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A List...August 25, Part I
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Date: Fri, 25 Aug 1995 17:08:54 +0059 (EDT)
From: George P Mokray
A List of Environmental and Telecommunications Events and Issues August 25 to September 1, 1995
Published, Edited and Written by George Mokray for Information Ecologies 218 Franklin St #3 Cambridge, MA 02139 (617)661-2676 gmoke@world.std.com
"A List..." now has a homepage: http://world.std.com/~gmoke/AList.html
Listings MassEnviro Listings "A List..." Is Now a Listserv Barry Kort and the Wetlands Strategizing the Environmental Information Infrastructure Sustainability Resources Ontological Breakdown, or, Pretending to be a Help System 150 Years of Scientific American
Listings
Tuesday, August 29
6:30 pm Jobs with Justice contact Pasqualino Columbaro at 265-9122 160 2nd St, Cambridge
Looks like the rest of the week is a good time for a vacation.
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MassEnviro Listings
For further information, contact Meg Colclough of the MA Executive Office of Environmental Affairs at (617)727-9800 x218 or massenviro@aol.com.
AUGUST 9-30 SCIENCE AT SEA PROGRAMS ..limited enrollment, call 800-552-3633
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"A List..." Is Now a Listserv
All those email addresses should be gone from the beginning of "A List..." this edition because I have taken advantage of the resources available through my Internet service provider, the World, and transformed this publication into a listserv.
That means that if you want to subscribe or unsubscribe, you should address the request to a-list@world.std.com, leave the subject line of the message blank, and type "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the text.
If you want to send a message to all the rest of the readers of "A List..." (and there are now at least 120 readers), address it to a-list@world.std.com. The listserv is presently unmoderated which means that you have to decide on your whether your missive is meaningful enough to go to all 120 people.
I hope that I will be able to learn all the ins and outs of the software and can continue to provide interesting and timely information to you all.
Thanks for your support.
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Barry Kort and the Wetlands
Editorial Comment: Barry Kort is a pioneer in using the Internet for educational purposes. He helps run Cyberion City (telnet://guest@michael.ai.mit.edu), an informal learning environment for kids, a text-based virtual reality that is a space station and virtual community, and works at Bolt, Baranek, and Newman on other educational projects (http://www.musenet.org). Lately, he's been having some problems with his condo association and their seeming violation of the abutting wetlands. He deserves any help that we can give him. Let him tell you about it.
I live in a condo in Bedford MA which encorporates and abuts a Wetlands. One parcel is owned by the Condo Ass'n and is designated Open Space, to be left in its natural, scenic and open condition. The adjoining parcel is owned by the Conservation Commission and is deeded as a Conservation Area which may only be used for 'passive recreation'.
The Trustees of the Condo Ass'n have permitted some unit owners to build a golf course upon the two parcels, without so much as a by-your-leave from affected parties. Then they rolled into the monthly condo fees the cost of operating and maintaining the golf course. After disputing the matter for several years, with no progress, I began withholding the portion of the condo fees that pay for the golf course (about $40/mo out of $250/mo).
This week the Trustess filed suit against me, seeking a lien on my unit and an order to sell it. You can read the legal papers at:
http://web.musenet.org/~bkort/bedfordshire.html
There are 13.5 acres of Conservation Land alongside the flowage of the Shawsheen River. A portion of the 23 Acre Open Space is also designated Wetlands. (There are 5 natural ponds on the two parcels. Two are directly connected to the Shawsheen, two are spring fed, and one is fed from runoff along the embankment.) The Trustees installed a diesel powered water pumping station on the Conservation Land and are pumping about 10,000 gallons a day out of the Shawsheen to water the greens. We have no permits for any of this.
There are 4 points of law at issue.
Point 1. The Trustees failed to obtain the 75% vote of the unit owners required by state law and by the condo ass'n bylaws to alter the common areas. Indeed the Trusteed didn't even notify the unit owners or call for a vote at all.
Point 2. The Trustees failed to apply to the Planning Board for an amendment to the Special Permit to build the Planned Residential Development. The original Special Permit provides that the previously existing golf course on the open space would be "permanently discontinued" as of Fall of 1986.
Point 3. The Trustees failed to apply to the Conservation Commission for a permit to alter lands protected by the Wetlands Protection Act and Conservation Bylaws.
Point 4. The Trustees built a portion of the golf course upon the adjoining parcel which is owned by the town.
Only Point 3 is relevant to Conservation Law. But together, we see a systematic pattern of failures to inform or obtain the legaly required approvals from interested parties.
Anyone who wishes to assist or intervene in this case is invited to contact me, Barry Kort, bkort@musenet.org.
Barry Kort bkort@musenet.org
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Strategizing the Environmental Information Infrastructure
Peter Stott (pstott@emerald.tufts.edu) of Tufts keeps on working. The Tufts Environmental Programs Council (TEPC) homepage (http://www.tufts.edu/tepc) coordinates environmental activities at Tufts, with brief descriptions of most environmental courses at Tufts and pointers to other resources. Ross Donald (rnn@world.std.com) sent him a copy of the Energy Foundation's listing of college courses on energy issues and Peter gave it a Webpage at http://www.tufts.edu/tepc/energy/. Now, Ross and Peter are trying to think through how to update the listing and arrange it as a true Web resource with appropriate hyperlinks. They are also musing about who is going to do it and how it is going to be financed.
And don't forget that Andy Nemec's RAGEpage has changed URL's. It is now at http://www.cybercom.net/~anemec. RAGE archives the earlier editions of "A List..." as well as a database of over 600 local environmental groups. This database needs to be used and updated. There is also the Web version of "A List..." at http://world.std.com/~gmoke/AList.html. Looks like we have the beginnings of an environmental information infrastructure.
Peter Stott and I and Ambrose Spencer met on Friday, August 18 to talk about designing that infrastructure. We were at one end of the table while a group of local WELL (Whole Earth Lectronic Link) folks were at the other. Nice party. Good strategizing. Ended the evening at Toscanini's for ice cream and the dancing iron filings (drop in and find out what that means).
Here's the outline I drew up for that meeting. Please feel free to fill in the holes and elaborate on the concepts. Peter is good. Andy is good. I may even be good but we can't do it all on our own. How do you envision a local environmental information system?
Environmental Information Strategy
There should be a central information site for ALL the pertinent local environmental information. This site should have links to as many other regional, national and international sites as are useful. There should be cross-references so that the education, government, business and general public match interests between the different sectors, so that if a citizens' group or municipality is working on a specific program or wetlands, for instance, it can find the businesses, college courses, and state and Federal programs that will support and amplify their local efforts.
This site should include: environmental events lectures and courses at colleges and universities Federal, state,local government legislation, hearings, and studies non-profits, citizens, and advocacy groups business forums, meetings and product announcements
databases environmental resources college and university courses and teachers Superfund and TRI sites indicators materials and technologies regulations and laws species diversity and environmental resources GIS
simulations environmental emergency planning and design - individual houses, neighborhoods, city, region sustainability and human/environmental systems efficiency
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Sustainability Resources
Sustainable Seattle has been working through the thorny path to sustainability for five years now. They are a pioneer if only for their work on sustainability indicators. Now they are beginning to go online. You can email them at sustsea@halcyon.com or reach their homepage at http://www.scn.org/sustainable/susthome.html. Their Web presence is still in an early stage of organization but it is certainly worth looking at to see what is possible with this kind of information.
Real Goods, the mail order solar and ecological product company, is also on the Web. Their URL is http://www.well.com/www/realgood. I find their prices to be on the high side but they are certainly the first place to look to see what is available in the marketplace.
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Ontological Breakdown, or, Pretending to be a Help System
Editorial Comment: This came to me through Doug Holmes, one of the emerging pioneers of industrial ecology and a chemical engineer with eclectic tastes. He got it from Adam Engst's tidBITS, a weekly for Mac users. Brad De Long's article is one of the best pieces on virtuality that I have ever read. Part of the reason for that is because I have visited the Museum of Paleontology online. When I showed my sister the Web for the first time at one of the new cyber-cafes, Cafe Liberty in Central Square, she immediately asked for dinosaur stuff. She is the mother of a three year old boy. I wonder if my nephew or his sister are pretending to be computers yet. It is a thought that gives me pause.
Ontological Breakdown, or, Pretending to be a Help System
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by Brad De Long
I recently had an Internet experience that was profoundly disturbing, and made me want to consult a philosophical professional in the same way that a health problem makes me want to consult a medical professional.
Let me start from the beginning. For the past year or so one of my main Internet activities has been to look for pictures of dinosaurs. My five-year-old sits on my right knee and my two-year- old on my left. We stare at Triceratops eye-to-eye, and count the teeth of Tyrannosaurus Rex. The five-year-old is pretty good at following links; the two-year-old is still at the "Twicer'ops. Piktur Twicer'ops" stage.
One of our favorite places is the University of California Museum of Paleontology - the UCMP. On the Internet, the UCMP is a marvelous virtual, interactive museum. Adam Engst even wrote in one of his books that he could "spend the rest of the afternoon here, browsing the exhibits, and all without hurting my feet."
http://ucmp1.berkeley.edu/welcome.html
Last June, I stopped being a Senior Treasury Department Official, and became a Berkeley economics professor. Since the UCMP is in the "berkeley.edu" domain, I asked around, and was told that the UCMP had just moved into the newly-renovated Valley Life Sciences Building.
So one afternoon I paused in my attempts to deal with the pile of paper created by the Associate Vice Chancellor for Sending Junk Mail to Faculty and the Assistant Associate Vice Chancellor for Thinking Up Pointless Rules, and took the five-year-old and the two-year-old to the Valley Life Sciences Building.
We first walked past a wall of news clippings and pictures of paleontological digs. We soon found ourselves in the central stairwell in front of a banner that said "University of California Museum of Paleontology." There was an impressive Tyrannosaurus skull behind glass. On the next floor up there was a similarly impressive Triceratops skull. The hip bones of a Tyrannosaurus (a different Tyrannosaurus) hung suspended in the stairwell.
That was pretty much it. The UCMP had just moved and not all of the public exhibits had been unpacked yet. By mid-September an entire Tyrannosaurus Rex will fill up the three-story stairwell. But the public fossil collection was very small. The UCMP is a research museum, not a display museum: it is for twenty-five- year-old graduate students fascinated by posters with titles like "Acid Rain an Agent of Extinction at the K-T Boundary - Not!" This research museum is not designed for five-year-olds, or for thirty- five-year-olds who don't know as much about geology and chemistry as they should.
I stood in the stairwell. I looked at the few impressive fossils. I thought to myself, "Let's get back to my office computer, so that we can see the real University of California Museum of Paleontology Dinosaur exhibit at:
http://ucmp1.berkeley.edu/expo/dinoexpo.html
"The real museum," I thought, "has audio narration by the discoverers of dinosaurs. The real museum has many more bones - a Diplodocus skeleton, for one thing. The real museum has detailed exhibits on dinosaur evolution and geology...
"No - wait.
"This is the real museum. The Internet Web site is just the "virtual" image - an electronic reflection - of this place."
And that was when I felt I needed a consulting philosopher bad.
There have long been speculations about how the electronic shadows made possible by the computer and telecommunications revolutions will acquire the intensity of effect, the immediacy, the complexity and the depth to become - in a certain sense - real. That afternoon in the Valley Life Sciences Building was the first time in my life that I had compared a place in the real world - the UCMP - to its virtual electronic image in cyberspace and found the real world lacking, found that the real world experience didn't have, compared to its virtual electronic image, the intensity of effect, the immediacy, the complexity, and the depth necessary for reality. Thinking back, I realized that the electronic world behind the computer screen has been slowly acquiring reality - and the real world losing it - for some years. I check the card catalog for something or other every week; but it has been four years since I saw a wooden or metal drawer with 3 by 5 cards in it. If I say "it's on my desktop," I almost surely mean that a pointer to the computer file exists at the root level directory of my notebook computer. As far as desktops and card catalogs are concerned, the "virtual" images have so swamped the "real" objects as to make them vanish from my consciousness. My cousin Tom Kalil tells me that cyberspace has obtained "lift- off." Traffic on the now-defunct NSFNET Internet backbone went up from 3.6 billion bytes in March 1993 to 4.8 trillion bytes in March 1995. WebCrawler and Yahoo now index over four million electronic documents, and receive more than 9.4 million hits per week. Some are oblivious to this transformation. I think of a respected academic elder who claimed that all physical discoveries since 1930 (including our current computer and communications technologies) were less significant than the past generation's "discoveries" in literary criticism; he had the lack of perception (or perhaps he was simply irony-challenged) to make this claim in an electronic mail message! For two generations people have been talking about how computers will have an extraordinary impact on human society and human knowledge. Our children will think as differently from us as we think differently from pre-Gutenberg monks, who would spend years copying and writing a commentary on a single illuminated manuscript. Our children will find our doctrines and beliefs as quaint as we find Socrates' distrust of the written word as an suitable tool for education.
The evening after returning from our expedition to the Valley Life Sciences Building I went upstairs to put the five-year-old to bed. He was talking - but not to himself. "If you want to read books," he said, "click on the bookcase. If you want to play with dinosaur toys, click over here." He was pretending to be a help system. "To play with Lion King toys, click on the bottom of the bed." I have pretended to be many things at play and at work - a space explorer, a wise king, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, a Berkeley professor. But I have never pretended to be a help system. "If you need help, click on my picture on top of the dresser. I'll be there in a flash..." Not only is the virtual world behind the computer screen acquiring an increasing aura of reality, but the real world on this side of the screen is acquiring aspects of virtuality as well.
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150 Years of Scientific American
The September 1995 issue of Scientific American is full of good stuff. First of all, it is a theme issue on "Technology of the 21st Century" which is a very good overview. There are articles on interactive software agents by Pattie Maes of MIT's Media Lab, a piece on industrial ecology by Robert Frosch of Harvard, another article on technology for sustainable agriculture, an "outline for an ecological economy", and a piece on information economy by Hal Varian, one of the major students of Internet pricing, as well as another article on renewable energy and the future of solar energy.
The news briefs in the front of the magazine are also very interesting. There is a piece on the black market for CFC's and the effect on the Montreal Protocal. Seems that the EPA has an 800# for whistle-blowers of the illegal CFC trade. There is also a piece on DNA calculators, the ultimate environmental/telecommunications linkage. Another article is about research on substituting new amino acids in protein sequences. More than the 20 amino acids which are naturally used in proteins can fit, if scientists shoe-horn them hard enough. I wonder what the unintended consequences of this research is going to be. Of local significance is an article on how dredging and sewage reduction may threaten the lobster harvest in Boston harbor, which is 30 - 40% of the Massachusetts catch. Finally, there is a piece on how some consumer technology may be considered "munitions" under the International Trade in Arms Regulation. It should be common knowledge that such commonly available encryption programs as PGP are classified as munitions and can't be exported lawfully from the USA but even some off the shelf hardware is also, technically, "munitions" under this Regulation. Cybernauts beware!
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