Rivers and Tides
More images are available from the Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalog, the Met, Met and WebShots.
Time interviewed Goldsworthy earlier this Met.
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More images are available from the Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalog, the Met, Met and WebShots.
Time interviewed Goldsworthy earlier this Met.
Technoviking
The music dances to Technoviking.
Chinese imports need to improve
And while some quality-control improvements are being made, a team of MSU scientists just back from China say they still have a long way to go.
"There are problems with a lack of trained staff to do the certifications, lack of training for producers and distributors and inadequate government oversight leading to misuse of labels," said Larry Busch, University Distinguished professor of sociology and director of MSU's Institute for Food and Agricultural Standards.
Busch was a member of a team of MSU scientists which took part in the international research symposium on Certification and Traceability for Food Safety and Quality in China.
To date, a wide range of systems of certification and traceability have been put into practice in China, but they are neither consistent with each other nor widely understood.
"Certification is when I buy something that has a label showing that someone inspected and found it to be in conformity," Busch said. "Traceability means that I can buy something at the supermarket and find out easily where it was produced, down to the level of the farm." .
With the worldwide growth of trade in food and agricultural products, and China emerging as a major player, there has been growing global public concern and awareness of food safety and quality. In addition, this growing awareness can be used to promote environmental improvements in the countryside by reducing agricultural chemical use.........
Internet users give up privacy in exchange for trust
The findings of the study are vital for those aiming to create online services that pose a potential privacy threat, such as Government agencies involved in developing ID cards. The project observed that even those people who declared themselves unconcerned about privacy would soon become opposed to ID cards if the way that they were asked for information made them feel that their privacy was threatened.
The Privacy and Self-Disclosure Online project is the first of its kind, in that rigorous methods were used to measure internet users actual behaviour. Dr Joinson explains; For the first time we have research which actually analyses what people do online, rather than just looking at what they say they do.
56 percent of internet users stated that they have concerns about privacy when they are online. The central issue was whether websites were seen as especially trustworthy or untrustworthy causing users to alter their behaviour. When a website is designed to look trustworthy, people are willing to accept privacy violations. But, the same actions by an untrustworthy site leads to people behaving in a much more guarded manner.........
Update on the bag experiment
If you recall my first post on this subject, you know that I have set two common plastic grocery bags in an exposed area in the forest so that I can check on their decay from natural forces. One of them (in the lower right of the photo above) is a regular grocery store bag that you can find blowing about the countryside or choking sea turtles just about everywhere. The second (upper left) is one I got from a local natural foods store that is suppose to biodegrade over time (the bag, not the store). I think the common grocery bag can be expected to last forever. (I had hoped to score another bag — one that would decay in only a few weeks — from a certain visitor from Oregon, but she seemed to have forgotten to pack a sample when she came.) My thought was that I could compare the decay of the bags and then draw profound conclusions from the observation.
There’s not much to report thus far, though. All that I noticed was that the printing on the bags has become a bit faded. It’s a start down the long road of decline, and I really do intend to keep you well informed about this thrilling experiment in the months and years to come.
Missouri calendar:
- Canada goose population at waterfowl areas is at its peak.
White space
Snow is a harsh editor, bringing out the most dramatic details and burying the rest. This black gum sapling grows less than ten feet from a trail, but I’d never focused on it before: an antelope in mid-leap, looking back over its shoulder.
From almost nothing in the depths of the hollow, the snow grew thicker on leaves and branches as I climbed the side of the ridge. A hundred yards beyond the “antelope,” I surprised a doe that had been bedded down under white mounds of mountain laurel. For once, her tail matched the color of the woods, and it was the grayish-brown of her winter coat that flashed alarm.
(Best viewed at larger size)
What begins as erasure, a laudable minimalism, becomes positively rococo as every last detail is freighted with a burden of white space.
Witch-hazel blossoms are capable of self-pollination when cold prevents the late moths, flies, and beetles from visiting. Is it possible that an early snow like this could also do the trick, if it were to soften and slide down a branch just so, from one flower to another? Well, probably not. But I like the idea of snow as a matchmaker, for some reason.
Going back along the ridgetop, I relished the silence and the fact that, for once, I didn’t break it just by walking: the fallen leaves were as muffled as those still clinging to the trees. From time to time a leaf-sized clump of snow would plummet to the ground, making a leaf-shaped print, like a promissory note.
Criterion's Berlin Alexanderplatz
Housing Woes, Credit Crunch 'May Be Spreading'
The drop in the MIT quarterly transaction-based index (TBI) may not only spell the end of a five-year rally that saw commercial property prices effectively double, but it may also signal that weakness in the housing market is spilling over into commercial real estate.
"The fall in our index is the first solid, quantitative evidence that the subprime mortgage debacle, which hit the broader capital markets in August, may be spreading to the commercial property markets," stated MIT Center for Real Estate Director David Geltner.
The TBI decline in the third quarter of 2007 marks its first quarterly downturn since the third quarter of 2003, when prices fell 2.4 percent. The last time prices fell more than in the third quarter of 2007 was in the fourth quarter of 2001 (9/11, recession), when they fell 3.9 percent.
Against a backdrop of more than a year's worth of housing price declines and an international credit crunch that erupted over the summer, analysts have been seeking clues about whether other markets and sectors of the economy--including commercial real estate--would be impacted.........
Pursuing parenthood: Discourses of persistence
This paper may be of value to people who find themselves repeatedly trying to achieve an elusive goal: it may help them gain insight into factors that influence how they try to reach their goals and whether they maintain them, write Eileen Fischer (York University, Ontario), Cele C. Otnes (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Linda Tuncay (Loyola University). Given the emotional and financial tolls exacted in these contexts, it is appropriate and important that consumer scholars turn their attention to persistence.
Goal-related research has explored the cognitive processes that take place as people appraise tactics for achieving goals, make plans, and decide whether to try again in the face of failure. This study complements previous work by exploring how discourses or, culturally engrained systems of ideas influence persistent goal striving. The scientists identify both goal specific and culturally pervasive discourses that influence how people appraise means of trying, the extent to which they plan their efforts, and their likelihood of persisting or abandoning a goal.........
Social change relies more on the easily influenced
Instead, using many computer simulations of public opinion change, Duncan J. Watts (Columbia University) and Peter Sheridan Dodds (University of Vermont), find that it is the presence of large numbers of easily influenced people who bring about major shifts by influencing other easy-to-influence people.
Our study demonstrates not so much that the conventional wisdom is wrong. but that it is insufficiently specified to be meaningful, the scientists write. Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large cascades of influence are driven not by influentials, but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals.
Instead of a model in which opinion flows only from the media to influentials, and then only from influentials to the larger populace, Watts and Dodds created an influence network with opinion flows in a number of directions at once, adjusted for the probability that a given individual will adopt a change when the information comes from a certain source.
They then introduced an event into the simulation, evaluating what factors resulted in an overall shift in opinion in their model system. They also introduced hyper influentials and monitored their effects, tried grouping individuals together into sub-networks, and adjusted the degree at which attitudes shift.........
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