Vera in the city project 

What will happen if we leave just an open white paper hanging in the space with the people? What will  people draw if this white paper is hanging in the city outside or inside? There will stay traces of people's thoughts or people's happiness or maybe some irritation about surroundings. This is the first project, which is called "Vera in the city"?Just one open pen, one location and the city. We are collecting there new pictures appearing and disappearing, like free offline Reddit plane.

Futurium mobility traces

In Futurium museum of Berlin there are many traces about the city already collected - we can use the arm-band without any personal information collected, or about sounds of the city, recordings of pollution and many other traces humans are leaving in the city.Have a look at the videos made in Futurium museum about how we are connected,  future  mobility data analysis transitions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRfu-INQYUs 

 What is the best way to educate people?

I see there are two main ways: one is when we give opportunity for students to choose the best way, how they would be prefer to be educated (bottom-up approach). 

There is also opportunity of top-down approach, when we are asking students, doing design thinkîng workshops for making course curriculum together. I guess, that the best way is something in the middle and this is quite challenging to find this golden "middle".

Some teaching materials are available at https://github.com/Big-data-course-CRI-in-2020 

How to isolate yourself in isolation : 24th April 2020

Tips:

1. First of all, one needs to make himself comfortable.  By this I mean, to maximize possible comfortability of his environment -  put plants around him/her if he/she (further just they) likes plants,  remove everything if they do not like to have anything around them.  The environment can make us feel comfortable and at the same time, it can make us feel  very bad, if we do not like it. Simply because we get more than 60% of the information  from the world from our eyes, smells around us .

2. Make a schedule, when the world around us can actually intervene in our environment, e.g. when you allow randomness interfere with you - either it is afternoons  when you are morning person, or mornings, if you wake up after lunch.  The easiest probably is for people who can work at night - almost nothing can make these people  to stop their isolation, maybe just the same owls as they are. 

3. Making more things than usually, which you do not allow yourself in normal life. Especially during isolation I noticed this is so important since you do not have  some pleasure from meeting random people or pleasure from simply going where you want (basic right of humans which we all needed to sacrifice  for stopping the epidemics spreading). 

4. Find the way you can communicate with the world:

people are used to express themselves, with their friends and their lovers, 

while during confinement you may not be able to express it easily through zoom or skype.

So, you can find other ways, express it by making a cake, by making a painting, 

creating new python package for programming, or just sleeping and dreaming and then 

writing a book about your dream.

All in all I really feel that there is a lot more potential for people to work remotely instead of spending their precious time and nerves on traffic and moves which are non necessary.

At the same time physical space allows to create so-called serendipity more easily, I believe that living the the technological era, when we are able to move with the speed of light from one place to another just using online meetings, can allow us to save and foster new unseen collaborations for life and work.

Quite a lot of scientists have been telling me about  what I call "transition period for scientists". 

-Transition can be understood from both ways "personal transition" when I as a researcher you make transition to the next step of your research-"career".

-At the same time, our world, and researcher's world inside it,  are now in constant permanent transition to a new state, so that, one can find themselves  like a river of constant new processes and changes and reinventions of the profession "researcher". Look at "researcher" profession in times during Gallileo and Cardono [The history of Risk book ] and compare it to the recent big research laboratories around the globe. The structure of profession "researcher"  has changed and evolved a lot.  At the same time, many articles were recently written around the topic of "search for self-identity" for researchers [many articles like this one].  The interest to this topic is so high due to fast changing times - sometime we just simply do not manage to follow up with changing times when some fields go "out of fashion" while some fields where we go deep are not anymore, where we can work calmly and profoundly due to some external and materialistic reasons.

On additional separate note I can add that many scientists may have so-called obsessive compulsive disorders,  but not with "washing their hands" as the people sometimes have, but with writing and following their ideas - remember, if during the night when you finally realised how to write down some solution you would start writing it. If this goes in normal scales and under control, this does not bring any harm to your personality, but if this is something,  which drives you and exists as a new "normal" state, this may be dangerous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive%E2%80%93compulsive_disorder 

Take care of yourself and make enough breaks!