Clarifying Cause and Effect
January 13, 2012 / By Anna Lynn Spitzer
It’s the holiday season, and much to the delight of economists, commerce is booming. But most shoppers are probably unaware that the products they purchase at the mall could be altering the Brazilian rainforest or increasing deforestation in Sumatra.
Calit2 academic affiliates Bill Tomlinson, informatics associate professor, and Rebecca Black, education assistant professor, want us to better understand this type of cause and effect.
The Causality Project, an online database and corresponding website currently under development, will draw direct links between specific human behaviors and their ultimate effects on the environment.
The project is one of 14 nationwide recently awarded a $50,000 grant from Constellation Energy, a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Baltimore, Md. The E2 Energy-to-Educate grants support hands-on projects that help students understand and address energy issues.
The Causality Project’s database currently contains about 2,500 connections, the tip of the proverbial iceberg according to Tomlinson, who is hoping eventually to include millions of diverse relationships. “There are thousands of potentially relevant topics, and each one links to many other topics. The challenge with environmental issues is they’re so interlinked with other aspects of our lives that it’s hard to understand them without understanding all of those linked domains as well,” he says. “We want to help people think about how all these topics are tied together.”
They’ll do this by applying network theory and analysis to find the shortest path between cause and effect, and use these pathways to educate the site’s users. “It’ll help people figure out how topics that seem like they have nothing to do with each other may actually be connected in important ways,” Tomlinson explains.
When complete, the site will serve as a wiki, similar to Wikipedia but with a key difference. “Wikipedia has articles on diverse topics related to the environment,” he says. “Our system highlights the connections between those diverse topics, because ultimately it is those connections that lie at the heart of understanding complex environmental systems.”
The $50,000 E2 grant will fund project development, educational design, and a UCI student contest. The site developers will reach out to members of campus environmental groups and other interested students, who will form teams to add content to the database, support existing linkages through citations to reputable sources, or upload videos that demonstrate causal connections. The Causality Project website will officially launch at the end of the contest, scheduled during spring quarter 2012.
Tomlinson, who directs UCI’s Social Code Group, has long sought ways to use interactive technology to make social and environmental issues understandable and engaging. The Causality Project easily fits that mold.
“The broad goal of the project,” he says, “is to help people understand that important environmental and societal issues are often connected in complex ways.”
-- Anna Lynn Spitzer