Helen Fox of WWF writes to tell me that:
WWF is offering Fuller Fellowships to support doctoral and postdoctoral marine protected areas (MPA) research in our marine priority geographies that shows promise to enhance scientific understanding of their ecological and social impacts.
She is also co-organizing a 1-day symposium New Perspectives on MPA Performance:
Linking Knowledge to Action on November 5 which will be webcast.
The Database of the Self in Hyperconnectivity is a graphic created by Venessa Miemis a Media Studies student, who created the figure for a course project, to communicate different ways people interact with online information (there is also an interactive version).
She used Holling’s adaptive cycle, which she calls a panarchy (but because she misses the x-scale aspect its really an adaptive cyle) to identify contexts in which individuals act, but acknowledges this in a comment discussion. Its interesting to see resilience thinking ideas pop up in other contexts.
I’m curious to the path by which panarchy moved into media studies (a quick google showed research in tagging classification systems using it) , and I wonder if any of the research on roles of people in environmental management done by Resilience Alliance researchers (e.g. in Panarchy book or Frances Westley, Per Olsson, and Carl Folke‘s work) was carried over with the concept. However, there are no references and no explanation of how the figure was created, but she does link to an Ecology and Society paper.
Google trends result for resilience. Scale is based on the average worldwide traffic of resilience in all years.
Benoît Mandelbrot the discover/inventor of fractals has died at 85. His work has been hugely influential in areas as diverse as computer graphics, finance and ecology.
In computer graphics fractals have been used to produce more realistic landscapes and vegetation, in finance his work as inspired people such as Nassim Taleb and others to think about the distribution of events, and in ecology fractals have been extensively used to understand the scaling of landscapes.
Mandelbort described his own career as a fractal:
“If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.”
There have been obituaries in the New York Times Benoît Mandelbrot, Novel Mathematician, Dies at 85, The Telegraph (UK), the Guardian, NPR, and The Atlantic.
Below are some links to his work:
Some Mandelbrot obituaries and appreciations have been published in The Telegraph (UK), The New York Times and The Atlantic.
Mandlebrot is probably most famous for the Mandelbrot set seen above and many version of which are seen below. R code to generate a mandelbrot set is here.
Novelist William Gibson interviewed by BBC News:
The rapid rate of technological and social change means the future comes crashing towards us faster than ever before, says visionary science fiction author William Gibson.
“In the 1960s I think that in some sense the present was actually about three or four years long,” he said, “because in three or four years relatively little would change.”
That stood in sharp contrast to late 2010, he said, when big changes had become a daily occurrence.
“Now the present is the length of a news cycle some days,” he said in an interview with BBC News.
That ferocious rate of change made writing about the present day exciting, he said, and explained why his current novel, Zero History, is set around about now.
“The present is really of no width whatever,” he said.
…
Realising how things were speeding up made Mr Gibson take a conscious decision to recalibrate what he described as his sense of “contemporary weirdness” that fuels his writing.
“By the time I had finished my sixth novel I had this nagging sense that my yardstick of contemporary weirdness was really an 80s yardstick,” he said.
“There’s a sense in which I need the formal official metric unit of contemporary weirdness in order to know how much I can successfully expand that and induce science fiction’s characteristic cognitive dissonance in the reader.
“What I actually found was that this contemporary weirdness was incredibly expansive and the deeper I looked into it the weirder it got,” he said.
The project description elaborates: “As a result, the planning is not static anymore. It is not a blueprint, not a collection of architectural elements to create an hypothetic Henna out of the current mindsets and needs, but a multitude of tools, methods, opportunities, options, to define a sustainable developing strategy to meet future’s demands. We keep an eye on time, its complexity and we humbly admit we cannot foresee future; we can only provide guiding principles from current scientific understanding to define a social ecological urbanity capable of sustainably moving on with unique identity.”Think Globally Radio recently posted a number of great interviews. Here is one interesting one with political scientist, and renown author Thomas Homer-Dixon from University of Waterloo (Canada) – one of the world’s leading scholars on the intersection of environment, security and crisis.
Direct link to the interview can be found here.
Computing for Sustainability has a fascinating collection of conceptual diagrams of sustainability. The collection includes over 250 images.
results from a google image search for sustainable development conceptual diagram
Its a diverse set including everything from Herman Daly’s vision of the economy (#1), the MA’s ecosystem service framework (#168), panarchy (#175), and Heman Daly’s steady state economy (#177). But it could use some editing and organization as it also includes many images that are not related to sustainability, such as the Seed logo integrated with balancing bodywork #41, or IWW’s poster of the capitalist system #199.
My colleagues are I recently published a paper in BioScience, Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing As Ecosystem Services Degrade?
The paper originated from the involvement of the first four authors, my former PhD student Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, my colleague at McGill Elena Bennett, and my former post-doc Maria Tengö and I, in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. While we were all happy with our work on the MA, we felt that the MA had not had enough time to digest its findings. I was particularly interested in the apparent contradiction between the MA’s assumption that ecosystem services are essential to human wellbeing and the observation that human wellbeing has been increasing as ecosystem services decline.
Our paper compares four alternative explanations of this apparent contradiction. Our abstract outlines the paper:
Environmentalists have argued that ecological degradation will lead to declines in the well-being of people dependent on ecosystem services. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment paradoxically found that human well-being has increased despite large global declines in most ecosystem services. We assess four explanations of these divergent trends: (1) We have measured well-being incorrectly; (2) well-being is dependent on food services, which are increasing, and not on other services that are declining; (3) technology has decoupled well-being from nature; (4) time lags may lead to future declines in well-being. Our findings discount the first hypothesis, but elements of the remaining three appear plausible. Although ecologists have convincingly documented ecological decline, science does not adequately understand the implications of this decline for human well-being. Untangling how human well-being has increased as ecosystem conditions decline is critical to guiding future management of ecosystem services; we propose four research areas to help achieve this goal.
BioScience has highlighted the article by writing a press release, providing a set of teaching resources, and featuring the article in the issue’s editorial. BioScience’s editor-in-chief Timothy M. Beardsley writes:
… BioScience will publish commentary on aspects of their analysis in a future issue. Yet the article clearly strengthens the case for research that integrates human well-being, agriculture, technology, and time lags affecting ecosystem services. Raudsepp-Hearne and her colleagues urge more attention to how ecosystem services affect multiple aspects of well-being, ecosystem service synergies and trade-offs, technology for enhancing ecosystem services, and better forecasting of the provision of and demand for ecosystem services.
The recent oil calamity in the Gulf of Mexico, the biological impacts of which will take years to fully manifest and will persist for decades, should be reminder enough that although technology can insulate us from degrading ecosystem services locally, it often does so by creating problems elsewhere. As the human population grows, fewer places remain where the impacts can be absorbed without adversely affecting somebody. Aggregate global human well-being is, apparently, growing—though it is obviously declining in some places. Extending and defending the gains, particularly as the quest for energy becomes more intense, will require policymakers to understand the complicated relationship between ecosystem services and the humans who use them.
I’ll summarize our paper and respond to some of the media coverage of our paper in followup posts.
The paper is:
Thanks to BioScience an open access version is temporarily available here.
Google Creative Lab has collaborated with the Montreal band, Arcade Fire to create a interactive web movie “The Wilderness Downtown” using Google earth. Director Chris Milk combines the nostalgia of the new Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait” with Google maps and street view images of the streets where the viewer lived to produce a very impressive combination of art and technology.
Wired blog Epicentre has an article that gives some background on the project:
The project came about one day when [director] Chris Milk and I were talking about Chrome Experiments and what can be achieved through a modern web browser and with the power of HTML5 technology,” said Google Creative Lab tech lead and co-creator of the project Aaron Koblin. “We were excited about breaking out of the traditional 4:3 or 16:9 video box, and thinking about how we could take over the whole browser experience. Further, we wanted to make something that used the power of being connected. In contrast to a traditional experience of downloading a pre-packaged video or playing a DVD, we wanted to make something that was incorporating data feeds on the fly, and tailoring the experience to a specific individual.
“One of the biggest struggles for a director is to successfully create a sense of empathy with their characters and settings. Using Google Maps and Street View we’re able to tailor the experience to each person. This effect is a totally different kind of emotional engagement that is both narrative and personally driven.”
…“Experiences” such as this will evolve to look much slicker in the future, but already, they’re capable of some fairly incredible maneuvers, integrating Arcade Fire’s stirring music with data from Google Maps and Google Street View, topping it all off with input from the user.
We’re impressed, but some streamlining will be required if bands that aren’t big enough to play Madison Square Garden, as Arcade Fire is, are going to be able to offer it. We counted a full 111 names in the credits.
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