The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives

The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.

It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map.

“The map underlies man’s ability to perceive,” said Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who was a pioneer in the use of maps as a generalized way to search for information of all kinds before the emergence of the online world.

As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods. As researchers and businesses learn how to use all the information about a user’s location that phones can provide, new privacy issues will emerge. You may use your phone to find friends and restaurants, but somebody else may be using your phone to find you and find out about you.

Digital map displays on hand-held phones can now show the nearest gas station or A.T.M., reviews of nearby restaurants posted online by diners, or the location of friends. In the latest and biggest example of the map’s power and versatility, Google started a location-aware friend-finding system called Latitude in 27 countries early this month.

On its face, Google’s new service — available on dozens of mobile systems — is simply a way for friends to keep track of one another and meet up, for families to stay in touch or for parents to find comfort in knowing where their children are.

But it will generate a gold mine of new information about where millions of people travel each day, and there is no doubt that Google and others are planning to dig in that mine. “Everyone is watching Google, and this will open a floodgate of location-oriented applications and services,” said Greg Skibiski, the chief executive of Sense Networks, a New York City firm that mines the millions of digital trails left by cellphone users for marketing purposes.

It was the arrival of the so-called WIMP interface — for windows, icons, menus, pointer — in the 1980s on both the Apple Macintosh and computers using Microsoft Windows that made personal computers personal and moved them beyond the world of hobbyists and business. Now many of the software designers who created those interfaces say they see a change of similar magnitude with phones and maps.

“We’re way early on, and we don’t know what the Macintosh of maps will be yet,” said Paul Mercer, a former Apple Computer software designer who more recently worked on the development of the Palm Pre smartphone. “But because of their relationship to the real world, maps will be a metaphor for a huge swath of mobile computing.”

Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now “augment” reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings produced by the phone’s camera.

With this sort of map it is possible to see a three-dimensional view of one’s surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world.

“I always said the next interface would be Quake,” said Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, referring to the popular video game. “How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you’re looking at in the physical world?”

Increasingly, phones will allow users to look at an image of what is around them. You could be surrounded by skyscrapers but have an immediate reference map showing your destination and features of the landscape, along with your progress in real time. Part of what drives the emergence of map-based services is the vast marketing potential of analyzing consumers’ travel patterns. For example, it is now possible for marketers to identify users who are shopping for cars because they have traveled to multiple car dealerships.

“When I go from point A to point B with my feet, there is something of real value there,” said Tony Jebara, a Columbia University computer scientist who is a co-founder of Sense Networks.

A full-blown map-based, location-aware mobile world would entail rethinking basic American notions of privacy. For a generation of older Americans, exposing their precise location around the clock to an army of little brothers for marketing and advertising purposes is a privacy invasion.

Today the vast majority of cellphone users in the United States still use the devices primarily for just one function: talking. About 10 percent of cellphone users take advantage of map features, according to the market research firm M:Metrics. But the number is growing, the company said. And a survey by another market research firm, LJS, showed that 24 percent of those interviewed wanted GPS mapping capabilities on their next phone, but only 19 percent wanted an Internet connection.

On the other hand, there is a generation of smartphone users in their 20s that has grown up sharing the most intimate details of their lives on MySpace and Facebook. They may have a different point of view.

Recently, for example, Sam Altman, a 23-year-old Stanford University computer science graduate and the founder of Loopt, a pioneering friend-finding service, was having dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., when he noticed from the screen on his phone that his freshman college roommate was having dinner just two restaurants away. The two met after dinner at a bar, where they were joined by another former Stanford student who noticed on his display that they were socializing together.

Mr. Altman said his willingness to display his location was just as valuable in his business dealings. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, he turned on a feature that broadcasts his location and his name. He had more than a dozen business contacts as he traveled around the vast trade show, and he said he was able to kick off four deals from his random contacts.

The map interface even seems to have a biological basis, as suggested by new brain studies showing how the world is represented in brain maps.

“Humans evolved with amazing navigational abilities in our brains from an evolutionary perspective,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. He argues that the correlation between the map on the phone and the internal map in your head is a natural way to navigate all kinds of information.

For example, neuroscientists have discovered that people who have occupations that require them to maintain complex mental maps of the world, like London taxi drivers, have an enlarged hippocampus. What happens when our hand-held computers become extensions of the way we think?

“I have wondered about the fact that we might as a culture lose the skill of mapping our environment, relying on the Web to tell us how to navigate,” said Hugo Spiers, a neurobiologist at University College London. “Thus, it might reduce the growth of cells in the hippocampus, which we think stores our internal maps.”

Among cellphone makers, the map metaphor has been adopted most aggressively by Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones. The company has acquired digital maps of 69 countries and is now rushing to deliver to developers the tools to create software for Nokia phones oriented toward maps and navigation. In many ways this is similar to the tool kit that early computer designers gave programmers to develop Windows applications.

“This is a new metaphor upon which others can build,” said Michael Halbherr, Nokia’s vice president for social location services.

NEW ORLEANS — It took only minutes for the mood to turn from relaxed to grim.

Early Monday morning, the emergency operations team for the Army Corps of Engineers had been cheered by what appeared to be a dodged bullet: Hurricane Gustav had weakened significantly and did not seem to be packing the kind of storm surge that would overwhelm the city’s incomplete hurricane protection system.

But then, around midday, reports started coming in to the team’s emergency operations center that water was approaching the top of the western floodwalls on the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, long known as the most vulnerable part of the protection system. If those walls failed — as they had on the east side of the canal in Hurricane Katrina three years ago, destroying much of the city’s Lower Ninth Ward — disaster was a distinct possibility.

The news was received with no anger, no shouting. The team members worked with quiet determination, trying to figure out why the water was stacking up in the canal. When a member of the team asked Capt. Eric Marshall to attend to some bit of administrative trivia, he said curtly: “It’s too late for that stuff. We’re in tactical mode.”

Hurricane Gustav hit a very different protection system than Hurricane Katrina did. Three years ago, there were no gates to prevent water from Lake Pontchartrain from swamping the city through drainage canals, and the storm surge created three enormous breaches in the canals’ vulnerable floodwalls. Those gates are now in place, and two of them were pressed into service on Monday and worked.

Pumping stations that remove floodwater from the city have been toughened, and they did not fail as they did in 2005. And communication between the various organizations that worked to keep the city safe has been significantly improved.

Corps officials warn that the flood-control system is far from complete. Protection against the kind of storm that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year will not be complete until 2011. But they can point to real improvements in the hurricane protection system, and just as important, in the organization that runs it.

When water began rising in the drainage canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain in the northern part of the city, the team was ready.

The water in the London Avenue Canal neared four feet and was on its way to the maximum allowed height of five feet. Col. Alvin Lee, the district commander, started the process of getting approval to close the floodgate. That would block any storm surge from Hurricane Gustav, and huge pumps would push drainage water over the gates and into the lake.

Colonel Lee explained the process simply: “We drop the gates and start the pumps.” The process, which had been practiced repeatedly, took less than an hour. Later Monday evening, the corps closed the gates at the 17th Street Canal as well.

The team spent the overnight hours before the storm in a bunker, a squat building that sits inside a warehouse at the Army Corps’ district headquarters on high ground near the Mississippi River. It looks like a couple of trailers welded together. But these are not the standard-issue FEMA trailers that many New Orleanians still live in. The steel walls are double hulled, and the structure is bolted to the concrete floor.

With the realization early Monday morning that Hurricane Gustav had weakened significantly, the relief in the command center was palpable. Computer models of the surge generated by the storm suggested that the levee system would not be harshly tested, though corps officials expected that the heavy rains would flood the city, as heavy rains often do.

“I think the big event’s going to be the rain event here,” Colonel Lee said to Lt. Gen. Robert L. Van Antwerp, the commanding general for the corps, who flew in from Washington on Sunday to work with the local district.

Then the water started flowing over the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal floodwall.

The team worked intently as flood-gauge readings were projected onto walls. Officials monitored real-time computer data and struggled to make sense of the complex, fast-moving situation via radio, cellphone and BlackBerry.

Waves lapped over the west floodwall of the canal. A railroad bridge that the corps expected to be raised was at water level and restricting the flow of the canal, and its controls were inaccessible. Ships had broken loose from their moorings. Water was rising in the Mississippi.

Working without letup, the team members watched the floodwalls and levees that they had worked for three years to harden against storms.

The canal’s west floodwalls were not replaced after Hurricane Katrina because they stood up to that storm. But they have been strengthened. Additional soil was pressed against both sides of the floodwall to reduce the amount the wall sticks up above the soil surface, minimizing the exposed area. The soil was strengthened in some areas by mixing in durable clays, and relief wells were dug on the protected side of the wall to reduce seepage pressure.

Later in the day, corps officials emerged from the center to see the canal for themselves. They were stunned by the sight of the lowered bridge across the canal. Jammed against it like driftwood were three enormous barges and a 500-foot ship that was to be cut up for scrap.

“This is a huge dam right here,” said General Van Antwerp, who seemed flabbergasted. “We thought it was just the bridge” that was restricting the water flow, he said. “This has complicated it tenfold.”

By late afternoon, the level of the canal had gone down by about eight feet. The emergency appeared to be past, and the system had passed its first test. Col. Jeffrey Bedey, stopping at headquarters between trips to inspect other suspected weaknesses in the system, allowed a tired smile.

“We’re just lucky Mother Nature gave us what she gave us,” he said.