Qibla and reliance on technology

Qibla app not quite working as it should

I was sat at my computer at work this afternoon when up popped a new email notification. It turned out to be a message from another of the Muslims in the office stating the direction of the Qibla (Mecca) along with a couple of maps as supporting evidence. I was mildly surprised - it was a little out of the blue as there had been no previous discussion of the issue and so far as I knew the direction I and others prayed in was well known and consistent. I bemusedly shrugged it off as the sender being a little bored and quickly forgot about it.

Later in the afternoon I remembered I hadn't prayed Zuhr (early afternoon prayer) and upon checking the time realised I only had a few minutes in which to do so. I hurriedly left my desk and went down to the first aid/prayer room and found myself a little disgruntled to see a man already using the sink for wudhu (ablutions). Didn't he know I was running late? I waited for him to finish and quietly chatted to the other man in the room and immediately as the sink became available, I performed wudhu. So far nothing out of the ordinary. 

But once I'd finished I turned to ask the first chap if we could pray in jamaat (as a group in congregation) and spotted that he'd placed his prayer mat in slightly the wrong direction. He wasn't out by much but I informed him he wasn't quite oriented properly - to which he responded that he was. The other guy in the room agreed with me and we both suggested that he should orient himself in the direction I indicated and I placed my prayer mat on the ground to show him what we meant.

He said no and whipped out his phone to show us a Qibla compass app which pointed in the direction he was facing and said another person had also done the same thing with their phone and they'd both gotten the same direction. At this point I understood why the email had been sent out earlier - someone else must've had this same discussion and not been impressed with obstinacy. It was not a new discussion to me - Qibla direction is a fairly common discussion point and in fact, shortly after I joined the company I myself had spent a chunk of time with architect's floorplans and Google maps and Qibla direction websites to identify to my own satisfaction which direction Mecca was in.

But with only a few minutes left in which to pray, I didn't have time to argue and explain the problems that phone compass sensors have inside buildings where they're surrounded by metal objects and electromagnetic-field-generating electrical devices or the previous discussions that had been had or the various lengths people (including myself) had gone to to work out the direction to our best understanding. His app had said this was the direction and his faith in technology was strong and stubborn and without freedom of time, I yielded the discussion and got on with the prayer united in congregation and his chosen direction.

Reliance on technology has become a way of the world with ever more devices, machines and apps that take care of all the details, big and small. They take away a lot of stress and make life a lot easier and we end up so reliant on them that we only notice when they break down. This isn't usually a problem - I'm perfectly happy to take a train to work, drive a car, use my phone as my alarm clock or type up a blog post on a computer. Technology as a tool is great but technology as a source of information is a whole other can of worms. 

The first claim to state is that information is only ever as good as the source. A known liar is no good as a source and a stranger shouldn't be taken at face-value. In day to day life, we laugh at people who use the Daily Mail as their evidence for stories and universities won't even accept Wikipedia as a citable source because, despite its sometimes overwhelming range and detail, the source of information on the website is unknown. Knowing what has gone into producing a piece of information is vital to being able to trust it. 

A couple of days ago I came across an interesting article on the BBC about how mathematical models are being used to score defendants on their likelihood to commit crime. The article mentions how the algorithm/model behind the scoring is a black-box secret. Yet it's apparently being used to decide whether a person is guilty or a crime or not. As someone who works in 'big data' this sets off all my alarm bells. If in my consultative work I built a model without explaining how it worked I'd be laughed out of the meeting room! Yet here is a live example of people making sentencing decisions based on "Computer says 'Yes'". 

In the case of the Qibla app above, the man had downloaded the app but didn't have an understanding of how it worked. It gave him an answer to a question he had and so far as he was concerned it had to be the right answer as it was a machine. Never mind that people were telling him otherwise. Just didn't occur to him that a machines can go wrong if the inputs are wrong. The image at the start of this post show just how wrong apps can be.

At the Saturday School I volunteer at, I get supremely infuriated and irritated when the A level students are using their calculators for the simplest calculations. I often confiscate them when I see them using a calculator to work out 1^2 or when they're confused after typing in a calculation and getting a different solution to the answer-sheet - "they're using a calculator so it must be correct and the answer-sheet wrong" - without realising they've actually typed the input numbers correctly.

It's a worrying trend that as technology gets more and more complicated, fewer and fewer people understand how it works and are happy to take it on blind faith that it works properly. The only real way to fight the trend is to get educated and learn more about the technology that controls you and the world around you and to be constantly aware that even the best machine is only as good as its input - what do you know of the input?

To quote Arthur Weasley in Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets "What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.”

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