It’s been a shaky week in Christchurch and Canterbury. Another M6.3 shock hit the city on Monday afternoon — renewing the misery for many in the city’s eastern and seaside suburbs, but thankfully not adding to the death toll. Attention has now turned — with some force — to the question of which suburbs should be rebuilt, and an excellent feature by David Williams in last Saturday’s Press on sea level rise and its implications for the rebuilding of Christchurch should cause some pause for thought.
Really nice article detailing some of the concerns in Christchurch, where some sections of the area dropped a meter. In a city perhaps 5 meters above current sea level, this could be very significant.
In fact, several developed parts of the area now experience daily tidal flooding as well as seasonal high tides. A few more earthquakes and Christchurch could barely be above sea level even with out the sea level increase brought on by climate change.
Currently playing in iTunes:The Band Played Waltzing Matilda by The Pogues from Rum S****y & the Lash [Expanded]
DIAMOND: There are so many societies in which the elite made decisions that were good for themselves in the short run and ruined themselves and societies in the long run….
Similarly, in the United States at present, the policies being pursued by too many wealthy people and decision makers are ones that — as in the case of the Mayan kings — preserve their interests in the short run but are disastrous in the long run.
Jared Diamond, author of the bestseller “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” has a fascinating video discussion of climate change. Below is the video and a blog post on it by WWF’s Nick Sundt.
In a new video, Jared Diamond talks about climate change, drawing parallels between modern Americans and the Classic southern lowland Maya – who failed to take the actions that might have avoided the collapse of their civilization. However, unlike the Maya, we have the “unique opportunity” and capacity to “learn from remote places and to learn from places remote in time,” Diamond says. “And among all the things that might incline me towards pessimism, that is the biggest thing that in the end inclines me towards optimism.”
He thinks we will eventually make the changes we need to because we will have the evidence of other places in time and in distance that did not make the right changes.
I think it all depends on just how much real control over decisions the elite maintain. Until that level of control is broken or diminished, we will continue on the Mayan’s path.
Two months ago, on a wooded path in upstate New York, a psychologist named Chris Chabris strapped a video camera to a 20-year-old man and told him to chase after a jogger making his way down the path.
Irresponsible environmental scarsters are back.During the past few days a number of you have emailed me about several media stories and web reports about radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant causing a 35% increase in infant mortality here in the Pacific Northwest.The majority of the mainstream media did not go with this story, but a few did, like our local KCPQ (see story here) and other outlets like examiner.com and the well-known Aljazeera.This was all based on a report by Physician Janette Sherman, and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano that was published online by the “Progressive Radio Network” and by the web site “Counterpunch.” In this report they noted that for the 4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 there were 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week) but for the 10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 there were 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week). They note that “this amounts to an increase of 35 per cent (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3 per cent ) and is statistically significant.”Folks, this is complete and utter nonsense and shows the downside of the web—crazy stuff gets sent around and news-hungry and sloppy media pick it up and give it credibility.First, the whole premise is silly. That the extraordinarily small amounts of radiation reaching our shores from Fukushima are killing infants through some mysterious mechanism. But it is worst than that…just plain bad statistics!Here is the their data for the four weeks before and the ten weeks after, shown in black and orange, respectively (credit to this site for the graphs)
There is a reason they chose the 4 weeks before the disaster – it gave them the results they wanted. If they had gone back 11 weeks before, they would have had an average infant mortality rate GREATER than seen since the disaster.
Yes, somehow the radiation killed all those infants 11 weeks before the meltdown.
One has to be aware of cherrypicking when one reads any article. And one of the most common ways is to limit the time period examined.
That was one of the first things that stuck out for me – why did they only look at the 4 weeks before yet at 10 weeks after? Why not do 10 weeks each? Or compare relative times in the year – that is March 2010 vs March 2011 – as infant mortality might also change during the year.
This is the same sort of things climate denialists use all the time. Here we see a more liberal group trying the same thing.
Two of Color’s photo-sharing competitors, Instagram and PicPlz, exemplify the lean start-up ethos. They started with $500,000 and $350,000, respectively, and teams of just a few people. As they have introduced successful products and attracted users, they have slowly raised more money and hired engineers.
Color, meanwhile, spent $350,000 to buy the Web address color.com, and an additional $75,000 to buy colour.com. It rents a cavernous office in downtown Palo Alto, where 38 employees work in a space with room for 160, amid beanbag chairs, tents for napping and a hand-built half-pipe skateboard ramp.
The difference between Instagram/PicPlz and Color isn’t just how much money they needed to get going. It’s that Instagram and PicPlz are easily understood, clearly appealing concepts. It’s easy to see what they do, and why one might want to use them. Color is just a mess. That they raised a ludicrous sum of money proves only that fools and their money are soon parted.
A 20th Century company gets lots of venture capital, hires lots of people and creates, usually by committee, its vision tof a product, hoping that the market place will like it. It has little clue whether its vision is appropriate or even useful. They spend months if not years working to reach their vision, costing investors millions. Their vision must be almost complete before the world sees it, right or wrong. Their development cycle is too long for any other course to really work.
A 21st Century bootstraps itself with just a few people who have internalized their vision and who work to get a working prototype of that vision out, and then work to adapt that product to what the market wants/needs. They spend weeks but never more than months to create and market its vision. Then, based on feedback from the marketplace, they recreate their rapid development cycle to move closer to perfection.
Color has raised $41 millon for a product no one really seems to like. They have grand visions but their first attempt is simply not making it in the marketplace. How in the world can they ever recoup that $41 million?
Instagram started with $500,000 and got its vision in the marketplace quickly. It had over 1 million users in just 10 weeks. There are now over 3.75 million. Millions of people who would be ready to download updates or the next new thing. They plan to monetize by providing fun add-ons but are also looking to the community they are creating.
The numbers are probably much larger now but think about how the investors might easily get back 10 times what they invested versus Color and their investors.
Instagram, due to the lean structure a 21st Century company can attain and to the rapid development cycle it can use, is the clear winner here. By the time Color has finally come out with something that others might use, Instagram will have adapted and be onto the next new vision.
George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy A Game of Thrones is one of the great stories of the last 20 years. Because it creates a narrative that deconstructs the characters we have come to expect in a fantasy. It forced us to re-examine these expectations – who is good, who is bad – by providing much deeper characterizations and very human responses.
In fact, for much of the book, there is little or no fantasy. This could just be some sort of odd historical work of fiction. But its twisting of what we expect in the narrative makes us very much aware of how we come to most works with a pre-conceived idea of good, evil, right wrong. We expect good guys to be smart and do good. Bad guys are never as smart as the good guy. IN battles, the good guys are never defeated and none of the major characters is physically damaged during any battle.
None of that is true here. Which is why I was worried about the TV adaptation. TV does not like to destroy preconceptions very often, The book contained many scenes that were important to the narrative but would not seem like anything TV would allow to be shown.
Yet HBO did and should be commended for allowing the writers of the TV adaptation to actually provide much the same story as the book.
Shocking things have happened yet we care even more deeply about the characters, even the bad ones, because we have to see how it all turns out, knowing that we cannot really get hints from our preconceptions.
Not only could anyone die, but the bad guys may never really get the death they deserve. Or they might. Only Martin knows.
Luckily, the internet can provide us some of what we want:
I want the writer to be the smartest of all, to have such a grasp of the narrative that every surprise actually makes absolute sense. It is not just a gotcha. we can see just how the writer got us to that surprise.
The finale of Game of Thrones set us up for an exciting new season next year, with every character having something to add.
All the reasons I loved the end of Game of Thrones are also reasons I loathed the end of the Killing. The killing is all about gotchas, for no reason other than to be a gotcha. The characters change their behavior simply to provide twists.
And this is a show where I definitely do not think the writers are smarter than me. They simply lie to me in order to drive the plot. The detectives have been so incompetent that they have literally ruined three and maybe more lives. One man lies in a coma and another may be killed, all because they were simply stupid.
Linden ends the season having left the Seattle PD. How in the world would any reasonably realistic world ever allow her back next season to work on this case?
So, we have a show that is not like any other police procedural – the cops are stupid and incompetent. And everyone is a suspect for one show? Red herrings become boring after a while and deus ex machina endings are just bad writing, not great art.
The end of the Killing reminded me of the end of Tootsie – where Hoffman reveals that he is really the son, not daughter, come to exact revenge. Such a contrived end is funny in this setting. Not so in the Killing where I feel I just waster 13 weeks of my life.
In contrast to Game of Thrones, there simply is no one in the show I care about at all, not even the police. They are stupid, incompetent, petulant, and just boring. And they change day to day based on what the writers want in order to make the plot more mysterious, etc.
After 13 weeks we know less about the killing of Rosie than the first 15 minutes. And the twisting of the characters in order to shock us has actually created characters I no longer give a rip about.
I’ll wait a year to see the 2nd season of Game of Thrones. It has compelling characters in a narrative that I simply can not guess.
Not so for the Killing. It has boring charcaters in service to a narrative that constantly lies to the audience. So I know how things will go next season – more lies from incompetents.
Here’s what we found: 111 health claims were made in UK newspapers over one week. The vast majority of these claims were only supported by evidence categorised as “insufficient” (62% under the WCRF system). After that, 10% were “possible”, 12% were “probable”, and in only 15% was the evidence “convincing”. Fewer low quality claims (“insufficient” or “possible”) were made in broadsheet newspapers, but there wasn’t much in it.
I do have one criticism, though. The paper is in a journal called Public Understanding of Science. It isn’t open access, though, so apparently the Public is not allowed to read about the Public Understanding of Science unless they cough up $25 per article. They can read about “science” for cheap in their local tabloid, though. Isn’t this part of the problem, too? Let’s also put part of the blame on a science publishing industry that puts up barriers to reading the real stuff.
A paper that demonstrates that much of the science reporting in the media is insufficient, – that only 15% is convincing – certainly substantiates Sturgeon’s Law, within experimental error.
But publishing the research in a journal which is really not accessible to the public does little to actually change the problem, as most people will never read about it except in the media which the paper demonstrates can not write well about science.
What is the purpose of the researchers? Because it certainly is NOT providing society with the ability to examine and judge their work. If that was the case, they would either have published in an Open access journal or one with a nominal charge to read.
Publishing in a journal that charges $25 to read suggest to me that the researcher’s purpose was mostly to enhance their own reputation. Actually educating people about this question was, at best, secondary.
Otherwise, the public would be able to read their work. As it stands now, even any scientist not working at a University would most likely have to ay to read the article.
by Easa Shamih (eEko) | P.h.o.t.o.g.r.a.p.h.y
by 
by 
by 
