Category Archives: Tools

Reflecting the Niger Delta: Tolu Ogunlesi on Tings Dey Happen

February 4, 2010 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

On 3 Quarks Daily Tolu Ogunlesi writes about American Dan Hoyle’s Tings Dey Happen. Dan Hoyle was inspired to write a one man play about Nigeria and the oil industry after being a Fulbright scholar in at the University of Port Harcourt, in Nigeria’s oil and conflict rich Niger delta:

TINGS DEY HAPPEN is in Pidgin English. When I heard Hoyle was going to be performing in Nigeria, at the invitation of the State Department, I decided I had to see the show. More than anything, I was curious to see what Hoyle’s idea of pidgin amounted to. There is so much contrived stuff that passes for Pidgin English in popular culture, that I really didn’t have any significant expectations.

By the end of the 75 minute performance, which took place at the heavily guarded American Guest Quarters on the Ikoyi waterfront in Lagos, I was more than impressed. Hoyle’s pidgin is impressive, as authentic (I hesitate to use that word) as it gets.

Hoyle cuts right through to the occasionally dark, often comical heart of Nigerian society. Early on in the one-man show (Dan plays all the voices, and they are myriad), a Nigerian explains that in Nigeria there are “no friends, only associates.”

Gangs roam the delta, but in Hoyle’s world, criminal and crude are, quite refreshingly, not synonyms. Some of the militants speak good English. They even have a sense of humour. “There’s no sign that says ‘Welcome to Nembe Creek’, ‘cos if you haven’t noticed, you’re not welcome,” Hoyle’s white character is told. Not long after the militants add, perhaps tongue-in-cheek: “We are too intelligent to kidnap you.” Perhaps this is because they know that he is merely an academic, with little potential for generating a decent ransom.

…

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Visualization

Mapping the Warmest Decade

January 27, 2010 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

This map shows how temperatures during the decade (2000-2009) compared to average temperatures recorded between 1951 and 1980. The most extreme warming, was in the Arctic (shown in red). The blue areas are cooler than average, while the grey areas show places where temperatures were not recorded.

From NASA’s Image of the Day: 2009 Ends Warmest Decade on Record

January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Throughout the last three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade. Since 1880, the year that modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present. In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C (1.5°F) since 1880.

Ecological Management, Reorganization

Ecological Imperialism during the Cold War

January 24, 2010 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

During the Cold War there was a a faint reprise of the Columbian Exchange. Science Now reports on a study by François Chiron and others in Biological Conservation (doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2009.10.021) in Cold War Split Birds, Too in ScienceNOW:

The Cold War divided the people of Europe for nearly half a century, and it turns out humans weren’t the only ones stuck behind the Iron Curtain. Trade blockades led to vastly different numbers and types of invasive birds in Western and Eastern Europe, new research reveals. The findings, say experts, highlight the dramatic impact human activity can have on the success of alien species.

… Western Europe saw the introduction of 96 species of birds during the Cold War, while Eastern Europe only saw 24. The relative freedom of movement and high levels of global trade in the West account for the difference, says co-author Susan Shirley, a wildlife ecologist at Oregon State University, Corvallis. “Trade is an important factor in the movement and establishment of alien species across the world.”

The way the Cold War carved up the globe also impacted the type of birds that were introduced. There was a rise in North American bird species, such as the ruddy duck, intentionally introduced to Western Europe many times between 1945 and 1989, but not much of a rise in the East. At the same time, people from former French and British colonies immigrated to Western Europe, toting along 23 African bird species. “They brought their caged pet birds with them–if not physically, then they brought the demand,” Shirley says.

While connections between Western Europe, the Americas, and Africa boomed, trade across the Iron Curtain withered: Exports from Western Europe to the East represented less than 5% of Western European’s total trade volume. The few invasive species that established themselves in Eastern Europe during the Cold War tended to come from other parts of Eastern Europe, or from Asia.

Since the Cold War ended in 1991, the pace of bird introduction events has picked up. Looking at records from 1989 to 2000, the study’s authors found more than 600 instances of alien species released into the wild in Eastern and Western Europe, versus almost 900 for the roughly 40 years of the Cold War. Trade and movement across the former Iron Curtain and rising prosperity in Eastern Europe has made the problem of invasive species worse, they say. “It’s speeding up exponentially, not just for birds but for many other groups, like plants, mammals, insects and fish,” says team leader Francois Chiron, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when this research was conducted.

Networks

Digital Democracy or Increasing Returns?

January 20, 2010 Garry Peterson 1 Comment

Thomas Slee reviews The Myth of Digital Democracy by ASU political scientist Matthew Hindman. Slee is the author of the popular economics book No One Makes You Shop at Walmart, which shows how game theory and increasing returns can eliminate much of the choice that some argue is found in markets. Hindman finds that the internet can amplify similar dynamics in politics.

The last sentence of Matthew Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy is “It may be easier to speak in cyberspace, but it remains difficult to be heard”. The book is about collecting and analyzing the following large data sets on the way to this conclusion:

The links among 3 million American political web pages together with data showing how Google leads its users to political sites. Hindman concludes that “link structure is an effective proxy for audience share” and that “communities of Web sites on different political topics are each dominated by a small set of highly successful sites”. The scale of online concentration is so profound, he argues, that claims the Internet “democratizes” politics are misleading. For example, when it comes to blogs, “the top blogs are now the most widely read sources of political commentary in the United States”, but these widely-read bloggers are very few in number (a few dozen) and they are “overwhelmingly.. well-educated white male professionals”. The kind of voices that get heard in political discussion are the same kind that were heard through offline media, only perhaps more so. “The vigorous online debate that blogs provide may be, on balance, a good thing for US democracy. But as many continue to celebrate the democratic nature of blogs, it is important to acknowledge that many voices are left out.”

Data from Hitwise of search-engine-directed traffic show that online politics is a tiny sliver of Internet traffic, and that “Scholars, public officials, and journalists have paid a great deal of attention to online politics. Citizens themselves, though, have directed their attention elsewhere.” Not too surprising perhaps.

Data from Hitwise and other sources, of patterns of concentration in [American] online and traditional news media. He concludes that online media is much more concentrated (a few outlets get a larger share of the traffic) than many offline industries, particularly radio. The biggest story is what he calls “the missing middle”:

From the beginning, the Internet has been portrayed as a media Robin Hood – robbing audience from the big print and broadcast outlets and giving it to the little guys. But the data in this chapter suggest that audiences are moving in both directions. On the one hand, the news market in cyberspace seems even more concentrated on the top ten or twenty outlets than print media is. On the other, the tiniest outlets have indeed earned a substantial portion of the total eyeballs… It is the middle-class outlets that have seen relative decline in the online world. Moreover, it is overwhelmingly smaller, local media organizations that have lost out to national sources. [p100]

It is a refreshing change to read a book about the cultural and political impact of the Internet that actually looks closely at Internet traffic (what people read) rather than at the number of sites (what people write), and it’s this perspective that leads Hindman to his myth-busting conclusions. The main flaw of the book is that it falls between two stools: it’s clearly an academic work that started as a set of papers or a thesis, but it is looking for a wider, popular audience. To reach that audience, Hindman should have got rid of many technical details and written a book with more narrative, but if you don’t mind reading technical studies, this is a good one, and I recommend it.

The book was also reviewed in Nature:

Most of Hindman’s book is directed towards the second, more significant, question of whether digital technologies change the balance of powerful political voices. There is much interest in whether the Internet can empower groups, such as younger people, who are seen as disengaged from the traditional political process. Hindman’s answer is in line with the ‘myth’ of his book title: political voices remain heavily filtered and concentrated on the Internet.

Using data from automated tools that analyse links between websites, Hindman demonstrates that search engines have a powerful effect in concentrating the sites that people visit to find political information. This is because a small number of sites consistently rise to the top of search lists because they have many links from other sites, and incoming links are used to assign priority by search algorithms. Political influence will be strongest in this handful of heavily linked websites, many of which belong to traditional media organizations. These will therefore continue to be of most interest to politicians.

…Political parties everywhere have great interest in digital campaigns, especially on the back of Obama’s success; it is now recognized that online activity has moved from an optional extra to an essential element of campaigning. These campaigns may bring different supporters, donors and activists into the political process. We would be right, however, to follow the considered approach of this book in not assuming that enhanced automation of campaigns will effect significant changes in political power. Based on current evidence, any claims that we are reaching a digitally powered democratic Utopia are indeed more myth than reality.

Networks, Scenarios

Cormac McCarthy and Santa Fe Institute

January 19, 2010 Garry Peterson 1 Comment

From the New Scientist I learned that American novelist Cormac McCarthy has a long history as a writer in residence at the Santa Fe Institute. Interviewing Joe Penhall the screenwriter of the movie based on McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road:

Cormac McCarthy doesn’t tell us the cause of the apocalypse. What did you imagine it might be?

McCarthy told me it was some kind of environmental meltdown. He has an office at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, he loves hanging out there and a lot of his friends are environmental scientists, molecular biologists and physicists, so he’s coming at it from a very scientific point of view. It’s about what would happen if environmental meltdown continued to its logical conclusion: crops and animals would die, the weather would go out of control, there would be spontaneous wildfires and blizzards, you wouldn’t be able to grow anything and the only thing left to eat would be tinned food and each other. But I was anxious not to quiz him too much about what happened because we wanted to preserve the mystique of it.

The Independent writes about Cormac McCarthy:

For him, science still guards the flame of creation that literature has lost. “Part of what you respect is their rigour,” he says of the scientists he admires. “When you say something, it needs to be right. You can’t just speculate idly about things.”

… McCarthy seems to have imbibed a scientific pessimism currently expressed in, but by no means confined to, worries about climate change and environmental entropy.

At Sante Fe, the subjects that snagged in McCarthy’s imagination include the logistics of mass extinction, best known through study of the meteorite strike that ended the reign of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Traces of this fascination crop up in The Road, but the rest of his oeuvre hints heavily that feral human beings can easily reach their own apocalyptic crisis, without any help from outside. “We’re going to do ourselves in first,” he said to Kushner when asked about the threat of climate change.

Oprah’s book club selected The Road last year. Oprah’s book club links to several SFI scientists discussing about the themes of the book including anthropologist Stephen Lansing (who also works at the Stockholm Resilience Centre). Lansing writes on Man vs. Nature: Coevolution of Social and Ecological Networks:

As early as 1820, one observer wrote that truly “external” nature—nature apart from humanity—”exists nowhere except perhaps on a few isolated Australian coral atolls.” Not only do humans directly alter many ecosystems through development and agriculture, we impact apparently untouched habitats in remote regions of the earth through pollution and climate change. Yet we depend on nature for “ecosystem services” such as water purification, pollination, fisheries and climate regulation. For better and for worse, humans are constantly coevolving with species and the environment. Many traditional societies have found creative ways to remind themselves of the critical interdependence of the human and natural worlds—consider the water temples of Bali, for example. Claude Lévi-Strauss, perhaps the greatest anthropologist of our time, believed that this interdependence is fundamental to human thought.

According to Lévi-Strauss, when we think about nature we are always already thinking about ourselves.

In the past decade, scientific journals and the media have been filling up with reports of our changing relationship to nature. The most prominent example is climate change, but there are many others: the destruction of the world’s tropical forests and reefs, the eutrophication of lakes and coastal zones, the beginning of a new age of mass extinction. In The Road , Cormac does not dwell on the scientific details of these catastrophes. Instead, he imagines a world that represents their logical outcome and asks us to imagine what that might feel like. What if there was a near-complete breakdown of the complex networks joining humans with one another and with other species? It’s a question that stirs and troubles our sense of who we are.

“There was yet a lingering odor of cows in the barn and he stood there thinking about cows and he realized they were extinct. Was that true? There could be a cow somewhere being fed and cared for. Could there? Fed what? Saved for what? Beyond the open door the dead grass rasped dryly in the wind” (p. 120).

Ecological Management

Roving bandits, piracy, and fishing

January 12, 2010 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Piracy has been in the news a lot over the past few years. Less noticed is the impact of’ roving bandit fishing fleets from the rich world that outfish local fisherman. The associated press reports on a perverse consquence of Somalian piracy Kenya fishermen see upside to pirates: more fish

A report on pirates this year by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore said the value of illegal catches from Somalia’s maritime jurisdiction is estimated at between $90 million and $300 million a year, and that foreign fishing vessels hail from all around the world.

The report’s author, Clive Schofield, a research fellow with the Australian Centre for Ocean Resources and Security at the University of Wollongong, called it ironic that nations contributing warships to anti-piracy efforts are in some cases directly linked to the foreign fishing vessels “stealing Somalia’s offshore resources.”

“This situation has led some pirates to justify their actions on basis of illegal foreign fishing activities — styling themselves ‘coastguards’ and characterizing ransom demands as ‘fines,'” the report said. “Without condoning acts of violence at sea, it is clear that the Somalis who hijack shipping off their coast are in fact not the only ‘pirates’ operating in these waters,” it said.

Piracy has not had a huge effect on Kenya’s overall fishing industry, which is not very well developed on the coast, according to the permanent secretary for Kenya’s Ministry of Fisheries Development, Micheni Japhet Ntiba. Kenya has brought in between 5,000 and 7,000 metric tons of fish off its Indian Ocean coast each of the last several years, he said, less than a tenth of Kenya’s yearly catch from Lake Victoria, on Kenya’s western edge.

Piracy “is a negative thing for Kenya fisherman. It’s a negative thing for the Kenyan economy. It’s a negative thing for the western Indian Ocean economy,” Ntiba said. “What I think is important for us is to invest in security so the government and the private sector can invest in the deep sea ocean resources.”

Still, Kenya’s sports fisherman say the pirates appear to have had a hugely positive effect on their industry. Angus Paul, whose family owns the Kingfisher sports fishing company, said that over the past season clients on his catch-and-release sports fishing outings averaged 12 or 13 sail fish a day. That compares with two or three in previous years.

Somali pirates, Paul said, are a group of terrorists, “but as long as they can keep the big commercial boats out, not fishing the waters, then it benefits a lot of other smaller people.”

Visualization

Visualizing the Arctic Oscillation

January 10, 2010 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Impact of the negative Arctic Oscillation on land surface temperatures throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Acquired December 1 - 31, 2009 from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite

The Arctic Oscillation is unusually strong right now. The consequences, a warm arctic and cold N Europe and E North America, are illustrated in the image Winter Temperatures and the Arctic Oscillation from NASA’s Earth Observatory’s Image of the Day:

If you live nearly anywhere in North America, Europe, or Asia, it’s no news that December 2009 and early January 2010 were cold. This image illustrates how cold December was compared to the average of temperatures recorded in December between 2000 and 2008. Blue points to colder than average land surface temperatures, while red indicates warmer temperatures. Much of the Northern Hemisphere experienced cold land surface temperatures, but the Arctic was exceptionally warm. This weather pattern is a tale-tell sign of the Arctic Oscillation.

The Arctic Oscillation is a climate pattern that influences winter weather in the Northern Hemisphere. It is defined by the pressure difference between air at mid-latitudes (around 45 degrees North, about the latitude of Montreal, Canada or Bordeaux, France) and air over the Arctic. A low-pressure air mass dominates the Arctic, while high pressure systems sit over the mid-latitudes. The strength of the high- and low-pressure systems oscillates. When the systems are weaker than normal, the pressure difference between the Arctic and mid-latitudes decreases, allowing chilly Arctic air to slide south while warmer air creeps north. A weaker-than-normal Arctic Oscillation is said to be negative. When high and low pressure systems are strong, the Arctic Oscillation is positive.

Adaptation, Cities, Design

Resilience Engineering

January 7, 2010 Henrik Ernstson Leave a comment

Resilience philosophy is spreading into many areas. Resilience Engineering is a collection of research organizations and laboratories that at least since 2006 is trying to re-define technology, people and risks in the light of resilience thinking. This is how they write about themselves:

The network of participating organizations of the Resilience Engineering Network (R.E.N.)

The term Resilience Engineering represents a new way of thinking about safety. Whereas conventional risk management approaches are based on hindsight and emphasise error tabulation and calculation of failure probabilities, Resilience Engineering looks for ways to enhance the ability of organisations to create processes that are robust yet flexible, to monitor and revise risk models, and to use resources proactively in the face of disruptions or ongoing production and economic pressures. In Resilience Engineering failures do not stand for a breakdown or malfunctioning of normal system functions, but rather represent the converse of the adaptations necessary to cope with the real world complexity. Individuals and organisations must always adjust their performance to the current conditions; and because resources and time are finite it is inevitable that such adjustments are approximate. Success has been ascribed to the ability of groups, individuals, and organisations to anticipate the changing shape of risk before damage occurs; failure is simply the temporary or permanent absence of that.

I acknowledge Keith Tidball in notifying me of this organization.

Ecological Economics, Networks, Visualization

Mapping global flows of virtual green and blue water

December 30, 2009 Garry Peterson 2 Comments

: Green and blue virtual-water ‘flows’ related to wheat trade by major exporting and importing nations (km3/year).
The size of each pie is determined by the amount of virtual water ‘traded’.
Countries with virtual-water ‘exports’ are depicted in green and countries with virtual-water ‘import’ in red; the colour shade depends on the quantity of virtual water ‘traded’. Period 2000–2004.

M.M. Aldaya, J.A. Allan and A.Y. Hoekstra in their paper Strategic importance of green water in international crop trade (Ecological Economics 2009) doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2009.11.001 map global flows of virtual water in the wheat trade.

In their paper they explain their figure:

The map presented in Fig. 6 shows the virtual-water ‘flows’ to the five major importing countries for wheat for the period 2000–2004.

By ‘importing’ virtual water embodied in agricultural commodities, a nation “saves” the amount of water it would have required to produce those commodities domestically.

Though from an importing country perspective it is not relevant whether products have been produced using green or blue water in the country of origin, from a global point of view it has important implications (Chapagain et al., 2006a). For instance, Egypt is the largest importer of wheat, with the USA providing about 45% of the country’s imports. Wheat from Egypt has an average virtual-water content of 930 m3/ton of which 100% is blue water (Chapagain et al., 2006a), while the USA has a virtual-water content for wheat of 1707 m3/ton of which 39.8% is blue water (Table 3).

By importing wheat, Egypt saves 930 m3 of water per ton of wheat. Globally, when imported from the USA, there is not a total water saving because wheat production in the USA requires more water than in Egypt. Exports to Egypt from this country result in a considerable net global water loss of 777 m3 per ton. However, if we just look at blue water only, importing wheat from the USA to Egypt saves 251 m3/ton (since USA production requires 679 m3/ton of blue water and wheat production in Egypt 930 m3/ton).

Along these lines, Egypt, as some other water-scarce importing countries, has formulated policies to import low value but high water consuming food like cereals (Van Hofwegen, 2005). Nevertheless, even if the potential of trade to “save” water at national level is substantial, most international food trade occurs for reasons not related to water resources (CAWMA, 2007).

Ecosystem services, Networks, Visualization

Maping global virtual waters flows

December 30, 2009 Garry Peterson 1 Comment

: Fig. 4. World map of virtual water exports.
(a) Total virtual water exports (flows exceeding 10 km3 yr−1 are shown);
(b) flows of virtual water exports originating from blue (irrigation) water (flows exceeding 1.0 km3 yr−1 are shown); and
(c) virtual water exports originating from nonrenewable and nonlocal blue water (flows exceeding 0.5 km3 yr−1 are shown).

Figure is from Hanasaki and others paper An estimation of global virtual water flow and sources of water withdrawal for major crops and livestock products using a global hydrological model (2009 Journal of Hydrology) doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2009.09.028.

They explain the figure:

The estimated flows of virtual water exports and imports in 2000 by nation were aggregated into 22 regions worldwide (Table 9; Fig. 4) to show net exports between regions.

Fig. 4a shows the virtual water export flows for all water sources. The figure indicates that North and South America were major regions from which virtual water export flows originate; East Asia, Europe, Central America, and West Asia were the major destinations. This pattern of flows agrees with the studies of (Oki and Kanae, 2004), (Yang et al., 2006) and (Hoekstra and Hung, 2005).

Fig. 4b shows the virtual water exports of blue water (withdrawn from streamflow, medium-size reservoirs, and NNBW sources), and

Fig. 4c shows the virtual water exports of NNBW. Most major flows of blue water and NNBW originated from North America and South Asia.

Interestingly, South America was the major total virtual water exporter but a minor blue water exporter because less cropland is irrigated on this continent.

Notably, South Asia, which is densely populated and where demand results in water scarcity (Oki and Kanae, 2006 and Hanasaki et al., 2008b), showed blue and NNBW virtual water export flows. [note: NNBW – is non-renewable and non-local blue water.]

Resilience Science