Category Archives: Distributed Participation

Burned vs. Burned Up

prescribed burn Regarding the Georgia and Florida swamp and pine fires, one of the main questions is at what point does preservation offer greater economic gain than resource extraction. Looking at the big picture brings out two points:

ActionBioscience.org: The figure "$33 trillion" was once projected as the value of ecosystems globally. What do you think of this type of economic analysis?

Polasky: The $33-trillion figure refers to one of the earliest studies that was done on the value of ecosystem services. The lead author was Robert Costanza. He and his coauthors tried to get at the notion of how we can establish on a global basis what the value of ecosystem services is. They came up with a number 33 trillion [USD] plus or minus a few trillion. There are a number of problems with the study. The most basic one is the question of what you are talking about when you consider all the ecosystem services of Earth. The entire system is our life support system. So what is our life support system worth? You don’t really have to have a scientific study in order to answer that question. The real value of the study was not the $33-trillion figure, which who knows what that means, but that it spurred people to focus on these issues.

Such values can be big, and the dollar value isn’t the only consideration. There is a bit of risk in that we can’t do without the biosphere, and some risk management is in order. Even beyond that obvious non-dollar value, there are further questions of species diversity and esthetics. Do we really want to kill off an ecosystem when we don’t really know what it’s doing for us, and do we all want to live surrounded by concrete?

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Your Risk Swamp

Bugaboo Wildfire Map Chandler commented on Wildfire Precedents about how some timber companies had mismanaged underbrush cleanup. That’s probably true in some places, but the details of the forestry and fire problems in the west and in the southeast are different. Fire is the usual method to clear underbrush in southeastern pine forests, But not the kind of fires we’re seeing this year.

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Truth is a Property of Networks

Dave Weinberger types out of a drug- and fatigue-induced haze:

Truth is a property of networks.

I can only guess at what I mean, starting with the obvious: Rather than thinking that truth is a relationship between the propositions we believe and the way the world is, such that the propositions represent the world, in the networked world the truth is argued for and connected via links. For all but the most mundane of truths, the network of conversations gives us more shades, nuances, and reasons to believe. Which leads me to think that if truth isn’t an emergent property of networks, then understanding is.

—Networked truth, Dave Weinberger, Joho the Blog, 13 April 2007

I think he’s right, except it’s not either/or: it’s both.

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Sentimental Education

Regarding Blogger Civility, I’d like to add that where there are real threats, of course the person threatened should complain, and if the threatener can be tracked down, there are already laws that apply. Also, some people think that technical subjects aren’t contentious enough to provoke threats; those people apparently haven’t yet gotten crazy rants from people who incorporate technology into their conspiracy theories, or who fear technology because it might help people oppose their favorite policies, or who don’t like technology because they’ve always been afraid of people who understand it, or who don’t like women/gays/blacks/whites/southerners/foreigners/whatever participating in it. And there are people who think the blogosphere is unusual in harboring threats; those people apparently don’t get out much. I wonder what sort of mail somebody like Condoleeza Rice or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John McCain gets?

Anyway, the idea of a blogger code of conduct reminds me of something else:

A technique to detect favorable and unfavorable opinions toward specific subjects (such as organizations and their products) within large numbers of documents offers enormous opportunities for various applications. It would provide powerful functionality for competitive analysis, marketing analysis, and detection of unfavorable rumors for risk management.

— Overview, Sentiment Analysis, IBM Tokyo Research Lab, accessed 13 April 2007

Yet another artificial intelligence scheme; ho hum. Or is it?

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Participatory Journalism

Here at the Freedom to Connect conference in Silver Spring, Maryland, Dan Gillmor is moderating a panel about peer production news. Here are some examples:

  • Bakersfield pothole map
    Locals report seeing potholes and they get mapped.
  • U.S. Fatalities in Iraq
    Someone has taken the home of record for each U.S. fatality in Iraq and mapped it.
  • Chicago Crime Map
    This one says down at the bottom: "Important disclaimer: This site is not affiliated with the Chicago Police Department. This site uses crime data obtained from the CPD’s Citizen ICAM Web site, which is a publicly available database of reported crime. Please read the Citizen ICAM disclaimer to understand the data fully."
  • Bakersfield homicide map
    "This is a map of Homicides in the Bakersfield area that occured in 2006. Locations are approximated and based on data provided by the Office of the Coroner."

In all these cases the data are mapped by someone who is not an official data producer, and at least in the pothole map case, the actual data are produced by individual citizens.

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