To: ENVINF-L@NIC.SURFNET.NL
Subject: Survey of Environmental Computer Models
Dear All,
I'm compiling a critical survey of environmental computer-based models
for use in Integrated Environmental Assessment. No, not all of them -
see below. Names and brief details of any suitable models would be
gratefully received. References to other sources of information are also
welcome.
I'm looking in the main sources of information (EPA, JRC, Enviroline,
etc.), but I'm sure there are plenty more. Also, it would be useful to
know what people (e.g. regulators and managers) actually use.
This survey is on behalf of the European Environment Agency and the
results will be published on their Web site.
To be more precise, what I want is models that:
- are useful in *integrated* environmental assessment -- you input a
problem or source term and get out a predicted consequence or (even
better) a solution;
- are usable by non-specialists (e.g. regulators, managers, planners);
- can be used as management tools for solving environmental planning
and management problems;
- are applicable to generic locations;
- are publicly available, either as Public Domain or commercial
software.
I don't want models of just a small corner of the environment, or
specialist models -- there are far too many of them!
All aspects of the environment are covered -- pollutant transport, land
use, ecological disturbance, noise...
Life-cycle assessment models and models with economic consequences are particularly interesting.
Replies may be sent directly to me (Martin.Peirce@aeat.co.uk). I'll
compile a digest of replies if anyone asks.
Thanks in advance.
Martin Peirce
Martin.Peirce@aeat.co.uk
Table of Contents
The Choices Before Us
Tim Weiskel of Harvard Divinity School (tweiskel@igc.apc.org) and an "A List..." reader was interviewed on WGBH-TV's "Greater Boston" April 14, 1997. He was trying to talk about the pressures of overpopulation on all our resources but the interviewer just wouldn't get it. You could see poor Emily Rooney, Andy's daughter and reputedly a savvy television person, shy away from the implications of what Weiskel was saying. When he tried to talk about the pressures of population on food supply in China, she gave a nervous laugh and responded by saying that the Chinese eat a lot of strange stuff that we wouldn't consider, like dogs for instance. I wonder how she would have reacted if she had seen a snake butchered before her in the marketplace of Guangzhuo as I once did.
Anyway, Tim said at least one thing so succinctly that I have hopes that it got through to the audience, if not the host:
"You have the choice of being a bicycle riding carnivore or, if you want to drive your car, you have to become a vegetarian."
Such are the choices before us.
One of the things Tim Weiskel does is the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values (http://divweb.harvard.edu/csvpl/ee/hsev) where he puts together a great program of speakers and maintains an invaluable set of Webpages with a lot of background information on a variety of environmental problems. Take a look at his work and, if you appreciate what he's doing, tell the University Committee on Environment and the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life about it.
Prof Michael McElroy
Chair, Univ Com on Environment
20 Oxford St, Hoffman Laboratory
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617)495-0368
(617)495-8839 fax
http://environment.harvard.edu
Dean Richard Thiemann
Director, Center for the Study of Values in Public Life
Harvard Divintiy School
56 Divinity Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617)496-5208
(617)496-3668 fax
csvpl@div.harvard.edu
http://divweb.harvard.edu/csvpl
Table of Contents
Visions of Virtually Wired Virtually Real
I am on the Board of Virtually Wired (55 Temple Place, Boston, MA 02111 (617)542-5555, info@vw.org, or http://www.vw.org), a public access computer site, and have been teaching the Introduction to Internet class there Wednesday afternoons for the past two years. When we opened way back in 1995 (on the Internet nobody may know you're a dog but everybody knows that time goes faster than dog-years), access to and training on the Internet and World Wide Web were unusual and exciting. There were only a few places you could go to get online and perhaps10% of the general population had dipped their toes in the digital infostream.
Today, maybe a third of everybody has online access at work or at home. Every main library and most schools have at least one computer available to browse the Web. CyberSmith is planning on having 400 cafes and probably many thousands of available machines in the next few years. Email kiosks are being built at airports and train stations and Dennis Leary's IBM Lotus Domino Internet TV commercials are annoying people all across the land. Access has become a commodity and training is available from every adult ed center and afterschool program.
Consequently, Virtually Wired which opened to provide cheap public access and training has had to change focus. After two years of paying our own way with daily and monthly passes ($5 a day and $20 a month), classes ($40) and tutorials ($55 for 2 hours), we find that we are not able to meet our obligations that way anymore. We have to find some other means to become a viable (nonprofit) business.
When we opened, we thought that we would serve low-income people. We were aiming for the homeless and unemployed. What we have found is that mostly middle-class, recently unemployed folks looking to upgrade their job skills are walking through the doors. Can we build a model that will meet their needs and support the true magic our ad hoc group of volunteers have found at Virtually Wired?
My vision is to concentrate on self help job training. We can help people access the Internet and learn basic computer skills from word processing to computer repair through readily available tutorials and classes. Or teach yourself with online lesson plans and a little help from your neighbor at the next machine. In my imagined Virtually Wired, we'd have an inhouse repair shop and computer recycling operation (a combination of what Ken Stoddard used to do at the BCS Mac office in Porter Square, the Broadway Bike School, and the Nexus machine shop where you can rent time on lathes and other machine tools.)
I want a place where you can walk in with something you found on the street and come out with a working computer that you helped (re)build to your own specifications, where one visit gives the first-time visitor
usable and marketable skills, a self-starting informational entrepreneurial community business generator that supports itself and provides useful work, volunteer or paid, for everybody who wants it.
That's what I'd like to see develop at Virtually Wired. And I'd like to see it develop fast enough to pay next month's rent.
Of course, all donations will be gratefully accepted and are tax-deductable as Virtually Wired is a bona fide nonprofit tax-exempt corporation.
Virtually Wired
55 Temple Place
Boston, MA 02111
(617)542-5555
(617)542-4248 fax
info@vw.org
http://www.vw.org
Table of Contents
Poem for the Assimilation of the Cyborg
Editorial Comment: This came along with my thinking about Virtually Wired and how to transform it into my ultimate computer clubhouse or geek club. The technology I am talking about here is close to available now. You can build your own 486-based wearable computer with eyephone and chording keyboard from off the shelf components now for less than $3000. Prototype sneaker-powered bodynet systems are being built at MIT Media Lab and IBM's Almaden Research Center, among other places.
The reference to "the elk in their migrations" comes from Gary Snyder's "Four Changes" one passage of which calls for:
"Computer technicians who run the plant part of the year and walk along with the elk in their migrations during the rest."
You can read the rest of "Four Changes" in Gary Snyder's _Turtle Island_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0877739528/alistA/) or _A Place in Space_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1887178279/alistA/). Written in 1969, "Four Changes" is well worth your attention.
Every lecture I go to at the Media Lab now has at least one cyborg, one person with something like a camcorder eyepiece and a waistpack wearable computer taking notes on a one hand chording keyboard while listening to the speaker. Within the next few years, we are all going to start seeing these folks on the street. Hell, the May 1997 issue of _Mobile Comuting and Communications_ (http://www.mobilecomputing.com) has a list of wearable computer system manufacturers.
Get ready for the cyborgs. Assimilate them before they assimilate you.
Portable motherboards
wearable wireless
street cyborg
from recycled parts.
Eyephone
bodynet
charged and recharged by
walking in
electromagnetic shoes.
Datagloved gestures
GPS belt buckle
digital audio/video
input/output
uploading automatically
to the World Wide Web.
Mobile network
augmented and annotated reality
virtual community
following "the elk in their migrations."
One town world global village
inter intra extra Net
tribal multimedia
realtime biological
machine coded
creation myth.
Assimilate the cyborg
Amplify the human
Recognize the animal vegetable mineral world
Information made flesh
through connection, intention,
and full honest purpose.
Be naked in your dreams
and dream electric sleep.
Table of Contents
Soros at Harvard
I went to see George Soros at Harvard, April 23, 1997, in the ARCO Forum of the Kennedy School. The place was packed. There must have been 2-300 people seated and standing throughout the atrium. They put in risers in the third floor balconies so more people could attend.
George Soros is a Hungarian immigrant who made billions in the foreign currency market. Since 1979 he has been using a series of foundations to fund projects all over the United States and the world. His foundations have been involved in Eastern Europe especially after the drawing of the Iron Curtain. During the last election cycle, there was Soros foundation money supporting medical marijuana legislation and he has recently established a fund for legal immigrants.
At Harvard, he talked about the ideas in his recent article in the _Atlantic Monthly_, "The Capitalist Threat" (http://www.TheAtlantic.com/atlantic/issues/97feb/capital/capital.htm) a title the editors choose Soros said. He wanted to call it something like "Notes on the Open Society," after Karl Popper's idea and book, _The Open Society and Is Enemies_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0691019681/alistA/) which has informed Soros' work since he was a student. He wanted to get three ideas across in the article and the speech: the Open Society, fallibility and reflexivity.
For Soros, the Open Society consists of civil, business, and democratic government sectors. It's most important characteristic is that "there has to be some common interest that takes precedence over" individual gain. It is this common interest that ensures the survival of democracy in the face of the absolutist ideas of communism and fascism, both of which Soros has experienced.
Fallibility is the recognition of our own, human fallibility. It is an acceptance of the fact that there is no such thing as perfect knowledge in the real world, despite what communism, fascism and laissez faire dogmatism profess. Admitting that we might be wrong, accepting our fallibility also admits that possibility of improvement. In an Open Society, improvement is always possible.
Reflexivity means we live within a reflexive world: the decisions we make affect the context by which we make those decisions. This is a systems concept, positive and negative feedback. Soros has used reflexivity in working the financial markets, finding that there is a disequilibrium in market participants trying to anticipate the future and the market responding to that anticipation. Soros has become a billionaire by responding to that disequilibrium. He says, " In social and political affairs the participants' perceptions help to determine reality. In these
situations facts do not necessarily constitute reliable criteria for
judging the truth of statements. There is a two-way connection - a feedback mechanism - between thinking and events, which I have called 'reflexivity.' I have used it to develop a theory of history." It is of his practical experience in using the concept of relexivity that George Soros questions the relevance of universal concepts. He does not believe in perfection and most especially not the existence of perfect knowledge in the marketplace or the perfect man of communism and fascism.
Soros feels that markets and private property are not enough, that we need a common interest.
He seemed like a very measured individual. He knew what he knew very well and would not venture out of that sphere of knowledge and experience. The measures of that box may very well be the current threats he sees to the Open Society in US - income inequity, denial of death, drug policy and free market absolutism.
Table of Contents
TV Violence and Neofascism
In the May 1997 _Atlantic Monthly_, there is an article about another Hungarian immigrant, George Gerbner, the former dean of the Annenberg School of Communications and his long-time work on the effects of television violence (http://www.theatlantic.com/atlantic/issues/97may/gerbner.htm).
Gerbner's main point is not about violence per se about the power relationships the popular presentations of violence represent. He says, "What is the message of violence? Who can get away with what against whom?" In most commentaries on his work, it is the sheer weight of so many murders and maulings per hour broadcast to every home and TV screen and the debate about whether that really affects behavior that is highlighted. The power structure behind the TV violence we see so much of is ignored. Too painful to look at?
Gerbner also calls for a common purpose to counteract the wholesale presentation of violence shilling for the retail sales of all those commercials. George Gerbner, who fled Hungary before the Nazis and returned to fight them behind the lines, believes, "The disempowering effectos of television lead to neofascism."
Hmmm. Two Hungarian immigrants with distinguished careers and personal experience of fascism see tendencies in our present society that remind them of the days of black shirts and swastikas. I am reminded of Bertram Gross, who died recently, and his prescient book _Friendly Fascism_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0896081494/alistA/).
Perhaps this is not just fear-mongering but a real warning. It is always time to counteract fascist tendencies. I know that's what I'm trying to do.
Table of Contents
Rock n Roll Wisdom
Rick Danko of "The Band" said something very wise in VH1 documentary I saw on April 17, 1997:
"When we were younger we wanted to change the world
and thought we could.
Now we know we're only here to help the neighborhood."
Table of Contents
The Begging Bowl
So far this year, "A List..."has received $327 from 8 people. That will pay my telecommunications bill for this year and may even contribute to the phone bill. I'd like to go for the utilities next and a little something for rent and food would be nice too. My own time will ever be a dead loss but I guess that is only to be expected.
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Information Ecologies
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