Further evidence that Earth's ecosystems constitute an interlocking interdependent fractal matrix of subsystems far more complex than we understand. Here is an example you have probably never heard of. I certainly had not. Until we realize and accept our ignorance our arrogance will keep us from learning. We do not have dominion over the Earth, one of the most toxic Judea-Christian myths. The Earth was here before us, and will be here long after our species is gone. At b! est we can be sand in the gears or lubricant. And it is yet another arrogance to believe we are the only conscious beings. We have no idea what the consciousness of dinosaurs was, any more than we can truly inhabit a whale's reality — or a flowers.
Research shows forest debris that drains into lakes is an important contributor to freshwater food chains – bolstering fish diets to the extent that increased forest cover causes fish to get ‘fat’ and sparse forest leaves smaller, underfed fish.
Indigeneity is an unusual way to think about International Relations (IR). Most studies of world politics ignore Indigenous perspectives, which are rarely treated as relevant to thinking about the international (Shaw 2008; Beier 2009).
Unconquerable Peoples
Yet Indigenous peoples are engaging in world politics with a dynamism and creativity that defies the silences of our discipline (Morgan 2011). In Latin America, Indigenous politics has gained international legitimacy, influencing policy for over two decades (Cott 2008; Madrid 2012). Now, Indigenous political movements are focused on resisting extractive projects on autonomous territory from the Arctic to the Amazon (Banerjee 2012; Sawyer and Gómez 2012). Resistance has led to large mobilized protests, invoked international law, and enabled alternative mechanisms of authority.
If you have been reading SR for some time you know I predicted this in the late 90s. Eventually a wide range of industries are going to be opposed to the carbon energy interests. This is an important trend, and one to watch closely.
Being a big business, the insurance industry is a strong backer of free enterprise and its laissez-faire leaders. But a rift could be developing now that some major carriers are staking claims in the climate change cause while many of their congressional backers have remained skeptical of the science.
For insurers, it’s not about the political machinations but rather, it’s about the potential economic losses. If even part of the predictions hold – the ones released by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change that ascribe temperature change to humans with 95 percent certainty – then the rate of extreme weather events will only increase and the effects would be more severe. That, in turn, would lead to greater damages and more payouts.
(NaturalNews) Is it real or is it another politically correct attempt by a federal government entity to provide an excuse for poor choices, poor performances or poor government education practices and standards?
It's hard to say at this stage, but nevertheless, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared that life in the inner city can create a health problem which then makes it tougher for young people there to learn.
The health problem? “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” the same condition that a number of soldiers returning from battle and victims of physical harm from crime have developed.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The CDC says that many of these children live in virtual war zones in the inner city. As such, according to doctors at Harvard University — which is well-known for its left-wing bias in research and the sciences — kids in the inner city are suffering from an even more complex form of PTSD that some of them have labeled “hood disease.”
In recent months I’ve discovered that random selection offers unexpected gifts to our efforts to create more fair, functional, and intelligent politics and governance. I share a key dynamic that defines random selection and show how it has been applied historically and might be used more in specific institutions and instances today.
Until a few years ago I thought that random selection was just a great way to pick people who were a cross-section of the population, for a survey or a citizen deliberation. Random selection guarantees diversity and safeguards against manipulation, two very important factors in such exercises. I didn’t think to explore it further.
Then while researching my 2012 book Empowering Public Wisdom, I discovered that ancient Athenians staffed 90% of their government posts by drawing lots from the general citizenry. THAT was certainly a different way to govern!! Then this year, while helping on a few on-the-ground projects involving random selection, I had to learn about the unexpectedly diverse nitty-gritty issues of how people actually do such selections.
I began to realize that random selection is much more nuanced and filled with possibilities than I’d previously thought. I dug further into the subject, reading three books and a number of articles on what is also called lot, lottery, and sortition. I am starting – just starting – to get a handle on its counter-intuitive logic and its novel promise of remarkable power and potential….
You’ll hear more from me about all this over the coming months. Right now I want to share the main reason I think random selection is really important for us social change agents to understand:
Random selection is a perfect tool to address our most dangerous political problem – special interest manipulation.
Its potency includes and goes beyond the problem of “money in politics”. It potentially deals with manipulation of politicians and public officials (which generates corruption) … manipulation of information and social narratives (which generates ignorance and folly) … manipulation of public policy and budgets (which generates injustice and concentration of wealth and power) … and manipulation of elections and districts (which generates political malignancy and polarization). Collectively these forms of manipulation generate apathy, cynicism, low voter turnout, powerlessness, and suffering among the population at large while degrading prospects for future generations.
If you are reading this, the chances are you already know how toxic such dynamics are to democracy. Imagine what a gift it would be to be able to address them all in one powerful way.
OpenEarth is a free and open source initiative to deal with Data, Models and Tools in earth science & engineering projects, currently mainly marine & coastal. In current practice, research, consultancy and construction projects commonly spend a significant part of their budget to setup some basic infrastructure for data and knowledge management. Most of these efforts disappear again once the project is finished. As an alternative to these ad-hoc approaches, OpenEarth aims for a more continuous approach to data & knowledge management. It provides a platform to archive, host and disseminate high quality data, state-of-the-art model systems and well-tested tools for practical analysis. Through this project-superseding approach, marine & coastal engineers and scientists can learn from experiences in previous projects and each other. This may lead to considerable efficiency gains, both in terms of budget and time. The following 2 papers describe the OpenEarth approach in more detail: Terra et Aqua, 2013, NCK 2012 & WODCON 2010.
Preeminent scientists are warning about serious threats to human life in the not-distant future, including climate change and superintelligent computers. Most people don't care.
Sometimes Stephen Hawking writes an article that both mentions Johnny Depp and strongly warns that computers are an imminent threat to humanity, and not many people really care. That is the day there is too much on the Internet. (Did the computers not want us to see it?)
Hawking, along with MIT physics professorMax Tegmark, Nobel laureateFrank Wilczek, and Berkeley computer science professor Stuart Russell ran a terrifying op-ed a couple weeks ago in The Huffington Post under the staid headline “Transcending Complacency on Superintelligent Machines.” It was loosely tied to the Depp sci-fi thriller Transcendence, so that’s what’s happening there. “It's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction,” they write. “But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake in history.”
And then, probably because it somehow didn’t get much attention, the exact piece ran again last week in The Independent, which went a little further with the headline: “Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence—but Are We Taking A.I. Seriously Enough?” Ah, splendid. Provocative, engaging, not sensational. But really what these preeminent scientists go on to say is not not sensational.
“An explosive transition is possible,” they continue, warning of a time when particles can be arranged in ways that perform more advanced computations than the human brain. “As Irving Good realized in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a ‘singularity.'”
Get out of here. I have a hundred thousand things I am concerned about at this exact moment. Do I seriously need to add to that a singularity?
