Scientists can have a heart, too. | Biodiversity loss. Land use. Freshwater use. Nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Stratospheric ozone. Ocean acidification. Climate change. Chemical Pollution. Aerosol loading in the atmosphere. |
Foley’s team was so moved by the research effort that it put together a compelling video (see below) dramatizing the situation, generated entirely with typography, graphics and energizing music. You can learn more about the team’s work at its research site, too. |
Jon Foley, director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, and a leader of the group, lays out the limits and their implications for human action in an article in Scientific American’s April issue. |
| Amid some controversy, the group has set numeric limits for seven of the nine so far (chemical pollution and aerosol loading are still being pinned down). And the researchers have determined that the world has already crossed the boundary in three cases: biodiversity loss, the nitrogen cycle and climate change.Read more at www.scientificamerican.com |
The economy works by making people selfish. Mass extinction is merely collateral damage.
Species are going extinct because humans can’t see it happening, and therefore
we can’t believe it is happening. It is as simple as that.
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Believing that the elephant will no longer be around is like believing that
one day the sun will rise in the west and the stars will fall as rain.
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We can only really get a handle on the short-term. A generation at most.
Long-term planning means the next year or two. Our minds can’t cope with
anything longer. That’s why we choose to govern ourselves by means of a
comfortable timescale. Four years, five years: that’s Politician’s Time.
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| Extinction is a happening thing, as I have pointed out more than once before.
But it is happening in slow motion: you don’t see a monkey turn into a man,
and you don’t see an animal go extinct. It’s just that one day you notice
that they haven’t been about for a few years. The current rate of extinction
is one species an hour, |
If they used the money to buy more forests, and then do the scam again, then it would pretty neat.
If it then emerged, however, that a hidden agenda of the scheme to preserve
this chunk of the forest was to allow the WWF and its partners to share the
selling of carbon credits worth $60 billion, to enable firms in the
industrial world to carry on emitting CO2 just as before, more than a few
eyebrows might be raised. The idea is that credits representing the CO2
locked into this particular area of jungle – so remote that it is not under
any threat – should be sold on the international market, allowing thousands
of companies in the developed world to buy their way out of having to
restrict their carbon emissions. The net effect would simply be to make the
WWF and its partners much richer while making no contribution to lowering
overall CO2 emissions.
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| The IPCC’s claim that 40 per cent of the forest is
threatened by global warming, it turned out, was not based on any scientific
evidence, but simply on WWF propaganda, Read more at www.telegraph.co.uk |
Dare I say that Amplify could be improved in this regard. | most people are interested in a wide variety of topics. What doesn’t happen to overlap adds to the overheads of useless hits, which waste time and electricity. |
However, the most serious drawback of the follow the leader paradigm may be the tendency for early members of a group who, as a consequence, have the greatest number of followers, to more or less dominate the proceedings thereafter. Then, of course, there is the massive distortion caused by the celebrity factor in early 21st century culture. |
| The difficulty is not about recommendations being a measure of value. After all, that is what Eugene Garfield’s Science Citation Index is all about – the more an author is cited, the more he is deemed to have contributed to the subject in question. What is lacking in the follow the leader paradigm is context, in order to give at least some idea of where people are going with social media contributions. Some kind of directory of interests based on questions in user profiles would be a start.Read more at www.ikmagazine.com |
I recommend reading the whole article, but then I would because I wrote it. | The idea is that somehow through the ‘wisdom of crowds’ this system of recommendations delivers the best knowledge, fastest, to the people who want or need to know |
| in the new era of social media, massive information flows are no longer organised in terms of ‘about-ness’, but in terms of ‘who-ness’. It’s not what you know, but who you know. This trend started on social networking sites, with the concepts of friends and feeds. |
| One of the cultural dynamics that reduces the value of information streams based on follow the leader is that many people follow others as a kind of thank-you for following them. Many others follow people principally to boost their own follower numbers. So, who is following who is a very inefficient way of finding anything out in advance about content or its quality |
| Then, there’s the difficulty that people quite naturally seem reluctant to recommend unpleasant news to their followers, |
They are working so hard in the dark, since they don’t know what intelligence is, how it is done, or how it is mashed up with purpose, consciousness and experience. They are working with an essentially Platonic understanding of reality i.e. there is a non socially constructed truth and meaning out there – which is more than 2000 years out of date.
There were real technology breakthroughs in the 1970s, when computers made all text searchable using Boolean AND, OR, NOT ‘operators’, automatic sorting became possible and relational databases were invented. Since then, it has served the interests of computer companies to pretend to put what they call ‘intelligence’ into their machines, rather than enable people to use the real technology breakthroughs of the 1970s more intelligently.
I am afraid that this is yet another profit-driven tragedy wasting billions which could have been invested in enhancing the intelligent use of the technology on what is essentially a chimera based on a misunderstanding about the nature of human intelligence. More than 30 years have been wasted.
Luckily, some of us who had the privilege of working with real masters of database development, are still around who believe that the real opportunities around these technologies lie in the development of the collaborative intelligence of users.
The application of this human intelligence is why I obtain so much more useful information from Amplify, than from Google. It is why Amplify is so important as an early form of collaborative intelligence.
Well, the truth is we don’t yet know, but as nanotechnology becomes more available, so will nano-waste. If such waste harms the body, it might be worth researching before more nano-products begin to flood the market. | Interest in ‘green’ innovation means not just thinking big but also very, very, very small. |
A survey by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies found that nanoparticles — particles less than 100 nanometers in size — are now used in more than 1,000 consumer products ranging from cars to food. Silver nanoparticles are widely used as coating materials in cookware and tableware and as ingredients in laundry liquids and clothes because of their antibacterial properties. You can even buy socks infused with silver nanoparticles designed to reduce bacteria and odor. |
“But what happens if we buy those socks and we wash them?” Sadik asked. “The nanoparticles end up in our water system.” |
| Some are known toxins; others have properties similar to asbestos. And it’s difficult, if not downright impossible, to monitor them |
| “We want to be able to develop nanomaterials while avoiding the unintended consequences of such developments,” Sadik added. |
But don’t let the bankers get away scott-free with this one as well… | Hundreds of NGOs, including Amnesty have supported the worldwide campaign to abolish the use of this weapon. In December 2008, 92 countries agreed to sign up to the Treaty but it couldn’t be effective until at least 30 states had ratified it. |
| Thanks to Burkina Faso and Moldova – this treaty will soon become effective, and hopefully this will significantly reduce the number of deaths and devastating injuries that occur in conflict zones as a result of unexploded munitions from these weapons. |
| According to a report published by the Cluster Munitions Coalition, it’s likely that your local bank is investing in cluster bomb producers. The report found that Barclays, HSBC and the Royal Bank of Scotland provide loans and investments to the tune of some £800 million between them. Read more at blogs.amnesty.org.uk |
As weather patterns become increasingly severe and heat rises, evidence suggests human aggression increases. Of course for a future world in heated chaos this would come as no surprise. Yet, crimes of desperation can be prevented before they happen if we secure our communities with networks of trust. Just something to think about… | If global warming is a scientific fact, then you better be prepared for the earth to become a more violent place. That’s because new Iowa State University research shows that as the earth’s average temperature rises, so too does human “heat” in the form of violent tendencies. |
| “It is very well researched and what I call the ‘heat hypothesis,’” Anderson said. “When people get hot, they behave more aggressively. |
| the researchers estimate that if the annual average temperature in the U.S. increases by 8°F (4.4°C), the yearly murder and assault rate will increase by 34 per 100,000 people — or 100,000 more per year in a population of 305 million. |
| global temperatures also increases known risk factors for the development of aggression in violence-prone individuals |
| rapid climate change can lead to changes in the availability of food, water, shelter |
| such shortages can also lead to civil war and unrest, migration to adjacent regions and conflict with people who already live in that regionRead more at www.newswise.com |
Think of this each time you visit the loo, and then think, what if you didn’t have one? | World Water Day, Monday 22 March 2010, is a crucial moment in the fight against the global sanitation and water crisis. |
In just one month, politicians from across the globe will gather in Washington DC to discuss what they need to do to fulfil some of the most basic rights of the world’s citizens – access to a safe toilet and clean water. |
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Three down six to go - Is Earth past the tipping point?
