from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/downtown-rural-detroit

Pre-Industrial Land-Use
http://www.detroitagriculture.org/GRP_Website/Grown_In_Detroit.html
http://www.greeningofdetroit.com/3_0_cool_projects.php
http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/policy.html
http://urbanfarming.org/homefarming.html

Downsizing
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/09/detroit-looks-at-downsizing-to-save-city/
Detroit wants to save itself by shrinking
“Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile. Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural. Detroit officials first raised the idea in the 1990s, when blight was spreading. Now, with the recession plunging the city deeper into ruin, a decision on how to move forward is approaching. Mayor Dave Bing, who took office last year, is expected to unveil some details in his state-of-the-city address this month. Though the will to downsize has arrived, the way to do it is unclear and fraught with problems. Politically explosive decisions must be made about which neighborhoods should be bulldozed and which improved. Some won’t go willingly. “I like the way things are right here,” said David Hardin, 60, whose bungalow is one of three occupied homes on a block with dozens of empty lots near what is commonly known as City Airport. He has lived there since 1976, when every home on the street was occupied, and said he enjoys the peace and quiet. On some blocks, only one or two occupied houses remain, surrounded by trash-strewn lots and vacant, burned-out homes. Scavengers have stripped anything of value from empty buildings. According to one recent estimate, Detroit has 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots. The approximately 40 square miles of vacant property in Detroit is larger than the entire city of Youngstown. Faced with a $300 million budget deficit and a dwindling tax base, Bing argues that the city can’t continue to pay for police patrols, fire protection and other services for all areas. The current plan would demolish about 10,000 houses and empty buildings in three years. The city might offer larger tracts for sale or lease, or turn over smaller pieces to community organizations to use.”

More Modest View
http://www.detroitmi.gov/DepartmentsandAgencies/MayorsOffice/ContacttheMayor/tabid/1238/Default.aspx
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703503804575083781073108438.html
Mayor Plans to Use Census Tally Showing Decline as Benchmark in Overhaul
“This city is shrinking, and Mayor Dave Bing can live with that. The nation’s once-a-decade census, which gets under way next month, usually prompts expensive tally-building efforts by cities eager to maximize federal funding tied to the count. But this time, Mr. Bing is pushing the city to embrace the bad news. The mayor is looking to the diminished tally, down from 951,270 in 2000, as a benchmark in his bid to reshape Detroit’s government, finances and perhaps even its geography to reflect its smaller population and tax base. That means, in part, cutting city services and laying off workers. His approach to the census is a product of not only budget constraints but also a new, more modest view of the city’s prospects. “We’ve got to pick those core communities, those core neighborhoods” to sustain and preserve, he said at a recent public appearance, adding: “That’s something that’s possible here in Detroit.” Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Bing, a Democrat first elected last year to finish the term of disgraced former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, hasn’t touted big development plans or talked of a “renaissance.” Instead, he is trying to prepare residents for a new reality: that Detroit—like the auto industry that propelled it for a century—will have to get smaller before it gets bigger again. With no high-profile census push, the city risks an undercount that would mean forgoing millions of dollars in federal funding. Nationwide, each person counted translates into about $1,000 to $1,200 in federal funding to municipal governments. But some community leaders see the hands-off approach as a sign the city’s leadership under Mr. Bing, a 66-year-old businessman and former basketball star, is prepared to face up to the depopulation problem and rethink Detroit’s future. “This is going to be hard to wrestle to the ground,” said Rip Rapson, president of the Kresge Foundation of Troy, Mich., a national philanthropy that has invested heavily in development projects aimed at salvaging the nicest remnants of the city. “He deserves enormous credit for leading the community into this.”

Economies of Scale
http://hantzfarmsdetroit.com/press.html
http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/29/news/economy/farming_detroit.fortune/index.htm
Can farming save Detroit?
“John Hantz is a wealthy money manager who lives in an older enclave of Detroit where all the houses are grand and not all of them are falling apart. With a net worth of more than $100 million, he’s one of the richest men left in Detroit. Not long ago, while commuting, he stumbled on a big idea that might help save his dying city. In some stretches he sees more pheasants than people. “We need scarcity,” he thought to himself as he drove past block after unoccupied block. “We can’t create opportunities, but we can create scarcity.” Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit. Hantz is willing to commit $30 million to the project. He’ll start with a pilot program this spring involving up to 50 acres on Detroit’s east side. “Out of the gates,” he says, “it’ll be the largest urban farm in the world.” If you let it revert to nature, you abandon all hope of productive use. If you turn it over to parks and recreation, you add costs to an overburdened city government that can’t afford to teach its children, police its streets, or maintain the infrastructure it already has. Houses in Detroit are selling for an average of $15,000. That sounds like a buying opportunity, and in fact Detroit looks pretty good right now to a young artist or entrepreneur who can’t afford anyplace else — but not yet to an investor. The smart money sees no point in buying as long as fresh inventory keeps flooding the market. As Hantz began thinking about ways to absorb some of that inventory, what he imagined, he says, was a glacier: one broad, continuous swath of farmland, growing acre by acre, year by year, until it had overrun enough territory to raise the scarcity alarm and impel other investors to act. Rick Foster, an executive at the Kellogg Foundation whom Hantz sought out for advice, nudged him gently in a different direction. “I think you should make pods,” Foster said, meaning not one farm but many. Hantz was taken right away with the concept of creating several pods — or lakes, as he came to think of them — each as large as 300 acres, and each surrounded by its own valuable frontage. “What if we had seven lakes in the city?” he wondered. “Would people develop around those lakes?”

photo by James Griffioen

To increase the odds that they will, Hantz plans on making his farms both visually stunning and technologically cutting edge. Mike Score, who recently left Michigan State’s agricultural extension program to join Hantz Farms as president, has written a business plan that calls for the deployment of the latest in farm technology, from compost-heated greenhouses to hydroponic (water only, no soil) and aeroponic (air only) growing systems designed to maximize productivity in cramped settings. Some of Hantz’s biggest skeptics, ironically, are the same people who’ve been working to transform Detroit into a laboratory for urban farming for years, albeit on a much smaller scale. The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network counts nearly 900 urban gardens within the city limits. That’s a twofold increase in two years, and it places Detroit at the forefront of a vibrant national movement to grow more food locally and lessen the nation’s dependence on Big Ag. None of those gardens is very big (average size: 0.25 acre), and they don’t generate a lot of cash (most don’t even try), but otherwise they’re great: as antidotes to urban blight; sources of healthy, affordable food in a city that, incredibly, has no chain supermarkets; providers of meaningful, if generally unpaid, work to the chronically unemployed; and beacons around which disintegrating communities can begin to regather themselves. That actually sounds a lot like what Hantz envisions his farms to be in the for-profit arena. But he doesn’t have many fans among the community gardeners, who feel that Hantz is using his money and connections to capitalize on their pioneering work. “I’m concerned about the corporate takeover of the urban agriculture movement in Detroit,” says Malik Yakini, a charter school principal and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which operates D-Town Farm on Detroit’s west side. “At this point the key players with him seem to be all white men in a city that’s at least 82% black.”"

City Services
http://instructables.com/id/Bicyle-Power-for-Your-Television,-Laptop,-or-Cell-/
http://treehugger.com/files/2010/01/pedal-power-in-detroit-green-gym-for-homeless.php

Pathways Of Desire
http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/trailmode.png
http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2009/06/streets-with-no-name.html
Streets With No Name / by James Griffioen / June 23, 2009
“This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried sidewalks. Without the city to tell him where to walk, the pilgrim who first sets out in fresh snowfall creates his own path. Others will likely follow, or forge their own paths as needed. In the heart of summer, too, it becomes clear that the grid laid down by the ancient planners is now irrelevant. In vacant lots between neighborhoods and the attractions of thoroughfares, bus stops and liquor stores, well-worn paths stretch across hundreds of vacant lots. Gaston Bachelard called these les chemins du désir: pathways of desire. Paths that weren’t designed but eroded casually away by individuals finding the shortest distance between where they are coming from and where they intend to go. Desire lines are considered by many landscape architects to be proof of a flaw in the design of a physical space, or more gently, a sign that concrete cannot always impose its will on the human mind. But what about a physical space that no longer resembles its intended design, a city where tens of thousands of homes have been abandoned, burned, and buried in their own basements? While actual roads and sidewalks crumble with each season of freezing and thawing, Detroiters have taken it upon themselves to create new paths, in their own small way working to create a city that better suits their needs.”

photo by James Griffioen

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/did-you-feel-that/

Days Now Slightly Shorter
http://jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-071
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=aLAUn4Gy92ss
“The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a NASA scientist has said. Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects. “The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross said. “It’s what we call the ice-skater effect,” said David Kerridge, head of Earth hazards and systems at the British Geological Survey. “As the ice skater’s going around in a circle, and she pulls her arms in, she gets faster and faster. It’s the same idea with the Earth going around if you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes.” The magnitude 9.1 Sumatran in 2004 that generated an Indian Ocean tsunami shortened the day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted the axis by about 2.3 milliarcseconds, Gross has said.”

(Rotation Affected Much More by Wind)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=did-the-earthquake-that-s

Core Flux
http://www.phy6.org/earthmag/dynamos2.htm
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091224-north-pole-magnetic-russia-earth-core.html
“The magnetic north pole moved little from the time scientists first located it in 1831. Then in 1904, the pole began shifting northeastward at a steady pace of about 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year. In 1989 it sped up again, and in 2007 scientists confirmed that the pole is now galloping toward Siberia at 34 to 37 miles (55 to 60 kilometers) a year. A rapidly shifting magnetic pole means that magnetic-field maps need to be updated more often to allow compass users to make the crucial adjustment from magnetic north to true North. Geologists think Earth has a magnetic field because the core is made up of a solid iron center surrounded by rapidly spinning liquid metal. This creates a “dynamo” that drives our magnetic field. Scientists had long suspected that, since the molten core is constantly moving, changes in its magnetism might be affecting the surface location of magnetic north. Nobody knows when another change in the core might pop up elsewhere, sending magnetic north wandering in a new direction.”

Earth’s Inconstant Magnetic Field
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/dynamic.html
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/Y2003/29dec_magneticfield.htm
“Every few years, scientist Larry Newitt of the Geological Survey of Canada goes hunting. He grabs his gloves, parka, a fancy compass, hops on a plane and flies out over the Canadian arctic. Not much stirs among the scattered islands and sea ice, but Newitt’s prey is there–always moving, shifting, elusive. His quarry is Earth’s north magnetic pole. Keeping track of the north magnetic pole is Newitt’s job. “We usually go out and check its location once every few years,” he says. “We’ll have to make more trips now that it is moving so quickly.” Earth’s magnetic field is changing in other ways, too: Compass needles in Africa, for instance, are drifting about 1 degree per decade. And globally the magnetic field has weakened 10% since the 19th century. They’ve also learned what happens during a magnetic flip. Reversals take a few thousand years to complete, and during that time–contrary to popular belief–the magnetic field does not vanish. “It just gets more complicated,” says Glatzmaier. Magnetic lines of force near Earth’s surface become twisted and tangled, and magnetic poles pop up in unaccustomed places. A south magnetic pole might emerge over Africa, for instance, or a north pole over Tahiti. Weird. But it’s still a planetary magnetic field, and it still protects us from space radiation and solar storms. And, as a bonus, Tahiti could be a great place to see the Northern Lights…”

North Magnetic Pole Shifting Rapidly Toward Russia
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1215_051215_north_pole.html
“New research shows the pole moving at rapid clip—25 miles (40 kilometers) a year. Over the past century the pole has moved 685 miles (1,100 kilometers) from Arctic Canada toward Siberia, says Joe Stoner, a paleomagnetist at Oregon State. At its current rate the pole could move to Siberia within the next half-century. “It’s moving really fast,” he said. “We’re seeing something that hasn’t happened for at least 500 years.” The shift is likely a normal oscillation of the Earth’s magnetic field, Stoner said, and not the beginning of a flip-flop of the north and south magnetic poles, a phenomenon that last occurred 780,000 years ago. Such reversals have taken place 400 times in the last 330 million years, according to magnetic clues sealed in rocks around the world. Each reversal takes a thousand years or more to complete. “People like to think something special is happening in their lifetimes, but despite the dramatic changes, I don’t see any evidence of it,” Stoner said. “It’s probably just a normal wandering of the pole.” The north magnetic pole shifts constantly, in loops up to 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide each day. The recorded location of the pole is really an average of its daily treks, which are driven by fluctuations in solar radiation. The pole is currently at about 80º north latitude and 104º west longitude, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.”

Build Yr Own
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90947943
“The compass has been around since at least the 12th century, but scientists still don’t know exactly how the Earth generates the magnetic field that keeps a compass needle pointing north. But geophysicist Dan Lathrop is trying to find out — by building his own planet. Later this year he plans to fill it with molten metal and set the whole 26-ton ball spinning. At top speed the equator will whirl by at 80 miles an hour. “It was a little scary the first time we spun it up,” he says. Lathrop figures it can’t be too hard to get a magnetic field — after all, most planets in our solar system have one. But while nature has an easy time making magnetic fields, scientists do not. This is Lathrop’s third attempt.

If you could dig a deep hole, about 2,000 miles down, you would hit the outer core, which is probably made of liquid iron. That iron can conduct electricity. And if it flows in the right way, it can turn the Earth into what scientists call a dynamo, generating a self-sustaining magnetic field — in Earth’s case, producing one pole up in Canada and another down in Antarctica. Iron only melts at high temperatures, though, so Lathrop’s team will fill his sphere with a different metal — sodium. Sodium becomes liquid at stovetop temperatures and conducts electricity well, but it’s flammable. A sodium fire can’t just be put out with water. Water can actually make things worse — so Lathrop’s team has disabled the sprinkler system…”

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/faking-the-mars-landing-pt-3/

Personnel Issue : Not All Pretend Astronauts Equally Serious
http://geekosystem.com/mars-desert-research-station-mdrs/
http://gizmodo.com/5476462/fake-mars-mission-befallen-by-real-drama

“The two-week simulations, including various experiments and equipment tests, take place at the Mars Desert Research Station, located outside Hanksville, Utah. The volunteers who participate are expected to take the matter very seriously—after all, our future Mars colony depends on it. But of course, some pretend Mars astronauts are more dedicated than other pretend Mars astronauts and this is where the trouble starts. After days of snits and snubs, the tension came to a head on February 15. In that day’s report, Commander Vermeulen explains: “…The growing frustration that after 9 days PE, Nora and Margaux are still not able to manage the Hab systems/ standard engineering reporting system (and even don’t consider this as a problem!), exploded during the lunch. The lack of dedication to the mission of some people overloads the others and it had to be spoken out. The problem was already there from the first day, when it came out that some people didn’t prepare anything for the mission, didn’t look at the manuals, which were send to them months ago and didn’t even prepare the tasks for their own role. The accusation into my direction that I didn’t brief enough about the systems was too much. Nicky almost exploded. Arjan reacted double: At one hand he couldn’t stop criticising the incompetence of some others during last week, but during the discussion he acted as if he was from Barcelona (don’t know anything). He has his own mission and own world…” The Commander’s Reports for the last days of the mission, which ended yesterday, obscure the interpersonal conflicts that paralyzed the crew. Only a few bloody noses are referenced, perhaps as physical manifestations of the crew’s frustrations.”

Boredom Practice, Minus Actual Danger
http://newscientist.com/article/dn18025-whats-the-point-of-a-fake-500day-mars-mission.html

“A few aspects cannot be simulated, however. There will be no radiation exposure or zero gravity, and if there is a real emergency during the simulation, volunteers will have the right to get out at any time. A study by Peter Suedfeld of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, argues that such experiments lack some key attributes of real long-haul space flight, such as dangerous voyages through unknown territory and the impossibility of rescue. Suedfeld concludes that mission planners would better identify the psychological stresses likely to be experienced by Mars explorers by reading the diaries of explorers on long expeditions over sea and land in previous centuries. Some behavioural scientists feel Antarctic research stations or nuclear submarines offer better analogies to prolonged space flight. But although Antarctic outposts have the necessary elements of danger, confinement and isolation, they lack the high level of automation found in space flight. Nuclear submarine control rooms are more like spacecraft, but military secrecy puts them off limits for academic research. A better model may be the experience of astronauts aboard space stations orbiting Earth. Their stays have lasted up to 438 days. By and large, space station missions have gone without incident. However, NASA astronauts on a three-month mission to Skylab in 1973 went on strike for a day saying they felt overworked and unsupported by their ground crew. In 1982, two Soviet cosmonauts spent most of a 211-day flight in silence because they got on each other’s nerves. Three years later, a six-month Soviet mission was cut short when a cosmonaut had a nervous breakdown. Sexual harassment could also endanger a mission. In an eight-month space station simulation in 2000, a man twice tried to kiss a woman against her will. As a result, locks were installed between different crew compartments. Astronauts in orbit often express feelings of neglect by ground crews, in part because of lags in communication and perhaps also because of a need by astronauts to take out their frustrations on others. As a result, ground crews as well as astronauts now receive psychological training.”

Alone Time
http://newscientist.com/article/mg18925421.400-in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-scream.html
In space no one else can hear you scream at each other

“You and your fellow inmates are bound to have survived some hair-raising, potentially fatal crises, and everyone’s nerves will be in tatters. The pilot won’t talk to the engineer. And if that geologist looks at you and rolls his eyes one more time, you’ll punch his lights out. Despite the exciting goals, a crewed mission to Mars would mean enormous psychological stress. The centrepiece of each station in the Utah desert and in the outback in Southern Australia, is an 8-metre-wide cylindrical habitat, or hab. Crews of four to six live and work as if they were on Mars, testing reconnaissance robots and collecting rocks in mock spacesuits. During Eggins’s studies, the volunteers completed questionnaires to assess their interactions with others. This revealed that people tend to cluster into cliques that often put their own goals ahead of the whole mission’s objectives. This led to a mishap in a Utah simulation in 2003, when the group split into three teams. One stayed in the hab, and two went out on separate rover trips, returning at about the same time. One person in the second rover damaged his helmet and was theoretically leaking oxygen. “It was obvious to everybody that in theory, if this was really Mars, then this guy would die,” says Eggins. However, the first team insisted on getting into the hab first and told the others to wait their turn, she says: “The first team were not thinking at all in terms of the overall goal of the mission, just of their own rights and the distinct subgroup.” In another Utah simulation last summer, Eggins’s colleague Sheryl Bishop of the University of Texas in Galveston studied the differences between an all-male crew, who lived in the hab for two weeks, and an all-female crew who moved in for the following fortnight. Both teams performed well and were very productive, but they did differ. Personality surveys showed that several of the men scored low on “agreeableness” and “conscientiousness”, and the group’s behaviour echoed this. Every night, the women filed daily reports to mission control by the agreed time. But the men were persistently late. They said they preferred to use the time to explore outside on the buggies.”

Volunteering Not To Leave Earth
http://newscientist.com/article/dn9770

“More than 70 people have volunteered to be confined in a mock mission to Mars – for 520 days. It would be the longest simulation of its kind. The Institute of Medical and Biological Problems (IMBP) in Russia is undertaking the isolation study to learn more about the personal dynamics of long-duration space travel, according to Russian media reports. An actual round-trip mission to Mars could last about 30 months – about twice as long as this simulation. Five people will be eventually be selected for the study. They will spend 250 days on a simulated space trip to Mars. Then, three of the five will leave the mock spaceship for a simulated “landing on Mars” that will last 30 days. The five participants will then embark on a 240-day journey “back to Earth”. They will communicate with mission control by email. The simulations lack some of the appeal that draws people to spaceflight, so researchers may end up studying a different group of people than those who would actually fly on a space mission, he says. The IMBP has tried to minimise this issue by using cosmonauts and astronaut candidates in the past. And they are giving preference in this simulation to applicants who are doctors, biologists and engineers between the ages of 25 and 50. But Musson says a long-duration space mission may take a different type of astronaut than those who go on shorter trips to space. He points out that on the International Space Station and on Russia’s former Mir space station, some of the go-getter astronauts with multiple academic degrees found themselves bored by some of the mundane tasks onboard. Musson says someone with a more laidback personality might be better suited for a long-duration mission to Mars.”

Previously On Spectre :
Faking The Mars Landing
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/04/24/faking-the-mars-landing/
Faking The Mars Landing, pt 2
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/faking-the-mars-landing-pt-2/

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/more-than-you-know/

Dunbar’s Number
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6999879.ece
“We may be able to amass 5,000 ‘friends’ on Facebook but humans’ brains are capable of managing a maximum of only 150 actual friendships, a study has found. Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has conducted research revealing that while social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history. Dunbar developed a theory known as “Dunbar’s number” in the 1990s which claimed that the size of our neocortex — the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are. Dunbar derived the limit from studying social groupings in a variety of societies — from neolithic villages to modern office environments. He found that people tended to self-organise in groups of around 150 because social cohesion begins to deteriorate as groups become larger.”

The Social Brain
http://www.commonsenseadvice.com/human_cortex_dunbar.html
“Dunbar has gone through anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up over and over again. For example, he looked at 21 different hunger-gatherer societies around the world and found that the average number of people in each village was 148.4. The same pattern holds true for military organization. Over the years, through trial and error, military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb for the size of a functional fighting unit – 200 men. They have realized that it is quite difficult to make any larger a group than this to function as a unit without complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to insure loyalty and unity within the group. With a group of 150 or so, formalities are not necessary. Behavior can be controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups, this seems impossible.

Further is the religious group known as the Hutterites, who for hundreds of years, through trial and error, have realized that the maximum size for a colony should be, low and behold, 150 people. They’ve been following this rule for centuries. Every time a colony approaches this number, the colony is divided into two separate colonies. They have found that once a group becomes larger than that, “people become strangers to one another.” At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens that somehow changes the community seemingly overnight. At 150 the colony with spontaneously begin dividing into smaller “clans.” When this happens a new colony is formed.

Another good example of our hard wired social limits is Gore Associates, a privately held multimillion-dollar company responsible for creating Gore-Tex fabric and all sorts of other high tech computer cables, filter bags, semiconductors, pharmaceutical, and medical products. What is most unique about this company is that each company plant is no larger than 150. When constructing a plant, they put 150 spaces in the parking lot, and when people start parking on the grass, they know it’s time for another plant. Each plant works as a group. There are no bosses. No titles. Salaries are determined collectively. No organization charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Wilbert Gore – the late founder of the company, found through trial and error that 150 employees per plant was most ideal. “We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty,” he said.”

A Functional Limit
http://www.liv.ac.uk/researchintelligence/issue17/brainteaser.html
http://radio-weblogs.com/0107127/categories/networksAsTheOrganizationOfTheFuture/2003/02/22.html

Illusion Of Chaos
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/11/noboss.html
http://www.workforce.com/section/09/feature/24/29/22/index.html
“The classic Gore culture began in the basement of the home of Bill Gore, who left DuPont in 1958 to create his own enlightened version of the workplace. Gore built the company upon four core principles–fairness; freedom to encourage others to grow in knowledge, skill and responsibility; ability to honor one’s own commitments; and consultation with others before taking action that could affect the company “below the waterline.” In Gore’s model, associates communicate directly with one another and are accountable to their peers rather than bosses. Ideally, leaders in the company emerge naturally by demonstrating special knowledge, skill or experience –”followship.” Thomas Malone, a professor at MIT and author of The Future of Work, describes Gore as a “miniature democracy. The way you become a manager is by finding people who want to work for you,” Malone says. The $1.84 billion company’s flat organizational structure makes it exceptionally nimble. “If someone has an idea for a new product, they don’t have to go up a hierarchy to find some boss to approve it,” says John Sawyer, chairman of the department of business administration at the University of Delaware. “Instead, they have to find peers in the organization who support the idea and will work with them. That open style of communication allows ideas to come up from the bottom.”

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/and-never-die/

Living to 1,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4003063.stm
“This means that all parts of the project should be fully working in mice within just 10 years and we might take only another 10 years to get them all working in humans. When we get these therapies, we will no longer all get frail and decrepit and dependent as we get older, and eventually succumb to the innumerable ghastly progressive diseases of old age. We will still die, of course – from crossing the road carelessly, being bitten by snakes, catching a new flu variant etcetera – but not in the drawn-out way in which most of us die at present. So, will this happen in time for some people alive today? Probably. Since these therapies repair accumulated damage, they are applicable to people in middle age or older who have a fair amount of that damage. I think the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already. It is very complicated, because ageing is. There are seven major types of molecular and cellular damage that eventually become bad for us – including cells being lost without replacement and mutations in our chromosomes. Each of these things is potentially fixable by technology that either already exists or is in active development. The length of life will be much more variable than now, when most people die at a narrow range of ages (65 to 90 or so), because people won’t be getting frailer as time passes. The average age will be in the region of a few thousand years. If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000. And remember, none of that time would be lived in frailty and debility and dependence – you would be youthful, both physically and mentally, right up to the day you mis-time the speed of that oncoming lorry.”

Longevity Escape Velocity
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/degrey07/degrey07_index.html
“The key conclusion of the logic I’ve set out above is that there is a threshold rate of biomedical progress that will allow us to stave off aging indefinitely, and that that rate is implausible for mice but entirely plausible for humans. If we can make rejuvenation therapies work well enough to give us time to make then work better, that will give us enough additional time to make them work better still, which will … you get the idea. This will allow us to escape age-related decline indefinitely, however old we become in purely chronological terms. I think the term “longevity escape velocity” (LEV) sums that up pretty well.”

SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence)
http://www.sens.org/
http://us.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2009/11/30/vs.clinic.immortality.cnn
http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/strategies_for_engineered_negligible_senescence.cfm

Donate Or Compete
https://www.mfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=mj_donations_donate
http://www.mfoundation.org/?pagename=mj_mprize_how

Negligible Senescence
http://www.agelessanimals.org/
http://www.smart-publications.com/articles/MOM-guerin.php
“There are certain species of rockfish, whales, turtles, and other animals that are known to live for hundreds of years without showing any signs of aging—a phenomenon known to biogerontologists as “negligible senescence.” No one knows for sure how long these animals can live for, but we know that they can live for over two hundred years without showing any observed increase in mortality or any decrease in reproductive capacity due to age. Striking examples are a 109 year old female rockfish that was captured in the wild while swimming around with fertilized eggs, and a hundred-plus year old male whale that was harpooned while having sex.

Q: What is negligible senescence?
Guerin: Basically, this refers to an animal species that doesn’t show any significant signs of aging as it grows older. Unlike humans and most other mammals, there’s no decrease in reproduction after maturity. There’s also no notable increase in mortality rate with age, but that’s a little harder to prove. I’ve been talking with a statistician and he’s asking, how do you know? To do a study of this type would take a couple of hundred years to complete. But compared to us there’s no noted increase in mortality rate. I mean, if you are ninety years old, you’re much more likely to die next year then you are if you’re only twenty years old. But we don’t seem to see any increase in mortality with rockfish and several of these other animals over time.

Q: So we don’t know if these animals are simply aging more slowly or not at all? Since we have haven’t found any rockfish or whales that live for four hundred years, that might suggest that there is a certain limit on how long they can live.
Guerin: Well, we just do not know. We honestly do not know. It really is unfortunate that there is so little known in this field. Ecologists have never thought of this in the terms that gerontologists are now thinking of it in. But this other group of organisms, those that possess what Finch termed “negligible senescence,” they don’t seem to be showing the classical signs of aging that we’re used to. So, who is to say the longest they could live? As an example, in Finch’s book that was published in 1990, at that time the longest lived whale was—I believe it was a Blue Whale—something like 108 years old. That’s like, okay, well that’s not so startling. Humans live longer than that. We’re mammals. They’re mammals. We live longer. Then a study was done on bowhead whales, and they found that out of forty whales sampled, four of them were over a hundred years old, and one of them was over two hundred years old. And they didn’t die of old age either—they were harpooned.”

Lobsters Immortal?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11382976
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/marine-life/400-pound-lobster.htm/
“In humans, telomerase levels decline later in life and are only found in some types of tissue, but in lobsters, telomerase is found in all types of tissue. That likely accounts for lobsters’ ability to grow throughout their lives. And because lobsters’ skeletons are on the outside and the molting process allows them to periodically shed their exoskeletons in favor of a new, larger one, their constant growth isn’t a problem. With a steady, evenly distributed supply of telomerase, lobsters don’t approach the Hayflick limit, which means that their cells stay pristine, young and dividing. Related animal species with vastly different life spans are also a point of interest. Conventional mice live only three years, but naked mole rats can live for 28. Other animals being studied include whales, bats, rockfish, zebrafish and clams, the oldest of which, a quahog clam, lived to be 220 years old. In many of these animals, the rate of telomere deterioration corresponds with their lifespan. The longer the telomeres last, the longer the animals live. Studying these creatures may tell us much about human aging and lead to treatments for aging-related diseases. If one day humans discover an important new treatment for cancer, it may be due to one of these creatures — or to the 200-pound lobster living peacefully in a tank at Boston University.”

Forever
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/20/184723/82
http://metafilter.com/88971/Nobody-Home
“For the past 21 years, across the limitless expanse of the North Pacific, a lonely whale has been singing, calling for a response. There has been none, and there never will. Picked up first in 1989 by NOAA hydrophones, the call is clearly a whale, but different than all other known species. Different enough that no other whale has responded in all this time. Hypotheses vary, but the mental image is definitely haunting.”

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/leakier-than-thou/

Wikileaks Develops New Business Model, Goes On Strike
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8490867.stm
“WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website that allows people to publish uncensored information anonymously, has suspended operations owing to financial problems. Its running costs including staff payments are $600,000, but so far this year it has raised just $130,000. WikiLeaks has established a reputation for publishing information that traditional media cannot. The website claims to be non-profit and relies on donations. A statement on its front page says it is funded by “human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public”.

Labor Dispute
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jan/29/wikileaks-shut-down
“Its tremendous success has meant the site has often struggled under the volume of users. It has faced down governments, investment banks and the famously litigious Church of Scientology but paying its operating costs has proved its undoing. As of today instead of reading government secrets and details of corporate malfeasance all visitors to the site will see is an appeal for cash. The site won Index on Censorship’s 2008 freedom of expression award because it’s an invaluable resource for anonymous whistleblowers and investigative journalists. But Wikileaks is not just a tool for journalists, it allows ordinary Kenyans to read a confidential report detailing the billions their former president allegedly siphoned from the country’s coffers. Its repository includes controversial military documents including the US rules of engagement in Iraq and an operating manual issued to army officers in Guantánamo Bay. It has put corporations on notice that the costs of unethical behaviour are immeasurable in PR terms because it amplifies the Streisand effect, the social media phenomenon that punishes those who use the courts to suppress or censor information, by ensuring it has a much wider reach.”

Overworked, Undervalued
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Notable_leaks
http://wikileaks.org/
“To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon. We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.”

Support Technically
“Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. If you support our mission, you can help us by integrating new hardware into our project infrastructure or developing software for the project. Become patron of a WikiLeaks server or other parts of our technology, adding more pillars to the stability and balance of the WikiLeaks platform. Servers come trouble-free and legally fortified, software is uniquely challenging. If you can provide rackspace, power and an uplink, or a dedicated server or storage space, for at least 12 months, or software development work for WikiLeaks, please write to wl-supporters[at]sunshinepress[dot]org”

Support Legally
“Individuals or organizations wishing to donate lawyer time write to wl-legal[at]sunshinepress[dot]org”

Going Galt
http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/26C3/mp4/26c3-3567-en-wikileaks_release_10.mp4
http://stefanmey.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/leak-o-nomy-the-economy-of-wikileaks/

Q. So, you strike?
A. Yes, it’s similar to what unions do when they go on strike. They remind people that their labour has value by withdrawing supply entirely. We give free and important information to the world every
day. But when the supply is infinite in the sense that everyone is able to download what we publish, the perceived value starts to reduce down to zero. So by withdrawing supply and making our supply to zero, people start to once again perceive the value of what we are doing.
Q. Do you urgently need money?
A. We have lots of very significant upcoming releases, significant in terms of bandwidth, but even more significant in terms of amount of labour they will require to process and in terms of legal attacks we will get. So we need to be in a stronger position before we can publish the material.

Ending in Pay Settlement: Leaked Data Back Up, For Now
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/wikileaks-meets-cash-goal
Wikileaks Meets Its (Minimum) Cash Goal
“The whistleblowing site Wikileaks has apparently raised the money it needs to continue operating, for the time being, according to a message the organization sent out Wednesday night on Twitter.
“Achieved min. funraising [sic] goal; we’re back fighting for another year, even if we have to eat rice to do it,” read the tweet.”

Secure Anonymized Upload [Disclaimer]
https://secure.wikileaks.org/

YOU Submit a document for us to publish and, inorder to maximize its impact, distribute amongst our network of investigative journalists, human rights workers, lawyers and other partners.

WE will publish and keep published the document you submitted, provided it meets the submission criteria. Your data is stored decentralized, encrypted and as a preserved historic record, accessible in full by the public. The information you submit will be cleaned by us to not be technically traceable to your PDF printing program, your word installation, scanner, printer. We also anonymize
any information on you at a very early stage of the WikiLeaks network, and our services neither know who you are nor do they keep any information about your visit. We will never cooperate with anyone trying to identify you as our source. In fact we are legally bound not to do so, and any investigation into you as our source is a crime in various countries and will be prosecuted.

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/fuck-you-money/

Zero Rupee Note
http://india.5thpillar.org/ZRN
http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/paying-zero-public-services
“In India, petty corruption is pervasive – people often face situations where they are asked to pay bribes for public services that should be provided free. 5th Pillar distributes zero rupee notes in the hopes that ordinary Indians can use these notes as a means to protest demands for bribes by public officials. According to Vijay Anand, the idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. Anand took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people. He thought these notes would be a way to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The notes did just that. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee notes to date since it began this initiative. Along the way, the organization has collected many stories from people using them to successfully resist engaging in bribery.

Anand believes that the success of the notes lies in the willingness of the people to use them. People are willing to stand up against the practice that has become so commonplace because they are no longer afraid: first, they have nothing to lose, and secondly, they know that this initiative is being backed up by an organization—that is, they are not alone in this fight. For people to speak up against corruption that has become institutionalized within society, they must know that there are others who are just as fed up and frustrated with the system. Once they realize that they are not alone, they also realize that this battle is not unbeatable. Then, a path opens up—a path that can pave the way for relatively simple ideas like the zero rupee notes to turn into a powerful social statement against petty corruption.”"

5th Pillar
http://india.5thpillar.org/
http://5thpillar.blogspot.com/

Zero Currency (Select by Country)
http://zerocurrency.org/
“Corruption in the form of bribery is prevalent throughout the world. The zero currency note in your country’s currency is a tool to help you achive the goal of zero corruption. The note is a way for any human being to say NO to corruption without the fear of facing an encounter with persons in authority. Next time someone asks you for a bribe, just take your country’s zero currency note and hand it to them. This will let the other person know that you refuse to give or take any money in order to perform services required by law or to give or take money to do something illegal.”

Corruption Perceptions Index
http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2009

Institutional Corruption
http://blip.tv/file/3120038
http://change-congress.org/about/

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/egalite-guaranteed/

Google Missing Persons Spreadsheet
http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/

iReport Search By Name
http://www.ireport.com/ir-topic-stories.jspa?topicId=381628

Reuters EIS
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/126373176384.htm
“Emergency Information Service is exclusively operating for and on behalf of earthquake survivors, using local languages, French and Creole. The service is free and global.”

Relief Efforts
http://www.trackernews.net/search/?s=HAITI
http://www.cidi.org/incident/haiti-10a/
http://www.interaction.org/crisis-list/earthquake-haiti

Health + Sanitation Guides (Kreyol)
http://www.hesperian.org/publications_download.php
http://www.hesperian.info/assets/Where_There_is_no_Doctor_Creole.pdf
http://www.hesperian.info/assets/hesperian_wwhnd_haitian%20creole_2000.pdf

Learn Kreyol
http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/?lang=ht
http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Creole-French-English_Phrase_Dictionary_Wiki

Technical Volunteer Registry
http://dex.cidi.org/
http://www.ewb-usa.org/haiti.php

Importable Infrastructure : Who’s Where, Doing What
http://haiti-orgs.sahanafoundation.org/prod/or/organisation
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/dbc.nsf/doc108?OpenForm&emid=EQ-2010-000009-HTI&rc=2

Conditions
http://wfplogistics.org/haiti-earthquake-2010

Crisis Mapping
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/main
http://sitroom.ushahididev.com/

Crisis Commons [White Hat]
http://haiti.crisiscommons.org/
http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake

Network Relief Kit (NRK)
http://www.nethope.org/impact/programs/
http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol19/?pg=46&pm=1
“NetHope members who have been active in our relief efforts firmly believe that NGOs on the ground require a lightweight “NetHope ICT Kit” they can carry in their baggage to provide instant communications from Day 1 onward. This kit must have the following features:”

U.S. Stops Deporting Haitians
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0113/Haiti-earthquake-US-stops-deporting-Haitians

Jubilee Act HR 4405 / Drop The Debt
http://www.one.org/us/actnow/drophaitiandebt/index.html
http://www.jubileeusa.org/jubilee-act.html

Inflatable Hospital En Route
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/press/release.cfm?id=4165
Doctors Without Borders Cargo Plane Blocked From Landing in Port-au-Prince

No Medicines, Baby Born On Street

PREVIOUSLY ON SPECTRE :

HASTILY FORMED RELIEF NETWORKS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2006/08/17/strong-angel-iii-hastily-formed-networks/
TXTBANKNG THE UNBANKED
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/sms-banking-in-kenya/
ONE CELLPHONE PER CHILD
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/one-cellphone-per-child
KATRINA 2.0
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/katrina-20/
R U IN JAIL?
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/r-u-in-jail/

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/haitians-eating-mud

….long before the earthquake….

Haitians Eating Mud (cont.)

Buying Cooking-Dirt On Credit [Video]
http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/02/19/dirt-poor-haitians-eat-cookies-made-of-mud/4120/

Geophagy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_eating
“Geophagy is the practice of eating earthy or soil-like substances such as clay, and chalk, in order to obtain essential nutrients such as sulfur and phosphorus from the soil. It is closely related to pica, a classified eating disorder in the DSM-IV characterized by abnormal cravings for nonfood items. The many possible health benefits of geophagy remain under study and are much debated. Many scientists believe that it is only harmful, while others argue that there may be adaptive benefits to the practice, since humans and animals alike have engaged in it for thousands of years.”

Butter-Flavored
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=b7ed2a4ccb7fdae5294a5dbad78a45306d828d99
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html
‘In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute. “It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”’

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/acacia-self-defense/

Acacia Self-Defense
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12717361.200-antelope-activate-the-acacias-alarm-system.html
Antelope activate the acacia’s alarm system
“Acacia trees pass on an ‘alarm signal’ to other trees when antelope browse on their leaves, according to a zoologist from Pretoria University. Wouter Van Hoven says that acacias nibbled by antelope produce leaf tannin in quantities lethal to the browsers, and emit ethylene into the air which can travel up to 50 yards. The ethylene warns other trees of the impending danger, which then step up their own production of leaf tannin within just five to ten minutes. Van Hoven made his discovery when asked to investigate the sudden death of some 3000 South African antelope, called kudu, on game ranches in the Transvaal. He noticed that giraffe, roaming freely, browsed only on one acacia tree in ten, avoiding those trees which were downwind. Kudu, which are fenced in on the game ranches, have little other than acacia leaves to eat during the winter months. So the antelope continue to browse until the tannin from the leaves sets off a lethal metabolic chain reaction in their bodies.”

Interspecies Mutualism
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7179880.stm
“It is all because of the Acacia’s mutually beneficial relationship with a biting ant. Together they fend off Africa’s big grazing mammals; but it is these very antagonists that are needed to keep the plant-insect team working in concert. The whistling thorn tree (Acacia drepanolobium) and the biting ant (Crematogaster) that lives on it form a relationship, evolved over many millennia, in which both species co-operate and in turn benefit from each other. When this “mutualism” is working well, Acacia trees provide ants with swollen thorns, which serve as nesting sites; and nectar, which the ants collect from the bases of Acacia leaves. In return for this investment, ants protect the tree from browsing mammals by aggressively swarming against anything that disturbs the tree.”

Bribes + Repellents
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8383577.stm
“That is the plus side for the plants. But being inhabited by aggressive insects could make one important aspect of a plant’s life difficult – flowering. One clever approach by the plant is a food “bribe”. Acacias produce structures called beltian bodies on the leaf tips. These, Dr Raine explains, are nutritious structures produced by the plant to feed its resident colony of ant-guards. But [when in bloom], it is a case of chemical warfare. Floral volatile compounds can act as signals – drawing in pollinators such as bees and hummingbirds in with their irresistible aromas. To the ants, however, they are far from irresistible. “The flowers seem to produce chemicals that are repellent to the ants,” said Dr Raine. “They release these particularly during the time when they’re producing lots of pollen, so the ants are kept off the flowers.” The researchers think that some of the repellents that acacias produce are chemical “mimics” of signalling pheromones that the ants use to communicate. “We put flowers into syringes and puffed the scent over the ant to see how they would respond, and they became quite agitated and aggressive” he explained. “The ants use a pheromone to signal danger; if they’re being attacked by a bird they will release that chemical that will quickly tell the other ants to retreat.” Dr Raine says this clever evolutionary system shows how the ants and their plants have evolved to protect, control and manipulate each other.”

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/so-far-so-good/

U.S. Supreme Court vs ‘Flying’ Asian Carp
http://www.michigan.gov/documents/ag/Motion-Petition-Brief_305173_7.pdf
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2009/12/michigan-sues-illinois-in-supreme-court.php

Enforcement Issues

Great Lakes Infected?
http://www.fws.gov/midwest/Fisheries/hot-asian-carp-12-09.html
http://www.asiancarp.org/rapidresponse/greatlakesthreat.htm

Laws Of Nature
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gPBBiKJKfp1MbkPXxJCnNjnZCCrQD9CNR67O0
Michigan files suit in US high court over Asian carp
“Michigan asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to close shipping locks near Chicago to prevent Asian carp from invading the Great Lakes and endangering their $7 billion fishery. State Attorney General Mike Cox filed a lawsuit Monday with the nation’s highest court against Illinois, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. They operate canals and other waterways that open into Lake Michigan. Bighead and silver carp from Asia have been detected in those waterways after migrating north in the Mississippi and Illinois rivers for decades. Scientists say DNA found north of the barrier suggest at least some of the carp have gotten through and may be within 6 miles of Lake Michigan. If so, the only other obstacle between them and the lake are shipping locks, which open frequently to grant passage for cargo vessels. Fifty members of Congress last week joined environmental groups in urging closure of the locks — the same demand made in Michigan’s lawsuit. “The Great Lakes are an irreplaceable resource,” Cox, who is seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Michigan, said at a news conference in Detroit. “Thousands of jobs are at stake and we will not get a second chance once the carp enter Lake Michigan.” He likened the fish to “nuclear bombs.” Cox went directly to the Supreme Court because it handles disputes between states. It asks the court to immediately order them closed, and to create new barriers to prevent the carp from entering the ship canal from nearby waterways during floods. “The carp invasion is a good textbook example of irreparable harm,” law professor Noah Hall said. “It’s unfortunate that there would be an assumption that this would make some positive resolution come sooner than is truly feasible,” Metropolitan Water Reclamation District spokeswoman Jill Horist said. “Even if the locks were closed there’s still a variety of ways for DNA or Asian carp to enter Lake Michigan.” Messages left with the Army Corps of Engineers seeking comment were not returned.”

Rivers Preventively Poisoned
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chicago-river-poisoned-to
Chicago river poisoned to block feared Asian carp
“Two electrical barriers in the canal were erected in 2002 and 2006 to shock any fish, particularly carp, that try to swim up the canal to Lake Michigan. The newer barrier is being switched off to perform maintenance on it. To give themselves a window to complete the task and keep any carp at bay below the barrier, authorities dumped into the canal more than 2,000 pounds (900 kg) of the natural poison rotenone that prevents fish gills from absorbing oxygen. The toxin, which is used as a broad-spectrum insecticide and pesticide, kills fish and freshwater snails but does not harm other animals. It dissipates within two days, though authorities planned to introduce a neutralizing agent to speed up the process. Notre Dame University scientists recently detected carp DNA on the lake side of the barriers, which could indicate the carp have already passed them and the effort is either too little or too late. Fishermen have been asked to look out for the invasive carp on the lake side of the barriers. The DNA discovery led some environmentalists to call for river locks to be shut and ask for permanent separation of the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River watershed. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm has indicated her state might demand locks be closed permanently.”

Previously On Spectre : Cloned Aquarium Plant Takes Over Mediterranean
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/hacking-nature-for-salvation-and-profit/
Viking Mice (+ Mummy Lice)
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/viking-mice/
Bad Moves In Central Planning : Death To Sparrows
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/11/08/spectre-classics-bad-moves-in-central-planning/

Carp Bow-Hunting
http://carpbusters.com/proteams_riversedge.shtml

Dystopian Ecotourism [Wear A Helmet]

Invasive Species Primer
http://www.bayjournal.com/article.cfm?article=3743
Proposal To Add Carp To State Prison Menus
http://www.sphere.com/nation/article/invasive-asian-carp-inspire-lawsuits-extreme-archery/19296294

Louisiana Gov’t Cajun/Jerk Cooking Show
http://www.lib.niu.edu/2002/oi020509.html
http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf?/base/sports-164/126199962984530.xml&storylist=louisiana
“The fish are easy to identify. They have small, downward-facing eyes, a stout body and protruding lower jaw. Silver carp commonly exceed 20 pounds. Record catches have approached 100 pounds, Thomas said. But the silver carp is best known for an unusual and dangerous survival behavior. When startled by the sound of a boat motor, it attempts to flee danger by jumping skyward, frequently hitting boats and people. The action has earned them the nickname, “flying carp,” Massimi said. “As you can imagine, getting hit by a 50 or 60 pound carp can cause serious problems,” Massimi said. The fish have been known to cause boating accidents, black eyes, bruises and more severe injuries. Trying to promote annoying invasive species as a tasty treat is a worthwhile tactic, but it might be difficult to pull off, Massimi said. Since the fish eat algae, they don’t tend to bite on hooks. Chapman, however, said that might make the fish a more exciting target for anglers. “You can go bowfishing or wait for them to jump in the boat,” Chapman said. “Commercial fishermen catch them in hoop-and-gill nets in Illinois.” Massimi, who tried Chapman and Thomas’ carp recipes at a recent state coastal meeting said the fish are delicious and taste like “fresh catfish.” Silver and bighead carp have moist, white mild flesh, he said. The larger carp yield meaty fillets. But their unusual bone structure does make them difficult to clean, a drawback that can make fishermen wary. In the video, Chapman demonstrates his unique cleaning methods. He also demonstrates three cooking methods: blackened fillets, grilled fillets and a fried, bone-in preparation he calls ‘flying carp wings’. “You eat the fish off the bone, just like a chicken wing,” Massimi said. The fish, regardless of how they are captured or cook, do need to be put on ice quickly, he said, because they spoil easily.”

Recipes (More Please)
http://www.lib.niu.edu/2002/oi020509.html
http://www.iisgcp.org/AsianCarp/recipes_chapman.pdf
From The Kitchens of Duane Chapman, USGS Fish Biologist, and Rob Maher, head of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources commercial fishing program, with Mike Hooe of the Illinois Division of Fisheries

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/hyper-adapted/

Synanthropes
http://beefheart.com/walker/lyrics/crow/icecreamforcrow.htm
http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10007459o-2000331777b,00.htm
“My new favourite word is synanthropy – the study and practice of creating symbiotic relationships between people and animals. Metafilter pointed me at A Vending Machine For Crows, a project by polymath techie Joshua Klein that aims to put some of the hundreds of millions of dropped coins back in circulation. It does this by training crows to realise that if they find coins and take them to the machine, they’ll get food. The benefits of this idea are manifold. Klein posits that if you can get a few crows trained, then the idea will spread naturally throughout the population – and that means that mostly, human intervention can be restricted to seeding the idea and then leaving enough machines around. That makes it very economical – especially if the crows remain unaware of the true market value of the coinage they find. Although I’m sure that economics will take over if the idea catches on; if it’s profitable for the machine operators, then rival devices will appear offering better deals and a wider range of treats – and I do hope crows really are partial to ice cream. Is it perhaps entirely smart to introduce intelligent non-humans into our economy? If this catches on,avian mugging will spread from the seagulls in no time flat.”

Coconuts As Portable Shelter
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/15/2771822.htm
“Scientists at the Melbourne Museum have recorded the first case of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The veined octopus selects, stacks, transports and assembles coconut shells as portable armour. “It comes at a cost, carrying these shells in this awkward way and it’s a fantastic example of complex behaviours in what we consider the lower life forms,” he said. They watched the octopuses dig out coconut shells from the ocean floor and empty the shells of mud using jets of water. Dr Finn says it is not unusual for octopuses to live inside coconuts but how it uses the shells is unique. “It gathers them together, it stacks them like bowls, covers its whole body over bowls, lifts them up and then trundles along on its arm tips until a predator comes or there’s a threat,” he said. “Then it closes them over like a ball and hides inside.”"

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