Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention,

on purpose,

in the present moment,

non-judgmentally.

 

—Jon Kabat-Zinn

Claudia L’Amoreaux

Mindful Digital Life

Seek app

Exploring the slippery slope to phone-in-hand…

© by Claudia L’Amoreaux

iPhone pic of Snap Polaroid by Claudia L’Amoreaux

I’ve been thinking about single purpose vs. multipurpose tools. One of the captivating features of my iPhone is the onboard digital camera. And I don’t even have the top of the line iPhone. It’s ridiculously seductive to have one tool for photography (and video), audio, email, texting, Kindle library, Seek, and the myriad other you-name-its onboard. It’s designed that way.

Being around a 16-month-old child a lot is helping to drive my current inquiry.

Recently I did a little personal experiment. I bought myself a Polaroid Snap camera for my birthday. I took it with me on a birthday road trip. I was traveling with a friend, an awesome and serious photographer, who was traveling with a small but powerful digital camera. I put my phone away on this trip. We took a lot of photos. The SNAP photos—tiny Polaroids with sticker backs—were a little disappointing (the camera needs a lot more daylight than I was giving it in the fog-dense north where I was traveling), but I enjoyed the process. Here’s an iPhone photo of one of the Polaroids from a page in my very analog trip journal. This was a particularly satisfying snapshot taken looking down at my new book on my lap (see this previous post), and that’s my friend’s hand petting my dog.

Some background. In my early 20s, I started using a video Portapak under the guidance of educator and mentor Nancy Rambusch. Nancy was pioneering the use of video in the classroom to give teachers feedback on their strengths and biases. Watching children’s interactions in slow motion revealed subtle dynamics that changed my view of relationship forever. I had my first taste of technology for the greater good. Years later, when the first digital video cameras came out, I used them intensely to document World Heritage sites in Salzburg, Austria and Jerusalem for a project collaborating with UNESCO.

Also in my 20s, I had a friend who was a National Geographic photographer. So I learned photography from a pro. I loved taking pictures. We’re talking slides, prints, proof sheets. Yes, another era. Pre digital. When digital cameras came along, I took one of the very first…a Kodak digital…to Brazil on a project working with a Mebengokre community on a sustainable business website (1997). I eventually worked my way up to the first Canon digital—I loved that camera for years. I took hundreds of photos.

And then came the iPhone. It was always with me. I didn’t have to carry another tool. All my photos were right there on the phone at all times. It was so easy. And here’s what I’m noticing today. Since she was born, I’ve deliberately put my phone away in my granddaughter’s presence. I enjoy being completely in the moment with her, eye to eye, hand to hand. I’m a photographer. As she gets older, I feel the pull to photograph more moments with her. And I’ve found my phone in my hand, taking a photo a little more frequently than I’d like (e.g., the other day capturing her first moments in a pool wearing water wings—she was so happy!) It’s a slippery slope.

Whimsy on Morning Walk. iPhone photo by Claudia L’Amoreaux

So I’m experimenting. I’m going to model single purpose tools. Next step…moving all my books off the Kindle app on my phone, to a low end Kindle device with the goal of separating out some of the infinite functions the iPhone currently does for me, and spreading out the capabilities across a wider range of “power objects” from my granddaughter’s perspective…so she’s not experiencing me just with phone-in-hand but sees me using a wider range of tools. Maybe her first camera will look something more like this (just an example, not a product recommendation), long before she has her own handheld computer and teleportation device that we naively still call a phone. Meanwhile, I’m challenging myself to let go of the all-too-easy path of one tool for everything.

Citizen Science—hands-on & participatory

© by Claudia L’Amoreaux



For those of you who have been waiting with great anticipation to hear the gender of the Ten-lined June Beetle, Polyphylla decemlineata, introduced in last week’s post, it’s a female. I guessed correctly. I emailed my photo to the nature center and heard back the next day from Suzie Fortner, the programs director of the non-profit Friends of the Dunes. In response to my questions confirming the name and the gender, she wrote:

Yes, that is a 10-lined June Beetle! Some people also call it a watermelon beetle. Only the males have the large feathery antennae, it helps them locate the female when they are in this reproductive life stage. The specimen in this picture is a female, probably about ready to lay eggs or about to die if she already laid her eggs. After spending years as a grub, they are only in this life stage for a month (typically June, but they were late this year), and all they do in this life stage is reproduce. 

I wrote back:

Thanks so much for the information, Suzie. Do they stay in larval (grub?) stage in ground before emerging as beetle? The ranger on duty said they stay in ground for 7 years…is that right? I’m writing a blog post about my visit to the center. I’ll send it to you when I post it.

And Suzie wrote back:

You probably spoke with our intern Blake, we do not have Rangers as we are a Non-profit & Land Trust. The entire life-cycle is 3-4 years. And yes, they live underground in the sand during the grub phase. Though sometimes they become infected with a cordyceps fungi which takes over their brain and grows out of their heads like antlers. The fungi causes them to climb to the surface in order to spread spores. 

I wrote:

Wow. That’s amazing about cordyceps. Is the photo they label as male in this photo an example of the antler-like fungi or is that normal male antennae? Thanks so much for answering my questions.

She wrote:

That is normal male antennae. Here are some with the cordyceps.

Mind duly blown. (This photo definitely took me down a rabbit hole of research on cordyceps ;D).

On this same trip, I knew that I was in river otter territory. I’ve seen lots of sea otters on the coast here in California but I had never seen a river otter in the wild. I was hoping to see one. Exploring the pier in the small town of Trinidad, I walked down a ramp from the main pier to a small wooden fishing pier below and just as I stepped onto the pier, a river otter came swimming directly toward me, and then dove under the water. A few boys were on the pier fishing and one said the otter had tried to steal his dad’s bait. When I do presentations and workshops, I talk about the River Otter Project here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I point people to the videos on their website, taken all around the Bay Area as part of their community science camera trapping project. When I got home, I did a little research and found my way to the River Otter demography study: a citizen science project. They had a form to record sightings in the Humboldt County. I was pretty thrilled to be able to enter my own sighting details.

Yesterday I received this email back:

Many thanks for your otter sighting at the Trinidad Pier! Some of the otters use these piers for foraging and possibly catching some leftovers from fishermen! We’re very glad you were able to catch your lone otter out there. No worries about the photo – maybe next time! [It moved too quickly for me to grab a photo.] Thank you again for your much appreciated contribution to the otter project! Hope to hear more from you soon!

Best,
Stephanie Cardenas, Research Assistant.

California River Otter. Photo by Rennett Stowe.

My point, in case you’re wondering: Citizen science is an awesome way to get hands-on and participatory, and to use technology for the greater good. Scistarter is a database of citizen science projects that you can search by keyword, topic, and area. Check it out. Has anyone noticed that the Seek app taps into the largest citizen science community of naturalists (540,000+ naturalists worldwide)? Observations of citizen science naturalists (20,000,000+ global observations) are what the Seek team uses to train their identification model, display ranges maps and generate nearby observations in Seek.

To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought

© by Claudia L’Amoreaux

“…I was glad to be alone. The discipline of the dark envelope summoned fresh images from the forest of how real organisms look and act. I needed to concentrate for only a second and they came alive as eidetic images, behind closed eyelids, moving across fallen leaves and decaying humus. I sorted the memories this way and that in hope of stumbling on some pattern not obedient to abstract theory of textbooks. I would have been happy with any pattern. The best of science doesn’t consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of thought, wherein the hunter’s mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. Easy to say, difficult to achieve.”

—Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

A book-loving friend of mine noticed a small town library we happened to be near was having a book sale. While my friend combed the boxes packed with every imaginable genre of book, I wandered straight to the science section. I pulled out this textbook by Edward O. Wilson, which he describes on the back cover as “three books in one”—a synthesis of what we know concerning biodiversity as an environmental issue, biodiversity studies and conservation biology as part of the natural sciences, and an introduction to evolutionary theory.

I bought the book for a dollar donation to the library, walked outside into the sun, and sat down to read. I was immediately drawn in by E.O. Wilson’s superheroic storytelling ability. I was transported to nighttime in the rain forest somewhere in the Amazon Basin, with the reflection of wolf spider eyes in my headlamp beam. He had me hooked on page 4.

The next day, at a coastal nature center, a young man walked in, spoke briefly with the ranger on duty, and left, returning in a few minutes with this creature on his hand. The ranger said it was a something or other beetle (the name went by too fast for me to catch) and that this beetle was a late bloomer…they live in the ground for seven years, and emerge and mate within 2 weeks. It seemed to be one of the last of the cohort. This particular one was making a loud hissing sound which the ranger told us meant it was disturbed. I managed to take this photo. According to a Washington State University entomology website, the males have large feathery antennae to detect the female pheromones. So I think this is a female. Although maybe I’m just missing the large feathery antennae. I’m emailing the photo to the nature center to see if they can help me identify the gender.

Remember a few weeks ago, I mentioned the AI/AR app, Seek, created by the iNaturalist folks? After searching my brain for the beetle name and failing, I opened up Seek on my iPhone, and selected my beetle on the hand photo, and in less than a second I had this creature’s name with some details about its life cycle and habitat. If you don’t already know (maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t?), meet the Ten-lined June Beetle, Polyphylla decemlineata.

My point…Seek is a really awesome app that is connecting me more deeply with the natural world around me. It’s available for Android and iPhone. Try it with your kids. Take a walk around your neighborhood and see what you discover. Let me know if you do. I’d love to hear what you find and what your kids think of Seek.

Hands-on family explorations of AI—in local nature

© by Claudia L’Amoreaux

Screen shot of Seek app showing photo and identification of Coast Redwood

I live on a steep hillside with several enormous and non-native Eucalyptus trees. They dominate the scene, so much so that I didn’t really notice the presence of a native & threatened species—Sequoia sempervirens—camouflaged just on the other side of my neighbors’ 6-foot wooden fence. But within 3 minutes of opening and using the Seek V2 app by iNaturalist, I had identified the Coast Redwood tree that I walk by everyday. And I had learned that this species which includes the tallest living trees on earth, can live 1200–1800 years. Respect.

Seek was created by the iNaturalist team at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. I had tried V1 but found it frustrating to use and abandoned it quickly. There it sat on my iPhone, along with my other abandoned apps, gathering pixel dust. Apparently I was not alone in this frustration. So they fixed it. And I have to say, they really got it right this time.

The iNaturalist team writes in an announcement about V2:

“In Seek v1, which launched in March 2018…you needed to take a photo before you had a sense of whether or not it was even identifiable by Seek. This caused frustration when people repeatedly experienced the lack of a computer vision match. Now, since you can see predictions overlayed on the camera you get immediate feedback about what you see and the specificity with which Seek can identify it.

The species included in Seek are based entirely on photos and identifications made by the global iNaturalist community, so the Seek camera will work best in places where there is already an active community of iNaturalist users, and for species that are easily identified from photos. Seek also uses data submitted to iNaturalist to show suggestions for ‘species nearby,’ but unlike iNaturalist, findings made with Seek will not be shared publicly, making it safe for children to use.

Seek is geared to encourage outdoor exploration of wild biodiversity (rather than pets, zoo animals, or garden plants). We hope kids, families, educators, and anyone into games will start exploring their natural surroundings with Seek, and we want this to inspire the next generation of biodiversity stewards by encouraging exploration and unlocking the names of species as a way to learn more about them. We want to make it easier for curious people who may not consider themselves naturalists to learn more about nature.”

Read this review by Eric Simmons, digital editor at Bay Nature, my favorite local magazine, about his experience taking Seek V2 out for a spin. You’ll learn more about how the computer vision works in this augmented reality app, and how the artificial intelligence trains to identify your images.

Make your family explorations of AI hands-on and grounded in learning about your local nature (for some guidance on family conversations about AI, revisit the second part of this post I wrote a month ago ). Try Seek. And do let me know how it goes. I would love to hear from you. Contact me here.