Journal Nature Supports Keystone Pipeline

It is totally unexpected for Nature magazine to weigh in on this debate, but it is certainly welcomed. For the past decades, the environmental movement has been allowed free rein to engage in scientific fraud to further their often paid agendas. It has thus become appropriate for leading science voices to step up and use their credibility to counter this behavior far sooner than has been the case.

The worst example has been the so called climate debate in which a select group were able to demonize honest dissent.

It is high time for the leading voices of science to preempt this activity as ac matter of policy. At worst, if it is possible, have two leading sides of the debate tilt at each other.

Beyond all that, if you are concerned about carbon, then while we still burn the stuff, the natural worst to best is clearly coal, oil through natural gas. Suddenly we can supply ample gas thanks to the magic of fracking. That alone is driving the thermal coal industry to the wall right now. This will not stop until all coal plants are shuttered. The stunning reality is that the USA will magically meet its Kyoto objective and eliminate offshore oil imports during the next several years through no government planning of its own.

Oil is for transportation and again oil transport can be graded best through worst with pipeline, sea through rail and truck. Millions of barrels of oil are now pouring into the US by rail over the CN track running through Chicago and down into the Gulf. Burlington Northern is moving north Dakota production in the same way. The rail companies are pinching themselves to discover that the US government is so stupid.

You will observe that the oil is moving regardless and that Canada is engaged in hauling oil into Eastern Canada and in increasing throughput into the West Coast for the Chinese market.

All that oil will be better served ending up in the Gulf refineries to displace incoming oil from the rest of the world. This ramps up the pressure to approve the pipeline and nicely neutralizes the environmental lobby.

Respected journal Nature supports Keystone XL pipeline

Obama urged to focus on coal instead

By Yadullah Hussain

http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Respected+journal+Nature+supports+Keystone+pipeline/7897379/story.html#ixzz2JZp9aNuZ

One of the world's most respected scientific journals says U.S. President Barack Obama should focus on coal-gorging power and utility companies in the United States, instead of appeasing environmentalists by turning down the Keystone XL pipeline.

"Regarding the Keystone pipeline, the administration should face down critics of the project, ensure that environmental standards are met and then approve it," Nature said in an editorial on its website.

Keystone XL pipeline, which will ship oilsands product from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, has been the subject of environmental rage and its scrapping is seen as central to reducing global carbon emissions.

But Nature contends the pipeline's impact on the environment is exaggerated. "Nor is oil produced from the Canadian tarsands as dirty from a climate perspective as many believe (some of the oil produced in California, without attention from environmentalists, is worse)."

While oilsands development raises "serious air-and water-quality issues in Canada," these issues are beyond the president's jurisdiction, the weekly periodical said. "By approving Keystone, Obama can bolster his credibility within industry and among conservatives."

The magazine, considered one of the most-cited scientific journals in the world, says Obama should instead send a message to the coal industry.

"The energy utilities will duly cry foul, but the same companies are already powering down old and inefficient coal-fired power plants in favour of natural gas plants. Why? Because natural gas is cheap and burns more cleanly than coal, helping companies to meet increasingly stringent air-quality regulations."

Meanwhile, a recent report by Greenpeace ranks coal as a bigger climate change culprit than the oilsands.

"Coal is the biggest threat globally," Keith Stewart, one of the report's authors, told The Canadian Press.

"Sometimes, we get a little parochial in Canada - we think that the whole world is entirely focused on tarsands as the biggest problem. What we're saying here is that it's one of the biggest problems."

The Pembina Institute has recommended scrapping the Keystone XL pipeline based on its findings.

"Moving forward with a pipeline that would undermine other critical efforts to reduce emissions is not an example of responsible resource development," wrote Nathan Lemphers, in a blog on the Pembina website, arguing that the approval of the pipeline will mean oilsands production equivalent in carbon emissions to building 6.3 new coal-fired power plants or putting 4.6 million cars on the road.

The U.S. State Department is expected to make a decision on the pipeline by the end of the first quarter.

Keystone was blocked last year amid concerns over the route of the pipeline, which crossed the sensitive Sand Hills region of Nebraska. TransCanada submitted a new plan in September of last year proposing an alternate route through the state. Nebraska's Republican Gov. Dave Heine-man gave the go-ahead to the pipeline last week.

Fog Cloth Waters Desert

This is important. It gives us a cheap and easy way to precipitate humidity at night and then drive it directly into a downward sloping collector tube after sunrise to feed a buried porous earthen pot to hold the water for a day or more. The canvas does not need to be tied against the wind either which implies scant maintenance.

As I have already posted, watering the desert is about extending the zone of one hundred percent humidity inland step by step and that entails supporting and protecting the full hydrological cycle. It may need to be established at tidewater with mangroves but inland it consists of the Eden cycle in which some water can be added artificially from the atmosphere in order to support the respiration of the adjacent plants. These will be obviously trees of some sort.

This technology fits the model rather well and can also be dirt cheap and easily maintained by the stakeholder.

The key has always been to get enough water from the atmosphere at night and to recover it in the morning to feed the adjacent tree. The difficulty was not doing it as doing it cheap enough to facilitate implementation. Obviously a hanging flag from a horizontal spar shifting in the wind or some other clever geometric shape will grab the moisture. That moisture should wick down into a collection tube easily enough also when the sun comes out.

I am thinking the Sahara Desert of course, but the coastal Mediterranean is superb for all this as it restores the original ancient cover enjoyed here and ample manpower exists to cause it all to happen fast.

Cotton with special coating collects water from fogs in desert

by Staff Writers

Eindhoven, Netherlands (SPX) Jan 23, 2013

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Cotton_with_special_coating_collects_water_from_fogs_in_desert_999.html

Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) together with researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), have developed a special treatment for cotton fabric that allows the cotton to absorb exceptional amounts of water from misty air: 340 % of its own weight.

What makes this 'coated cotton' so interesting is that the cotton releases the collected water by itself, as it gets warmer. This property makes of the coated cotton materials a potential solution to provide water to the desert regions, for example for agricultural purposes. The results of this research will be published next month in the scientific journal Advanced Materials.

The researchers applied a coating of PNIPAAm, a polymer, to the cotton fabric. At lower temperatures, this cotton has a sponge-like structure at microscopic level.

Up to a temperature of 34C it is highly hydrophilic, in other words it absorbs water strongly. Through this property the cotton can absorb 340 % of its own weight of water from misty air - compared with only 18% without the PNIPAAm coating.

In contrast, once the temperature raises the material becomes hydrophobic or water-repellant, and above 34C the structure of the PNIPAAm-coated Beetles in desert areas can collect and drink water from fogs, by capturing water droplets on their bodies, which roll into their mouths.

Similarly, some spiders capture humidity on their silk network. This was the inspiration for this new coated-cotton material, which collects and releases water from misty environments simply as the temperature changes throughout the day.

This property implies that the material may potentially be suitable for providing water in deserts or mountain regions, where the air is often misty at night. According to TU/e researcher dr.

Catarina Esteves a further advantage is that the basic material - cotton fabric - is cheap and can be easily and locally produced. The polymer coating increases the cost slightly, but with the current conditions the amount required is only about 12%. In addition, the polymer used is not particularly costly.

Fine-mesh 'fog harvesting nets' are already being used in some mountains and dry coastal areas, but these use a different principle: they collect water from misty air, by droplets that gradually form on the nets and fall to the ground or a suitable recipient. But this system depends on a strong air flow, wind. The coated cotton developed the research team can also work without wind.

In addition, cotton fibers coated with this polymer can be laid directly where the water is needed, for example on cultivated soil. The researchers are also considering completely different applications such as camping tents that collect water at night, or sportswear that keeps perspiring athletes dry.

The research was led by professor John Xin at PolyU and dr. Catarina Esteves at TU/e. They now intend to investigate further how they can optimize the quality of the new material.

For example they hope to increase the amount of water absorbed by the coated-cotton. Moreover they also expect to be able to adjust the temperature at which the material changes from water-collecting to the water-releasing state, towards lower temperatures.

Whitebark Pine a Potential Cultivar

This tree needs to be domesticated. Hybridization could also help to prepare a cultivar able to prosper in the boreal forest. We have already identified a couple of other such likely plants but a tree quite able to supplant the wild tree cover and that is also highly productive of ripe seed cones is an ideal option.

The apparent potential productivity also looks promising and they should be easy to harvest. The competition from the birds and squirrels can be partially suppressed by an active population of martens and fishers and their cousins. One has to get in to do the harvest as soon as the cones are ready from the sound of it.

One by one, we are identifying cultivars for the boreal forest and there remains no doubt that it can be done.

The problems talked about here will pass through a natural cycle and in time fully recover.

Mountain pine beetles threaten endangered whitebark pines

By Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun January 21, 2013

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Mountain+pine+beetles+threaten+endangered+whitebark+pines/7847068/story.html#ixzz2IekdmL60

Mountain pine beetles have hammered more than B.C.’s lodgepole pine forests — they’ve taken endangered whitebark pine trees, robbing Interior grizzly bears and other species of an important food supply.

Slow-growing whitebark pine trees are rarer than lodgepole pine, grow at higher elevations, and produce cones with large seeds that form a food source for Clark’s nutcracker (which disperses them across the landscape), red squirrels, chipmunks, and pre-denning black bears and grizzlies. The latter species are of special concern in Canada.

Native people have also long eaten the seeds raw or roasted.

A new study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports that a warmer climate has “increased access of native bark beetles to high-elevation pines that historically received only intermittent exposure.”

The study explains that whitebark pine have “inferior defences against mountain pine beetle compared with its historical lower-elevation host, lodgepole pine” and are vulnerable to “temperature-driven range expansions.”

Wayne McCrory, a consulting bear biologist from the Kootenays, said areas of the Chilcotin have some of the largest stands of whitebark pine in Western Canada. He said grizzlies are known to raid squirrel seed-caches and two of four grizzly scats he examined in the upper Taseko watershed last fall “were all pine-cone residue.”

Under ideal conditions, one baseball-sized cone can harbour 100 or more pea-sized seeds.

Whitebark pine in B.C. and Alberta are federally listed as endangered due to climate change, spread of the mountain pine beetle and white pine blister rust, as well as encroachment of subalpine fir and Engelmann spruce into the pine’s habitat due to human suppression of forest fires.

To help save the whitebark pine, a non-profit society has been formed to collect seeds, especially from healthy trees in stands riddled with blister rust. Some seeds are stored for future use and some are used for replanting seedlings.

Biologist Randy Moody, director of the recently formed Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation of Canada, said pine beetles go through a stand and kill the trees relatively quickly, whereas blister rust is a “slow burn” that poses a greater threat over the longer term.

A 2010 report by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada noted the slow-growing whitebark pine does not produce sizable cone crops for 60 years and can live 500 to 1,000 years.

About 56 per cent of the tree’s habitat is in Canada, extending from the U.S. border to about 200 kilometres north of Fort St. James on the dry eastern side of the Coast Mountains and to about 150 kilometres north of Jasper in the Rocky Mountains.

COSEWIC estimates whitebark pine occupies about 561,000 hectares in B.C., of which about 34 per cent is infected with white pine blister rust, a disease introduced from Eurasia. It predicts about 70 per cent of B.C.’s whitebark pine habitat will be lost by 2055.

By comparison, the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations estimates mountain pine beetle infestation in lodgepole pine trees covers more than 18 million hectares.

Mountain pine beetles have hammered more than B.C.’s lodgepole pine forests — they’ve taken endangered whitebark pine trees, robbing Interior grizzly bears and other species of an important food supply. Slow-growing whitebark pine trees are rarer than lodgepole pine, grow at higher elevations, and produce cones with large seeds that form a food source for Clark’s nutcracker (which disperses them across the landscape), red squirrels, chipmunks, and pre-denning black bears and grizzlies. The latter species are of special concern in Canada.

High-temperature Superconductors (HTS) Change the Game

 Our HTS cables are presently getting twenty percent of possible. Change that up and reduce costs in half and we have our new grid. These look to be achievable.

It has taken twenty five years from original discovery and there is another decade here at least. A reminder of just how long it take to make nature work out. Of course, we have been tracking a range of developing technologies and this is no surprise. Yet I am still impatient.

As posted before, this is a pending industrial revolution.

High-temperature superconductors change the game

By Arthur L. Robinson

http://www.superpower-inc.com/system/files/MRS+bulletin-Sept2012-Energy+Quarterly-HTS.pdf

A quarter century after the Nobel-prize-winning discovery in 1986 of the first “high-temperature superconductors” (HTS), the once heady prospect of transforming the electrical power industry with lossless superconductors operating at liquid nitrogen temperature is no longer a dream. Years of materials research and a suite of highly successful demonstration projects have put HTS not only on the doorstep of the electric power grid but of facilitating its entry into the 21st century, including the increasingly mandatory shift to green, renewable energy.

The US National Academy of Engineering describes the vast networks of electrification known as the grid as “the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century.” But the future demands better: a grid that is not fragmented but truly national in scope; where large amounts of power can be transported over vast distances in a flash by underground cables from wherever generated to wherever needed; where networks are redundant to back up outages; where overloads, short-circuits, losses, and fluctuations can be instantly compensated; where fleets of electric cars can be plugged into the grid to recharge without overloading it; and where the frequency and voltage of the power are reliably maintained (increasingly essential for the digital society).

Many think the grid is not up to the demands of the 21st century without a serious effort to upgrade. A 2010 report titled “Science for Energy Technology” from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Offi ce of Basic Energy Sciences offers an entrée for high-temperature superconductor power equipment, [but] “to achieve competitive cost-performance, significant improvements over existing wire performance are still required.”

Surveying current major HTS challenges, the DOE report says, “chief among these [is] a major increase (at least a factor of two) in high-temperature superconducting current-carrying capability under operating conditions.”

Superconductors are best known for the lossless transmission of dc electric currents when cooled below their transition temperatures. In service, however,superconductors contain arrays of nanosized, quantized, “flux tubes” or vortices of supercurrent circulating around non-superconducting cores. Vortices are no problem when pinned at structural defects like dislocations or impurities in the superconductor, but at a critical current, they break free, dissipating energy as they move, thereby introducing a resistance. In practice, incorporating pinning defects designed to block vortex motion raises the critical current to levels that are useful, but there is much room for improvement.

Determining the maximum critical current that could be obtained by introducing the “ideal”distribution of defects awaits the ability to understand the behavior of large arrays of vortices in a field of pin sites. In large arrays, the best critical currents are only ~20% of the theoretical critical current, but why is not known. “There’s some theory but still lots of empiricism,” said Drew Hazelton of SuperPower, Inc., a major HTS wire maker.

The availability of HTS conductors will be an industry gamechanger said Steve Eckroad of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Up until now, utilities have relied on a high voltage, low-current network based on copper for generators, transformers, and urban underground cables (rural overhead lines are usually aluminum). Superconductors with no dc and only small ac losses plus high current density change the equation to lower voltage and higher current. HTS cables have five times the capacity in the same cross-sectional area as conventional copper cables.

One way to exploit this capability is by combining HTS with renewable energy sources for a truly green grid in which remotely generated power from renewable sources could travel to distant consumers over what wind and solar power advocates call “green power superhighways.” However, long-distance transmission is not yet a near-term prospect for HTS, owing to the huge capital investment costs and an unproven track record of benefits.

Here is where the ongoing materials research could pay off.

Eckroad said, “Our studies suggest that reducing the present cost of the superconductor by a factor of two would bring the cost of 10-GW, 1200-mile-long, superconducting cables to within range of that of conventional overhead lines. Since underground dc cables also offer substantial environmental, siting, and aesthetic benefi ts over conventional overhead transmission lines, they may become an attractive alternative option in some situations.”

Whether cable or something else, every HTS power applicaHigh-temperature superconductors change the game

By Arthur L. Robinson

Feature Editor James Misewich

Are high-temperature superconductors ready to take on the grid?

James Misewich, Brookhaven National Laboratory

Arthur L. Robinson, lewie@artmary.net

Israeli Bombs Missile Convoy in Syria

 Let us make it simple. When the Assad regime in Syria falls or at least enters its terminal stage, the Israeli air force will act to destroy all threats available then and there as if war had been declared. They may even claim it is in support of the new regime.

This will cleanly eliminate a Syrian threat for years to come and may partially stabilize the Northern flank. Most certainly, Hezbollah is well on the way to been fully isolated and Iranian regime change would finish that. And the Iranian string is surely running out.

Thus Israel is able to operate over Syrian air space to defend it interests with scant consequence.

Israeli Bombs Missile Convoy in Syria

ANDRE HEATH

http://thecelestialconvergence.blogspot.ca/2013/01/shadow-wars-escalating-towards-world_30.html

January 30, 2013 - MIDDLE EAST - A western diplomat and a security source told Reuters that Israeli jets attacked a target on the Syrian-Lebanese border overnight. "The Israeli air force blew up a convoy which had just crossed the border from Syria into Lebanon," an unnamed security source told Agence France-Press.

A "well-placed defense analyst" told John Ray of ITV News that the strike was in Hezbollah Lebanese territory and the missile struck a "truck of scud and antiaircraft missiles" headed to members of the Iran-backed militant group. The reported strike comes amid Israeli concerns that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's chemical and/or conventional weapons could fall into the hands of extremist rebels or Hezbollah guerrillas.

 

On Sunday Israel's vice premier Silvan Shalom said that any sign Syria's grip on its chemical weapons is slipping could trigger Israeli military strikes. On Tuesday Dan Williams of Reuters reported that Israeli officials said Syria's advanced Russian-supplied weapons — including anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles — represent as much of a threat as unconventional weapons. 

Earlier the Lebanese army reported that three sets of Israeli jets flew entered its airspace throughout the night. On Tuesday Israeli air force chief Major-General Amir Eshel told an international aerospace conference said the air force was involved in "a campaign between wars," working with Israeli intelligence agencies in often covert missions "to reduce the immediate threats [and] to create better conditions in which we will be able to win the wars, when they happen." 

"We do not comment on reports of this kind," an Israeli Defense Force spokeswoman told Reuters. In October Sudan accused Israel of bombing a arms factory that was widely believed to be owned by Iran and used to supply weapons to Hamas in Gaza. - Business Insider.

Killer Cats and Birds

We have been seriously underestimating the damage inflicted by wild cats. On the other hand, mice are an easy meal for a cat and that is surely the bulk of the diet. Yet one does need to know just were these numbers actually come from.

My own experience with wild and tame cats inform me that females do not enjoy the wild and tend to come in from the cold with their litter. Thus it is the surviving males that run wild. Their numbers are actually small and now smaller yet because of the contraction of fertile tame females through neutering.

Cats themselves have serious enemies in the wild that make the claim of a huge population rather suspect. For the female, she has the additional risk of encountering a strange male who will kill her kits. That is why they are adapted to human protection in the first place.

A cat stalking a bird is dramatic and often visible, but a cat stalking a mouse goes unnoticed mostly.

So unless cat behavior shifts strongly in the wild in ways I have not observed. These numbers may simply be quite wrong. Perhaps it is time we rigged up a wild cat with the appropriate camera gear to see just what it does. A real country cat count would be nice also. How is another matter. I never did see one in the wilds around our farm and we knew it was there because it came by over several years whenever the female we kept went into heat.

Killer cats take down billions of birds, report says

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/killer-cats-down-billions-birds-report-says-190711103.html

Cats may kill up to 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion mammals in the United States alone each year, a new study has found.

That means predatory felines are likely the leading human-linked cause of death for birds and mammals, surpassing habitat destruction, collisions with structures such as buildings, and pesticide poisoning, reports an article published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

"The magnitude of wildlife mortality caused by cats that we report here far exceeds all prior estimates," said the paper co-authored by three U.S. Scientists.

The researchers warned that very large numbers of birds and mammals are likely being killed "in all parts of the world where free-ranging cats occur," not just the United States.

According to the paper, cats were previously thought to be a "negligible" cause of mortality for birds and mammals compared to other human-linked threats, and that is one of the reasons why policies to deal with stray cats often involve neutering them and then returning them to their hunting grounds.

The study, led by Scott Loss at the Migratory Bird Center of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute at the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., combined and analyzed data from as many other studies as the researchers could find about cats preying on birds and mammals in North America.

Although the estimates of the feral cat population and the average kills per cat varied widely among the studies, Loss and his colleagues were able to say that U.S. cats fell 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds a year — a huge number considering that the entire population of North American land birds is estimated to be just 10 to 20 billion.

As for mammals, cats were estimated to kill 6.9 to 20.7 billion per year. For comparison, the human population worldwide is seven billion.

The study found that a large majority of the birds and animals killed by cats were native species.

Cats without owners are blamed for most of the deaths. There are about 30 million to 80 million such feral cats in the U.S., each of which can kill upwards of 200 mammals a year alone, the study reported.

However, pet cats were far from innocent, causing 258 million to 1.5 billion of the bird deaths and 571 million to 2.5 billion of the mammal deaths.

The paper advocated taking measures such as limiting or preventing cats' access to the outdoors.

Mastering the Science of Mass Persuasion

 This needs to be understood. Data mining has reached the point that it can predict your behavior with serious accuracy. The unanswered question here is just how much investment in time and money is needed to provide this data?

I ask that because the political cauldron has seen a no holds barred dash to the finish line at what is becoming catastrophic expense. Most of that money is outright wasted although no contractor will ever let on. In fact it has become an advertising war contributing little to understanding the candidates.

Obama is a great example. During the first campaign, he was kept in a bubble to hide many controversial aspects of his history. These have never been examined and will never be. We were sold a feel good story that certainly had its high points. Yet that is true for any candidate who gets up there.

What we now have is gladiatorial rather than magisterial. It is a money fueled race to the bottom that is barbaric and only works in the minds of the advertisers who sell this nonsense.

Recall that the popular vote itself shifts no more than zero to three points in either direction around the mean of fifty fifty. What this means is that all this noise and effort is targeted at one to two folks out of every hundred who will vote. The rest are voting the same old way.

This approach then allows the campaign to identify the must sees. A mutual program to advertise and conduct civil discourse would be better for all under a tight set of rules and would get the same result while allow the focus to go on the folks who do need persuasion.

Team Obama Mastered the Science of Mass Persuasion - And Won

22 January 2013

by Eric Siegel

http://truth-out.org/news/item/14026-team-obama-mastered-the-science-of-mass-persuasion-and-won

Eric Siegel opens a window on the new marketing technologies of persuasion modeling and predictive analytics successfully used in the Obama re-election campaign.

Last October, a colleague and I speculated on how a special, powerful form of predictive analytics would revolutionize presidential campaigning - and, if successful, how it might be poorly received by the public thereafter. In our work, he and I focus more on financial, marketing and online applications of this technology. But we had bet the story would not break within politics until the years 2016 or 2020.

Surprise: There's no wait! Since Obama's win in November, we've learned they already did this. The president won reelection with the help of the science of mass persuasion, a very particular, advanced use of  predictive analytics, which is technology that produces a prediction for each individual customer, patient or voter.

This may be the first story ever of a presidential campaign performing and proving the effectiveness of mass scientific persuasion.

The technology's purpose is to predict for each individual and act on each prediction. But you may be surprised to know what the Obama campaign analytics team predicted. In this persuasion project, they did not predict:

Who would vote Obama

Who would vote Romney

Who would turn out to vote at all

. . . and they didn't even predict:

Who was "undecided"

Instead, they predicted persuasion:

Who would be convinced to vote Obama if (and only if) contacted

This is the new microcosmic battleground of political campaigns - significantly more refined than the ill-defined concept of "swing voter."

Put another way, they predicted: For which voters campaign contact would make a difference. Who is influenceable, susceptible to appeal? If a constituent were already destined to vote for Obama, contact would be a waste. If an individual was predicted as more likely swayed toward Obama by contact than not swayed at all, they were added to the "to-contact" list. Finally, to top it off, if the voter was predicted to be negatively influenced by a knock on the door - a backfired attempt to convince - he or she was removed from the campaign volunteers' contact list and labeled: "Do-not-disturb!"

I interviewed in detail Rayid Ghani, chief data scientist of Obama for America - who will be keynoting on this work at Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco (April 14-19) and Chicago (June 11-12) - for my forthcoming book.

To make this campaigning possible, team Obama first collected data on how contact (door knocks, calls, direct mail) faired across voters within swing states. Of course, such contact normally helps more than it hurts. But, since the number of volunteers to pound the pavements and dial phones is limited, targeting their efforts where it counts - where contact actually makes a difference - meant more Obama votes. The same army of Obama activists was suddenly much stronger, simply by issuing more intelligent command.

Therefore, they used the collected data not just to measure the overall effectiveness of campaigning, but to predict the persuadability of individual swing state constituents. Each person got a score, and the scores drove the army of volunteers' every move.

Persuasion modeling (aka uplift modeling or net lift modeling) has been honed in recent years for use in marketing. It's the same principle as for political campaigning, guiding calls and direct mail just the same (although marketing more rarely employs door knocks) - but selling a product rather than a president.

I've extensively covered this technology, which is more advanced than "regular" predictive analytics. Normally, you predict human behavior like click, buy, lie, or die. In this case, you predict the ability to influence said behavior.

If consumer advocates consider mass marketing a form of manipulation, they may find in this work even more to complain about. Was the election Moneyballed? As mere mortals, are we consumers, patients and voters too susceptible to the invisible powers of advanced mathematics? Will privacy proponents whip out their favorite adjective-of-concern, "creepy"? Shouldn't elections be about policies, not number-crunching?

No question, the power of persuasion prediction is poignant. Industries are salivating and pouncing.

Sometimes this kind of work truly helps the world. Less paper is consumed when direct mail is more focused and consumers receive fewer "junk mail" items. Patients receive predictively improved health care. Police patrol more effectively by way of crime prediction. Fraud is similarly detected, several times more effectively. Movie and music recommendations improve.

How can this power be harnessed without doing harm? And how is "harm" to be defined in this arena?

For more information about predictive analytics, see the Predictive Analytics Guide; for more on persuasion modeling see this whitepaper.

Gamma Ray Signal?

Nice idea, but a full on solar flare is way more likely and may produce similar effects. Just how do we tell the difference? What is needed is someway to determine the effect of a solar flare in the first instance so that we can determine frequency. In short we are running blind.

In the meantime we have notable signal in the data stream that lacks confirmation so far from alternative data. The explanation is creditable but unprovable for now.

I continue to be impressed by just how successfully the Earth's envelope protects life on Earth. If this explanation holds up and as much holds up for solar flares, then we have nothing to worry about from that quarter.

i do not think that the picture is convincing either.

Gamma-ray burst 'hit Earth in 8th Century'

By Rebecca Morelle

21 January 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21082617

A gamma ray burst, the most powerful explosion known in the Universe, may have hit the Earth in the 8th Century.

In 2012 researchers found evidence that our planet had been struck by a blast of radiation during the Middle Ages, but there was debate over what kind of cosmic event could have caused this.

Now a study suggests it was the result of two black holes or neutron stars merging in our galaxy.

This collision would have hurled out vast amounts of energy.

The research is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Last year, a team of researchers found that some ancient cedar trees in Japan had an unusual level of a radioactive type of carbon known as carbon-14.

In Antarctica, too, there was a spike in levels of a form of beryllium - beryllium-10 - in the ice.

These isotopes are created when intense radiation hits the atoms in the upper atmosphere, suggesting that a blast of energy had once hit our planet from space.

Using tree rings and ice-core data, researchers were able to pinpoint that this would have occurred between the years AD 774 and AD 775, but the cause of the event was a puzzle.

The possibility of a supernova - an exploding star - was put forward, but then ruled out because the debris from such an event would still be visible in telescopes today.

Another team of US physicists recently published a paper suggesting that an unusually large solar flare from the Sun could have caused the pulse of energy. However some others in the scientific community disagree because they do not think that the energy produced would tally with the levels of carbon-14 and beryllium-10 found.

So now German researchers have offered up another explanation: a massive explosion that took place within the Milky Way.

One of the authors of the paper, Professor Ralph Neuhauser, from the Institute of Astrophysics at the University of Jena, said: "We looked in the spectra of short gamma-ray bursts to estimate whether this would be consistent with the production rate of carbon-14 and beryllium-10 that we observed - and [we found] that is fully consistent."

These enormous emissions of energy occur when black holes, neutron stars or white dwarfs collide - the galactic mergers take just seconds, but they send out a vast wave of radiation.

Prof Neuhauser said: "Gamma-ray bursts are very, very explosive and energetic events, and so we considered from the energy what would be the distance given the energy observed.

"Our conclusion was it was 3,000 to 12,000 light-years away - and this is within our galaxy."

Although the event sounds dramatic, our medieval ancestors might not have noticed much.

If the gamma-ray burst happened at this distance, the radiation would have been absorbed by our atmosphere, only leaving a trace in the isotopes that eventually found their way into our trees and the ice. The researchers do not think it even emitted any visible light.

Rare events

Observations of deep space suggest that gamma ray-bursts are rare. They are thought to happen at the most every 10,000 years per galaxy, and at the least every million years per galaxy.

Prof Neuhauser said it was unlikely Planet Earth would see another one soon, but if we did, this time it could make more of an impact.

If a cosmic explosion happened at the same distance as the 8th Century event, it could knock out our satellites. But if it occurred even closer - just a few hundred light-years away - it would destroy our ozone layer, with devastating effects for life on Earth.

However, this, said Prof Neuhauser, was "extremely unlikely".

Commenting on the research, Professor Adrian Melott from the University of Kansas, US, said that although he thought a short gamma-ray burst was a possible conclusion, his group's research suggested that a solar flare was more likely based on observations of Sun-like stars in our galaxy.

He said: "A solar proton event and a short gamma-ray burst are both possible explanations, but based on the rates that we know about in the Universe, the gamma-ray burst explanation is about 10,000 times less likely to be true in that time period."

Masonic Lithograph 1880's

An odd item picked up by a friend in the antique trade

.China Recasting Gold to Eliminate Tungsten Threat

Three years ago I posted an item on the ease with which tungsten can be used to displace the bulk of the gold reserves held in Fort Knox along with an item tracking such an event.

It solved a serious problem for myself. I had tracked the gold market for decades and had become intuitively aware that a huge amount of non existent gold had been fed into the market and actually delivered.

Thus the rumble of failed delivery into China blew open the scheme. This meant also that the Chinese now knew. Thus it is certain that they would wish to settle this issue. The sure way is to in fact recast all that gold into much smaller ingots that are also good delivery and way more inconvenient to play with. Needless to say, they are doing just that.

At the same time, several countries have now asked for their gold to be returned to them. Most likely all this gold will also be recast into the smaller ingots.

While this is all going on, everyone involved is imitating a clam and saying nothing at all.

This article tries to turn all this into a pending attack on the US dollar and it is not. Wall Street did that trick all by itself. In case you think gold has anything to do with currency, recall that Canada has no gold reserves at all and is doing wonderfully. You can not have it both ways.

China Makes Move To Collapse U.S. Dollar: Announces Gold Back Currency For Global Trade

Monday, January 28, 2013 11:35

http://beforeitsnews.com/economy/2013/01/china-makes-move-to-collapse-u-s-dollar-announces-gold-back-currency-for-global-trade-2484718.html

The People’s Bank of China has already reduced its holdings of US treasuries below those of Japan and last announced a change in its gold reserves in 2009 when it declared a 76 per cent hike to 1,054 tonnes. Germany, Italy, France and the US keep more than 70 per cent of their reserves in gold, the last bulwark against the devaluation of money printing.

According to the article, China is recasting all of their gold reserves into small one kilo bars in order to issue a new “gold-backed” currency. Many say this will disrupt global trade and will eventually cause a collapse of the US dollar.

There can be no doubt that the US dollar will soon be history. China is recasting all of their gold reserves into small one kilo bars in order to issue a new ‘gold backed’ global currency. This is surely a strategic part of their recent push to sign new trade agreements with Russia, Japan, Chile, Brazil, India, and Iran. The cat is now out of the bag, the US will be given the ‘bums rush’ by the largest trading nations in the world and the dollar will go down in flames. GATA now estimates that 80% of the gold that investors believe they have in allocated accounts is long gone, the majority of it probably wound up in China.

Here is an excerpt from Jim Willie’s ‘Hat Trick Letter’

Many are the events, signals, and telltale clues of a real live actual systemic failure in progress. Until the last several months, such banter was dismissed by the soldiers in the financial arena. But lately, they cannot dismiss the onslaught of evidence, a veritable plethora of ugly symptoms of conditions gone terribly wrong and solutions at best gone awry and at worst never intended in the first place.

CHINA RECASTS GOLD BARS

China is well along an ambitious plan to recast large gold bars into smaller 1-kg bars on a massive scale. A major event is brewing that will disrupt global trade and assuredly the global banking system. The big gold recast project points to the Chinese preparing for a new system of trade settlement. In the process they must be constructing a foundation for a possible new monetary system based in gold that supports the trade payments. Initally used for trade, it will later be used in banking. The USTBond will be shucked aside. Regard the Chinese project as preliminary to a collapse in the debt-based USDollar system. The Chinese are removing thousands of metric tons of gold bars from London, New York, and Switzerland. They are recasting the bars, no longer to bear weights in ounces, but rather kilograms. The larger Good Delivery bars are being reduced into 1-kg bars and stored in China. It is not clear whether the recast project is being done entirely in China, as some indication has come that Swiss foundries might be involved, since they have so much experience and capacity.

The story of recasting in London is confirmed by my best source. It seems patently clear that the Chinese are preparing for a new system for trade settlement system, to coincide with a new banking reserve system. They might make a sizeable portion of the new 1-kg bars available for retail investors and wealthy individuals in China. They will discard the toxic USTreasury Bond basis for banking. Two messages are unmistakable. A grand flipped bird (aka FU) is being given to the Western and British system of pounds and ounces and other queer ton measures. But perhaps something bigger is involved. Maybe a formal investigation of tungsten laced bars is being conducted in hidden manner. In early 2010, the issue of tungsten salted bars became a big story, obviously kept hush hush. The trails emanated from Fort Knox, as in pilferage of its inventory. The pathways extended through Panama in other routes known to the contraband crowd, that perverse trade of white powder known on the street as Horse & Blow, or Boy & Girl.

Pineal Gland Conjectures

It is very easy to dismiss a claim by labeling it a myth. It has turned out to be far more difficult to apply some semblance of scientific method to the data itself simply because the data is not been systematically accumulated. Bigfoot research has quietly become compelling because thousands of individual reports have been gathered, but each and every reporter has also been debriefed. Do that more than fifty times and the probability of an underlying reality handily reaches the tipping point.

The meditation protocol is gathering more and more practitioners, yet most are far from Yogis. I expect the actual protocol to be universally taught and performed by everyone in time. The medical benefits are just too obvious and valuable. It provides a clear base for mental stability by centering the mind. Yet the scattered claims out there powerfully inform us that there is more to be gained.

Part of it is to experience the light and the sound. More intriguingly it is to access the GOD internet as it appears Cayce achieved. Today we are sitting with a nice shiny computer without knowing what to do. The secret is to ask a question and to accept an answer and then use intellect to test the answer. We need to learn such a protocol and see where it takes us.

Photosynthesis, Solar Power & the Pineal Gland: A Foreshadowing of Human Light Processing?

January 24, 2013

Christina Sarich

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2013/01/24/photosynthesis-solar-power-a-foreshadowing-of-human-light-processing/

Solar energy has already come a long way. In the past five years it has evolved from cumbersome solar panels which had to be installed by the dozen on roof tops in order to provide enough kilowatts per hour to power even the smallest home’s energy needs. Then came the film-like rolls, which were much lighter, and recently, even a spray paint that is based onnanotechnology such that you can paint some great graffiti and enjoy solar powering your computer, refrigerator and AC all at once. In the latest news from MIT, biomedical engineer, Shuguang Zhang, offers the possibility of sending solar power to remote villages by utilizing agricultural waste to make solar cells with a form of photosynthesis called photosystem-I (PS-I). It would be layered on a substrate like more conventional solar panels and produce electric current when exposed to light.

“It is either easy or impossible.” Salvador Dali

Being the wacky-minded, non-MIT graduate that I am, I started thinking. If we can create power from the largest free energy source in our Universe (it has been estimated we could power an entire city for a year with just 8 minutes of the sun’s blaring rays) and a little organic matter, what is to keep us from powering ourselves with the light that is reflected in our personal, tiny sun – the pineal gland. After all, this fascinating gland has rods and cones, and actually processes light, much like our own eyes. There are references to the ‘illumination’ that occurs once the pineal gland has been opened, and while this is a metaphor with a more esoteric meaning, why not a physical one too? The conifer tree that produces the pinecone, is one of the oldest genera on the planet. It has existed three times longer than all flowering plant species. Correct me if I’m wrong, but even fifth grade science class said that photosynthesis was required for flowers to bloom, and leaves to stay green. If plants can get their power directly from the sun, why couldn’t we?

“We have more power than will; and it is often by way of excuse to ourselves that we fancy things are impossible.”  Francois Duc De la Rochefoucauld

The pineal gland has been called the seat of the soul, the thousand-petaled lotus, the epicenter of enlightenment, the eye of Horus, and just, the pinecone, but perhaps our true illumination, spiritually, also means we can start burning our own wattage, through the activation of that tiny gland in the center of the brain. There are, after all, myths and stories about yogis with super natural powers living in the Himalayas that could go for weeks on end without food or water. The legends say that they existed on light. In ancient yogic texts these abilities are nothing to laugh at. The siddhis are supernatural powers said to be realized by those who were awakened or illumined. They even have specific names, like Anima, Mahima, Garima, Prapti, etc. in the Sanskrit language. We already have pedestrian ways to generate our own power, through kinetic energy. Peddle-a-kilowatt bicycles are all over the place now. Is processing light energy so far-fetched?

“The alternative physics is a physics of light. Light is composed of photons, which have no antiparticle. This means that there is no dualism in the world of light.” Terence McKenna

Ancient texts even talk about light-body activation. It requires shifting to a higher frequency, ideally so that your gross, or material body becomes light enough to work with other elements in our galaxy – wind, air, water, the rays of the sun included. Scientists have already pointed to the probability that there are multiple dimensions in space. String theory specifies this. This contender for the TOE, or theory of everything would actually make it more probable that those ancient metaphors weren’t some tweaked out version of Star Wars, Episode 30027. If multiple dimensions exist, then the holographic principle and other suggestions of a ‘unified field’ would make it possible to live on light, literally.

“In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.”  Miguel de Cervantes

The problem is that siddhis, or ‘special’ powers are only given fleeting reference in ancient texts because it was thought that these powers could corrupt an impure mind. To use a Star Wars reference again, if the mind isn’t purified, one could turn into a Darth Mall or Darth Vadar and instead of utilizing their powers for good, they could inflate the ego and use them for evil. I suspect that many people could become very ego-inflated with the intuitive insights they receive on a spiritual path, as they become lighter and clearer, since many spiritual ‘gurus’ have been unable to shed their natural human wants and desires. There are jokes about Zendos being full of sake-drunk monks and the sycophants who follow them regardless. It isn’t improbable that we could develop super-human traits, though.

Consider these miraculous feats. In the uterus, babies ‘breath’ water from their mother’s wombs through the umbilical chord. When enough adrenaline is flooding the body, mothers have been known to lift entire cars to free their children who were pinned underneath. Wim Hof, a daredevil Dutchman who ran an Arctic marathon survived minus 20 degree Fahrenheit weather without a shirt on. A 6-foot-6 man named John Evans can balance an entire car on his head. These are just examples of lay-people doing extraordinary things.

“… A spirit molecule needs to elicit, with reasonable reliability, certain psychological states we consider “spiritual”. These are feelings of extraordinary joy, timelessness, and a certainty that what we are experiencing is more real than real. Such a substance may lead us to an acceptance of the coexistence of opposites, such as life and death, good and evil; a knowledge that consciousness continues after death; a deep understanding of the basic unity of all phenomena; and a sense of wisdom or love pervading all existence.” Rick Strassman, M.D. DMT, The Spirit Molecule

Furthermore, Shaolin Kung Fu masters can push cars with a blade against their necks, and whip around in circles defying gravity. Tibetan monks have already proven they can significantly alter their own body temperatures through meditation. When covered with cold, wet sheets, they were able to change their temperatures enough to make the sheets steam. In meditation the pineal gland is increasingly opened, and dowses the brain and body in seratonin-derived melatonin, or dimethyltryptamine (DMT). These feats are likely just the tip of the iceberg.

“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” Walt Disney

If opening the pineal gland to illumine the mind does nothing more than open alternative worlds to our awareness, who is to say that eventually our exploration won’t show us a way to take light in through our eyes and skin and use it like fuel for our bodies. Even if we don’t do it through a special adaptive biological process, the MIT scientists who are figuring out how to use solar power and plant rubbish have the right idea. If esoteric tales from the past can meet with the cutting edge science of the present, we might just fuel Disneyland roller coasters with an afternoon bask in the sun.

About the Author

Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny, Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and See the Big Picture. Her blog is Yoga for the New World.

References:

http://vivekananda.hubpages.com/hub/supernatural_powers_and_indian_yogis

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/biosolar-0203.html
http://videosift.com/video/Tibetan-Monks-Altering-Body-Temperature-Through-Meditation

http://www.livescience.com/14048-amazing-superhuman-feats.html

'Strongest Evidence of Life on Mars'

Right now, it would be astonishing to discover no subterranean life on Mars. This goes out and makes the argument.

The serious question is not so much that life does exist, but whether it naturally conforms to terrain life and if any conflicts exist. I think that the probability is on the side of fairly safe compatibility because inter planet transport has been shown to be an real effect.

It is also creditable that life began here as an interstellar transport to begin with. That still does not answer the question of first mover, but eliminates the question of life throughout the universe generally. There is likely no such thing as a barren solar system and it is merely a function of the availability of congenial local conditions.

This could mean that our biology is at least compatible with life everywhere for good or for ill I should warn here. After all, our biology was quite compatible when Columbus did his thing. Yet Mars is presently an inoculated planet without the advanced biology we have. So it may be just fine.

'Strongest evidence yet to there being life on Mars'

Martian rocks from a crater hit by a meteorite may contain the strongest evidence yet that there is life on Mars.

20 Jan 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9814256/Strongest-evidence-yet-to-there-being-life-on-Mars.html

Prof John Parnell, 55, has co-written a theory with Dr Joseph Michalski, a planetary geologist at the Natural History Museum, that suggests they have discovered the best signs of life in the huge McLaughlin Crater on the surface of Mars.

The document, published today in Nature Geoscience journal, describes how they assessed the crater, created by a meteorite which smashed into the surface of Mars, flinging up rocks from miles below.

The rocks appear to be made up of clays and minerals which have been altered by water - the essential element to support life.

Speaking from his laboratory at the University of Aberdeen, geochemist Prof Parnell said: "We could be so close to discovering if there is, or was, life on Mars.

"We know from studies that a substantial proportion of all life on Earth is also in the subsurface and by studying the McLaughlin Crater we can see similar conditions beneath the surface of Mars thanks to observations on the rocks brought up by the meteorite strike.

"There can be no life on the surface of Mars because it is bathed in radiation and it's completely frozen. However, life in the sub surface would be protected from that.

"And there is no reason why there isn't bacteria or other microbes that were or still are living in the small cracks well below the surface of Mars.

"One of the other things we have discussed in our paper is that this bacteria could be living off hydrogen, which is exactly the same as what microbes beneath the surface of the Earth are doing too.

"Unfortunately, we won't find any evidence of animals as the most complex life you might get in the sub surface would be fungi.

"But fungi aren't even that far removed from plants and animals, so I think you could say that life on Mars could be complex, but small."

Prof Parnell reckons that although the next mission to Mars will have a drill to examine possibilities of life beneath the surface of Mars, he says his new study suggests looking around the edges of craters would be easier and more beneficial.

He said: "What we're really doing is emphasising that if we are going to explore for life on Mars, we need to go beneath the surface. So we need to find an approach beneath the surface.

"One approach to do that might be to drill and indeed the next European mission to Mars will have a drill on it, but that will only go down about two metres.

"And although drilling two metres on Earth would be a fantastic technological achievement, it's only really scratching the surface.

"So the alternative is to use what nature has done for us and that's why we are are particularly interested in the McLaughlin Crater that we have investigated in our paper.

"Because when a meteor lands, it excavates a big hole in the ground and throws rocks from the bottom of the hole outside the crater to where we could conceivably go and sample them."

And while the craters on Mars may uncover secrets about the planet's possibility of supporting life, Prof Parnell also revealed the results could show us how life on Earth began.

He said: "It's very easy to draw parallels between what Mars looks like and what the early Earth might have looked like, because the rocks on Earth that we see now have been recycled a lot in ways that they have not been recycled on Mars.

"Mars has not had things like erosion and shifting of mountain ranges to destroy vital evidence from the past.

"So studying meteorite craters of Mars may well actually give us an indication to how life on Earth began.

"Although we all live on the surface of Earth, life did not originate here, but actually in the sub surface.

"It was only when life had taken hold below the surface that it gradually expanded and came up to the surface.

"In fact, there's so much life below the surface of our planet that we are actually the unusual ones living above it."