Archive for April, 2007

Seven Ways to Improve Environmental Education

Published by Garry Peterson on April 25, 2007 in Ideas. 3 Comments

An essay in PLOS Biology The Failure of Environmental Education (and How We Can Fix It), by Daniel Blumstein & Charlie Saylan propose seven ways to improve environmental education. The proposal has some good points, but is both US-centric and and some of their points are overly based on the assumption that everyone agrees on what environmental outcomes are desireable (1,5) and that we know what is needed to create a sustainable society (2, 6). Their seven proposals are:

  1. Design environmental education programs that can be properly evaluated, for example, with before-after, treatment-control designs. Such approaches represent a sea change from programs today, and we expect considerable resistance from environmental educators. But the environmental community at large must stop rejecting criticism as negative and must embark on a policy of continuing self-evaluation and assessment. To be deemed effective, environmental education and the funding process that supports it must also work backward from specific environmental problems by evaluating the degree of actual impact on a specific issue versus the amount of money and energy spent on public education. …
  2. Many environmental issues facing us today are caused by over-consumption — primarily by developed countries. Changing consumption patterns is not generally a targeted outcome of environmental education, but we believe it is one of the most important lessons that must be taught. The magnitude of our impact, as first proposed in 1971 by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, can be viewed as dependent upon population size, affluence (specifically, per capita economic output), and technology (specifically, the environmental output per unit of economic impact). As countries develop, their environmental footprint may expand, and consumption control may become more important. … Thus, we need to radically overhaul curricula to teach the conservation of consumable products. Teaching where and how resources come from—that food, clean water, and energy do not originate from supermarkets, taps, and power points—may be an important first step.
  3. We need to teach that nature is filled with nonlinear relationships, which are characterized by “tipping points” (called “phase shifts”): there may be little change in something of interest across a range of values, but above a particular threshold in a causal factor, change is rapid. For instance, ecology, which focuses on understanding the distribution and abundance of life on Earth, is a complex, nonlinear science. If environmental education is linear—in other words, if you teach that recycling one beer bottle will save “x” gallons of water—people will not have the foundation to think about linkages or nonlinear relationships. …
  4. We need to teach a world view. … A greater appreciation of the diversity of cultures and peoples in the world should help us realize the selfish consequences of our consumption. “Not in my backyard” is not a sustainable rallying cry in an interconnected world when we are faced with global climate change. We are too late for “think globally and act locally” to work. …
  5. We must teach how governments work and how to effect change within a given socio-political structure. We suspect that many individuals will be offended by the thought that large industries have so much sway on the wording of state and federal legislation. We all suffer from polluted water and greenhouse gasses, but lobbyists are very effective in diluting potentially costly legislation meant to safeguard our water supplies or prevent rampant climate change. Understanding how the system works will empower subsequent generations to change it.
  6. We must teach that conservation-minded legislation may deprive us of some of the goods and services that we previously enjoyed. Self-sacrifice will be necessary to some degree if we are to avoid or minimize adverse effects of imminent environmental threats with truly global consequences.
  7. Finally, we must teach critical thinking. Environmentally aware citizens must be able to evaluate complex information and make decisions about things that we can’t currently envision. True scientific literacy means that people have a conceptual tool kit that can be applied to a variety of questions. Unfortunately, much science education is not inspired, and students are required to learn facts without being given the ability to manipulate and analyze those facts. …

Pathological overproduction

Published by Garry Peterson on April 23, 2007 in Ecological Economics. 0 Comments

fast foodMichael Pollan writes on potential reform of the US’s pathologic farm bill in the New York Times Magazine:

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

Great Lakes hemorrahagic fish virus surprise

Published by Garry Peterson on April 21, 2007 in General and Greenlash. 1 Comment

Viral hemorrhagic septicemia (V.H.S.) is an invasive virus that causes internal bleeding and organ failure of most of the sport and commercial fish in the Great Lakes. It has already killed tens of thousands of fish in the eastern Great Lakes, and is now spreading through the Great Lakes. It is likely to indirectly change the Great Lakes’ already unstable ecological structure. A New York Times article Fish-Killing Virus Spreading in the Great Lakes and the Toronto Star article Pathogen stalks fish report on the spread of the virus:

One of Dr. Casey’s colleagues researching the virus, Dr. Paul Bowser, a professor of aquatic animal medicine, added, “This is a new pathogen and for the first number of years — 4, 5 or 10 years — things are going to be pretty rough, then the animals will become more immune and resistant and the mortalities will decline.”

No one is sure where the virus came from or how it got to the Great Lakes. In the late 1980s, scientists saw a version of V.H.S. in salmon in the Pacific Northwest, which was the first sighting anywhere in North America. V.H.S. is also present in the Atlantic Ocean. But the genesis of a new, highly aggressive mutated strain concentrating on the Great Lakes is a biological mystery.

“We really don’t know how it got there,” said Jill Roland, a fish pathologist and assistant director for aquaculture at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “People’s awareness of V.H.S. in the lakes was unknown until 2005. But archived samples showed the virus was there as early as 2003.”

Scientists pointed to likely suspects, mainly oceangoing vessels that dump ballast water from around the world into the Great Lakes. (Ships carry ballast water to help provide stability, but it is often contaminated and provides a home for foreign species. The water is loaded and discharged as needed for balance.)

Fish migrate naturally, but also move with people as they cast nets for sport, for instance, or move contaminated water on pleasure boats from lake to lake.

The United States Department of Agriculture issued an emergency order in October to prohibit the movement of live fish that are susceptible to the virus out of the Great Lakes or bordering states. The order was later amended to allow limited movement of fish that tested negative for the virus.

“Getting rid of it is extremely hard to foresee,” said Henry Henderson, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Midwest office in Chicago. “These species spread, and reproduce. It is a living pollution.”

From the Toronto Star:

The deaths to date are just a small fraction of the millions of fish in the lakes. Even so, governments around the lakes are worried enough to try unprecedented steps to contain the virus.

VHS is suspected to be the latest on a growing list of destructive species – including zebra mussels and round gobies – brought into the lakes from Europe and Asia, usually in the ballast water of ocean-going ships.

The potential impact on fish isn’t the only concern. VHS doesn’t harm humans, but that doesn’t mean others that follow will be so benign, says Jennifer Nalbone, of Great Lakes United, a cross-border advocacy group based in Buffalo that for years has demanded strict controls on ballast.

“It’s a wake-up call that the lakes are vulnerable to any pathogen getting in here. We need to try to slow the spread but also to close the door.”

 

How to write consistently boring scientific literature

Published by Garry Peterson on April 19, 2007 in General. 3 Comments

Danish biology professor Kaj Sand-Jensen has a new Oikos paper (2007 - 116: 723-727) which provides advice on How to write consistently boring scientific literature:

A Scandinavian professor has told me an interesting story. The first English manuscript prepared by one of his PhD students had been written in a personal style, slightly verbose but with a humoristic tone and thoughtful side-tracks. There was absolutely no chance, however, that it would meet the strict demands of brevity, clarity and impersonality of a standard article. With great difficulty, this student eventually learned the standard style of producing technical, boring and impersonal scientific writing, thus enabling him to write and defend his thesis successfully.

I recalled the irony in this story from many discussions with colleges, who have been forced to restrict their humor, satire and wisdom to the tyranny of jargon and impersonal style that dominates scientific writing. Personally, I have felt it increasingly difficult to consume the steeply growing number of hardly digestible original articles. It has been a great relief from time to time to read and write essays and books instead.

Because science ought to be fun and attractive, particularly when many months of hard work with grant applications, data collections and calculations are over and everything is ready for publishing the wonderful results, it is most unfortunate that the final reading and writing phases are so tiresome.

I have therefore tried to identify what characteristics make so much of our scientific writing unbearably boring, and I have come up with a top-10 list of recommendations for writing consistently boring publications.

  • Avoid focus
  • Avoid originality and personality
  • Write long contributions
  • Remove implications and speculations
  • Leave out illustrations
  • Omit necessary steps of reasoning
  • Use many abbreviations and terms
  • Suppress humor and flowery language
  • Degrade biology to statistics
  • Quote numerous papers for trivial statements

Via Erik Andersson.

Sandstorms and Land degradation in China

Published by Garry Peterson on April 18, 2007 in Ecosystem services, Greenlash and Regime Shifts. 1 Comment

Gaoming Jiang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Botany, writes about China’s failure to restore degraded arid land in a China Dialogue article Stopping the Sandstorms:

In Beijing, the weather forecast says that more sandstorms are on the way. The capital was hit by four sandstorms in March, and even Shanghai was recently smothered by dust clouds from the north. Television reports now describe these events as “sandy weather”, rather than “sandstorms”. But whatever you call them, they are becoming ever more frequent visitors to Beijing in springtime.

While everyone is cursing the weather, I find myself worrying: how many tonnes of soil are being lost? And how long will it be before there is nowhere in China for plants to take root? Academics argue to what extent these sandstorms are “imports” from Mongolia and the former Soviet Republics, or whether they are the “domestic” products of the arid deserts and damaged grasslands of China’s west. But either way, there is no denying the degree of environmental degradation in western China over the last three decades. Regardless of whether the capital’s weather comes from beyond its borders, China needs to put measures in place to restore the grasslands and reduce the risk of sandstorms.

Sixty billion yuan has been invested in projects to control the sandstorms that are hitting northeastern China. Tree-planting projects have also been running for 30 years across north China. But why haven’t they worked? And more importantly – what will?
Continue reading ‘Sandstorms and Land degradation in China’

Gelman’s notes on Black Swans

Published by Garry Peterson on April 17, 2007 in Ideas and Reorganization. 0 Comments

Noted Bayesian statistician Andrew Gelman writes his notes on Nassim Taleb’s book the Black Swan:

As I noted earlier, reading the book with pen in hand jogged loose various thoughts. . . . The book is about unexpected events (”black swans”) and the problems with statistical models such as the normal distribution that don’t allow for these rarities. From a statistical point of view, let me say that multilevel models (often built from Gaussian components) can model various black swan behavior. In particular, self-similar models can be constructed by combining scaled pieces (such as wavelets or image components) and then assigning a probability distribution over the scalings, sort of like what is done in classical spectrum analysis of 1/f noise in time series. For some interesting discussion in the context of “texture models” for images, see the chapter by Yingnian Wu in my book with Xiao-Li on applied Bayesian modeling and causal inference. (Actually, I recommend this book more generally; it has lots of great chapters in it.)

That said, I admit that my two books on statistical methods are almost entirely devoted to modeling “white swans.” My only defense here is that Bayesian methods allow us to fully explore the implications of a model, the better to improve it when we find discrepancies with data. Just as a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg, Bayesian inference is just a theory’s way of uncovering problems with can lead to a better theory. I firmly believe that what makes Bayesian inference really work is a willingness (if not eagerness) to check fit with data and abandon and improve models often.

update: Gelman follows up on his comments with:

Dan Goldstein and Nassim Taleb’s paper writes: “Finance professionals, who are regularly exposed to notions of volatility, seem to confuse mean absolute deviation with standard deviation, causing an underestimation of 25% with theoretical Gaussian variables. In some fat tailed markets the underestimation can be up to 90%. The mental substitution of the two measures is consequential for decision making and the perception of market variability.”

This interests me, partly because I’ve recently been thinking about summarizing variation by the mean absolute difference between two randomly sampled units (in mathematical notation, E(|x_i-x_j})), because that seems like the clearest thing to visualize. Fred Mosteller liked the interquartile range but that’s a little too complicated for me, also I like to do some actual averaging, not just medians which miss some important information. I agree with Goldstein and Taleb that there’s not necessarily any good reason for using sd (except for mathematical convenience in the Gaussian model).

 

Climate change and Tipping Points in the Amazon

Published by Garry Peterson on April 12, 2007 in Greenlash, Regime Shifts and Vulnerability. 0 Comments

Most of the talks from a recent conference on Climate change and the fate of the Amazon at University of Oxford are available online as slides and podcasts. Some of the interesting points from the conference:

  • Intact forests may be more resistant to drought than climate-vegetation models usually assume (deep roots, large soil water reserves, hydraulic uplift)
  • The interaction of drought with forest fragmentation and fire ignition points can trigger tipping to savanna forest with less biodiversity and biomass.
  • Global demand for soybeans and biofuels could drive substantial land clearing.
  • Substantial opportuntities for land use change feedbacks exist in Amazonia. Climatic drying could allow the expansion of soy and sugarcane cultivation, which would feedback to stimulate further drying.
  • There is a need increase the resilience of the Amazon, because models estimate a non-trival chance of severe drought and forest dieback over the 21st century. Resilience can be enhanced by enhancing the recycling of water vapour that maintains mesic forests in the amazon.

David Oswald works on Amazonia forest resilience in my lab. He attended the conference and has these recommendations on the talks:

Carlos Nobre - Dr. Nobre is very well-known internationally and especially in Brazil. He is a climate scientist by training but is involved in the leadership of scientific research projects such as IGBP, CPTEC, and the LBA project. He alludes to the importance of Ecological Resilience and Stability in his talk, but more detail and a conceptual framework is required - (that is what I am working on).

Peter Cox - Dr. Cox is a well-known global climate modeller and first published a paper in 2000 about the “Dieback” of the Amazon. This was very controversial when it came out and inspired many people to look at this problem from different perspectives and also using different global climate models. The follow up work to the 2000 paper has similar results and unfortunately, one of the outcomes of the conference was that there is general concensus that increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the corresponding climate change could have very serious effects on the Amazon. Again, these research projects at this scale have a high degree of uncertainty, but the people presenting, who are all experts, came to similar conclusions. Check it out for yourself.

Chris Huntingford - Dr. Huntingford’s presentation was a follow up to Cox’s work, basically testing the hyothesis and strength of results.

Luiz Aragao - Dr. Aragao and his collaborators did some interesting work with remote sensing, similar to the type of approach I am taking. Very solid work.

Michael Keller - Dr. Keller is with the US Forest Service and has been involved with the LBA project in a leadership position since the early 90’s. He has a broad historical as well as sound scientific perspective on things.

Dan Neptad - Dr. Nepstad is extremely well known in Amazonian research and is at the Woods Hole Research center. He has done some very interesting work with water availability and ecosystem health in the Amazon and has designed some very cool experiments. Increasingly, his work is focused on the interaction between science and development policy in this region. His presentation speaks to that. He is a progressive thinker, and also very active on the ground in the Amazon.

Juan Carlos Riveros - Dr. Riveros gave a very interesting talk on conservation strategies in the Amazon. I was blown away by the extent of the research they have done and continue to do with respect to conservation strategies. They have done some very interesting spatial analytical work. Good for a geography-oriented person.

Diogenes Alves - Dr. Alves is an interesting person. By training, he is a computational mathematician. He has been involved extensively with the design and planning of the LBA project. His presentation outlined the epistemological framework they used and also some of the challenges they initally faced with the structuring of an international scientific research project that clearly was embedded in a complex social and economic situation. He alluded to Systems Theory in his talk, and that really appealed to me, so I am including this one for those that are interested in the links between Social Science and Natural Science and the practical realities one faces when doing this type of research.

Kevin Conrad - Mr. Conrad is with a group called the Rainforest Coalition. He presented a strategy for rainforest conservation based on using the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol as a means of attaching economic value on the carbon market to rainforests that are preserved and not degraded. I did not understand in depth this strategy, but it seems that there are positive merits to this approach. I personally, am not 100% sold on exclusively using market solutions but I think that they do play an important role. For more detail you can check out his presentation and come to your own conclusions.

Dr. Yadvinder Malhi’s provides a summary of the conference. He draws out the key points and overall conclusions.

People dislike inequality

Published by Garry Peterson on April 11, 2007 in Inequality. 0 Comments

A recent paper suggests that people prefer equality, and are willing to personally suffer to eliminate extreme inequality. Egalitarian motives in humans (Christopher T. Dawes et al Nature 2007 (446) 794-796 ).

Abstract: Participants in laboratory games are often willing to alter others’ incomes at a cost to themselves, and this behaviour has the effect of promoting cooperation. What motivates this action is unclear: punishment and reward aimed at promoting cooperation cannot be distinguished from attempts to produce equality. To understand costly taking and costly giving, we create an experimental game that isolates egalitarian motives. The results show that subjects reduce and augment others’ incomes, at a personal cost, even when there is no cooperative behaviour to be reinforced. Furthermore, the size and frequency of income alterations are strongly influenced by inequality. Emotions towards top earners become increasingly negative as inequality increases, and those who express these emotions spend more to reduce above-average earners’ incomes and to increase below-average earners’ incomes. The results suggest that egalitarian motives affect income-altering behaviours, and may therefore be an important factor underlying the evolution of strong reciprocity and, hence, cooperation in humans.

From Aleks Jakulin on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

Global English and Linguistic Diversity

Published by Garry Peterson on April 10, 2007 in General. 0 Comments

Today roughly 1/4 of the world’s people speak English (1.5 Billion: 400 million people as a first language; 300-500 million as a second language; and another 750 million speak some English). There are about 3X more non-native speakers than native speakers. The IHT (April 9, 2007) article Across cultures, English is the world discusses the global dominance of the English language.

Riding the crest of globalization and technology, English dominates the world as no language ever has, and some linguists are now saying it may never be dethroned as the king of languages.

Others see pitfalls, but the factors they cite only underscore the grip English has on the world: cataclysms like nuclear war or climate change or the eventual perfection of a translation machine that would make a common language unnecessary.

Some insist that linguistic evolution will continue to take its course over the centuries and that English could eventually die as a common language as Latin did, or Phoenician or Sanskrit or Sogdian before it.

“If you stay in the mind-set of 15th-century Europe, the future of Latin is extremely bright,” said Nicholas Ostler, the author of a language history called “Empires of the Word” who is writing a history of Latin. “If you stay in the mind-set of the 20th-century world, the future of English is extremely bright.”

That skepticism seems to be a minority view. Experts on the English language like David Crystal, author of “English as a Global Language,” say the world has changed so drastically that history is no longer a guide.

“This is the first time we actually have a language spoken genuinely globally by every country in the world,” he said. “There are no precedents to help us see what will happen.”
…
“English has become the second language of everybody,” said Mark Warschauer, a professor of education and informatics at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s gotten to the point where almost in any part of the world to be educated means to know English.”
…
New vernaculars have emerged in such places as Singapore, Nigeria and the Caribbean, although widespread literacy and mass communication may be slowing the natural process of diversification.
…
“We may well be approaching a critical moment in human linguistic history,” Crystal wrote. “It is possible that a global language will emerge only once.”

After that, Crystal said, it would be very hard to dislodge. “The last quarter of the 20th century will be seen as a critical time in the emergence of this global language,” he said.

The spread of English comes, at least partly, at the expense of other languages. Today, 3,000 of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages are viewed to be endangered. 95% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the world’s people - 25% have less than 1000 speakers. This simplification of the world’s languages represents a huge loss of accumulated cultural knowledge, despite the richness that also emerges in the global diversification and richness of English. For more on endangered languages see Foundation for endangered languages, Cultural Survival, and Ethnologue (which lists over 500 nearly extinct languages).

Black Swans: expecting the unexpected

Published by Garry Peterson on April 7, 2007 in Ideas and Reorganization. 3 Comments

black swan book coverNassim Nicholas Taleb uses the term Black Swan to identify significant unexpected events. Holling made some similar points from a different perspective in his 1973 paper on resilience and his 1986 paper the resilience of terrestrial ecosystems; local surprise and global change. In on the interdisciplinary Edge Taleb writes on Learning to expect the unexpected and defines what he means by Black Swans:

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that’s what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

From my perspective, Black swans occur when there are significant mismatches between the models people use to understand the world and the subsquent expectations that those models produce and observations. In other words, black swans are model errors - something that I’ve written (Peterson, Carpetner & Brock et al 2003) in the context of ecological management.

Continue reading ‘Black Swans: expecting the unexpected’