Okhotsk Soap Opera Update: Playing Leapfrog

So perhaps this tense if ignored soap opera is finally drawing to a close. With a let up in the weather, all ships should be free from the ice by tomorrow. I'm not sure I understand the apparent surprise at the official doublespeak in the last paragraph, though. It's not a Russian thing, it is a Government thing.

Amplify’d from eureferendum.blogspot.com

Events in the Okhotsk Sea crisis are moving apace, with TASS reporting that the Bereg Nadezhdy fish carrier "has been led by two icebreakers from the ice area to clear water." Now the Admiral Makarov and Krasin icebreakers are returning to the Sodruzhestvo factory ship "in order to guide the vessel to ice-free waters."

This looks quite promising. An earlier bulletin set the scene, telling us that the icebreakers were leading the fish carrier to "ice-free waters" and had covered 12 of the 38 miles to the ice edge, over the past 24 hours. Then Ria Novosti issued a bullish report relaying an announcement from a spokesman for Russia's Federal Fishing Agency.

Said Alexander Savelev, the Bereg Nadezhdy had been successfully towed to clear water. "The refrigerator vessel is out of danger," he said. "In the next few hours, after refuelling, the icebreakers will return for the Sodruzhestvo mother fishery ship."

What is interesting though is that, throughout the operation, diverse spokespersons have been stressing that the ships were in no danger. With Alexander Savelev now telling us that the Bereg Nadezhdy is "out of danger," we can only draw our own conclusions as to the veracity of the previous statements. Read more at eureferendum.blogspot.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/ania0

Icy Rescue on Hold

This appears to be turning into quite the soap opera. I have been following it since the beginning of the year, and it has been interesting to watch the expected rescue date keep getting pushed further and further out. Apparently there are some significant challenges to rescuing vessels trapped in a freezing ocean, particularly if one of the ships is wider than the icebreaker sent to rescue it. Probably, the Russians are the only ones in the world who maintain the resources for it.



I have not seen this covered in any of the mainstream media; CNN, NYT, WaPo are all silent. The source below is an acquired taste, but it really is the only source I have seen covering it at all.

Amplify’d from eureferendum.blogspot.com

Breaking news as of 16:30 GMT was that the rescue operation in the Okhotsk Sea had been suspended "as weather conditions have deteriorated".

What was hoped to be the final phase of the operation to extract the trapped shipped was started at 21:30 Moscow time on Wednesday. "However, the deterioration of weather conditions (a cyclone is hovering over Sakhalin, and there is no transport connection) has suspended the active phase of the operation to get the ships out of ice," a source said. "Abnormally bad weather is characterized by zero visibility, strengthening winds and ice compression."

Earlier, we had learned that the rescue was continuing. With all the delays though, the icebreakers and the trapped ships have spent so long in the ice field that it had grown massively bigger – and thicker – and they were still trapped, making minimal progress. Voice of Russia was telling us that, as of "this morning", i.e., when their piece was being written, the Krasin and Admiral Makarov had managed to escort the Bereg Nadezhdy only two miles. After that, it said, the icebreakers would return for the Sodruzhestvo, "that was left in a relatively safe zone earlier". "It is still unclear how long the whole operation will take," the agency was saying. That was very much a change of tone.

What I think might have been happening is that they running a sort of shuttle service, dragging one ship a few miles, parking it in relatively safe ice and then going back for the other one. Once the two ships are reunited, they then repeat the process all over again.

This has to be extremely fraught as the ice is clearly building up faster than they can break thought it. The reality is that they are deeper into the ice now that when the ships were first trapped on 31 December, now three weeks ago. And now, it seems, they are temporarily defeated, as the weather worsens.

We also see for the first time the Sodruzhestvo under tow. From the angle it is difficult to see, but she looks to be close-coupled. I wasn't sure they could do that with such a big ship, but they do seem to be doing it. I’ve taken out a screen grab, cleaned it up and posted it (above). Quality is not very good, but at least you can see it for yourself.

See more at eureferendum.blogspot.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bn5ae

Imagining America as China, or, Size Matters

An interesting thought experiment from James Fallows, to help us better understand the world and necessities from a Chinese point of view.



He also mentions the concept of "Zipper streets;" apparently, because of lack of communication, it is not uncommon for various public departments to rip up a street, dig it out, and repave it multiple times in a matter of months or even weeks. Imagine the outcry if something like that were to happen in the US! Perhaps that too speaks to some of the issues of size related to being China.

Amplify’d from www.theatlantic.com

1) All of the Americas within US borders. I mentioned yesterday that Thomas Barnett had given a realistic brief appraisal of China's strengths and weaknesses in an NPR interview. A point I particularly liked was this tip for comparing American and Chinese scale: If Americans wanted to imagine what it would take to be "strong" in the way China currently is, he said, all we'd have to do is think of moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we'd require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians. China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable. If we did that, we'd be up to about a billion people -- and then if we also took every single person from Nigeria, and for good measure everyone in hyper-crowded Japan too, we'd finally be up to China's 1.3 billion size. At that point, like China, we'd have tremendous scale in everything. Rich people. Big businesses. A huge work force. Countless numbers of multi-million population cities. And we would also have a tremendous amount of poverty, plus pressure on resources of every kind, from water to food to living space. Just as China does now. Scale gives China some strengths. But it also creates tremendous challenges, as Americans would recognize if we thought about this prospect for even a minute. Seriously, reflect on this, and consider that it is China's reality now. Read more at www.theatlantic.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bmj73

Leo and Jeff diss Google Buzz on TWiG

So, I was listening to TWiG with @leolaporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Gina Trapani, and they had a huge rant about Google Buzz. Jeff in particular was quite vocal (I think he is more eloquent in print than on air). Leo made the point that he thinks people are not really interested in conversations; they are basically just interested in talking, not listening. This, then, explains the failure of services like Buzz and Jaiku, and ultimately Quora (hmm, no mention of Amplify), compared to the success of Twitter.

Let me say that my history in social media conversation begins with Buzz, oddly enough on the prompting of Leo. I found the experience fascinating. I managed to contribute to some discussions, much like the NNTP groups in the 90s. Unfortunately, I also noticed that many people (the ones I followed at any rate, including the aforementioned Leo and Jeff) just simply dumped their Twitter feeds into Buzz. (@ncoutlander has an excellent post on using Amplify as a social media command center; I note the word "command" because I think if you aren't selective and just dump everything everywhere all the time, it becomes more of a "social diarrhea.")

It became clear that Leo was not that interested in conversations at this level; not with me, at any rate. To be fair, I can't expect him to be. Leo is a media personality with thousands of followers and millions of listeners. He obviously has his preferred conversation partners and his preferred mode of conversation, namely his netcasts and Twitter and whatever else he prefers. Jarvis, on the other hand, appears willing to engage anyone. He just refuses to go outside his comfort zone on Twitter and engage with anything more than 140 characters, and he eventually became antagonistic to those who tried to convince him (or shame him or cajole him; it wasn't always civil) to more fully engage using Buzz.

Ironically, Leo's last activity on Buzz was to tout this great new thing called Amplify, so I followed him here. He then dropped off the map, but I kind of like it here. It's not a contest and I'm not trying to build a following (I don't have a lot to say, anyway), but I do have tens of followers, and at least half of those aren't spammers. I still follow Buzz, but now I follow different people and different conversations. I am enjoying both.

So, to @jeffjarvis, I say I'm glad Twitter works so well for you, just please don't denigrate other modes of conversation that others value and enjoy; the form of "publicness" is up to the"public" to decide, not self-styled experts, as you yourself have pointed out, on Buzz even! To @leolaporte, I say I'm glad you have your preferred milieu; please don't condemn us to a world of social diarrhea because you can't see the value of any particular threaded conversation service, but let us enjoy conversation where we like and how we like. To the rest of us, let's keep these in mind also; engage respectfully, where and how you like, and let others do the same. We can't be everywhere, so let's be where we want to be and enjoy it.



Pace.

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/blixo

Oceanic “garbage patch” not nearly as big as portrayed in media

I interpret this as saying that the amount of plastic trash in a particular ocean area the size of Texas is roughly the same as the amount of plastic trash in the state of Texas. To me, it shows how issues like this can be exaggerated in order to appear more urgent, and the result is that it encourages solutions that may not be effective or appropriate to the magnitude of the problem, and when the exaggeration is exposed, it causes the general public to lose confidence in the scientists promulgating it. And there were many scientists repeating it, most of whom never even investigated the issue because they heard it from their sources and they "knew" it was right.

Two wins for science in one day. Yay!

Amplify’d from oregonstate.edu

CORVALLIS, Ore. – There is a lot of plastic trash floating in the Pacific Ocean, but claims that the “Great Garbage Patch” between California and Japan is twice the size of Texas are grossly exaggerated, according to an analysis by an Oregon State University scientist.

“There is no doubt that the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans is troubling, but this kind of exaggeration undermines the credibility of scientists,” White said. “We have data that allow us to make reasonable estimates; we don’t need the hyperbole. Given the observed concentration of plastic in the North Pacific, it is simply inaccurate to state that plastic outweighs plankton, or that we have observed an exponential increase in plastic.”

The studies have shown is that if you look at the actual area of the plastic itself, rather than the entire North Pacific subtropical gyre, the hypothetically “cohesive” plastic patch is actually less than 1 percent of the geographic size of Texas.

Among other findings, which White believes should be part of the public dialogue on ocean trash:

Calculations show that the amount of energy it would take to remove plastics from the ocean is roughly 250 times the mass of the plastic itself;

Plastic also covers the ocean floor, particularly offshore of large population centers. A recent survey from the state of California found that 3 percent of the southern California Bight’s ocean floor was covered with plastic – roughly half the amount of ocean floor covered by lost fishing gear in the same location. But little, overall, is known about how much plastic has accumulated at the bottom of the ocean, and how far offshore this debris field extends;

It is a common misperception that you can see or quantify plastic from space. There are no tropical plastic islands out there and, in fact, most of the plastic isn’t even visible from the deck of a boat;

There are areas of the ocean largely unpolluted by plastic. A recent trawl White conducted in a remote section of water between Easter Island and Chile pulled in no plastic at all.

There are other issues with plastic, White said, including the possibility that floating debris may act as a vector for introducing invasive species into sensitive habitats.

“If there is a takeaway message, it’s that we should consider it good news that the ‘garbage patch’ doesn’t seem to be as bad as advertised,” White said, “but since it would be prohibitively costly to remove the plastic, we need to focus our efforts on preventing more trash from fouling our oceans in the first place.” Read more at oregonstate.edu

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bkqlw

Elaborate Fraud

Just one of numerous takes on this finding about the already discredited and retracted study linking vaccines to autism. To me the most important quote is this: "But perhaps as important as the scare’s effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion, and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it."

The outrage, though, is the last sentence. Wakefield is now a rock star with a permanent megaphone; the fact that he is a confirmed fraud will have no bearing at all, the damage is (and continues to be) done.

Amplify’d from www.collide-a-scape.com

Yesterday, after the news broke of an extensive investigative report by Brian Deer, a British journalist, CNN’s Anderson Cooper took it from there and completed the evisceration of huckster Andrew Wakefield, whose infamous 1998 study supposedly linking autism to the MMR vaccine was retracted last year by the journal Lancet.

Additionally, the editorial chastises the media for “unbalanced” reporting on the bogus vaccine-autism link, and also blames the continuing vaccine scare on

an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals, and the medical profession.

There’s also this that seems to get lost in all the controversy:

But perhaps as important as the scare’s effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion, and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it.

So will this news of “elaborate fraud” by a champion of the debunked vaccine-autism connection give pause to the the anti-vaxxers, who regard Wakefield as their hero? Of course not. Read more at www.collide-a-scape.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bkqgr