industryterm:energy

  • Alphabet to build futuristic city in Toronto
    https://www.ft.com/content/5044ec1a-b35e-11e7-a398-73d59db9e399
    http://prod-upp-image-read.ft.com/64d05ab4-b383-11e7-8007-554f9eaa90ba

    Alphabet is setting out to build the city of the future, starting with a downtown district of Toronto, in what it hopes will serve as a proving ground for technology-enabled urban environments around the world.

    In a first-of-its-kind project, Alphabet’s subsidiary Sidewalk Labs will develop a 12-acre waterfront district, Quayside, with a view to expand across 800 acres of Toronto’s post-industrial waterfront zone.

    Self-driving shuttles, adaptive traffic lights that sense pedestrians, modular housing and freight-delivering robots that travel in underground tunnels might all be part of the new development, according to the winning bid submitted by Sidewalk Labs.

    In its proposal, Sidewalk also said that Toronto would need to waive or exempt many existing regulations in areas like building codes, transportation, and energy in order to build the city it envisioned. The project may need “substantial forbearances from existing laws and regulations,” the group said.

    Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau announced the deal on Tuesday in Toronto.

    “We started thinking about all the things we could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge,” said Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet. “That’s not how it works, for all sorts of good reasons,” he added with a laugh.

    For Alphabet, the project presents a chance to experiment with new ways to use technology — and data — in the real world. “This is not some random activity from our perspective. This is the culmination of almost 10 years of thinking about how technology could improve people’s lives,” said Mr Schmidt.

    Despite a growing political backlash against big tech in the US, where politicians are grappling with the growing influence of Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon, the company’s city-building effort has been undeterred.

    Mr Trudeau described the project as a “test bed for new technologies . . . that will help us build cleaner, smarter, greener, cities”.

    “Eric [Schmidt] and I have been talking about collaborating on this for a few years, and seeing it all come together now is extraordinarily exciting,” he added.
    Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, with Dan Doctoroff, chief executive of Sidewalk Labs © Bloomberg

    One of the challenges for the new district will be setting data policies and addressing concerns over privacy, which are particularly acute because smart city technologies often rely on collecting vast amounts of data to make cities run more efficiently.

    In the vision statement submitted as part of its bid, Sidewalk describes a vast system of sensors that will monitor everything from park benches and overflowing waste bins, to noise and pollution levels in housing. The development will also pioneer new approaches to energy, including a thermal grid and on-site generation, and tech-enabled primary healthcare that will be integrated with social services.
    Big Tech’s power remains unchallenged

    The transportation proposal for the district includes restricting private vehicles, and instead offering self-driving shuttles and bike paths that are heated in the winter, according to the vision document. A series of underground utility tunnels will house utilities like electrical wires and water pipes, and also provide pathways for freight-delivering robots.

    Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet that was founded in 2015 by Dan Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor of New York, will spend $50m on initial planning and testing for the development. As part of the effort, Google will also move its Canadian headquarters to Toronto.

    Mr Doctoroff said the group would present a detailed plan in one year, following extensive consultations with the community. “Our goal here is to listen, to understand,” he said. “This has to be a community conversation . . . otherwise it won’t have the political credibility to do things that are quite bold.”

    #smart_city #Alphabet #Toronto #Dérégulation #Vectorialisme

  • World’s First Floating Wind Farm Opens Up Off Scotland – gCaptain
    http://gcaptain.com/hywind-sctoland-worlds-first-floating-wind-farm-opens-up-off-scotland

    The first offshore wind farm to use floating wind turbines has started producing power for the Scottish energy grid in what could be the start of offshore wind’s push into deeper and more favorable waters for renewable energy production.

    Hywind Scotland, the first floating wind farm in the world, was officially opened Wednesday by the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, officially opens the wind farm. The project is operated by Statoil in partnership with Masdar,

    The 30MW pilot wind farm is located in the North Sea about 25 kilometers offshore Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and will power approximately 20,000 households. The park, made up of five Siemens 6MW wind turbines, covers an area of about 4 square kilometers, and is located in water depth ranging from 95-120 meters. The area sees an average wind speed of about 10 meters per second.

  • AlphaGo Zero: Learning from scratch | #DeepMind
    https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch

    While it is still early days, #AlphaGo Zero constitutes a critical step towards this goal. If similar techniques can be applied to other structured problems, such as protein folding, reducing energy consumption or searching for revolutionary new materials, the resulting breakthroughs have the potential to positively impact society.

    #machine_learning #go #TPU

  • Slowing Demand Growth to Push #Big_Oil From Cars to Chemicals - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-16/slowing-demand-growth-to-push-big-oil-from-cars-to-chemicals

    Global oil demand growth will slow to a crawl and gasoline use will peak within the next decade, prompting the world’s biggest energy companies to accelerate the shift to natural gas and chemicals, according to consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd.

    Major crude producers will have to adapt to significant changes in the coming years, but their businesses can grow. Oil consumption will keep expanding until at least 2035 as the petrochemical industry, which provides the building blocks to manufacture everything from plastics to pesticides, makes up for the contraction in some transport fuels, Wood Mackenzie said in a report on Monday.

    but their businesses can grow -> ouf !

  • China to take 70 percent stake in strategic port in Myanmar - official
    https://www.reuters.com/article/china-silkroad-myanmar-port/china-to-take-70-percent-stake-in-strategic-port-in-myanmar-official-idUSL4

    China has agreed take a 70 percent stake in a strategically important sea port in Myanmar, at the lower end of a proposed range amid local concerns about Beijing’s growing economic clout in the country, a senior government official said.

    Oo Maung, vice chairman of a government-led committee overseeing the project, said Myanmar had pushed for a bigger slice of the roughly $7.2 billion deep sea port, in western #Rakhine state, in negotiations with a consortium led by China’s CITIC Group. Agreement was reached in September, he said.

    Locals from Rakhine and communities across Myanmar think that the previous 85/15 percent agreement is unfair to Myanmar. People disagree with the plan and the government is now trying to make a better deal,” he said.
    […]
    Reuters in May reported that state-owned CITIC had proposed taking a 70-85 percent stake in the #Kyauk_Pyu port, a part of China’s ambitious “Belt and Road” infrastructure investment plan to deepen its links with economies throughout Asia and beyond.

    China has been pushing for preferential access to the deep sea port of Kyauk Pyu on the Bay of Bengal, an entry point for a Chinese oil and gas pipeline that gives it an alternative route for energy imports from the Middle East that avoids the Malacca Strait, a shipping chokepoint.

    The port is part of two projects, which also include an industrial park, to develop a special economic zone in Rakhine. CITIC was awarded the tenders in both initiatives in 2015.

    #OBOR

    pour l’info de mai, c’est là https://seenthis.net/messages/596147

  • It’s easy to become obese in America. These 7 charts explain why. - Vox
    https://www.vox.com/2016/8/31/12368246/charts-explain-obesity

    “The food environment is a strong predictor of how we eat,” says Scott Kahan, director of the National Center for Weight and Wellness and a faculty member at both Johns Hopkins and George Washington University. “And in America, the unhealthiest foods are the tastiest foods, the cheapest foods, the largest-portion foods, the most available foods, the most fun foods.”

    To make things more complicated, there’s a supply problem. We’re told to eat nutrient-dense foods like broccoli and Brussels sprouts instead of energy-dense foods like soda and french fries, yet there aren’t enough nutrient-dense foods to go around. Researchers have pointed out that if Americans actually followed the US dietary guidelines and started to eat the volume and variety of produce health officials recommend, we wouldn’t have nearly enough to meet consumer demand.

    As of 2013, potatoes and tomatoes made up half of the legumes and vegetables available in this country, according to the US Department of Agriculture. And when we do eat tomatoes and potatoes, they’re often accompanied by so much sugar, fat, and salt that we’re propelled to overeat.

    #obésité #santé #états-unis

  • Climate Alliance Mapping Project

    https://climatealliancemap.org/about/project-background

    https://climatealliancemap.org/map

    n 2009, scientists and world leaders agreed that the increase in global temperature should be held below 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels in order to prevent dangerous climate change. And in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, country governments agreed to hold global temperatures below the 2°C target and pursue the more ambitious goal of 1.5°C. In 2012, a study by the International Energy Agency concluded that no more than 1/3 of known fossil fuel reserves could be used before 2050 if the world is to limit global temperature increase to 2°C. Therefore, at least 2/3 of known fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground.

    In a recent study in Nature, McGlade and Elkins (2015) use economic modeling to develop an argument about where and which types of fossil fuels should remain in the ground in order to meet the target of 2 °C. Considering different emissions scenarios and the projected costs of energy resources, they conclude that globally, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80 percent of current coal reserves should remain unused from 2010 to 2050. Their model is based on the economically-optimal solution, which maximizes ‘social welfare’ (or the sum of consumer and producer surplus).

    #amazonie #climat #peuples_autochtone #cartographie #énergie

  • Almost three-quarters of new ships carrying consumer goods already exceed IMO’s post-2025 energy efficiency requirement – new study

    Almost three-quarters (71%) of all new containerships, which emit around a quarter of global ship #CO2 emissions, already comply with the post-2025 requirements of the IMO’s Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI), a new study reveals. Additionally, the best 10% of new containerships are already almost twice as efficient as the requirement for 10 years time. These findings are part of a study based on analysis of the International Maritime Organisation’s (IMO) own data and conducted by Transport & Environment (T&E), a founding member of the Clean Shipping Coalition (CSC).

    https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/styles/main_image/public/media/CurrentEfficiencyShips.png?itok=5F1B5jMb
    https://www.transportenvironment.org/press/almost-three-quarters-new-ships-carrying-consumer-goods-alread

    #transport_maritime #émissions_de_CO2
    via @reka

  • Almost three-quarters of new ships carrying consumer goods already exceed IMO’s post-2025 energy efficiency requirement – new study | Transport & Environment

    https://www.transportenvironment.org/press/almost-three-quarters-new-ships-carrying-consumer-goods-alread

    https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/styles/main_image/public/media/CurrentEfficiencyShips.png?itok=5F1B5jMb

    Almost three-quarters of new ships carrying consumer goods already exceed IMO’s post-2025 energy efficiency requirement – new study

    Published on October 2, 2017 - 10:10

    The efficiency of the 10% best ships reveals how stringent the requirements should be.

    Almost three-quarters (71%) of all new containerships, which emit around a quarter of global ship CO2 emissions, already comply with the post-2025 requirements of the IMO’s Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI), a new study reveals. Additionally, the best 10% of new containerships are already almost twice as efficient as the requirement for 10 years time. These findings are part of a study based on analysis of the International Maritime Organisation’s (IMO) own data and conducted by Transport & Environment (T&E), a founding member of the Clean Shipping Coalition (CSC).

    #transport_maritime

  • Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2017 : From World Development Indicators

    https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/26306

    The Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2017 uses maps, charts and analysis to illustrate, trends, challenges and measurement issues related to each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The Atlas primarily draws on World Development Indicators (WDI) - the World Bank’s compilation of internationally comparable statistics about global development and the quality of people’s lives Given the breadth and scope of the SDGs, the editors have been selective, emphasizing issues considered important by experts in the World Bank’s Global Practices and Cross Cutting Solution Areas. Nevertheless, The Atlas aims to reflect the breadth of the Goals themselves and presents national and regional trends and snapshots of progress towards the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals: poverty, hunger, health, education, gender, water, energy, jobs, infrastructure, inequalities, cities, consumption, climate, oceans, the environment, peace, institutions, and partnerships. Between 1990 and 2013, nearly one billion people were raised out of extreme poverty. Its elimination is now a realistic prospect, although this will require both sustained growth and reduced inequality. Even then, gender inequalities continue to hold back human potential. Undernourishment and stunting have nearly halved since 1990, despite increasing food loss, while the burden of infectious disease has also declined. Access to water has expanded, but progress on sanitation has been slower. For too many people, access to healthcare and education still depends on personal financial means. To date the environmental cost of growth has been high. Accumulated damage to oceanic and terrestrial ecosystems is considerable. But hopeful signs exist: while greenhouse gas emissions are at record levels, so too is renewable energy investment. While physical infrastructure continues to expand, so too does population, so that urban housing and rural access to roads remain a challenge, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile the institutional infrastructure of development strengthens, with more reliable government budgeting and foreign direct investment recovering from a post-financial crisis decline. Official development assistance, however, continues to fall short of target levels.

    #développement #développement_durable #odd #visualisation

  • Un texte un peu ancien, et en anglais, mais qui ne semble pas avoir été publié sur SeenThis, de #Chimamanda_Adichie sur la #dépression et le déni qu’on en fait, pour mon retour sur ST après deux semaines de vacances :

    Mornings are dark, and I lie in bed, wrapped in fatigue. I cry often…
    Chimamanda Adichie, The Guardian, le 1er février 2015
    http://www.mymindsnaps.com/chimamanda-adichies-struggle-with-depression

    Sometimes it begins with a pimple. A large shiny spot appears on my forehead. Or it begins with a feeling of heaviness, and I long to wear only loose-fitting clothes. Then my mood plunges, my lower back aches, my insides turn liquid. Stomach cramps come in spasms so painful I sometimes cry out. I lose interest in the things I care about. My family becomes unbearable, my friends become strangers with dark intentions, and cashiers and waiters seem unforgivably rude. A furious, righteous paranoia shrouds me: every human being with whom I interact is wrong, either insensitive or ill-willed. I eat mounds of food – I crave greasy stews and fried yams and dense chocolate truffles – or I have no appetite at all, both unusual for a careful, picky eater. My breasts are swollen and taut. Because they hurt, I wear my softest bras – “tender” seems a wrong word for the sharp discomfort. Sometimes they horrify me, so suddenly round, as though from science fiction, and sometimes their round perkiness pleases my vanity. At night, I lie sleepless, drenched in strange sweat; I can touch the wetness on my skin.

    I am sitting in a doctor’s office in Maryland and reciting these symptoms. On the wall of the bright room, there is a diagram of a lean female, her ovaries and uterus illustrated in curling lines; it reminds me of old pictures of Eve in the garden with Adam. The doctor is a kind and blunt woman, bespectacled, but reading over her lenses the forms I have filled out. When she first asks why I have come to see her, I say, “Because my family thinks I need help.” Her reply is, “You must agree with them or you wouldn’t be here.” Later, it will strike me that this is a quality I admire most in women: a blunt kindness, a kind bluntness.

    When she asks questions, I embellish my answers with careful detail – the bigger-sized bra I wear for a few days, the old frost-bitten ice cream I eat because I will eat anything. I make sure to link everything to my monthly cycle, to repeat that I always feel better when my period starts. I make fun of my irritability: everyone I meet is annoying until I suddenly realise that I am the only constant and the problem has to be me! It is, I tell her, as though a strangeness swoops down on me every month, better on some and worse on others. Nothing I say is untrue. But there are things I leave out. I am silent about the other strangeness that comes when it will and flattens my soul.

    “It sounds like you have premenstrual dysphoric disorder,” she says.

    It is what I want to hear. I am grateful because she has given me a name I find tolerable, an explanation I can hide behind: my body is a vat of capricious hormones and I am at their mercy.

    But the doctor is not done. Her eyes are still and certain as she says, “But the more important thing is that you have underlying depression.” She speaks quietly, and I feel the room hold its breath. She speaks as if she knows that I already know this.

    In truth, I am sitting opposite her in this examining room because my family is worried about the days and weeks when I am, as they say, “not myself”. For a long time, I have told them that I just happen to have hormonal issues, victim to those incomplete tortures that Nature saves for femaleness. “It can’t be just hormonal,” they say. “It just can’t.” Mine is a family full of sensible scientists – a statistician father, an engineer brother, a doctor sister. I am the different one, the one for whom books always were magical things. I have been writing stories since I was a child; I left medical school because I was writing poems in biology class. When my family says it is “not just hormonal”, I suspect they are saying that this malaise that makes me “not myself” has something to do with my being a writer.

    Now, the doctor asks me, “What kind of writing do you do?”

    I tell her I write fiction.

    “There is a high incidence of depression in creative people,” she says.

    I remember a writers’ conference I attended in Maine one summer years ago, before my first novel was published. I liked the other writers, and we sat in the sun and drank cranberry juice and talked about stories. But a few days in, I felt that other strangeness creeping up on me, almost suffocating me. I drew away from my new circle of friends. One of them finally cornered me in the dormitory and asked, “You’re depressive, aren’t you?” In his eyes and his voice was something like admiration, because he believed that there is, in a twisted way, a certain literary glamour in depression. He tells me that Ernest Hemingway had depression. Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill had depression. Graham Greene had depression. Oh, and it wasn’t just writers. Did I know Van Gogh had wandered into the field he was painting and shot himself? I remember feeling enraged, wanting to tell him that depression has no grandeur, it is opaque, it wastes too much and nurtures too little. But to say so would be to agree that I indeed had depression. I said nothing. I did not have depression. I did not want to have depression.

    And now, in the doctor’s office, I want to resist. I want to say, no thank you, I’ll take only premenstrual dysphoric disorder please. It fits elegantly in my arsenal of feminism after all, this severe form of premenstrual syndrome, suffered by only 3% of women, and with no known treatment, only different suggestions for management. It gives me a new language. I can help other women who grew up as I did in Nigeria, where nobody told us girls why we sometimes felt bloated and moody. If we ever talked about what happened to our bodies, then it was behind closed doors, away from the boys and men, in tones muted with abashment. Aunts and mothers and sisters, a band of females surrounded in mystery, the older whispering to the younger about what periods meant: staying away from boys, washing yourself well. They spoke in stilted sentences, gestured vaguely, gave no details. Even then I felt resentful to have to feel shame about what was natural. And now here I was, burnished with a new language to prod and push at this damaging silence.

    But depression is different. To accept that I have it is to be reduced to a common cliché: I become yet another writer who has depression. To accept that I have it is to give up the uniqueness of my own experience, the way I start, in the middle of breathing, to sense on the margins the threat of emptiness. Time blurs. Days pass in a fog. It is morning and then suddenly it is evening and there is nothing in between. I am frightened of contemplating time itself: the thought of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, the endless emptiness of time. I long to sleep and forget. Yet I am afraid of waking up, in terror of a new day. Mornings are dark, and I lie in bed, wrapped in fatigue. I cry often. My crying puzzles me, surprises me, because there is no cause. I open a book but the words form no meaning. Writing is impossible. My limbs are heavy, my brain is slow. Everything requires effort. To consider eating, showering, talking brings to me a great and listless fatigue. Why bother? What’s the point of it all? And why, by the way, are we here? What is it I know of myself? I mourn the days that have passed, the wasted days, and yet more days are wasted.

    The doctor calls these symptoms but they do not feel like symptoms. They feel like personal failures, like defects. I am normally full of mischievous humour, full of passion, whether in joy or in rage, capable of an active, crackling energy, quick to respond and rebuke, but with this strangeness, I do not even remember what it means to feel. My mind is in mute. I normally like people, I am deeply curious about the lives of others, but with this strangeness comes misanthropy. A cold misanthropy. I am normally the nurturer, worrying about everyone I love, but suddenly I am detached. It frightens me, this sense of slipping out of my normal self. It cannot be an illness. It feels like a metaphysical failure, which I cannot explain but for which I am still responsible.

    There is an overwhelming reluctance to move. A stolidness of spirit. I want to stay, to be, and if I must then only small movements are bearable. I switch off my phone, draw the shades, burrow in the dim stillness. I shy away from light and from love, and I am ashamed of this. I feel guilty about what I feel. I am unworthy of the people who care about me. I stew in self-recrimination. I am alone. Stop it, I say to myself. What is wrong with you? But I don’t know how to stop it. I feel as if I am asking myself to return a stolen good that I have not in fact stolen.

    In some of my family and friends, I sense confusion, and sometimes, suspicion. I am known to nurse a number of small eccentricities, and perhaps this is one. I avoid them, partly not to burden them with what I do not understand, and partly to shield myself from their bewilderment, while all the time, a terrible guilt chews me whole. I hear their unasked question: Why can’t she just snap out of it? There is, in their reactions, an undertone of “choice”. I might not choose to be this way, but I can choose not to be this way. I understand their thinking because I, too, often think like them. Is this self-indulgence? Surely it cannot be so crippling if I am sentient enough to question it? Does the market woman in Nsukka have depression? When I cannot get out of bed in the morning, would she be able to, since she earns her living day by day?

    The doctor says, about the high incidence of depression in creative people, “We don’t know why that is.” Her tone is flat, matter-of-fact, and I am grateful that it is free of fascination.

    “Do you think anybody else in your family might have depression?” she asks.

    Nobody else does. I tell her, a little defensively, about growing up in Nsukka, the small university campus, the tree-lined streets where I rode my bicycle. It is as if I want to exculpate my past. My childhood was happy. My family was close-knit. I was voted most popular girl in secondary school.

    Yet I have memories of slow empty days, of melancholy silence, of perplexed people asking what was wrong, and of feeling guilty and confused, because I had no reason. Everything was wrong and yet nothing was wrong.

    I remember a gardener we had when I was a child. A wiry ex-soldier called Jomo. A man full of stories for little children. My brother and I followed him around as he watered the plants, asking him questions about plants and life, basking in his patience. But sometimes, he changed, became blank, barely spoke to anybody. Perhaps he had depression. Later, I will wonder about African writers, how many could be listed as well in this Roll of Depression, and if perhaps they, too, refuse to accept the name.

    The doctor says, “I’d recommend therapy, and that you try anti-depressants. I know a good therapist.”

    A therapist. I want to joke about it. I want to say that I am a strong Igbo woman, a strong Nigerian woman, a strong African woman, and we don’t do depression. We don’t tell strangers our personal business. But the joke lies still and stale on my tongue. I feel defensive about the suggestion of a therapist, because it suggests a cause that I do not know, a cause I need a stranger to reveal to me.

    I remember the first book I read about depression, how I clung to parts that I could use to convince myself that I did not have depression. Depressives are terrified of being alone. But I enjoy being alone, so it cannot be depression. I don’t have drama, I have not ever felt the need to rant, to tear off clothes, to do something crazy. So it cannot be depression, this strangeness. It cannot be the same kind of thing that made Virginia Woolf fill her pockets with stones and walk into a river. I stopped reading books about depression because their contradictions unsettled me. I was comforted by them, but I was also made anxious by them.

    I am in denial about having depression, and it is a denial that I am not in denial about.

    “I don’t want to see a therapist,” I say.

    She looks at me, as if she is not surprised. “You won’t get better if you do nothing. Depression is an illness.”

    It is impossible for me to think of this as I would any other illness. I want to impose it my own ideas of what an illness should be. In its lack of a complete explanation, it disappoints. No ebb and flow of hormones.

    “I don’t want to take medicine either. I’m worried about what it will do to my writing. I heard people turn into zombies.”

    “If you had diabetes would you resist taking medicine?”

    Suddenly I am angry with her. My prejudices about American healthcare system emerge: perhaps she just wants to bill more for my visit, or she has been bribed by a drug rep who markets antidepressants. Besides, American doctors over-diagnose.

    “How can I possibly have PMDD and depression? So how am I supposed to know where one starts and the other stops?” I ask her, my tone heavy with blame. But even as I ask her, I feel dishonest, because I know. I know the difference between the mood swings that come with stomach cramps and the flatness that comes with nothing.

    I am strong. Everyone who knows me thinks so. So why can’t I just brush that feeling aside? I can’t. And it is this, the “cantness”, the starkness of my inability to control it, that clarifies for me my own condition. I look at the doctor and I accept the name of a condition that has been familiar to me for as long as I can remember. Depression. Depression is not sadness. It is powerlessness. It is helplessness. It is both to suffer and to be unable to console yourself.

    This is not the real you, my family say. And I have found in that sentiment, a source of denial. But what if it is the real me? What if it is as much a part of me as the other with which they are more at ease? A friend once told me, about depression, that perhaps the ancestors have given me what I need to do the work I am called to do. A lofty way of thinking of it, but perhaps another way of saying: What if depression is an integral but fleeting part of me?

    A fellow writer, who himself has had bouts of depression, once wrote me to say: Remember that it is the nature of depression to pass. A comforting thought. It is also the nature of depression to make it difficult to remember this. But it is no less true. That strangeness, when it comes, can lasts days, weeks, sometimes months. And then, one day, it lifts. I am again able to see clearly the people I love. I am again back to a self I do not question.

    A few days after my doctor visit, I see a therapist, a woman who asks me if my depression sits in my stomach. I say little, watching her, imagining creating a character based on her. On the day of my second appointment, I call and cancel. I know I will not go again. The doctor tells me to try anti-depressants. She says in her kind and blunt way: “If they don’t work, they don’t work, and your body gets rid of them.”

    I agree. I will try antidepressants, but first, I want to finish my novel.

  • Misuse of Meta-analysis in #Nutrition Research | Nutrition | JAMA | The JAMA Network
    http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2654401

    A 2014 meta-analysis examined the relationship between saturated fat intake and coronary artery disease.2 One of the included prospective studies, the Oxford Vegetarian Study,3 included vegans, ovolacto vegetarians, fish eaters, and meat eaters, with reported saturated fat intake ranging from 6% to 7% of energy in vegan participants to approximately twice that amount in the other diet groups. Those in the highest tertile of saturated fat intake had nearly triple the risk of fatal ischemic heart disease compared with the lowest tertile.

    In contrast, another study included in the meta-analysis, the Malmö Diet and Cancer cohort study,4 had no groups at the lower end of saturated fat intake, which ranged from 13% to more than 22% for the lowest to the highest quintiles, and no significant association between saturated fat intake and risk of cardiovascular events was detected. The Malmö authors cautioned, “only 1.2 percent of the present study population actually followed national Swedish recommendations (less than 10 energy percent) on saturated fat intake. Strictly speaking, the SFA-CVD [saturated fatty acids-cardiovascular disease] hypothesis is thus not fully testable in this population.”

    Nevertheless, the Malmö study was given substantial weight in the meta-analysis, which concluded that available evidence did not support limiting saturated fat, a conclusion repeated in a New York Times commentary proclaiming “Butter is Back” and a Time magazine cover displaying an artistic butter swirl and the bold headline “Eat Butter,” and cited by the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. The following year, a Gallup poll registered a sharp decline in the number of US adults limiting fat in their diets.

    #biais #méta-analyse

  • 5 Raspberry Pi Alternatives to Build Your Own Small Computer - Make Tech Easier
    https://www.maketecheasier.com/raspberry-pi-alternatives

    A single board computer (SBC) is a complete computer built on a single circuit board. These tiny PCs were designed to be low cost and energy efficient. As such, SBCs proved to be popular with hobbyists, DIY enthusiasts and educational institutions.

    Upon the release of the Raspberry Pi, SBCs gained far greater attention. The Raspberry Pi was initially designed to teach basic computer science. The first-generation Raspberry Pi was released in 2012 and quickly surpassed expectations. It has since gone on to become the best-selling British computer of all time with over eleven million units sold.

    Despite its popularity, the Raspberry Pi family of computers are not the only SBCs on the market. In fact there are a number of manufacturers making SBCs at lower price points and with more powerful hardware. If you’re looking for a Raspberry Pi alternative, consider the SBCs below.

  • How to Run the Economy on the Weather - LOW-TECH MAGAZINE
    http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/09/how-to-run-the-economy-on-the-weather.html
    http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e8883301b8d2acd680970c-700wi

    Before the Industrial Revolution, people adjusted their energy demand to a variable energy supply. Our global trade and transport system — which relied on sail boats — operated only when the wind blew, as did the mills that supplied our food and powered many manufacturing processes.

    The same approach could be very useful today, especially when improved by modern technology. In particular, factories and cargo transportation — such as ships and even trains — could be operated only when renewable energy is available. Adjusting energy demand to supply would make switching to renewable energy much more realistic than it is today.

  • Undercover With the Alt-Right - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/opinion/alt-right-white-supremacy-undercover.html

    Last September, Patrik Hermansson, a 25-year-old graduate student from Sweden, went undercover in the world of the extreme right. Posing as a student writing a thesis about the suppression of right-wing speech, he traveled from London to New York to Charlottesville, Va. — and into the heart of a dangerous movement that is experiencing a profound rejuvenation.

    Mr. Hermansson, who was sent undercover by the British anti-racist watchdog group Hope Not Hate, spent months insinuating himself into the alt-right, using his Swedish nationality (many neo-Nazis are obsessed with Sweden because of its “Nordic” heritage) as a way in. It wasn’t always easy. “You want to punch them in the face,” he told me of the people he met undercover. “You want to scream and do whatever — leave. But you can’t do any of those things. You have to sit and smile.”

    What he learned while undercover is one part of a shocking, comprehensive new report from Hope Not Hate that sheds light on the strange landscape of the alt-right, the much discussed, little understood and largely anonymous far-right movement that exists mostly online and that has come to national attention in part because of its support for Donald Trump.

    The extreme alt-right are benefiting immensely from the energy being produced by a more moderate — but still far-right — faction known as the “alt-light.”

    The alt-light promotes a slightly softer set of messages. Its figures — such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich — generally frame their work as part of an effort to defend “the West” or “Western culture” against supposed left-liberal dominance, rather than making explicitly racist appeals. Many of them, in fact, have renounced explicit racism and anti-Semitism, though they will creep up to the line of explicitly racist speech, especially when Islam and immigration are concerned.

    According to researchers, the key to hooking new recruits into any movement, and to getting them increasingly involved over time, is to simply give them activities to participate in. This often precedes any deep ideological commitment on the recruits’ part and, especially early on, is more about offering them a sense of meaning and community than anything else.

    Intentionally or not, the far right has deftly applied these insights to the online world. Viewed through the filters of alt-light outlets like Breitbart and Prison Planet, or through Twitter feeds like Mr. Watson’s, the world is a horror show of crimes by migrants, leftist censorship and attacks on common sense. And the best, easiest way to fight back is through social media.

    The newly initiated are offered many opportunities to participate directly. A teenager in a suburban basement can join a coordinated global effort to spread misinformation about Emmanuel Macron, France’s centrist president, in the hopes of helping far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Anyone who wants to do so can help spread the word about supposed mainstream media censorship of the Muslim “crime wave” the far right says is ravaging Europe.

    These efforts — a click, a retweet, a YouTube comment — come to feel like important parts of an epochal struggle. The far right, once hemmed in by its own parochialism, has manufactured a worldwide online battlefield anyone with internet access can step into.

    #Alt_right #Extrême_droite #Médias_sociaux #Post_truth

  • Atlas of Challenges and Opportunities in European Neighbourhoods

    CIST – Collège international des sciences du territoire

    http://www.gis-cist.fr/en/portfolio/atlas-of-challenges-and-opportunities-in-european-neighbourhoods

    https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-28521-4

    Pierre Beckouche, Pierre Besnard & Hugues Pecout (eds.), Springer, 2016

    https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-319-28521-4.pdf

    This atlas provides a macro-regional overview of the areas that surround the European Union, from the Sahara to the Middle East, Western Balkans to European Russia, Turkey to the Arctic. Detailing key socio-economic data as well as developmental trends, the maps provide a comprehensive territorial analysis at local scale and explore the potential for regional integration and cooperation.
    These pioneering maps examine challenges that threaten this wide yet inter-connected region, including environmental concerns in the North, political unrest in the East, social factors in the Western Balkans, and the upheaval in the Mediterranean since the Arab spring. Coverage investigates such key countries and areas as Libya, Israel, Palestine, Syria, and Ukraine, as well as explores such essential issues as Europe’s energy procurement. In addition, it also presents a comparison with other world regions such as East Asia and North America.
    In the end, readers discover that territorial integration faces many shortcomings, but that deep regional cooperation would be a key driver for the EU’s sustainable future.

    This atlas features the main results of the “Integrated Territorial Analysis of the Neighbourhoods” research project undertaken by ESPON (The European Observation Network for Territorial Development and Cohesion). It provides scholars, local authorities and NGOs involved in cross-border cooperation, companies interested in energy, agriculture, water, transportation and communication, and interested readers with key insights into this important region.

    #europe #voisinage #atlas #cartographie

  • “To admit that the climate crisis is real is to admit the end of the conservative political and economic project.”

    IRMA WON’T “WAKE UP” CLIMATE CHANGE-DENYING REPUBLICANS. THEIR WHOLE IDEOLOGY IS ON THE LINE.
    https://theintercept.com/2017/09/11/irma-donald-trump-tax-cuts-climate-change-republican-ideology-capitali

    AS ONE OF the most powerful storms ever recorded bore down on the continental United States, with much of Florida under evacuation order, President Donald Trump was focused on a matter of grave urgency.

    He gathered his cabinet at Camp David and said there was no time to waste. With Hurricane Irma set to potentially devastate huge swaths of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, now was the time, he said, to rush through massive … tax cuts.

    Yes, that’s right. He wasn’t focused on getting massive aid to those most affected. He wasn’t focused on massive change to our energy and transit systems to lower greenhouse gas emissions so that Irma-like storms do not become a thrice-annual occurrence. His mind was on massive changes to the tax code — which, despite Trump’s claims that he is driven by a desire to give the middle class relief, would in fact hand corporations the biggest tax cut in decades and the very wealthy a sizable break as well.

    Some have speculated that seeing the reality of climate change hit so close to home this summer — Houston underwater, Los Angeles licked by flames, and now southern states getting battered by Irma — might be some kind of wake-up call for climate change-denying Republicans.

  • EDITORIAL: The Washington_Post Editorial Board’s Epic Fail on ’#Carbon-Free' Nuclear Power - EnviroNews | The Environmental News Specialists
    http://www.environews.tv/042817-editorial-washington-post-editorial-boards-epic-fail-carbon-free-n

    An examination of nuclear energy from point A, where the drill bit hits the ground in the initial quest for uranium, to the process of uranium enrichment and zirconium-clad fuel rod production, on to energy generation, power plant dismantlement, nuclear waste disposal and finally uranium mine remediation, nuclear power presents anything but a clean and green energy paradigm. Au contraire, what can be observed is a dirty, deadly, carbon-loaded process that litters the environment with radioactive isotopes and radon gas, while dumping plenty of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere along the way. To top it all off, nuclear power facilities require an enormous amount of concrete, which releases heavy doses of CO2 as it dries. Does that all sound “carbon-free?” If so, sit tight, we’re just getting started.

    #carbone #co2 #énergie #nucléaire #MSM #WAPO

  • Why We Had to Change the Meaning of Nothing - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/why-we-had-to-change-the-meaning-of-nothing

    “Nothing,” in physics, is really quite something.Photograph by www.cafecredit.com / FlickrNothing” isn’t what it used to be. It used to be something self-evident: the opposite, or the absence, of something. We still use the word this way colloquially, of course. When I’m asked, on the sidewalk, if I can spare some change or a dollar, I say, if I have neither, “Sorry, I got nothing.” But this sense of the term doesn’t make much sense in science—at least, not anymore. “Nothing” used to be taken as an empty void, the space in which no particles exist. This way of thinking works for money. You either have it, in your wallet or your bank, or you don’t. But it doesn’t work with matter, energy, space, and time. “Nothing,” in physics, is really quite something. The cosmologist and theoretical physicist (...)

  • Grizzly bears go vegetarian due to climate change, choosing berries over salmon
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/25/grizzly-bears-go-vegetarian-due-climate-change-choosing-berries

    The study found that during the unusually warm summer of 2014, the bears, which would traditionally kill up to 75 percent of the salmon, were nowhere to be seen near the streams.

    Instead, they were in the hills busy munching on berries, which contain less protein and therefore take less energy to break down, causing them to gain weight more quickly.

    Biologists warned that changes caused by a warming planet were behind the bears’ unusual behavior and could affect the entire ecosystem.

    The researchers found that the forests around the streams suffered because the bears’ fish carcasses were no longer there to enrich the soil.

    “Bears switched from eating salmon to elderberries, disrupting an ecological link that typically fertilizes terrestrial ecosystems and generates high mortality rates for salmon,” the study said.

    On average, red elderberries are said to be ripening two and a half days earlier every decade.

    If the pattern continues, they will regularly overlap with the salmon by 2070.

    The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    #climat #alimentation #ours #écosystème #sols

  • Commentary: A win for Trump’s #gas_diplomacy
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-grigas-lng/commentary-a-win-for-trumps-gas-diplomacy-idUSKCN1BB01K

    Last week, American liquefied natural gas (LNG) made its way to the somewhat unlikely market of #Lithuania. The former Soviet republic traditionally bought its gas from Russian state company Gazprom; this was its first shipment from the United States. For President Donald Trump, that must have been a gratifying sign of the success of his administration’s nascent energy diplomacy.

    The U.S. became the world’s largest producer of natural gas around 2011, overtaking its long-time competitor Russia and starting to rival Saudi Arabia in oil production. This was made possible by the shale revolution – the breakthrough of hydraulic fracturing, better known as “fracking,” that could split rock formations below ground and boost the extraction of oil and gas resources from shale rock formations. Environmentalists oppose LNG exports on the grounds that methane leakage from fracking can make natural gas as harmful to the climate as coal and that the LNG trade involves the energy-intensive measures of freezing gas, shipping it across oceans, and then regassifying – a process that further increases the carbon footprint.
    […]
    Nonetheless, Cheniere launched its inaugural delivery of LNG to Poland in June. During his visit to Poland the following month, Trump reiterated the implications of this delivery: “We are committed to securing your access to alternate sources of energy, so Poland and its neighbors are never held hostage to a single supplier of energy,” he said.

    While reducing Gazprom’s dominance is part of Washington’s long-standing agenda, the Trump administration is the first to explicitly link the trinity of diplomacy, LNG trade, and national economic interests in Europe, Asia, and beyond. However, U.S. officials should be wary of implying that Washington’s LNG diplomacy is centered on making America’s friends buy gas to prove their loyalty. It’s already in Washington’s economic interests to support its allies’ energy security. There is no need for the White House to belabor the point.

  • Collector analyses depiction of Holy Land under Ottomans by cartographers, travellers | Jordan Times

    http://www.jordantimes.com/news/local/collector-analyses-depiction-holy-land-under-ottomans-cartographers-tra

    AMMAN — The former minister of water, energy and planning Hisham Khatib is also a collector of historical maps, manuscripts, photographs and paintings related to the Ottoman period in the Holy Land.

    #cartographie_historique #cartographie #empire_ottoman #moyen_orient

  • Victoria review – an authentic piece of cinematic magic
    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/03/victoria-sebastian-schipper-observer-review

    Können sie eine Schulterkamera zweieinhalb Stunden laufen lassen und am Ende noch wackelfreie Bilder drehen? Sturla Brandth Grøvlen kann das und hat dafür prompt ein paar Preise bekommen. Mal abgesehen von der Plansequenz ist Viktoria endlich mal wieder ein Film, der Berlin neu sieht und zeigt.
    Na dann ab ins Kino oder Film, Bier und Chips in der Videothek besorgt und ab aufs Sofa. Video on demand? Keine Ahnung, vielleicht gibt es Viktoria auch bei Arte oder Netflix.

    The young heroine of the German film Victoria really does have a busy night on the town – a mere few hours that take in flirtation, peril, dancefloor euphoria, an impromptu piano recital and, to cap it all, some reckless criminality. What’s more, director Sebastian Schipper gets it all into a taut 140 minutes – and one single continuous shot. But, more than a technical prodigy, Victoria is an authentic piece of cinematic magic. Taking us deep into one woman’s experience, it’s as adrenaline-charged as any mainstream action cinema, but with a minimum of production frills.

    When Victoria emerges into a chilly Berlin morning, we feel we’ve lived through the emotions of a lifetime with her
    The film starts in a techno club in Berlin’s Mitte district around 4am; as the bass thumps and the lights flash, we spot Victoria (Laia Costa) dancing alone and carefree. She’s from Madrid, a pianist recently dropped out from conservatoire and taking time out in Berlin, working in a cafe. After a while, the camera follows her to the exit, where a dorkish-looking bloke named Sonne (Frederick Lau) sticks his head in and asks her if the club’s worth the price of admission. When Victoria leaves, Sonne is outside with three dodgy-looking pals. They spin her the weariest lines in the book, offering to show her the real Berlin. For some reason Victoria decides to join them – making us wonder whether she’s hopelessly naive, fearlessly open to anything the night will bring, or very possibly the craziest person in the picture.

    As the night develops, we become aware of how confidently Schipper uses his limited time. He doesn’t pelt through the action, but paces it very effectively. We’re already quite a way into the course of events when Victoria and Sonne share an interlude of quiet intimacy, and she serenades him with a brief Liszt piano recital.

    It’s now, as the film appears to be winding down, that Schipper ramps things up. The boys have urgent business to take care of, and they need Victoria to help them. As they rendezvous in a subterranean car park with the sinister, leather-faced Andi (André Hennicke), we’re suddenly thrown into deep genre territory – and it’s not spoiling anything to reveal that things, as per genre convention, don’t go according to plan.

    What you won’t see coming is the nuanced set of changes in Victoria’s relationship with the guys, or the shifts in her character: from happy-go-lucky ingenue (an impression underlined by Costa’s impish, Björk-like features) to determined urban desperado, and finally to something like a tragic opera heroine. Costa gives a terrific, affecting and, by the end, intensely unsettling performance. Lau’s Sonne undergoes similar changes – starting as an oafish lunk, but once into the adventure, acquiring a muscular dash and a distinctly Brando-esque charisma.

    The tracking shot: film-making magic - or stylistic self-indulgence?
    Read more
    The film doesn’t flaunt its technical bravado, so you’re never too distracted by wondering how Schipper and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen pulled off their choreography, turning a nondescript small section of Mitte into a nocturnal playground of seemingly infinite possibility. But you do become aware of the film’s tricks with duration, as in the gang’s brief return to the club – in reality lasting just a few minutes, but feeling like a whole tournament of triumphant revelry. “Real time” in cinema has rarely been so craftily elasticised.

    The art of the mad tracking shot – the seamless, sinuous take that seems to go on for ever – has become a big deal in recent years, whether outrageously faked, as in Iñárritu’s Birdman, or performed with stately rigour, as in Sokurov’s Russian Ark. While Victoria never feels like a mere bid for a championship medal, Schipper, Grøvlen and the cast and crew impress mightily with their energy, discipline and (a usually meaningless term among movie folk, but one that makes absolute sense here) commitment to “the moment”. When Victoria finally emerges into a chilly Berlin morning, we feel we’ve lived through the emotions of a lifetime with her. Mind you, having stayed in this very part of Mitte two months ago, I can tell you she’ll be lucky to find a decent breakfast round there.

    Die Welt der Drehorte: Victoria
    https://www.filmtourismus.de/victoria

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlG0nauf8fo

    Victoria (2015)
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_(2015)

    Der Film wurde in einer einzigen Kameraeinstellung gedreht. Um die ungewöhnliche Drehweise realisieren zu können, musste die Vorgehensweise der Produktion angepasst werden. So bestand das Drehbuch für den über zwei Stunden langen Film ursprünglich lediglich aus zwölf Seiten. Dies hatte zur Folge, dass die Dialoge des Films gemeinsam mit den Hauptdarstellern vor Ort geschrieben wurden und spontan während des Drehs angepasst werden konnten, beispielsweise wenn bestimmte Vorgänge länger oder kürzer dauerten als geplant.

    Es wurden insgesamt drei vollständige Versionen des Films gedreht. Die letzte dieser Fassungen wurde schließlich komplett im Spielfilm verwendet und dabei nicht geschnitten. Die relativ geringe Drehzeit wurde durch eine umso intensivere Zeit zum Proben ausgeglichen.

    Gedreht wurde die finale Fassung am 27. April 2014 zwischen 4:30 und 7:00 Uhr in Berlin-Kreuzberg und Berlin-Mitte. Schipper standen sechs Regieassistenten und drei komplette Teams für den Ton zur Verfügung. Als Kamera wurde eine Canon C300 verwendet. Es kamen 150 Statisten zum Einsatz.

    #Film #Berlin#Kreuzberg #Mitte #Charlottenstraße #Friedrichstraße #Hedemannstraße #Rudi-Dutschke-Straße #Besselstraße #Behrenstraße #Zimmerstraße