stephen.nyc

Tag: Australia

  • The Coronavirus is causing the world’s largest work-from-home experiment

    The Coronavirus is causing the world’s largest work-from-home experiment

    The Coronavirus is essentially a flu-like respiratory-illness. Here’s what we know so far:

    • It’s contagious like SARS, and about 2x more infectious than the seasonal flu.
    • So far, the fatality rate is less than 3%. There’s already been more fatalities than the last SARS outbreak in China. Keeping that number low is going to have to be a global effort. Young children and the elderly are at a higher-risk of respiratory issues.
    • The period for symptoms to fully appear is roughly 2-weeks. This is what makes this virus especially difficult to detect and prevent. The virus can easily spread from person to person prior to showing any symptoms.
    • The virus has already spread across multiple borders. Primarily mainland China has the most confirmed cases. Russia, Unites States, United Kingdom, Thailand, Turkey, Japan, Australia and have had infected travelers confirmed.
    • The WHO has declared the Coronavirus a global health emergency which should catalyze superpowers to work to contain the spread of the infectious virus.
    • To prevent further spread of the disease, many Chinese companies are asking their corporate workforce to work-from home:

    Tiko Mamuchashvili, a senior event planner at the Hyatt hotel in Beijing who was supposed to return to work on Friday, was initially told her vacation would be extended until Feb. 3. Then she received a notification to work from home for two additional days. A few days later, the directive was extended until Feb. 10. She has to notify her department each morning about her whereabouts and report whether she is running a temperature.

    “Usually going back to work from holidays feels a little weird, but working from home this time with such short notice feels even more unusual,” she said. With hotel event cancellations rolling in on a daily basis, “basically, all I can do is answer emails,” she said.

    Wuhan’s concerted effort to fight the spread of this virus abroad and within its border is remarkable. But, other metropolitan areas like Hong Kong are not getting the same countermeasures. Reportedly there’s been 15 confirmed cases in Hong Kong. Hopefully others can and will emulate Wuhan’s work-from-home experiment and their hyper-mobilized efforts to quarantine, treat and contain the spread:

  • BlackRock will divest from fossil fuel industries — CEO letter to investors states ‘climate risk is investment risk’

    BlackRock will divest from fossil fuel industries — CEO letter to investors states ‘climate risk is investment risk’

    Bill McKibben at The New Yorker writes:

    By one estimate, there’s about eighty trillion dollars of money on the planet. If that’s correct, then BlackRock’s holding of seven trillion dollars means that nearly a dime of every dollar rests in its digital files, mostly in the form of stocks it invests in for pension funds and the like. So when BlackRock’s C.E.O., Larry Fink, devoted his annual letter to investors to explaining that climate change has now put us “on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” it marked a watershed moment in climate history.

    He’s right about the financial future, of course—one can’t look at the clouds of smoke now obscuring the Australian continent and come away thinking that we can maintain our present course. But anyone paying attention—which includes investment-fund C.E.O.s—has known the score for years. What’s changed now are a couple of factors.

    This is impressive, and Larry Fink is completely right. “Climate risk is investment risk,” as he states in his letter. If we don’t start acting right now — we might not have an opportunity later. It begins here, with the reshaping of how we invest. Taming the river of money, will make considerable waves in the future.

    It wasn’t that long ago that CEO’s and leaders from blue-chip giants of the Business Roundtable were meeting to redefine the responsibility companies should play in society. There’s serious momentum, for the first time in nearly a century to re-think and re-model companies, businesses, and Wall Street — from the top-down. We’re entering an era where leadership is finally understanding just how important it is to put money where it matters most: engaging on middle-class wealth, diversity/inclusion and perhaps most importantly, environmental protection.

  • Australia’s catastrophic bushfires are generating severe thunderstorm systems

    Australia’s catastrophic bushfires are generating severe thunderstorm systems

    It was only two days ago that the New South Wales Rural Fire Service warned the developing bushfires were growing in intensity and would generate its own weather system. Unfortunately, these bushfires were growing far too quick to be contained. In turn, these sorts of weather patterns become a repeating cycle: fires, wind, thunderstorm, lighting, and repeat.

    The Amazon fires had roughly 2.2M hectares burned, the 2019/2020 Australia Bushfire has burned 5.9M hectares so far. It’s a bit mind-blowing to draw a comparison between two very large numbers. The destruction of wildlife alone is enough to make your stomach churn, and the video really communicates the devastation:

    https://twitter.com/goodoldcatchy/status/1212755943102058501?s=21

    Most of the pictures of these bushfires and the pyro-cumulonimbus (sometimes referred to as cumulonimbus flammagenitus) cloud formations are really intense:

    https://twitter.com/merxplat/status/1213410879972114439?s=20

    According to Quartz, this is only the beginning. Climate change has radically altered meteorology on Earth, and we can expect these sorts of weather patterns more frequently in arid regions:

    As global temperatures rise, pyrocumulus clouds may become more common. A similar fire-induced weather system took place during California’s wildfire season in 2018. The state’s hilly terrain created perfect conditions for not only thunderstorms, but fire tornadoes. An unprecedented number of wildfires in north Russia and the Arctic Circle in the summer of 2019, as captured by satellite images, contributed to an increase in lightning strikes in the North Pole.

    To make matters worse, the smoke and carbon dioxide is stuffing the air downstream in Auckland, New Zealand and turning the sky orange. This is getting really bad, really quickly.

  • Drought-stricken Queensland struggles as a Chinese company moves in to bottle its water

    Drought-stricken Queensland struggles as a Chinese company moves in to bottle its water

    Marc Bain writes at Quartz:

    Drought has been a chronic issue in southeastern Australia for years. In regions such as southern Queensland, months can pass without rain. Local communities have to ration water or risk running out.

    Yet a company owned by Chinese investors based in Brisbane still got approved last week to run a commercial water-mining operation in the area. It plans to transport the water to a facility where it can bottle and sell it.

    This reminds me of the Nestlé Bottling company which continues to bottle clean water near Flint, Michigan as the city of Flint continues to suffer from tainted poisonous lead-tainted water. Thanks to the egregious and violent extremes of climate change, we can expect more and more of these sorts of stories. Simply put, water is the new oil in this new era.

  • Interfaces, People and Machines: Good Design Goes Beyond Just Good Looks

    Interfaces, People and Machines: Good Design Goes Beyond Just Good Looks

    Interface: people, machines, design, is a new show exhibiting at the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences in New South Wales, Australia. From the exhibition’s description:

    Interface: people, machines, design explores how design has been applied to information technology products; about how a handful of companies made complicated technology appealing and easy to use. What they did effectively was, look at what you do, think about what you need and create what you want. Interface is about the visionaries who started some of the great consumer product companies of the 20th century, including Olivetti, Braun and Apple, and how the designers and engineers they hired found a means of imparting their ideals into the products they designed.

    I’m a huge fan of user-centric design. We often forget that everything is designed. While most items are not thoughtfully designed, the most successful are (and therefor, plenty of products are emulations or forked from original products without permission, such as mass-market SEM watches). The Conversation has an excellent summary of the exhibit core-focus on human-centric engineering and design:

    While we nowadays associate interfaces with digital computing, this show suggests we should think otherwise. Tactile buttons, knobs, dials and machined surfaces abound.

    […]

    Featuring the work of well-known designers such as Dieter Rams, Jonathan Ive, Ettore Sottsass, Susan Kare and Peter Behrens, the show does more than acknowledge the genius of the “superstar”. It also presents an “archaeology” of how material, function and form morph across time.

    More than this, Interface underscores the importance and continuity of what we now call “user-centered design”. It shows this across a range of practices – and not just modern information design.

    2+7 Telephone. Designed by Marcello Nizzoli, made by SAFNAT, Italy, 1958. Powerhouse Museum
    Divisumma 18 portable calculator, designed by Mario Bellini, made by Olivetti, Italy, 1973. Photo: Powerhouse Museum. Powerhouse Museum

  • Fairy Circles

    Fairy Circles

    Our planet, Earth, as it has come to be known — is the only place known to harbor life, is a pretty weird and mysterious ball of mud. We have it pretty good here. Even as we sit right on the cusp of complete annihilation, it’s really not so bad here. Protected by our thin atmosphere and fickle magnetosphere, we dodge immediate extermination by the all too occasional heat, radiation, and the insufferable sub-zero temperatures of interstellar space.

    While we understand a whole lot about Earth and the life here (past and present), there’s also just so much we still don’t know or understand. One particular mystery (National Geographic has some great photos here) of life we don’t fully understand isn’t a creature at all — rather it is the absence of life that is startling. They’re called fairy circles.

    Fairy circles seen from a hillside in Namibia. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

    Scientists back in 2004, believed they were the result of radioactivity or even termites. But alas, results came up short in several excavations and published papers detailing the lack of discovery. Others, unconvinced by previous research pressed on with the theory of termites causing the anomaly:

    New research may now have yielded a more credible explanation for the fairy circles as examples of natural ecosystem engineering by a particular species of sand termites, Psammotermes allocerus. A German scientist reported on Thursday that most likely these industrious termites were the agents for making much of their desert home an oasis of permanent grassland.

    Curious thing about the fairy circles, they occur pretty frequently in the deserts of Namibia. Researchers continue to go there for answers but then, something very peculiar happened. The fairy circles began cropping up in Australia.

    The only thing Australia has in common with southwest Africa is the dry, arid conditions that resemble a desert. But apart from that, the two continents have been separated from each other for about 200 million years now, and the wildlife disparity couldn’t be more different.

    The mystery continued to unravel and unfurl between scientists. However, nowadays there seems to be some agreement that the odd circles are a bi-product of ecosystems operating at the razors-edge for survival. Not unlike extremomophilic bacteria living in high-temperature deep-sea vents or cacti in deserts. The grasses, are just trying to organize in optimal patterns:

    Many other researchers, including entomologists and botanists, aren’t convinced. They think the circles occur because plants engage in a tug-of-war for water and other scarce nutrients. Due to their battles, the landscape “self-organizes” into rings of deep-rooted grasses, draining water from a central reservoir where no other plants can thrive. This explains why, as the researchers Michael Cramer and Nichole Barger found in 2013, the fairy circles are restricted to places with low rainfall, and why they grow after dry years and shrink after wet ones.

    There we have it. To be brief, there are two grass types: one that prefers to grow deep with roots on the edges of moisture and nutrients., and the other which prefers to grow in a collective matrix with shorter root structures. A slide from Cramer and Barger’s research is pretty revealing:

    Michael D. Cramer & Nichole N. Barger

    Mystery solved, for now at least. If you’re upset and feel robbed of an unsolved mystery, I invite you to read more about Australia’s unsolved (and often strange) mysteries.

  • Summerland Peninsula Returned to Penguins, Suburb is Erased

    Besha Rodell for The New York Times:

    The “penguin parade” has been a major attraction since the 1920s, when tourists were led by torchlight to view the nightly arrival of the birds — the world’s smallest penguin breed, with adults averaging 13 inches tall — from a day of fishing and swimming.

    For much of that time, the penguins lived among the residents of a housing development, mostly modest vacation homes, in tight proximity to cars and pets, as well as ravenous foxes. The penguins’ numbers fell precipitously. But in 1985, the state government took an extraordinary step: It decided to buy every piece of property on the Summerland Peninsula and return the land to the penguins. The process was completed in 2010.

    The birds are now thriving. There are about 31,000 breeding penguins on the peninsula, up from 12,000 in the 1980s. Phillip Island Nature Parks is the most popular wildlife tourist destination in the state of Victoria, drawing 740,000 visitors in 2018. And late last month, a gleaming symbol of that success opened to the public: a $58 million visitor center, a striking star-shaped building with glass walls that look onto penguin burrows.

    The penguins are alright! ????????

    This is the first time in a very long time, I’ve come across a positive environmental story. Make sure to checkout the entire piece at The Times. There’s incredible photography, and it’s such an uplifting tale. It’s proof-positive that when we come together, invest in long-term preservation efforts, we can make a lasting impact protecting what matters most to us — our shared home.

  • Sally West’s Beach Studies

    Sally West’s Beach Studies

    I’ve been wanting to share this artist’s work on my blog for a long time. So long in fact, I don’t even remember how I came across her paintings in the first place.

    Sally West is an oil painter who lives and works in Australia. She has some pretty killer work, but her beach studies have recently blown me away. They’re just deliciously weighty, and the folds of thick dabs of oil produce a dance of motion I really enjoy. If I could afford to buy paintings, Sally West would probably be one of my first fine art purchases. Here’s some of her beach studies from her recent Surf & Snow series:

    If you’re interested in learning more about Sally West, check out KAB Gallery’s blog post on her work.