Wild Sanctuary, a company dedicated to archiving the natural sounds around the globe is offering a software application that can associate natural sounds with locations in Google Earth – sweet!
Archive for Environment
Virtual Weather
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Earth Research Lab has a very nice series of slides showcasing the planet’s weather system including one that
gives Second Life users the opportunity to walk through a series of interactive exhibits, showing, for example, the effects of global warming on large glaciers
Images: Tsunamis, hurricanes hit ‘Second Life’ | CNET News.com
see also the Environment category
Personal Security, War And Global Climate Mesh
As recently seen in posts on Ogilvy And Global Climate Change Awareness and Darfur Atrocity Awareness, the meshverse can be a tool for addressing complex problems. In order for people to grasp the magnitude of many of today’s global challenges, there have to be tools for organizing, analyzing and communicating information about the problems and potential solutions. No tool is perfect and tools can be misused and abused but the scope of problems this planet faces are growing as rapidly as the meshverse and we need better ways of resolving them. War as a means of conflict resolution has gone beyond being ineffective to becoming increasingly counterproductive. As the environmental impact of war increases, the impact of global climate change leads to more war
Global warming poses a “serious threat to America’s national security” and the U.S. likely will be dragged into fights over water and other shortages, top retired military leaders warn in a new report.
The report says that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water, increased hunger instability from worsening disease and rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. “The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism,” the 35-page report predicts.
Ex-generals: Global warming threatens U.S. security – CNN.com
This in my view goes beyond the security of nations(let alone just the U.S. ) since each one of us has only one planet to live on. Addressing global concerns is in the interest of personal security for everyone.
Ogilvy And Global Climate Change Awareness
Ogilvy is flooding portions of Second Life to promote awareness of global climate change.
“As Second Life is created, owned and maintained by its citizens they have the power to change things for the better. We’re hoping that this sense of empowerment will be reflected when the second life citizens move from the virtual to the real world.”
Using The Meshverse To Address Global Warming
Just a few days ago, was talking about Augmented Reality With Croquet, now from the Linden blog I see a post about Augmented Reality that talks about how Second Life can be used to deal with global warming issues:
Gavin Starks from Global Cool commented at Euro FOO that one of the problems with carbon emissions is that no one can see them. By building a HUD and a database mapping SL object Ids to RL carbon costs we could make carbon costs visible in SL and use it to educate people about carbon emissions in RL.
On the one hand, from a coding perspective Croquet is a MUCH better tool for addressing this kind of work, but Second Life is right now easily accssible to a huge body of people and MUCH better supported. As one of the Croquet architects has recently pointed out, Croquet is a tool for building virtual world environments rather than an environment itself. But this doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. Even without Second Life being open source, there are ways to mix the two in a solution. This is where the Intermeshverse Group can really have an impact. Stay tuned.
Environmental Mesh
the electricity grid of the future, one that will look more like the Internet – distributed, interactive, open-source – than the dumb, one-way network of today
Call it the networked environment. Picture tiny – we’re talking small as a dime – wireless sensors lining lake beds and ocean floors, buried in the ground, and floating in the sky.
Conservationists are looking to tag endangered animals with radio frequency ID tags and GPS sensors, and then use Web 2.0 mashup techniques to overlay their locations and map details of their habitats and habits with other landscape features to design better wildlife preserves.
