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Friday, October 24, 2003
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 Timothy Wilken, MD writes: This morning the leading business news was Google's pending IPO. Is this a good thing? I don't think so. Google has been a shining prototype for gift economy. IPO status will push it back firmly into the market economy. I expect the Google we all know and love will begin to deteriorate rapidly as its mission changes from public service to the acquisition of money. ... The human condition of INTERdependence means all humans need help. This is important enough that it can not be said too often. All humans need help unless they wish to live at the level of animal subsistence. INTERdependence means sometimes I depend on others and sometimes others depend on me. As a synergic help exchange — the Gift Tensegrity will be radically different from both the adversary help exchange — the Coercion Tensegrity and the neutral help exchange — the Product Tensegrity. One of the primary differences will be how the roles of giver of help and receiver of help change in the new synergic help tensegrity. Active control shifts away from the predators and buyers (receivers of help) to active control by the giftors (givers of help). ... The new IPO will make a few boys very rich, but as Google embraces the Product Tensegrity and the Great Market it will loose its way, and become just another footnote in history. (03/30/02)
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 Matthew Engel writes: Earlier this year, just before he was fired as environment minister, Michael Meacher gave a speech in Newcastle, saying: "There is a lot wrong with our world. But it is not as bad as people think. It is actually worse." He listed five threats to the survival of the planet: lack of fresh water, destruction of forest and crop land, global warming, overuse of natural resources and the continuing rise in the population. What Meacher could not say, or he would have been booted out more quickly, was that the US is a world leader in hastening each of these five crises, bringing its gargantuan appetite to the business of ravaging the planet. American politicians do not talk this way. Even Al Gore, supposedly the most committed environmentalist in world politics, kept quiet about the subject when chasing the presidency in 2000. Those of us without a degree in climatology can have no sensible opinion on the truth about climate change, except to sense that the weather does seem to have become a little weird lately. Yet in America the subject has become politicised, with rightwing commentators decrying global warming as "bogus science". They gloated when it snowed unusually hard in Washington last winter (failing to notice the absence of snow in Alaska). When the dissident "good news" scientist Bjorn Lomborg spoke to a conservative Washington thinktank he was applauded not merely rapturously, but fawningly. While newspapers report that Kilimanjaro's icecap is melting and Greenland's glaciers are crumbling, the US government has been telling its scientific advisers to do more research before it can consider any action to restrict greenhouse gases; the scientists reported back that they had done all the research. The attitude of the White House to global warming was summed up by the online journalist Mickey Kaus as: "It's not true! It's not true! And we can't do anything about it!" What terrifies all American politicians, deep down, is that it is true and that they could do something about it, but at horrendous cost to American industry and lifestyle. (10/24/03)
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 BBC Nature -- Repeated escapes of farmed salmon could drive endangered populations of wild Atlantic salmon to extinction, say scientists in the British Isles. There has been concern over the past decade that domesticated salmon are breeding with native salmon, changing the genetic make-up of the fish and damaging their ability to survive in the natural environment.Until now, there has been little direct scientific evidence but, according to a report published in the journal Royal Society Proceedings B, the fears of environmentalists may be justified. In a 10-year study, researchers from Ireland, Northern Island and Scotland, found that wild salmon were vulnerable to extinction because of genetic and competitive pressures from farmed fish. Experiments with wild and farmed salmon hybrids in fresh and marine water showed that the offspring of fish that had interbred had a much lower survival rate - some 70% of the fish died in the first few weeks of life. Overall, farmed salmon were much less successful at surviving in the wild compared with native salmon and were unlikely to return to rivers to spawn. However, they grew quicker than wild salmon and the ones that did survive displaced many of their wild cousins from the rivers. The team, led by Dr Philip McGinnity of Ireland's national agency, the Marine Institute, and Professor Andy Ferguson of Queen's University Belfast, warn that accidental and deliberate introductions of farmed salmon could lead to extinction of vulnerable wild populations of Atlantic salmon. (10/24/03)
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 BBC Nature -- Medical science risks missing out on some remarkable new drugs because of the imperilled status of cone snails. The marine molluscs, which live in shallow tropical waters, have powerful venoms that will form the basis of a novel class of strong painkillers. But the animals are now under intense pressure from habitat loss and because their beautiful shells make them the highly prized target for collectors. Their plight is raised in the current edition of the journal Science. "Tropical cone snails may contain the largest and most clinically important pharmacopoeia of any genus in Nature, but wild populations are being decimated by habitat destruction and overexploitation," said Dr Eric Chivian, from Harvard Medical School in Boston, US. "To lose these species would be a self-destructive act of unparalleled folly." Chivian; Professor Callum Roberts of York University, UK; and Aaron Bernstein, of Chicago University, US, believe urgent action is now needed to give the snails better protection. They say a good first step would be to bring the animals under the aegis of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites). This would require countries to monitor their trade and prevent unsustainable activity. "They are exquisite and within easy reach of people," said Professor Roberts. "As a result, they are suffering badly from unregulated, intensive collection." Hundreds of tonnes of shells are imported into the US and Europe annually. (10/24/03)
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 BBC Technology -- The Nuna II vehicle has won the 2003 World Solar Challenge in Australia for cars that are powered only by sunlight. The Dutch machine completed the 3,010 km race distance in just 30 hours and 54 minutes - a record for the event. The competition which runs from Darwin to Adelaide and attracts entries backed by big motor manufacturers is seen as a test bed for solar cell technology. The very best cars with their sleek designs will regularly top 100 km/h in the heat of the Australian outback. Nuna II also won the 2001 race and came back this year with a revised shape and improved aerodynamics. Built by students from the universities in Delft and Rotterdam, the car employs developments that have come straight out of the European Space Agency (Esa). These include ultramodern solar cells, high performance batteries and space plastics that were originally intended for use on spacecraft. For example, the very same batteries are now travelling on Smart 1, Esa's lunar probe which left the Earth to map the Moon last month. Chris Selwood, World Solar Challenge event manager, said the 2003 cars were of a higher standard than previous years. "This has been probably the most successful World Solar Challenge with all 22 teams still remaining in the event," he said. "A couple of teams encountered minor technical problems on day two but have been able to continue." (10/24/03)
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 BBC Nature -- East Asia's booming ivory trade could send elephant numbers into freefall if the current ban on ivory selling is temporarily lifted, campaigners say. They fear poachers will use the cover of a planned one-off sale of African ivory stockpiles to go on a killing spree of the threatened animals. The Far East's love for ivory could help push elephants to the brink of extinction within 20 years, they argue. Numbers have already dwindled from one million in 1980 to just 500,000 today. South Africa, Namibia and Botswana have received permission under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) to sell 60 tonnes of government ivory stocks after May 2004. Much of the ivory has been confiscated from poachers. But a group of conservation organisations, headed by Save the Elephants, is concerned that an injection of ivory into the market could wet the global appetite for tusk products. And in turn, this could encourage illegal poachers to try to meet the demand. Save the Elephants sent undercover researchers to China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to find out what current global demand is like. The researchers, Esmond Martin and Dan Stiles, found 54,000 pieces of ivory on sale in the five markets. "This suggests roughly 27 tonnes of ivory is still in circulation globally more than 10 years after the trade was banned worldwide," Daniel Stiles said. "That translates to about 3,500 tusk-bearing elephants and, probably, to the slaughter of more than 5,000 because poachers commonly mow down whole herds, including young. (10/24/03)
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8:49:52 AM 
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2003
Timothy Wilken.
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