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n2doc's JournalNature faces off against politics in North Carolina
by Kirk Ross
RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA — During the early morning hours of May 2, part of the northbound lane of North Carolina Highway 12 in Kitty Hawk broke off and washed into the Atlantic Ocean.
While the loss of 200 feet of roadway and about 500 feet of a protective sand berm will be temporary, it was more than just another hit to the road from a big spring storm at high tide under a full moon. In a state that has been engaged in a highly charged, highly politicized debate about climate change for more than five years, it was a reminder that the Atlantic isn’t waiting to see who wins the argument.
It was also a reminder that North Carolina, with its rapidly developing coastline and intricate ecological network of sounds and estuaries, has a lot at stake as sea levels rise. The state has more than 300 miles of direct coastline and thousands of miles of tidal areas. Like much of the Southeastern U.S. coast, commercial and residential development is growing more concentrated on barrier islands that move over time, rolling over themselves and drifting toward and away from the mainland with the rise and fall of the sea.
Given the nature of the North Carolina coast and the intense energy of waves in the Atlantic, official public policy has been not to try to fight the ocean but to deal with its effects. Since the early 1980s the state has prohibited hardened structures like seawalls and jetties. Only recently has it allowed construction of a small number of jetties to protect areas threatened by heavy erosion and to keep inlets clear for boat traffic.
Coastal scientists have conducted extensive modeling on North Carolina’s inlets and coastline and for more than a decade have looked for ways to include analyses of the impact of rising sea levels in their models.
more
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/25/nature-faces-off-against-politics-in-north-carolina.html
Paul Krugman- The Big Meh
Remember Douglas Adams’s 1979 novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”? It began with some technology snark, dismissing Earth as a planet whose life-forms “are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” But that was then, in the early stages of the information technology revolution.
Since then we’ve moved on to much more significant things, so much so that the big technology idea of 2015, so far, is a digital watch. But this one tells you to stand up if you’ve been sitting too long!
O.K., I’m snarking, too. But there is a real question here. Everyone knows that we live in an era of incredibly rapid technological change, which is changing everything. But what if what everyone knows is wrong? And I’m not being wildly contrarian here. A growing number of economists, looking at the data on productivity and incomes, are wondering if the technological revolution has been greatly overhyped — and some technologists share their concern.
We’ve been here before. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” was published during the era of the “productivity paradox,” a two-decade-long period during which technology seemed to be advancing rapidly — personal computing, cellphones, local area networks and the early stages of the Internet — yet economic growth was sluggish and incomes stagnant. Many hypotheses were advanced to explain that paradox, with the most popular probably being that inventing a technology and learning to use it effectively aren’t the same thing. Give it time, said economic historians, and computers will eventually deliver the goods (and services).
This optimism seemed vindicated when productivity growth finally took off circa 1995. Progress was back — and so was America, which seemed to be at the cutting edge of the revolution.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the techno-revolution. We did not, it turned out, get a sustained return to rapid economic progress. Instead, it was more of a one-time spurt, which sputtered out around a decade ago. Since then, we’ve been living in an era of iPhones and iPads and iDontKnows, but even if you adjust for the effects of financial crisis, growth and trends in income have reverted to the sluggishness that characterized the 1970s and 1980s.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/opinion/paul-krugman-the-big-meh.html?ref=opinion&_r=1
Life in the slow lane
ON FRIDAY afternoons, residents of Washington, DC, often find a clear route out of the city as elusive as a deal to cut the deficit. Ribbons of red rear-lights stretch off into the distance along the highways that radiate from the city's centre. Occasionally, adventurous southbound travellers experiment with Amtrak, America's national rail company. The distance from Washington to Raleigh, North Carolina (a metropolitan area about the size of Brussels) is roughly the same as from London's St Pancras Station to the Gare du Nord in Paris. But this is no Eurostar journey.
Trains creep out of Washington's Union Station and pause at intervals, inexplicably, as they travel through the northern Virginia suburbs. In the summer, high temperatures threaten to kink the steel tracks, forcing trains to slow down even more. Riders may find themselves inching along behind a lumbering freight train for miles at a time, until the route reaches a side track on which the Amtrak train can pass. The trip takes six hours, well over twice as long as the London-Paris journey, if there are no delays. And there often are.
America, despite its wealth and strength, often seems to be falling apart. American cities have suffered a rash of recent infrastructure calamities, from the failure of the New Orleans levees to the collapse of a highway bridge in Minneapolis, to a fatal crash on Washington, DC's (generally impressive) metro system. But just as striking are the common shortcomings. America's civil engineers routinely give its transport structures poor marks, rating roads, rails and bridges as deficient or functionally obsolete. And according to a World Economic Forum study America's infrastructure has got worse, by comparison with other countries, over the past decade. In the WEF 2010 league table America now ranks 23rd for overall infrastructure quality, between Spain and Chile. Its roads, railways, ports and air-transport infrastructure are all judged mediocre against networks in northern Europe.
more
http://www.economist.com/node/18620944
Sanders worries of ‘political gossip’ dominating campaign coverage
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on Sunday that the media is “doing pretty well” covering his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against frontrunner Hillary Clinton, but he’s worried about “political gossip” taking over as the campaign moves on.
“We have gotten more serious discussion on our issues than I might have thought about,” Sanders said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
“But this is what I worry about: In terms of campaign coverage, there is more coverage about the political gossip of a campaign, about raising money, about polling, about somebody saying something dumb, or if some kid who works for a campaign sends out something stupid on Facebook, we can expect that to be a major story.”
Sanders announced his presidential campaign in April. He said Sunday that he would put pressure on Clinton on issues like trade and Wall Street regulations, but that “taking cheap shots at people, I don’t think that’s what politics should be about.”
more
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/243042-sanders-worries-of-political-gossip-dominating-campaign
Shooting Son Doong in 360°
Making a massive interactive gigapixel experience in the world’s largest cave
By Martin Edström
As me and my team left for Vietnam this January, we had a goal: to make an interactive reportage about the world’s largest cave for National Geographic. This included several things no one had ever attempted before: lighting up and capturing the largest caverns that exist on this Earth. In 360 degrees.
What could go wrong, right?
more
http://petapixel.com/2015/05/21/shooting-son-doong/
The 360 experience (stunning)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150520-infinity-cave-son-doong-vietnam-virtual-tour-photography-conservation/
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