All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Reorganization

briefly noted: disruptive technological change

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1) The Atlantic on the Digital Underground of North Korea

2) New York Times Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software about innovations in AI that allow textual analysis of large sets of documents. The article discusses two approaches it terms “linguistic” and “sociological.”:

The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents. More advanced programs filter documents through a large web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”
The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.
Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing “digital anomalies” that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.

3) An interactive example on game theoretic AI that plays rock paper scissors quite well.

4) New Yorker’s Letter from China interviews Rebecca MacKinnon on Internet in China – censorship, the state, the public, and corporations.

Ideas, Networks

Steven Johnson on the source of good ideas

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Two short videos by science writer Steven Johnson on his book Where good ideas come from: the natural history of innovation.

An animated promotional video for his book:

And him giving a TED talk.

Steve Johnson has posted some of the responses to his ideas on his blog.

I haven’t read the book, but complex systems scientist Cosma Shalizi has a rich review that addresses many of the books strengths and weaknesses.  He introduces the book as:

This is 100-proof American evolutionist, naturalistic liberalism, which is to say, Pragmatism. It is a celebration of the virtues of openness, experimentation (including failed experiments), giving “slow hunches” chances to develop, to serendipitously blending ideas from diverse intellectual backgrounds and disciplines, and the continuity of human culture and thought with processes in the natural world. It’s a view of the social life of the mind, illustrated by engagingly-told anecdotes from the history of science and technology; apt references to a wide range of scholarly studies; long, admiring quotations from Darwin; the natural history of coral reefs and the evolution of sexual reproduction. (The broader history of culture, especially the fine arts, is occasionally alluded to, and there are abundantly merited plugs for his old teacher Franco Moretti’s studies on the evolution of genres and “distant reading”; but mostly it’s a science-and-technology book.) Johnson has painted a crowd scene: good ideas hardly ever come from isolated individuals thinking very hard and having flashes of inspiration; they come from people who are immersed in communities of inquiry, and especially from those who bridge multiple communities. The picture is an attractive one, which I actually think (or perhaps “fervently pray”) has a lot of truth to it.

Scenarios

Participatory Scenario Development Approaches

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Participatory scenario development is a process that involves the participation of stakeholders to explore the future in a creative and policy-relevant way. For an example see the 2008 paper Making Investments in Dryland Development Work: Participatory Scenario Planning in the Makanya Catchment, Tanzania, which Elin Enfors wrote with me and two other colleagues.

Two recent reports present lessons learned from the World Bank’ Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change project use of participatory scenarios.  Such reports are important as the tools and techniques that people need to use are difficult to adequately describe in papers, and have too narrow audience to be worthwhile to describe in books.  The reports are freely downloadable from the World Bank.

Approaches for Identifying Pro-Poor Adaptation Options (PDF, 3.7 MB).  By Livia Bizikova, Samantha Boardley, and Simon Mead

The first report presents lessons learned from the application of participatory scenario-based tools within the World Bank’ Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change project. The authors illustrate how such tools provide opportunities to increase the usability of information on climate change impacts when developing adaptation responses and explore linkages between development, projected climate change and relevant adaptation responses.

Pro-Poor Adaptation: Capacity Development Manual (PDF, 4.0 MB) By ESSA Technologies Ltd and International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD)

The second report is based on the experiences of the authors in designing, developing and delivering participatory scenario workshops as part of World Bank’ Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change project.  It focuses on providing ‘how to’ information for people to apply participatory scenario approaches.

Ecological Economics

Green Growth vs. No Growth – a debate on CBC’s Ideas

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CBC’s radio show Ideas recently hosted and then podcast a debate on Green Growth or No Growth at the University of Ottawa.  The debate starts from accepting the idea that humanity faces serious environmental problems.  The debaters then debate the resolution: Be it resolved that building an environmentally sustainable society will require an end to economic growth.

I disagree with the idea framing the debate that human impact on the natural world is always problem. While reducing the environmental impact per unit of human wellbeing is good, we can also work to shift the impacts of human impact from a negative to a positive. Or in other words we can also choose to invest in the building, enhancing, restoring Earth rather than only reducing the amount we impact it.

The program was released as a downloadable podcast on February 28, 2011, and will be available until the end of March.  The podcast can be found at at http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/index.html?newsandcurrent. Click on the link and scroll about half way down the page, click “The Best of Ideas” link.

The ‘no-growth’ side was:

Peter Victor
Author of Managing Without Growth: Slower By Design, Not Disaster, professor (and former Dean) at York University, and former Assistant Deputy Minister in the Ontario government.

Tim Jackson
Economics commissioner with the UK Sustainable Development Commission, professor at the University of Surrey (UK), and author of Prosperity without Growth – economics for a finite planet.(external link)

The ‘green-growth’ side was:

Richard Lipsey
one of Canada’s pre-eminent economists, professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University, and author of Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long Term Economic Growth.

Paul Ekins
Author of Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability: The Prospects for Green Growth, professor at University College London, and Director of the UK Green Fiscal Commission.

Ecological Economics

Living in the Anthropocene

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On Yale360 Paul Crutzen and Christian Schwägerl write that Living in the Anthropocene:

Living up to the Anthropocene means building a culture that grows with Earth’s biological wealth instead of depleting it. Remember, in this new era, nature is us.

In the March 2011 National Geographic, environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert writes Enter the Anthropocene—Age of Man, which describes the idea and the geological changes being produced by humanity.  This article looks at the anthropocene more from the point of view as damage to the biosphere, rather than what we can do to reduce that damage and increase human wellbeing. It is illustrated by photos two of which are shown above.

For more on living in the anthropocene, see our 2009 post resilience as an operating system for the anthropocene on Chris Turner‘s article Age of Breathing Underwater on the anthropocene in the Walrus, as well as our recent article on the Environmentalist’s Paradox.

Regime Shifts, Visualization

Mapping impact of snow and ice feedbacks on climate

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NASA Earth Observatory Image of the day has some powerful figures created with data from a new paper by Mark Flanner and others Radiative forcing and albedo feedback from the Northern Hemisphere cryosphere between 1979 and 2008. in Nature Geoscience. They use satellite data to estimate how changes in snow and ice in the Northern Hemisphere have contributed to rising temperatures over the last 30 years. They found that these changes in albedo have warmed the planet more than expected from models.

NASA Earth Observatory writes:

The left image shows how much energy the Northern Hemisphere’s snow and ice—called the cryosphere—reflected on average between 1979 and 2008. Dark blue indicates more reflected energy, in Watts per square meter, and thus more cooling. The Greenland ice sheet reflects more energy than any other single location in the Northern Hemisphere. The second-largest contributor to cooling is the cap of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean.

The right image shows how the energy being reflected from the cryosphere has changed between 1979 and 2008. When snow and ice disappear, they are replaced by dark land or ocean, both of which absorb energy. The image shows that the Northern Hemisphere is absorbing more energy, particularly along the outer edges of the Arctic Ocean, where sea ice has disappeared, and in the mountains of Central Asia.

“On average, the Northern Hemisphere now absorbs about 100 PetaWatts more solar energy because of changes in snow and ice cover,” says Flanner. “To put it in perspective, 100 PetaWatts is seven-fold greater than all the energy humans use in a year.” Changes in the extent and timing of snow cover account for about half of the change, while melting sea ice accounts for the other half.

Flanner and his colleagues made both calculations by compiling field measurements and satellite observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer, and Nimbus-7 and DMSP SSM/I passive microwave data. The analysis is the first calculation of how much the energy the entire cryosphere reflects. It is also the first observation of changes in reflected energy because of changes in the entire cryosphere.

Inequality, Visualization

Plutocracy in the USA: four views

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1) From State of Working America an interactive graph of changes in average income and the top percentiles of US income.

From  1939 to 1973, during the 24 years from the start of WW2 to the first oil crisis the US’s average income grew by $30,500.  72% of this economic growth in incomes went to the poorest 90%, and 28 % went to the richest 10%.

Over the following 24 years, between 1974 and 2008, the US’s average income grew by $11,000 – average income of the poorest 90% declined, and all the growth went to the richest 10%, mostly to the richest 1%.

The data on the website comes from economist Emmanuel Saez’s work.

2) Economist Daron Acemoglu of MIT is interviewed by EconTalk about the role income inequality may have played in creating the financial crisis.

… Acemoglu suggests a simpler story where the financial sector through its political influence distorted the rules of the game, benefiting executives in the industry, which in turn led to outsized rewards and ultimate instability in the financial industry.

3) From the Washington Post Federal investigators expose vast web of insider trading.

“Given the scope of the allegations to date, we are not talking simply about the occasional corrupt individual; we’re talking about something verging on a corrupt business model,” Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

The heightened focus on insider trading by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission comes as the financial crisis has shaken confidence in the honesty of the financial markets.

Far from being a victimless crime, insider trading takes advantage of honest investors. In a series of cases, financiers are accused of gaining – or avoiding the loss of – more than $100 million trading such familiar stocks as Google, IBM, Hilton and Intel.

“What’s at stake is the credibility of our markets,” said former Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), chairman of a panel Congress created to review the Treasury Department’s $700 billion bailout of financial companies. Insider trading, he said, “sends a clear message to people who want to invest in the United States that . . . I’m not going to get a fair shake in the market. And that’s very dangerous.”

4) Economist Robert Schiller is an expert on speculative bubbles. He was recently interviewed by the Browser and recommends five books about human behaviour, inequality and the financial crisis. Among other books he recommends Winner-Take-All Politics (mentioned earlier on Resilience Science). He says:

This is a new book – it just came out. It’s about rising inequality and it traces back to fundamental causes.

… In the US, we’ve seen a rapid concentration of wealth at the extreme high end. The top tenth of a per cent of the top hundredth of a per cent of the population is getting wealthy very fast. They point out that this is not true in Europe, and yet the economies are very similar and growing at similar rates. If the technology is the same, why would there be a difference at the extreme high end? And they argue that the answer is really political. There have been political changes in the US that allow the extreme high end to garner more wealth. Ultimately, it represents a failure of our society to take account of the fact that the extreme high end can lobby and can organise for its own interests, and we’ve let it happen.

General

A Word on Statistics by Wislawa Szymborska

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One of my favourite poets is Wislawa Szymborska and I can across this poem while watching Al Jazzera‘s coverage of the violence Libya.  (From the book Miracle Fair)

A WORD ON STATISTICS

Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).

Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred —
a figure that has never varied yet.

(translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)

General

Postdoc on Planetary Boundaries at Stockholm Resilience Centre

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The Stockholm Resilience Centre seeking a research coordinator to coordinate and initiate interdisciplinary research on Planetary Boundaries.

The job ad is here:

The successful candidate will benefit from a dynamic research environment at the SRC as well as the wider network of Planetary Boundary research partners. He/she will be based in the Global and cross-scale dynamics theme at SRC. To the extent that it is compatible with the tasks and responsibilities of this position, the research coordinator is encouraged to pursue his/her personal research interests within the broader Planetary Boundaries research programme.

…

The position is a one-year full-time employment, with possibilities for extension. Starting date: May 2011 or by agreement.

Visualization

Modernist agricultural diversity

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Agricultural Fields near Perdizes, Minas Gerais, Brazil from NASA EOS

The visual diversity of the field forms is matched by the variety of crops: sunflowers, wheat, potatoes, coffee, rice, soybeans, and corn are among the products of the region. While the Northern Hemisphere is still in the grip of winter, crops are growing in the Southern Hemisphere, as indicated by the many green fields. Fallow fields—not in active agricultural use—display the violet, reddish, and light tan soils common to this part of Brazil. Darker soils are often rich in iron and aluminum oxides, and are typical of highly weathered soil that forms in hot, humid climates.