Feb. 6, 2013 ? Tropical rainforests are often called the "lungs of the planet" because they generally draw in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. But the amount of carbon dioxide that rainforests absorb, or produce, varies hugely with year-to-year variations in the climate. In a paper published online Feb 6 2013 by the journal Nature, a team of climate scientists from the University of Exeter, the Met Office-Hadley Centre and the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, has shown that these variations reveal how vulnerable the rainforest is to climate change.
Lead author Professor Peter Cox of the University of Exeter explained: "We have been struggling for more than a decade to answer the question 'will the Amazon forest die back under climate change?' Our study indicates that the risk is low if climate change is associated with increased plant growth under elevated carbon dioxide. But if this effect declines, or climate warming occurs due to something other than a carbon dioxide increase, we expect to see a significant release of carbon from tropical ecosystems."
The study reveals a new way to find out how sensitive biological systems are to changes in climate. The key was to learn how to read the year-to-year variations in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide increases each year as a result of burning fossil fuels and deforestation. But the amount it goes up from one year to the next depends on whether tropical forests are absorbing carbon dioxide or releasing it -- and this in turn depends on whether the tropical climate was warmer and dryer than usual, or wetter and cooler. So the trace of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere holds a record of how the lungs of the planet respond when the climate warms or cools.
The team studied how these year-to-year variations in carbon dioxide concentration relate to long-term changes in the amount of carbon stored in tropical rainforests. They found that climate models that predicted tropical forest dieback under climate change also had a very large year-to-year variation in carbon dioxide concentration, while models in which the rainforest was more robust to climate change had more realistic year-to-year variation in carbon dioxide concentration.
By combining this relationship with the year-to-year variation in carbon dioxide as seen in the real world, the team were able to determine that about 50 billion tonnes of carbon would be released for each degree Celsius of warming in the tropics. Peter Cox said the findings were initially a relief: "Fortunately, this carbon release is counteracted by the positive effects of carbon dioxide fertilisation on plant growth under most scenarios of the 21st century, so that overall forests are expected to continue to accumulate carbon."
The researchers are however certain that tropical forests will suffer under climate change if carbon dioxide doesn't fertilise tree growth as strongly as climate models suggest.
Co-author, Chris Jones, of the Met Office said: "The long-term health of tropical forests will depend on their ability to withstand multiple pressures from changing climate and deforestation. Our research has shed light on the former, but the latter remains a significant pressure on this ecosystem."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Exeter, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
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Journal Reference:
Peter M. Cox, David Pearson, Ben B. Booth, Pierre Friedlingstein, Chris Huntingford, Chris D. Jones, Catherine M. Luke. Sensitivity of tropical carbon to climate change constrained by carbon dioxide variability. Nature, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nature11882
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
If you had 10 million pounds to spend on open data research, development and startups, what would you do with it? That?s precisely the opportunity that Gavin Starks (@AgentGav) has been given as the first CEO of the Open Data Institute (ODI) in the United Kingdom.
The ODI, which officially opened last September, was founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. The independent, non-partisan, ?limited by guarantee? nonprofit is a hybrid institution focused on unlocking the value in open data by incubating startups, advising governments, and educating students and media.
Previously, Starks was the founder and chairman of AMEE, a social enterprise that scored environmental costs and risks for businesses. (O?Reilly?s AlphaTech Ventures was one of its funders.) He?s also worked in the arts, science and technology. I spoke to Starks about the work of the ODI and open data earlier this winter as part of our continuing series investigating the open data economy.
What have you accomplished to date?
Gavin Starks: We opened our offices on the first of October last year. Over the first 12 weeks of operation, we?ve had a phenomenal run. The ODI is looking to create value to help everyone address some of the greatest challenges of our time, whether that?s in education, health, in our economy or to benefit our environment.
Since October, we?ve had literally hundreds of people through the door. We?ve secured $750,000 in matched funding from the Amida Network, on top of a 10-million-pound investment from the UK Government?s Technology Strategy Board. We?ve helped identify 200 million pounds a year in savings for the health service in the UK.
200 million pounds? What do you base that estimate upon?
Gavin Starks: Part of our remit is to bring together the main experts from different areas. To illustrate the kind of benefit that I think we can bring here, one part of what we?re doing is to try and unlock data supply.
The Health Service in the UK started to release a lot of its prescription information as open data about nine months ago. We worked with some of the main experts in the health service with a big data analytics firm, Mastodon C, which is a startup that we?re incubating at the ODI.
Together, they identified potential areas of investigation. The data science folks drilled into every single prescription. (I think the dataset was something like 47 million rows of data.) What they were looking at there was the difference between proprietary drugs and generics, where there may be a generic equivalent. In many cases, the generic equivalent has no clinical difference between the proprietary drugs ? and so the cost difference is huge. It might be 81 pence or 81 pennies for a generic to more than 20 pounds for a drug that?s still under license.
Looking at the entire dataset, the analytics revealed different patterns, and from that, cost differences. If we carried out this research over a year ago, for example, we could have saved 200 million pounds over the last year. It really is quite significant. That?s on one class of drugs, on one area. We think this research could be repeated against different classes of drugs and replicated internationally.
Which open data business models are the most exciting to you?
Gavin Starks: I think there?s lots of different areas to explore here. There are areas where there can be cost savings brought to any organization, whether it?s public sector or private sector organizations. There?s also areas of new innovation. (I think that they?re quite different directions.) Some of the work that we?ve done with the prescription data, that?s where you?re looking at efficiencies.
We?ve got other startups that are based in our offices here in Shoreditch and London that are looking at transportation information. They?re looking at location-based services and other forms of analytics within the commercial sectors: financial information, credit ratings, those kinds of areas. When you start to pull together different levels of open data that have been available but haven?t been that accessible in the past, there?s new services that can be derived from them.
What creates a paid or value-add service? It?s essential that we create a starting point where free and open access to the data itself can be made available for certain use cases for as many people as possible. There, you stimulate innovation if you can gain access to discern new insight from that data.
Having the data aggregated, structured and accessible in an automated way is worth paying for. There could be a service-level-agreement-based model. There could be a carve-out of use cases. You could borrow from the Creative Commons world and say, ?If you?re going to have a share alike license on this, then that?s fine, you can use it for free. But if you?re going to start creating closed assets, as a result, there may be a charge for the use of data at that point.?
I think there?s a whole range of different data models, but really, the goal here is to try and discern what insight can be derived from?existing datasets and what happens when you start mashing them up with other datasets.
What are the greatest challenges to achieving some of the economic outcomes that the UK Cabinet Office has described?
Gavin Starks: I think there are many challenges. One of the key ones is just understanding. One challenge we?ve heard consistently from pretty much everybody has been, ?We believe there?s a huge amount of potential here, but where do we start??
Part of the ODI?s mission is to provide training, education and assets that enable people to begin on that journey. We?re in the process right now of designing our first dozen or so training programs. We?re working at one level with the World Bank to train the world?s politicians and national leaders, and we?re working at the other end with schools to create programs that fit with existing graduate courses.
Education is one of the biggest challenges. We want to train more than technologists ? we also want to train lawyers and journalists about the business case to enable people to understand and move forward at the same pace. There?s very little point in just saying, ?There is huge value here,? without trying to demonstrate that return on investment (ROI) and value case at the same time.
What is the ODI?s approach to incubating civic startups?
Gavin Starks: There are two parts to it. One is unlocking supply. We?re working with different government departments and public sector agencies to help them understand what unlocking supply means. Creating structured, addressable, repeatable data creates the supply piece so that you can actually start to build a business. It?s very high-risk to try and build a business when you don?t have a guarantee of supply.
Two, encouraging and incubating the demand side. We?ve got six startups in our space already. They?re all at different stages. Some of them are very early on, just trying to navigate toward the value here that we can discern from the data. Others are more mature, and maybe have some existing revenue streams, but they?re looking at how to really make this scale.
What we?ve found is of benefit so far ? and again, we?re only three months in ? is our ability to network and convene the different stakeholders. We can take a small startup and get them in front of one of the large corporations and help them bridge that sales process. Helping them communicate their ideas in a clear way, where the value is obvious to the end customer, is important.
What are some of the approaches that have worked to unlock value from open government data?
Gavin Starks: We?re not believers in ?If you build it, they will come.? You need to create a guaranteed data supply, but you also need to really engage with people to start to unlock ideas.
We?ve been running our own hackathons, but I think there?s a difference in the way that we?ve structured them and organized them. We include domain experts and frame the hack events around a specific problem or a specific set of problems. For example, we had a weekend-long hackathon in the health space, looking at different datasets, convening domain experts and technical experts.
It involved competitions, when the winner gets a seat at the ODI to take their idea forward. It might be that an idea turns into a business, it might turn into a project, or it might just turn into a research program.
I think that you need to really lead people by the hand through the process of innovation, helping them and supporting them to unlock the value, rather than just having the datasets there and expecting them to be used.
Gavin Starks: This is like the early days of the web. There are lots of estimates about how much everything is going to be worth and what sort of ROI people are going to see. What we?ve yet to see, I think, is the honest answer.
The reason I?m very excited about this area is that I see the same potential as I saw in the mid-1990s, when I got involved with the web. The same patterns exist today. There are new datasets and ecosystems coming into existence that can be data-mined. They can be joined together in novel ways. They can bridge?the virtual and physical worlds. They can bring together people who have not been able to collaborate in different ways.
There?s a huge amount of value to be unlocked. There will be some dead ends, as we had in the web?s development, but there will be some incredible wins. We?re trying to refine our own skills around identifying where those potential hot spots might be.
Health services is an area where it?s really obvious there?s a lot of benefits. There are clear benefits from opening up transportation and location-based services. You can see the potential behind energy efficiency, creating efficient supply chains and opening up more information around education.
You can see resonant points. We?re really drilling into those and asking, ?What happens when you really put together the right domain experts and the supportive backers??
Those backers can be financial as well as in industry. The Open Data Institute has been pulling together those experts and providing a neutral space for that innovation to happen.
Which of those areas have the most clear economic value, in terms of creating shorter term returns on investment and quick wins?
Gavin Starks: I don?t think there?s a single answer to that question. If you look at location-based services, corporate data, health data or education, there are examples and use cases in different parts of the world where they will have different weightings.
If you were looking at water sanitation in areas of the world where there is an absence of it, then they may provide more immediate return than unlocking huge amounts of transportation information.
In Denmark, look at the release of the equivalent of zip code data and the more detailed addresses. I believe the numbers there went from four-fold return to 17-fold return, in terms of value to the country of their investment in decent address-level data.
This is one area that we?ve provided a consultation response in the UK. I think it may vary from state-to-state in the U.S., or maybe in areas where the specific focus on health would be very beneficial. There may be areas where a focus on energy efficiency may be most beneficial.
What conditions lead to beneficial outcomes for open data?
Gavin Starks: A lot of the real issues are not really about the technology. When it comes to the technology, we know what a lot of the solutions are. How can we address or improve the data quality? What standards need to exist? What anonymity, privacy or secrecy needs to exist around the data? How do we really measure the outcomes? What are the circumstances where stakeholders need to get involved?
You definitely need political buy-in, but there also needs to be a sense of what the data landscape is. What?s the inventory? What?s the legal situation? Who has access? What kind of access is required? What does success look like against a particular use case?
You could be looking at health in somewhere like Rwanda, you could be looking at a national statistics office in a particular country where they may not have access to the data themselves, and they don?t have very much access to resources. You could be looking at contracting, government procurement and improving simple accountability, where there may be more information flow than there is around energy data, for example.
I think there?s a range of different use cases that we need to really explore here. We?re looking for great use cases where we can say, ?This is something that?s simple to achieve, that?s repeatable, that helps lower costs and stimulate innovation.?
We are really at the beginning of a journey here.
Red Hat made headlines for becoming the first billion-dollar open source company. What do you think the first billion-dollar open data company will be?
Gavin Starks: It would be not unlikely for that to be in the health arena.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. This post is part of our ongoing investigation into the open data economy.
Mirage 2013 is an international conference with focus on Computer Vision / Computer Graphics collaboration techniques. It is the 6th in a series of successful events having the objective of bringing together scientists and people interested in the interdisciplinary fields of vision and graphics, with special emphasis on the link between the converging disciplines. With recent developments in 3D sensor and camera technologies, mobile computing, and GPU processing, many novel applications emerge in areas like multimedia, augmented reality, media production, gaming, and medicine. Mirage 2013 will provide a forum for discussing innovative research and novel ideas in computer vision and graphics with plenary talks, single track oral sessions, and practical technology demonstrations.
Authors are encouraged to submit their recent research results, practice and experience reports, or novel applications relating to the topics of the Mirage 2013 conference.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
Model-based imaging and analysis
Image-based modeling and 3D reconstruction
Capture, processing, and display of 3D video
Image and video-based lighting and rendering
Computational photography
Time of flight, Kinect imaging
Model-based vision approaches
3D indexing and database retrieval
Object, body, and face tracking in image sequences
Model-based image and shape analysis
Model-based video compression techniques
With applications in the field of:
Multimedia applications, multimedia database classification
Virtual and augmented reality
Human / Computer interfaces
Media productions from and for films, broadcasts and games
Post-production, computer animation, virtual special effects
Realistic 3D simulation, virtual prototyping
Video-games and entertainment industry
Medical and biomedical applications
A printable version of the MIRAGE 2013 Call for Papers can be downloaded here Download Call for Papers.
Important Dates:
March 1st 2013 ? Paper submission deadline
March 5th until April 5th 2013 ? Paper review period
April 12th 2013 ? Paper notification of acceptance
May 7th 2013 ? Final paper due
Some British cable subscribers will soon have a new master: international telecom giant Liberty Global has just acquired Virgin Media for $23.3 billion in cash and stock.The deal gives Liberty an even larger stake in Europe than it had before and, if you believe the new partners, creates one of the bigger broadband companies on the planet at 47 million homes covered across 14 countries. Liberty also sees Virgin as good at tackling the business and mobile spaces that have been its relative weak points. How this will affect the UK isn't immediately apparent, although Virgin Media will continue to run under its existing name -- that moebius logo isn't going anywhere in the foreseeable future. We'll at least have some room to ponder the consequences when the buyout isn't poised to close until sometime in the second quarter.
When nWay began a trial of its dark, sci-fi combat game ChronoBlade on Facebook last year, the San Francisco-based startup felt sure it had a hit on its hands.
"First of all, what comes is, 'Wow, I had no idea you could actually do a game of this quality on Facebook,'" said Dave Jones, Chief Creative Officer of nWay, who has worked on Grand Theft Auto.
Then came some resistance: Jones admits some potential investors and partners questioned how an action-focused game with slick graphics can play to a Facebook audience more accustomed to Farmville and other less time-consuming casual games. Others wondered how the game - which launches this year - would gain significant users and revenue on the social network.
But Facebook is betting nWay and a clutch of other developers this year can extend console-style action games beyond Microsoft's Xbox or Sony's PlayStation onto the world's largest social network.
Facebook is spearheading the launch of 10 high-quality games created by third-party developers in 2013 that squarely target so-called hardcore gamers, an atypical audience overlooked thus far against the wealth of family-friendly offerings like Zynga's Farmville that now dominate the social network's gaming landscape.
The effort, which began late last year but will accelerate in 2013, is part of Facebook's ongoing objective of making sure its 1 billion-plus users log in and spend more time on the network, which in turn boosts ad revenue. Facebook also takes a cut of its applications' revenue.
Facebook's push into action and battle games follows a meeting in January between companies that make games like "first-person shooters" and Vice President Joe Biden to look for ways to curb gun violence in the wake of the Connecticut school shootings.
Based on the console gaming industry experience, hardcore gamers - typically men 18 to 30 years old - spend more time and effort to master fast-paced games such as first-person shooters (Microsoft's Halo) or real-time strategy games (Activision Blizzard's StarCraft).
"You'll see a whole set of games hitting in the next two quarters in particular and throughout the year that really start to redefine what people think of Facebook games," Sean Ryan, head of game partnerships at Facebook said in an interview.
Facebook will embrace games from "casual all the way up through first-person shooters, massively multiplayer online games, real-time strategy games - all those types of more core player-versus-player games."
Just as hardcore gamers interact online and form clans in multiplayer games on console game networks like Xbox LIVE, Facebook can be that social layer needed to foster such gaming communities that help popularize titles, Jones said.
GAMING POPULATION
Over a quarter of Facebook's 1.06 billion monthly active users play games, one of the largest gaming communities in the industry, and the social network hopes that can grow.
Facebook also aims to make more revenue from games. Revenue from the area was flat in the fourth quarter from a year ago, the company said on Wednesday without providing details.
The 8-year-old social network takes a 30 per cent revenue share from game developers who offer their product free but then charge for virtual goods - like ammunition and power boosts.
On Wednesday, Facebook's Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman told analysts on a post-earnings conference call that its "games ecosystem continues to show healthy signs of diversification" and suggested that games revenue would grow with increasing user engagement.
To grow its gaming business, Facebook has invested time and resources to work with developers since the summer to bring titles like u4iA's first-person shooter Offensive Combat and Plaruim's real-time strategy game Stormfall: Age of War alive, Ryan said.
"It doesn't mean we're walking away from other games, but there's no question our focus for 2013 much of it will be about becoming a better platform for core gamers and developers who make those games."
To help users discover them, Facebook added new action and strategy games categories on its App Center that also shows you friends from your list playing those games. It brought back notification messages from game apps - a feature that had been removed because users found the annoying - with certain restrictions that stop developers from spamming a gamer.
Developers also rely on word-of-mouth publicity and ads on Facebook's advertising platform to draw in prospective gamers.
Stormfall has a player base of 4.5 million and hardcore games were proving to be far more lucrative, said Gabi Shalel, chief marketing officer Of Tel Aviv, Israel-based Plarium.
"Hardcore gamers pay more, play more and generate higher average revenue per user than traditional casual games."
Kixeye, which makes the warfare-strategy game War Commander, said its gamers spend 20 times more than players of social games, helping it stay profitable over the past three years.
Going forward, nWay's Jones says Facebook must have a defining title that comes along that establishes it as a hardcore gaming spot for gamers.
"Like Super Mario did for Nintendo or Halo on Microsoft, I think it just takes one title to come along, sort of as a benchmark to legitimise the whole thing," he said.
I am sure the analysis into Boeing?s problems with the Dreamliner will continue for some time. At present, there seems to be a growing consensus that ?outsourcing? was to blame.
My understanding is that management in the 1990?s was reluctant to commit funding to new aircraft development ? especially on the scale needed for a concept such as Dreamliner. This resistance was overcome through a creative suggestion ? to outsource almost 60% of the work to external parties and thereby slash the investment required from Boeing.
For the finance executives, this was an attractive solution. However, it seems that there was inadequate thought given to the implications of managing a portfolio of outsourced suppliers. This model was not the same as traditional procurement or project management. It required an organization capable of managing commercial relationships, equipped with the skills and tools to integrate across multiple stakeholders and ensure alignment of performance.
My suspicion is that Boeing did not make the investments needed to manage this complex network of relationships. It most likely relied instead on traditional skills ?that lacked the insights or the flexibility needed to succeed. This was probably a classic case of failed ?commercial assurance?, driven by over-reliance on technical and financial skills, coupled with contract managers trained in standard administration procedures.
As a footnote, it is interesting that during the years in which development took place, IACCM received several approaches from teams in Boeing who wanted to join its member network. On each occasion, those initiatives appeared to be stifled by top management who felt that there was no need for additional skills or insights. To this day, Boeing remains the only major aerospace and defense company that has no links to the worldwide IACCM community. Of course, that may be just a coincidence, but equally it may be that ?Boeing management has still not grasped the importance of developing process and talent that enables a new approach to trading relationships.
In the end, I doubt that outsourcing itself was the problem with Dreamliner. It is more likely that senior management simply did not grasp the organizational and operational consequences of an outsourced development model and therefore lacked the skills, tools, insights and management system needed to achieve success. ?If that is the case, they will certainly not be the first to learn this lesson.
So will Dreamliner kill outsourcing? I think not. There truly are economic and commercial benefits to be gained from outsourced relationships ? but they can be secured only when there is organizational adjustment capable of overseeing this business model.
Bill Clinton speaking at Ed Koch's funeral (Screengrab via YouTube)NEW YORK?Former President Bill Clinton offered a funny and moving eulogy to former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, praising him as someone who truly understood and tried to help ?real people.?
Speaking at Koch?s funeral on Monday morning, Clinton praised Koch as someone who ?had a big brain but an even bigger heart."
"I don?t think I ever debated, discussed, agreed with, argued with anybody in this line of work who had a better feel for the impact of what government had on real lives of people," Clinton said. "He could imagine what life was like."
Addressing a crowd that included many of New York?s current and former top political officials, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Clinton said he and Koch had exchanged many letters over the years.
?These are the letters, just the letters, that I got from Ed Koch when I was president,? Clinton said, laughing and holding up a thick stack of papers.
Among other things, Clinton said he had received a copy of every political column Koch had written, as well as missives and advice on policy issues including gun control and health care.
Smiling, Clinton recalled one letter in which Koch urged him to link impotence to smoking in hopes of convincing young kids to curb their addiction to cigarettes.
?This Viagra?s a big deal,? Clinton said Koch told him. ?Now, politicians don?t like to talk about this, especially among young people, but young people are way more sophisticated than older people and they get this, and it doesn't work to tell people that they get cancer or respiratory diseases. Go after the virility argument."
Clinton recalled that in his final years, Koch focused on thinking about what life would be like for future generations, and that he had been an early champion of issues like curbing childhood obesity. ?It?s not just New York that owes him a lot,? Clinton said.
Koch, who had suffered from health problems since leaving City Hall in 1989, rarely spoke of his own medical issues, Clinton said, but asked about others. Speaking about this last conversation with him, Clinton said the former mayor didn?t speak of his own ailments, but rather asked about the health of his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had been hospitalized with a brain clot after a fall in December.
Addressing the late mayor, Clinton said, ?We?re all doing fine, but we miss you. We're doing a lot better because you lived and served.?
Bloomberg also gave a eulogy for Koch, praising him as an unabashed champion for New York City.
The ODI, which officially opened last September, was founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. The independent, non-partisan, ?limited by guarantee? nonprofit is a hybrid institution focused on unlocking the value in open data by incubating startups, advising governments, and educating students and media.
