2014/04/15

When lions are just a commodity

http://invisiblegreenhand.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/when-lions-are-just-a-commodity/

Does it matter if wild animals are treated as a commodity? If farming and hunting animals contributes to their survival, then should we not just regulate the industry so it is done with high animal welfare standards and maximum conservation … Continue reading →

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2014/04/14

Which is better, data or theory?

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/which-is-better-data-or-theory.html

One of the most annoying arguments that I see popping up again and again is the question of "Which is better, theory or data?" (A related bore-fest is "Which is better, induction or deduction?") Actually, you can't have one without the other. In a recent blog post, Paul Krugman points out that you can't have data without theory:But you can't be an effective fox just by letting the data speak for itself — because it never does. You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking. If you think the data are speaking for themselves, what you're really doing is implicit theorizing, which is a really bad idea (because you can't test your assumptions if you don't even know what you're assuming.)True. Suppose you find a correlation between having an unfulfilling sex life and liking Charlie Kaufman movies. Does that mean that people watch Charlie Kaufman movies to ease the pain of their lame sex lives? Or did the fact that they watch Charlie Kaufman movies actually ruin their sex lives? Or are both the result of some third factor, such as being an insufferable hipster? If you don't pick one, you'll never be able to understand what's really going on. Even if all you care about is predictive power - you want to be able to catch someone watching a Charlie Kaufman movie and say "I bet girls won't touch that guy with a 10 foot pole" - you still need to assume that the correlation is stable over time, and your assumption is a theory. It's equally true that you can't actually have theory without data. A theory is always about something that you think is going on in the world, so you can't have something to theorize about without first seeing something happen in the world (i.e. data). For example, suppose my theory - which I deduced from some sort of a priori assumptions - is that watching Charlie Kaufman movies ruins one's sex life. I couldn't have made that theory without observing the existence of Charlie Kaufman movies.So just as "data with no theory" is really just an implicit vague theory, "theory with no data" is really just sparse, unsystematic data. You can't have one without the other. But what you can do is be lazy with theory or be lazy with data. You can be an armchair philosopher, dreaming up ideas about how the world works without ever bothering to find out if your ideas are right. Then you get something like this:Or you can be a "regression monkey", sitting there sifting for correlations without having any idea what you're looking at. Then you get something like this:Obviously, if you're going to get good results, you shouldn't do either of these.But which is a bigger menace to society, laziness about data or laziness about theory? Theory-laziness is seductive because it's easy - mining for correlations isn't very mentally taxing. But data-laziness is seductive because it's hard - the more complicated and intricate a theory you make, the smarter it makes you feel, even if the theory sucks.In the past, data-laziness was probably more of a threat to humanity. Since systematic data was scarce, people had a tendency to sit around and daydream about how stuff might work. But now that Big Data is getting bigger and computing power is cheap, theory-laziness seems to be becoming more of a menace. The lure of Big Data is that we can get all our ideas from mining for patterns, but A) we get a lot of false patterns that way, and B) the patterns insidiously and subtly suggest interpretations for themselves, and those interpretations are often wrong.So anyway, I hope this post destroys all of those "data vs. theory" arguments forever and ever. 

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Villareal (2011)



Villareal, D. (2011). ESTIMACIÓN DEL ESCURRIMIENTO HÍDRICO DEBIDO AL CAMBIO DE USO DEL SUELO EN LA SUBCUENCA ATOYAC DEL ESTADO DE OAXACA A TRAVÉS DE UN SIG.  TESIS QUE PARA OBTENER EL GRADO
DE MAESTRO EN CIENCIAS.  CIIDIR-Oaxaca.

En La ciudad de Oaxaca, el crecimiento acelerado de la población ejerce una enorme presión sobre los recursos naturales, propiciando el deterioro del ecosistema natural. Este crecimiento además deteriorar el medio ambiente y con ello la perdida de flora y fauna, trae consigo también el aumento en la demanda de agua, y por lo tanto la disponibilidad del recurso, lo que ha ocasionado por consecuencia, una sobreexplotación del manto acuífero de la zona.
Por ello es de importancia, determinar el grado en que el crecimiento poblacional, que modifica el uso de suelo, ha influido específicamente en el recurso hídrico de la entidad.
La hipótesis planteada en el documento es que los cambios en el escurrimiento en la subcuenca Atoyac se han visto seriamente afectados por los cambios de uso de suelo que ha sufrido la zona durante un periodo de 15 años.
El trabajo de investigación consistió en realizar balances hídricos de 1990 al 2005, considerando el cambio de uso de suelo, en la subcuenca Atoyac del estado de Oaxaca. Dicho análisis permitió obtener lo siguiente:
Las coberturas de suelo han cambiado de 1990 a 2005,  el bosque pasó de ocupar un área del 40.96% a 29.67%, la zona agrícola aumentó de 47.84% a 53.74%, las áreas con cuerpos de agua se incrementaron de 0.06% a 0.12 %, la zona urbana paso de 7.37% a 14.22%, y las áreas de pastizal disminuyeron de 3.77% a 2.25%.
Con base en los resultado de las coberturas de uso de suelo, el autor llegó a establecer que, estos cambios han influido en la variación del tirante de la lámina del escurrimiento superficial, lo que ha incidido directamente en la disminución de áreas de infiltración y en particular el crecimiento de la zona urbana, es la que más ha contribuido dentro de este rubro.
Debido a las alteraciones dadas en el escurrimiento como parte del ciclo hidrológico, se deduce que estos han incidido directamente en la recarga del acuífero, ya que, el promedio anual del tirante de la lámina de agua para 1990 era de 12.1 mm y paso a 15.1 mm para el 2005. Lo significa que cada vez se infiltra menos agua al subsuelo, debido a la alteración del ciclo hidrológico y favoreciendo aún más, el cambio climático que a su vez trae consigo eventos extremos como inundaciones y sequias.
Este trabajo contribuye al tema de investigación sobre tragedia Económica del Estrés Hidrosocial, ya que el concepto de caudal ecológico  está relacionado con la disponibilidad del agua para el ecosistema,  lo que se pretende es comparar el caudal ecológico de la cuenca en la que se ubica la ciudad de Oaxaca, con una cuenca poco perturbada. El cambio de uso de suelo afecta directamente además de otros factores a la disponibilidad del recurso hídrico. Y ya que en este trabajo se obtuvo la relación que tiene el cambio de uso de suelo con respecto a la tasa de escurrimiento y esto influye a todo el proceso del ciclo hidrológico, se puede tomar como un escenario posible a evitar en la cuenca de estudio.

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2014/04/13

Gloria Muñoz Ramírez: Los de abajo

http://lajornada.feedsportal.com/c/32833/f/625435/s/39478577/sc/31/l/0L0Sjornada0Bunam0Bmx0C20A140C0A40C120Cindex0Bphp0Dsection0Fpolitica0Garticle0F0A17o1pol0Gpartner0Frss/story01.htm

Lejos de llevar el "progreso" a las comunidades indígenas, los proyectos carreteros atropellan la vida comunitaria, arrasan con cultivos y en no pocos casos con vestigios arqueológicos, que no son pasado para las culturas originarias, sino parte de su historia y su presente.

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Valdemar

Act fast to curb global warming, or extract CO2 from air: U.N.

http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/topNews/~3/jpUFCRyaDxk/story01.htm

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent BERLIN (Reuters) - Faster action is needed to keep global warming to agreed limits and delays until 2030 could force reliance on technologies to extract greenhouse gases from the air, a U.N. report said on Sunday.
 


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Valdemar