Friday, May 10, 2013
Carbon Dioxide Level Passes Long-Feared Milestone
[ed. Don't worry, it's just a political ploy.]
The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.
Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.
The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.
“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.
Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.
The new measurement came from analyzers high atop Mauna Loa, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for monitoring the worldwide carbon dioxide trend.
Devices there sample clean, crisp air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, producing a record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely tracked for half a century.
Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa. But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, according to data from both NOAA and Scripps.
Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle and the level will dip below 400 this summer, as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say that will be a brief reprieve — the moment is approaching when no measurement of the ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below 400.
“It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E. Raymo, a Columbia University earth scientist.
by Justin Gillis, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Jonathan Kingston/Aurora Select, for The New York Times
Joe Biden: The Rolling Stone Interview
As Biden tells it, these days he and the president see eye to eye on all policy issues. Only their nuances are slightly different. It's not far-fetched to think that Biden will run for president in 2016 on Obama's coattails. This notion surprises many Republicans, who feel Obama is foundering and that Biden, who will be 74 at the beginning of the next presidential term, is too old. But Biden is smart to stay close to Obama, whose public-approval rating hovers just below 50 percent (a number that rises to around 75 percent among registered Democrats). Assuming Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, she will sell herself as a successor to her husband, harkening back to the economic heyday of the 1990s. By contrast, if Biden gets into the race, it will be as an Obama Democrat promising to expand on the record of the last two terms.
What matters the most to Biden these days is whether he can persuade Congress to enact meaningful gun-control laws. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama asked Biden to head up the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force. Though his efforts so far have failed to overcome congressional resistance, he says that he is not giving up. If serious gun-control legislation is passed in the next three years – and Biden is convinced it will – he will deserve the lion's share of the credit.
My takeaway from my one-hour White House interview with Joe Biden is that he must be considering a presidential run. There will be too much Obama-era unfinished business – implementing the Affordable Care Act, fighting for climate-change initiatives, for example – for Biden to throw in the towel. His strengths as a candidate are his blue-collar persona, family values, lifetime support of labor unions and farmers, foreign-policy expertise and stouthearted belief that the Obama administration's record of accomplishment – from the economic recovery to the killing of Osama bin Laden – has been historic. With Air Force Two at his disposal and his two superbright sons, Hunter and Beau, probably working as his chief advisers, Biden can give Hillary Clinton a run for her money. Although she will have an unquestioned advantage among women, it's not inconceivable to think that labor unions, environmentalists, African-Americans, LGBT voters and small-business owners will prefer the hypercaffeinated, hard-charging vice president. Like Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a presumed Republican candidate, Biden has learned to turn the sound-bite culture on its head by speaking from the gut. Though he's been a major political player since the Nixon years, Biden has pulled off the trick of not seeming like politics-as-usual. It could be a mistake to underestimate his populist appeal. And it's hard to imagine that this highly ambitious man will choose not to pursue the office he's wanted all his life.
by Douglas Brinkley, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Mark Seliger
Departures
“How can he watch television when he’s asleep?” I asked my father.
We heard the toilet flush and out walked Tutti, my uncle’s girlfriend.
“How’s he look?” she said, gesturing to the hat.
“Like a dead farmer,” my father said.
“Whoa, I just had déjà vu,” Tutti said, her hand at her chest.
“Any news?” my father asked.
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” She could tell my father was unhappy about the hat. “This is just to keep me entertained. I’ve been here for hours. I didn’t mean anything by it.” She took the hat off his head and put it over the lamp on the nightstand.
“What are you two doing this afternoon?” she asked.
“We didn’t have anything planned other than to visit the hospital. Maybe we’ll go down to the beach for a little while. Right, bud?”
My father patted me on the back.
“I would just love it if I could come with you.”
“What if he wakes up?” I said.
“He won’t wake up while we’re at the beach,” Tutti said.
Tutti was from Ottawa. She didn’t live with my uncle. She had a condo in Naples, Florida, provided for her by another lover, a wealthy man who sold Mercedes-Benzes and turned over houses that had been foreclosed on. She was in her mid-forties and had been married to her high school boyfriend, who managed a Tim Horton’s doughnut shop. She still saw him, but, according to my father, whose openness about that time, years later, provides most of the exposition here, wanted to experience much more than that man could give. She flew to Canada in the summers and stayed with him for a month or two, and then flew to Boston to be with my uncle in his little cottage near the beach on Cape Cod. Her lover in Florida unknowingly paid for everything. Tutti’s cover was that she was one of the top interior decorators in the world. She had phony business cards and a client list of rich-sounding names. I thought she was beautiful, but I didn’t have much to compare her to. My mother had died when I was three. She was an artist. Her paintings hung in our house. There is one of a cathedral in Mexico that I particularly like and that I have with me still. The cathedral is off to the side of a dirt road. The viewer stands on the road, considering whether or not to enter the cathedral. She died from a brain embolism. My father and I were asleep when it happened. “She died dreaming,” my father used to say. In photographs she was still and easy to forget. But Tutti moved. Her breasts swung. Her skin changed colors. Her hair glowed in sunlight.
by Patrick Dacey, Guernica | Read more:
Image from Flickr via anyjazz65
Finally, Serious DMCA Reform
But copyright reform groups panned these bills. Not only did they provide only narrow and temporary relief on the cell phone unlocking issue, the groups said, but they completely ignored the underlying problem: a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that makes it a crime to "circumvent" copy protection even for lawful purposes.
New legislation sponsored by Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Thomas Massie (R-KY), Anna Eshoo (D-CA), and Jared Polis (D-CO) takes a broader approach to the issue. In addition to explicitly legalizing cell phone unlocking, the Unlocking Technology Act of 2013 also modifies the DMCA to make clear that unlocking copy-protected content is only illegal if it's done in order to "facilitate the infringement of a copyright." If a circumvention technology is "primarily designed or produced for the purpose of facilitating noninfringing uses," that would not be a violation of copyright.
For example, Lofgren's bill would likely make it legal for consumers to rip DVDs for personal use in much the same way they've long ripped CDs. It would remove legal impediments to making versions of copyrighted works that are accessible to blind users. And it would ensure that car owners have the freedom to service their vehicles without running afoul of copyright law.
"Americans should not be subject to fines and criminal liability for merely unlocking devices and media they legally purchased," said Rep. Lofgren in a press release. "If consumers are not violating copyright or some other law, there's little reason to hold back the benefits of unlocking so people can continue using their devices."
Lofgren's bill attracted enthusiastic support from activists and advocacy groups that had been lukewarm about previous unlocking bills.
by Timothy B. Lee, ARS Technica | Read more:
Image: topcat_angel
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Social Robots: Our Charismatic Friends in an Automated Future
Life is not necessarily easier with machines -- technology can be high maintenance -- but it can be more rewarding. We are already cyborgs, conjoined with our mobile phones, social-media identities, apps and automotive exoskeletons. An augmented self doesn't forget birthdays, always knows the best curry joint in town (as long as there's Wi-Fi), and can win Olympic medals after losing legs from a childhood disease.
As a robot designer, I'm not excited by the paradigm of a robot that will -- painstakingly -- imitate each of my capabilities so that I don't have to do anything for myself. I can already do the things I can do. Humans and machines have different capabilities, which is the reason why we can achieve more together.
Sending a robot to Mars makes sense, because they are better suited for the rigours of the trip. However, humans must manage the mission objectives and deal with unexpected situations. Human flexibility and creativity have no parallel in machines, but if we can rely on the capabilities of robots, extensions of mankind can touch the far ends of our solar system.
Social robotics takes this concept one step further. Humans are social creatures. As soon as we encounter a machine capable of motion, sensing and some modicum of volition, we place that machine into the social hierarchy of human relations. I have mourned the loss of a stolen laptop as if it were a loved one, and I bought my Nao robot Data, rather than return it to Aldebaran Robotics, the company I was working for at the time, because I had bonded with it in the way I might with a puppy. I'm now a doctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, and the robot splurge is the reason that I don't own a car.
In the way that sending machines to Mars makes sense, one of the reasons automation has been so effective is that the distribution of labour is entirely severed. By partnering with machines, we gain capabilities beyond our own limitations. We can already fly, talk to someone on the other side of the planet and cure disease, so what super-human capacities might we invent when we come up with ways for robots to integrate seamlessly into our homes, offices, schools, hospitals or entertainment centres?
For the last decade, I have been a researcher of social robotics. Rather than asking humans to learn a programming language to communicate with our creations, my team and I seek to create robots that grasp enough about human sociability and convention so that they are able to meet us in the middle. And designing robots for people means understanding ourselves. Our brain structure affects whether we interpret motion as aggressive or friendly, alive or inanimate. Our psychology influences our snap judgments of intent. I would not hire a gardener I did not get along with or trust. Similarly, a successful robot must connect with us at a visceral level.
by Heather Knight, Wired | Read more:
Image: Spencer Lowell
The Fight Against Small Apartments
One neighbor was Alan Gossett. Gossett was trying to sell his blue Craftsman house, which shared an alley with the new development. Standing on the corner of his rear deck, Gossett pointed through the trees to the half-built structure and said, "I think this is going to be a magnet for very sketchy people."
Why sketchy?
According to permitting paperwork, the building was a commonplace cluster of six town houses—the sort that would typically attract well-to-do buyers. But inside each town house, the developer was building up to eight tiny units (about 150 to 250 square feet each, roughly the size of a carport) to be rented out separately. The tenants would each have a private bathroom and kitchenette, with a sink and microwave, but they would share one full kitchen for every eight residents. The rent would be cheap—starting at $500 a month, including all utilities and Wi-Fi—making this essentially affordable housing in the heart of the city. And, remarkably, for affordable housing, it was built without any subsidies from the city's housing levy. But Gossett was bracing for 46 low-income renters in the space where he'd been expecting six new homeowners instead.
Gossett and other neighbors felt hoodwinked, they told me.
There was no public notification and no review process that allowed neighbors to pose objections. This was due to a loophole in the permits: The city and developers classified the building as six units (with up to eight bedrooms each), instead of as an apartment building with dozens of units, which would have required a more public process. Neighbors said they feared that the area wasn't ready for so many new residents and that the influx of newcomers would usurp on-street parking. But Gossett also seemed concerned by who his new neighbors might be.
"Anyone who can scrape up enough money to live month-to-month can live there," he said, worried that low-income interlopers would jeopardize his chances to sell his own house. "I don't think most people want to live next to a boarding house with itinerant people living in it."
This style of development is called microhousing, or in the case of this particular project, the developer, Calhoun Properties, has trademarked the name aPodments. Gossett and other neighbors said they should be banned. (...)
Seattle is a leader on the nation's bell curve of prosperity, ranking in the top five local economies since 2010, according to a Policom Corporation report. Unemployment is less than 6 percent, construction cranes swing across the skyline, and vacancy rates for apartments are at a scarce 3 percent in some central neighborhoods. Affordable housing is virtually nonexistent. In the past five years, the monthly rental rates for studios have increased 15 percent and one-bedroom apartments have increased 21 percent, according to real-estate economist Matthew Gardner. The price of an average studio apartment in Seattle last month hit $991, and one-bedrooms soared to $1,230, according to the real-estate tracking firm Dupre + Scott.
In this environment, microhousing is in high demand. "Kids are coming out of college, and in not much smaller numbers than the baby boom generation—and are they wanting to live in Issaquah?" Gardner asks. "No, they are not. They are going to want to live downtown. But when you start looking at average unit size, it will be increasingly unaffordable. But they are willing to live in a smaller space if the absolute dollars they pay are less." Since I visited that aPodment in 2009—the first of its kind built for that purpose—several developers have applied for permits to construct 44 more microhousing projects, according to the city's Department of Planning and Development. Seven are complete, and 37 others are getting permits or being built. In all, the city forecasts that 2,371 microhousing units are slated to enter the rental market.
Many community groups have made it their mission to halt this trend. They see this wave of microhousing as an invasive species. In their eyes, developers stand to get rich by transforming beautiful residential areas—defined by lawns and plentiful parking—into crowded, dilapidated slums of inhumanely small homes with shared kitchens and undesirable tenants.
by Dominic Holden, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: Kelly O
Good People
[ed. From a compilation of Russian dash cams. A nice antidote to the daily mayhem we usually see on the 24-hour news cycle.]
via:
Elizabeth Warren Q&A: Students “Deserve the Same Break that Big Banks Get”
Warren was discussing the first bill she has introduced in the Senate, a plan released on Wednesday to address the crisis of outstanding student debt – which topped $1 trillion this year, with over 37 million Americans owing thousands of dollars in higher education costs that could take decades to pay back.
Student debt is now the second-highest form of debt in America – behind only mortgage debt – with the number of borrowers and the average balance increasing 70 percent since 2004. Research from the New York Federal Reserve Board indicates that this has begun to have an impact on the broader economy, with young people burdened by student debt more reluctant to take out auto or home loans. And without congressional action, this will get worse: on July 1, interest rates on federally subsidized Stafford student loans will double, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. This will effectively raise costs for 8 million student borrowers by $1,000.
President Obama’s budget proposal would set subsidized student loan rates at 1 percent above the interest rate it costs the Treasury Department to borrow money for the U.S. government. But a variable rate without a cap would come back to haunt students when interest rates rise again. Another proposal would simply freeze the current rate of 3.4 percent, and would institute a plan limiting payment to 10 percent of income over a 10-year period.
Warren’s plan takes it a step further. For the next year, she would reduce the subsidized student loan interest rate to the same rate that America’s largest banks pay to borrow money from the Federal Reserve at the “discount window.” Currently, banks pay a minimal 0.75 percent to borrow from the Fed, one-ninth the rate that students would pay if Congress fails to act by July 1. Under the plan, the Federal Reserve would give the Department of Education the funds necessary to equalize those rates.
Warren introduced the legislation in a Senate floor speech Wednesday morning.
This one-year stopgap, while Congress works on a permanent solution, would solve several problems. In the near term, it would save money for students, perhaps relieving some of the burden that has led them to scale back their purchases and threaten overall economic growth. In addition, the Federal Reserve has a stated policy of lowering interest rates to spur economic activity, known as quantitative easing, but they have had difficulty extending the benefits of QE beyond Wall Street and the wealthy. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted as much last February, noting in a speech that while QE has helped housing and stock markets, difficulty in obtaining mortgage credit has meant that “the strong actions taken by the Federal Reserve … have had less effect on the housing sector and overall economic activity than they otherwise would have had.” If the Fed is looking for ways for Main Street to benefit from cheaper borrowing rates, they could hardly endorse a more appropriate policy than lowering student loan interest rates in the short term to what they give out to big banks.
by David Dayden, Salon | Read more:
Image: AP/Cliff Owen
If You Use the Web, You Are a 'Curator'
A curator ingests, analyzes and contextualizes web content and information of a particular nature onto a platform or into a format we can understand. In other words, a curator is like that person at the beach with the metal detector, surfacing items and relics of perceived value. Only, a web curator shares those gems of content with their online audiences.And since people create 571 new websites every minute, tweet175 million times per day and upload 48 hours of new video each minute, a curator's work is never done.
It seems everywhere you look on the web, a different kind of curation is cropping up. Do you use Pinterest or Tumblr? Believe it or not, you're a social curator — or you're following users who are. These social platforms are as much about repinning and reblogging content from other people (curation) as they are sharing your own ideas (creation).
Take a look at your Facebook profile, at the types of articles you save on Pocket, at the list of subreddits to which you subscribe. Notice any patterns? Maybe you tend to share cat GIFs or Pocket news about the oil crisis. Sharing those interests makes you a curator.
Some believe "curator" to be a reappropriated, throwaway term, one that simply elevates marginally focused web users.
"Guess what? Assembling a group of tangentially related things and publishing them online does not make you a curator," writes Mel Buchanan, the Hermitage Museum's assistant curator in a blog post titled "An Open Letter to Everyone Using the Word ‘Curate’ Incorrectly on the Internet." [The link to the original post has since been disabled.] "So what does it make you? A blogger? A list-maker? An arbiter of taste? Sure, I’ll take any one of those. Just stop calling yourself a curator," writes Buchanan.
by Stephanie Buck, Mashable | Read more:
Image via iStockphoto, laziesVisa
War on Prairie Dogs
More than most people, perhaps, Stapleton resident Patricia Olson feels a strong connection to animals. A veterinarian and former CEO of the world's largest nonprofit dedicated to animal health sciences, she's helped fund research studies on everything from housecats to sea lions to gorillas.
But even though she lives in a place that was once a vast grassland, Olson had never paid much attention to prairie dogs. Not until a contractor hired by Forest City, the developer in charge of transforming Stapleton from a decommissioned airport into a mixed-use, amenity-stuffed community of tomorrow, began gassing them right around the corner from her home.
A yipping, thriving colony of black-tailed prairie dogs had taken over a vacant stretch of land on the south side of East 26th Avenue, the dividing line between Aurora and Denver on the east side of Stapleton. Like many neighbors, Olson had become so accustomed to the colony that she drove slowly on 26th to avoid mashing the occasional stray darting in and out of the street. But one day, close to Thanksgiving 2011, she came home to find the land being prepped for construction and men sealing up the burrows.
The men explained to Olson that the area was slated to become a children's playground and "natural park." But first they had to exterminate the prairie dogs.
"I tried to find out why they were doing it and what poison they were using," Olson recalls. "And that's when I got really upset."
Over the next few months, Olson read up on prairie dogs — their behavior and their role as a keystone species in the shortgrass prairie ecosystem, providing food and habitat for a wide range of animals, insects and plants. She learned more than she wanted to know about the poison the men were using: aluminum phosphide, a rodenticide that, when ingested, produces highly toxic phosphine gas, internal bleeding — and, in some cases, an agonizingly slow death. (...)
Choice of lethal compounds aside, Olson thought the entire procedure smacked of bad policy. A recent study in Science suggests that prairie dogs that lose close kin disperse further, possibly in search of their lost relatives; sure enough, in recent months new burrows have appeared on 26th, flanking either side of the playground under construction. And what's the point, Olson wondered, of creating a "natural" park in which one of the most essential natural components has been removed?
"If you poison them, they go looking for Aunt Mildred and disperse," Olson says. "That's exactly what happened. It's not effective. It's not humane. So what are they doing?"
Despite the outcry, developers and park managers are doing what they've always done with Colorado's prairie dogs: waging war on them as if dealing with mosquitoes or noxious weeds. Ranchers have long regarded the lowly rodent as a flea-bitten, grass-stripping, plague-infested nuisance, and that distorted characterization has strongly shaped how urban as well as rural colonies are treated. For a keystone species, prairie dogs have virtually no protection from annihilation, particularly on private land; with little fuss, they can be shot, poisoned or even buried alive with bulldozers. State law makes it extremely difficult to relocate them across county lines, and surveys indicate that their habitat along the Front Range is becoming increasingly fragmented.
by Alan Prendergast, Denver Westworld | Read more:
Image via:
Some 370 blue-coloured carp streamers fly at the tsunami-devastated city of Higashimatsushima, Miyagi prefecture on May 3, 2013. People hoist the blue-coloured carp streamers to mourn children who died in the March 11, 2011 tsunami disaster in the city. [Credit : Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images]
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