Same same, but different

Great project. Traveling around the world with solar energy. Wow!

Between science and art: Commercial shipping activity can lead to ship strikes of large animals, noise pollution, and a risk of ship groundings or sinkings. Ships from many countries voluntarily participate in collecting meteorological data globally, and therefore also 7 report the location of the ship. We used data collected from 12 months beginning October 2004 (collected as part of the World Meteorological Organization Voluntary Observing Ships Scheme; http://www.vos.noaa.gov/vos_scheme.shtml) as this year had the most ships with vetted protocols and so provides the most representative estimate of global ship locations. The data include unique identifier codes for ships (mobile or a single datum) and stationary buoys and oil platforms (multiple data at a fixed location); we removed all stationary and single point ship data, leaving 1,189,127 mobile ship data points from a total of 3,374 commercial and research vessels, representing roughly 11% of the 30,851 merchant ships >1000 gross tonnage at sea in 2005 (S14). We then connected all mobile ship data to create ship tracks, under the assumption that ships travel in straight lines (a reasonable assumption since ships minimize travel distance in an effort to minimize fuel costs). Finally, we removed any tracks that crossed land (e.g. a single ship that records its location in the Atlantic and the Pacific would have a track connected across North America), buffered the remaining 799,853 line segments to be 1 km wide to account for the width of shipping lanes, summed all buffered line segments to account for overlapping ship tracks, and converted summed ship tracks to raster data. This produced 1 km2 raster cells with values ranging from 0 to 1,158, the maximum number of ship tracks recorded in a single 1 km2 cell.
Because the VOS program is voluntary, much commercial shipping traffic is not captured by these data. Therefore our estimates of the impact of shipping are biased (in an unknown way) to locations and types of ships engaged in the program. In particular, high traffic locations may be strongly underestimated, although the relative impact on these areas versus low-traffic areas appears to be well-captured by the available data (Fig. S2), and areas identified as without shipping may actually have low levels of ship traffic. Furthermore, because ships report their location with varying distance between signals, ship tracks are estimates of the actual shipping route taken.
What happens in the vast stretches of the world’s oceans – both wondrous and worrisome – has too often been out of sight, out of mind. The sea represents the last major scientific frontier on planet earth – a place where expeditions continue to discover not only new species, but even new phyla. The role of these species in the ecosystem, where they sit in the tree of life, and how they respond to environmental changes really do constitute mysteries of the deep. Despite technological advances that now allow people to access, exploit or affect nearly all parts of the ocean, we still understand very little of the ocean’s biodiversity and how it is changing under our influence. The goal of the research presented here is to estimate and visualize, for the first time, the global impact humans are having on the ocean’s ecosystems. Our analysis, published in Science February 15, 2008, shows that over 40% of the world’s oceans are heavily affected by human activities and few if any areas remain untouched.

By understanding the blindspots associated with your personality type, you can avoid the common career pitfalls encountered by people like yourself. You can also identify your unique strengths, motivations, and any skills or qualities you may need to develop. Here is another test. Here is a description of my type.

Author and activist Michael Pollan is a passionate advocate for sustainable food. In his compelling talk at PopTech, he explores how our industrial food system is keeping us overly dependent on fossil fuels, destroying our environment, and making us sick. Breaking this cycle requires fundamentally changing our relationship to food – and eating more meals together.

PEIR, the Personal Environmental Impact Report, is a new kind of online tool that allows you to use your mobile phone to explore and share how you impact the environment and how the environment impacts you.
What’s unique about PEIR? Taking a step beyond a “footprint calculator” that relies only on your demographics, PEIR uses location data that is regularly and securely uploaded from your mobile phone to create a dynamic and personalized report about your environmental impact and exposure.

Wilderness? Only 10% of the land area is remote – more than 48 hours from a large city

Concentration & density. 95% of the people live on just 10% of the land

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Nice statistics exploration tool.

The ground-breaking Global Peace Index (GPI) has been expanded and updated with the latest available figures for 2008, a year on from the completion of the first GPI, which ranked 121 nations according to their relative states of peace.

The index is composed of 24 qualitative and quantitative indicators from highly respected sources, which combine internal and external factors ranging from a nation’s level of military expenditure to its relations with neighbouring countries and the level of respect for human rights. These indicators were selected by an international panel of academics, business people, philanthropists and peace institutions. The GPI is collated and calculated by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Wow, impressive way of displaying geographic, moving data in this BBC report.

Nicely done. Takes perhaps a bit to get into it, but the cartograms just are a different way of presenting (in cartographic form) information.

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Interesting talk of Klaus Töpfer about Climate Change, the need to change and more…

Two citations out of his presentation:

Get Vegetation images for free.

The VEGETATION Programme offers :

• Earth observation sensor on board of the SPOT satellite
• Daily coverage of the entire earth at a spatial resolution of 1 km
• Ready to use high quality remote sensing imagery available to end-users in near-real time
• Up-to-date information for decision makers to optimise policies for resource management and environmental monitoring

VirtualWater: Water is probably one of the most precious resources and vital for everyone’s everyday life. In spite of this obvious fact, people use large amounts of water: drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, etc.

CARMA provides the world’s most detailed and comprehensive information on carbon emissions resulting from the production of electricity. Power sector emissions make up 25% of the global total, 40% of carbon emissions in the United States, and are a primary cause of global warming.

Environmental scientist David Keith talks about a cheap, effective, shocking solution to climate change: What if we injected a huge cloud of particles into the atmosphere, to deflect sunlight and heat? As an emergency measure to slow a melting ice cap, it could work. Keith discusses why geo-engineering like this is a good idea, why it’s a terrible one — and who, despite the cost, might be tempted to use it.

Really cool application, showing at each second the change of population, number of people infected by diseases, oil pumped, car produced etc. etc…

Tony Buzan on creativity and learning how to learn. Tony Buzan who you may recall is the father of Mindmapping as we know it today (or at least the first to market it by that name). Buzan’s presentation is perhaps not the most exciting, but hang with it, it’s good. I think you will find the content very interesting.

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Great presentation on how to present statistics. I love the gapminder software – what a astonishing tool for statistical data visualization!

Bereits der gemessene durchschnittliche Temperaturanstieg um 0,95 Grad Celsius in Deutschland hat für eine Verschiebung der Klimazonen um bis zu 100 Kilometer nach Norden gesorgt.

Folglich beginnt der Frühling zeitiger – zwischen zwei und sieben Tagen früher als noch vor 20 Jahren, wie Annette Menzel, Ökoklimatologin an der TU München, ermittelt hat. 

Während die Temperatur in dem untersuchten Zeitraum am Bodensee um 2,4 Grad Celsius anstieg, erhöhte sich die Zahl der Vogelarten von 141 auf 156. “In so kurzer Zeit ist das dramatisch. Und es ist nur der erste Zipfel. Alles gerät in Bewegung.“

Mediterrane Arten wie Zaun- und Zippammer, Orpheusspötter, Mittelmeermöwe und Purpurreiher zählen nun zur festen Fauna am Bodensee, sagt Böhning-Gaese, die ihre Forschungsergebnisse demnächst im Journal Conservation Biology veröffentlicht. 

An verschiedenen Stellen ist das Mittelmeer seit 1995 um bis zu drei Grad wärmer geworden, zudem stieg der Salzgehalt an, was vielen tropischen Arten entgegenkommt. 

(aus der Süddeutschen Zeitung online)