by Paul Johnston
London-based ex-civil servant now working for Cisco as head of the European public sector team within IBSG, Cisco's global strategic consulting arm. Launched and helped shape this site after wri... More about Paul Johnston
The World grows a Planetary Skin
I couldn't resist sharing this great initiative some of my colleagues have been working on with NASA - its an attempt to create a planetary skin for the world that will monitor carbon emissions and provide useable information so that we will no longer be flying blind in relation to the environmental impacts of the decisions we are all making one way or another each day. Have a look at the video and you will get a sense of what it is all about http://www.planetaryskin.org/content/resources.php#videos
Comments
"The surface of the earth is alive with motions too subtle for direct human observation, the slow wrinkling of the planetary skin, that pose considerable risks to cities and people. Slow shifts of the earth's plates regularly build up strains that cause earthquakes. Volcanoes swell before they explode. Glaciers move and polar ice packs break up as the earth warms, raising seas and threatening to flood coastal areas." one could read Sep 3 1996 in The New York Times. This was also the day when the US launched Operation Desert Strike with a cruise missile attack against the Iraqi air defense infrastructure. - It's all about setting priorities; let's go for the Planetary Skin project!
posted over 2 years ago
This is very exciting. I am a PhD oceanographer who worked at NASA Ames from 1995-2005. One of the accomplishments I am most proud of is called WorldWind. In many way similar to Google Earth, developed as an Opensource project at a fraction of the cost, it allowed one to pull in different data sets and view them on a Planetary Surface. Alas - NASA is so big, sometimes it doesn't recognize the true potential of some of its own projects. The issue is NASA collects terabytes of EOS data every day, and there is no way to analyse it all. By having an Opensource viewer - anyone would be able to download and 'process' data. The key is getting the NASA data formats into something XML like - there is a WML (web mapping language) standard that can be read with existing XML tools. Sorry to get so technical.
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
Real Video demos using worldwind: http://federman.best.vwh.net/mi/ww.rm download
The value to both education and research should be immense. Good luck with this intiative.
updated over 2 years ago, posted over 2 years ago
Yes, let’s embrace the Planetary Skin project. If possible without repeating the Collateralized Debt Obligations failure, not because the computer programs that were assessing the risks were wrong (they were not), but because they didn’t take in consideration that humans are not only rational and might one day (and unfortunately they did) start to decide by the stomach and bring the system down. - When Joseph Weizenbaum died in March last year, he wouldn’t have thought that his 1976 Bestseller Computer Power and Human Reason would get so brutally true six months later. Or in other words: Smart and sustainable economic recovery means Planetary Skin combined with human compassion and wîsdom. That’s the direction I wish we take.
posted over 2 years ago