[P2P-F] 2 items of interest .. hive intelligence and abandoning climate change concerns

[Michel Bauwens]

*Online Gamers Crack AIDS Enzyme
Puzzle*<http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/online-gamers-crack-aids-enzyme-puzzle-20110919-1kgq2.html>
The Sydney Morning-Herald (Australia)
*This is an example of an emerging new trend: hive intelligence. Linkage
through the internet leading to linkage in the nonlocal consciousness
domain, guided by shared intention. This demonstrates the power of such a
cohort, linked together in a game that invokes both reasoning and what is
called "intuition" -- which read opening to nonlocal consciousness -- to
solve urgent problems. This is excellent news. T! his is a new innovation
process that holds enormous potential, as the report makes clear.*
Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or
Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an
AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.

The exploit is published on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural &
Molecular Biology, where - exceptionally in scientific publishing - both
gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors.

Their target was a monomeric protease enzyme, a cutting agent in the complex
molecular tailoring of retroviruses, a family that includes HIV.
Advertisement: Story continues below

Figuring out the structure of proteins is vital for understanding the causes
of many diseases and developing drugs to block them.

But a microscope gives only a flat image of what to the outsider looks like
a plate of one-dimensional scrunched-up spaghetti. Pharmacologists, though,
need a 3D picture that "unfolds" the molecule and rotates it in order to
reveal potential targets for drugs.

This is where Foldit comes in.

Developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, it is a fun-for-purpose
video game in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold
chains of amino acids - the building blocks of proteins - using a set of
online tools.

To the astonishment of the scientists, the gamers produced an accurate model
of the enzyme in just three weeks.

Cracking the enzyme "provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral
drugs", says the study, referring to the lifeline medication against the
human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

It is believed to be the first time that gamers have resolved a
long-standing scientific problem.

*"We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods
had failed," Firas Khatib of the university's biochemistry lab said in a
press release.*

"The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly
directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems."

One of Foldit's creators, Seth Cooper, explained why gamers had succeeded
where computers had failed.

"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good
at," he said.

"Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers
and humans. The results in this week's paper show that gaming, science and
computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before."
*Post Comment » <http://www.schwartzreport.net/addcomment.php?id=9356>*
*Climate Change: Who Cares Any
More?*<http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1b5e1776-df23-11e0-9af3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1YBnuuyJu>
SIMON KUPER - Financial Times (U.K.)
*This is the latest twist in the climate change trend, one which recognizes
nothing serious is going to be done about climate change until it is too
late and that all subsequent responses involve rich countries working out
local solutions while the world as a whole does... well, whatever it can
afford which, in the case of much of the world, is nothing at all.

This isn't going to work, of course, because it does not really address the
mass migrations that are coming, the utter disruption of the food system,
the increasing potential for pandemics as system break down. But when one is
as stupid as we are culturally, one is stupid all the way through.

The only "solution" I can see that has a chance is working at the local
level, for local responses that preserve the quality of life for
individuals, families and communities locally.*
When someone offered me a trip to India, I said, 'Definitely.” A couple of
years ago I’d have fretted about the carbon emissions. But like almost
everyone else, I have given up trying to prevent climate change. We in the
west have recently made an unspoken bet: we’re going to wing it, run the
risk of climatic catastrophe, and hope that it is mostly faraway people in
poor countries who will suffer.

Worries about climate probably peaked in 2007. That year I attended a
workshop full of northern European policymakers and politicians. The
moderator asked who believed climate change was a serious problem.
Practically everyone in the room raised their hands. We then spent two days
discussing action. I left feeling that if you were running a country like
Britain in 2007, you probably thought climate change was the single
overriding issue. Terrorism, immigration and even the economy were details
by comparison.

But in 2008 the economic crisis hit. To quote political scientist Roger
Pielke Jr’s 'iron law”: 'When policies focused on economic growth confront
policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will
win out every time.” In fact, Pielke, who teaches at the University of
Colorado, thinks the pre-2008 talk about action was mostly just talk anyway.
'It was easier for our societies to pretend we were doing something on the
issue when we felt rich, and were naive about the challenges of actually
transforming our energy system,” he says. 'But we never adopted any policies
that had a chance to do the job.”

Nowadays few societies even pretend to be doing anything anymore. The
Copenhagen global summit on climate in 2009 flopped. Carbon emissions are
rising at the high end of the scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. Worse, the global economy is becoming less carbon-efficient
per unit of output, as more countries turn to coal. When Japan and Germany
decided to go off nuclear after the Fukushima disaster, they weren’t
thinking about climate.

It’s sometimes said that democracies think too short-term to be able to
tackle climate change. Well, dictatorships aren’t tackling it either. They
too obey Pielke’s iron law. If they can get an extra person a car, they
will. Sure, countries are developing alternative energies such as wind and
solar. It’s handy to have something besides fossil fuels. But we will still
consume every molecule of fossil fuel we can find.

Illustration showing two men pushing a globeNo big state is doing enough
about climate change. For the planet, it barely matters whether Barack Obama
(who believes climate change is real) or Rick Perry (who doesn’t) wins next
year’s US election. Obama won’t stop climate change either. Ordinary people
sense the cause is lost. The wasteful minutiae of daily life that might once
have worried us – running a big bath, eating a steak, idly googling old
classmates – we now just do. Governments aren’t taxing this waste much.

We journalists are dropping the topic too. It’s been a thrilling year for
news, but the great absence on the news sites is climate change. Max
Boykoff, a colleague of Pielke’s at Colorado who tracks newspaper coverage
of the issue, finds that European and north American newspapers are writing
much less about it now than in 2006/7. Asian newspapers are also writing
somewhat less, even though their economies are doing fine. The environment
bores readers.

Almost everyone has given up. The question then becomes: what will happen?
Nobody is sure. Almost all climate scientists think the outcome will be bad,
perhaps catastrophic. They foresee more storms, droughts, floods and crop
failures around the world, as Obama said in 2009 when he was still talking
about these things. However, climate is far too complex a system to permit
exact predictions. Nobody knows whether global temperatures will rise two
degrees centigrade this century, nor whether that is the tipping point for
catastrophe. When climate scientists make exact predictions, says Pielke,
it’s usually a bid to focus the minds of politicians and voters. It hasn’t
worked.

Rich countries now have a semi-conscious plan: whatever happens, we’ll have
the money to cope. We’ll build dikes, or pipe in more water from somewhere
else, or turn up the aircon if it gets too hot. Our model is the
Netherlands: the country below sea level protects itself against flooding
through a network of dams, sluices and barriers. This costs about €45 per
Dutch person per year. The Dutch think that even as climate change raises
sea levels, their defences can cope for another four centuries. By then
there’ll be new technologies.

In short, rich countries will buy protection. If they need to abandon
vulnerable cities like New Orleans or Venice, they will. The bigger problem
is for poor countries. If Bangladesh floods or Nigeria dries up, they
probably won’t cope well. But then our mental health in the west is built on
not worrying too much about what happens to Bangladeshis or Nigerians.
*Post Comment » <http://www.schwartzreport.net/addcomment.php?id=9353>*

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