Worth a Look: Citizen Science

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Key Players, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Worth A Look

Wikipedia Page

Citizen science is a term used for projects or ongoing program of scientific work in which individual volunteers or networks of volunteers, many of whom may have no specific scientific training, perform or manage research-related tasks such as observation, measurement or computation.

The use of citizen-science networks often allows scientists to accomplish research objectives more feasibly than would otherwise be possible. In addition, these projects aim to promote public engagement with the research, as well as with science in general. Some programs provide materials specifically for use by primary or secondary school students. As such, citizen science is one approach to informal science education.

Phi Beta Iota: Citizen Science is in its infancy, but with the emergence of open source software and open source intelligence combinations such as represented by SourceMap.org, Citizen Intelligence and Citizen Counterintelligence are sure to be coming along soon….and if combined with multi-lingual networks such as provided by Telelanguage, a global multinational citizen information-sharing and sense-making grid can be created that implements the Swedish vision of M4IS2: Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making. This has enormous implications for both real-time science and real-time warning as well as real-time Emergency Action.

2010/01/102010/01/10

Worth a Look: SourceMap (Supply Chain)

Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Worth A Look

Sourcemap is a platform that enables users to contribute to and share ideas about sustainability. Whether you are inviting people to an event, buying ingredients for a recipe, or designing a product, your choices have a significant impact. Some decisions have impacts that stretch across the world, whereas others are entirely regional. Understanding the reach of our actions and facilitating positive change is fundamental to improving economic, social, and environmental conditions.

With a tip of the hat toleonardo bonanni doctoral candidate at the MIT Media Lab, a designer and an artist. He teaches the MIT class Future Craft: Radical Sustainability in Product Design on the social aspects of mass design. You can also find his blog, photos, and videos. To find out more and for contact information, download his resume.

2010/01/032010/01/03

Journal: Bio-Engineering Ramps Up

Earth Intelligence

FullStory Online

Researchers engineer bacteria to turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel

(Nanowerk News) Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels. In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis. The research appears in the Dec. 9 print edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology and is available online.

Nature Biotechnology 27, 1177 – 1180 (2009)
Published online: 15 November 2009 | doi:10.1038/nbt.1586

Direct photosynthetic recycling of carbon dioxide to isobutyraldehyde

2010/01/022010/01/02

Journal: Rural; Cooperative; Wind; Fast–Any Questions?

05 Energy, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Full Story Online

Rural Electric Cooperative Completes $240 Million Wind Farm in 4 Months

A North Dakota rural electric cooperative made history on New Year’s Eve, in completing the nation’s largest wind project to be entirely owned by a consumer cooperative.

The $240 million, 115.5 MW wind farm was begun in August and completed a mere four months later; three and a half hours before midnight on the last night of 2009. GE supplied the 77 1.5 MW turbines.

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By the end of 2010 the cooperative hopes that it will produce 20% of its electricity from wind power for its 2.8 million rural consumers in parts of rural Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

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1. Rural empty states are where the wind is.
2. Rural empty states are where electricity cooperatives are.
3. Rural empty state’s cooperatives are beating national averages in bringing the most renewable energy online the fastest.

Renewable capacity among rural electricity cooperatives grew 65% in 2008. The rest of us: 25%

2009/12/302009/12/30

Journal: One World, Region by Region, Tribe by Tribe

02 China, 03 India, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, Policies

Phi Beta Iota: Chuck Spinney's flagging of the below piece supports the point we were making with the post on dynamic planning. For fifty years the USA has been throwing its weight around on the basis of partisan, ideological, and often illegimiate purposes, and it has been able to get a way with it because in an Industrial Era, might does make right. We are no longer in an Industrial Era. We've entered an era in which information asymmetries are being extinguished, while power asymmetries are emergent–demographic power trumps everything else when you get right down to it. This entire web site makes that point in the aggregate. On a sidenote, Kashmir is about water but no one seems to acknowledge that. Water is one of the things we are going to have to figure out how to do in a non-zero fashion. Hence, for the USA to dig itself a grave in Central Asia without giving any thought to the ten high-level threats to humanity as a whole, and the twelve policies, and the eigth demographic challengers, and to calculate a non-zero course through this maze, is nothing more than idiocy on steriods.

Full Story Online

The Afghan Triangle: Kashmir, India, Pakistan

Graham Usher

Graham Usher is a writer and journalist based in Pakistan and a contributing editor of Middle East Report.

For the last 61 years the fight has been fought, mostly, in and for Indian-occupied Kashmir (IoK): the territory Delhi and Islamabad have contested since the 1947 partition cleaved them into two states—and Kashmir into “Pakistani” and “Indian” parts. Sometimes (1947, 1965, 1971, 1999) the war has been hot. More often it has been waged via Pakistani proxies against a standing Indian military. Since 1989, it has been channeled through a low-intensity, Pakistan-backed separatist-Islamist insurgency that has killed 50,000 people and incurred an Indian military occupation three times the size of America’s in Iraq and three times as lethal.

See also:

Scott Atran

Professor and author

Posted: December 30, 2009 11:57 AM

The Terror Scare

2009/12/29

Journal: Keystone Cops on Earth and Space Data Sharing

Earth Intelligence

Wikipedia Page

UN-SPIDER (“United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response”) aims at providing universal access to all types of space-based information and services relevant to disaster management by: being a gateway to space information for disaster management support; serving as a bridge to connect the disaster management and space communities; and being a facilitator of capacity-building and institutional strengthening

Phi Beta Iota: As usual, everyone is doing their own thing, from the new Planetary Skin Initative to ReliefWeb to the Global Disaster Information Network (GDIN) to Google and Wolfram Alpha. The UN has exactly ONE document that can be used to get everyone on the same page: Review: A More Secure World–Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. What the UN needs now is a Strategic Analytic Model and a concept of operations for creating the World Brain Institute and Global Game using Open Everything as the guide for software, standards, sourecs, and spectrum.

2009/12/292009/12/29

Journal: ClimateGate 29 December 2009 Morning

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

grpahic climate gate — ClimateGate Rolling Update

Hope for a Climate Change Solution in the Wake of Copenhagen — If Governments Can't, People Can

The scale and speed of change required goes well beyond anything political leaders have ever had to contemplate, much less achieve. And even if the political will were there to achieve this level and speed of carbon reduction, the social change 1.0 tools at their disposal — command and control, and financial incentives — are not designed for this type of rapid, transformative change. They were purposely designed over two centuries ago for gradual, incremental change.

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If command and control and financial incentives are not enough to turn the tide in the necessary timeframe, can renewable energy and new breakthrough technologies come to the rescue of humankind? While a low-carbon future critically depends on new technologies, there is no credible scenario by which they can be brought to scale in the ten-year window within which our scientists tell us we must make major carbon reductions.

The dilemma we face is what systems theory calls second order change — or change that requires a system to transform and reorganize at a higher level of performance. When the easier-to-implement solutions prove inadequate for the speed and magnitude of change required, the system goes into stress and must evolve, or it will break down.

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A Cool Community also enables a city or town to enjoy the immediate practical benefits of more livable neighborhoods, greater environmental sustainability, and economic development. Furthermore, it creates a robust long-term carbon reduction capability by building the community leadership, carbon-literate citizenry, and political will necessary to sustain this type of change over time.

Continue reading “Journal: ClimateGate 29 December 2009 Morning”