#Fenner School of Environment and Society

[sciencespies]

We need to talk about the rapid decline in insects around the world

https://sciencespies.com/environment/we-need-to-talk-about-the-rapid-decline-in-insects-around-the-world/

We need to talk about the rapid decline in insects around the world

Apocalypse or revolution? Depending on the study making headlines, insect numbers around the world are either in dramatic freefall or simply an alarming state of flux, with some species even benefiting from changes in climate.

While researchers debate the details, most are in agreement that our existing lifestyle is fundamentally linked with insect numbers, and unless we act fast, we can expect trouble in the future.

In a series of papers published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), experts sum up the state of insect numbers as a measure of biomass, individual numbers, and species. And no matter which way we cut it, it’s an issue we really need to get on top of.  

Saul Cunningham from the Australian National University wasn’t one of the 56 authors contributing to the commentary. But as Director of the Fenner School of Environment & Society at the university, he’s aware of just how important insects are to our communal wellbeing.  

“Insects are hugely important to ecological processes that humans rely on, including the provision of food and recycling of nutrients into the soil,” says Cunnigham.

“That is why they have been described as the little things that run the world.”

Those ‘little things’ have been running vital ecological processes for hundreds of millions of years, diversifying into more than a million extant species. And that’s just the ones we’ve counted. It’s hard to imagine a world without them.

Yet in recent decades the ranges and proportions of many species have dipped significantly, most likely due to factors such as changing temperatures, rainfall, habitat loss, and pesticide use.

Most commonly cited statistics put estimates of insect biomass loss at around 1 to 2 percent per annum – a shocking figure made all the more alarming when local variations are taken into account, with some areas seeing losses of 10 percent or more every year.

“They also show that insect declines are not universal, with losses not apparent for some other regions,” says Cunnigham.

“The studies add significant urgency to the case that we need to develop agricultural practices that support healthy and diverse insect populations.”

Not only is the decline not universal, in some parts of the globe insects are having a hey-day. Especially in temperate climates, many species are booming, most likely due to rising temperatures pushing ranges of habitat out towards the poles.

It’s a great time to be alive if you’re a southern British species of moth, for example. With environmental protection laws cleaning up waterways, populations of aquatic bugs and beetles are on the rise.

But just because the big picture is complicated, it doesn’t mean we ought to be complacent. For one thing, the loss of even a few less robust species in the midst of global climate change could be a sign that worse is to come.

As to thriving insect populations, a surplus of moths, water-striders and cockroaches won’t mean much when crops fail in the wake of lost pollinators, or garbage overflows for want of specialist detritivores.

Entomologist Akito Kawahara from the Florida Museum of Natural History co-authored one of the journal’s opinion pieces, urging communities to do more to ensure there are plenty of creepy-crawlies around to continue their hard work.

“In the US alone, wild insects contribute an estimated US$70 billion to the economy every year through free services such as pollination and waste disposal. That’s incredible, and most people have no idea,” says Kawahara.

He and his team outlined a handful of simple actions we can all undertake to do our bit to ensure local biodiversity remains strong.

For example, keeping outside lights off at night, or switching bulbs to avoid luring insects away from habitats where they’re doing more good; washing your car and driveway with biodegradable soaps, and using soy-based driveway sealants.

Some of the suggestions don’t even require lifting a hand. Got a lawn? Hold off on mowing for a few weeks. Better still, rip up a portion of it and replace with some natives. Kawahara recommends reserving a chunk of your yard space for insects, which means no pesticide and plenty of choice in vegetation.

“If every home, school and local park in the US converted 10 percent of lawn into natural habitat, this would give insects an extra 4 million acres of habitat,” he advises.

Hopefully, 2021 will see even more studies on insect numbers in flux around our planet, painting a complex scene of species in freefall and others breaking new ground. We’re going to need all the information we can get.

“We can learn from those places that are not witnessing dramatic insect declines,” says Cunnigham.

“Globally we are not monitoring insect populations in a widespread or systematic way, which limits our power to respond.”

This research was published in PNAS.

#Environment

[wolfliving]

Twentieth-century precursors of the “smart city”

“Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.”  This has been said to be the most boring headline in the world.

Volume 10/11  Number 1   March 2001

What is Smart about the Smart Communities Movement? Mary Anne Moser Resources and the Environment Program University of Calgary

Introduction A Brief History of the Smart Communities Movement The Rhetorical Resonance of Smart: Thinking Machines Smart Economic Strategies Conclusion References

Introduction The Smart Communities movement is the phenomenon of villages, towns and cities getting almost ubiquitously connected to the Internet, and using the connection to involve citizens in networked activities--ranging from electronically accessed government services, telehealth and distance education to e-commerce. 

These initiatives have been undertaken almost without exception as public/private partnerships whose purpose is to create a competitive advantage for regional economies. What distinguishes them from other information-economy strategies is that they depend on the citizens of that community for their success. Thus the public is implicated in a way not normally associated with economic decisions.

It is currently unclear whose interests are served in the Smart Communities movement--whether it is equally smart for the private sector partners, government funders, and members of the communities. Smart Communities initiatives are relatively new, and their impact as yet not well understood or documented. 

At this juncture in time, then, it is useful to examine how the word smart may be operating in the new movement. This paper will show how the smart in Smart Communities has roots in various intellectual histories, and how these histories are connected to a pivotal role for the public in the context of Smart Communities.

 It will consider the way that the term smart is a political choice of words, and how this word aligns a political wish with the potential of technologies sprung from artificial intelligence research and cybernetics models.

Although the some historical background from the U.S. will be discussed in this study, most of this discussion will focus on the Canadian experience, where Smart Communities is the term most frequently used to describe community network projects. In the United States, the term Community Networks is also widely used, sometimes almost interchangeably with Smart Communities. 

However, the political and rhetorical charges of the two terms are substantially different. The term Community Networks emphasizes the grass-roots origins of the Community Networks movement. The term Smart Communities, more commonly used in Canada, has quite different origins and rhetorical force. It is this term that will be the subject of this paper.

To trace the genealogy of the word smart in this label, it is first necessary to describe what Smart Communities are, or at least what the term Smart Communities refers to. Then we can take a step back and look at the cousins of the word smart--intelligence, rationality--to help trace the roots of the term within the information society that has spawned it. 

This exploration will be structured around two areas of thought, both of which offer insight into how the word smart could be understood in the Smart Communities movement. The first concerns the history of "thinking" machines, which in this case has stimulated the technological development based on artificial intelligence, and the market for technology products. The second looks at strategies to manage economic growth, which points to the role of technology in economic programs. Together these contribute to an understanding of how the word smart may be loaded in its Smart Communities usage. A Brief History of the Smart Communities Movement

The Smart Communities movement took shape over the 1990s as a strategy to broaden the base of users involved in information technology. It has been driven by two concerns: one is based on the need for skilled workers for an expanding information economy, the other has roots in reviving communities whose economic base has been destabilized by the information economy. Although related, they will be treated here in turn.

The need for skilled workers is a product of the rapid pace of development of the information economy. The knowledge workers required to maintain this economy are in short supply, as the daily headlines about "brain drain" and hiring competition among companies and universities testify. 

Much of the strategizing for an information economy has followed a trajectory triggered by the now seminal work of Fritz Machlup, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962). 

Machlup's study was followed fifteen years later by a nine-volume study led by Marc Porat and Michael Rubin for the U.S. Department of Commerce. Around the same time, sociologist Daniel Bell steered the issue into the realm of the social and coined the term "post-industrial society" to describe the new social framework that he saw as fundamentally altered by the centrality of information-related activities (1979). 

Since the publication of these widely recognized foundational documents on the information society, over two decades of strategizing have unfolded. Most of these studies concern gaining a foothold or advantage in an information economy:

The accumulation of skills, experience and technical know-how, whether at the level of firms or of countries, takes time and is a process pertinent to long-run economic development. The heritage of technology and human capital can only increase through a snowball effect, through gradual accretion, from the local, national and international environment, to an initial kernel of knowledge (OECD 1992, 17).

The initial emphasis on scientists and engineers as the fuel for the information economy (PITAC 1999) was complemented by an understanding that the learning process is also integral to the uptake of innovation - whether it involves doctors learning telehealth skills, professors learning distance education technology, or citizens learning to access government service online. In addition to a broad base of learners and users, skilled troubleshooters are required.

 A subhead for a Computing Canada article reads: "As systems and software become more complex, end users are increasing demands for technical assistance. The software support market hit $22B in '98" (Downey 2000, 14). Smart Communities represent a strategy to attract, engage and train the broad base of users identified as integral to information economy success.

The second motivation for the Smart Communities movement has come in part from the need to revitalize local economies. This revitalization first took the form of industry-driven initiatives for strengthening a region's economic base.

By 1986, the industry equivalent of a "smart community" was well under way in the form of the Teleport, a term coined in 1982 by a joint venture of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith; and Western Union Telegraph Company (Hanneman 1986, 4). 

This joint venture was a combination telecommunications and real estate project that involved the construction of a satellite uplink facility surrounded by an industrial park on Staten Island. It was conceived "from the union of economic necessity and technological innovation," according to the developers (Annunziata and Catlin 1986, xxi). 

They needed to "stem the migration of jobs and industry" from the New York area and therefore wanted to rebuild the economy from a technological base, but they were also concerned that the New York region might not be able to capitalize on new telecommunications technologies because its airwaves were congested. The presentation of an information technology solution to an information-age problem is one of the characteristics of the Smart Communities movement. 

This first industry initiative also represented a model for the private/public partnerships that were emerging as commercially successful strategies involving information and communications technology.

These early teleports were described as "hubs of the intelligent city" (Hanneman 1986, 10), where intelligence is described as attending to and investing in telecommunications infrastructure in city planning. The wisdom of building a teleport, according to Hanneman, is that it prepares the city for an impending explosion in network traffic resulting from personal computer use and recognizes that there will be competition for network business among a highly educated citizenry that demands access. 

In technical terms, the intelligent networks described the systems of computers and networks that managed the flow of information in an industrial park or city. At this time, these telecommunications projects started to differentiate cities based on their level of intelligent infrastructure.

As this differentiation took shape, intelligent cities developed different strategies to expand the use of information infrastructure out from the limited domains of high-tech industrial parks into more broadly based arenas, in particular, into commerce and education. The scope of technology-based economic strategies widened as the consequences of the information economy were felt more widely. Developments started to marry the advanced technology with the interests of civic bodies to restore health to dying cities that were suffering, in part in due to these same early industrial upstarts elsewhere. From this point onwards, the integration of intelligent networking and computing infrastructure became more colloquially described.

In 1992, the OECD identified several cities that it called "learning cities" (Thorne 1998), which were actively involved in building a skilled information economy workforce. One of these was Edmonton, Canada, cited for its coalition of school boards and post-secondary institutions aimed at mutually advancing skills in new technologies. Collaborations aimed at developing community or regional information infrastructure began to emerge in disparate locations. They also began to include organizations with more diverse interests. 

Another early example was Blacksburg, Virginia, where an alliance of town officials, the local university, and private industry was exploring the potential for an "electronic village" (International Center for Communications 1997a, 2). The Blacksburg Electronic Village was one of the first communities in North America to install a broadband networking infrastructure, and has been followed by hundreds of community network projects in the U.S.

The inclusion of users in technology implementation marked a shift in strategy from revitalization for purely economic purposes to revitalization for sociopolitical reasons as well. The social needs arose when it became clear that not only were local economies being affected by information technology, the traditional social cohesion of a city appeared to be suffering, rather than flourishing, as technology became more widespread. 

Some of these results were documented in 1993, when the International Center for Communications (ICC) in San Diego undertook an inaugural study into the state of the American city. It found that many major American cities were "dying, in large part because cities in themselves were losing their relevance as governing units" (International Center for Communications 1997a, 1). 

The study found that telecommunications advances had displaced the geopolitical role of the city as a hub of transportation or production, and had made obsolete many of the advantages of a common physical location. People could shop anywhere, or work anywhere. This affected many parts of a city's make-up and its perceived future well-being:

Government and business leaders are concerned about losing control over their communities' economic destinies, as shifting business and population patterns are eroding their economic base. Economic and social institutions ranging from city hall to local schools are struggling as their traditional practices are proving insufficient to the rapid technological and complex social and economic challenges of the late 20th century (International Center for Communications 1997b, 1).

The answer, suggested the study, "lay in an entirely new form of civic organization" (International Center for Communications1997a, 3). It officially coined the term Smart Communities to describe a particular solution for the problems it found. These Smart Communities would "rely on the power of cooperation, shared resources and shared goals to increase their competitive ability to retain and attract people, businesses and jobs to their region" (1997a, 3).

Since 1993, numerous Smart Community initiatives have developed throughout North America and in other industrialized countries. In the Canadian context, Smart Communities refer not only to self-identified cities or towns that have adopted IT-based economic strategies but also to the Canadian government's Smart Communities campaign launched in 1999, as part of its Connecting Canadians agenda. 

This federal Smart Communities project began with a call for proposals in 1999 from communities for projects to "fundamentally transform" the community by using information technology. It selected 12 proposals in the spring of 2000, one in each province and territory, and is investing $5 million in each of what will be Canada's "demonstration Smart Communities" (Industry Canada 1999).

Canada's project incorporates the findings of a 1998 study by the La Jolla Institute on exploiting high technology for knowledge-based economic growth. John Reardon, who supervised the La Jolla study, concluded:

Today, a community's strength is based on knowledge of the greater whole, on what you, me, the scientists, the academics, what we are all doing in the community. That is why a smart city focuses on institutions and alliances ... The strongest cities will be the ones best able to form alliances--to be anchored in several areas, several things they are good at" (Reardon 1999).

This "gestalt" philosophy, which views a balanced organized whole as more than the sum of its parts, is aligned with the inclusiveness required for the use of the word smart in a broadly based public context.

Because today's Smart Community initiatives require not only positive reception from, but also, active involvement of general audiences, the Smart Communities literature also marries the concerns of economists and politicians with motivational studies. The outreach process, for example, is an integral part of Smart Communities planning. 

The Smart Communities Implementation Guide published by the International Center for Communications (1997b), advises that outreach be a priority from the first stages, "otherwise the project may be perceived as exclusive and the sense of broad community ownership essential to success and sustainability won't develop" (29). By mixing economic goals with motivational outreach programs, Smart Communities bring private sector concerns with information economy into the public sphere. They do this in two ways. First, they implicate the general population in the economic vitality of an information-age community by presenting reasons that the public should be technology literate. Second, they advance the responsibility of individuals in a geographic region to create the required social and economic alliances for sustainable information-age communities.

When intelligent hubs of infrastructure alone led to the unstable community situations noted above, it became clear a key contributor to sustainability was community involvement. Smart Communities therefore attempt to regain control with a user-involvement approach. When these interests in networking technology shifted from establishing industry advantages to include community balance, the vocabulary about information infrastructure also changed: intelligent shifted to learning, which shifted to smart. Smart communities needed a particular type of buy-in that relies upon a rhetorically charged term. Because of the need to appeal to a broader base of community members, the word smart served the situation better than the more elitist term intelligent. The Rhetorical Resonance of Smart: Thinking Machines

The genealogy of smart technology can be traced back to the computing science sub-discipline of artificial intelligence. Much of the early work on artificial intelligence was inspired by a desire to "create a machine on the model of man [sic], a robot that is to have its childhood, to learn language as a child does, to gain its knowledge of the world by sensing the world through its own organs, and ultimately to contemplate the whole domain of human thought" (Weizenbaum 1976, 203). Decades of debate on the ethics of this possibility have ensued.

Machine intelligence and artificial intelligence are terms used almost interchangeably to describe the higher-level data processing capabilities of computers. IBM's computer Deep Blue, which beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, is a good example of what some would call artificial intelligence, although its performance is not touted by IBM as intelligence but "a new genre of computing, one that combines the powerful parallel computers and advanced algorithms of scientific computing with the vast databases typical of business computing to make human decisions" (Schechter 1999, 13).

This new genre of research has given rise to the commercial application of intelligent-acting products and services, that is, smart technologies. Smart technologies do not necessarily embrace the same grand goals of replicating human intelligence, writ large, as does the parent discipline of computing science. Smart technologies, unlike intelligent machines, are pragmatic implementations of technology rather than intellectual pursuits. They are a manifestation of the convergence occurring in information and communications technology, a convergence that is often described as "the currents developments in broadcasting, multimedia, programme-making, virtual reality, entertainment and telecommunications" (Knight and Weedon 1995, 5).

The first smart technologies were fairly simply feedback-response technologies, clever in the sense that they appeared to predict and respond in ways a person might want them to, but technologically a departure from the artificial intelligence research that lived in universities. What distinguishes smart technologies from data-processing computers is that they integrate multimedia input and output devices. They are designed to be machines that are responsive to feedback from users or their environments, by processing input data to trigger an appropriate response.

For example, smart technology might be used to regulate home lighting in response to the traffic patterns and preferences of its inhabitants. A typical example in the medical realm is a technology that reads levels in the blood stream and maintains a desired balance by triggering the release of a needed substance. The body is made up of systems that do this all the time naturally. Smart, in this context, means responding to data in a way that is appropriate for maintaining control of the organism, and involves no intelligence in the mental processes sense. Smart technologies may also be networked so that patterns of interaction with users can be recorded in central databases. This data can then be "mined" to provide information about consumer patterns for marketing or product-development purposes. In this way, smart technologies provide intelligence to technology companies.

This is what is known as "smart technology" in a technical sense. Both the technology and the label itself are offspring of "artificial intelligence" or AI research initiated in university computer science and computer engineering departments. Because of its association with specialist practices--whether science or surveillance--the word intelligence to describe these technologies is limited in its marketplace appeal. In marketing language, the word smart appears. Smart has broader connotations, for smartness includes the notion of being quick-witted, a keen bargainer, well-groomed, fresh and bright in appearance, in good repair, stylish, even severe (Oxford Dictionary 1995). 

Smart, therefore, is more user-friendly than the term intelligent, which is limited to having a quick mind, being responsive to feedback, or having data-processing capability. Smart also encompasses characteristics that can be readily learned, whereas intelligence is more limited in this way. This distinction is important because, for a user-oriented movement like Smart Communities, or for a smart technology aimed at consumers, the more inclusive and less intimating term is likely to get wider reception.

In short, the word smart in the realm of technology has quite a different meaning from that suggested by intelligent networks or Smart Communities as described above. Smart technologies refer to computational processes that may or may not involve networks, and have roots in computation rather than networking. So the technology that normally characterizes Smart Communities--which is high-speed network connections--is only tangentially related to any actual implementation of smart technology in the cybernetic, feedback-controlled sense. 

However, the meaning of smart in Smart Communities picks up on the commercial successes and public interest in artificially intelligent smart machines. In other words, the network technology characterizing Smart Communities is not artificially intelligent or smart, but the inference of technological cleverness migrates through the affiliation of advanced technology alone. Smart Economic Strategies

James Beniger describes how the regulation of government and industry bureaucracies has been enabled by computer technology. In an information society, as Beniger suggests, "a society's ability to maintain control--at all levels from interpersonal to international relations--will be directly proportional to the development of its information technologies" (1986, 8-9). 

Beniger's use of a biological feedback model offers considerable potential for understanding how a user-oriented strategy, such as Smart Communities, could be an effective control response to the negative effects on cities described in the first part of this paper. Although reductionist and rationalist, Beniger's model facilitates an understanding of a system whose goal is the avoidance of chaos. This model also describes a sociopolitical expression of organic control that varies in response to scale, though not to a particularly new crisis.

If the global information economy is viewed as an organic structure, then it follows that local, provincial and national governments might experience a loss of control, since they have traditionally operated in a closed system. The Smart Communities movement plays an interesting role in this context, for it partly incorporates and partly resists the globalization of marketplaces. It therefore highlights the rebalancing that is a part of the Smart Communities strategy. 

As mentioned earlier, it is a strategy that both supports an information economy by encouraging trained workers, and tempers a global economy by creating geopolitical economies. On both these counts, the community citizen has been invoked. To understand how the public's role has taken on increased importance in information-age economic strategies, it is useful to follow some of the research studies undertaken to devise strategy for managing politically closed systems in a global information economy.

These studies reveal the sense of urgency pressed upon federal governments for competitive action concerning technologies, and hint at the arrival of the term smart in a community-oriented government program. For example, in 1992 the OECD, whose purpose is to facilitate "a better understanding and mastery of the relationship between technology and economic growth" concluded that technological change, and its associated economic benefits, is "fundamentally a social process" (15). Reports such as this one underscore the role of individuals and cultures of innovation, both for creating the necessary workforce but also for their role in technology implementation. The OECD report acknowledges that technologies may be selected not for their superior qualities or efficiency but may become efficient simply because they are chosen (21). In other words, if everyone uses a certain piece of software, it becomes efficient simply because everyone uses it. It is inefficient to use an incompatible type, whether or not it is a superior product.

In Canada, a 1992 report sponsored by the Economic Council of Canada was undertaken as part of a larger project to understand Canada's competitiveness and trade performance. It says that "Canada's position has been slipping relative to that of its trading partners, and that this jeopardizes future living standards" and concludes that "Canadians have not responded quickly or effectively enough to the challenges that have been taking place in international markets" (McFetridge 1992, vii). 

Since then, the Government of Canada and some of the provinces have launched strategies to have Canadians respond more quickly. The federal Smart Communities program of Industry Canada is one of them. Maurice Estabrooks, a senior economist in the Canadian government's Department of Industry in the 1990s, claims that information technology offers "great opportunities for learning, education, entertainment, cultural exchange, world development, and human understanding. These are just some of the potentials of broadband intelligent multimedia telecommunications technology, and this is why governments perceive investments in advanced telecommunications infrastructures to be crucial to economic growth and competitiveness" (1995, 154-55).

Internationally, the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD) responded to the impact of information and communications technology by focusing in the years 1995 to 1997 on ways it could "close the gap between North and South, between the 'included' and 'excluded,' so that everyone has equitable access to sustainable development and growth" (Howkins and Valanin 1997, xi). By the mid- to late-1990s, a focus on an inclusive user-oriented approach was becoming clear in economic strategies.

American studies, such as the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee report (PITAC 1999) underscore the need to invest in people, most notably researchers, but also highlight an increased need for research into the social and economic implications of information and communications technology. Both of these reports reveal an increasing awareness of the role of human resources in the information economy.

The kinds of reports just described often contain warnings about regional or national economies falling behind, and imply an impending loss of control. For example, the PITAC report concludes that current levels of funding for research are "seriously inadequate. Research programs intended to maintain the flow of new ideas in information technology and to train the next generation of researchers are funding only a small fraction of the research that is needed" and furthermore, that this lack of investment may prevent the research required to "protect us from catastrophic failures of the complex systems that underpin our transportation, defense, business, finance, and healthcare infrastructures" (1). 

Such warnings, much like the Smart Communities strategy, suggest that information technology is required to address problems created by the technology and that, without it, chaos could ensue. Smart in this sense is directly linked to the cybernetic meaning of smart as a mechanism for control. The ideology underlying the word smart in the Smart Communities movement, then, also speaks of the "wisdom" or appropriateness of this particular economic strategy for regulating balance in the developing information economy. In particular, the smart of Smart Communities reflects interests in maintaining control of regional economies made volatile by emerging global marketplaces, through engagement of a broader public with technology.

Conclusion

One of the particular characteristics of debates about the merits and problems with information and communication technologies is the high level of uncertainty. The potential or perceived impact of information technology is deeply equivocal. Both the far left and the far right have used the decentralizing effects of information technology in their arguments, but with the goals of achieving different ends (Winner 1986, 85). It is now almost a truism that "ICTs can often produce contradictory results simultaneously: homogeneity and fragmentation, for example, or greater equality and greater inequality" (Howkins and Valinin 1997, 19).

Smart Communities, however, are unequivocally branded as an effort to reduce this uncertainty. Through the choice of the word smart, the movement--whether emerging from grass-roots collaborations or government programs--is positioned to garner widespread public support for the implementation of information technology. At the same time, it implicates this public in a strategy for control of economic forces that is rhetorically affiliated with artificial intelligence, and conceptually a product of the same cybernetic feedback-control model. References

Annunziata, Robert, and Robert Catlin. 1986. Introduction. In Teleports and the Intelligent City, ed. Andrew D. Lipman, Alan D. Sugarman and Robert F. Cushman. Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin. Bell, Daniel.1979. The Social Framework of the Information Society. In The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View, ed. Michael L. Dertouzos and Joel Moses. Cambridge: MIT Press. Beniger, James R. 1986. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Downey, Geoffrey. 2000. Outsourcing No Longer About Savings. Computing Canada 26:7, 13-15. Estabrooks, Maurice. 1995. Electronic Technology, Corporate Strategy, and World Transformation. Westport, CT: Quorum Books. Hanneman, Gerhard J. 1986. Teleports: An Overview. In Teleports and the Intelligent City, ed. Andrew D. Lipman, Alan D. Sugarman and Robert F. Cushman. Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin. Howkins, John and Robert Valinin, eds. 1997. Development and the Information Age. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre and United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development. IBM. 2000. Smart Home Info-Structure Wiring. http://www.can.ibm.com/smarthomes/wiring.html Industry Canada, Smart Communities: Program Guide (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 1999). Industry Canada. 1998. Smart Communities: Report of the Panel on Smart Communities. Ottawa: Government of Canada. International Center for Communications. 1997a. Smart Communities Guidebook. San Deigo: International Center for Communications at San Diego University. International Center for Communications. 1997b.. San Deigo: International Center for Communications at San Diego University. Knight, J. and A. Weedon. 1995. Editorial. Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 1, 5-8. Machlup, Fritz. 1962. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. New Jersey, Princeton University Press. McFetridge, D.G. 1992. Advanced Technologies in Canada: An Analysis and Recent Evidence of Their Use. Ottawa: Canada Communication Group. National Science Foundation. 1998. Economic and Social Significance of Information Technologies. In Science and Engineering Indicators--1998. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation. http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/pubsys/browser/odbrowse.pl OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). 1992. Technology and the Economy: The Key Relationships. Paris: OECD. Oxford Dictionary, The Concise. 1995. Ninth Edition. Oxford: Clarendono. PITAC. 1999. Information Technology Research: Investing in our Future. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee Report to the President. Porat, Marc U., and Michael R. Rubin. 1977. The Information Economy. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Reardon, John. 1999. In Rod Ziegler, Edmonton Journal. 29 April, H1. Schechter, Bruce. 1999. Daring to Think Deep. Think Research 2. Boston: IBM. Teletronic Communications. 1987. The Smart Subdivision: Residential Applications of IVDM Technology. Edmonton: Alberta Municipal Affairs. Thorne, Duncan. 1998. Edmonton: Smart City Campaign. Edmonton Journal, 13 November, B3. Weizenbaum, Joseph. 1976. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. New York: W.H. Freeman. Weizenbaum, Joseph. 1991. Computers, Tools, and Human Reason. In Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society, ed. David Crowley and Paul Heyer. New York: Longman. Winner, Langdon. 1985. Do Artifacts Have Politics? In The Social Shaping of Technology: How the Refrigerator Got its Hum, ed. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman. Milton Keynes, PA: Open University Press. Winner, Langdon. 1986. The Whale and The Reactor: A Search for Limits in the Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[instantnightmarementality-blog]

What is the purpose of a call for papers Call for papers - Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal

Presenting your paper at a conference or workshop. Accounting for modern slavery, employees and work conditions in business. Special issue call for papers from Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal. Dr Katherine Christ, University of South Australia Business School Professor Dr Roger Burritt, Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University Professor Dr Stefan Schaltegger, Centre for Sustainability Management, Leuphana University. In recent years there has been much interest in developments that encourage business organisations to operate in a more sustainable manner. It would appear that many societal, political and economic actors are working for the days when exploiting social capital and the natural environment in the name of economic gain come to an end. The challenge associated with balancing the three perspectives of sustainability (the social, the environmental and the economic) is huge and accounting academics have played an important role developing tools, highlighting the business case for sustainable action and seeking to understand current practice. However, to date most efforts in this area have been concerned with the environmental and economic aspects of sustainability while neglecting the social. In some ways this is understandable as it can be argued that society is embedded in ecosystems and that environmental issues such as carbon and water are easier to measure and report. Nonetheless, recent developments including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are giving the social aspects of sustainability a prominent place on the corporate agenda (Bebbington and Unerman, 2018 forthcoming; Kolk, 2016). As a result issues such as modern slavery in corporate supply chains, human rights, employees and work conditions are now unable to be ignored. Instances of unacceptable working conditions such as the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in 2013 when 1,100 people were killed leave an indelible mark (Siddiqui and Uddin, 2016). The preponderance over time of slavery-related working conditions including forced labour, debt-bondage, child labour, wage exploitation, human trafficking, etc., shocking as they are, do not seem to be in decline in spite of increased CSR activities and good political intentions. Public outcry has permeated the halls of government with Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA amongst others introducing legislation to combat practices where victims are coerced to engage in unreasonable work through physical or mental threat. For instance, working conditions also include ongoing debates concerning more extreme negative social issues of working for corporations (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017). These include conflict minerals and related human rights issues, child labour, migration and refugees being employed as blackmarket workers, the need to account for institutional pressure to address trafficking, and the invisibilities of zero hours contracting and sub-contracting, etc. Improving modern slavery, employees and work conditions in business also takes place in the context of female employees being trapped in the downside of salary differentials relative to men; high unemployment, underemployment and lack of opportunity for decent work for the vulnerable and Indigenous. Also the need for adoption and championing of strategic and practical progress into improved protection of modern slaves by a union movement in decline.... View more ...

[minglebox004edu-blog]

The diversity of experience represented in these six new Fellows is testament to the depth and range of our academic community.

Six ANU academics will be inducted into the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia for their distinguished contributions to their disciplines and to society.

The academics, whose expertise spans history, the environment, psychology and policy, were elected as Fellows of the Academy for substantially advancing research knowledge in their fields of endeavour.

Those elected from ANU are:

Professor Xuemei Bai, Fenner School of Environment and Society

Professor Frank Bongiorno, School of History

Professor Nicholas Brown, School of History

Professor John Hewson AM, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy

Professor Elinor McKone, Research School of Psychology

Honorary Associate Professor David Stanton AM, Social Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy

We are delighted to see these six members of the ANU community recognised for their significant contributions to their fields,"We are delighted to see these six members of the ANU community recognised for their significant contributions to their fields," ANU Vice Chancellor Brian Schmidt said.

"Social sciences have an immense impact on our society in tangible and enduring ways.

"The diversity of experience represented in these six new Fellows is testament to the depth and range of our academic community.

"Their contributions have helped shape our nation."

The newly-elected Fellows will be formally inducted at the Academy's General Meeting and Annual Symposium in Adelaide from 18-20 October 2017.

Click here for more education detail's please visit Minglebox.com

Source: PR

[oaepauli-blog]

Intruder Alert It's a delicate ecosystem and will need to be closely monitored: Intruding marine vegetation to drastically change Antarctica's ecosystem

[sciencespies]

Artificial trees capture new bird species on candid camera

https://sciencespies.com/biology/artificial-trees-capture-new-bird-species-on-candid-camera/

Artificial trees capture new bird species on candid camera

Capture 4661, Sculpture Camera. Molonglo Life. http://molonglo.life/#!/capture/4661

More

An experiment from The Australian National University (ANU) using artificial trees has attracted birds and other wildlife never before seen in a damaged Canberra landscape—catching them on camera at the same time.

The experiment is a collaboration with the ACT Parks and Conservation Service and uses a series of power poles and translocated dead trees erected in landscape under regeneration.

The ANU researchers saw a four-fold increase in bird species on five recently erected power-poles. There was also a seven-fold increase in bird species across five re-purposed dead trees.

In a separate project on the same site, the birds were captured on motion-sensitive cameras hidden in the artificial structures, with the footage providing a public database for species activity.

Associate Professor Philip Gibbons from the ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society wanted to test whether artificial structures could be used to provide a home for birds and other wildlife when mature trees were cut down for residential and other development.

He says the artificial trees work better than he “could have ever hoped for.”

“Even if we plant new trees elsewhere to replace those we knock down they take a century to mature and develop suitable habitats for birds and wildlife,” Associate Professor Gibbons said.

“Globally, mature trees are in decline and we’re going to see an absence of mature trees in some landscapes by the end of this century. So these artificial structures are really key to filling that gap to preserve the ecosystem.

“And from what we can see they work. Not only did they attract birds to the landscape, but they also provided a home for ladybirds, wood spiders and microbats.”

Associate Professor Gibbons said the artificial trees weren’t a “cure-all.”

“The structures can only do so much and we found 37 percent of bird species that live in mature forests did not venture into the artificial structures,” he said.

“We need to preserve as many mature trees as we can, continue to plant more new seedlings for the future and then raise these artificial structures if we are to mitigate this deficit of mature trees for future generations.

“At the end of the day, you can’t beat real trees. But they can take years to grow. So this is a great option in areas needing regeneration or while you wait for trees to mature.”

The study area, a 50-hectare site at Barrer Hill in the Molonglo Valley, has been set aside for regeneration to offset mature trees and other native vegetation cleared for new suburbs.

The final piece of the restoration project was a “living art sculpture” created from a 400-year old yellow box tree cut down in a nearby suburb and re-erected in the offset site.

Dr. Mitchell Whitelaw from the ANU School of Art worked with American architect Joyce Hwang from University of Buffalo and Darren Le Roux of ACT Parks to install motion-sensitive cameras into the tree-sculpture.

They’ve captured images of more than 23 bird and animal species using the structures including a peregrine falcon, nankeen kestrel and tawny frogmouth.

More common species such as crimson and eastern rosellas, starlings, yellow-tailed black cockatoos, galahs, red wattlebirds, willie wagtails, red-rumped parrots, kookaburras, bats and marsupials are also using the structures.

Dr. Whitelaw’s database of pictures and videos is available at http://molonglo.life/#!/

People can watch and contribute to the content by tagging and identifying species.

“As well as some delightful and beautiful images, we’ve caught footage of a currawong raiding a starling’s nest. This is the sort of action in nature people just don’t get to see every day,” Dr. Whitelaw said.

“The database is a real-time record of the restoration of an ecosystem. We want people to feel connected to these public places and the wildlife in them.”

Explore further

Smart city planning can preserve old trees and the wildlife that needs them

More information: Dr Whitelaw’s database of pictures and videos is available at molonglo.life/#!/  

Provided by Australian National University

Citation: Artificial trees capture new bird species on candid camera (2019, August 23) retrieved 25 August 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-08-artificial-trees-capture-bird-species.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

#Biology

[kathleenseiber]

Killer fungus is wiping out world’s amphibians

An invasive fungus has led to one of the greatest documented losses of vertebrate biodiversity, according to a new global analysis.

In the 1970s, frogs in remote regions of Australia and Central America began to suddenly disappear.

Researchers investigated whether climate change, UV radiation, or pollution caused the disappearance, but they didn’t find a clear explanation until a small team in northern Queensland realized the population declines resembled the pattern of an extraordinary disease outbreak.

In 1998, after combining disease outbreak approaches from human medical science with ecology and veterinary medicine, Lee Berger discovered chytridiomycosis, a previously unknown disease parasitic fungi cause that invades the skin of amphibians.

Litoria serrata (the Green-eyed Treefrog) from the Queensland rainforest has declined due to chytridiomycosis. (Picture: Lee Skerratt/U. Melbourne)

‘Enormous loss’ of diversity

The new study, which appears in Science, shows chytridiomycosis is responsible for the dramatic population declines in 501 species of amphibians, including 90 extinctions—mostly frogs, but also toads and salamanders. In Australia, 40 species have declined and seven have become extinct.

This represents “the greatest recorded loss of biodiversity attributable to a disease,” says lead author Ben Scheele, postdoctoral fellow at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at Australian National University.

“This also places Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (B. dendrobatidis), the fungus that is the most common cause of chytridiomycosis, among the most destructive invasive species we have ever seen,” Scheele says. “In terms of impact, it is comparable to rodents and cats, which threaten 420 and 430 species with extinction, respectively.”

A photo using a scanning electron microscope shows an infected frog with fungal tubes poking through the skin’s surface. (Credit: Lee Berger/U. Melbourne)

Among the 501 amphibian species which have suffered declines, 90 are confirmed or presumed extinct in the wild and a further 124 have lost more than 90 percent of their population, disappearing from many environments where they were abundant.

“That is an enormous loss of biodiversity, but these are only the species that have been confirmed to be affected—it’s very likely there are others that have suffered loss or become extinct, including species that we never had the opportunity to see,” Scheele says.

Skin invasion

Two parasitic chytrid fungi cause chytridiomycosis, most commonly B. dendrobatidis, with B. salamandrivorans affecting fire salamanders in Europe. B. dendrobatidis is likely native to East Asia, but is now present in more than 60 countries.

When chytridiomycosis shows up in a susceptible amphibian population, its effects are sudden and devastating, says study coauthor Berger, principal research fellow in wildlife health and conservation at the University of Melbourne.

Queensland’s Common Mistfrog populations have declined due to chytridiomycosis. (Credit: Lee Skerratt/U. Melbourne)

“The fungus invades the skin of adult amphibians, living inside epidermal cells and disrupting skin function,” she says.

“Unlike mammals, amphibians absorb water and electrolytes through their thin, permeable skin, but chytridiomycosis inhibits that process. Frogs lose potassium and sodium until their blood levels are too low and their hearts begin to malfunction. They become lethargic and die.”

Mixed results

Infected frog populations can crash within months of the fungus arriving. Some species may have a genetic resistance to chytrid fungi, but that can present its own problems.

“Frog species that tolerate infection can become ‘reservoirs’ for the fungus, allowing it to persist and spread to new areas,” Berger says.

“For many species, chytridiomycosis is the principal driver of decline, exemplified by rapid mass mortalities in undisturbed environments. In other species, chytridiomycosis acts in concert with habitat loss, altered climatic conditions, and invasive species to exacerbate declines.”

While declines and extinctions of amphibians peaked in the 1980s, chytridiomycosis still threatens new populations and stifles the recovery of those it has affected. Of the 501 species the researchers examined, there are 292 surviving species for which population trends are known; 232 of these have shown no signs of recovery.

Beyond recovery?

There are signs of recovery in 60 of the species Scheele studied, but this generally reflects localized increases in number rather than a return to pre-outbreak abundance, he says.

“We analyzed the data to determine the probability of species returning to previous numbers and found species that experienced more recent or more severe declines, lived at higher elevations, were large or nocturnal. These are less likely to recover.

“Taking those factors into account, we found that if a species had lost more than 90 percent of its previous numbers, the chance of it recovering was less than one in 10.”

To give these frogs, toads, and salamanders the best possible chance of survival and recovery we must limit the further spread of chytridiomycosis and do better to manage other threats, says coauthor Lee Skerratt, associate professor and principal research fellow in wildlife biosecurity at the Melbourne Veterinary School.

“Amphibians are one of the most threatened groups of animals, with 32 percent of all species at risk of extinction,” he says. “Chytridiomycosis is the major threat and many species will disappear unless we develop a targeted sustainable solution. Although other factors could help push them over the edge, chytridiomycosis is the main driver and needs to addressed urgently.”

Unrecognized pathogens

The catastrophic damage chytridiomycosis has done to Earth’s biodiversity illustrates the importance of biosecurity, underpinned by good wildlife health surveillance; outbreak response; and research, he says.

It took more than 15 years for Australia to cobble together enough funds to have Berger, then a PhD student, look at mass amphibian decline and extinction. Skerratt says she made one of Australia’s major discoveries.

“Imagine if we did more than just pass the hat around once a decade. Imagine if Australia had a National Wildlife Health Centre dealing with wildlife disease outbreaks like comparable countries. Maybe we would have saved hundreds of species from decline and extinction,” Skerratt says.

“Unlike other invasive species, diseases of wildlife are insidious and do not tend to garner political attention and support. Hence, there is a dire need for a call to arms and sustained funding to maintain capacity and progress on finding a solution to this biodiversity crisis,” he says.

The unprecedented lethality of a single disease affecting almost an entire vertebrate class highlights the threat from the spread of previously unrecognized pathogens in a globalized world.

“Around 300 million years ago, there was one supercontinent, called Pangaea, and species could move across almost the whole of the world’s landmass without barriers. Global trade has recreated a functional Pangaea for infectious diseases in wildlife, with far reaching impacts on biodiversity, livestock, and human health,” says Skerratt.

“The world urgently needs effective biosecurity and an immediate reduction in wildlife trade to reduce the risk of outbreaks like chytridiomycosis.”

Source: University of Melbourne

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