Archive for the 'Networks' Category

Connecting the world

Published by Garry Peterson on June 7, 2008 in Networks. 0 Comments

The Economist reviews Mobility and digital media - Nomads at last:

mobile vs internet users…these changes amount to a historic merger, at long last, of two technologies that have already proved revolutionary in their own right. The mobile phone has changed the world by becoming ubiquitous in rich and poor countries alike. The internet has mostly touched rich countries, and rich people in poor countries, but has already changed the way people shop, bank, listen to music, read news and socialise. Now the mobile phone is on course to replace the PC as the primary device for getting online. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 3.3 billion people, more than half the world’s population, now subscribe to a mobile-phone service (see chart 1), so the internet at last looks set to change the whole world.

Revenge of the Slow

Published by Garry Peterson on March 25, 2008 in Ecosystem services, General and Networks. 1 Comment

cambray cheese platterBruce Sterling writes about the networked boutique localism of the slow food movement in a Metropolis magazine article Revenge of the Slow:

Slow Food began as a jolly clique of leftist academics, entertainers, wine snobs, and pop stars, all friends of Ital­ian journalist and radio personality Carlo Petrini. Their galvanizing moment, which occurred in 1986, was an anti-McDonald’s demonstration at which Petrini and his dining buddies brandished pasta pans while folk-dancing in the streets of Rome. This prescient intervention predated Jose Bove’s violent wrecking of a French McDonald’s by some 13 years. While the anti-WTO crowd was politically harassing corporate globalizers, Slow Food was methodically building constructive alternatives. Today, Slow Food is well-nigh as “glo­­bal” as McDonald’s but networked rather than hierarchical. Year by methodical year the Slow Food network has stuck its fingers into a host of pies.

As a nonprofit heritage organization, the Slow Food empire retains a mere 150 full-time employees with a modest budget of $37 million a year. Yet Slow Food has invented the modern Italian food-heritage industry. Today it is a thriving ganglion of local chapters, called convivia, which number about 83,000 people in more than 100 countries. It’s also a publishing house specializing in tourist guidebooks, restaurant recipes, and heritage reprints. …

The cleverest innovation to date is the network’s presidium system. The Slow Food “presidia” make up a grassroots bottom-up version of the European “Domain of Control” system, which requires, for instance, that true “champagnes” must come from the province of Champagne, while lesser fizzy brews are labeled mere “sparkling wines.” These presidia have made Slow Food the planetary paladin of local production. Slow Food deploys its convivia to serve as talent scouts for food rarities (such as Polish Mead, the Istrian Giant Ox, and the Tehuacan Amaranth). Candidate discoveries are passed to Slow Food’s International Ark Commission, which decides whether the foodstuff is worthy of inclusion. Its criteria are strict:

(a) Is the product nonglobalized or, better yet, inherently nonglobalizable?

(b) Is it artisanally made (so there’s no possibility of any industrial economies of scale)?

(c) Is it high-quality (the consumer “wow” factor)?

(d) Is it sustainably produced? (Not only is this politically pleasing, but it swiftly eliminates competition from most multinationals.)

(e) Is this product likely to disappear from the planet otherwise? (Biodiversity must be served!)

For the foodstuff artisan (commonly dirt poor and neglected somewhere in the planet’s backwoods), Slow Food has a strong value proposal. It is, among its many other roles, a potent promotion machine. Transforming local rarities into fodder for global gourmets is, of course, profitable. And although he’s no capitalist—the much honored Petrini is more justly described as a major cultural figure—he was among the first to realize that as an economic system globalization destroys certain valuable goods and services that rich people very much want to buy. In a globalized “flat world,” the remaining peaks soar in value and become natural clusters for a planetary elite. …

A local product with irreducible rarity can be sold to a small elite around the world. But it can’t be sold to mass consumers because it doesn’t scale up in volume, so it can never lose its cachet. The trick is in uniting these niches. A capitalist business has a hard time of that, but a cultural network is a different story. …

Slow Food, in its solemn wisdom, will methodically seek out local producers of the product, raise their consciousness, and then fly them to Italy and unite them in subsidized conferences. The group links local farmers, bakers, millers, and butchers with their peers in other countries: the “Terra Madre” global network. Having built this distribution net, Slow Food offers grants to needy producers for things like barns, butcher shops, and tractors. Then as a final twist, Slow Foodies cheerily eat the end products themselves.

The upshot is an obscure piece of rural heritage cunningly reengineered as a curated service/­product in Europe’s modern food-heritage industry. To Americans it might seem paradoxical that Eur­ope’s rural farmers could be at once blood-and-soil heritage patriots and culture-industry jet-setters whose star clients are wealthy politicized food theorists. But while McDonald’s mechanically peddles burgers to the poor, Slow Food acculturates the planet’s wealthy to the gourmand quality of life long cherished by the European bon vivant. They have about as much in common as an aging shark and a networked swarm of piranhas.

Ecology for bankers

Published by Garry Peterson on February 20, 2008 in Ecological Economics, Networks and Regime Shifts. 4 Comments

In Feb 21 2008 Nature, ecologists Robert May, Simon Levin, and George Sugihara write about how ecological thinking can be used to illuminate financial dynamics in their commentary Complex systems: Ecology for bankers:

‘Tipping points’, ‘thresholds and breakpoints’, ‘regime shifts’ — all are terms that describe the flip of a complex dynamical system from one state to another. For banking and other financial institutions, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression epitomize such an event. These days, the increasingly complicated and globally interlinked financial markets are no less immune to such system-wide (systemic) threats. Who knows, for instance, how the present concern over sub-prime loans will pan out?

Well before this recent crisis emerged, the US National Academies/National Research Council and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York collaborated on an initiative to “stimulate fresh thinking on systemic risk”. The main event was a high-level conference held in May 2006, which brought together experts from various backgrounds to explore parallels between systemic risk in the financial sector and in selected domains in engineering, ecology and other fields of science. The resulting report was published late last year and makes stimulating reading.

Catastrophic changes in the overall state of a system can ultimately derive from how it is organized — from feedback mechanisms within it, and from linkages that are latent and often unrecognized. The change may be initiated by some obvious external event, such as a war, but is more usually triggered by a seemingly minor happenstance or even an unsubstantial rumour. Once set in motion, however, such changes can become explosive and afterwards will typically exhibit some form of hysteresis, such that recovery is much slower than the collapse. In extreme cases, the changes may be irreversible.

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Two particularly illuminating questions about priorities in risk management emerge from the report. First, how much money is spent on studying systemic risk as compared with that spent on conventional risk management in individual firms? Second, how expensive is a systemic-risk event to a national or global economy (examples being the stock market crash of 1987, or the turmoil of 1998 associated with the Russian loan default, and the subsequent collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management)? The answer to the first question is “comparatively very little”; to the second, “hugely expensive”.

Global information flows

Published by Garry Peterson on October 11, 2007 in Networks and Visualization. 0 Comments

global network traffic

Map of international phone-call traffic in 2005, from Telegeography. The map shows the disproportionate centrality of the USA in international telephone traffic.

via Wired

Scholarly networks on resilience, vulnerability and adaptation - update

Published by Garry Peterson on September 26, 2007 in Adaptation, Networks, Visualization and Vulnerability. 1 Comment

Marco Janssen has updated his 2006 analysis of scholary networks in global change resilience, vulnerability and adaptation research. For his new paper in Ecology and Society (Janssen 2007) Janssen added more than 1000 new publications to the database, to analyze a total of 3399 publications from between 1967 and 2007. His analysis shows both rapid increase in the publications in the field, as well as increased integration of the three knowledge domains

Janssen mapped the co-author network of the almost 7000 unique authors in the data set. He selected the 16 most productive authors with a minimum of 15 papers. Both sets make up the set of 17 authors who are very productive and/or collaborative. Next, we determined all co-authors for those 17 authors, but kept only the 69 authors who had published a minimum of six papers.

figure 2

The figure above shows the most productive and best connected authors with the strongest co-authorship relations. Circles denote author nodes, and are labeled by the author’s last name and initials. Legend: Node – author; Node area size—# of publications; Node area color—# of unique co-authors.

Also, interestingly, three of the journals that contain the most articles in this field were newly founded in the past decade: Global Environmental Change, Ecology and Society, and Ecosystems. Ecology and Society is the most journal with the most papers in the resilience domain and the 4th greatest number of citation.

Key works that are heavily cited across research communities are:

Burton, I., R. W. Kates, and G. F. White. 1978. The environment as hazard. Oxford University Press, New York, New York, USA.

Holling, C. S. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4:1–23.

Green Lands, Blue Waters

Published by Garry Peterson on April 3, 2007 in Ecological Management, Ecosystem services and Networks. 0 Comments

Chad Monfreda has an post on WorldChanging ‘Green Lands, Blue Waters’ and Nested Activism on the ecological problems produced by industrial agriculture in the Mississippi River Basin and an innovative project to try and transform the river basin Green Lands, Blue Waters.

a long-term comprehensive effort whose mission is to support development of and transition to a new generation of agricultural systems in the Mississippi River Basin that integrate more perennial plants and other continuous living cover into the agricultural landscape.

Chad’s describes how he thinks this project represents ‘nested activism.’ His description sounds a lot like how the case of Kristianstad Water Realm in Sweden has been analyzed by Per Olsson and other (see Olsson et al 2004). He writes:

I see four ways in which Green Lands, Blue Waters foreshadows a kind of “nested activism” that goes beyond network-centric advocacy by deliberately seeking synergistic connections between organizations working at different scales.

First, nested activism engages interests across multiple spatial scales and multiple political jurisdictions. It doesn’t recruit participants from a single spatial scale, like the watershed or basin. Nor does it look towards a single jurisdiction, like community activists, state scientists, or national NGOs. Instead nested activism blends the logic of bioregionalism with political realism by deliberately forging horizontal links within and vertical links across spatial scales and political jurisdictions. In the case of Green Lands, Blue Waters, a three-tiered network emerges: watershed-level learning committees, state-level coordinating committees, and a basin-level body with a national voice. Multiple scales and levels lend players secret allies who mount actions in places that those players can’t access themselves.

Second, it leverages mutualisms to create solutions. Nested activism is active, meaning it doesn’t just respond to problems but proactively creates solutions. It’s one thing to identifying win-win relationships; it’s quite another to make them happen. Synergies, however, are only possible if members are diverse. Getting together with people just like yourself too easily leads to monopoly, disenfranchisement, and battles over turf.

Third, what I’m calling “nested activism” aims for durability without ossification. One of the main problems with big non-profits is the tendency for funding cycles to freeze them into a risk-averse state. A lot of capital becomes tied up in slow-moving organizations, whose predictability opponents learn to outmaneuver. On the other hand, network-centric advocacy’s distributed capital is speedy but insufficiently coordinated to press for the kinds of structural changes so badly needed. By contrast, not-too-strong, not-too-weak links among diverse, nested actors encourage persistent alliances but also relinquish old ones that cease to serve their purpose.

Fourth, a flexible prolematique is essential for the first three points. In order to get initial buy-in from diverse interests, and to keep them involved over the long-haul, nested activism should encourage what in the lingo of science studies we might call the interpretive flexibility of a boundary object around which everybody can rally, even as they define it differently. In the case of Green Lands, Blue Waters, revenue-seeking investors, research-oriented academics, and election-minded politicians can gather around the object of Continuous Living Cover Systems for very different reasons. Nobody can define the solutions, or even the questions, from the outset; rather, they emerge from interactions within the network.

Green Lands, Blue Waters’ motto is to keep working lands working. What’s clearly not working is piecemeal thinking that sacrifices broadly optimal solutions for merely efficient ones. And master plans to deliver utopia hardly bear mentioning. Truly transformative solutions are harder, messier—nested, active, full of niches, and diverse. They balance compromise and collaboration. They are about creating a better world, rather than mending a broken one.

Building Interdisciplinarity

Published by Garry Peterson on February 23, 2007 in Ideas and Networks. 0 Comments

An article in Harvard Magazine (January-February 2007) describes The Janelia Experiment, an new biomedical research facility designed to foster great inter-discplinary research. Fostering interdisciplinary research is topic the Stockholm Resilience Center is grapling with as it organizes itself (but without the problems a $16 billion endowment brings).

Great scientific research organizations, of the rare variety that produce multiple Nobel Prize-caliber breakthroughs, share common traits that can be imitated. This is the precept behind the creation of Janelia Farm, the new biological-research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). In November, scientists from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute visited the new campus, where everything from architecture to organization to social culture has been planned to nurture an optimal environment for scientific discovery. What the visitors saw may offer ideas for Harvard, which is planning an ambitious science-research campus in Allston and working to ensure that the organizational structure of the sciences, as well as the architecture of new buildings, will promote a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration.
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Such places did exist in the past. Both Bell Labs and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, England, took a long-term approach to problem-solving, one in the physical sciences, the other in biology. Both produced results that were “offscale,” Rubin says, “even compared to the best private institutions.” Both were used as models for Janelia Farm.

Common to Bell Labs and the LMB were small research groups, leaders who were active bench scientists, internal funding for research, outstanding shared support and infrastructure, limited tenure, and a culture that rewarded collegiality and cooperation.

Sociological research, Rubin says, has shown that humans don’t have meaningful interactions with more than about 20 people. “If you want to have interactions between groups and every group is 20 people, well, it’s just not going to happen,” says Rubin. “It’s fundamental human nature.” Thus groups at Janelia Farm, with its goal of increasing interdisciplinary cooperation between labs, are limited to no more than six members.
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Yet even if the opportunities to create an organizational structure that promotes interdisciplinary collaboration are somewhat limited within the university environment, there is no such limitation on design and architecture that promotes collaboration. In this sense, Janelia Farm is also a model that blends lessons of the past with the most contemporary thinking in lab design. There are spaces that promote interaction: a cafeteria with good, inexpensive food, and a pub that serves coffee and tea during the day and cheeseburgers and beer after work. Forcing people out of their normal environments is a good thing, says Rubin. The LMB had a canteen and the culture there, he says, was that you were free to sit down with people you didn’t know. (A 2004 study by the National Academy of Sciences asked research administrators what they would cut last in a hypothetical budget crunch. They overwhelmingly named their cafeteria.)

Ethan Zuckerman reviews Infotopia and discusess social decision-making

Published by Garry Peterson on December 8, 2006 in Ecological Management, General and Networks. 0 Comments

On My heart’s in Accra Ethan Zuckerman reviews Cass Sunstein’s book “Infotopia”, which discusses how the internet changes group decision making processes. Zuckerman writes:

Infotopia… In his new book, Infotopia, [Sunstein’s] become a cyber-enthusiast to an extent that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago. Specifically, he’s excited about the ways new online tools make it possible for groups of people to assemble information and accumulate knowledge. He’s become a devotee of Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who saw markets, first and foremost, as a way to aggregate information held by a large group of people. There’s ample evidence that Hayek was right in an examination of the failure of planned economies - smart men sitting in a room do a far worse job of setting the price of copper ore or bread than the collected actions of thousands of consumers, iterated over time.

Markets aren’t the only way to aggregate information from a large group of people. Deliberative groups, where a set of people get together and share the knowledge they have on a problem or an issue, are favored by many political theorists, including Jürgen Habermas, who bases much of his political philosophy on the establishment of a public sphere where deliberation can occur. Sunstein is deeply suspicious of the optimistic claims made for deliberation, and cites a wealth of studies that demonstrate that deliberation, in many cases, leads to bad decisions and the reinforcement of extreme views.

(You can think of Infotopia as a caged deathmatch between Hayek and Habermas, streamed live on the Internet. Habermas taps out somewhere around page 200.)

Continue reading ‘Ethan Zuckerman reviews Infotopia and discusess social decision-making’

Two faces of India: water and wind

Published by Garry Peterson on September 29, 2006 in Ecological Management, General, Networks and Vulnerability. 0 Comments

india sanitationIn two recent articles the New York Times has written about different faces of India: environmental crisis and environmental innovation both driven by failures to effectively govern energy and water systems.India’s water management crisis is described in the article In Teeming India, Water Crisis Means Dry Pipes and Foul Sludge. The article focuses on New Delhi and how India’s inequality limits its ability to govern public goods, such as aquifiers, rivers, and even its water system.

The crisis, decades in the making, has grown as fast as India in recent years. A soaring population, the warp-speed sprawl of cities, and a vast and thirsty farm belt have all put new strains on a feeble, ill-kept public water and sanitation network.

The combination has left water all too scarce in some places, contaminated in others and in cursed surfeit for millions who are flooded each year. Today the problems threaten India’s ability to fortify its sagging farms, sustain its economic growth and make its cities healthy and habitable. At stake is not only India’s economic ambition but its very image as the world’s largest democracy.

…New Delhi’s water woes are typical of those of many Indian cities. Nationwide, the urban water distribution network is in such disrepair that no city can provide water from the public tap for more than a few hours a day.

An even bigger problem than demand is disposal. New Delhi can neither quench its thirst, nor adequately get rid of the ever bigger heaps of sewage that it produces. Some 45 percent of the population is not connected to the public sewerage system.

Those issues are amplified nationwide. More than 700 million Indians, or roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation. Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5 die each year, according to the United Nations.

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[New Delhi’s] pipe network remains a punctured mess. That means, like most everything else in this country, some people have more than enough, and others too little.

The slums built higgledy-piggledy behind Mrs. Prasher’s neighborhood have no public pipes at all. The Jal Board sends tankers instead. The women here waste their days waiting for water, and its arrival sets off desperate wrestling in the streets.

Kamal Krishnan quit her job for the sake of securing her share. Five days a week, she would clean offices in the next neighborhood. Five nights a week, she would go home to find no water at home. The buckets would stand empty. Finally, her husband ordered her to quit. And wait.

“I want to work, but I can’t,” she said glumly. “I go mad waiting for water.”

Elsewhere, in the central city, where the nation’s top politicians have their official homes, the average daily water supply is three times what finally arrives even in Mrs. Prasher’s neighborhood.

The same public failings have also lead to an unexpected wind power boom in India. This boom, lead by Suzlon Energy, is described in The Ascent of Wind Power.

Not even on the list of the world’s top 10 wind-turbine manufacturers as recently as 2002, Suzlon passed Siemens of Germany last year to become the fifth-largest producer by installed megawatts of capacity. It still trails the market leader, Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark, as well as General Electric, Enercon of Germany and Gamesa Tecnológica of Spain.
Suzlon’s past shows how a company can prosper by tackling the special needs of a developing country. Its present suggests a way of serving expanding energy needs without relying quite so much on coal, the fastest-growth fossil fuel now but also the most polluting.
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Roughly 70 percent of the demand for wind turbines in India comes from industrial users seeking alternatives to relying on the grid, said Tulsi R. Tanti, Suzlon’s managing director. The rest of the purchases are made by a small group of wealthy families in India, for whom the tax breaks for wind turbines are attractive.

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The demand for wind turbines has particularly accelerated in India, where installations rose nearly 48 percent last year, and in China, where they rose 65 percent, although from a lower base. Wind farms are starting to dot the coastline of east-central China and the southern tip of India, as well as scattered mesas and hills across central India and even Inner Mongolia.

WorldChanging also comments on wind power in India.

Building more resilient neighborhoods

Published by Garry Peterson on September 16, 2006 in Adaptation, Networks and Vulnerability. 1 Comment

Elena Bennett writes:
If, as Alex Steffen argued recently on World Changing, increasing neighborhood resilience is important, how can we go about ensuring that our communities are resilient as possible? Steffen writes, for example that, “Communities which have been designed to be walked and biked rather than driven can better withstand a disruption in the supply of gas.”

The Orion Grassroots Network has a new member, an informal organization that could increase neighborly communication, effectively making communities more resilient. The organization is called the Professional Porch Sitters.

The group was started by Claude Stephens (a.k.a. Crow Hollister) in Louisville, KY, who writes:

“There are no dues, no membership requirements, no mailings, no agenda, no committees, no worries. PPS believes that the radical act of sitting around sharing stories with no specific agenda is critical to building sustainable communities….To become a member you simply need to say you are a member and agree to sit around with friends and neighbors shooting the breeze as often as possible or practical. Preferably on a porch but that’s not critical…

Television and air-conditioning have moved far too many people off their porches and into their homes where they quickly become isolated from their communities. We believe that sometimes the most effective course of action is to sit down and relax while sipping lemonade and sharing stories.”

National Public Radio’s show All Things Considered recently had a story on the merits of porches which mentioned the Professional Porch Sitters in which they write:

“Porches, debate and democracy go together.”

You can find out more about starting your own chapter of the Professional Porch Sitters at the Orion Grassroots Network

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