Archive for February, 2005

Avian Innovation

Published by Garry Peterson on February 26, 2005 in Ideas. 0 Comments

Louis Lefebvre, from the department of Biology at McGill, recently compared the ability of birds to innovate using thousands of reports of feeding innovations birders have observed and published. Crows and jays were the most innovative. Chickens and turkeys were the least. Also, from comparing successful and unsuccessful introductions of birds, it appears that more innovative bird species appear to be more successful invaders (Sol et al 2002. Behavioural flexibility and invasion success in birds. Anim. Beh.).

From the BBC:

Dr Lefebvre said that many of the novel feeding behaviours he included in the work were mundane, but every once in a while, birds could be spectacularly inventive about obtaining their food.

During the war of liberation in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, a soldier and avid bird watcher observed vultures sitting on barbwire fences next to mine fields waiting for gazelles and other herbivores to wander in and get blown to smithereens.

“It gave them a meal that was already ground up,” said Dr Lefebvre.

“The observer mentioned that once in a while a vulture was caught at its own game and got blown up on a mine.”

Stewart Brand on Long Term Thinking and Cities

Published by Garry Peterson on February 26, 2005 in Design, Ideas and Reorganization. 1 Comment

From an article in the Portland Tribune:

Brand, whose current lecture is titled “The Future of Cities as if the Past Mattered,” makes a distinction between long-term planning and long-term thinking, favoring the latter because we can’t know the future.
…
“Institutions max out at 40 to 50 years; some universities have lasted a thousand years. Religions — some poop out pretty quickly — while cities vary enormously, such as capitals of dynasties. Jerusalem has been an important town for 2,000 years.”
He compares aerial photos of earthquake-devastated Turkey from the 1990s with those of recently tsunami-ravaged Asia.
“All the buildings went down except the mosques,” he says. “This is because some parts of civilization move faster than others.” Islam is ancient, but modern businesses bought off the government to get around building codes, he says.

Resilience of social memory

Published by Marco Janssen on February 26, 2005 in Ideas. 0 Comments

Two recent publications provide some interesting ideas how knowledge can be maintained over a long period. John Cisne developed a population ecology model of medieval manuscripts. Manuscripts are copied manually, and more popular books have more chance to be copied. Cisne used concepts from population ecology to understand the paleodemography of the manuscripts and conclude that the leading technical titles who circulated in Latin probably survived. See also the commentary of Gilman and Glaze in the same Science edition.
We write only once a sentence that maybe read many times. Changizi and Shimojo analyzed the complexity and redundancy of characters of more than 100 languages. They conclude that the characters are constructed on average by 3 strokes, and that this is 50% redundant. The explanation for this is that characters are still correctly classified (by reading) when errors are made (by writing).

After the Tsunami

Published by Garry Peterson on February 23, 2005 in Reorganization. 1 Comment

UNEP has just released a report
After the Tsunami: Rapid Environmental Assessment

It can also be downloaded as a 9mB pdf file.

UNEP recommends:

[Rebuilding should be done] in a manner that preserves natural resources for the benefit of the local communities who were hardest hit by the disaster, a new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) says. Vulnerability mapping is urgently needed to pin point coastal sites where homes, hotels, factories and other infrastructure should be banned or restricted. …. This makes sense not only in respect to tsunamis but also with respect to storms surges, floods, hurricanes and other extreme weather events.”

The New Scientist has a short article about the report. They write:

Fresh water supplies including groundwater, irrigation channels and even wells, were severely contaminated in all seven of the tsunami-hit countries studied by UNEP - Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, the Seychelles, Yemen and Somalia. All the freshwater sources on many islands - including all of Sri Lanka’s wells - are thought to be polluted.

Water sources have been poisoned by sea water, sewage, human and animal decomposition and oil leaks, the report found. Toxic materials from damaged buildings have also been a problem, including asbestos, radioactive products and heavy metals. On beaches in Somalia, for example, the tsunami stirred up nuclear and hazardous waste deposits that had been dumped during the country’s long civil war.

Eric Falt, a UNEP spokesperson, told New Scientist that lessons could be learnt from the disaster, and much of the environmental damage need not be repeated. “It’s an opportunity for planners to do things differently; to not build so close to the sea and for shrimp farmers not to repeat the destruction of mangroves,” he said.”

Wildlife appears to have fared better than other environmental aspects. But many of Sri Lanka’s important turtle nesting sites were destroyed and there are reports that these severely endangered creatures are being eaten by desperately hungry local people.

However, there has also been some good news - turtles on Tanjung Bungah beach in Malaysia have taken advantage of the lack of tourists to begin breeding. More than 30 baby Olive Ridley sea turtles emerged onto the usually packed beach on 16 February, prompting a local campaign for a protected nest area.

Paper competition on “Novel approaches of integrative science for the future”

Published by Marco Janssen on February 1, 2005 in General. 0 Comments

The journal Ecology and Society invites submissions for in a manuscript competition on novel ways of performing integrative science and policy research. The annual ‘Ralf Yorque Memorial Prize’ of 5,000 Euro will be awarded to the most novel paper that integrates different streams of science to assess fundamental questions in the ecological, political, and social foundations for sustainable social-ecological systems.

Transdisciplinary science is often promoted in words and not in practice. Young scholars derive many incentives to specialize in certain disciplines, and experience few incentives to be creative in combining insights from various scientific disciplines and performing science in nontraditional ways. This paper competitions is meant to be an incentive in the effort to stimulate novelty and creativity of new ways of performing science.