Method | Jotup

Darwin's 'sustainable' Middle Arm project reveals Australia's huge climate policy gamble

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Protesters rallied at Parliament House in Canberra on Tuesday, railing against Darwin’s controversial Middle Arm venture which critics say would benefit the gas industry.

Key Points:

Protesters rallied at Parliament House in Canberra on Tuesday, railing against Darwin’s controversial Middle Arm venture which critics say would benefit the gas industry.
The project has been thrust into the headlines of late.
Fyles describes Middle Arm as a “sustainable development precinct”.
In effect, the Middle Arm project, and others like it, are grand experiments with our climate.

The ‘circular’ economy

The strategy doesn’t seek to reach net-zero simply by pumping less carbon into the atmosphere – for example, by deploying renewable energy.
It also involves activities that remove, capture, store or use carbon, therefore “offsetting” or cancelling out emissions from other sources.
Proponents of the strategy characterise it as a simple matter of inputs (emissions) and outputs (offsets) cancelling each other out.
largely powered by renewables, master-planned to achieve a circular economy approach of sustainable and responsible production and will use technology to achieve low-to-zero emissions.

‘Sustainable’ claims called into question

For example, internal government documents make clear the precinct is “seen as a key enabler” of the gas industry.
One confirmed future tenant will be Tamboran Resources, which plans to frack and drill for gas in the Beetaloo Basin.
Announcing the project in 2021, the NT government called it a “a game-changer”.
Claims that Middle Arm would substantially be powered by renewable energy are also in doubt.

Offsets won’t save us, either

And in 2021, the then Coalition government released a climate plan in which more than half the carbon savings would be achieved via carbon offsets, as well as unspecified “technology breakthroughs”.
Carbon offsets are used by polluters to compensate for their emissions.
Carbon offsets are contentious because they allow companies to keep pumping out carbon.

Looking ahead

Meanwhile, the world has just experienced its hottest month on record.
At a time like this, we must focus on achieving genuine emissions reductions, rather than playing risky games with our climate.

Internet shutdowns: here’s how governments do it

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Senegal’s government has shut down internet access in response to protests about the sentencing of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko.

Key Points:

Senegal’s government has shut down internet access in response to protests about the sentencing of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko.
This is a tactic governments are increasingly using during times of political contention, such as elections or social upheaval.
I’m a researcher who investigates the causes and consequences of internet access disruptions and censorship in various African countries.
There are two common strategies governments use to disrupt internet access: routing disruptions and packet filtering.

How to shut down the internet

Routing disruptions Every device connected to the internet, whether it’s your computer, smartphone, or any other device, has an IP (internet protocol) address assigned to it.
An autonomous system is a collection of connected IP networks under the control of a single entity, for instance an internet service provider or big company.
So, if an autonomous system, like an internet service provider, suddenly withdraws its border gateway protocol routes from the internet, the block of IP addresses they administer disappears from the routing tables.
As a consequence, customers using IP addresses from that autonomous system can’t connect to the internet.
Packet filtering To target specific content, governments often use packet filtering – shutting down only parts of the internet.

Violation of rights

A detailed overview of techniques is provided by Access Now, an NGO defending digital civil rights of people around the world.
There is wide agreement that internet shutdowns are a violation of fundamental rights such as freedom of expression.

The incredible creativity of William Friedkin: Oscars, box-office hits – and arthouse, experimental genre cinema

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Tuesday, August 8, 2023

With the audacity of relative youth on their side, they wanted to bring down the old system and remake Hollywood.

Key Points:

With the audacity of relative youth on their side, they wanted to bring down the old system and remake Hollywood.
Released in 1971, the film galvanised audiences, changed the landscape of Hollywood genre realism, and took home five Oscars – including Best Picture.
Read more:
From the Moscow stage to Monroe and De Niro: how the Method defined 20th-century acting

Enduring artistic fascination

Friedkin plays the thriller like something lifted from the French New Wave, say Jean-Pierre Melville’s glorious Le Cercle Rouge of 1970.
The French Connection was followed by perhaps the most notorious film of the Hollywood 1970s: The Exorcist (1973).
But there many works from the last 40 years of enduring artistic fascination: the synth-oozing To Live and Die in LA (1985), which sets the template for Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004); Jade, Friedkin’s 1995 attempt to outdo Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992), a perverse pleasure precisely for its manic unevenness; and 2011’s stylised, hyper-violent domestic drama, Killer Joe.
Read more:
50 years since Mike Oldfield began writing Tubular Bells: the pioneering album that changed the sound of music

My personal top five

I want to close this reflection with my William Friedkin top five, which I’ll be revisiting across the next week: 5.
Sorcerer (1977) Many commentators on Friedkin’s career regard The Sorcerer as Friedkin’s last great auteur film.
Cruising (1980) Has Cruising – a film about a serial killer within New York’s homosexual subcultural community - been cancelled?
The Exorcist (1973) Simply put, the milestone that brought one of the most distinctive artistic visions to a classical possession genre story.
The film oozes a place and time unlike any other film shot in New York in the 1970s.

In the future, we could snuff out cyclones. But weather control comes with new risks

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Technology, Cold War, Poverty, Aerosol, Method, Politics, Policy, The Rev, Livestock, Research, Goal, Science, Seeding, Death, Flood, River, Water, Dust, Project, Weather, Farm, Rain, Property insurance, Agriculture, Film industry, Atlantic Ocean

Typhoons are intense circular storms, which Australians know as tropical cyclones and Americans call hurricanes.

Key Points:

Typhoons are intense circular storms, which Australians know as tropical cyclones and Americans call hurricanes.
A cyclone is a heat engine, transferring heat from warm ocean water up into colder layers of the atmosphere.
No wonder there’s been renewed interest in Cold War era experiments in weather control.

Why are researchers even looking into this?

In 1970, an enormous cyclone struck Bangladesh (then East Pakistan).
Meteorologists knew it was coming, but they had no way to communicate to people in its path.
Scientists are exploring ways of preventing natural disasters, from bushfires to floods to hailstorms.

Can we really turn a cyclone into a normal storm?

In the 1960s, the United States explored the use of cloud seeding to stop hurricanes from forming.
While some seedings seemed to correlate with weaker hurricanes, the link was never adequately found and the project was eventually abandoned.
If we could cool the surface – such as by piping chilled water from depths below 200 metres – we could prevent the cyclone from ever forming.
Other research has found aerosols could reduce cyclone intensity while boosting rainfall on the rotating outer edges of cyclones.
Making the call to try to stop a cyclone means taking decisions early.

Difficult politics, difficult policy

Let’s say the Philippine government spots a extremely dangerous cyclone forming and decides to disrupt it.
Suddenly, another storm reappears, heading straight for China, a country you have a testy relationship with, and who may blame you for weather manipulation.
When Cuban dictator Fidel Castro heard of Project STORMFURY, he feared it was an attempt to turn the weather into a weapon.
Should private companies be allowed to run their own field tests or should these large-scale interventions be government-only?

What’s next?

That won’t be easy – most international agreements move slowly, and most don’t meet their intended goals.
Roslyn Prinsley is the Head of Disaster Solutions at the ANU Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions.
Thao Linh Tran is a Research Fellow at the ANU Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions and Research School of Earth Sciences.

Computer science can help farmers explore alternative crops and sustainable farming methods

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Monday, August 7, 2023

Human, Food, Ziziphus, Intuition, Breeding, Method, Farmer, Wildfire, Agriculture, Geology, Eye, Indigenous, Goal, History, Plant, School, Climate change, Flood, Time, Knowledge, Sorghum, Weather, Bay, Ecosystem, Nitrogen, Society, Environment, Bacteria, Farm, Software, Fine chemical, Video game, Online shopping

They account for the vast majority of calories that people around the world consume.

Key Points:

They account for the vast majority of calories that people around the world consume.
In their view, this approach isn’t sustainable ecologically or economically, and farmers and scientists alike feel trapped within this system.
It has proved hard to scale up alternative methods, such as organic farming, as broadly as industrial agriculture.

Big output, big impacts

Technological improvements led the way, including the development of synthetic fertilizer and statistical methods that improved plant breeding.
These advances made it possible for farms to produce much larger quantities of food, but at the expense of the environment.
But it’s hard for them to figure out what new systems could perform well, especially in a changing climate.

Farms as state spaces

Moving through the space entails making choices, and those choices change the state of the system, for better or worse.
Each configuration of the board at a moment in time is a single state of the game.
A farm and its layout of plant species at any moment in time represent one state in that state space.
Nature causes minor state transitions, such as plants growing and rain falling, and much more dramatic state transitions during natural disasters such as floods or wildfires.

Finding synergies

Individual farmers don’t have the time or ability to do trial and error for years on their land.
Conventional agriculture limits farmers to a few choices of plant species, farming methods and inputs.
Our framework makes it possible to consider higher-level strategies, such as growing multiple crops together or finding management techniques that are best suited to a particular piece of land.
Cultures throughout human history have had their own favored intercropping systems with similar synergies, such as tumeric and mango or millet, cowpea and ziziphus, commonly known as red date.

Modeling alternative farm strategies

The goal is to enable users to consider alternative designs based upon their intuition, minimizing the costly trial and error that’s now required to test out new ideas in farming.
Today’s approaches largely model and pursue optimizations of existing, often unsustainable systems of agriculture.
Our framework enables discovery of new systems of agriculture and then optimization within those new systems.

How algae conquered the world – and other epic stories hidden in the rocks of the Flinders Ranges

Retrieved on:

Sunday, August 6, 2023

Evidence of how it came to be so beautiful and nurturing is locked in the rocks of South Australia’s Flinders Ranges – a site now vying for World Heritage listing.

Key Points:

Evidence of how it came to be so beautiful and nurturing is locked in the rocks of South Australia’s Flinders Ranges – a site now vying for World Heritage listing.
Their legacy is the oxygen we breathe and the evolution of the first animals more than 500 million years ago.
The soft bodies of these animals have been exceptionally preserved at the new Nilpena-Ediacara National Park, which opened in April 2023.

A superbasin on the shores of the Pacific

The rocks of the Flinders Ranges formed at the same time as the Pacific Ocean basin.
The plate tectonic “dance of the continents” tore North America away from Australia 800 million years ago.
Geologists call this the Adelaide Superbasin.

Land of fire and ice

The planet plunged into an 80-million-year Ice Age, the likes of which has never been seen again.
The Cryogenian contains a least two global glaciations when the planet became covered in ice - an occurrence earth scientists refer to as “Snowball Earth”.
Read more:
Ancient volcanic eruptions disrupted Earth's thermostat, creating a 'Snowball' planet

Part One: Picturing the world before the first animals

The glaciers ploughed through hills and valleys, planing off the country and leaving behind vast swathes of boulder clay that now forms rocks over much of the Flinders Ranges.
We used these variations to build a picture of highly saline shallow seas rich in bacterial life, but devoid of much else.

Part Two: Dating Snowball Earth

Using established methods we can date one of the minerals in the sand (zircon).
This enabled us to more accurately date the Snowball Earth rocks in the Flinders Ranges called the Sturt Formation.
It is the first study to directly date sedimentary rocks that formed during the Snowball Earth event.
So the planet experienced more of a cold period rather than a completely frigid snowball.

The rise of the algae

The geological processes and their timing helps us understand how the Earth system came to be.
The frozen world of the Cryogenian stressed the microbial life that dominated the oceans way back then.
This newcomer was algae, life with cells containing a nucleus.

A place of true world heritage

Our research into these rocks links the interdependence of Earth systems.
The stories locked in the hills of the Flinders Ranges undoubtedly give the region a heritage value to the world.
We eagerly await news of world heritage listing, which is not expected until 2025 at the earliest.

Online romance scams: Research reveals scammers' tactics – and how to defend against them

Retrieved on:

Friday, August 4, 2023

The internet has revolutionized dating, and there has been a surge in U.S. adults using apps to find ideal matches post-pandemic.

Key Points:

The internet has revolutionized dating, and there has been a surge in U.S. adults using apps to find ideal matches post-pandemic.
While these apps offer convenience for connecting with romantic partners, they also open the door to online romance scams.
Online romance scams exploit people through calculated online social engineering and deliberately deceptive communication tactics.

How online romantic scams work

They plan their actions in advance, patiently following their playbooks to ensure profitable outcomes.
Scammers worm their way into a victim’s heart to gain access to their money through false pretenses.
In a previous study, my colleague Volkan Topalli and I analyzed victim testimonials from the website stop-scammers.com.
Across the globe, online romance scammers use different techniques that vary across cultures to successfully defraud victims.

Deterrence and rewards

Our investigation showed that deterrent messages can significantly affect scammers’ behavior.
Here’s an example of a deterrent message: “I know you are scamming innocent people.
For example, scammers subtly persuade victims to see themselves as holding more power in the interaction than they do.

Blocking scammers

An example would be applying linguistics algorithms to identify keywords like “money,” “MoneyGram” and “bank” in conversations to alert potential victims of the scam and deter scammers from engaging further.
By concentrating on identifying scammers’ use of counterfeit profile pictures, this advanced algorithm holds the potential to preemptively hinder scammers from establishing fake profiles and initiating conversations from the outset.

How to protect yourself

Ukraine war: why Crimean Tatar fighters are playing an increasing role in resistance to Russian occupation

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, August 2, 2023

A resistance group of Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group native to the Russian-occupied peninsula, is now a prominent player in the Ukraine war.

Key Points:

A resistance group of Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group native to the Russian-occupied peninsula, is now a prominent player in the Ukraine war.
The Atesh (fire) movement has pledged to wage an unending war on the Russian invaders of Ukraine.
Founded in September 2022, Atesh seeks to disrupt logistics, sabotage key targets, and stoke discontent against – and within – Russian president Vladimir Putin’s army.
Atesh’s methods are ruthless, as witnessed by the killing of 30 Russian servicemen in hospitals in Simferopol in November 2022.

Who are the Tatars?

Unlike the Slavic Russians, the Crimean Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group native to the Crimean peninsula.
Under the rule of Joseph Stalin (1924-1953), the Soviet Union engaged in the active repression of the Crimean Tatars.
This led to a number of Tatars cooperating with the Germans following the Nazi invasion of June 1941.
Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of treachery and deported the community en masse to the Gulag.
Although some Crimean Tatars served with the Axis powers, rather more served in the Red Army.
The invasion of Crimea by Russia in 2014 was a disastrous return to the past for the Crimean Tatars.

Olympic star Nadia Comăneci was a Romanian 'hero' who defected to escape her government. What do her surveillance files reveal?

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, August 1, 2023

These quotes, which would sit comfortably in a Le Carre thriller, come from Nadia Comăneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape (2023).

Key Points:

These quotes, which would sit comfortably in a Le Carre thriller, come from Nadia Comăneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape (2023).
Translated from Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth, this book sheds light on state surveillance, lived experience and sport in the Eastern Bloc.

The most famous gymnast in the world

Put simply, Comăneci, the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of ten in an Olympic event, was, as Olaru points out, “the most famous gymnast in the world”.
By the autumn of 1969, Comăneci had enrolled at her local gymnastics centre, where she received formal training.
In 1970, she became the youngest gymnast to win at the Romanian Nationals.
Comăneci shot to international prominence in 1975 when, at the age of 13, she dominated proceedings at the European Gymnastics Championships.
Comăneci’s name and score was on everybody’s lips and immediately started to wend their way around the world.
Read more:
Friday essay: from delicate teens to fierce women, Simone Biles' athleticism and advocacy have changed gymnastics forever

Influential, abusive coaches

Béla and Márta Károlyi are two of the most influential and successful coaches in the history of gymnastics.
They are also extremely controversial - as viewers of Athlete A will already know.
Consider what Olaru has to say about the pair, who feature prominently in every chapter of his book.
Only when there was a need to manipulate them did he tell the young gymnasts he cared about them.
The depressing conclusion Oralu reaches is that the Romanian authorities chose to ignore the multiple warnings that came their way.

America’s gymnastics community knew

It matters because it’s clear the US gymnastics community was well aware of Károlyi’s reputation.
Take Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, published in 1995, which exposed the abusive reality of professional gymnastics in the US.
USA Gymnastics continued to place its trust - and the bodies of its athletes - in Károlyi’s hands.

Terrorists are using fraud to fund their activities – the UK government needs to act urgently

Retrieved on:

Friday, July 28, 2023

This work has identified a terrorism financing dossier, which includes passport fraud, immigration fraud, identify theft, financial fraud and tax fraud.

Key Points:

This work has identified a terrorism financing dossier, which includes passport fraud, immigration fraud, identify theft, financial fraud and tax fraud.
Benefit fraud is one of the most common methods used to fund terrorism in Europe, especially in Belgium, Scandinavia and the UK.
The UK government also needs to reconsider its current fraud and counter terrorism strategies.
They should include measures that focus on using fraud investigation as a disruptive mechanism to prevent future acts of terrorism.