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Internet Could Act As Ecological Early Warning System
Wired is reporting that ecologists think the internet could act as an early ecological warning system based on data mining human interactions. While much of this work has been based on systems like Google Flu Trends, the system will remain largely theoretical for the near future. "The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can't keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It's more crowd mining than crowd sourcing."
Anything that allows quick transmission of data would help as a warning system.
Don't mine me, bro.
It's too bad predictive markets have been ruled politically impossible.
If you create a futures market for prediction of future events you give people incentive to share the info they have, and a way to benefit from putting this information on the market, to pay them for sharing knowledge. The Pentagon tried to create such a market for terrorist attacks a number of years ago and the political establishment caught wind of it and murdered it in its crib, calling it a cynical way to make money from terrorist attacks. The truth is, it's a damn effective way to get people to share rare but critical info and no other mechanism is as effective.
This reminds me of an old quote that is apropos in today's political and news-climate: "We should never choose what we want to be true over what we know to be true." Politics shouldn't kill things that produce results.
So, if you want to predict ecological disasters, nothing is stopping us from doing things in a similar way. Some lonely janitor in a nuclear facility with inside info about how poorly the place is being run could bet a thousand dollars in the ecological futures market that said reactor was going to experience an environmental problem within the next year and that would quickly become a sign, as others in the know bet the same way, that the place needs attention and needs it now.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
http://www.xkcd.com/552/
From TFA:
"Web crawlers can collect information on the drivers of ecosystem change, rather than the resultant ecological responses," they write.
Which assumes they have a good model of what's driving the changes in the first place. Of course, I presume data miners are well aware of these problems. Are there any experts on it here who can briefly describe how effective (or not) the current techniques are at sifting gold from the silt?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
...data mining human interactions
Depending on what human interaction they're mining, I might be in favor of strip mining.
greed@All_Evils:~#
I could be a little off base - it's happened before, I'm sure it'll happen again - but this sounds like a load of shit.
We already know there's a problem, what we need to do is fix it.
I don't think that looking into articles on the internet is even close to a solution. It just sounds like a group of people that are good with data trying to cash in on some grants or corporate funding. We don't need more spin doctors.
They need to get off of their asses and do something useful, like take part in some recycling.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
Will you guys stop griping and eat yer soylent green? You'll feel much better and less gripey on a full stomach of ground-up stomach (and other bits).
Then we will know Gaia is pissed.
early warning as in someone posting to twitter that they're abandoning their penthouse due to the rising waters?
yeah, that's a bit late for an early warning.
I can't remember most of the details, but the idea was that mobile phone users could snap pictures of poor (or good) environmental practices, and geolocating would pin them to a map.
people are TERRIBLE witnesses to events. ask 2 people what they thought happened and you will get 2 different stories. just look at how crap the mainsteam media is at reporting on science subjects, and your telling me you want to use this as a data feed to determine the state of the planet? the red light for "everything is fucked" will be flashing constantly no matter what because no one ever writes stories about stuff that's fine.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
So by the time we burn more electricity to filter out the bullshit and gross errors we'll be well seated to look at a data set that say we've done too little too late.
Sounds just like everything else on the net if you ask me.
Most climate change theories put the temperature shift at fractions of a degree every decade. But this is too fast to keep up with the information? Most areas with extensive internet are already under 24X7 satellite surveillance that can measure temperature and precipitation. What are they expecting to get out of this? If I'm sick, I search for "flu remedy". I will likely be sick tomorrow. It is possible I've spread germs and others will get sick. A new trend of searches for "flu remedy" is a decent indicator that people are concerned about the flu, and that is a decent indicator that they know sick people. If I'm cold when I go out, I search for "winter coat". It may or may not be cold tomorrow, but probably will be since cold days group together. It is likely other people are also cold. But this isn't a predictive indicator. I'm cold because the temp already has dropped. The weatherman knows this, and I may have done my search because he said it was going to be cold tomorrow. The satellite knows this. Vast records are kept about how cold it was in Podunk, Kansas. You could predict that coat searches will go up because it was cold, but once people are searching for coats it's as a result of data you've already got from much more scientific measurements. Even if you could find a method that was predictive, what indication is there that populations, even if good at predicting short term weather (I'm not convinced), are competent in any way at predicting long term climate changes? Are they really arguing that the people, many of whom have a disturbing habit of living on flood plains, barrier islands and below sea level, are going to produce accurate data about future environmental shifts? It seems far more likely that this is a chance for someone to do research using a cool new toy. Our climate models current are pretty universal in their failure to predict the future, and that's with tons of solid data. This seems like a buzzword filled hole designed to sound urgent and cutting edge. An unproven model using an unproven data collection method can be used to justify any conclusion that will keep this project funded as long as it sounds cool enough to the people footing the bill.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
ecologists think the internet could act as an early ecological warning system based on data mining human interactions
I think Aesop's fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf would probably apply here.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver --Proverbs 25:11
help
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
...only thing what Internet can offer, is the free information and freedom to all citizens to express them selfs without a fear that governments and companies will "hunt them down"?
What if Internet is the really the early warning system, but not for global warming or similar, but for knowledge and correct information.
Internet is a Threat (with capitalized T) for those who posses the power to control governments and whole world. Free information is that what makes them afraid. If people would have freedom and could really affect things what surrounds them. These people who has the real power, would loose it right away. Democracy is just a fake what is throw over the truth and the real power. Media is just a tool for those. And all what they want normal people to do, is to buy products what they sells and buy some more and speak by those words what they choose and be quiet from those things, what they do not want us to know.
Internet can only bring the knowledge to us and warn us from evil things. If we just want to use it correctly. Just say No for DRM and all other sensor and you make sure that your children's are free in future.
We already are overpopulated, we already are consuming much more than the biosphere is able to produce with sustainability and we know it.
So, anything that we should do when the warning system fires, we should be doing NOW.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
The real markets only collapsed because the government messed with them.
That's only part of the story. I'm a libertarian, but I've lived too long in the 3rd world to accept the idea that private enterprise is going to build certain critical infrastructure (like roads, sewers, etc.)
If the government hadn't made it profitable to make bad loans, the banks wouldn't have done it.
The bad loans are only the tip of the iceberg. The real monster is all the outstanding derivatives. I don't think anyone knows how big it really is, estimates vary by the hundreds of trillions of dollars how much it is, and the most pessimistic figures I've seen dwarf global GDP.
The bad loans weren't the root cause of the problem per se, the problem was that they were packaged into other financial instruments and sold as AAA debt. If they had been treated as the bad loans they truly were, we have enough regulation in place to deal with that.
The governmental blame lies in encouraging very smart people being required by law to do something really dumb (issue bad loans) and leaving the only (temporary) avenue of escape as doing something "innovative" outside the existing financial system.
It's kind of sad in a way. Bookies have had this all figured out for ages. They adjust odds on the bets (like financial derivative instruments) so that no matter which side of the bet wins, they end up paying out something less than they take in. All of the Wall Street bookies appear to have been betting on financial good times continuing forever and that is well-documented in history as being a major mistake.
Does this imply that we should move Wall Street to The Strip in Las Vegas? We would have probably been better off in the long run if it had been done before ...
Are there any experts on it here who can briefly describe how effective (or not) the current techniques are at sifting gold from the silt?
I would imagine so. In the old days, we used to call this a "bullshit filter". So long as you have a good representative sample, statistical methods Just Plain Work. I described some of this in a previous message in this thread.
The biggest danger in any of this sort of work is wanting the results to come out the way you wish them to. If I took a direct poll of my friends and coworkers I talk to, the approval rating of the man bowling 129 in the White House basement would be just around 0, but that is obviously not a representative sample.
I think I wrote a /. journal entry on this topic. If I haven't, I should.
Disclaimer:
I'm from the old school of data mining and not up on the state of the art. And, I do not work for Google.
We already are overpopulated, we already are consuming much more than the biosphere is able to produce with sustainability and we know it.
Maybe, no, and no. There are all sorts of hysterical claims that the "carrying capacity" of Earth is lower than it currently is. To be blunt, we have plenty of food excess now, we have little evidence of this lack of sustainability.
It looks like, in the US, the per-acre yeild for wheat production has increased, over the past century, at about the same rate of population. At the same time, fewer people are involved in agriculture, and the price of food is declining. The amount of land used for farming seems to be decreasing. From the looks of it, the production of food follows much the same model as the production of other common widely distributed goods. Over time, methods grow more efficient, the price drops, fewer people are needed to produce the good, and labor shifts from actual production to efficiency engineering and new product development.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
Douglas Adams was right. ;)
..., and the price of food is declining. ...
You just can't be living in the same U.S. where I live.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
Here's an excellent example of human beings not being able to sense long term trends because the pain here and now looms so much larger than the good over time. While the short term trend is that fuel, and therefor food, prices are increasing, the long term trend is decline. According to the USDA In 1930's people spent about a fourth of their total income on food. In 2004 it's less than a tenth. Also, that's the consumption of food in a time when American's have grown fatter. More food is being bought for a lower percentage of a person's income.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1147437&cid=27056793
All this jerk The End of Days does here is post under multiple accounts (to mod his posts as The End of Days up) and he admitted to it in the url above.