This book highlights cutting-edge research in the field of network science, offering scientists, researchers and graduate students a unique opportunity to catch up on the latest advances in theory and a multitude of applications. It presents the peer-reviewed proceedings of the fifth International Workshop on Complex Networks & their Applications (COMPLEX NETWORKS 2016), which took place in Milan during the last week of November 2016. The carefully selected papers are divided into 11 sections reflecting the diversity and richness of research areas in the field. More specifically, the following topics are covered: Network models; Network measures; Community structure; Network dynamics; Diffusion, epidemics and spreading processes; Resilience and control; Network visualization; Social and political networks; Networks in finance and economics; Biological and ecological networks; and Network analysis. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-50901-3; Part of the Studies in Computational Intelligence book series (SCI, volume 693)
Month: April 2017
📺 Seed: The Untold Story | Independent Lens (PBS), S18 E13
Worshiped and treasured since the dawn of humankind, few things on Earth are as miraculous and vital as seeds. SEED: The Untold Story follows passionate seed keepers intent on protecting our 12,000 year-old food legacy. In the last century, 94% of our seed varieties have disappeared. This once abundant seed diversity — painstakingly created by ancient farmers and gardeners over countless millennia — has been drastically winnowed down to a handful of mass-produced varieties. Under the spell of industrial "progress" and corporate profits, family farmsteads have given way to mechanized agribusinesses sowing genetically identical crops on a massive scale. But without seed diversity, crop diseases rise and empires fall. More than a cautionary tale of "man against nature," SEED reveals the work of farmers, scientists, lawyers, and indigenous seed keepers who are fighting a David versus Goliath battle to defend the future of our food. In a story both harrowing and heartening, we meet a wide variety of reluctant heroes working to rekindle a lost connection to our most treasured resource, from the pueblos of New Mexico to a seed bunker in Norway, from India to America’s heartland, from Peru to Hawaii. Among the dozens of people featured are Will Bonsall of the Scatterseed Project, Dr. Jane Goodall, environmental lawyer Claire Hope Cummings, ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan, botanical explorer Joseph Simcox, Andrew Kimbrell of the Center for Food Safety, and physicist/activist Dr. Vandana Shiva. SEED explores the hidden fabric of our food and the people that painstakingly and meticulously curate its diversity, in an era of climate uncertainty and immense corporate power.
I think I preferred the shorter podcasts I recently listened to: Why Save Seeds and Seed Law on the fantastic Eat This Podcast [1][2] mostly because they were a bit more scientific and policy-minded. This documentary was interesting, told some great personal stories, but could be viewed as not the most balanced of presentations. It obviously went for a more uplifting and poignant stance surrounding the people and the communities as well as their stories.
It could easily have spent 20-30 minutes delving into more of the science and the policy portions of the story to better underpin the overall arc of the story and simply had a longer 90 minute running time instead of just an hour spent primarily focused on trying to pull simply at our heartstrings.
I agree that the decrease in diversity of our seed stores is an appalling travesty, but the topic deserves better coverage and a more nuanced viewpoint of the relevant science and policy could have done far more to get people interested in the subject. I certainly would have appreciated it.
References
🎧 Changing Global Diets: the website | Eat This Podcast
A fascinating tool for exploring how, where and when diets evolve. Foodwise, what unites Cameroon, Nigeria and Grenada? How about Cape Verde, Colombia and Peru? As of today, you can visit a website to find out. The site is the brainchild of Colin Khoury and his colleagues, and is intended to make it easier to see the trends hidden within 50 years of annual food data from more than 150 countries. If that rings a bell, it may be because you heard the episode around three years ago, in which Khoury and I talked about the massive paper he and his colleagues had published on the global standard diet. Back then, the researchers found it easy enough to explain the overall global trends that emerged from the data, but more detailed questions – about particular crops, or countries, or food groups – were much more difficult to answer. The answer to that one? An interactive website.
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While this seems a short and simple episode with some engaging conversation, it’s the podcast equivalent of the floating duck–things appear smooth and calm on the surface, but the duck is paddling like the devil underneath the surface. The Changing Global Diet website is truly spectacular and portends to have me losing a day’s worth of work or more over the next few days.
Some of the data compilation here as well as some of the visualizations are reminiscent to me of some of César A. Hidalgo’s work at the MIT Media Lab on economic complexity and even language which I’ve briefly mentioned before or bookmarked.[1][2]
I’d be curious to see what some of the data overlays between and among some of these projects looked like and what connections they might show. I suspect that some of the food diversity questions may play into the economic complexities that countries exhibit as well.
If there were longer term data over the past 10,000+ years to make this a big history and food related thing, that would be phenomenal too, though I suspect that there just isn’t enough data to make a longer time line truly useful.
References
🔖 Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security
The narrowing of diversity in crop species contributing to the world’s food supplies has been considered a potential threat to food security. However, changes in this diversity have not been quantified globally. We assess trends over the past 50 y in the richness, abundance, and composition of crop species in national food supplies worldwide. Over this period, national per capita food supplies expanded in total quantities of food calories, protein, fat, and weight, with increased proportions of those quantities sourcing from energy-dense foods. At the same time the number of measured crop commodities contributing to national food supplies increased, the relative contribution of these commodities within these supplies became more even, and the dominance of the most significant commodities decreased. As a consequence, national food supplies worldwide became more similar in composition, correlated particularly with an increased supply of a number of globally important cereal and oil crops, and a decline of other cereal, oil, and starchy root species. The increase in homogeneity worldwide portends the establishment of a global standard food supply, which is relatively species-rich in regard to measured crops at the national level, but species-poor globally. These changes in food supplies heighten interdependence among countries in regard to availability and access to these food sources and the genetic resources supporting their production, and give further urgency to nutrition development priorities aimed at bolstering food security.
Today is My Third Indieweb Anniversary
For those who aren’t aware of the broader concept of Indieweb, here is a great introduction with some history by Tantek Çelik entitled The Once and Future IndieWeb
IndieWeb Summit
This is also a good time to remind those who are interested, that the annual IndieWebSummit is coming up soon and RSVP’s are now open:
June 24-25, 2017
Portland, Oregon
The seventh annual gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their own personal websites, and build upon each others creations.
I hope to see people there in person, though I’ll note that remote attendance is possible as well.
A Brief Look Back
This post started out initially as a brief status update and I extended it with the video and notice about the upcoming Summit.
Now that I’m past what I would consider “note” length, and since it’s a milestone of sorts, I thought it would be interesting to take a nostalgic look back at my last year of Indieweb. I didn’t think it would be quite so much, but it’s really amazing what you can do if you take things in small steps over time. So here’s a quick review of some of the things I’ve done in the last year on my site. (Thank goodness for documentation!)
- I’ve made some reasonable changes to my theme and CSS
- I’ve now got a built in RSS feed reader and better own my bookmarks of things I want to read
- I’ve added a few new post types which I use more regularly: checkins, jams, listens, wishes, and watches
- I don’t tweetstorm often, but when I do, I’ve changed how it happens
- I’ve improved archiving my content to Archive.org as it posts
- I’ve added some custom RSS feeds for better content discovery and subscription
- I support subscription by web-based Push notifications
- I’ve started owning my highlights, notes, and marginalia from books, e-books, and online articles.
- Changed the way I own my Instagram posts (still via PESOS), but with better metadata and display of maps when location is added
- I continue to own my Twitter archive and have detailed how others can too
- I own my reading status updates and don’t rely as much on GoodReads.com
- I now own all of my content from Tumblr and now only syndicate content there when I do use it
- I downloaded and owned my TwitPic Archive in case it shuts down
Other Indieweb activities, which don’t necessarily appear on my site:
- I started local Los Angeles Homebrew Website Club meetups to help others
- I helped co-host and attended my first IndieWebCamp
- I’ve also written a lot about Indieweb in the past year as it relates to other areas including education and journalism and done some reasonable work improving the Indieweb wiki, particularly with regard to indiewebifying one’s WordPress site.
As a separate statistic I made approximately 1,071 posts to my (main) site in the last year compared to 136 in the same time frame the year prior. There are over 2,400 posts on my social stream site this past year. It’s great owning it all here now instead of having it spread out all over hundreds of other sites and thousands of URLs over which I have no control.
To my recollection I’ve only joined 6 new silos in the past year (to which I really only syndicate into). In that same time frame at least 15 services of which I was a member or used at one time or another have shut down and disappeared. Entertainingly (and perhaps miraculously) one which had previously disappeared came back to life: Upcoming.org!
Checkin City of Pasadena Schoolhouse Garage
Checkin Cross Campus Old Pasadena
Checkin 76
Checkin Smart & Final
🔖 Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2016
The ALife conferences are the major meeting of the artificial life research community since 1987. For its 15th edition in 2016, it was held in Latin America for the first time, in the Mayan Riviera, Mexico, from July 4 -8. The special them of the conference: How can the synthetic study of living systems contribute to societies: scientifically, technically, and culturally? The goal of the conference theme is to better understand societies with the purpose of using this understanding for a more efficient management and development of social systems.
👓 Jonathan Demme, ‘Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Philadelphia’ Director, Dead at 73 | Rolling Stone
'Stop Making Sense' filmmaker succumbs to esophageal cancer
Independent Publisher 2 Is Here | WordPress Blog
A beloved WordPress.com theme, improved for simplicity and speed.
👓 “Radioactive Boy Scout” regularly visited by FBI for a decade, father says | Ars Technica
New documents show David Charles Hahn was reported to authorities in 2007, 2010.
It’s been windy like this for most of the last day or so…
Instagram filter used: Clarendon
Photo taken at: Glendale, California