07.02.08
Posted in Conservation, Climate Change, Economic Development at 11:09 am by justakim
This little blurb from the Economist suggests that increasing organic farming will be detrimental to the poor because organic farming is more expensive, less productive, and uses more land. Combine that with sensationalist titles such as “Some 1.5 bln people may starve due to land erosion” and you have a disaster in the making, right?
That’s a very simplistic view of the situation.
One would think that by definition, intensive agricultural production would be more detrimental to the land than less-intensive practices. Perhaps you may have lower yield, or require more work to harvest, but in the long run it is better to preserve the land being used. Add to this the costs of seeds and rising cost of fertilizer (which is tied to the energy market, and monocultural practices that necessitate shipping food around while strangling local farmers, and one must wonder how the poor can afford to live with conventional industrial agriculture.
Distribution prices are going up. And who knows about distribution better than Wal-Mart? Over the last two years, Wal-Mart has been sourcing more produce locally. Not only are they in on the game, they’ve been anticipating it. The forward-thinking is brilliant and profitable.
Wal-Mart said that in the United States, produce travels an average 1,500 miles from farms to consumers’ homes, and it should be able to save millions of “food miles” — the distance food travels from farm to plate — through local sourcing, better packing of its trucks and improved logistics.
In an example, Wal-Mart said that by sourcing peaches in 18 states instead of just two, as it did before, it saves 672,000 food miles and 112,000 gallons of diesel fuel — or more than $1.4 million dollars in transportation costs per season.
Meanwhile, our available fish stocks are changing due to climate change and overfishing. Lobster, crab, and squid are increasing while bottom fish are decreasing. Bad news for some perhaps, but that just means more squid for me!
But Nils Stolpe, communications manager for the Garden State Seafood Association in New Jersey, argues that people’s seafood diets change for reasons apart from availability.
“The reason we’re getting more calamari is because we’re getting more sophisticated as seafood eaters,” he said.
“Ten, fifteen years ago nobody ate salmon, because we weren’t in tune with eating salmon. Now everyone’s growing it, and we’re a lot more familiar with it.”
…say what? All my Northwest brethren understand the inferiority of farmed Atlantic salmon. Where was this guy ten years ago, in a shack? Everyone growing salmon would indicate it has to do with availability. Whatever. It doesn’t matter to me if people eat squid because it’s the popular food, the price, or because they are inspired to diversity. Squid is good. Lobster is good. Crab is real good. Changes are not so good, but tasty.
Onto more bad food news… I picked up some ice cream. I accidentally picked up the wrong kind (cinnamon dulce de leche != chocolate) and in my disappointment, I was pondering the Haagen-Dazs lid and discover they are out to save the bees. They are donating funding to reserach into the mysterious disappearance of the bees.
In case you’ve missed their disapperaance,
Bustling colonies, tens of thousands strong, were emptying in a matter of days. Systematic searches for dead bees around the colonies mostly drew a blank… “Imagine waking one morning to find 80 per cent of the people in your community are just gone,” says May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
There is no shortage of potential culprits; European honeybees make up the vast majority of commercial stocks in the US and they are susceptible to myriad viral and fungal blights and two forms of parasitic mites, one of which wiped out about half of the American honeybee population in the 1980s. Yet, in this instance, the precise cause of the sudden decline, dubbed “colony collapse disorder”, remains elusive. The pattern of disappearance offers few clues, since CCD appears to be widespread and plagues non-migrating colonies as well as those that are moved from place to place to pollinate crops.
Diversity loss could be catching up to us as well. A larger diversity in pollinators leads to more successful pollination. Researchers found that diversity in time of day, and pollination height of pollnators leads to more effective pollination. Different pollinators come by at different times of day, and prefer a different height off the ground to pollinate, so they hit a certain band. Similar groups share similar body types. Some plants specialize and work with a specific pollinator and their success is linked with that one species. Others attract a diversity and benefit from diversity.
The aforementioned European honeybees have threatened many native bee species in the US, including (probably especially) kinds that don’t sting. Great choice, folks.
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06.30.08
Posted in Fun and Games, And Now for Something Completely Different, Behavior at 12:16 pm by justakim
Some online gaming companies have come to realize that customer behavior impacts sales (language warning). This article discusses how the game can be engineered to discourage certain antisocial behaviors that run rampant in multiplayer games today.
I really like not only the acknowledgment that gamer culture (or lack thereof) is a turnoff for many, and that it would be economically worthwhile to do something about it.
You don’t have to let (social filter) hurt your multiplayer game’s popularity or sales. Social environments can be designed to minimize bad behavior. Social conflict is inevitable in online gaming — but it doesn’t have to be as frequent or severe as it is.
But if you don’t design the social environment, your game will probably end up feeling like most do right now — like the lawless territories of the Wild West.
Censorship added by me.
It seems to me that online gaming will inevitably become more-or-less civilized, like a vast portion of the rest of the internet has become over the years.
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Posted in Energy at 10:03 am by justakim
Marketplace talks with a Rodeo champion about the cost of gas. These guys, who travel thousands of miles a year, are being hit hard. They’ve swapped cars for something more efficient while ditching the camper, and being more picky about which shows they attend. “They” are four bullriders.
“So what we’ve got here is a cowboy carpool?”
Ahahaha
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06.27.08
Posted in Behavior, Book at 11:54 am by justakim
It’s alright
I picked up this book expecting it to get somewhat technical about the mechanisms of the brain. However, it lacked the depth and substance I expected (in comparison to other recent popular science books). Parts of it relied upon summarizing very succinctly research findings (such as the chapter on chioce basedon Kahnaman’s work), and others seemed to lack many references at all as the author describes his theories without more than anecdotal evidence (the sort that he warns readers against).
It was nice in that it got me thinking about evolutionary effects on the brain and how different aspects might be (or appear to be) less than optimal, but the arguments were not as convincing as they could have been. Either there is more evidene from the field of psychology that the author did not bother to elaborate on and reference, or there isn’t much evidence to support his ideas at all.
It was worth reading, not so much buying.
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06.24.08
Posted in Conservation, Climate Change at 6:36 pm by justakim
Endemic California plants will become climate change refugees. As the climate changes faster than the general pace of evolution, the plants unique to California will have to find new places to live, or risk extinction.
“In nearly every scenario we explored, biodiversity suffers — especially if the flora can’t disperse fast enough to keep pace with climate change,”
…an island called California. *sniff* (book ref.)
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06.23.08
Posted in Behavior, Book at 11:08 am by justakim
A fun read.
This is a popular science presentation of statistics and statistical history focusing on the effects of randomness and our reactions to it. It is relevant in that many of these statistical and misinterpretive situations appear in economics and environmental science and is a very unintimidating introduction to the subject.
While the ideas in this book are not that extraordinary or revealing to anyone who’s taken a statistics class, this book shines in giving real-world examples of applications and misinterpretations. It was interesting enough to read even if there was nothing particularly new.
It is true that there have been many books on the subject, and the author goes into exceedingly thorough detail, but it’s well presented for what it is, and is far more engaging than many of its peers.
I actually hadn’t run into the Monty Hall problem until a couple weeks ago. Poor Marilyn,
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06.21.08
Posted in School, Book at 8:47 am by justakim
for my advisor,
The Wizard of Numbers
the spell is provocation
that lights the mind ablaze,
curiosity takes expression
and clears that foggy haze.
there is no greater motivation
than your internal need,
to find yourself the answer;
to want is to succeed.
the magic revelation
is what you learn is real
and all those sterile concepts
might have their own appeal.
so cast the spell of provocation;
evoke and you might find
one of those precious moments
where mind and soul align.
I dedicate this to my advisor, who turned one of those unpleasant subjects into something I pursue with great interest. Merely with unspoken faith in my abilities and supporting the opportunity to see something for myself, a difficult and painful activity was transformed into a surmountable, and dare I say enjoyable, challenge.
With this reminder of how interpretation impacts my life, I would like to present the principles of interpretation.
In the book Interpreting Our Heritage, Freeman Tilden laid out the original principles of interpretation; the art of presentation. His intent was to write a guide for the park service to improve how they portray natural and historic resources to visitors both in displays and in presentations. His principles have long been the building blocks from which the park service designs visitor centers, interpretive talks, displays, and various other forms of communication.
I consider these principles in many contexts; books, presentations, poetry–just about any situation where I am attempting to present something or it is being presented to me. It hadn’t occurred to me to view teaching in the interpretive framework until just recently despite the fact that I learned of this in an environmental education class. So here they are, the groundbreaking framework for understanding how we convey what we know to an audience.
I Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.
If the material does not have relevance to the student, it will be difficult to explain. How do you convey something if you do not appeal to common ground between the teacher and the student? An extreme case of this is when you’re trying to teach material and the students don’t have the math prerequisites. Once in undergrad, I was using a book with differential equations and I thought they were doing some sort of derivatives… not very useful.
A less extreme example would be working in econometrics without examples to give solid meaning to the motions being made. The stronger the connection to the material being used, the less sterile the experience will be.
II Information, as such, is not Interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based on information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information.
A list of facts has little value on their own. Anyone can memorize numbers, quotes, equations, and get nothing out of it. A list of facts may test your memorization skills, but is not conducive to learning and developing new understandings. Interpretation gives these items context and meaning.
III Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.
Teaching skills are teachable to an extent, and each teacher has a unique style. I’m sure that most people are not naturally good teachers from day one, nor does your first day destine the rest of your teaching career. It is, however, not a clear-cut skill where precise execution is possible.
IV The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.
This is the magic: you may be able to teach a student a subject they have no interest in, but they can go much further if by provocation, they do so of their own. I cannot stress the difference it makes between trying to learn something and wanting to know something.
V Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part, and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A given piece has little relevance on its own without a role in a greater whole. Even if a focus is a small piece, context should be provided to give it relevance.
People are also not so divisible and learning does not happen in a vacuum.
VI Interpretation addressed to children (say, up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults, but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program.
You can teach kids about economics so long as you understand what experiences they do and do not have.
These principles may seem simple and straightforward, but it is that same simplicity that makes the Art of War profound. There is far more to art than a few guidelines. This is just the first, the original framework from which more complex understandings can be built.
Consider the power of these thoughts though. Teaching is an art form where you take knowledge and show what it means. The material has to be made accessible by connecting to what the student already knows. Getting your students excited about a topic can do so much more than a technically excellent presentation.
This is perhaps a different wording from the evaluations filled out at the end of every class, and the way we describe ‘good’ or ‘bad’ teachers, but does it not convey why a teacher is successful or not? The ability to interpret is what it comes down to. This describes the general strengths and weaknesses of a teacher and suggests that there is always a way to improve one’s teaching ability.
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06.20.08
Posted in Behavior, Book at 6:44 am by justakim
It took me a while, but I finally finished this book by Nassim Taleb.
It’s a decent book about how randomness is misinterpreted and how that leads to false assumptions in the market that can ruin you. Just because the market’s been going up for the last 20 years doesn’t mean it’ll always go up.
He gets into a few non-market examples as well, like the OJ Simpson trial, and some history about behavioral economics.
However, the main reason why it took me so long to finish the book is that he is extremely arrogant and spends an incredible amount of time insulting everyone including the reader. Yes yes we bought your book sir. Hope you didn’t intend on a second round of this game.
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06.19.08
Posted in Energy, Conservation, Climate Change, Resources, Behavior at 11:03 pm by justakim
Killing critters vs culling herbivores
Researchers looked back upon a controversial hedgehog culling
and used “content analysis”, a framework used by social scientists that basically looks at diction (vocabulary, wording). They found that different stakeholders discussed the same situation with completely different language.
“The pro-hedgehog lobby wrote about killing and animal welfare issues and used emotive or informal vocabulary, whereas the pro-bird lobby used more scientific language and vocabulary concerning wildlife and the Hebrides. Interestingly, media coverage of this controversy tended to use language similar to that of the pro-hedgehog groups. Our results show how content analysis allows differences in focus between stakeholder groups to be highlighted in a quantitatively rigorous way, and that this can encourage a dialogue to develop in which all stakeholders are at least addressing the same issues.”
…quantitatively rigorous? Yeah well, I don’t think you have to run statistical tests on word counts to know they’re approaching the situation differently and using their written skills to best frame their position. it does however make it easier to identify and address differences.
Miles Per Word
Changing how fuel efficiency is described can make a difference in what cars people buy. Rather than describing efficiency in miles traveled per gallon, if one were to describe it in gallons per 100 miles traveled, it would be easier to see how much of a difference it would make to take a very low efficiency car and improve it.
At 10 mpg, it takes 10 gallons to travel 100 miles. If that were doubled to 20 mpg, it would take 5 gallons. You save 5 gallons.
A car with 25 mpg takes 4 gallons to travel the same distance. Double that to 50 mpg would take 2. You save only 2 gallons.
We’re better off by having people ditch SUV’s for average cars than replacing average cars with better ones. This may seem pretty obvious for after all the SUV is the symbol of everything anti-environmental, but perhaps moreso when presented slightly differently.
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06.16.08
Posted in School at 7:34 am by justakim
I almost missed my graduation Saturday. Our car was stuck in the snow on a forest road off the side of Mt. Hood overnight somewhere around here. Check out street view!
Throughout a long night of straight digging, we had economics to entertain us.
Substitution
While carbon-fiber kayak oars are completely inferior to snow shovels for shoveling snow, they’ll do in a pinch. They’re ridiculously tough. The thin blade edge is great for cutting into the snow, it’s just not so good at scooping water in a solid state. We did a lot of atrocious makeshift substitutions, but hey, it worked!
Supply and demand
Referencing Princess Bride, I said “If only we had a holocaust cloak” which led me to think about the contents of the car. We’d just gone to Costco and had a dozen rolls of paper towels… and no gloves. We started wrapping half a dozen sheets per hand, replacing them when they got too wet. Yes, I’m a terrible, terrible environmentalist, but I still have all my fingers.
After 12 hours of digging, we finally got free. I was late for the opening but had maybe 30 minutes of breathing room before they called the hood parade. I can tell you that I was much happier to be there than if nothing happened.
Don’t wander around the uninhabited bits of Oregon in “March” conditions the night before graduation.
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