and I work on those concepts and I'll share some of that
with you, and then I recently published a thing on visualising physical geography which
is good. How do we see things? Cause if you see it you might believe it.
Now, this is one of my favourite planets, I don't know about you, but I call it home,
and it's got some serious conditions and so I'll talk about some of those but viewer discretion
advised, any of those who don't want to hear some of the things about the planet you might
lose sleep tonight, I'm going to share some of them but that's just to set the stage,
ok. I'm not here to try to do doom and gloom and depress you, in fact we're meeting at
a pub later for those and I'll give a pint to anybody that says they need it just to
recover, ok. So we'll go that route. Some of the questions that we like to ponder, alright.
How are things working? What do we give those children that I had to face this morning?
And how can we protect and preserve the things that we think are near and dear to our hearts?
So there's a lot of questions we need to pose and think about in our lifestyle, in our research,
are we addressing any of those? As we go through those, what are the problems, how do we know
the problems and a lot of times that's a good question. Something will be put forth, climate
change, global warming, things like that and people say "Is it happening, how do we know?",
you do need to know how we know and I'll show you how we know in a little bit. So who should
be involved, just a few people in the university? Oh that's right, we can solve all the problems
of the planet, right? Ah ah, back to Kofi Annan, all of us need to work together. Why
should we? Well, that should be obvious. The where shows up time and time again and that's
that spatial glue that we want to keep reminding ourselves why the space is so important. And
how to get engaged? Well, take a sign up after the course, or the lecture.
So some of the threatened animals on this planet, and I found out quite a few of the
children had seen a drop bear, there was a small minority that didn't actually believe
that they existed but the majority did, so I'm very impressed because I only learned
about drop bears recently. But I think it's worth preserving all these things. Now, different
people have a view of where we're at, right? If you have this view then you are boreal-centric
in your behaviour. If you have this view then you have the right view. And you got to think
about it, same image but how do you see the world and there's no reason this isn't the
right view, is that true, right? And yeah that's the way it is, so I would posit that
the way our brains work has to do with how we view things, and for those of you who want
to get extra credit, epistemology, there's a good word for you. You can use that in your
next class. Yes, we are exhaling CO2, so are we polluting
the environment? No, we're not polluting the environment by breathing out. But the way
we run our energy system, fossil fuels, etcetera, we have a challenge because we do know. And
the reason we know is this guy who should have gotten a Nobel prize, is everybody familiar
with the Keeling curve? That's a hard way to say it. Who hasn't ever seen the Keeling
curve? That's a tough one too. There you go. The Keeling curve, and there's a lot of people
that haven't. Thank you for your honesty sir. In the late 50s, Charles David Keeling ran
to the top of the highest mountain in Hawaii to measure CO2 in the air. Up till that time
we did not know that it was increasing, so once he started collecting the carbon dioxide
measurements, all of a sudden, you know the first few years how do you know what's going
on? That's right, I got a pointer. The first few years how do we know what's going on?
And what it is, is winter, summer, and that means different things to different people,
we're in spring time here, but as the Northern Hemisphere has all its greenery it sucks in
the carbon dioxide and it goes to the minimum. When it drops all the leaves it does the opposite
so there's more carbon dioxide, because the mass of the planet is on the Northern Hemisphere
in terms of greenery. So it goes up and up and up. Well that's how we found out we actually
are increasing. So it's not somebody's opinion, it wasn't a political party that made this
curve, this was bonafide science and that's why we care, cause if your kid had a temperature
like that you wouldn't say "Gee I wonder where it's going", you would say "Oh, let us think
about this". The greenhouse concept of CO2 going in the atmosphere and getting a blanket
that thermally enhances the planet, was not invented last year, the year before, the year
before. It was done by a bloody Swede a hundred year ago, ok. So we've known about this for
a long time. So we understand the physics and the chemistry, and now it's upon us as
to what's going on, and now we're going out, running out with international science, and
in the UN I worked with scientists from everywhere, and government officials, to bring this data
together so that we could find out what's going on, and the water's warming up and the
atmosphere is warming up, it's not debatable. We can go back with a variety of measurements
and a lot of different ways of doing it and we find out that we're at the highest temperature
in a long time. How high, oops, sorry guys at the back there. How high? Well, very high.
Let's go back a little farther. 650 thousand years, I think most statutes of limitations
would apply to that, right? We're not responsible for that. We're still higher. So it's just
awesome to where we are, and for people to say, and I have had many people say, "Well
its part of nature's cycle, and we should just watch and see what goes on" and I go
"Yeah, but nature's real brutal when it comes to extinction and I don't want to just sit
by and watch this adventure, I'd like to be paying attention while it happens at least,
I want to be awake", because there are some impacts and we know they're out there, and
there's our litany. You can make a career being a climate scientist these days. Well,
that's one end of the spectrum, or you can make a career out of being a good citizen
and scientist and dealing with a lot of issues, in the meantime maybe take a walk to work,
take the subway to work sometimes. What do learn from people who live on islands in the
south Pacific? I don't know, that's you guys and gals. What we learned is that people who
live in grass houses and store stones have something to offer us, it's hard to say that
fast. And Jared Diamond and others have found out that when you don't behave properly in
the ecological goods and services, the environment that you have, if you don't do things properly
a transition will occur, and that transition may be catastrophic to you, or not, but things
happen. So we need to learn from history, we need to learn from what we can do, and
we need to better behave. One of my jobs, and this was the sobering part, I'll get to
the happy part soon, the sobering part was that I had to deliver report card of the planet
to 192 nations. Well, it was harsh. And it was harsh for me, I actually did go through
a little downside there for a while think "Wow, this is not fun, I thought this was
going to be a great job but I'm preparing a report card, I was like "Uh oh"", but like
a friend of mine reminded, me this recent report card we had 4 out of 90 things that
showed some progress and we ended up with a 2.25, I don't know how you guys grade on
curves here but that's still a little low, you can shift the curve but as one friend
said "Hey, it's better than zero". So yeah, ok. We've gone up and measured eight nations,
their best scientists have come together so again I love it when people tell me this is
a political thing and da da da, and you go "Well, the best scientists from the northern
countries have come back and they've been measuring the loss of ice" and that's why
we say yeah, things are happening. And when they come back they go it's amazing because
not only are we losing it but we're losing it faster, so it's accelerating. So some interesting
things are happening, we don't have to be doom and gloom but if you do have a house
on the water you might consider a few options because things are happening, right. As Ed
Wilson reminds us, we're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction of species, and
that's a serious thing, so we can do things about that. Again, don't get too depressed
yet, we've got happy thoughts ahead but we've got to set the pace, the stage of why this
is serious, alright, and I'm showing you enough issues over here of why it's serious and it
shouldn't be a game, it shouldn't be a video game, it shouldn't be anything like that.
This is the world we live in and we need to face it. Shoot, the world I lived in was Khrushchev
was going to nuke us, you know, so we all come to awareness and maturity at different
levels. This is everywhere in the news, and one of the things that bothers me, and by
the way, a lot of good letters, there was somebody from nearby huh, 2007, some of you
might know him, Tim Flannery, so you've got your own folks writing things about this,
one of the things that bothers me is that children, their number one fear in polls taken
in the UK and United States, number one fear, climate change. What are we selling them?
That is a horrible thing to hand a generation. If the climate is changing, ok, let's deal
with it, not doom and gloom and fear. We need to, you know, have them worrying about drop
bears not climate change. You understand the prospective that we're handing these, so it's
everybody's job here. Now, you've got some perspectives on how this message is coming
about, right, and you can see how some of you are going "I don't know, I don't know".
The bottom line: throw climate change out of your dialog. The bottom line is sustainability
of the planet, equitability of the nations. That's the bottom line. So, the things that
we should do for sustainability, oh by the way it's going to help in climate change.
So you don't have to talk about climate change at all, cause to many people, and I have some
friends in the United States that are very right wing and if I say climate change their
heads just "Oop, not going to think, not going to think", but if I say sustainability and
keeping the car markets open in Australia and doing this or that then they'll engage,
cause they can talk about it. So you got to think about how we look at that.
So I think that's all the horrible slides, oh no there's one. The Kiwis, does anyone
know some Kiwis here, any All Blacks fans? You realize they've got a love affair with
cars? They're number two. It's horrible. I see one Kiwi squirming, he knows. This is
the kind of thing we need to do, so go buy a car from a Kiwi and get him to quit. So,
these are the kinds of things that we have to deal with because in the picture at night
when we tuck each other in bed we got to go "What's the vision we want here? What's really
a good way for us to live on this planet?" and I don't like this one myself, I think
we need to change. And yet, three pillars of sustainability: economy, social, environment,
it's a shaky, scary world out there, right? It's going to lead some of us into a lot of
directions, as I say maybe there's a theology degree we ought to add this department, you
know, because people are going to be wondering what's going on. But aha, not a panacea but
a tremendous set of arrows in our quiver, are the technological ones. I could sell you
in technology, except you're sitting here in QUT. So this is the epitome of a place
that thinks about technology, and so we want to do that because it's exciting. But to put
it in perspective, this is an advanced statistic that I developed years ago, when you're sitting
there and you're talking about those things I was telling you and you notice that everybody's
moving down the line and you're like "Ok", you probably aren't communicating the way
you want to, right? You've got to advance that, so if you start talking about some of
these issues and they move over and the guy says "Would you like an ale? Where are you
from?", then you know you're engaged. In this group you all think and talk alike more so
than a lot of the people out there in the bars, and so at home, your neighbours, have
that conversation, have that conversation and hear from them what they say, and if they
say "Well climate change's claptrap, I read about it someplace else" then you say "Well,
ok, let's put climate change away, let's talk about the rest of the planet". So there's
so many way's to engage, and that's what I want you to get to think about, how do we
engage with the rest of the planet. Sometimes I think you don't appreciate, you, academic,
government, us, what people prefer: left side or right side? Left side or right side? What
is going to make people, the rest of us *** sapiens, this is what they like, and if somebody's
telling you differently in the university I'll talk to you later about it, this is what
they like. So how we view ourselves as scholars, as intellectuals, as, you know, graduates
of the university, where are we at? I was a lot, a bit, of that first guy, I was like
explorer, entrepreneur, that's where I was, and young. I wasn't so attracted to the lone
wolves, there's places full of them, I'll bet you've seen one or two. But it's working
with some of the others down here and saying "Nah, likes make this happen", that's again
why I'm very attracted to this QUT, SIBA, Government of Queensland relationship because
they're going "They're down here, they're down here making it happen". Because things
are happening fast, are they not, and as I say, you know, if you're waiting for the gun
to go off at the starting line, you miss the sound. Now, we had a statistician, did she
come today? I don't know if she showed up. But you all know statistics, and our friend
Mr Bell. Most of the people out there are not engaged, and if you do it on maths sometimes,
I used to have my students do it they thought "So you think you're top one percent?" "Oh,
I'm not top one percent" "Yes you are, you're in the top one percent of the world, unquestionably,
unquestionably". And so the ones that are going to think about what it's going to take
to move that over a little bit and get more engaged, that's the challenge we have. And
I don't know if you know Bill Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, they're the ones that came up
with the ecological footprint and began looking at how much of this Earth we're using to support
our lifestyle, and we thought "You know, it would be nice to know". Well, unfortunately
it came like two and a half planets is required to keep us living in the quality of life that
we want, so we have to act fast. Uh oh, is there a chance? Is it not going
to work? How many people are out there? Well that's not where the people all live, that's
where the people use energy because Africa's got a lot of people, about 900 million out
there, but they're not using electricity so it's not just population. So I pause as I
think about one of the challenges for us to get our heads around this, and it dawned on
me some time ago that we're dealing with exponential, and we talk about exponential because, you
know, "Hey, exponential this, exponential that" and I started really trying to find
out the fundamentals of exponentials and how do we think about it, and what I came up,
cause it, you know, we're at 7.2 billion and the reason it was important to me is some
of the baby boomers in here, there was 2.5 billion when we were born, so we were down
there here we are and yet how do we think about population growth, and most of us don't
get blown over every time we see 7.2 but its exponential. I posit that it's our brains
are not wired for exponential. We do not have the innate programming to understand exponential.
Through primitive tribes everywhere, you get by with one, two, three many; it's in the
Chinese language of the number system, and many, many others, and so if you go through
that's all you needed. So you say, how many snakes in the bush? One, that's good enough.
How many stars in the sky? Many, that's good enough. You realize you could do most everything
you needed with just one, two, three many, and it worked for hundreds of thousands of
years. But now we're up there trying to scale this thing whether we want to or not, and
we don't have that programmed in our head. So we deal with things like Moore's law, and
how is all this rapid technology increasing, even though that's a cost based law, and where
is that going to go; are we going to get singularity, artificial intelligence. Well how do we put
our brains around that exponential increase? It's very difficult, we teach ourselves as
scientists and engineers to do logs and indice lines like that because otherwise, and we're
not talking one exponential curve, we're talking population growth, resources declining, species
etcetera etcetera etcetera. So I say that this is a whole other area, and this is the
kinds of things that we would talk about at QUT in the future, is to get people interested
in some basic theology and theory of how the brain works, how do we comprehend this? Because
we've been assuming when we tell people exponential growth of population that they get it. Why
would they get it? Just doesn't happen. So, things out there, you can how them pictures
and it helps, but people aren't going to get it because we don't get it innately, and so
when they rise up to do good things we need to understand that. Our job, study, communicate,
go back, it's an iterary process that we've been trained to, is it not? And where we have
to do it, to make an impact, is right here in Aus, right here locally, that's where you
can absolutely have a big impact, and we've got to re-establish our basic premise for
why we're doing it, I'm not going to preach those things, people come up with their own
ideas of what we have to do to be sustainable, and then we can talk about technology, the
QUT salvation. Space and change are happening fast, what we have is the world affairs, I've
showed you enough of that, don't need to talk about it, but the speed again is what I want
to show you one little idea after we get a foundation of the space. Immanuel Kant, those
Germans gave us a lot of good things, the Volkswagen, they also gave us a philosophy
that said "All of knowledge is based in these three fears", all of knowledge, so that our
whole epistemology, our whole concept of what we know is based in these three areas, and
you can translate that to all the data you collect and everything else; space, time and
categories of numeration. When we put those together, we end up with everything being,
as I say the big picture of where everything comes, but also big data so now we can translate
that big data is actually composed of space, time and things, numbers. In a spatial context,
we go back to Buckminster Fuller, and I highly recommend you reading some of Bucky Fuller's
work, because he predicted mid-century, last century, the creation of a 3D geoscope where
we could learn about the planet and use computers to make important decisions on how to survive
on the planet, and Bucky even wrote a book called 'Spaceship Earth', which I highly recommend,
because it talks about this planet we're living on going through the cosmos, has everything
we need to live on and if we don't do it right we're going to be in trouble. So it's a great
metaphor, and he brought in the three dimension and computer issues, so again the things I'm
talking about are on the shoulders of giants, like Buckminster Fuller. Waldo Tobler, first
rule of geography: things closer together are more related than things far apart. You
lasses and blokes are more related than I am back in the US, and that's a truism. So
space also has an important component in commerce, who you're going to sell it to; transportation,
how far you're going to go; etcetera. So this is just one, we're teaching a little geography
today, Waldo Tobler, delightful fellow, still around. But it gets us asking important spatial
questions, and the important spatial questions began being answered in the early 80s with
the explosion of geographic information systems; we could look at a map and overlay it and
ask these questions. So these fundamental questions, and there's more, but this is basically
it: What are related? Where are my neighbours? Do I have neighbours that store nuclear waste?
What are the kinds of things going on? Where's pollution? What do I need to worry about?
Spatial as an ingredient of decision support is critical, and the Queensland government
is dealing with so much of it, and what they have to go through, again, who lives where
what, what are the impacts, how do we all relate and how can we get more taxes. So,
a lot of information out there, and we see it out there and it has spatial attributes
for most of it. We were just talking to Zoe Wilson, and when they looked through it they
had 600 databases and they classified 400 of them as spatial, even though others have
relationships. So that's what they found, just for all the volumes of data that they
were looking at. And the question is can you find something that isn't spatial? It's not
easy. So the idea of this growing world with information, with spatial attributes, and
look what the kinds of things you can do, company, a little German called Wisdom did
a little experiment, there's things that people are doing right now on the relationships that
are mindboggling. And when you begin to jump in to the bigger big data social media, there
is so much you can learn about people because people are very, very generous with providing
you private information about their lives, yeah, a lot more than I ever thought possible,
they're doing it. So this is this incredible world we got with technology and change and
this and that. But what about the time aspect, keeping an eye on the time, and again how
do we perceive that, I'll give you one example which explains why I know I cannot, so I'm
not claiming that I can think through this time thing. I had the great pleasure of being
befriended and befriending Ed Mitchell. He was the sixth man to walk on the moon, so
I got to hang with some astronauts, they're cool, they're all old fighter pilots so they're
good guys. At his birthday, a couple of years ago, down in Florida, we're all sitting there,
there's a dozen of us, and somebody gives him a birthday card, you've been there, right,
it opens up "Da da da da da da", that's trademark so I can't sing it, "Da da da da da da". So
they had the little card that sings, and I went "Oh, stop stop, Ed Ed", and he goes "What?",
and I said "Hold that up please", and he goes "Pfft, what's Tim got me doing now?". He holds
it up, and I said "Ed, what are you going to do after the party, are you going to throw
that in the trashcan?" and he goes "Yeah", and I said "Ok, you should recycle that, you
know that's right" and he goes "Yeah yeah yeah" and I said "Now tell us, more or less
computing power in Apollo 14 than the card you just said you were going to throw away"
and he goes "Oh, this card's got a lot more computing power than Apollo 14". Not just
a little, a lot more, and it was going in the trashcan. Ok, how do you put your head
around that? I'm talking to the guy that landed there and I can't put my head around that,
so if that happened and I say "Where are we going to be 30 years from now?", tell me that
we even have a chance of comprehending that. If you had told Ed when he landed on the moon
"By the way, you're going to get a birthday card 30 years from now, you know go in a time
capsule" there's no way, so it's very challenging all these concepts that we talk about. Of
course Moore's law and these other things, I'll let you follow up on those in detail,
but in Moore's law alone, at the beginning of this curve Nobel, Alfred, actually sent
the first rocket up and took the first picture, so anybody that's into remote sensing there's
a little historical factoid, took the first picture from a rocket over 100 years ago,
and now we've got, what, one or two satellites up there? Yeah, at least. And this is just
a small picture of, there are so many up there they need a traffic cop, you know, it really
is busy. But those are providing us information about the planet crustal movement, all kinds
of good stuff. So that's what we're being enabled with, empowered with, in terms of
spatial information and technology. I had the pleasure of serving for the county manager
as the GIS manager for Clark County, Nevada, with its famous city Las Vegas, fastest growing
city in the United States. Watching the people move in, mind boggling. So, change in technology
and using spatial information to understand this is what we set in the United Nations
we did this all over the world to show people how things are changing the landscape. I bet
if you took a few pictures here 25 years ago you'd see a few differences too, wouldn't
you. So getting a better handle on that requires spatial information and technology, and an
understanding of how to apply it. Very valuable for planning the future to figure out where
we came from. Wonderful little place, gives us butterflies, it's a plethora of pharmaceuticals
available from the Amazon, but then somebody let in a road and the foresters started going
to town and the next thing you know we're deforesting the last tropical forests, untouched,
down in the amazon. Very important stuff to get a handle on measure and communicate otherwise
who's going to care? Because I don't know about you but I haven't been down there. So
the digital Earth program, initiative, community, started from NASA based on these issues and
we began to look at where the tools out there that we can deal with. So anybody recognize
that? Who can nail me what that image is of? Come on. What is it? I thought someone would
sucker in with Google Earth and they're wrong. This, this is the company Google Earth bought,
Keyhole, this is the first image cause I hired them and gave them their first contract and
we had them show this in Nairobi to begin looking at the planet at the UN so people
could get it, cause I was tired of handing that report card to 192 nations and going
"Uh, things aren't going so good". I want to take charge, I want to be responsible,
be aware, and I like that. I like that. So that's what we did, and then boom, it's happening
right here, we just yesterday saw a big event. You got Mr Newman is up there doing this,
you got it. You got Queensland Globe, so there's not going to be any excuse for you to misbehave
here, is there? No no no. So, we need a strategy that talks about how we do that though, it's
very complex and that's your job. And this was a model that we came up with in the UN
that says "We have silos of information, we've got departments in universities, we've got
people in different disciplines". You're not going to change that, don't try. It's like
hitting your head against a brick wall. Get a chemist to think like a biologist, or a
physicist to think like a sociologist, it ain't going to happen. But if you take those
silos of information and integrate them with our tools based off what, foundations, the
kinds of things that SIBA and other organizations fight for in terms of open standards, built
on that foundation we can tie that information together and start looking at the social,
economic and environmental components in a planet and say "Aha, this is where I want
to be, we want to plan the future and we want to do a darn good job". Guess what? That hasn't
happened yet, this is the image, this is the model that I hope is a vision you go "We could
do that, because they just did open data in Queensland, I just talked to the lady that
kicked it off" which means you have access to all that. Is it going to be easy? No. Do
you have all the interfaces? No. Do you have all the models and tools for using it? No.
So business and the university have a whole tremendous opportunity to be successful in
this, whether it's a PhD or a wonderful application for a business, so much opportunity here,
very exciting time. So, from these it can go to many different systems. Google Earth's
just one, just one. So, tremendous and obvious benefits, right, all this stuff, this is good
news, look at all, you got to love that, that's like God, Mum and apple pie. Absolutely, this
is what we want. So there we go, in the hands of the people, we have the technology and
this is the good news. They're connected, they know where they're going, absolutely.
Sometimes they get distracted, but hey, they're just human beings, right, they have important
messages to share, they have a voice. Course you've read the newspapers recently, it's
going to cost you 30 days probation if you actually kill somebody, and it's happening.
Now Malthusian, you know, those that are of the Malthusian bet might say this is a good
way to go, but I'm kind of thinking "Huh, we still have another challenge, you know,
we have a challenge and we have a challenge to figure this out before Darwinian principles
figure it out for us". We need to think about what's going on with this anonymous crowd
out there, this big powerful, and look up Sir Galton, did some interesting things with
the wisdom of crowds, I won't go into great detail on it, but what's bothered me is I've
been looking around and I'm going "Ok, the human condition, remember, you've got to talk
to your neighbour, your family, we're getting together and saying "That's a romantic evening?
Not the ones I remember". Let's see here, we like sports, we like arts, not working
for me. The great outback, let's go on outside and see the good world, eh? I'm going "What's
going on?", and it's a gender-transition issue right, so it's covering everybody, but I'm
kind of wondering about that". But that's feeding big data, and big data is a great
buzzword, whatever your paper, whatever your research, just put big data on the front,
you're going to get funded, don't worry about it. So, things that took 100 years to get
the baseline in are now digitally available for you right there so the time factor again
is mindboggling for some of us that were in that period, and here's something I popped
off of the Queensland Globe, and you know, so these are the things you got at your fingertips
so there's no excuse of not having enough data and the coverage, and we're going to
need that cause there's a lot of things in the, I don't know if we have any biologists
ecologists in here but nth-dimensional hypervolumes describes an ecological niche, and we've never
been able to model it but we've been able to describe it. Now the computers and 3D modelling
and the things we've got are going to be able to approach it. This is the highest dimension
driven ever, ever, ever shown in physics, again it's kind of fuzzy, but why do we want
n-dimensional hyper-volumes? How can this technology help us? This is disease, if I
remember right it was a kind of fish, so these were fish diseases spreading throughout the
United States. It was published, you can get that paper it's actually Australian authors,
without the models and the three dimensional tools, we can't do things that are very practical
so if you like to eat fish you're going to want to know about things. So it all starts
to come together from different, the confluence of topics and issues and science coming back
to the spatialist phenomenon, and the big data aspect is kind of like that big hole
that we're all stepping into and we're going to get lost unless we pay attention. So this
is phenomenal, a lot of sociologist, I mean the connection issues, we're just touching
it, we're just touching it. I keep coming up with, I like people being able to report
something without having their name known, but I really don't want people without their
name causing trouble in society, so how do we balance that? How do we balance that? I
think, in my country you got freedom of speech, yes, if you stand up and represent yourself,
not if you don't tell people who you are. So I think we all respect that, if you got
something to say stand up and say it, we'll support you. But isn't anonymous, so that's
a real tricky area we need to look at, but it's amazing and I think some of you have
used some of these tools, who's connected to what, what's connected to what. It gets
real exciting and you can learn a lot of things, the analytics are phenomenal when we look
at disease or marketing or social issues or biology, you name it.
And so when we begin to put our fingers on this connections, and you'll notice in this
diagram that Buddha is being poked at, alright, but who's the guy in action, the one in Australia.
So you see, this is Australia making a difference. And so as we begin to think and study more
about our minds and how they work, and the artificial intelligence and my brain engineering
and mapping, we see tremendous advances, and that's why I got off ***, it's one picture
and I knew that was never going to do it, that's how we're discovering things and the
poor little children their brains weren't really formulated at 16, it took way into
the 20s, and it was like "Oh ok, maybe we shouldn't throw them all in prison, maybe
we should work for them a little longer". Yeah, so the things we're learning from the
brain imagery and the brain mapping are helping us, and we've got so many areas in this spatial
and this exponential area, we talked about Digital Earth a little bit, physiome, the
body, amazing concepts, genome, the DNA, we are really, really in an interesting time,
it's kind of like an intersection with everybody having a road rally coming through the intersection
and you're standing there coming from all directions, it's very, very dizzying at times.
And yet we have, and this is thanks to SIBA, one of the developments is having iPads, the
things that people are carrying around, when they go to a house, amazing engineering applications,
what about if the house is on the fire? Wouldn't it be nice to know that there were some children
in the back room? Things of that nature. What if you come to another house and you want
to find out how much energy loss is in it? Tremendous applications being able to take
our spatial knowledge and information and being able to walk in the real world and apply
it, so this is a very, very exciting visualization, three dimensional space time, fourth dimension,
at a time when what's happening? Everywhere you're getting your picture taken, whether
you want to or not, we're a spatially-enabled web society, so everything, the information
again, over 90 percent of the information that exists today occurred in the last two
years, so two years from now 90 percent of the information that's ever existed on the
planet, ever, will have just been created because of all of these things. So I remember
when I started off in grad school we always started off your thesis like "Where are you
going to get your data?" and that was always a challenge, and sometimes you would spend
three years getting your data and then you would do your analysis and it was 90 percent
of your thing was getting data. Anybody that spends three years getting data today, I want
to talk to them, I think I can save you a little time. Data is there, and so as we sit
within this concept of space and time and what's going on with speed in our brains,
we do want to reflect, and that's what I started off the talk, we want to reflect with why
we're doing it, what's important, what's our mandate, or manifest destiny, what binds all
of us together in an agreement in space and time as to why we want to play with these
games, and I think we use these tools to begin mapping and charting a world that's going
to be meaningful to our children, meaningful to us, one where equity, green concepts, yes,
a lot of these are touchy feely concepts, but since we all benefit, why not let the
touchy feely lead the way? It's ok, because in the end we all benefit, and if we all benefit
we're going to have to do a lot of hard work here to make a difference. And that, I'm very
pleased and privileged and honoured to have been invited here to share some of my ideas
of what this place can do. Thank you. [Applause]