Tag Archives: Dr. Andy Miah

Miah and the Olympics; birth of the buckyball

Given that the Winter Olympics are due to open later this week in Vancouver (Canada), there is a  flurry of interest in gene doping and other means of enhancing athletic performance. (I’m mentioning this because developments in elite athletics find their way into consumer markets and because of my interest in human enhancement.) For example, the University of British Columbia (UBC) is hosting,

Sport, Ethics and Technology: Is High Performance Sport Inconsistent with Ideals and Ethics?

Date/time: Monday, February 8, 8 p.m.

Location: Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
University of British Columbia
6265 Crescent Road, Vancouver
For a map and closest parking, visit: www.maps.ubc.ca?130

As the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games approach, Olympic athletes will come under close public scrutiny.  New technology will offer unexpected advantages that will challenge the boundaries of what is considered a level playing field.

And given those challenges, how do we determine what is ethical and fair? These questions are explored with Richard Pound followed by a panel discussion with Jim Rupert, Beckie Scott and other participants.

*Richard Pound is a former Olympic swimmer, McGill Chancellor and World Anti-Doping Agency Chairman.

*Jim Rupert is an associate professor in the School of Human Kinetics at UBC. His research looks at future trends in doping and doping control as it pertains to genetics and “gene-doping.”

*Beckie Scott is a former Olympic cross-country ski racer who currently serves as a member of the IOC.

This event is one of five provocative dialogues presented by UBC’s Sport and Society series during February and March. Find details at: http://bit.ly/9LuMXO

Friday, Feb. 5, 2010, the lead article in Section B of The Vancouver Sun by Margaret Munro was (print version), Gene Doping; The latest way to boost performance. The article noted that Andy Miah, at the University of the West of Scotland, in contrast to Olivier Rabin and Theodore Friedmann, the experts (whose study was just published in the journal Science) quoted in the article, suggests that gene doping may be safer than current methods of enhancing performance.

I have mentioned Andy before (here in my series on human enhancement and here regarding a book he edited on art and the future). His response to the Rabin/Friedmann concerns is here. An abstract of Rabin and Friedmann’s article is available here but the full article is behind a paywall.

Andy was also featured in an article in The WestEnder (a Vancouver community newspaper) by Jackie Wong titled (in the print version), New-media [sic] centre seeks to democratize Olympic coverage. From the article,

“We can say that Vancouver 2010 is the first truly digital Olympic Games,” says Andy Miah, chair in Ethics and Emerging Technologies in the School of Media, Language, and Music at the University of the West of Scotland. Miah has been researching new media and the Olympics for 10 years, at six Olympic Games.

Andy has written an essay about new media and its role at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics at Huffington Post. From the essay,

…. perhaps the most interesting dimension of Vancouver’s media culture is the rise of three other media entities, the first of which is the W2 Centre on Hastings, led by Irwin Oostindie. W2 is a cultural and arts infrastructure, serving the independent sector. It will run an extensive programme of art, debate and cultural experiences, some of which will have buy in from the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), while other elements will be more independent. To this end, W2 will serve as a bridge between the privileged participants and the critical commentators around Games time. For example, they will host the Legal Observers programme, headed up by the Pivot Legal Society and BC Civil Liberties Association, which will monitor the operations of Olympic security during Games time. It will also host a cultural collaboration between the London 2012 and Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiads, as part of the UK’s Abandon Normal Devices festival, led by England’s Northwest.

You can read more here.

I’ve now mentioned the two areas that Andy sees as the two major controversies from the Vancouver Olympics, doping and new media activism.

One final note on this, Andy will be bringing a team of about 10 students from his university in Scotland who will be blogging from this site, Culture@tO Vancouver 2010. I’m not sure what the start date will be, presumably Feb. 12, 2010 when the games open.

Bucky balls are the popular name for the buckminsterfullerene (aka fullerene). Named for Buckminster Fuller, the molecule resembles one of Fuller’s geodesic domes. (There’s a geodesic dome in Vancouver which houses our local science centre and during the Olympics it will be home to the Sochi [host for 2014 Olympics], Russia pavilion.) The fullerene was first discovered at Rice University in Texas and this year marks its 25th anniversary and what many describe as the birth of nanotechnology. In celebration, the university is hosting a technical symposium.  From the news item on Nanowerk,

On Oct. 11-13, the best minds in carbon nanotechnology will gather at Rice University for a technical symposium during the Year of Nano, a series of events at the university celebrating the 25th anniversary of nano’s big bang.

Hmmm … I may have gone a little ‘link happy’ today. Tomorrow I should be looking at nano sponges and patents. Later this week I expect to be posting my interview with Dr. Cheryl Geisler, the new dean for Simon Fraser University’s new Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology (FCAT).

Back from the 2009 International Symposium on Electronic Arts

I was a little optimistic about being able to blog while I was in Ireland and Northern Ireland for the 2009 International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA). I’d forgotten just how jampacked conference schedules can be.

First off, my presentation (Nanotechnology, storytelling. sensing, and materiality which was part of the Posthumanism: New Technologies and Creative Strategies track) was on Aug. 26, the first day (thank goodness), and according to the moderator, it went well. It’s the first time I’ve had a relatively full room for one of my presentations. Of course, I had a typo on my first slide … I’d misspelled my name. We had some good discussion after my talk which is usually a sign that people have been engaged at some level.

I was excited and thrilled to find out that the moderator for the session was Andy Miah (you can find him here or here) as I know he’s been interested in nanotechnology (he had a nano project for a PhD student a few years back).  He’s currently a professor at the University of the West of Scotland and much in demand at various conferences and symposia.  His interests are broad ranging from literature, sciences, philosophy, and more. I found out from him on the last day of the conference that 40% of the submissions for my track were accepted.

I also got to meet Julie Freeman, an artist who worked with Jeremy Ramsden (scientist) to produce: in Particular; Nano Novels – Art & Science from the Tiniverse. She very kindly gave me a copy of their work and I have to say it was a thrill to meet her. If you’re interested in the “novels”, go here. (I think the word novel is being used in a form of word play as is “particular” i.e. playing off nano particle.) If you’re interested in Julie Freeman’s work, go here.

Unfortunately my notes are nowhere near as coherent as I imagined them to be but I will be blogging more about the conference in the next day or so. Also, I will be posting an interview with Preston Manning later this week.

Nanotechnology enables robots and human enhancement: part 4

In Tracy Picha’s Future of Your Body Flare magazine article (August 2009) , she finishes her anecdote about the paralympian, Aimee Mullins (mentioned in my posting of July24, 2009), with a discussion of her racing prosthetics which were designed to resemble a cheetah’s hind legs.

And they not only propelled sprinters like Mullins to smoke the competition but they began to make their wearers look like threats to other “able”-bodied athletes.

Picha goes on to mention the controversy over Oscar Pistorius another paralympian  who has recently been allowed to compete in the Olympics despite the debate over whether or not his carbon fibre cheetah-shaped racing prosthetics give him an advantage over athletes using their own human legs. If you’re interested in the controversy, you can check it out in this Wired article. Picha’s article is only available in the print version of Flare magazine’s August 2009 issue.

I think the distinctions in the  study I mentioned on Friday (July 24, 2009) between restorative/preventive but non-enhancing interventions, therapeutic enhancements, and non-therapeutic enhancements are very useful for understanding the issues. (Note: I mistakenly identified it as a UK study, in fact, it is a European Parliament study titled, Human Enhancement.) The study also makes distinctions between visions for the future and current scientific development, which given the hype surrounding human enhancement is important. The study also takes into account the political and social impacts of these developments. If you’re interested in the 200 page report, it can be downloaded from here. There’s a summary of the study by Michael Berger on Nanowerk Spotlight here.

So, are robots going to become more like people or are people going to fuse themselves with equipment and/or enhance themselves with chemicals (augmenting intelligence mentioned in my June 19, 2009 posting here) or ???  Actually, people have already started fusing themselves with equipment and enhancing their intelligence with chemicals. I guess the real question is: how far are we prepared to go not only with ourselves but with other species too?

You may want to check out Andy Miah’s (professor Andy Miah that is) website for some more thinking on this topic. He specializes in the topic of human enhancement and he follows the Olympics movement closely. His site is here and he has some slide presentations available at Slideshare and most relevant one to this series is: Bioethics and the Olympic Games: Human Enhancement here.

As for nanotechnology’s role in all of this. It is, as Victor Jones noted, an enabling technology. If those cheetah legs aren’t being made with carbon nanostructures of one type or another, they will be. There’s nanotechnology work being done on making the covering for an android more skinlike.

One last thing, I’ve concentrated on people but animals are also being augmented. There was an opinion piece by Geoff Olson (July 24, 2009) in the Vancouver Courier, a community paper, about robotic insects. According to Olson’s research (and I don’t doubt it), scientists are fusing insects with machines so they can be used to sniff out drugs, find survivors after disasters,  and perform surveillance.

That’s as much as I care to explore the topic for now. For tomorrow, I swing back to my usual beat.

Nano, the arts, and the future

In New York state, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is  opening, on October 3, 2008, a new performance/high tech/research space called the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center or EMPAC. The whole thing is being powered by Rensselaer’s Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations and despite its name the center is supposed to bring together artists and scientists. In other words, the general public may go there for a performance, artists can collaborate virtually, or scientists can “immerse themselves in data and fly through a breaking wave or inspect the kinks in a DNA molecule.” There’s more in the NY Times article titled ‘Art and Science, Virtual and Real, Under one Big Roof’ here.

Dr. Andy Miah (University of the West of Scotland) is launching (on October 30, 2008 in Liverpool, UK) a new book with a symposium both of which are called, Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty. The book looks exciting. I notice that Richard Jones has a chapter in it and I loved Jones’s nanotechnology book, ‘Soft Machines’.  It’s not obvious from the title but the book does discuss science, technology, and ethics in relation to art and our futures.  Wish I could attend. More  information about the book and symposium here.

A few weeks ago, the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies announced an event for Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2008. It’s called: Nanotechnology? Synthetic Biology? Hey, What’s That? The details aren’t up on their website yet but according to the press release the talk will focus on the results of an opinion poll that was run in August 2008, asking people if they’d heard of nanotechnology or synthetic biology (“An emerging area of research that uses advanced science and engineering to make or redesign living organisms, such as bacteria, so that they can carry out specific functions”). Two representatives from the polling company and David Rejeski, Director, Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies will be speaking from 12:30 – 1:30 pm ET next week, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2008. you can attend by webcast (I’ll put up a link when the site has the webcast set up). If you’re attending the live event, please rsvp here.