EXTRACT 1: An endless supply of data, probably unparalleled in its breadth and depth, flows from every continent to a cluster of buildings on the edge of the English Garden in Munich. An encyclopedia of life, its dangers, its injustices, its coincidences, is being assembled there. There is probably no other place on Earth where the risks of the modern world are being studied more intensively and comprehensively than at the headquarters of Munich Re, the world's risk center.
EXTRACT 2: Today Munich Re wins accolades for its restraint, while its shareholders are eagerly awaiting the results of a new project. The goal of the project under development in Oechslin's department, more comprehensive than any other project before it, is to redefine the limits of knowledge by developing a global risk model.
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Phi Beta Iota: This is a superb article that ably documents how much can be known–and shared–that most governments and international organizations are simply not conscious of, or if conscious, exploiting microscopic bits of the data for nefarious purposes. These are the kind of people that could and should be at the heart of creating a World Brain and Global Game.
The world’s population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years — and only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth.
This is the paradoxical answer that Hans Rosling unveils at TED@Cannes using colorful new data display technology (you’ll see).
Phi Beta Iota: This is consistent with the report of the UN High-Level Threat Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, which identified POVERTY as the top threat to humanity, in part because it spawns everything else including Infectious Disease (#2), Environmental Degradation (#3, the poor doing more damage than all the corporations on the planet), and so on. See also:
+ Collect information from cell phones, news and the web.
+ Aggregate that information into a single platform.
+ Visualize it on a map and timeline.
Crowdmap is designed and built by the people behind Ushahidi, a platform that was originally built to crowdsource crisis information. As the platform has evolved, so have its uses. Crowdmap allows you to set up your own deployment of Ushahidi without having to install it on your own web server.
The philosophical foundation for The WRSC is in its founding premise stated as a question posed in R. Buckminster Fuller's World Game™ simulation:
“How do we make the world
work for 100% of humanity
in the shortest possible time
through spontaneous
cooperation without
ecological damage or
disadvantage to anyone?”
The World Resources Simulation Center (WRSC) will be a non-profit visualization facility where you can literally “see” the critical trends of global and regional issues, the relationships between issues, and the consequences of different strategies. For detailed information, begin by downloading the proposal documents to learn more about the specifics of the project. Next, explore several quick demonstrations of new technologies and how data and mapping information can be utilized in powerful new ways. (videos follow, continue with post) Continue reading “Event: 7-30 Sept 2010, San Diego CA, World Resources Simulation Center Demo”
Where Wind and Solar Power Make Sense
GOOD Blog > Andrew Price on February 15, 2010
How much energy we can generate with wind and solar power projects depends, of course, on the wind and the sun. So being smart about where we put solar panels and turbines is pretty important. A company called 3TIER has made a business out of providing “prospecting tools” for renewable energy.Here's their latest map for where solar power can be harvested in the western hemisphere:
See the graphic and the process by the Beehive Design Collective
After two years of collaborative research, storysharing, metaphor crafting, and meticulous illustrating, the bees have completed an epic illustration about mountaintop removal coal mining.
See the graphic and process by the Beehive Design Collective
The U.S. Geological Survey is using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to support a student who’s investigating social Internet technologies as a way to quickly gather information about recent earthquakes.
In this exploratory effort, the USGS is developing a system that gathers real-time, earthquake-related messages from the social networking site Twitter and applies place, time, and key word filtering to gather geo-located accounts of shaking. This approach provides rapid first-impression narratives and, potentially, photos from people at the hazard’s location. The potential for earthquake detection in populated but sparsely seismicly-instrumented regions is also being investigated.
Social Internet technologies are providing the general public with anecdotal earthquake hazard information before scientific information has been published from authoritative sources. People local to an event are able to publish information via these technologies within seconds of their occurrence. In contrast, depending on the location of the earthquake, scientific alerts can take between 2 to 20 minutes. By adopting and embracing these new technologies, the USGS potentially can augment its earthquake response products and the delivery of hazard information.
