Guest Blog: Why we live in dangerous places

Natural disasters always seem to strike in the worst places. The Sendai earthquake has caused over 8,000 deaths, destroyed 450,000 people’s homes, crippled four nuclear reactors and wreaked over $300 billion in damage. And it’s only the latest disaster. Haiti will need decades to rebuild after its earthquake. New Orleans still hasn’t repopulated following Hurricane Katrina. Indonesia still feels the effect of the 2004 tsunami. The list could go on and on. The unfortunate lesson is that we live in dangerous places. 

We have built civilization’s cornerstones on amorphous, impermanent stuff. Coasts, rivers, deltas and earthquake zones are places of dramatic upheaval. Shorelines are constantly being rewritten. Rivers fussily overtop their banks and reroute themselves. With one hand, earthquakes open the earth, and with the other they send it coursing down hillsides. We settled those places for good reason. What makes them attractive is the same thing that makes them dangerous. Periodic disruption and change is the progenitor of diversity, stability and abundance. Where there is disaster, there is also opportunity. Ecologists call it the “intermediate disturbance hypothesis.” 

The intermediate disturbance hypothesis is one answer to an existential ecological question: Why are there so many different types of plants and animals? The term was first coined by Joseph Connell, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, in 1978.¹ Connell studied tropical forests and coral reefs, and during the course of his work, he noticed something peculiar. The places with the highest diversity of species were not the most stable. In fact, the most stable and least disturbed locations had relatively low biodiversity. The same was true of the places that suffered constant upheaval. But there, in the middle, was a level of disturbance that was just right. Not too frequent or too harsh, but also not too sparing or too light. Occasional disturbances that inflict moderate damage are, ecologically speaking, a good thing. 

To see how this works, let’s imagine a hypothetical forest, one that escapes disturbance for thousands, even millions of years. Eventually, it will be dominated by two species—a tree species that is best adapted to the type of soil, quantity of water and amount of sunlight, and an understory species that can best cope with limited sunlight under the canopy. No other species could possibly compete; eventually, two species would become the best plants for the conditions. While it’s a gross generalization, it illustrates the point. Stable environments can stifle diversity. 

This would not be the case in a more realistic forest, however, one that suffers from the periodic fallen tree, occasional fire or odd tornado. In the window opened by disturbances, other species would have ample opportunity to gain a foothold. If a tree falls, other species could bolt toward the sun. After a fire, herbs that sprout vigorously would have a leg up on previously dominant plants that bud languorously. Life explodes into the openings when given new opportunities. 

Biodiversity has flourished where the occasional disturbance kicks open a door. These places are also all the more stable for it. Diversity breeds stability. They are also richer in food and resources, two qualities that attracted our ancestors. The natural bounty of those places made the occasional hurricane or tsunami tolerable. 

Today, many of us don’t have the same problems our forebears did. We don’t need to live next to our food. Our water comes from a tap. We can drop our packages off at the post office. But the past is hard to escape. While the requirements of the last century may have disappeared, our cities have not. We are creatures of habit. 

Yet social inertia is not the only reason we still live in dangerous places. As aesthetically tuned creatures, we crave dramatic landscapes forged by catastrophe. California is celebrated for its tectonic rocky shores. Mount Saint Helens almost certainly has more visitors now than before it blew its top. The Mississippi River is responsible for untold hardship, yet it’s held up as an honored piece of Americana. 

That’s not to say that the Sendai earthquake or Australia’s Black Saturday bushfires will be lauded in the future. They are more than intermediate disturbances—they are real disasters. Yet in ecological terms, each would have been a small speed bump. What turns intermediate disturbances into natural disasters is population density. Earthquakes didn’t kill when our buildings didn’t require stairs. And though tsunamis still have always been devastating, they caused few human casualties before we built cities. Avalanches in remote parts of Alaska don’t usually raise eyebrows, but they are a constant concern for many villages in the Swiss Alps. Much of the handwringing over sea level rise is precisely because so much of the world’s population lives near the ocean. 

That’s not to say we should flee the coasts or abandon the breathtaking but dangerous places. Our fear of change may seem like a hindrance, but our stubbornness is also one of our greatest assets. Without overcoming intermediate disturbances like floods or sandstorms, there would be no Rome or Cairo. We live on a tumultuous planet where life has thrived under a regime of constant upheaval. Adapting is—and always has been—our last, best hope.
—

¹ Though he coined the term, two previous studies had described essentially the same concept.return

References:
Connell, J.H. 1978. Diversity in tropical rain forests and coral reefs. Science 199(4335):1302-10. PMID: 17840770
Wilkinson, D.M. 1999. The Disturbing History of Intermediate Disturbance. Oikos 84(1):145-147. DOI: 10.2307/3546874.
Image:
The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai. Source: Library of Congress via Wikipedia.
About the Author: Tim De Chant is the creator of Per Square Mile, a blog about density, and a contributor to Ars Technica. He received his PhD in Environmental Science, Policy and Management from the University of California, Berkeley and was a AAAS Mass Media Fellow at the Chicago Tribune. You can find him on Twitter at  @tdechant and on the web at www.de-chant.com/tim.
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

via scientificamerican.com

Start-Ups: Don't Outsource Coding

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Nasihat yang bagus untuk yang memulai atau mengawali usaha.

Research practices must be changed to minimize fraud deception

In 1998, a study linking the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism in children appeared in a respected medical journal. For a decade, the study grabbed headlines worldwide. Worried parents rejected the life-saving vaccine for their children and those with autistic children agonized that they allowed an injection that caused the condition.

But the vaccine-autism research was a fraud. The paper was retracted 12 years later, denounced as an elaborate deception.

"The fraud in that MMR study epitomizes how fabricated research can lead to a domino effect of tragic consequences," says Vineet Chopra, M.D., F.A.C.P., F.H.M., assistant professor of Internal Medicine at U-M. "Patients fear potentially lifesaving interventions, clinicians alter practice and scientists and governments waste precious resources to evaluate researchers' claims."

Chopra expresses these concerns in a commentary published in the Journal of the American Medical Association March 23 with Matthew Davis, M.D., M.A.P.P., associate professor of pediatrics and communicable diseases, internal medicine and public policy at the University of Michigan Medical School and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. They call for changes throughout the research process to adjust expectations for researchers that conduct studies, the journals that publish results and the public that responds to the findings.

Chopra and Davis emphasize the critical importance of equipoise-a state of genuine uncertainty on the part of the researcher as to what a study will reveal.

"In an era of increasing competition for funding and publication, researchers face mounting pressure to report the results they wish to see.," says Davis. "Of course, it's natural for the public to want unequivocal advances in understanding and the latest accomplishments in medical research. But research doesn't always yield those results.

"The key is for funders, journals, the media and the public to value equipoise in the research process, rather than only the results."

In their JAMA commentary, Chopra and Davis recommend steps to reach research equipoise:

1. Mandate the public release of all available data in connection with a study, as opposed to specific data associated with outcomes.

2. Reduce publication bias, in which medical journals accept and publish chiefly those studies with statistically significant results. This jeopardizes consideration and dissemination of research pertaining to findings on both sides of an issue, and influences investigators before research begins.

3. Shift the focus of public and private sponsors of research from outcome to process, affirming that study veracity is more valuable than results.

4. Train researchers to recognize, appreciate and root out biases in their work.

"Researchers may lie about their research for personal or political gain. They make front page news when they get caught, but they represent a small part of the overall picture. A broader problem occurs when a researcher conducts a study with an answer to their question already in mind. Their certainty, rather than genuine uncertainty, influences their investigation and reporting, leading to results that may not be accurate," says Chopra.

"Society demands research that is moral, ethical and honest. When this is not the case, both the public and researchers, even those telling the truth, lose."

Source: University of Michigan

via sciguru.com

Twitter: tweeting louder than ever

from: Guardian: Tech

As it turns five, the microblogging service is only getting bigger and more pervasive – and more important to journalism

'Just setting up my twttr", wrote Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder and chairman, on 21 March 2006 at 12.50pm, Pacific Daylight Time. If you feel like lighting candles and baking cakes, that's 8.50pm GMT on Monday – marking the point at which Twitter, variously dubbed a social networking service and a microblogging service, turns five.

In that time it has woven itself into tumultuous events: the news that a plane had crash-landed in the Hudson River (with picture); the election protests in Iran; the rapid dispersal of the news of an 7.8-magnitude earthquake in China; updates from the ground about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

There have been less important moments – multiple billions of them, including Stephen Fry being stuck in a lift ("we could be here for hours. Arse, poo and widdle"); the race in 2009 between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to be the first past 1m followers (a contest rendered irrelevant by Charlie Sheen's meteoric rise this year); Sarah Palin's coinage of "refudiate"; and Clarence House announcing the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Twitter has become an endlessly flowing river of news, opinion, information, expertise, contacts, data, links, connections. You can not only find out what is happening, but connect to the people you're trying to reach more directly.

It's changed the relationship between media, fans and celebrities: the latter can dismiss a story within seconds of it appearing. (Though it has also proved a tabloid godsend, which can generate endless stories from celebrities' real tweets – especially after the PCC ruled that tweets are public statements.) And links to stories broadcast on Twitter are a new source of incoming traffic for news organisations - though presently far behind Facebook or Google.

The question now is: where will Twitter be in five years' time? It is still struggling to fin...

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