GasBuddy has an interactive map of gas prices by county in the USA and by census division in Canada. The USA map shown below has a lot more variation. But there are also interesting differences in not only price, but in variation in price among states (for a closer look).
I’m not sure if their an art project or practical tool but these autonomous biomorphic Robot Jellyfish are interesting. From National Geographic:
Propelled by flexible, electrically driven tentacles, robotic jellyfish swim at the Hannover Fair.
Using a type of “swarm intelligence,” the Festo company’s so-called AquaJellies set their own courses and can come together or avoid each other as needed. The robots “talk” via light pulses underwater and via radio at the surface.
On Technium Kevin Kelly writes:
One one level, these autonomous robotic jelly fish illuminated the mechanism by which real jellyfish swim. … The parallels in their motions — clearly visible in the video — feel so organic that we immediately assign them life-like adjectives.
I think we are primed to find lifelikeness in machines. E.O. Wilson calls it our biophilia — our intense attraction to living things. As we design machines to approach the complexity of organisms and mimic their behavior (as these do), we will be very quick to include them in our love.
People or organizations can focus their effort on a narrow goal, or they can diversify the uses of resources to explore and innovate. It is hard to do both at the same time. This pattern arises in politics as well as in corporations, agencies or academic institutions. When politics of democracies begin to lock into a stationary state, party positions are caricatures, messages are simplistic, campaigns are tightly scripted, media events are rigidly coordinated, and big donors demand loyal candidates. These conditions do not encourage broad, creative, inventive discussions of the most important problems of the day. Such a political environment seems hopelessly incapable of addressing the multiple shocks of the present – the credit crisis, sharply rising prices of energy and food, shortage of arable land, declining capacity of ecosystems to produce the goods that people need, and the complex challenges of climate change, among others. These shocks are unprecedented, so the solutions are novel – the kinds of solutions that cannot emerge from gridlock politics.
Nonetheless, people need answers to complex questions. In a recent global survey, respondents were asked to identify the questions that were most important to them. Questions were then ranked in order of the number of respondents who identified them as important. All of the top-ranking questions were deeply complex. What does sustainability look like? How must humans adapt to survive the changes of this century? What economic structures best support a shift to sustainability? How can we re-invent politics so people feel that they have a voice? What kind of leadership does the world need now?
Complex questions can be addressed by scenarios – sets of stories about the future, derived from collaborative processes and models, designed to integrate diverse perspectives. The scenarios of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment are a recent example.
Scenarios are a way of building resilience – the capacity to maintain useful features of nature and society, while inventing and implementing transformations to new ways of living. In a recent talk at Resilience 2008 I discussed some of the connections between scenarios and resilience. To break out of traps, people need positive stories of what the future could be, and blunt warnings of dangerous paths. Scenarios provide such motivating visions. Moreover, the process of scenario-building itself may create connections that enable transformation. Scenario projects form networks of people in settings that promote playful, inventive thinking at the margin of formal politics. The scenarios, the insights, the people, or the networks themselves are capable of infiltrating wider thinking, and thereby contributing to change when the conditions are right.
What could expand the use of scenarios to build resilience? We need more people trained in relevant skills such as collaboration, rapid prototyping, flexible fast modeling, synthesis, and use of art, music, science and stories together. Courses exist and a sizeable literature is available. Yet the best way to learn scenarios is by doing. Why not try scenario thinking the next time you face a complex problem with long-term consequences?
On Pruned Alexander Trevi describes the sculptor David Nash‘s art created from following the movement of a wooden boulder down a stream. Nash tried to use the river to move the wood to his studio, and when it became stuck he documented the movement of the wooden boulder downstream. The 25-Year Riverine Journey of a Wooden Boulder Carved out of a Felled 200-Year-Old Oak Tree:
“For 25 years,” Nash writes, “I have followed its engagement with the weather, gravity and the seasons. It became a stepping-stone into the drama of physical geography. Spheres imply movement and initially I helped it to move, but after a few years I observed it only intervening when absolutely necessary – when it became wedged under a bridge.”
The journey is so extraordinary — made more so perhaps by the fact that it’s so well-documented — that we can’t help but quote the rest of Nash’s accounts:
During the first 24 years it moved down stream nine times remaining static for months and years. Sedentary and heavy it would sit bedded in stones animated by the varying water levels and the seasons. Beyond the bridge its position survived many storms, the force of the water spread over the shallow banks did not have the power to shift it. I did not expect it to move into the Dwyryd river in my lifetime.
Then in November 2002 it was gone. The ‘goneness’ was palpable. The storm propelled the boulder 5 kilometres, stopping on a sandbank in the Dwryd estuary. Now tidal, it became very mobile. The high tides around full moon and the new moon moved it every 12 hours to a new place, each placement unique to the consequence of the tide, wind, rain and depth of water.
In January 2003 it disappeared from the estuary but was found again in a marsh. An incoming tide had taken it up a creek, where it stayed for five weeks. The equinox tide of March 19 2003 was high enough to float it back to the estuary where it continued its movement back and forth 3 or 4 kilometres each move.
The wooden boulder was last seen in June 2003 on a sandbank near Ynys Giftan. All creeks and marshes have been searched so it can, only be assumed it has made its way to the sea. It is not lost. It is wherever it is.
Last week at Resilience 2008 in Stockholm, I gave a presentation on the Practitioner’s workbook Assessing and Managing Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems. The workbook incorporates key principles underlying resilience thinking and provides a framework for assessing the resilience of social-ecological systems and considering options to set the system on a sustainable trajectory. The workbook builds on research by RA members and others and while it offers neither a recipe for effective management nor a panacea for resource problems, it does provide a foundation for integrated resource management that takes into account cross-scale interactions, alternate regimes, change, and uncertainty.
In the spirit of knowledge sharing, and collaboration, a wiki version of the workbook was launched last week. The workbook wiki is aimed at those who have experience applying resilience concepts to social-ecological systems and who want to contribute to the on-going development of the resilience assessment guide.
Feedback from those who have used the resilience assessment workbook (first made available last July), identified some of the strengths and weaknesses of the original version as well as a few gaps. The wiki editorial team will begin organizing the development of new content and a bunch of new material that will be linked to the workbook including: thematic versions of the workbook (e.g. urban resilience, coral reef resilience); modules on participatory research, adaptive co-management, assessing ecosystem service tradeoffs, etc.; research methods; translations (Spanish, Russian, Swedish); new examples and case studies.
Discussions among those who have used the workbook highlight the need for many more examples and case studies of completed assessments. People want to know how others are applying the assessment process in different settings, how they are adapting it, what problems have arisen, and how they were dealt with. A large network of people who have completed resilience assessments will be encouraged to contribute their examples and case studies to the wiki. These entries will include authorship and be reviewed by editors.
A neat visualization of CO2 emissions from the Vulcan project. They CO2 levels, which aren’t measured, from fine scale air pollution data and atmospheric models to produce high resolution hourly map of US CO2 emissions. Kevin Gurney posted a visualization of their data on YouTube, in which you can see the daily and seasonal variation in emissions.
via Great Beyond and Andrew Revkin’s DotEarth
In a few weeks the conference Resilience 2008 will begin in Stockholm. Along the the scientific talks is an art exhibit on resilience. Its called Changing Matters – the Resilience Art Exhibition and will be opening at the Naturhistoriska riksmuseet just before the conference (it runs 12 April -7 September 2008).
On the conference website the art exhibit and its rationale are described.
A central message of the Resilience 2008 Conference is that resilience is not just an ecological issue, or a social, economic or cultural issue. These issues are interlinked. Resilience involves ecological, economic, cultural, ethical and other social dimensions and values. Sustaining and developing social capacity will be a prerequisite for adaptability and transformability.
To explore this fundamentally important feature, and to complement and enhance the scientific symposium, we invited artists to submit proposals for a Resilience Art Exhibition to be held in connection with the science and policy conference. The full Resilience Art Exhibition, where invited artists interpret the notion of resilience, will take place between April 12 and September 7, 2008, at The Swedish Museum of Natural History (Naturhistoriska riksmuseet).
During the conference there will also be highlights and excerpts shown in the grand lecture hall Aula Magna at Stockholm University.
Falling Boxes by Paul Matosic, one of the artists in the exhibition
The artists participating in the show are:
The South San Francisco Bay salt evaporation ponds, which are often visible from planes flying in and out of San Francisco Airport. Salt ponds with different salinity levels are inhabited by different organisms that give them different colours. Algae colour low salinity ponds green, while different algae color high salinity ponds red. Bacteria and shrimp also shift the colours.
Hidden Ecologies is blog describes work from the San Francisco Exploratorium that explores and visualizes the transitional landscapes surounding San Francisco Bay at different scales. Architect Cris Benton has made a collage of his photos from high and low elevations of Salt Pond Colors:
Bruce 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.
The Online Journalism Blog has created media attention cartograms that show how the world looks from the point of view of different news sources. Cartograms that distort the world by population look quite different:
via Ethan Zuckerman
