Internet Could Act As Ecological Early Warning System 63
Wired is reporting that ecologists think the internet could act as an early ecological warning system based on data mining human interactions. While much of this work has been based on systems like Google Flu Trends, the system will remain largely theoretical for the near future. "The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can't keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It's more crowd mining than crowd sourcing."
Re:Pretty obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:HORSE SHIT (Score:3, Insightful)
Arguably, signal cuts through noise. If millions of people are wrong about it but in random directions, the handful of people that are completely right about it, and the elite cadre who are just slightly more right than wrong about it, might turn into a usable few bits of info on the subject.
Why wait till is too late for reversing the damage (Score:4, Insightful)
We already are overpopulated, we already are consuming much more than the biosphere is able to produce with sustainability and we know it.
So, anything that we should do when the warning system fires, we should be doing NOW.