Europeana porta online tutto il sapere del Vecchio Continente

http://www.corriere.it/cultura/08_novembre_19/europeana_di_pasqua_0714ed20-b63c-11dd-909d-00144f02aabc.shtml

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http://www.europeana.eu/portal/index.html

MILANO – «Facciamo questo per non abbandonare del tutto l'Europa nelle mani dei motori di ricerca americani»: nelle parole di Jean Noel Jeanneney, presidente della Bibliothèque nationale de France, c'è lo spirito di Europeana, troppo facile da paragonare a Google Books eppure diversa e, forse, persino migliore. L'Europa risponde dunque con un minimo scarto temporale alla provocazione di Google che, con la sua nuova icona Google Preview, permette di accedere a tutti i volumi indicizzati dal suo servizio di ricerca libri all'interno di pagine web esterne. E se Mountain View, con il suo instancabile fermento, regala una versione embedded dei volumi (con possibilità di consultazione online nel caso di diritti d'autore scaduti), il Vecchio Continente sfida il colosso americano con un progetto altrettanto ambizioso, anche considerata la tradizione culturale europea.
EUROPEANA – Opere letterarie, foto, film, libri, dipinti, mappe, giornali: in Europeana (o meglio nel suo prototipo) in sostanza sarà accessibile un patrimonio culturale finora conservato gelosamente (e già digitalizzato) dalle biblioteche e dai musei europei, tra cui la Divina Commedia di Dante, i manoscritti e le registrazioni di Beethoven, Mozart e Chopin, i quadri di Vermeer, la Magna Carta britannica e le immagini della caduta del muro di Berlino. E per il 2010, quando il sito sarà molto di più di un prototipo, la mole di materiali dovrebbe sfiorare i sei milioni di documenti e minacciare seriamente il rischio di una privatizzazione della conoscenza.
TUTTO HA AVUTO INIZIO QUANDO.... – Del resto l'Europa aveva deciso di mettere online il suo sapere già da tempo e il primo passo dell'iniziativa è stato scandito dalla decisione del Parlamento Europeo di dare sostegno al progetto, accordando i finanziamenti necessari all'interno dell'eContentplus Programme (finalizzato a migliorare l'accessibilità e l'uso dei documenti digitali europei). La precedenza alla messa online verrà data mano a mano ai documenti di ciascuna cultura considerati più espressivi e prioritari. E intanto a battezzare la neonata Europeana sarà l'inossidabile Viviane Reding, commissario Ue alla Società dell'informazione, che ha spiegato l'iniziativa con un esempio semplice e illuminante: «Uno studente d'arte irlandese potrà ammirare la Gioconda senza andare a Parigi».

Emanuela Di Pasqua19 novembre 2008

Prishtina European Grand Prix 2009

workshop Ecologies of Identities [UBT Prishtina, Politecnico di Milano]- Novembre 2008

prima presentazione video

in collaborazione con Alberto Clerici

ringraziamo Autosalloni Prishtina, Lanti, Virusi, Rrebeli, Plusi, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, 50 cent, Euronews, Sokolekrajes, Skillz, Mergim e Selim

POST - Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking

http://www.postcoml.org/

http://explore.noaa.gov/abstract-and-bio-pacific-ocean-shelf-tracking-project-dr-david-welch

Dr. David Welch reviews the technical operation of the Pacific Ocean Tracking Project (POST) and reviews its performance in addressing key policy questions.
Abstract
Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) array, currently operates as the world’s largest telemetry system for studying the movements and survival of marine fish. It will provide the exemplar for the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN), the subject of the May 18th talk by Ron O’Dor. OTN shall form “an array of POST arrays," sitting on the continental shelves of all the continents on the planet. As such, it provides a prime example of what the evolving Ocean Observation System (OOS) system might look like.One of the Census of Marine Life’s (CoML's) original field projects, POST made a natural fit given the CoML’s focus on distribution, diversity, and abundance of marine life. However, POST has begun to prove itself in addressing key US policy questions for fisheries, and thereby demonstrating the fundamental linkage between these biological questions and vexing high-level policy issues. POST thus forms an interesting example of how the development of a highly quantitative tool looking at basic biological processes can inform and reinvigorate the science of fisheries management—and ocean research.The operational considerations involved in developing POST include the need for:
Developing large-scale and high volume methods for conducting surgery on thousands of test animals while ensuring the highest ethical standards of fish handling and surgical procedures are met.
Developing technical methods for deploying and maintaining a very large scale permanent tracking array on the seabed.
Ensuring that the data are recovered in very high yield to validate the array concept and provide meaningful scientific results to justify the support for building (and expanding) the array.
Dr. Welch reviews the technical operation of POST from the twin perspectives of ethical animal use and technical operation of a large-scale engineering system. In the final section of the talk, he reviews the performance of the array in addressing key policy questions concerning the management of Columbia & Fraser R salmon populations.
Biography
David Welch received a B.Sc. in Biology and Economics from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia) in 1985.
He started and led the Canadian government’s High Seas Salmon Program at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in 1990, after a quarter century of governmental hiatus in ocean research on salmon. During the next decade he studied the ocean biology of Pacific salmon, and provided some of the first compelling evidence for a potentially profound impact of global warming on Pacific salmon in the ocean.
Dr. Welch serves as the chief architect of the Census of Marine Life’s project POST and President of Kintama Research. Welch started Kintama in 1990 to develop the pioneering technology platform necessary for delivering data from a permanent ocean array capable of directly measuring survival of migrating fish in the ocean.
We can measure the success of POST from three perspectives:
It is the largest and most complex marine tracking array under single management anywhere in the globe, with a current geographic span of almost 2,500 km;
The Canadian Government committed $45M Cdn starting in 2007 to champion the globalization of the POST array as the Ocean Tracking Network;
The array is now capable of measuring the movements and survival of fish as small as 12.5 cm year-round, and may be capable of tracking fish as small as 10 cm by 2008.
As a result, the marine science community stands on the brink of having the ability to conduct direct quantitative experimental studies in the ocean on fish of the kind that transformed chemistry and physics one and two centuries ago.
Dr Welch has previously acted as scientific spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund on the issue of global warming, and received an invitation to testify on the results of his research on the ocean biology of Pacific salmon in the U.S. Senate. Dr Welch speaks fluent Japanese and lives on Vancouver Island in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

In Texas, Weighing Life With a Border Fence

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/us/13border.html

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: January 13, 2008
GRANJENO, Tex. — Rafael Garza, a former mayor of this small border city, stood steps from the back door of his simple brick house and chopped the air with a hand. “This is where the actual fence would be,” he said.And the federal property line, he said, would be at his shower.
Mr. Garza, 36, a Hidalgo County sheriff’s sergeant who traces his family here to 1767, was imagining what life would be like in the shadow of the Proposed Tactical Infrastructure — the wall, to many outraged South Texans — that the Department of Homeland Security has committed to build by the end of the year.
Although federal officials say its location and design are still in flux, official maps of the Texas third of the 370-mile intermittent pedestrian barrier from Brownsville to California have provoked widespread alarm among property owners fearful of being cut off from parts of their own land or access to the Rio Grande for livestock and crops.
In the Rio Grande Valley last week, yards were plastered with signs demanding “No border wall,” raising the prospect of a protracted legal, if not physical, standoff, although Congress has recently taken steps to review the original plan. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is under fire from some fellow Republicans for amendments to a financing bill last month that they say scale back the fence.
At the same time, local concern was heightened by letters in December from the United States Army Corps of Engineers to property owners in the Southwest — 71 of them in Texas — who had refused access to their land for up to a year of survey work and were given 30 days to comply or face a federal lawsuit.
One was Dr. Eloisa G. Tamez, a nursing director at the University of Texas, Brownsville, at Texas Southmost College, who owns three acres in El Calaboz, the remnant of a 12,000-acre land grant to her ancestors in 1747 by the King of Spain. The barrier would rise within feet of her backyard, as well.
“It’s all I have,” said Dr. Tamez, 72, a widow who served for years as a chief nurse in medical centers of the Department of Veterans Affairs. “Who do they think we are down here? Somebody sitting under a cactus with a sombrero taking a nap?”
Her deadline expired last Monday with no legal action.
But Laura Keehner, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said Friday, “We will begin that process as early as next week.”
Ms. Keehner said that of 135 letters sent seeking access for surveys, 30 local landowners had so far agreed. “They recognize that a fence will help fight drug trafficking and human trafficking,” she said.
The government would have to pay for any private land acquired or condemned for the fence, at a price set by federal evaluators. But landowners would not be compensated for allowing surveys, except for cases of damage.
Not all residents vowed resistance. Juan Hernandez, 43, a poultry farmer in Los Indios, sounded resigned. “I don’t know how they’re going to do it, but they’re going to do it,” said Mr. Hernandez, who complained about rampant drug trafficking.
He said, “if it helps my kids” he could go along with a fence. “I’m probably having to move,” he said, “but if they pay for it, O.K. ”
Valley officials and residents who denounced the fence said they were not soft on illegal immigration or blind to the dangers of drug smuggling and terrorism. “Who doesn’t want security?” said Mayor Richard Cortez of McAllen. “Our fight with the government is not over their goals, it’s how they go about them.”
“You can go over, under and around a fence,” he said, “and it can’t make an apprehension.”
Instead, he said, the government should deepen the river, clear the land for better surveillance and create a legal Mexican worker program.
Up and down the border, his fellow mayors agree, banding together in the Texas Border Coalition with rare unanimity to oppose the fence, calling instead for increased electronic measures like sensors and more Border Patrol agents.
Stirring particular concern was the plan to run the fence north of the levees built decades ago to hold back the Rio Grande, now flowing in many places a mile or more to the south. So the fence would in effect cut off swaths of American soil — including range and farmlands — between the barrier and the international boundary of the river.
To build the fence as originally conceived, in two parallel rows with a road for the Border Patrol between them, some local officials were told, the government would need to acquire a strip of land at least 150 feet from the levee. That would take it into the backyards of Mr. Garza in Granjeno, Dr. Tamez in El Calaboz and other property owners.
But Ms. Keehner of the Homeland Security Department said the agency was reviewing its options. “That’s why we need the surveys,” she said.
Local officials have been told that there would be some kind of gates through the fence, but what kind and where have yet to be specified.

The last maps also show wide gaps between segments of fence, setting the barrier in more developed areas where the risk was greater that illegal immigrants could more easily melt into the population, and leaving open desolate tracts that could be more easily monitored.

But that raised other concerns for residents like Aida Leach of River Bend Resort, a golf community outside Brownsville that the maps show getting partly fenced.
“The wall stops at part of the houses and starts again,” leaving her house exposed, Ms. Leach told a meeting of concerned property owners that was convened Wednesday night at the San Ignacio de Loyola Roman Catholic Church in El Ranchito by lawyers from Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid. “So I guess they’ll be coming to our house.”
“Good question,” said Corinne Spenser-Scheurich, one of the lawyers. Ms. Spenser-Scheurich said landowners should not feel intimidated by the government’s requests to survey. “To sign or not is a personal choice,” she said.
Another landowner, H. R. Jaime, attending with his 90-year-old mother, Frances Wagner Quiñones, whose forebears settled nearby Landrum, asked, “What happens to water rights, if we can’t get to the water and pump it out?”
Emily Rickers, another of the lawyers, said the government might have to compensate him for that as well.
At the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge to Reynosa, Mexico, George Ramon, the bridge director for McAllen, questioned the value of a border fence considering how brazenly the fences at the heavily patrolled crossing were regularly breached, aided by “spotters” who hang around the bridge communicating with cellphones and hand signals like baseball coaches.
“They form a human pyramid and leap the fence,” Mr. Ramon said. “I’ve seen them pay a guy who helps them over.” Others, known as “port runners” just make a dash for it past the toll takers and agents and melt into the crowd. “It’s a constant, daily occurrence” he said.
He kept five police cars lined alongside the fence as a deterrent, but they proved worthless, he said, “as soon as they figured out no one was in them.”
He stopped at a hole in a chain-link fence, where cars were lining up to enter the United States. “Well,” he said, “it’s cut again.”

Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/world/americas/20burro.html

LA GLORIA, Colombia — In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon.

Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.
His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.
“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.
“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”
A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.
In doing so, Mr. Soriano has emerged as the best-known resident of La Gloria, a town that feels even farther removed from the rhythms of the wider world than is Aracataca, the inspiration for the setting of the epic “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, another of the region’s native sons.
Unlike Mr. García Márquez, who lives in Mexico City, Mr. Soriano has never traveled outside Colombia — but he remains dedicated to bringing its people a touch of the outside world. His project has won acclaim from the nation’s literacy specialists and is the subject of a new documentary by a Colombian filmmaker, Carlos Rendón Zipaguata.
The idea came to him, he said, after he witnessed as a young teacher the transformative power of reading among his pupils, who were born into conflict even more intense than when he was a child.
The violence by bandit groups was so bad when he was young that his parents sent him to live with his grandmother in the nearby city of Valledupar, near the Venezuelan border. He returned at age 16 with a high school degree and got a job teaching reading to schoolchildren.
By the time he was in his 20s, Colombia’s long internal war had drawn paramilitary bands to the lawless marshlands and hills surrounding La Gloria, leading to clashes with guerrillas and intimidation of the local population by both groups.
Into that violence, which has since ebbed, Mr. Soriano ventured with his donkeys, taking with him a few reading textbooks, encyclopedia volumes and novels from his small personal library. At stops along the way, children still await the teacher in groups, to hear him read from the books he brings before they can borrow them.
A breakthrough came several years ago when he heard excerpts over the radio of a novel, “The Ballad of Maria Abdala,” by Juan Gossaín, a Colombian journalist and writer. Mr. Soriano wrote a letter to the author, asking him to lend a copy of the book to the Biblioburro.
After Mr. Gossaín broadcast details of Mr. Soriano’s project on his radio program, book donations poured in from throughout Colombia. A local financial institution, Cajamag, provided some financing for the construction of a small library next to his home, but the project remains only half-finished for lack of funds.
There is little money left over for such luxuries on his teacher’s salary of $350 a month. Already the family’s budget is so tight that he and his wife, Diana, opened a small restaurant, La Cosa Política, two years ago to help make ends meet.
Even among the restaurant’s clientele, mainly ranch hands and truck drivers with little formal education, the bespectacled Mr. Soriano sees potential bibliophiles. On the wall above tables laid out with grilled meat and fried plantains, he posts pages from Hoy Diario, the region’s daily newspaper, and prods diners into discussions about current events.

“We can take political talk only so far, of course,” he said, referring to the looming threat of retaliation from the paramilitary groups, which have effectively defeated the guerrillas in this part of northern Colombia. “I learned that if I interest just one person in reading a mundane news item — say, about the rising price of rice — then that’s a step forward.”

Such victories keep Mr. Soriano going, despite the challenges that come with running the Biblioburro.
He fractured his left leg in a fall from one of his burros in July, leaving him with a limp. And some of his readers like the books they borrow so much that they fail to return them.
Two books that vanished not long ago: an illustrated sex education manual, and a copy of “Like Water for Chocolate,” the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel’s novel about food and love in a traditional Mexican family.
And there are dangers inherent to venturing into the backlands around La Gloria. Two years ago, Mr. Soriano said, bandits surprised him at a river crossing, found that he carried almost no money, and tied him to a tree. They stole one item from his book pouch: “Brida,” the story of an Irish girl and her search for knowledge, by the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho.
“For some reason, Paulo Coelho is at the top of everyone’s list of favorites,” said Mr. Soriano, hiding a grin under the shade of his sombrero vueltiao, the elaborately woven cowboy hat popular in Colombia’s interior.
On a trip this month into the rutted hills, where about 300 people regularly borrow books from him, he reminisced about a visit to the National Library in the capital, Bogotá, where he was stunned by the building’s immense collection and its Art Deco design.
“I felt so ordinary in Bogotá,” Mr. Soriano said. “My place is here.”
At times, on the remote landscape dotted with guayacán trees, it was hard to tell whether beast or man was in control. Once, Mr. Soriano lost his patience, trying to coax his stubborn donkeys to cross a stream.
Still, it was clear why Mr. Soriano does what he does.
In the village of El Brasil, Ingrid Ospina, 18, leafed through a copy of “Margarita,” the classic book of poetry by Rubén Darío of Nicaragua, and began to read aloud.
She went beyond where the heavens are
and to the moon said, au revoir.
How naughty to have flown so far
without the permission of Papa.
“That is so beautiful, Maestro,” Ms. Ospina said to the teacher. “When are you coming back?”

An Eye on the Swarm

http://www.princeton.edu/~icouzin/

http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=RbxDLjcosss


http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=RVvcX8HWghA

From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm 1-2

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/science/13traff.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants.
Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock.
Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible.
“They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.”
The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said.
By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.
Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.
“No matter how much you look at an individual army ant,” Dr. Couzin said, “you will never get a sense that when you put 1.5 million of them together, they form these bridges and columns. You just cannot know that.”
To get a sense of swarms, Dr. Couzin builds computer models of virtual swarms. Each model contains thousands of individual agents, which he can program to follow a few simple rules. To decide what those rules ought to be, he and his colleagues head out to jungles, deserts or oceans to observe animals in action.
Daniel Grunbaum, a mathematical biologist at the University of Washington, said his field was suddenly making leaps forward, as math and observation of nature were joined in the work of Dr. Couzin and others. “In the next 10 years there’s going to be a lot of progress.”
He said Dr. Couzin has been important in fusing the different kinds of science required to understand animal group behavior. “He’s been a real leader in bringing a lot of ideas together,” Dr. Grunbaum said. “He has a larger vision. If it works, that’ll be a big advance.”
In the case of army ants, Dr. Couzin was intrigued by their highways. Army ants returning to their nest with food travel in a dense column. This incoming lane is flanked by two lanes of outgoing traffic. A three-lane highway of army ants can stretch for as far as 150 yards from the ant nest, comprising hundreds of thousands of insects.
What Dr. Couzin wanted to know was why army ants do not move to and from their colony in a mad, disorganized scramble. To find out, he built a computer model based on some basic ant biology. Each simulated ant laid down a chemical marker that attracted other ants while the marker was still fresh. Each ant could also sweep the air with its antennas; if it made contact with another ant, it turned away and slowed down to avoid a collision.
Dr. Couzin analyzed how the ants behaved when he tweaked their behavior. If the ants turned away too quickly from oncoming insects, they lost the scent of their trail. If they did not turn fast enough, they ground to a halt and forced ants behind them to slow down. Dr. Couzin found that a narrow range of behavior allowed ants to move as a group as quickly as possible.
It turned out that these optimal ants also spontaneously formed highways. If the ants going in one direction happened to become dense, their chemical trails attracted more ants headed the same way. This feedback caused the ants to form a single packed column. The ants going the other direction turned away from the oncoming traffic and formed flanking lanes.
To test this model, Dr. Couzin and Nigel Franks, an ant expert at the University of Bristol in England, filmed a trail of army ants in Panama. Back in England, they went through the film frame by frame, analyzing the movements of 226 ants. “Everything in the ant world is happening at such a high tempo it was very difficult to see,” Dr. Couzin said.
Eventually they found that the real ants were moving in the way that Dr. Couzin had predicted would allow the entire swarm to go as fast as possible. They also found that the ants behaved differently if they were leaving the nest or heading back. When two ants encountered each other, the outgoing ant turned away further than the incoming one. As a result, the ants headed to the nest end up clustered in a central lane, while the outgoing ants form two outer lanes. Dr. Couzin has been extending his model for ants to other animals that move in giant crowds, like fish and birds. And instead of tracking individual animals himself, he has developed programs to let computers do the work.
The more Dr. Couzin studies swarm behavior, the more patterns he finds common to many different species. He is reminded of the laws of physics that govern liquids. “You look at liquid metal and at water, and you can see they’re both liquids,” he said. “They have fundamental characteristics in common. That’s what I was finding with the animal groups — there were fundamental states they could exist in.”
Just as liquid water can suddenly begin to boil, animal swarms can also change abruptly thanks to some simple rules.
Dr. Couzin has discovered some of those rules in the ways that locusts begin to form their devastating swarms. The insects typically crawl around on their own, but sometimes young locusts come together in huge bands that march across the land, devouring everything in their path. After developing wings, they rise into the air as giant clouds made of millions of insects.
“Locusts are known to be around all the time,” Dr. Couzin said. “Why does the situation suddenly get out of control, and these locusts swarm together and devastate crops?”
Dr. Couzin traveled to remote areas of Mauritania in Africa to study the behavior of locust swarms. Back at Oxford, he and his colleagues built a circular track on which locusts could walk. “We could track the motion of all these individuals five times a second for eight hours a day,” he said.
The scientists found that when the density of locusts rose beyond a threshold, the insects suddenly began to move together. Each locust always tried to align its own movements with any neighbor. When the locusts were widely spaced, however, this rule did not have much effect on them. Only when they had enough neighbors did they spontaneously form huge bands.
“We showed that you don’t need to know lots of information about individuals to predict how the group will behave,” Dr. Couzin said of the locust findings, which were published June 2006 in Science.
Understanding how animals swarm and why they do are two separate questions, however.
In some species, animals may swarm so that the entire group enjoys an evolutionary benefit. All the army ants in a colony, for example, belong to the same family. So if individuals cooperate, their shared genes associated with swarming will become more common.
But in the deserts of Utah, Dr. Couzin and his colleagues discovered that giant swarms may actually be made up of a lot of selfish individuals.
Mormon crickets will sometimes gather by the millions and crawl in bands stretching more than five miles long. Dr. Couzin and his colleagues ran experiments to find out what caused them to form bands. They found that the forces behind cricket swarms are very different from the ones that bring locusts together. When Mormon crickets cannot find enough salt and protein, they become cannibals.
“Each cricket itself is a perfectly balanced source of nutrition,” Dr. Couzin said. “So the crickets, every 17 seconds or so, try to attack other individuals. If you don’t move, you’re likely to be eaten.”
This collective movement causes the crickets to form vast swarms. “All these crickets are on a forced march,” Dr. Couzin said. “They’re trying to attack the crickets who are ahead, and they’re trying to avoid being eaten from behind.”
Swarms, regardless of the forces that bring them together, have a remarkable ability to act like a collective mind. A swarm navigates as a unit, making decisions about where to go and how to escape predators together.
“There’s a swarm intelligence,” Dr. Couzin said. “You can see how people thought there was some sort of telekinesis involved.”
What makes this collective decision-making all the more puzzling is that each individual can behave only based on its own experience. If a shark lunges into a school of fish, only some of them will see it coming. If a flock of birds is migrating, only a few experienced individuals may know the route.
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have built a model of the flow of information through swarms. Each individual has to balance two instincts: to stay with the group and to move in a desired direction. The scientists found that just a few leaders can guide a swarm effectively. They do not even need to send any special signals to the animals around them. They create a bias in the swarm’s movement that steers it in a particular direction.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right information, though,” Dr. Couzin pointed out.
Two leaders may try to pull a swarm in opposite directions, and yet the swarm holds together. In Dr. Couzin’s model, the swarm was able to decide which leaders to follow.
“As we increased the difference of opinion between the informed individuals, the group would spontaneously come to a consensus and move in the direction chosen by the majority,” Dr. Couzin said. “They can make these decisions without mathematics, without even recognizing each other or knowing that a decision has been made.”
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have been finding support for this model in real groups of animals. They have even found support in studies on mediocre swarmers — humans.
To study humans, Dr. Couzin teamed up with researchers at the University of Leeds. They recruited eight people at a time to play a game. Players stood in the middle of a circle, and along the edge of the circle were 16 cards, each labeled with a number. The scientists handed each person a slip of paper and instructed the players to follow the instructions printed on it while not saying anything to the others. Those rules correspond to the ones in Dr. Couzin’s models. And just as in his models, each person had no idea what the others had been instructed to do.
In one version of the experiment, each person was instructed simply to stay with the group. As Dr. Couzin’s model predicted, they tended to circle around in a doughnut-shaped flock. In another version, one person was instructed to head for a particular card at the edge of the circle without leaving the group. The players quickly formed little swarms with their leader at the head, moving together to the target.
The scientists then sowed discord by telling two or more people to move to opposite sides of the circle. The other people had to try to stay with the group even as leaders tried to pull it apart.
As Dr. Couzin’s model predicted, the human swarm made a quick, unconscious decision about which way to go. People tended to follow the largest group of leaders, even if it contained only one additional person.
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues describe the results of these experiments in a paper to be published in the journal Animal Behavior.
Dr. Couzin is carrying the lessons he has learned from animals to other kinds of swarms. He is helping Dr. Naomi Leonard, a Princeton engineer, to program swarming into robots.
“These things are beginning to move around and interact in ways we see in nature,” he said. Ultimately, flocks of robots might do a better job of collecting information in dangerous places. “If you knock out some individual, the algorithm still works. The group still moves normally.” The rules of the swarm may also apply to the cells inside our bodies. Dr. Couzin is working with cancer biologists to discover the rules by which cancer cells work together to build tumors or migrate through tissues. Even brain cells may follow the same rules for collective behavior seen in locusts or fish.
“One of the really fun things that we’re doing now is understanding how the type of feedbacks in these groups is like the ones in the brain that allows humans to make decisions,” Dr. Couzin said. Those decisions are not just about what to order for lunch, but about basic perception — making sense, for example, of the flood of signals coming from the eyes. “How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you’re seeing?” Dr. Couzin said. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm.

From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm 2-2

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/science/13traff.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/us/08reef.html

http://www.nycsubway.org/perl/showpix?bmxpbmU9MTc3fDB8NHwyMHx8UD0vY2Fycy9yZWRiaXJkLXNjcmFwLmh0bWx8YWRkZGF0ZSBkZXNj

SLAUGHTER BEACH, Del. — Sixteen nautical miles from the Indian River Inlet and about 80 feet underwater, a building boom is under way at the Red Bird Reef.

One by one, a machine operator has been shoving hundreds of retired New York City subway cars off a barge, continuing the transformation of a barren stretch of ocean floor into a bountiful oasis, carpeted in sea grasses, walled thick with blue mussels and sponges, and teeming with black sea bass and tautog.
“They’re basically luxury condominiums for fish,” Jeff Tinsman, artificial reef program manager for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, said as one of 48 of the 19-ton retirees from New York City sank toward the 666 already on the ocean floor.
But now, Delaware is struggling with the misfortune of its own success.
Having planted a thriving community in what was once an underwater desert, state marine officials are faced with the sort of overcrowding, crime and traffic problems more common to terrestrial cities.
The summer flounder and bass have snuggled so tightly on top and in the nooks of the subway cars that Mr. Tinsman is trying to expand the housing capacity. He is having trouble, however, because other states, seeing Delaware’s successes, have started competing for the subway cars, which New York City provides free.
Crisscrossing over the reef, commercial pot fishermen keep getting their lines tangled with those of smaller hook-and-reel anglers, and the rising tension has led the state to ask federal marine officials to declare the area off limits to large commercial fishermen.
As the reef has become more popular, theft and sabotage of fishing traps and pots has more than doubled in the last several years, said Capt. David Lewis of the Delaware Bay Launch Service. “People now don’t just steal the fish inside the pots out here, they’ve started stealing the pots, too,” he said.
The reef, named after New York City’s famous Redbird subway cars, now supports more than 10,000 angler trips annually, up from fewer than 300 in 1997. It has seen a 400-fold increase in the amount of marine food per square foot in the last seven years, according to state data.
Mr. Tinsman said his department was doing everything it could to expand the capacity, noting that last year, when subway cars were unavailable, he sank a 92-year-old tugboat and the YOG-93, a 175-foot decommissioned Navy tanker built in 1945 for the planned invasion of Japan. Fifty subway cars are due this month, he said.
“The secret is out, I guess,” said Michael G. Zacchea, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority official in charge of getting rid of New York City’s old subway cars.
Mr. Zacchea added that Delaware’s prospects for expanding the reef looked grim because New York State has said it wanted all of the city’s retired subway cars once the United States Army Corps of Engineers updates the state’s reef permit this summer. Mr. Zacchea said he would soon stop shipments out of state, saving perhaps $2 million in transport costs. As a good faith gesture, the city probably will provide about 100 cars to Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and New Jersey before out-of-state deliveries are halted.
While New York State works to get its permit in place, other states are pushing hard to get what they can from the city, Mr. Zacchea said.
Last month, for example, New Jersey, which stopped taking the cars in 2003 because of environmental concerns, asked the city for 600 of them.
Tim Dillingham, the executive director of the American Littoral Society, a coastal conservation group based in Sandy Hook, N.J., said natural rock and concrete balls were far safer and more durable materials for artificial reefs.
“Those materials also cost more, and we’re sensitive to the realities of budget crunches in many states,” Mr. Dillingham said.
The American Littoral Society and other environmental groups opposed the use of the Redbird cars because they have small levels of asbestos in the glue used to secure the floor panels and in the insulation material in the walls.
State and federal environmental officials approved the use of the Redbirds and other cars for artificial reefs in Delaware and elsewhere because they said the asbestos was not a risk for marine life and has to be airborne to pose a threat to humans.
Mr. Dillingham said his group had pushed New Jersey to use only New York City’s cars, which have only stainless steel on the outside, contain less asbestos and are more durable. Delaware, which oversees nine artificial reef sites in state waters and five, including Red Bird Reef, in federal waters, was the first state to get subway cars from New York City, in August 2001.
In the last several years, the reefs have drawn swift open-ocean fish, like tuna and mackerel, that use the reefs as hunting grounds for smaller prey. Sea bass like to live inside the cars, while large flounder lie in the silt that settles on top of the cars, said Mr. Tinsman, the Delaware official.
States have experimented with other types of artificial reef materials, including abandoned automobiles, tanks, refrigerators, shopping carts and washing machines.
Mr. Tinsman particularly favors the newer subway cars with stainless steel on the outside to create reefs. “We call these the DeLoreans of the deep,” he said.
Subway cars in general, he said, are roomy enough to invite certain fish, too heavy to shift easily in storms and durable enough to avoid throwing off debris for decades.
“The one problem I see with them,” Mr. Tinsman said, “is that just like the DeLoreans, there are only a limited number.”

España, bajo el estrés del agua

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/Espana/estres/agua/elpepisoc/20080929elpepisoc_2/Tes

+

http://reports.eea.europa.eu/eea_report_2008_4/en/

Un informe de la Agencia Europea de Medio Ambiente afirma que el país vivirá sus próximos años entre inundaciones y sequías

El estrés del agua quiere decir sequía y desertificación. Significa que en el futuro, a nuestra lista de preocupaciones, se añadirá la falta de agua. Pero también el exceso: inundaciones y crecidas de ríos. Es la expresión que utiliza la Agencia Europea de Medio Ambiente (EEA) para calificar lo que va a sufrir en las próximas décadas España y todos los países de la cuenca del Mediterráneo.

La Unión Europea ha publicado un informe llamado Impactos del cambio climático en Europa que especifica las convulsiones que vivirá el viejo continente por el calentamiento global. El estudio analiza la cantidad del agua que el hombre ha necesitado entre 1975 y 2006 y, por otro lado, muestra la evidencia de que las lluvias serán muy intermitentes en Europa. Lloverá poco y se necesitará más agua. "En el mismo período ha habido un significativo incremento en la demanda de agua en España (entre el 50% y el 70%) y en las áreas mediterráneas", asevera el informe. Y las predicciones de futuro van en línea ascendente. "La demanda crecerá cada vez más, especialmente en el sur donde la necesidad de agua para la agricultura es mayor. Con ella, se desarrollará una competición por este bien entre los distintos sectores (turismo, agricultura, energía) y usos".
En promedio, la exigencia de agua en todos los países de Europa ha crecido al rededor de 50 milímetros cúbicos por hectárea al año pero, en algunos casos como en el centro de España, Italia, Grecia, el Magreb, el sur de Francia y Alemania la cifra oscila entre 150 y 200 metros cúbicos por hectárea al año. Y, como se prevé que las lluvias, se reducirán se necesitará regar más. Por eso la falta de agua causará un impacto negativo tanto en términos económicos como en ecológicos. Además, en el Mediterráneo se ha observado un creciente déficit del agua en los últimos 32 años.
Aunque el informe vaticina desertización para España, el estudio tampoco nos libra de los desbordamientos de los ríos. Habrá un incremento porque la alternancia entre períodos de sequía y precipitaciones torrenciales hace a España más propensa a estas inundaciones. Para 2080 pronostica que entre 2000 y 4000 personas se verán afectadas por las inundaciones en las zonas costeras por la subida del nivel del mar en Andalucía, Galicia, las Islas Baleares y Asturias. La región más afectada será el País Vasco: entre 4000 y 8000 personas podrán ser víctimas de la subida del mar. Países como Reino Unido, Sicilia o Grecia podrán ver afectada a gran parte de su población (entre 8000 y 50.000 personas). El planeta ya está experimentando una subida de las temperaturas de 0,8 grados centígrados por encima de los niveles preindustriales y el nivel del mar ha crecido 3,1 milímetros al año en los últimos 15 años.
Para mitigar todos estos problemas el informe apuesta tanto por la reducción del CO2 como por la adaptación a las consecuencias del cambio que ya no se pueden remediar. "El 90% de todos los desastres que han sucedido en Europa desde 1980 están directa o indirectamente relacionados con el clima y representan el 95% de las pérdidas económicas causadas por catástrofes", señala el informe.
Para evitar estas pérdidas se pone tres metas: la primera, una mayor vigilancia, monitorización y estudio de los cambios a nivel internacional; la segunda, estabilizar el clima para 2020 por debajo de los dos grados centígrados con respecto a los niveles pre industriales "para evitar consecuencias irreversibles en la sociedad y en los ecosistemas". Por último, hace hincapié en la adaptación.
Afirma que uno de los grandes retos de España de todo el Mediterráneo en adaptación es la diversificación del turismo en otros sectores. El estudio asegura que la subida de la temperatura hará marcharse a los turistas más al norte, en busca del mismo clima que antes se gozaba en España. Por eso, para no perder dinero, será imprescindible invertir en otros sectores.

Pirahã Exceptionality: a Reassessment

http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000411

Andrew Nevins (Harvard)
David Pesetsky (MIT)
Cilene Rodrigues (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)

March 2007
Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirahã is exceptional in displaying "inexplicable gaps", that these gaps follow from an alleged cultural principle restricting communication to "immediate experience", and that this principle has "severe" consequences for work on Universal Grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language (especially the rich material in Everett (1986; 1987b)), we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical "gaps" supposedly characteristic of Pirahã are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world's languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Pirahã lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Pirahã. Likewise, we find no evidence that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Pirahã constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominal possessor recursion and the behavior of wh-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Pirahã. Finally, following mostly Gonçalves (1993; 2000; 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Pirahã culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the "immediate experience" restriction. We are left with no evidence of a causal relation between culture and grammatical structure. Pirahã grammar contributes to ongoing research into the nature of Universal Grammar, but presents no unusual challenge, much less a "severe" one.

Format:
[ pdf ]

Reference:
lingBuzz/000411(please use that when you cite this article, unless you want to cite the full url: http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000411 )

La tribù che sa contare fino a due

http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2007/aprile/03/tribu_che_contare_fino_due_co_9_070403121.shtml

Una popolazione isolata dell' Amazzonia accende il dibattito sull' esistenza di una grammatica universale innata

Il linguaggio: dipende dai modi di vita o esiste una matrice mentale?

In questi ultimi anni, la lingua, la cultura e le credenze di un' isolata popolazione dell' Amazzonia, i Piraha, circa trecento individui distribuiti su otto villaggi lungo le sponde del fiume Maici, parevano aver tenuto in scacco la linguistica e l' antropologia. La vicenda aveva presto straripato ben oltre i confini accademici, trovando vasta eco anche sulla stampa. Il motivo di tanto scalpore è presto detto. Il linguista americano Daniel Everett, adesso professore all' Università dell' Illinois, dopo aver vissuto per lunghi anni a contatto con i Piraha, aveva riportato, nella sua tesi di dottorato e poi in vari articoli specialistici, alcuni dati sbalorditivi. Stando a quanto afferma Everett, la lingua dei Piraha avrebbe il più ristretto repertorio di suoni linguistici mai registrato (appena dieci fonemi), due sole parole per i colori (chiaro e scuro), nessuna parola per i numeri oltre uno e due (ma anche questi con un significato solo approssimativo), una sola parola per padre e madre, nessuna possibilità di esprimere una frase che contiene una frase subordinata, come «Ti ho detto che il bambino ha fame». La lista di queste radicali povertà linguistiche è lunga. I Piraha adulti sono strettamente monolingui e incapaci di apprendere qualsiasi altra lingua. Ma c' è ben di più. I Piraha non si curano di tracciare relazioni di parentela oltre quella con i propri fratelli e fratellastri, non hanno alcuna concezione che il mondo sia esistito prima che fossero nati i più anziani del villaggio, che una piroga e i suoi occupanti continuano ad esistere anche dopo aver svoltato la curva del fiume, sparendo dalla vista. Secondo Everett, gli stretti confini dell' esperienza immediata e diretta racchiudono il loro intero mondo mentale. OGNI SERA - Inoltre Everett racconta che, insieme alla moglie Keren, anch' essa linguista, ogni sera, per mesi e mesi, su richiesta esplicita dei Piraha, ha tentato pazientemente di insegnare loro i numeri da uno a nove in portoghese brasiliano, dato che la loro lingua non ha i numeri. Dopo mesi di tale volontaria scuola serale, i Piraha adulti avrebbero dichiarato, con grande rammarico: «La nostra testa è troppo dura». I bimbi Piraha riescono ad imparare i numeri, ma non gli adulti. Nei loro scambi in natura con occasionali mercanti brasiliani i Piraha adottano criteri volubili. Uno stesso individuo, talvolta esige molta merce in contraccambio, ma talvolta si accontenta di molto meno, per prodotti identici. I Piraha hanno la netta sensazione che i mercanti si approfittino di loro, e vorrebbero poter imparare a far di conto, ma si sono rassegnati a non riuscirvi. Questi racconti degli Everett sono in netto disaccordo con moltissimi dati di altri linguisti ed antropologi, su popolazioni che anch' esse parlano lingue prive di un sistema di numeri (uno, due, tre, molti è il caso tipico). Il compianto linguista Kenneth Hale, del Mit, esperto di lingue aborigene australiane senza incertezza, raccontava, invece, che i parlanti di quelle lingue non hanno difficoltà ad imparare un sistema numerico estratto da altre lingue e poi riescono a far di conto, come tutti noi. MESI - Lo psicologo Peter Gordon, della Columbia University, dopo aver passato alcuni mesi con i Piraha e aver sondato la loro ridotta capacità di stimare le quantità numeriche, ha pubblicato su «Science», nel 2004, un articolo intitolato «La vita senza i numeri». Gordon dichiara che, come i piccioni e i bimbi molto piccoli, i Piraha adulti non sanno contare oltre tre e stimano solo grossolanamente la differenza tra gruppi grandi e gruppi piccoli di oggetti. La loro lingua, del resto, stando agli Everett e a Gordon, non avrebbe nemmeno parole per esprimere i comparativi (tanto quanto, più di, meno di). In una recente intervista al «New Scientist», Everett non ha lesinato le parole: «La lingua dei Piraha è l' ultimo chiodo nella bara della teoria Chomskiana secondo la quale esisterebbe una grammatica universale innata». A dispetto dell' immenso seguito conquistato dalle teorie di Chomsky, alle quali lui stesso dice di essersi ispirato nel passato, Everett presenta i Piraha come prova vivente che la lingua e il pensiero sono interamente plasmati dalla cultura, dall' esperienza dei sensi e dai modi di vita. Una netta reazione a queste sue tesi non ha tardato a farsi sentire. In questi giorni, un illustre linguista del Mit, David Pesetsky (titolare delle cattedra precedentemente occupata da Noam Chomsky, ancora attivissimo, ma ufficialmente in pensione), un giovane e valente fonologo di Harvard, Andrew Nevins e una linguista brasiliana, Cilene Rodrigues, esperta di sintassi comparata, hanno reso disponibile su Internet un testo di 60 dense pagine nelle quali confutano tutte le conclusioni di Everett, punto per punto (http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000411). Passando al setaccio i dati spesso contraddittorii dello stesso Everett, questi studiosi mostrano che alcune pretese limitazioni della lingua dei Piraha risultano puramente illusorie, mentre altre sono reali, ma presenti anche in lingue molto distanti dal Piraha, e distanti tra di loro, come il tedesco, il cinese, l' ebraico, il bengalese, la lingua degli indiani Wappo della California e quella parlata dai Circassi del Caucaso. Trattandosi di popoli con culture e stili di vita diversissimi, queste particolarità linguistiche comuni non possono certo, con buona pace di Everett, essere state plasmate da fattori ambientali e sociali. Nessun chiodo e nessuna bara, bensì un' accurata nuova rivendicazione dell' ipotesi che le variazioni tra le lingue umane riflettono variazioni di una comune profonda matrice mentale, la quale, ovviamente, interfaccia con la cultura, ma non viene da essa plasmata. IDEA SEDUCENTE - Pesetsky, Nevins e Rodriques giustamente insistono su una lezione centrale: ciò che è universale e comune a tutte le lingue, compreso il Piraha, non sono l' una o l' altra specifica forma linguistica, bensì un menu fisso forme linguistiche alternative, menu dal quale ciascuna lingua sceglie quanto le aggrada. Nevins in particolare insiste su un punto: «La nostra analisi conferma il grande interesse del caso Piraha, non lo sminuisce certo. Molti trovano intuitivamente seducente l' idea che le lingue siano plasmate dalla cultura e dagli stili di vita. E' interessantissimo mostrare, invece, una volta di più, proprio con una lingua insolita e per noi remota come quella dei Piraha, che esistono profonde somiglianze sintattiche tra lingue di culture molto diverse». L' antropologo brasiliano Marco Antonio Gonçalves ha raccolto tra i Piraha varie elaborate narrazioni. Eccone una, in sintesi: il demiurgo Igagai ha rigenerato il loro mondo dopo un diluvio e poi ha dato alle donne il fuoco per cuocere. Il mondo ha molti livelli, è sempre esistito, ma viene anche ricostruito ogni giorno. Forse non sono miti in senso stretto, questi dei Piraha, forse sono semplici novelle. Ma come non fare paralleli con Noè, Sisifo, Prometeo, Eraclito. Forse anche per i miti esiste un menu fisso, dal quale tutta l' umanità via via sceglie ciò che (come diceva Claude Lévi-Strauss) «è buono da pensare».

Industrial Metabolism

http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/80841e/80841E00.htm

Edited by Robert U. Ayres and Udo E. Simonis
©The United Nations University, 1994

The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations University.
United Nations University PressThe United Nations University53-70 Jingumae 5-chome, Shibuya-kuTokyo 150, JapanTel.: (03) 3499-2811. Fax: (03) 3406-7345.Telex: J25442. Cable: UNATUNIV TOKYO.
Typeset by Asco Trade Typesetting Limited, Hong KongPrinted by Permanent Typesetting and Printing Co., Ltd.,Hong KongCover design by Apex Production, Hong Kong
UNUP-841ISBN 92-808-0841-9United Nations Sales No. E.93.III.A.303500 P

Contents
Note to the reader from the UNUAcknowledgementsIntroduction
Part 1: General implications
1. Industrial metabolism: Theory and policy
What is industrial metabolism?The materials cycleMeasures of industrial metabolismPolicy implications of the industrial metabolism perspectiveReferences
2. Ecosystem and the biosphere: Metaphors for human-induced material flows
IntroductionThe ecosystem analogueThe environmental spheres analogue: Atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphereSummary and conclusionsReferences
3. Industrial restructuring in industrial countries
IntroductionIdentifying indicators of environmentally relevant structural changeStructural change as environmental reliefEnvironmentally relevant structural change: Empirical analysisTypology of environmentally relevant structural changeSpecific conclusionsGeneral conclusions
4. Industrial restructuring in developing countries: The case of India
Industrial metabolism and sustainable developmentIndustry and sustainable developmentResource utilizationEnergy efficiency: An overviewEnergy use in Indian industry: A case-studyConclusionsReferences
5. Evolution, sustainability, and industrial metabolism
IntroductionTechnical progress and reductionismThe mechanical paradigmThe evolution of ecological structureDiscussion
Part 2: Case-studies
6. Industrial metabolism at the national level: A case-study on chromium and lead pollution in Sweden, 1880-1980
IntroductionThe use of chromium and lead in SwedenCalculation of emissionsThe development of emissions over timeThe emerging immission landscapeConclusionsReferences
7. Industrial metabolism at the regional level: The Rhine Basin
IntroductionGeographic features of the Rhine basinMethodologyThe example of cadmiumConclusionsReferences
8. Industrial metabolism at the regional and local level: A case-study on a Swiss region
IntroductionMethodologyResultsConclusionsReferences
9. A historical reconstruction of carbon monoxide and methane emissions in the United States, 1880-1980
IntroductionCarbon monoxide (CO)Methane (CH4)References
10. Sulphur and nitrogen emission trends for the United States: An application of the materials flow approach
IntroductionSulphur emissionsNitrogen oxides emissionsConclusionReferences
11. Consumptive uses and losses of toxic heavy metals in the United States, 1880-1980
IntroductionProduction-related heavy metal emissionsEmissions coefficients for productionConsumption-related heavy metal emissionsEmissions coefficient for consumptionHistorical usage patternsConclusionsReferences
AppendixPart 3: Further implications
12. The precaution principle in environmental management
IntroductionPrecaution and "industrial metabolism"Precaution: A case-studyHistory of the precaution principleThe precaution principle in international agreementsPrecaution on the European stagePrecaution as a science-politics gamePrecaution on the global stageReferences
13. Transfer of clean(er) technologies to developing countries
IntroductionSustainable developmentEnvironmentally sound technology, clean(er) technologyIndustrial metabolismKnowledge and technology transferEndogenous capacityCrucial elements of endogenous capacity-buildingInternational cooperation for clean(er) technologiesConclusionsTwo case-studiesReferencesBibliography
14. A plethora of paradigms: Outlining an information system on physical exchanges between the economy and nature
IntroductionDistinguishing between "harmful" and "harmless" characteristics of socio-economic metabolism with its natural environmentOutline of an information system for the metabolism of the socio-economic system with its natural environmentAn empirical example for ESIs: Material balances and intensities for the Austrian economyPurposive interventions into life processes (PILs)ConclusionsReferences
BibliographyContributors

Riconoscere un naso da pochi pixel un software ricrea i volti nascosti

http://www.repubblica.it/2008/09/sezioni/scienza_e_tecnologia/software-volti-nascosti/software-volti-nascosti/software-volti-nascosti.html

Un algoritmo traduce i pixel attingendo da un database di volti umaniTra le possibili applicazioni l'identificazione di criminali e persone scomparse

IN aeroporto, al supermercato, mentre guidiamo: telecamere e webcam sono dappertutto e registrano i nostri movimenti proprio come aveva previsto Orwell nel suo capolavoro 1984. Ma forse neanche il visionario scrittore inglese avrebbe immaginato che un giorno saremmo riusciti a identificare un volto prendendo spunto da un fotogramma di pochi pixel. A segnare il sorpasso del presente su un futuro immaginato ha pensato l'equipe del professor Pablo Hennings-Yeomans, ricercatore della Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, che ha messo a punto un software capace di ricostruire i tratti del viso basandosi su immagini in bassissima risoluzione. Un'applicazione che potrebbe essere usata in mille modi, dall'identificazione di criminali e persone scomparse al recupero di video e foto sul web. Al di là dei risvolti pratici, ciò che gli studiosi hanno annunciato con orgoglio all'International Conference on Biometrics 2008 è che in materia di identificazione facciale è stato fatto un bel passo avanti. "I sistemi usati oggi - spiega Hennings-Yeomans - tengono conto di luce, angolazione del viso e tipo di telecamera usata, ma non fanno che trasformare un'immagine in bassa risoluzione in un'altra che non esiste. Da una foto sfocata, il computer ricostruisce un volto riconoscibile all'occhio umano ma spesso diverso da quello di chi si sta cercando". Il software progettato dai ricercatori della Pennsylvania utilizza invece un algoritmo che traduce i pixel in bassa risoluzione in immagini reali, ricavando le informazioni necessarie proprio da un database di 300 volti umani. Da ogni faccia, il sistema "estrae" le caratteristiche lineari e le codifica, creando un'associazione immediata tra immagine digitale in bassa risoluzione e tratti del viso.
Insieme all'ingegnere informatico B. Vijaya Kumar e al ricercatore Simon Baker della Microsoft Research, Hennings-Yeomans ha programmato un software che unisce la precisione di un algoritmo di alta risoluzione alla gamma di informazioni dell'altro, programmato per la catalogazione dei lineamenti. "In questo modo - continua il ricercatore - si evitano distorsioni che, specie in campo forense, possono essere pericolose". Il progetto "Recognition of low-resolution faces using multiple still images and multiple cameras" è stato già sperimentato con successo e funziona ancora meglio se si utilizzano immagini provenienti da videocamere diverse. Naturalmente, mettono in guardia gli autori, il software è migliorabile. "Ma presto cercherete e troverete le cose su Google inserendo un frammento di immagine, invece che un testo. Presto anche le immagini più irriconoscibili non avranno segreti", conclude Hennings-Yeomans. Attenzione, dunque, perché il grande occhio non solo ci guarda, ma è anche capace di riconoscerci da lontano. Con gran sollievo di avvocati, pm e forze dell'ordine. Anche se l'intimità del cuore, come scriveva Orwell, resta imprevedibile.

BlackBox Project in an abandoned coal mine

http://www.techworld.com/green-it/news/index.cfm?newsID=10667

Sun and a consortium of other businesses are going to lower Blackbox self-contained computing facilities into a Japanese coal mine to set up an underground datacentre, using up to 50 percent less power than a ground-level datacentre.

The coolant will be ground water and the site's temperature is a constant 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) all year, meaning no air-conditioning will be needed outside the containers. This reduces the energy required for the water chillers, used with surface-level Blackbox containers.
The group estimates that up to $9 million of electricity costs could be saved annually if the centre were to run 30,000 server cores.
Sun is working with eleven other companies, including Internet Initiative Japan - an ISP, BearingPoint, Itochu Techno-Solutions and NS Solutions. They will form a joint venture with Sun. NTT Communications and Chuo University are also involved.
The disused coal mine is located in the Chubu region on Japan's Honshu island. Sun will build 30 Blackbox self-contained datacentres containing a total of 10,000 servers (cores). This can be increased to 30,000 cores if there is the demand for it.
The containers will be lowered 100m into the mine and linked to power, water cooling and network lines via external connectors.
Sun has been developing its Blackbox concept for three years and a typical one has 250 servers mounted in seven racks inside a standard 20-foot shipping container. Sun says that With T-series processors, a single Blackbox can hold up to 2,000 cores, providing 8,000 simultaneous processing threads.
Such a subterranean datacentre will be easier to secure against unauthorised entry and terrorist attacks. The Blackbox containers are robust enough to withstand earthquakes, being capable of withstanding a quake of magnitude 6.7 on the Richter scale. The Nihonkai-Chubu earthquake shook the region in 1983.

The project has been initially costed at $405 million and the site should start offering datacentre services to public and private sector customers in April, 2010.