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."

Comments

Predictive Markets

[Anenome]

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.