West African fishing communities drive off ‘pirate’ fishing trawlers

fishing, over fishing, EC, EU, fishing quotas, environment, Sierra Leone, GPS, EJF

A group of 23 impoverished west African fishing communities has driven off a fleet of illegal, unreported and unregulated “pirate” trawlers by filming and reporting them when they are found in their waters. In the 18 months since the London-based Environment Justice Foundation (EJF) raised the £50,000 needed to buy and equip a small seven-metre community surveillance boat for villages in the Sherbro river area of Sierra Leone, local fishers have filmed and identified 10 international trawlers working illegally in their protected waters and have made 252 separate reports of illegal fishing. Images of the pirate ships and their GPS positions are analysed to establish the identity of the vessels and the evidence is passed on to European Union (EU) and African governments, fishing ports and other communities. Nine of the 10 ships identified by the Sierra Leonean communities were found to have licences to export their catches to Europe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/11/west-africa-fishing-pirate-trawlers?intcmp=122

Emptiness · Meanjin

Australia history apartheid boer-war white-australia-policy meanjin

Australians simply have an abysmal sense of history. And without it, with the wilful elision of the past and its present day consequences, the nation has a gnawing hole in its centre. There is an emptiness in the heart of this country. Terra Nullius remains in perpetuity, in the ignorance of the intelligentsia and in the pale, revisionist, self-congratulatory history.

http://meanjin.com.au/articles/post/emptiness/

A Time Capsule to Outlast Earth

photography time space longnow trevor-paglen art artifacts

Consumed by the idea that these technological monuments will outlive us — and after years of discussion with scientists, philosophers, artists, and anthropologists — Paglen compiled a list of 100 images culled from human history and etched them onto an ultra-archival silicon disc. The disc was designed by materials scientists at MIT and Carleton College, and has now been affixed to a communications satellite, EchoStar XVI, whose launch was set for this month from the Baikanour Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, but was delayed due to a rocket failure in August. The satellite – located at the 61.5 orbital location and containing 32 Ku-band transponders, to offer HD transmissions […] But its productive lifespan is a mere blip in the deep time of space compared to Paglen’s little golden disc, which will wait patiently, bearing its curated record of the human race, for unknowable millennia.


http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/21/pics-or-it-humanity-didn-t-happen-trevor-paglen-made-a-time-capsule-to-outlast-earth

Correlation does not imply causation: How the Internet fell in love with a stats-class cliché.

statistics slate correlation causality cliches interweb

In the decades to come, the phrase correlation does not imply causation made its way into textbooks and academic journals, while the social sciences were made over with newfangled statistics. By the 1940s, economists had devised a name for the insufficiency of correlations: They called it the “identification problem.” A flood of numbers in the postwar years may have made the anxiety more acute until its apotheosis in the present day, when Google, Amazon, and the other data juggernauts belch smoggy clouds of information and spit out correlations by the ton. “That may be as deep a sense of causation as they care about,” Porter says. “To them, perhaps, automated number-crunching stands for the highest form of knowledge that civilization has ever produced.” In that sense, the admonitory slogan about correlation and causation isn’t so much a comment posted on the Internet as a comment posted about the Internet. It’s a tiny fist raised in protest against Big Data.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/10/correlation_does_not_imply_causation_how_the_internet_fell_in_love_with_a_stats_class_clich_.single.html

The 100 Most Iconic Artworks of the Last 5 Years (2007–2012)

art 2012

What are the most resonant works of art from the recent past? From among the thousands of individual works that pass through galleries and museums, which have affected the conversation in some significant way? Amid all of contemporary art’s chaotic installations and ephemeral gestures, which images have some staying power? These are the questions that ARTINFO set out to answer with its list of “100 Most Iconic Artworks From the Last 5 Years.”

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/826311/the–100-most-iconic-artworks-of-the-last–5-years

Pigeons may ‘hear’ magnetic fields

biology, navigation, mesmerism, magnetism, pigeons

Pigeons’ remarkable navigational feats have long been pegged to the birds’ ability to sense magnetic fields, but pinning down how they do so has frustrated scientists for years. Work published today in Science shows that individual cells seem to encode information on a magnetic field’s direction, intensity and polarity1. The work also suggests that these signals come from a part of the inner ear called the lagena, further complicating matters for researchers in the field.

http://www.nature.com/news/pigeons-may-hear-magnetic-fields–1.10540

The universe will fly like a bird

technology blindness, technolgy, futurism, humanities, singularity, ai, spaceweaver, rene

I admire Ray Kurzweil’s advocacy of radical ideas. However, like so many scientists and tech mavens he has never been able to frame the essential humanistic components of his master plan in a compelling way. When you promote powerful notions of human transformation it obviously becomes important not to portray humanity as something that must be overcome. Therefore it would seem to be essential to include a Future Humanities department as part of the Singularity University’s curriculum.

http://spacecollective.org/rene/4708/The-universe-will-fly-like-a-bird

Amidst all the attention given to the sciences as to how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of…

“Amidst all the attention given to the sciences as to how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered“useless,” will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously. The arts are the science of enjoying life.”

–John Maeda

Resiliency, Risk, and a Good Compass: Tools for the Coming Chaos

resilience, joi ito, compass, systems, failure, principles, risk, education, learning, innovation

There are nine or so principles to work in a world like this: Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety. You want to focus on the system instead of objects. You want to have good compasses not maps. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it. It disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience. It’s the crowd instead of experts. It’s a focus on learning instead of education.

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/resiliency-risk-and-a-good-compass-how-to-survive-the-coming-chaos/

Distance 01: “What Designers Know” by Jon Whipple

research, design, dsign

Because we already know a great deal, we can move research from a step in the design process to an ongoing, agency-wide activity: we can adopt a distributed research model. This model would result in better, more focused work, allowing us to spend more of our energy on specific issues relevant to the project at hand. It would also help us meet deadlines, because we can capitalize on the experience of the designer and community while maintaining a good relationship with the client. In this essay, I’ll describe how research is built and distributed across teams, and how it can benefit all of us to focus on institutional knowledge.

http://distance.cc/issues/01/01b-Jon-Whipple.html