Category Archives: Resources

Blogging Theme for Week 14

As a theme for this week, I would suggest “Policy proposals for limiting carbon emissions”.   We discussed some of these in class on Friday, but in a quite abstract, mathematical way – how they could work in an “ideal world”.   But how about in the real world? What ideas are being tried, how might they work in practice, how successful are they?

Here are some possible readings and references on this issue

Remember that, as always, the theme above is only a suggestion.  You are welcome to post on any relevant topic, including one of the earlier suggested themes.  Here is a list of those:

 

Alien Supercivilizations Absent from Nearby Galaxies

This piece from Scientific American:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alien-supercivilizations-absent-from-100-000-nearby-galaxies/

is mostly about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).  But on the way, it gets into some interesting musings on exponential growth, energy usage, and whether our picture of what “advanced civilization” entails is realistic.  Here’s a quote:

In 2011 the science fiction author Karl Schroeder coined an all-too-plausible reason for the apparent absence of aliens: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.” In this view the future of technology would not consist of star-hopping civilizations spreading like wildfire through galaxies, disassembling planets and smothering suns, but rather of slow-growing cultures becoming more and more integrated with their natural environments, striving for ever-greater efficiencies and coming ever-closer to thermodynamic equilibrium. Simply put, profligate galaxy-spanning empires are unsustainable and therefore we do not see them. “SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products,” Schroeder has written. “Waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals—we merely have to posit that successful civilizations don’t produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.”

Tragedy of the commons

The phrase “tragedy of the commons” is used generally in environmental writing to talk about the way some shared resource can be damaged when individuals – striving to maximize their personal gains in utility – use more than their socially optimal share of the resource.   The term was introduced though in a famous paper by Hardin

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full.pdf

which refers specifically to population issues.  This is a disquieting article to read today, with its echoes of early 20th-century eugenicists’ fears of the “lower classes” outbreeding the elite, but it is also an important one in the history of environmental thought.

Blogging Theme for Week 13

For this week, as a theme, I’d suggest “the spread of epidemics in a social network”.   “Epidemic” of course sounds like a disease, but also the spread of new ideas (recycling?) or technologies (solar panels, maybe?) can be thought of as a kind of epidemic.

Here is a link to a TED talk about this sort of idea.  To identify the network nodes which were most likely to be highly connected (and therefore contribute most to the spread across the network) the researchers used a simple trick: have people nominate their friends.  This works because, as we briefly discussed in class, the average person’s average friend is likely to be better connected than the average person.

Remember that, as always, the theme above is only a suggestion.  You are welcome to post on any relevant topic, including one of the earlier suggested themes.  Here is a list of those:

 

Blogging theme for week 12

It has been good to talk to some of you in office hours about ideas for your blog posts.  I encourage you all to make use of the support provided in office hours to make your blog contributions the best that they can be.

For this week my suggested theme is  “The Anthropocene”.  This term showed up in Chris Uhl’s talk last week.  It has been suggested to describe an epoch (a period of geological time) in which the geologic history of the whole Earth becomes dominated by human influence.

You could blog about the process which leads to such an “official” designation, the evidence for a new geologic era, and how present human-influenced characteristics of the natural world (e.g. rate of species extinction) compare to previous epochs.

Remember that, as always, the theme is only a suggestion.  You are welcome to post on any relevant topic, including one of the earlier suggested themes.  Here is a list of those: