Category Archives: Peer Reviewed Article Review

“automated curation of wild places”

This is a fascinating idea, could even be attempted on other planets, and provides limitless ideas for dystopian science fiction about what could go wrong and/or whether we could all be experiencing some form of “automated curation” right now.

Designing Autonomy: Opportunities for New Wildness in the Anthropocene
Bradley Cantrell, Laura J. Martin, and Erle C. Ellis

Maintaining wild places increasingly involves intensive human interventions. Several recent projects use semi-automated mediating technologies to enact conservation and restoration actions, including re-seeding and invasive species eradication. Could a deep-learning system sustain the autonomy of nonhuman ecological processes at designated sites without direct human interventions? We explore here the prospects for automated curation of wild places, as well as the technical and ethical questions that such co-creation poses for ecologists, conservationists, and designers. Our goal is to foster innovative approaches to creating and maintaining the autonomy of evolving ecological systems.

After rooting around just a bit I was able to find an open source proof of this paper here.

R and differential equations

Here’s a new R package for solving differential equations. Sounds like something that might be of interest to only a few ivory tower mathematicians, right? But solving differential equations numerically is the critical core of almost any dynamic simulation model, whether it is simulating water, energy, money, ecology, social systems, or the intertwinings of all of these. So if we are going to understand our systems well enough to solve their problems, we have to have some people around who understand these things on a practical level.

inequality and carbon emissions

A paper in Ecological Economics explores the links between inequality and carbon emissions.

The Trade-off Between Income Inequality and Carbon Dioxide Emissions

We investigate the theoretically ambiguous link between income inequality and per capita carbon dioxide emissions using a panel data set that is substantially larger (in both regional and temporal coverage) than those used in the existing literature. Using an arguably superior group fixed effects estimator, we find that the relationship between income inequality and per capita emissions depends on the level of income. We show that for low and middle-income economies, higher income inequality is associated with lower carbon emissions while in upper middle-income and high-income economies, higher income inequality increases per capita emissions. The result is robust to the inclusion of plausible transmission variables.

It could be that as developing countries develop, greener technologies become available to the working and middle classes faster than their household incomes actually increase. I am thinking of a switch from biomass and coal to electricity and natural gas, for example. These will lower people’s ecological footprint without necessarily costing them a lot more money. Once they start to get more money, they may start to transition to higher-impact behaviors, like driving instead of bicycling, and eating more meat and less grain.

You certainly wouldn’t want to promote income inequality as a policy measure to help the environment. There are social and tax policies that could be pursued instead, for example keeping communities walkable and mixed use even as incomes rise, and pricing meat at its true cost to the environment. These aren’t easy things to do politically in developing countries or anywhere else, of course, because they would require a political system willing to take on corporate power such as the oil, automobile, highway, and agriculture industries which tend to be immensely powerful and intertwined with political, bureaucratic and military elites.

synergy, uniqueness, and redundancy in interacting environmental variables

This is a bit over my head, but one thing I am interested in is analyzing and making sense of a large number of simultaneous time series, whether measured in the environment, the economy, or output of a computer model. This can easily be overwhelming, so one place people often start is trying to figure out which time series are telling essentially the same story, or directly opposite stories. Understanding this allows you to reduce the number of variables you need to analyze to a more manageable number. Time series make this more complicated though, because two variables could be telling the same or opposite stories, but if the signals are offset in time, simple ways of looking at correlation may not lead to the right conclusions. With simulations you have yet another set of complicating factors, which is the implicit links between your variables, intended or not, and whether they exist in the real world or not.

Temporal information partitioning: Characterizing synergy, uniqueness, and redundancy in interacting environmental variables

Information theoretic measures can be used to identify non-linear interactions between source and target variables through reductions in uncertainty. In information partitioning, multivariate mutual information is decomposed into synergistic, unique, and redundant components. Synergy is information shared only when sources influence a target together, uniqueness is information only provided by one source, and redundancy is overlapping shared information from multiple sources. While this partitioning has been applied to provide insights into complex dependencies, several proposed partitioning methods overestimate redundant information and omit a component of unique information because they do not account for source dependencies. Additionally, information partitioning has only been applied to time-series data in a limited context, using basic pdf estimation techniques or a Gaussian assumption. We develop a Rescaled Redundancy measure (Rs) to solve the source dependency issue, and present Gaussian, autoregressive, and chaotic test cases to demonstrate its advantages over existing techniques in the presence of noise, various source correlations, and different types of interactions. This study constitutes the first rigorous application of information partitioning to environmental time-series data, and addresses how noise, pdf estimation technique, or source dependencies can influence detected measures. We illustrate how our techniques can unravel the complex nature of forcing and feedback within an ecohydrologic system with an application to 1-minute environmental signals of air temperature, relative humidity, and windspeed. The methods presented here are applicable to the study of a broad range of complex systems composed of interacting variables.

wildlife resilience and urban parks

This article suggests that urban parks are not as good as rural reserves for supporting biodiversity, but they can still play a role in improving the resilience of species. Of particular interest to me are some the measures ecologists are coming up with to try to define and measure resilience.

Urban parks can maintain minimal resilience for Neotropical bird communities

Birds may use urban parks as shelter and refuge, contributing with numerous ecosystem services upon which humans and other organisms depend on. To safeguard these services, it is important that bird communities of urban environments hold some degree of resilience, which refers to the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and changes, while maintaining its functions and structures. Here we assessed the resilience of the bird community inhabiting an urban park in the Southeast region of Brazil. We classified birds in feeding guilds and identified discontinuities and aggregations of body masses (i.e., scales) using hierarchical cluster analysis. We then calculated five resilience indices for our urban park and for a preserved continuous forest (reference area): the average richness of functions, diversity of functions, evenness of functions, and redundancy of functions within- and cross-scale. The urban park had less species, lower feeding guild richness, and lower within-scale redundancy than the reference area. However, they had similar proportion of species in each function, diversity of functions, evenness of functions, and cross-scale redundancy. The lower species richness and, consequently, the lack of some species performing some ecological functions may be responsible for the overall lower resilience in the urban park. Our results suggest that the bird community of the urban park is in part resilient, as it maintained many biological functions, indicating some environmental quality despite the high anthropogenic impacts of this area. We believe that urban forest remnants with more complex and diverse vegetation are possibly more likely to maintain higher resilience in the landscape than open field parks or parks with suppressed or altered vegetation. We propose that raising resilience in the urban park would possibly involve increasing vegetation complexity and heterogeneity, which could increase biodiversity in a large scale.

water-related risks to economic growth

From Water Resources Research:

Water and growth: An econometric analysis of climate and policy impacts

Water-related hazards such as floods, droughts and disease cause damage to an economy through the destruction of physical capital including property and infrastructure, the loss of human capital and the interruption of economic activities, like trade and education. The question for policy makers is whether the impacts of water-related risk accrue to manifest as a drag on economic growth at a scale suggesting policy intervention. In this study, the average drag on economic growth from water-related hazards faced by society at a global level is estimated. We use panel regressions with various specifications to investigate the relationship between economic growth and hydroclimatic variables at the country-river basin level. In doing so, we make use of surface water runoff variables never used before. The analysis of the climate variables shows that water availability and water hazards have significant effects on economic growth, providing further evidence beyond earlier studies finding that precipitation extremes were at least as important or likely more important than temperature effects. We then incorporate a broad set of variables representing the areas of infrastructure, institutions and information to identify the characteristics of a region that determine its vulnerability to water-related risks. The results identify water scarcity, governance and agricultural intensity as the most relevant measures affecting vulnerabilities to climate variability effects.

getting out of a burning building

There’s no perfect way to get people out of a burning high rise quickly.

Fire evacuation in high-rise buildings: a review of human behaviour and modelling research

A review of literature related to fire evacuation in high-rise buildings was carried out with the following objectives, (1) to identify the key behavioural factors affecting the performance of people during a fire in a high-rise building, the singularities associated to this type of buildings and areas of future research; (2) to review the procedures and strategies currently adopted in high-rise buildings; (3) to review and analyse the capabilities of evacuation models by reviewing their current characteristics and applications in the context of high-rise building evacuations. The review included both findings on human behaviour in high-rise buildings and modelling techniques and tools. Different categories of building use were taken into account, namely office buildings, residential buildings and health care facilities. The individual or combined use of different egress components was analysed. Egress components include the use of stairs, elevators as well as alternative means of escape (e.g., sky-bridges, helicopters, etc.). The effectiveness of the egress components is strongly affected by the building use and the population involved. The review shows that evacuation models can be effectively employed to study relocation strategies and safety issues associated with high-rise buildings. The suitability of egress models for high-rise building evacuations is associated with their flexibility in representing different egress components and complex behavioural processes. The review highlights that there is not a definitive model to be used but that the predictive capabilities of evacuation modelling techniques would be enhanced if more than one model is employed to study different egress aspects. Future research and model developments should focus on the study of the impact of staff actions, group dynamics and people with disabilities. Given the increasing height of buildings and the gradual reduction in the physical abilities of the population, the effects of fatigue on evacuation need further studies.

music and the brain

Evidence continues to mount that musical training is good for the brain:

According to a new Canadian study led by the Rotman Research Institute (RRI) at Baycrest Health Sciences, older adults who had musical training in their youth were 20% faster in identifying speech sounds than their non-musician peers on speech identification tests, a benefit that has already been observed in young people with musical training…

Among the different cognitive functions that can diminish with age is the ability to comprehend speech. Interestingly, this difficulty can persist in the absence of any measurable hearing loss. Previous research has confirmed that the brain’s central auditory system which supports the ability to parse, sequence and identify acoustic features of speech – weakens in later years.

Starting formal lessons on a musical instrument prior to age 14 and continuing intense training for up to a decade appears to enhance key areas in the brain that support speech recognition. The Rotman study found “robust” evidence that this brain benefit is maintained even in the older population.

decoupling

Here’s a new article from Ecological Economics on the idea of decoupling human progress from energy use. In other words, the idea that we can continue to improve the quality of our lives and society without continuing to produce and consume ever more energy, materials, and stuff. To do this requires distinguishing needs from wants, which goes against the grain of mainstream economics.

A Framework for Decoupling Human Need Satisfaction From Energy Use

Climate change poses great challenges to modern societies, central amongst which is to decouple human need satisfaction from energy use. Energy systems are the main source of greenhouse gas emissions, and the services provided by energy (such as heating, power, transport and lighting) are vital to support human development. To address this challenge, we advocate for a eudaimonic need-centred understanding of human well-being, as opposed to hedonic subjective views of well-being. We also argue for a shift in the way we analyse energy demand, from energy throughput to energy services. By adopting these perspectives on either end of the wellbeing-energy spectrum, a “double decoupling” potential can be uncovered. We present a novel analytic framework and showcase several methodological approaches for analysing the relationship between, and decoupling of, energy services and human needs. We conclude by proposing future directions of research in this area based on the analytic framework.

new studies about drugs

Here are a bunch of new studies on drugs, both legal and illegal. Now, I am not advocating drug use. I am just advocating being aware of scientific research and making responsible decisions that reflect one’s personal risk tolerance. I would also point out that some legal drugs, like alcohol, tobacco, and prescription pain killers, are absolutely proven to cause harm to a lot of people, while some illegal drugs are not. I don’t take illegal drugs personally, because the idea of not knowing where they came from or what is in them is too scary for me. Nonetheless, here we go.

Recent studies have found that:

  • There is no association between marijuana use and heart disease.
  • There is a strong association between common pain killers, including ibuprofen, and heart disease, in “high doses”. I do not know if high doses include the Extra Strength Advil I can buy over the counter.
  • There is no clear link between marijuana use by pregnant women and any adverse effects on babies, although there is the “theoretical potential“. There is a strong link between alcohol and adverse effects on babies – I won’t even bother citing studies, they are easy to find.
  • “Magic mushrooms” are considered nontoxic, but they can have profound psychological effects. People who already have suicidal tendencies somewhat frequently attempt suicide while taking them, which is disturbing.

So I think there are pretty clear reasons to support medical use of marijuana and hallucinogens, and any side effects of recreational use should probably be treated as social or medical problems rather than law enforcement ones. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a gradual trend toward legalization, and eventual co-opting of access to these drugs by the mainstream government and corporate world. And next time I have a headache, I think I will just drink a glass of wine and go to bed rather than reaching for the ibuprofen bottle.