Environment (Problems) – Page 8 – Public Intelligence Blog

cover mapping sustainability — Amazon Page

5 for Potential Value, ZERO for Greed Pricing

August 21, 2010

Nazli Choucri (Author, Editor), Dinsha Mistree (Editor), Farnaz Haghseta (Editor), Toufic Mezher (Editor), Wallace R. Baker (Editor), Carlos I. Ortiz (Editor)

I was about to buy this book when I noticed the price–$189. This is, once again, a situation where the authors have to think clearly when arranging for publication. News flash: you can still publish and be listed on Amazon, get the publication credit, and NOT be a prisoner to a greedy publisher out of touch with the information society. It is not enough to be published–one must be published in a manner that makes the knowledge accessible to all others, not “locked down” by publisher over-pricing.

Springer is offering it for $139, and Barnes & Noble is offering it for $103.

An online version is offered but Springer site is not at all friendly and there is no obvious price-checkout option for guests.

This book should be selling for no more than $49.00. I am adding it to my Amazon list of outrageously priced books antithetical to the needs of society.

AA Mind the Gap — Vote and/or Comment on Review

2010/08/192010/08/19

Review (Preliminary): Atlas of Science–Visualizing What We Know

6 Star Top 10%, Atlases & State of the World, Best Practices in Management, Budget Process & Politics, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Economics, Education (Universities), Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Games, Models, & Simulations, History, Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Commercial), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

cover atlas of science — Amazon Page (Pre-Order)

Katie Borner

MIT Press to release 31 October 2010

On sale for just under $20–this is a BARGAIN.

Review

“Science is a voyage of discovery and Katy Börner has provided its first atlas. This excellent book offers a compendium of all that is best in explaining visual maps of our scientific knowledge.”
—Michael Batty, University College London, author of Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals (MIT Press)

Product Description

Cartographic maps have guided our explorations for centuries, allowing us to navigate the world. Science maps have the potential to guide our search for knowledge in the same way, helping us navigate, understand, and communicate the dynamic and changing structure of science and technology. Allowing us to visualize scientific results, science maps help us make sense of the avalanche of data generated by scientific research today. Atlas of Science, features more than thirty full-page science maps, fifty data charts, a timeline of science-mapping milestones, and 500 color images; it serves as a sumptuous visual index to the evolution of modern science and as an introduction to “the science of science”—charting the trajectory from scientific concept to published results.

Atlas of Science, based on the popular exhibit “Places & Spaces: Mapping Science,” describes and displays successful mapping techniques. The heart of the book is a visual feast: Claudius Ptolemy's Cosmographia World Map from 1482; a guide to a PhD thesis that resembles a subway map; “the structure of science” as revealed in a map of citation relationships in papers published in 2002; a periodic table; a history flow visualization of the Wikipedia article on abortion; a globe showing the worldwide distribution of patents; a forecast of earthquake risk; hands-on science maps for kids; and many more. Each entry includes the story behind the map and biographies of its makers.

Not even the most brilliant minds can keep up with today's deluge of scientific results. Science maps show us the landscape of what we know.

Exhibition (Ongoing) at National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C.; The Institute for Research Information and Quality Assurance, Bonn, Germany; and Storm Hall, San Diego State College

Continue reading “Review (Preliminary): Atlas of Science–Visualizing What We Know”

2010/08/012010/08/01

Review: Green Gone Wrong–How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Culture, Research, Economics, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Science & Politics of Science, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Combines Holistic Thinking with Drill-Down Detail

August 1, 2010

Heather Rogers

This is a solid five in my view because the author goes beyond weaving a story about green gone wrong in three main areas (food, shelter, transportation), providing what almost all other books miss: the systems of systems “its all connected” and “what's good for one part of the system may be very bad for other parts,” both views developed by, among others, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Ackoff, and Herman Daly.

As much as I read, I can say up front that I found no false notes or glibness in this book, and found many nuggets that were new to me. Among the concepts covered by the book that were new to me were “food miles” (a portion of “true cost”), Eathship, Passivhaus (Passive House), Baugruppe (families hiring community builders directly, cutting out the middlemen developers), Agro-Ecology, Socio-Ecology, and the Jevons Paradox (conservation savings get poured back into expansion, nullifying the savings).

Two bottom lines up front:

EDUCATION of both the public and the politicians, and of all those associated with creating anything, is the sucking chest wound in our society. Green to Gold, Cradle to Cradle, Sustainable Design, Ecological Economics, all of this is going nowhere unless we can ramp up the speed and depth of public education on these topics.

GREEN TECHNOLOGY MAINTENANCE & REPAIR is the other sucking chest wound. The momentum is not there yet, meaning that well-intentioned groups can buy in to ecologically-sensible technology, but the company that installs it is generally not local, and there are no local green maintenance & repair skill sets on call. This struck me as a huge opportunity for community colleges.

Continue reading “Review: Green Gone Wrong–How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution”

2010/07/252010/07/25

Review: Hack the Planet–Science’s Best Hope–or Worst Nightmare–For Averting Climate Catastrophe

5 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Science & Politics of Science, Threats (Emerging & Perennial)

Tour of the Horizon, the Smartest of Skeptics

July 25, 2010

Eli Kintisch

I bristled when I saw the title, but bought the book in association with my own talk to Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) on “Hacking Humanity.” I've put the book down glad I did not give up in the early pages, and thoroughly impressed by the author, clearly among the smartest of skeptics.

Although I was suprised to find no mention of HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) which is striving for openness but still appears to have an unnerving patina of weather change and earthquake triggering potential–in my uninformed view. I'd love the author's informed opinion on HAARP.

What the author does provide in this book is a totally superb overview with multiple drill-downs of what is now called “geoengineering.” Geo-systems are not in this book, and that is the greatest flaw with any contemplation of geo-engineering–you cannot engineer what you cannot understand.

The arrogance of those proposing “methods” to “hack” the Earth is truly outstanding, an arrogance I am glad to see that the author does not share. Among the long list of ideas:
Continue reading “Review: Hack the Planet–Science's Best Hope–or Worst Nightmare–For Averting Climate Catastrophe”

2010/07/252010/07/25

Review (Guest): The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning

4 Star, Atlases & State of the World, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

4.0 out of 5 stars An important book on our planet's future

April 13, 2009

Review by Future Watch Rider

Book by James Loveluck

Lovelock merits our attention because he has been proven right in predicting grim events. Indeed, Lovelock's grim views have in some ways been too optimistic in light of the speed with which the global environmental situation has been declining.

I think his views in this book are too pessimistic but Lovelock is a creative original thinker about science who does not fit into neat categories. He has infuriated a lot of his fellow environmentalists with his advocacy of nuclear power. He does so because he sees the huge size of the gap between what is needed and what exists. For example, President Obama has promised to “double” the percentage of renewable energy America uses in a few years. It sounds great….. until you realize renewable energy is less than one percent of America's energy now. (Meanwhile, renewable energy is being very badly hurt by the global economic crisis.) Optimistic predictions about a “boom” in renewable energy over the past 20 years by various environmental advocates have turned out to be pie in the sky. It hasn't happened. Hopefully, it will happen now. However, according to predictions of the International Energy Agency, the share of the world's energy coming from coal, the worst form of energy, is going to go up, not down by 2020. This is why Lovelock also supports research on making coal less disastrous although it's never going to be “clean” as claimed by the coal industry and its millions of dollars in advertising. (Some environmental purists have also attacked him for this.)

Continue reading “Review (Guest): The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning”

2010/07/212010/08/02

Review: Eaarth–Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

4 Star, Atlases & State of the World, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Disease & Health, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Future, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Public Administration, Science & Politics of Science, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Starts Weak, Ends Strong, Not the Whole Picture

July 21, 2010

Bill McKibben

EDIT of 2 August 2010: However great the mind or the man, we all make mistakes. Paul Hawkins made his with Monsanto, I've made mine. ClimateGate established with clarity the fraud associated with both the fabricated science and the intended “sub-prime mortgaging” of the Earth's atmosphere. Maurice Strong and Al Gore are pushing fraud, not fixing. Mercury and sulfer and methane are bigger problems than carbon, and global warming is a small element–not even close to being the main event–within Environmental Degradation, threat #3 after poverty and infectious disease. It troubles me when people vote against the messenger–McKibben is a great man–he's also made a mistake. Get over it and do more reading, integrate more, and it will all come out fine.

. . . . . . .

I was so annoyed with the narrow first third that glorifies the likes of Al Gore, Thomas Friedman, and Larry “women can't think like scientists” Summers that I was actually contemplating three stars. This is a weakly researched book that buys into the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Maurice Strong carbon fraud, while ignoring the vastly more intelligent findings of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, in which Environmental Degradation is #3 and more broadly defined.

Any book that quotes the discredited James Hansen of NASA and that builds a case around Op-Eds and undocumented assertions is a stain upon scholarship, and the first third of this book falls into that sinkhole. Despite many references to the Copenhagen summit, there is not a word in this book about ClimateGate (see the Rolling Update at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog) and therefore I find this author guilty of active misrepresentation bordering on a lack of integrity in this specific instance. The author is spending too much time with newspapers and not enough time with books representing the distilled reflections of others.

Having said that, and deducted one star for the lapse, I find the balance of the book absorbing, fascinating, and rich in gems of insight and fact. It should be read in conjunction with:

Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
Human Scale
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
The Future of Life
Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America
The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters
The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with “Climate Change” Turning Out to Be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History?
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits

My criticism and praise of this important work are based on the above and the other 1,600 non-fiction reviews I have posted to Amazon, all more easily accessible in 98 reading categories at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Network.

Early points that got my attention:

Continue reading “Review: Eaarth–Making a Life on a Tough New Planet”

2010/07/13

Review (Guest): Bureaucracy–What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It

5 Star, Budget Process & Politics, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Diplomacy, Economics, Education (General), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Leadership, Military & Pentagon Power, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

James Wilson (Author)

43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive Guide To Government Bureaucracy, January 1, 2002

By	Tansu Demir (Springfield, IL) – See all my review

This book is really a “comprehensive” (in the literal meaning of the word), clearly written, richly supported by concrete cases (mostly, federal agencies) guide about government bureaucracy mainly in the United States. From introduction to the end, Wilson clearly and convincingly demonstrates the reasons what the government agencies do and why they do that in the way they do.

The book is organized into six parts: Organizations, Operators, Managers, Executives, Context, and Change. In the first part, Wilson's thesis is simply that organization matters. Organization must be in accordance with the objectives of the agency. In the second part, the author examines the operators' behavior (say, street-level bureaucrats) and how their culture is shaped by the imperatives of the situation they encounter in a daily basis. The third part deals with the issues peculiar to managers of public agencies. In this part, attention is focused upon the constraints that put the mangers in a stalemate (see chapter 7, this chapter is completely insightful!!). The fourth part is devoted to the Executives. This part clearly illustrates why the executives of government agencies compete with other departments and which strategies are used in the process of competition and/or cooperation (especially see the 10th chapter about Turf, insightful!!). In the fifth part, Wilson focuses on the context in which public agencies do their business (Congress, Presidents and Courts). In the last part, Wilson summarizes the problems and examines alternative solutions (the market alternatives to the bureaucracy) and concludes with reasonable and “little” propositions.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): Bureaucracy–What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It”

Category: Environment (Problems)

Review: Mapping Sustainability–Knowledge e-Networking and the Value Chain