(the arguments he’s responding to are in blockquotes)
‘Open-source doesn’t offer constant innovation, lowered costs and collaboration?
“The biggest open-source projects of them all is the internet itself. (The internet is without doubt also the most complex interconnected “machine” humans have ever created.) It runs on open standards and protocols and is constantly developed. HTML is the code which is used to markup web pages such that they get structure and layout [2]. The HTML standard is a huge collaborative project. No single organisation owns the HTML standard and it is a constant effort to improve it. It is not always clear what is the best way forward and often something good happens which wasn’t “according to plan”, like HTML5. HTML and its use is a highly collaborative environment, all the code is open (for any web page). You can “View->Source” and see how a particular web page has been assembled. This very open way of working has been a critical part of making the web an enormous success. I think that this is innovative and collaborative…
The web propelled the internet into popularity and has made it possible to get access to all the glory (and gore) of the internet, for as low as US$15/month or free at your local library or school. I think there is overwhelming evidence to support the statement that open-source is offering constant innovation, lowering costs and creates collaboration.
BUENOS AIRES–There may be nothing more depressing than watching a deforestation map in real time, knowing that each time a green pixel turns red, the corresponding square of earth has been denuded of trees.
That must make the folks at Terra-i some of the biggest sadists (or masochists) in the world, as they programmed a system that lets you do just that.
Phi Beta Iota: This may well be the most important post Dr. Patrick Meier has done to date. Robert Steele is writing a new chapter or article, Public Administration in the 21st Century: New Rules, Hybrid Forms, One Constant — The Public that will integrate and expand on the core insight at the conclusion of the below post: routing around government may be the most important non-violent ethical means of displacing corrupt governments and restoring the sovereignty of the public.
When Philippine President Joseph Estrada was forced from office following widespread protests in 2001, he complained bitterly that ”the popular uprising against him was a coup de text.” Indeed, the mass protests had been primarily organized via SMS. Fast forward to 2012 and the massive floods that recently paralyzed the country’s capital. Using mobile phones and social media, ordinary Filipinos crowdsourced the disaster response efforts on their own without any help from the government.
Below is a very important 2 part analysis of the meaning of the recent heat wave in the US and and the nature of reported temperature increases in general, and whether or not they can be attributed to increases in CO2 concentrations.
The author, John Christy, is a highly regarded climatologist, albeit a skeptical one. At the end of Part II, Christie gently eviscerates the recent analysis by climate activist/scientist James Hansen, et al, by definitively showing how Hansen's analysis is biased to produce a preordained answer, both in terms of Hansen's selection of its data interval and his metric of choice. (See Hansen's op-ed in Washington Post here and I would urge readers to download his report). Anyone interested in trying to sort the wheat from the chaff in the climate wars ought to study these two papers. (I have not changed a word, but reformatted them in a few places, breaking paragraphs into “bullets” and highlighted i; I also inserted a few comments in [red] to clarify his points.)
guest post by John Christy, UAHuntsville, Alabama State Climatologist
Let me say two things up front.
The first 10 weeks of the summer of 2012 were brutally hot in some parts of the US. For these areas it was hotter than seen in many decades.
Extra greenhouse gases should warm the climate. We really don’t know how much, but the magnitude is more than zero, and likely well below the average climate model estimate.
Now to the issue at hand. The recent claims that July 2012 and Jan-Jul 2012 were the hottest ever in the conterminous US (USA48) are based on one specific way to look at the US temperature data. NOAA, who made the announcement, utilized the mean temperature or TMean (i.e. (TMax + TMin)/2) taken from station records after adjustments for a variety of discontinuities were applied. In other words, the average of the [adjusted] daily high and daily low temperatures is the metric of choice for these kinds of announcements.
Unfortunately, TMean is akin to averaging apples and oranges to come up with a rather uninformative fruit.
“We need bees for the future of our cities and urban living,” Noah Wilson-Rich said at TEDxBoston. Wilson-Rich completed his Ph.D. in honeybee health in 2005. In 2006, honeybees started disappearing. “We don’t even find dead bodies, and it’s bizarre. Researchers still do not know what’s causing it,” says Wilson-Rich. We’ve been hearing about the disappearance of bees for some time, but Wilson-Rich is bringing a new perspective to the table. Cities need bees, and bees need cities.
