The comic shows what needs to change

The Oatmeal Tried to Watch ‘Game of Thrones’ and This Is What Happened
[Via Daring Fireball]

Infuriatingly spot-on.

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The comic explains the piracy that really hurts companies – the people who want to buy the product but can’t.

Pirates that simply coopy without thinking about paying are nevert going to be dislodged. But a large number of people using these sites want the product – they just can not get to it legally.

As Apple showed with iTunes, make it easy and legal and people will pay.

Putting people in jail is not the right approach.

Google Reader becomes less useful

Farewell Google Reader – We’ll Miss You – Forbes
[Via Forbes]

Word on the street is Google Reader’s social functions, its funky community of shares and comments, and the archives of these interactions, will all be flushed down the memory hole tomorrow.

I check my Reader every day and it’s always a minute or two before I realize that these people I’m following, these comment threads I’ve become accustomed to, these excellent finds – will all be gone.

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Google messed with Search, to its detriment in my opinion. It is messing with its Maps, now charging perhaps $10,000 for a license to put tMaps on a website.

And Now Google Reader is messed around with. I think Google’s focus on social sharing to compete with Facebook will harm it. It is competing head to head with way too many companies – Apple with regard to mobile devices, Facebook for Social sites, Microsoft on Search.

Can gmail be far behind?

I just do not believe it will be able to keep its eyes on the prize in so many different areas. We can see this in the problems each area has. Google is starting to fall into the same sort of trap others have of trying to be all things to everyone in all the cutting edge areas.

I simply do not trust Google like I used to. They are becoming more and more interested in doing things for their own purposes rather than making my life better. They are focussing on copying others, becoming the second to market in areas rather than the best.

Soon you might have to have a Facebook account to access content on the Internet

Can You Sign Up for Spotify Without Facebook?
[Via Daring Fireball]

Not any more.

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Does anyone think this is a good trend? In order to listen to music or watch a movie or read a magazine, you’ll have to have a Facebook account?

Not what I envisioned free meant.

There is a reason it is called Labor Day

This day isn’t for the rich guys. It isn’t for the pretty guys.

It is for the working guys.

“Will you be a gun thug or will you be a man?”

or a more modern version:

or from across the ocean:

or  this one sung by the son of our greatest folk writer/singer singing his Dad’s greatest song, accompanied by another great folksinger, accompanied by his son. I also believe Arlo’s family also accompanies him:

 

The release of methane causes extinction events

by Dave Hogg

Did Methane Cause the Mass Extinction That Made Way for the Dinosaurs? [Via 80beats]

What’s the News: Two hundred million years ago, half of the Earth’s species vanished in the blink of a geological eye, clearing the way for rise of the dinosaurs in the Jurassic. The cause of that mass extinction, a new study suggests, may have been gigatons of methane released from the sea floor after a slight rise in the earth’s temperature, triggering much greater warming. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because scientists are worried the same thing will happen today.
What’s the Context:

The primary theory as to what went wrong at the end of the Triassic period, when this extinction took place, holds that tons of carbon dioxide released during the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea ratcheted up global temperatures to deadly levels over the course of several hundreds of thousands of years. But these researchers’ work seems to indicate that the change took place even more quickly than that. In a previous study looking at limestone, which is the remains of ancient sea creatures, this team found that it disappeared from the geological record quite suddenly—a mere 20,000 years after the extinction event began.

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The researchers found a spike of carbon dioxide followed by a massive release of methane right at the boundary of the extinction event. They found warming effects in plant growth at the time and an enahnced hydrological cycle – all symptoms of global warming.

Huge amounts of methane – which is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – are found under the ocean’s surface under the forzen permafrost of the Northern reagions.. The structures that hold them in place break down with warming, resulting in catastrophic release of the methane into the atmosphere.

There have already been reports describing how much methane is being relased in Siberia due to warming. Now we are getting a better idea of just what can happen when all that methane is released, as what apparently happened at the Permian-Triassic extinction– the greatest extinction eent ever; 96% of all marine species gone; 70% of all terrestrial species gone; 5-6 million years before any sort of recovery and 30 million until complete recovery.

A tipping point with ocen acidification could cripple ocean ecosystems but the release of methane in such large amounts would decimate everything.

We may have very little time to solve these problems before they are on a path that can not be altered.

Cherrypicking and noise; some more tools of the denialist

by Olgierd Pstrykotwórca

Trend and Noise
[Via Open Mind]

A commenter recently linked to a post by Steve Goddard claiming that “GISS Shows No Warming Over The Last Decade.” Goddard shows this graph: and thinks that establishes his claim. So I asked the reader, Suppose I characterize the global … Continue reading →

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Quote mining is one tool and here is the other – cherrypicking of data.

Let’s pose a thought experiment. Suppose there is something that is increasing every year at a set rate – say 1. But there is inherent noise in the data of ± 2. How many years will it take to see the trend above the noise? Well, one or two would not be enough for the tend to overwhelm the yearly noise.

That is what is answered in this post. Invariably, denialists actually chose a time period that is simply too short to separate signal from noise, so they can pretend that there is really no signal.

So, when someone picks an arbitrary date, be a little skeptical, particularly when they are trying to deny the consensus of most other researchers.

In this post, he shows that in a statistical sense, the temperatures of the last decade do not fall below the longterm trend. They fall within the expected error range based on the inherent noise of global temperatures.The fluctuation in yearly temperatures simply hides the trend, as would be expected over such a short period of time.

Looking at 30 years and the trend is obvious above the noise.

Acidification of the oceans should be a much larger concern

by USFWS Pacific

Ocean acidification: How much is too much? [Via Hot Topic]

 

Over at Skeptical Science we (Doug Mackie, Christina McGraw, and Keith Hunter) have started a long series (18 parts) about ocean acidification (Introduction , 1, 2). We all deride blog science. Blog science is what happens when people try to get a complex message across in 800 words or less. Real science takes time to explain. There is too much et voila in writing about climate change in general and ocean acidification in particular. Denialists have not touched ocean acidification because they don’t understand it. The chemistry is very subtle and even posts on normally reliable blogs like Skeptical Science have made errors.[More]

 

Much of the carbon dioxide we have added to the atmosphere has entered the oceans. Just as dissolving carbon dioxide to soft drinks lowers their pH, making them more acidic than without the carbon dioxide, so does the pH of the oceans become lower. But, many of the biological processes used by ocean animals to create their structural elements – the shells that act like bones – have pretty definite pH requirements. As the oceans become more acidic, it becomes harder to produce the calcareous shells needed to survive. At some point, it becomes impossible to produce appropriate structures and the animals die. This has been seen in fossil sediments and seen in the lab. It has also been examined in the wild, in the waters surrounding natural carbon dioxide seeps that lower local pH levels tremendously. Low pH levels than normal result in decimation of the ecosystem. Instead of rich coral reefs, there was only slime and sea grass. We may very well get to see the real time result in the general oceans if we keep releasing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide.

Eating local food not so simple

by Red Junasun

Local Food or Less Meat? Data Tells The Real Story [Via HarvardBusiness.org]

In recent years, one part of the food business has rivaled organics as the hot growth area: “local” food (defined vaguely as coming from the same state or from less than 100 miles away, for example). It’s a market segment that has just about doubled in sales and number of outlets over the last decade. The world’s biggest food buyer, Wal-Mart, jumped on the bandwagon last fall and announced that it would double the amount of local food it sells (to 9 percent of all its food sales). The idea of buying locally is not new, and farmers’ markets have been big for years. It’s become almost gospel that the food on our plates has traveled about 1500 miles to get to us.

 

So it would seem logical that the best way to shrink your food-related carbon footprint associated would be to buy from near by. But it turns out that this assumption is wrong.

Thankfully, a couple scientists took a harder look at the data and published an analysis in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology. The abstract for this article is a prime example of clear writing and good lifecycle analysis — which don’t usually go together — so check it out. But here’s the essence:

• Food is transported a long way, going about 1,000 miles in delivery and over 4,000 miles across the supply chain.
• But 83% of the average U.S. household’s carbon footprint for food comes from growing and producing it. Transportation is only 11%.
• Different foods have vastly different greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity, with meat requiring far more energy to produce, and red meat being particularly egregious, requiring 150% more energy than even chicken.

So the journal article adds this up to an obvious conclusion: if you want to reduce your food’s carbon footprint, eat less meat. In short, “Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.”

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A very interesting examination that demonstrates the complexity of our food supply. The huge overall GHG emissions from beef outweigh how local the food is. Relatively simple changes in diet can have even greater effects than getting the beef locally.

Simplifying the complex process of producing and transporting food to our tables can sometimes make things worse. This paper provides a small peek at solving a difficult problem.

Cutting spending will not create the jobs we need

by Alex E. Proimos

2011 Private Employment is 2% Below 2001 Levels
[Via The Big Picture]

From the Liscio Report, via Alan Abelson, May Employment data shows that a limp recovery is growing limper.

“As our friends and astute data scanners at the Liscio Report, Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood, observe, disappointments were scattered throughout the report, And while they don’t think May is “an overture to a double dip,” it does plainly reflect accelerating erosion on the job front . . .

More than a little shocking to Philippa and Doug (and to us as well) is that private employment today is 2% below where it stood 10 years ago and, as they’ve noted before, job loss over a 10-year period is unprecedented since the advent of something resembling reliable tallies began in 1890. So far, they point out somewhat grimly, “we’ve regained just 1.8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession and its aftermath, or about one in five.”

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We have been cutting taxes and government spending for well over a decade yet we have fewer people employed today than in 2011. All that has happened is that the richest americans became richer while the rest of us became poorer.

This is unprecedented in American history. One would think that the policies followed over most of this decade would be shown to simply be ineffective for creating jobs.

Why in the world would we think that continuing along this path would solve our current problems? The tax rates and spending of the 90s gave us our best economy and actually produced Federal budgets that could have lowered our debt. We had surpluses.

The tax cuts in the next decade have produced the worse employment record in American history. When will we see a shift back to what worked in the 90s?

Probably never again. From the Barron’s article:

Moreover, there seems no immediate cure in sight for the truly sick housing market, and attempts by Washington to administer one, as its efforts to date have painfully demonstrated, are an odds-on bet to make it even sicker. Nor, obviously, is the poisonous political atmosphere in Washington conducive to sensible fiscal and monetary policy.

On the contrary, the mood in the capital seems to favor following Europe’s lead in pushing austerity at all costs to revive an already-floundering economy. And just as it won’t work in the Old World, it won’t work here, either.

Nice, succinct overview of our current housing problem and perhaps how to fix it

Creating productive jobs the way out of Great Recession
[Via The Seattle Times]

The most arresting piece of the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index report last week was that house prices have fallen further than during the Great Depression, when they took 19 years to recover their losses.

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Owning a home, and the vast industry that engendered, was once the American Dream. It supported the last and largest manufacturing industry in the US, something that could not be outsourced to other lands.

Now that industry is broken and may never come back. We need to shift our entire way of thinking to overcome this. Current estimates by many are that it could take up to a generation to accomplish this relying purely on market forces.

The Great Depression was overcome by relying on more than just market forces. There is a role for government to speed up the transition, for helping our society to hold together during the transition so we do not tear ourselves apart – as so many leaders seem bent on doing.

That is what we should be talking about.

But we are not having that conversation. Instead it is about how the wealthy – many of whom are responsible for the mess we are in – to become wealthier. Some dream of an Apocalypse and are working to make it happen.

Earthquake, tsunami and now a typhoon?

Japan plant ‘unready’ for typhoon
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

The crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is not fully prepared for the heavy rain and winds of a typhoon bearing down on Japan, the plant’s operator admits.

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First Category 5 storm of the year. Luckily it has weakened over the last day and is now just a tropical depression as it hits Japan.

Having a lot of rain and wind right now would not be helpful at all. ANd these people do not need even more stress worrying about storms. BUt it looks likely they may have to deal with that this summer.

An acidification lab for the ocean

BBC News – Bubbling sea signals severe coral damage this century

[Via BBC]

Findings from a “natural laboratory” in seas off Papua New Guinea suggest that acidifying oceans will severely hit coral reefs by the end of the century.Carbon dioxide bubbles into the water from the slopes of a dormant volcano here, making it slightly more acidic.

Coral is badly affected, not growing at all in the most CO2-rich zone.

Writing in journal Nature Climate Change, the scientists say this “lab” mimics conditions that will be widespread if CO2 emissions continue.

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The closer to the vents, the lower the pH. So the researchers were able to exactly stratify the ecosystems around the vents by pH levels. As pH dropped and became more acidic, the types of coral seen also dropped until at 7.8 – the ocean is normally a pH of 8.1 – there was only one simple type of coral left.

At 7.7, there were no corals at all and a completely different ecosystem, dominated by grasses. But the hard shelled mollusks – who have a hard time creating their shells at low pH – normally seen with these grasses were missing.

And this was a reef not affected by overfishing or pollution, so it probably understates the ecosystem change.

There is a very good chance that these levels of ocean acidification will be seen in the lifetimes of people alive today. They would witness the death of coral reefs.

Group learning works better than lectures

by Conor Lawless

Lots of Ink: A Nobelist (further) undermines the big-shot lecturer as essential to teaching er [Via Knight Science Journalism Tracker]

A number of outlets ran with the main news from an unsurprising, but remarkable anyway, report on how to teach college physics. In Science on Friday a physics Nobelist, Carl Wieman best known for his role in confining Bose-Einstein condensates in the laboratory, reported that people like him giving lecture is an okay way to teach college students. A better way, his study concludes, is to let teaching assistants ride herd and interact with students as they wrestle and collaborate over focussed challenges that compel them to embrace new information. In a one-week competition between traditional teaching and collaborative, interactive supervised learning without a professor in sight, students in the latter group crushed those in the former when they all took a standard quiz.

(By the way, Wieman is not only merely a Nobel-Prize winning physicist working for the White House who is not named Chu, interesting as that is. Now on leave from U. of Colorado and U. of British Columbia , he has a distinctive, fascinating early background. Check his Nobel Foundation autobiography and its passages on the backwoods of Oregon.)

While this topic is, strictly, one that might fit the education beat, many of the bylines with the stories are those of science reporters.

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Having small groups working on focussed problems, facilitated by those with core knowledge, may very well be the best way to teach/learn a subject. It certainly is one of the best ways to solve most problems. There is increasing evidence that what we call reasoning requires a social setting. In fact, the best reasoners are usually those who make the best arguments – sometimes those arguments are wrong. Often because of confirmation bias. We only reason well when we get together and pick at each others arguments.

“Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That’s why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, “The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.”

“Now, the authors point out that we can and do re-use our reasoning abilities. We’re sitting here at a conference. We’re reasoning together. We can re-use our argumentative reasoning for other purposes. But even there, it shows the marks of its heritage. Even there, our thought processes tend towards confirmation of our own ideas. Science works very well as a social process, when we can come together and find flaws in each other’s reasoning. We can’t find the problems in our own reasoning very well. But, that’s what other people are for, is to criticize us. And together, we hope the truth comes out.”

Science works because it uses a set of logical and argumentative principles that reduces – but does not necessarily destroy – confirmation bias. (This is why scientists have a hard time debating lawyers. Lawyers have a wide range of argumentative tools that scientists do not. Thus lawyers often seem to ‘reason’ better than scientists.)

So we evolved to reason out the best arguments in a social setting. And the best decisions will be made when confirmation bias is removed. Which is what science tries to achieve.

Teaching by lecturing large classes would not be a good way to learn, based on this argumentative theory. In large lecture halls, the main reasoning argument to convince people is based on the authority of the speaker, not on what they say. “They are the teacher; they must be right.”

But split the class into groups and have them reason the way we have for eons – around a campfire or around a table. Now we start to reason the way we evolved with all the various argumentative approaches, some useful and many not. This is where the facilitator with knowledge can help steer the students to the correct result.

A successful facilitator will be able to use their superior reasoning skills – since they do know what the real answer is – to ‘convince’ the group. The group will not only remember the argument better; they will get to it faster and with deeper retention.

Because that is really how we evolved to deal with a complex world.

Alternative nuclear power plant designs – can they work?

Small Modular Reactors: Safer and Cheaper?
[Via Climate Central - News, Blogs & Features]

In the wake of the Fukushima accident, and on the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl, the debate over whether nuclear power can be safe and economical enough to be a big part of the world’s energy future, especially for helping to reduce global warming emissions, is in full swing once again. The danger of a major accident that releases significant amounts of radioactivity is just part of it. Nuclear power plants also generate radioactive waste that has to be disposed of somehow, and the creation and transportation of nuclear fuel raises the risk of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium finding its way into the hands of bomb-makers. On top of this, how much it will cost to build enough power plants to make a dent in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is uncertain — especially if Fukushima leads to tougher safety regulations.

For decades, though, some nuclear engineers have been pushing an alternate technology that they claim could address these concerns. Called Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s), these plants, which have been proposed with a variety of designs, would be inherently cheaper to build and safer to operate than conventional plants, for a variety of reasons — or at least, so their proponents argue. They may be right, but so far the nuclear industry hasn’t had enough real-world experience with any of the proposed designs to know how well their performance lives up to their theoretical promise.

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I will be facilitating a discussion on nuclear power at the Sustainable Path Foundation’s Idea Club on Monday.

Nuclear will be part of our power production if we hope to make a full transition to a greener world. However, current plant design is not as optimized for the best generation of power as it is based upon Cold War military needs.

Much better reactor designs can be used if there is not any reason for weapons grade material. SMR’s hold some potential, as do a host of other designs being tested in different countries.

But, as seen here with this design, and with all the others, humans are the weakest link, often being the proximate cause for problems or making decisions leading to further difficulties.

One of the things we will discuss is how we can do a better job with this. For example, many people knew that the power generators in Japan were in a vulnerable position. In fact, the second generation plants built in Japan put the generators inside hardened buildings.

These newer plants also had pipes to directly inject sea water in case of a reactor problem. These plants were only a few kilometers from the catastrophic site at Fukushima yet suffered little of the problems seen from the earthquake.

So, how do we force a plant redesign and refurbishment? When it will cost a lot of money and probably shut down a plant for a time? How do we get the safety motive pushed as strong as the profit motive? I

f we cannot solve that, then these sorts of problems – and include the Gulf Disaster from last year here also – will continue to haunt us. Especially as we continue to operate at the very limits of our engineering abilities to find, control and exploit energy sources.

The Japan nuclear power plant – The No. 1 plant was considered a “learning experience.”

asahi.com（朝日新聞社）：Fukushima No. 1 plant designed on ‘trial-and-error’ basis – English
[Via Asahi]

While changes improved safety at the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant, overconfidence, complacency and high costs stymied such action at the now-crippled Fukushima No. 1 plant, according to people familiar with the situation.The difference in the safety designs was the main reason why the crisis continues to unfold at the Fukushima No. 1 plant–one of the oldest in Japan–while the No. 2 plant a few kilometers south remains relatively unscathed by the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.

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The plant that failed had 5 reactors built from first-generation plans bought from GE. The sixth and last reactor was a Mark II version, as was an entire plant built a few miles away. Both were hit with 14 foot waves that were much higher than anyone ever expected.

The Mark II versions were all able to be put into cold shutdown and were safe. Four of the five Mark I versions failed.

One difference between the Mark I and MArk II versions – in the MArk II version, the emergency generators for the Mark II were placed INSIDE the reactor buildings instead of being outside open to the elements.

In addition, the Mark II reactors had pipes to allow direct insertion of sea water if needed. he Mark I reactors did not. The inability to easily inject water into the reactors here has been the main cause of the problems.

The reactors that are having problems are the oldest ones, built on old designs. Why not upgrade them? It would have cost money for something that they really did not see the need for.

I guess they have learned something here. Kind of a bad way to have a learning experience. I also loved this last quote:

Other TEPCO officials said that changing the anti-tsunami design or moving the location of the emergency generators would have been an acknowledgment that previous decisions were insufficient.

Kiyoshi Sakurai, a commentator on technology issues, said that relying on a GE design also put the Fukushima No. 1 plant at a disadvantage because U.S. designers were not as cautious about earthquakes and tsunami as those working in Japan.

So, fixing the plants would have admitted that they were not perfect the first time. But that is undercut by the next sentence. They could have easily saved face for the corrections by saying the original plans had not taken into account sufficient Japanese knowledge about earthquakes and tsunamis.

It was the money.