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.
Millions of years of evolution and experience are being wiped out. The only way it will stop is if internationally traded currencies lose their value, and the global economy comes to a halt. So there may yet be a chance the slaughter could end.
Proposals to ban trade in bluefin tuna and polar bears were overwhelmingly
rejected yesterday at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species (Cites), meeting in Doha, Qatar.
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| A plan for a 20-year ban on ivory sales, to protect African elephants, is also
likely to fail in the coming days — partly because Britain and other members
of the EU are refusing to support it. |
| Only 20 of the 120 countries at the meeting voted to ban
trade in the bluefin. |
| The Cites process, which requires a two-thirds majority for a proposal to be
adopted, is vulnerable to well-funded lobbying by countries and industries
that depend on trade in a species. The vested interests exploit
uncertainties in the estimates of population numbers, and strike backroom
deals to secure the votes of developing countries where endangered species
are far down the list of political priorities.
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Despite a month of trying, there has been no success in papering over the cracks in the Euro.
Europe’s rescue plan for Greece appears to be crumbling after the country
threatened to call in the International Monetary Fund unless Brussels comes
up with real money on acceptable terms within a week.
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| The inability of the eurozone to put together a viable package after a month
of talks has dismayed markets, which thought the terms of a deal had already
been agreed. |
| The euro fell two cents against the dollar to below $1.36. |
| Greek Premier George Papandreou told the European Parliament that his country |
| is in effect already subject to the full
rigours of an IMF-style austerity plan but without enjoying any of the
benefits. |
| savings from cost-cutting measures were vanishing into
the pockets of bond-holders through higher interest rates.
|
| a German-led bloc of states is also warming to the IMF |
| IMF route is fraught with danger |
| completely undermines the credibility of
monetary union. |
| An overgrown, disused ride becomes a new Avenue which will, in a few years time, be lined by great trees. It’s a lucky thing, too, since we will be able to use Ford Dexter to pull the charcoal wood out now. In future, the Avenue will make it possible to pull out the harvests of thousands of hazel spar gads and poles. |
Andrew and billhook take a break |
There is no doubt that it’s hard work. Trunks of the felled trees have to be sawn in half, and all the side branches chopped off with the billhook. The side branches or ‘brash’ must be picked up off the ground and laid in lines called, ‘wind rows’, while the trunks have to be dragged and piled up next to the rides. |
Bend, lift, saw, chop over and over and over again without the help of any machinery, just as our ancestors did for hundreds of years. |
The result is a new landscape with straight young oak and ash trees planted by the previous owner which in 50 years time will make the high canopy to be then further thinned for timber. During this time, it will be possible to cut approximately 10 hazel crops of thousands of gads and poles each. |
Cherry and oak trunks with wind rows behind them |
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Three down six to go - Is Earth past the tipping point?
