Monday, September 12th, 2011
Stephan: Roger Nelson's Global Consciousness Project looks at the nonlocal aspect, of all life being interconnected and interdependent. This uses a supercomputer to probe the matrix of the media zeitgeist.
A study, based on millions of articles, charted deteriorating national sentiment ahead of the recent revolutions in Libya and Egypt.
While the analysis was carried out retrospectively, scientists say the same processes could be used to anticipate upcoming conflict.
The system also picked up early clues about Osama Bin Laden’s location.
Kalev Leetaru, from the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science, presented his findings in the journal First Monday.
Mood and location
The study’s information was taken from a range of sources including the US government-run Open Source Centre and BBC Monitoring, both of which monitor local media output around the world.
News outlets which published online versions were also analysed, as was the New York Times’ archive, going back to 1945.
In total, Mr Leetaru gathered more than 100 million articles.
Reports were analysed for two main types of information: mood – whether the article represented good news or bad news, and location – where events were happening and the location of other participants in the story. The Nautilus SGI supercomputer crunched the 100 million articles.
Mood detection, or ‘automated sentiment mining’ searched for words such as ‘terrible’, ‘horrific’ or ‘nice’.
Location, or ‘geocoding’ took mentions of specific places, such as ‘Cairo’ […]
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Monday, September 12th, 2011
TOM BRAITHWAITE and PATRICK JENKINS, - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: The corporatist forces are completely blatant about what they want. And utterly shameless in exercising the legalized bribery that buys the Congress.
New international bank capital rules are ‘anti-American
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Monday, September 12th, 2011
Stephan: Our economic structure is beginning to engage with climate change as a reality, not an argument. Part of this trend concerns how the insurance industry responds to the effects of climate change, and what it can and cannot do. At the start its pretty obvious the industry is not ready for what is coming, but way ahead of the Congress. There is going to be a lot of stress in this transition because whole areas will become uninsurable as a result of flooding, or sea rise, or violent, destructive weather.
Here in Vermont, inland flooding from Hurricane Irene resulted in 13 counties being declared a disaster zone. In his request for the declaration, Governor Peter Shumlin stated, ‘At the height of the storm’s impact, there were 15 Vermont communities completely cut off by flood waters or failed infrastructure.’
The estimated cost of public assistance for recovery from the storm, Shumlin continued, will be in excess of $11 million. His request also noted that Vermont has experienced a number of weather-related disasters during the past nine months.
In a press conference held yesterday to announce the publication of a new report, Sharlene Leurig, senior manager of the insurance program at Ceres and author of the report, stated, ‘2011 has been a painful and important reminder that changing climate will inflict damage across the U.S. Even before Hurricane Irene, insured losses in the U.S. this year were 40 percent higher than in the entire year of 2010.’
The report, entitled ‘Climate Risk Disclosure by Insurers: Evaluating Insurer Responses to the NAIC Climate Disclosure Survey,’ studies the preparedness of the insurance industry for the impacts of climate change. Its finding, Leurig said, ‘That insurers are concerned about climate risk but don’t understand what to do about […]
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Sunday, September 11th, 2011
JONATHAN FAHEY, Energy Writer - The Associated Press
Stephan: This is the latest in several intersecting trends, power usage, the Green Transition, and the economy. What particularly interested me is that part of this arises, just as it was predicted it would, from the conversion to the new lightbulbs. As simple as that.
NEW YORK — American homes are more cluttered than ever with devices, and they all need power: Cellphones and iPads that have to be charged, DVRs that run all hours, TVs that light up in high definition.
But something shocking is happening to demand for electricity in the Age of the Gadget: It’s leveling off.
Over the next decade, experts expect residential power use to fall, reversing an upward trend that has been almost uninterrupted since Thomas Edison invented the modern light bulb.
In part it’s because Edison’s light bulb is being replaced by more efficient types of lighting, and electric devices of all kinds are getting much more efficient. But there are other factors.
New homes are being built to use less juice, and government subsidies for home energy savings programs are helping older homes use less power. In the short term, the tough economy and a weak housing market are prompting people to cut their usage.
As a result, many families can expect their monthly bills to remain in check, even if power prices rise. For utility executives, who can no longer bank on ever-growing demand, a major shift is under way: They’re finding ways to profit when people use less power.
‘It’s already […]
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Sunday, September 11th, 2011
JEANNA BRYNER, - LiveScience
Stephan: This is the latest in the trend showing that other mammals, such as dolphins, are far more intelligent than we have previously understood.Yet even here one sees the hubris:
'The dolphins aren't actually talking, though.
'It does not mean that they talk like humans, only that they communicate with sound made in the same way,' Madsen told LiveScience.'
We have no idea what they are doing, how much information is being communicated. Only that they do it.
In the face of this whaling really should be seen as a war crime. We know so little of the world, yet think we know so much.
Dolphins ‘talk’ to each other, using the same process to make their high-pitched sounds as humans, according to a new analysis of results from a 1970s experiment.
The findings mean dolphins don’t actually whistle as has been long thought, but instead rely on vibrations of tissues in their nasal cavities that are analogous to our vocal cords.
Scientists are only now figuring this out, ‘because it certainly sounds like a whistle,’ said study researcher Peter Madsen of the Institute of Bioscience at Aarhus University in Denmark, adding that the term was coined in a paper published in 1949 in the journal Science. ‘And it has stuck since.’
The finding clears up a question that has long puzzled scientists: How can dolphins make their signature identifying whistles at the water’s surface and during deep dives where compression causes sound waves to travel faster and would thus change the frequency of those calls. [Deep Divers: A Gallery of Daring Dolphins]
To answer that question, Madsen and his colleagues analyzed recently digitized recordings of a 12-year-old male bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) from 1977. At the time, the researchers had the dolphin breathe a mixture of helium and oxygen called heliox. (Used by humans, heliox makes one sound […]
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