Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 02/02/07
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
“NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE SHOWS NUMBER OF SINGLE PERSONS IN U. S.
“The February 2007 print issue of National Geographic contains a two-page map showing the number of single men and women in various cities of the U.S. The legend shows that more than 40,000 of each sex live in the following cities:
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| Men | Women |
| Seattle | Boston |
| San Fran-Oakland | New York |
| Los Angeles | Philadelphia |
| Phoenix | Baltimore |
| Las Vegas | Washington |
| Dallas-Fort Worth | Miami |
| Austin | Detroit |
| Houston | Chicago |
“WARMING OCEANS PUT KINK IN FOOD CHAIN, STUDY SAYS”
Portions of an article from 01/30/07 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NEWS
“The growth of tiny plants at the base of the ocean food chain is tightly linked to changes in the climate, according to a recent study. The finding shows that as temperatures warm, the growth of single-celled ocean plants called phytoplankton slows at Earth’s mid and low latitudes. The plants’ growth increases when the climate cools.
“While the findings are related to short-term changes in climate, they help scientists predict how the ocean will respond to long-term climate change, according to Jorge Sarmiento, an atmospheric and ocean scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. ‘This is telling us we can expect reduced biological production [the ability to support life such as plants, fish, and wildlife] with global warming in many regions of the world,’ he said…
“Michael Behrenfeld, a botanist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, was lead author of the study. He said the research demonstrates a solid link between climate change and marine life. The growth of phytoplankton, for example, influences how much food fish have to eat, which in turn affects the marine birds that eat the fish. As the Earth warms, Behrenfeld said, changes in the upper ocean will change not only phytoplankton but also the species that dominate different regions of the environment. ‘It will change the structure of the ecosystem,’ he said…
“Since 2000 the ocean surface temperatures have gradually warmed, and growth rates of the plankton have declined almost in lock step, Behrenfeld noted. ‘Projection into the future would suggest that as temperatures continue to warm, the climate will continue to suppress biology on a global basis,’ he said. Behrenfeld explained that the link between climate and biology results from the way climate affects the stratification, or layering, of ocean waters. As the ocean surface warms, it becomes lighter than the cold, dense water below it. The cold water is full of nutrients that phytoplankton need for growth. The increased layering essentially cuts off the phytoplankton from their food supply…
“Photosynthesis by phytoplankton absorbs about 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas tied to global warming - each year, according to Behrenfeld. ‘That has a profound influence on the carbon cycle on Earth,’ he said, referring to the process by which carbon, a key building block of life, is recycled in the environment…”
To read the complete article, click on http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/
“REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL”
Portions of an article from an article in The Economist of 01/31/07:
“A year into his job, Ben Bernanke of the Fed may feel cautiously optimistic about America’s economy…
“For starters, many believe that the housing bubble has finished deflating. Although existing home sales are still weakening – the latest data show a fall of 0.8% in December, more than economists had expected – the sales of new homes are surprising strong. Consensus estimates had predicted a rise of a little over 1.2% for these in December; instead, they surged by almost 5%, after a healthy rise in November. That still leaves a lot of softness in the construction market, but not as much as many had feared.
“For some time now, analysts have viewed the American economy as largely supported by rising house prices, which made consumers feel wealthier and thus more willing to spend. But even as prices have fallen, consumer confidence has bounded along at its highest level for five years. On Tuesday January 30th the Conference Board, a private research group in New York, said that its confidence index, which had been expected to remain flat, had edged up slightly…”
To read the complete article, click on http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8624149
“GOOGLE’S MOON SHOT”
Portions of an article from THE NEW YORKER of 07/02/05
“Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google’s original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the company’s custom-made scanning equipment.
“Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be on the company’s engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up and running in a beta (or resting) version, you can enter a word or phrase – say, Ahab and whale – and the search version returns a list of works in which the terms appear, in this case, nearly eight hundred titles, including numerous editions of Herman Melville’s novel. Clicking on ‘Moby-Dick, or The Whale’ calls up Chapter 28, in which Ahab is introduced. You can scroll through the chapter, search for other terms that appear in the book, and compare it to with other editions.
“No one knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. ‘We think that we can do it all inside ten years,’ Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the company’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California. ‘It’s mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot…”
To read the complete six-page article, click on http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070205fa_fact_toobin
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