These Indian fishermen take plastic out of the sea and use it to build roads 07-20

Every one of India’s 1.3 billion people uses an average 11kg of plastic each year. After being used, much of this plastic finds its way to the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, where it can maim and kill fish, birds and other marine wildlife.

Fisherman in India’s southern state of Kerala are taking on the battle to cut the level of plastic waste in the oceans.

When the trawlers drag their nets through the water, they end up scooping out huge amounts of plastic along with the fish. Until recently the fishermen would simply throw the plastic junk back into the water.

But last summer Kerala’s fisheries minister J. Mercykutty Amma started a scheme to change this. Under her direction, the state government launched a campaign called Suchitwa Sagaram, or Clean Sea, which trains fishermen to collect the plastic and bring it back to shore.

In Suchitwa Sagaram’s first 10 months, fisherman have removed 25 tonnes of plastic from the Arabian Sean, including 10 tonnes of plastic bags and bottles, according to a UN report on the scheme.

From waste to roads

Once all the plastic waste caught by the Keralan fishermen reaches the shore, it is collected by people from the local fishing community - all but two of whom are women - and fed into a plastic shredding machine.

Like so many of India’s plastic recycling schemes, this shredded plastic is converted into material that is used for road surfacing.

There are more than 34,000km of plastic roads in India, mostly in rural areas. More than half of the roads in the southern state of Tamil Nadu are plastic. This road surface is increasingly popular as it makes the roads more resilient to India’s searing heat. The melting point for plastic roads is around 66°C, compared to 50°C for conventional roads.

Using recycled plastic is a cheaper alternative to conventional plastic additives for road surfaces. Every kilometre of plastic road uses the equivalent of a million plastic bags, saving around one tonne of asphalt. Each kilometre costs roughly 8% less than a conventional road.

And plastic roads help create work. As well as the Keralan fishing crews, teams of on-land plastic pickers across India collect the plastic waste. They sell their plastic to the many small plastic shredding businesses that have popped up across the country.

Plastics ban

The need for schemes such as Suchitwa Sagaram is emphasised by research that shows 90% of the plastic waste in the world’s oceans is carried there by just 10 rivers - two of which are in India.

According to a study by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, India’s Indus and Ganges rivers carry the second and sixth highest amounts of plastic debris to the ocean. The Indian Ocean, meanwhile, is choked with the second highest amount of plastic out of all of the world’s oceans. 

Like Kerala’s fisheries minister, Indian politicians appear to be taking action in the face of this mounting crisis.

This month India’s prime minister Narendra Modi pledged to eliminate all single-use plastic in the country by 2022, starting with an immediate ban in urban Delhi.

The move came just three months after India’s western state of Maharashtra issued a ban virtually all types of plastic bag, disposable cutlery, cups and dishes, as well as plastic containers and packaging.

Residents face fines from 5,000 rupees (US$73) for a first time offence to 25,000 rupees ($367) and jail time for repeat offenders, while the state’s Environment Department is also encouraging people to recycle bottles and milk bags through a buy-back scheme.

While’s India’s plastic problem is substantial due to the size of its population and its rate of economic growth, schemes such as those in Maharashtra, Delhi and Kerala set an example to western nations.

In the US, for example each person on average generates up to 10 times the amount of plastic waste generated by their Indian counterpart.

If western nations followed India’s lead of combining political pressure with entrepreneurial ventures, perhaps the world will stand of a chance of avoiding the predicted catastrophe of there being more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050. 

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More Americans are killed in Lawn Mover incidents than by terrorists 01-03

Kim Kardashian is an unlikely champion of statistics, but a tweet from the reality TV star in January 2017 contained a startling figure that has been named International Statistic of the Year.

She shared a table showing a range of violent or unexpected ways people meet their deaths annually in the United States. Kardashian’s aim was to highlight how many more Americans are killed by fellow citizens with guns, than by terrorists.

The table also revealed that lawnmowers are actually more deadly than terrorists.

According to the table below, first published by the Huffington Post, an average of 69 people are killed every year in accidents involving lawnmowers. By comparison 14 people are killed each year by terrorists. The killers in this category include Muslims inspired by jihadist philosophy as well as white, far-right extremists. Both categories include American citizens.

Lawnmower trend

The statistic of 69 lawnmower deaths a year was named International Statistic of the Year for 2017 by the UK’s Royal Society of Statistics.

Liberty Vittert, a member of the Royal Society’s judging panel, said: “Everyone on the panel was particularly taken by this statistic and its insight into risk - a key concept in both statistics and everyday life.

“When you consider that this figure was put into the public domain by Kim Kardashian, it becomes even more powerful because it shows anyone, statistician or not, can use statistics to illustrate an important point and illuminate the bigger picture.

”The killer lawnmower statistic was sourced from the US Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) database. The CDC analyzed death statistics from 2005 to 2014. It found there were 689 deaths involving lawnmowers during this 10-year period.

More recent data show death by lawnmowers is a growing trend: Between 2006 and 2015 there were 723 lawnmower deaths, an average of 72 per year.

And in the 10 year period between 2007 and 2016 there were 758 deaths caused by lawnmowers, an average of 76 per year.

During the same period the CDC recorded eight deaths in total related to terrorism, an average of less than one death per year. This is far lower than the figure in the Huffington Post’s table that shows an average of 14 year, which is based on 15-year data since 9/11.

Deaths from lightning averaged out at 30 per year. Falling out of bed can prove exceptionally dangerous. An average of 802 people meet their deaths this way every year.

Perception gap

This disparity between terror-related deaths and everyday accidents like falling out of bed highlight a gap between reality and people’s perceptions.

Chapman University’s 2017 Survey of American Fears reveals that 43.3% of Americans are either afraid or very afraid of a terrorist attack.

Far fewer - just 28.1% - are afraid of a random mass shooting, and just 18.3% are afraid of being murdered.

Let’s compare those fears with reality. Americans are 14,381 times more likely to be killed by a firearm held by a fellow citizen than they are to be killed in a terrorist attack.

CDC data show a total of 115,053 deaths in the US caused by firearms between 2007 and 2016, an average of 11,500 per year.

But the US isn’t the only country where there are large gaps between perception and reality.

In fact, according to Ipsos MORI’s latest Perils of Perception Index, the US has only the 15th largest perception gap in the world.

On issues ranging from murder rates to teen pregnancies, survey respondents from South Africa were likely to give the least accurate guesses of where the figures stood.

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Are economic statistics in danger of becoming irrelevant? 05-16

Are economic statistics in danger of becoming irrelevant?

Reliable economic statistics are a vital public good. They are essential to effective policymaking, business planning, and the electorate’s ability to hold decision-makers to account.

And yet the methods we use to measure our economies are becoming increasingly out of date. The statistical conventions on which we base our estimates were adopted a half-century ago, at a time when the economy was producing relatively similar physical goods. Today’s economy is radically different and changing rapidly – the result of technological innovation, the rising value of intangible, knowledge-based assets, and the internationalization of economic activity.

In light of these challenges, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne asked me ten months ago to assess the United Kingdom’s current and future statistical needs. While my research focused on the UK, the challenges of producing relevant, high-quality economic statistics are the same in many countries.

Recent technological advances have radically altered the way people conduct their lives, both at work and at play. The advances in computing power underpinning the digital revolution have led not only to rapid quality improvements and product innovation, but also to new, connectivity-driven ways of exchanging and providing services.

One particular challenge for economic measurement stems from the fact that an increasing share of consumption comprises digital products delivered at a zero price or funded through alternative means, such as advertising. While free virtual goods clearly have value to consumers, they are entirely excluded from GDP, in accordance with internationally accepted statistical standards. As a result, our measurements may not be capturing a growing share of economic activity.

Consider the music industry. Downloads and streaming services have now largely replaced CDs, the dominant medium in the 1990s. And yet the money has not followed; the industry’s revenues and margins have both plummeted. As a result, its contribution to GDP (as we currently measure it) may be falling, even as the quantity and quality of services are increasing.

Two methods can give us a rough estimate how much digital economic activity we are failing to capture in our measurements. We can use average wages to estimate the value of the time people spend online using free digital products, or we can adjust telecommunication services output to account for the rapid growth in Internet traffic. Both approaches suggest that accounting for these types of activities could add between one-third and two-thirds of a percentage point to the average annual growth rate of the UK economy over the past decade.

The digital revolution is also disrupting traditional business models. The reduced search and matching costs offered by a range of online platforms are unlocking the market for skills (known as the “gig economy”) and the market for underutilized assets (known as the “sharing economy”). This, too, causes conceptual and practical measurement challenges for established GDP calculus. The traditional statistical distinction between productive firms and consuming households leaves little room to account for households as value creators.

Measuring GDP, it turns out, is like trying to hit a moving target. The digital revolution is likely to be followed by yet another wave of disruptive technology, including advances in materials science, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering. As the economy evolves, so must the frame of reference for the statistics we use to measure it.

Consequently, internationally agreed statistical standards will almost always be somewhat out of date or incomplete, as they are bound to lag behind changes in the economy. National statistical offices should explore measurement issues that go beyond the prevailing standards, rather than use compliance as an excuse for their failure to innovate.

One solution would be to establish a continuing program of research into the measurement implications of emerging economic trends, conducting one-off studies at first to gauge their potential quantitative importance. This could then guide the development of experimental statistics capturing the new phenomena.

New techniques of collecting and analyzing big data, such as web scraping, text-mining, and machine learning, provide an opportunity for statisticians. Governments already hold some administrative data, but their use for statistical purposes often requires legislative changes. Unlocking this trove of information would extend statistical samples to near-census size, increase their timeliness and accuracy, and reduce the respondent costs to businesses and households.

Ensuring that data accurately reflect a changing economy is one of the hardest tasks faced by national statistical institutes worldwide. Success requires not only understanding the limitations of traditional measurements, but also developing a curious and self-critical workforce that can collaborate with partners in academia, industry, the public sector, and other national statistical institutes to develop more appropriate methods.

The UK is by no means alone in facing these challenges. But we need to act quickly. Otherwise, the speed of economic change will render our statistics irrelevant to modern life.

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These technologies are shaping the future 05-16

Cloud computing has been named the technology most likely to shape the future, according to an IBM survey.

The poll questioned C-level executives from 70 countries on which technologies they thought would be particularly important in the next three to five years. The following chart, produced by Statista, shows the percentage of CxOs (C-level executives) who identified a particular technology as influential.

Of all the respondents, 63% said cloud computing and related services would have the biggest impact by 2020. Next on the list was mobile solutions – named by more than three in five CxOs. The top three is completed by the internet of things, with over half the respondents considering it likely to be important in the next three to five years.

Other technologies on the list include cognitive computing, bio-engineering and innovations relating to energy.

They are all technologies with the potential to have a positive impact on societies, from mobile banking in the developing world to the solutions we need for tackling climate change, and also meeting our energy needs. The World Economic Forum’s Emerging Technologies Report highlights the most innovative solutions to the world’s toughest challenges.

Competitors now look and feel so much different. No industries are immune to digital disruption. It’s starting to change the way entire industries are thinking about things. If you focus only on the thing that you know, you will miss the thing that’s coming at you from the left or the right. You have to be willing to be disruptive. Learn fast, scale rapidly. You have to make big strategic bets.

Is my strategy ambitious enough? What do I do to make sure that I’m fit for the future? How do I actually execute? Outthink Boundaries.

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How big data from space helps life on earth 02-18

How Big Data from Space helps  Life on Earth

As an oceanographer and former NASA astronaut, I am particularly well placed to appreciate the perspectives space can give us on life on earth. My first glimpse of our blue planet stole my breath and has never let it go.

I have been working to deepen our understanding of and appreciation for this planet since. Key to that understanding are the observational data – much of it from satellites – that feed our knowledge of this planet. Among other things, observations from satellites help us to understand our changing climate, predict hazardous weather and provide early warning of potential crop failures or freshwater shortages.

The big data revolution could lead to currently unimagined uses for the data we receive from satellites. Entrepreneurs could come up with new applications and ideas for mashing up data. But the data itself should, I believe, be regarded as a public good. How to guarantee this, in a world where public budgets are squeezed and space exploration is becoming increasingly affordable for private players, is a question that deserves serious thought and active engagement.

From fish in Peru to drought in Australia

It is worth reflecting on the sobering fact that we are the first generation of humans that could even have this conversation. Just over four decades ago, nobody would even have thought to connect variations in the catch of Peruvian fisheries, say, with unseasonably dry spells in central Australia. It was only with the availability of snapshots from satellites in the 1970s that we could identify and begin to understand the phenomenon that linked them: El Nino.

Since then our uses of data from space have become increasingly sophisticated. It is bordering on miraculous, for example, that we can have a reasonable degree of confidence in long-range weather forecasts. Weather patterns are so complex, chaos ought to overwhelm predictability once we look just a day or two ahead. But by analyzing patterns from thousands of different kinds of daily observations over the years, we have become better able to tease out the likeliest patterns.

No single satellite can make all the observations necessary to compile a reliable weather forecast. Indeed, no single country’s satellites can do so. There has developed, therefore, a convention of data sharing among government-run space programmes to enable each country’s meteorological offices to access all the information they need to predict the weather.

Data as a public good

This is what I mean by regarding data as a public good. The ability to forecast hurricanes, typhoons, droughts and heatwaves is clearly of benefit to humanity as a whole, and the data on which it relies is deservedly regarded as part of the global commons.

I believe we should take the same approach to all kinds of “environmental intelligence” represented by satellite data, in combination with sensors on the ground, whenever it has implications that transcend national borders – where population’s lives and livelihoods are at stake. By analyzing the reflections of microwaves beamed at forests, for example, we can tell when their ecosystems are under stress; measurements of ocean temperatures help us to predict where fish will be; observations from space can warn about problems with soil conditions that could help the world to prepare for poor harvests.

As technology advances, so does the capacity to generate actionable intelligence. In recent years, for instance, satellites have allowed us to map differences in gravity on the Earth’s surface so precisely that we can calculate how much groundwater is stored in aquifers – something never before possible. Given the potential of freshwater shortages to impact everything from food security to energy supplies and geopolitical tensions, it is clearly beneficial for this knowledge to be in the public domain.

“The price could be paid in human lives”

The question of how to ensure space-based knowledge is used for the common good has become pressing with the dawning of a new space age, in which satellites have become affordable for private interests. At the same time, public finances in countries which have traditionally funded major space programmes have come under stress. Increasingly, there is pressure on governments to buy in data from private providers rather than fund satellite programmes themselves.

At first glance, this makes sense. But some changes in the private sector’s role in space raise troubling hypotheticals. Imagine that a commodity trader, for example, monopolized data that enabled harvests to be predicted. A killing could be made on the futures markets – but the price could be paid in human lives, if exclusion from that data hindered public agencies from preparing for famine.

As private satellites proliferate and the big data revolution advances, we need to debate public and private roles in space. One model to consider is the Monsanto-owned Climate Corporation. It takes publicly available data and adds value by analyzing it in ways that generate guidance individuals will pay for: when a farmer should irrigate a field, for example.  The underlying public data remain freely available – even viewable on a the free level of the company’s web service – and so continue to serve the general public via advanced warning of severe drought or accurate forecasts of seasonal flooding.

In the coming decades, new technologies and business models will radically expand the data available from satellites and the uses to which it can be put. Our challenge is to ensure that observations about our planet benefit everyone who lives on it.

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