Here I am recovering from flu on the 12th floor of a hotel overlooking the center of the capital of India. From my window I can see barely 200 m. It is the worst smog in this city in 17 years, according to the local news reports.

The vague silhouettes of two large hawks glide by about 50 m away. I suspect there is no chance of them spying food on the ground from this height.

About 1km away, far out of view, the biennial  Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction  is taking place at th e  Vigyan Bhawan  Conference  Centre.

Why is it so difficult for societies to prevent human-made disasters such as smog? If we cannot deal with the simplest and most obvious of dangers, created by our own local actions, how can we possibly deal with global disasters such as rapid climate change?

View towards  Vigyan Bhawan  and India Gate.
Neither is visible though merely 1-2 km distant. (PJM 5th November 2016).

I am waiting for the start of the 1st International Agrobiodiversity Conference, 6. - 9. Nov. 2016, here in New Delhi. There will be many papers concerned with serious issues, but I wonder if we can have an emergency session on the role of agrobiodiversity in reducing CO2 emissions in forestry and agriculture?

One of the causes of the current smog in New Delhi is the burning of crop residues by farmers in neighbouring regions of Northern India. This is an old practice, so it should not be a scapegoat for the present crisis. What is new is the addition of car and truck traffic and poorly controlled use of diesel powered vehicles. Neverthless, we should ask if crop management practices can be changed to help reduce the smog. Can crop stubble be transformed into high value products such as fermented fertilisers, or energy for carbon-neutral transport or farm machinery?

Farmers have many reasons to burn crop stubble. Ash has a direct benefit for soil, and burning also helps to break the life-cycles of some pests and diseases. The human labour or machinery needed for field management is less with fire than with other methods of removing and treating stubble. Burning may reduce the need for expensive agrichemicals to manage field hygiene. Burning is part of an established complex system, and changing the process would have many downstream consequences. To replace burning with other methods requries a lot of thought about the entire food production system and how all the parts integrate with each other.

Ideally, biologically-diverse agroforestry systems that do not require burning can add value to unburnt straw from cereal crops, can be more productive, and can support the human, animal, and mechanical requirements needed for their operation, as well as creating surplus for use by urban populations.

That's an ideal - but can such an alternative be created to the current open, mono-cultural field systems of northern India?  It is no use telling farmers to stop burning without providing incentives and practical models  that can replace current practices.

Should we be holding a joint session on environmental risk management and agrobiodiversity?

Are there any Ministers willing to gate-crash the Agrobiodiversity party? Are there any Agriculturalists willing to gate-crash the Risk-Reduction party? Or do we all party on, in our separate spheres of interest, while the world burns around us? 

I am breathing the same air as those birds outside, for a few days.

Fortunately for me, I can fly further and faster to escape this immediate problem, but I am contributing much more to the problem than they are. For their sake, and for sake of people who must perservere in conditions like this, I hope I can learn something useful over the next few days, and apply this to my work as a crop historian and science writer.

Lately I have been playing with different possible short phrases with which to summarise the aims of the Research Cooperative, in the title position of our home page.

Recently, under the logo image and text, I posted the words:

exploration, knowledge, wisdom

All very fine words, and relevant, but somehow pompous and vague at the same time. They do not explain the network concretely.

So then I changed to this for a few hours:

for better communication (any science, language, audience)

This errs too far in the opposite direction: too much information will dilute the impact, or make it disappear entirely.

So for now, I have settled on just the single phrase

for better communication

This refers not just to the better communication of science, but also to better communication between all participants in the ecosystem of science communication... which extends in many directions (academia, industry, public education, specialist audiences, general audiences, etc.).

If anyone has further ideas, please comment!

We can change the wording again, and perhaps rotate various tropes that describe what we are doing, or are trying to do, with the Research Cooperative. One trope can never describe all aims, or satisfy all members in a large group.

In 1966, the London-based political scientist Barbara Ward published a book titled Spaceship Earth (Columbia University Press: New York, 152 pp.).

She wrote at a time when the revolutionary impacts of computers and global communication were becoming evident.

Now, 50 years later, her ideas seem prescient.

"...the process of change is accelerating. Technology and science have become the common mode of human living and are invading every human institution and activity."

"...Today, suddenly, the experience of the human race is much more like that of being put in a barrel and sent over Niagara Falls."

"...This extension of all our senses by electronic means of communication creates a world awareness of what is going on in our planetary society, and this is bound to become a new factor in the pressures at work in world politics."

It seems we are still in the falling barrel.

The fact that we can make a phone call from inside the barrel has not changed the fact that it is falling.

I am not far into the book yet, but look forward to reading it all.

The chapter titles are:

1. "A New History"

2. The Balance of Power

3. The Balance of Wealth

4. The Balance of Ideology

Concrete Elephants of the Upper Mekong

28th Jan 2016

(author's sketch)

Globally there may be thousands of academic conferences, small and large, held around the world each year.

In my own limited experience, most academic conferences are initiated and organised by academic institutions and staff. The larger meetings may involved commercial conference support services and organizing of various kinds, but the commercial services and organizers have not initiated any of the meetings I have attended.

Currently I am involved with preparations for the 8th World Archaeology Congress to be held in Kyoto in late August this year (see wac8.org ).

My role is relatively minor - a theme co-organizer responsible for assessing session proposals and paper submissions for one of the main themes of the Congress.

It is a large congress that is held every few years in a different part of the world, and may attract as many as 2,000 participants, approximately. High registration fees are requested for participants from wealthier nations, and these fees will be used for preparation, support staff during the Congress, and to support attendance by many participants from low-income countries. The Congress also depends on academic funding sources, sponsorships, and extended volunteer efforts by many people.

A Congress organized in this matter depends largely on cooperation, good will and good communication among a large number of people scattered around the world.

To coordinate all this requires a quite deep hierarchical structure of committees and organizing teams. At the same time, any member of the WAC membership is free to contact key persons at any level in the organization.

The formal structure is much needed, but we also depend on informal networking and contacts to raise issues that have been overlooked and to bring problems to light at as soon as possible.

The organizing process begins with a decision about where to hold each Congress years in advance, usually during or soon after the preceeding Congress. The process is relatively transparent, and participants can readily learn about the history of the Congress and its academic foundations.

When considering whether to join this or any other academic meeting, it is useful for potential participants to study the origin and history of the meeting, the motives and aims of the organizers, and the results or publications of past meetings involving the same organizers or organization.

Having said all that, if an enitrely new meeting is proposed by an enthusiastic academic team with new ideas, then the lack of any established meeting series or history should not matter.

What matters most is whether or not the meeting will be useful for the participants, for the research field, and as a stimulus for research communication.

I have been living and working in Japan almost continuously since 1990, and have been seeing the again of Japanese society first hand... in my own extended Japanese family, on the streets, and in the local newspapers.

This week, over New Year, I have been at the house of my late parents in-law. After some years of standing empty, the house is being downsized, renovated, and reoccupied by my single sister-in-law. In this family with three sisters, there are just two marriages, and two children. Re-occupying the house has been a happy process for everyone. Today I pruned a flowering peach tree, observed by a friendly and ageing couple across the street. I did not see any young children in our street over the last three days.

In the evening I went for a long walk through our suburb, on the outer edge of Tokyo. On one street corner I saw a very old man delivering a single greeting card to a red letter box.

A New Year Card

On this,

the second day

he sent a single card

Was this the story of his life,

the first day?

I hope his second day

will not be lonely

with no reply

Yesterday (Jan. 1),TheJapan Times(an English language daily) carried a front page headline on the aging population:

'Japan's population dilemma, in a single-occupancy nutshell' (by Reiji Yoshida, staff writer).

Yoshida reports that the nation's total fertility rate (TFR - number of children in an average woman's lifetime) is now at a record low of around 1.42, far below the 2.1 figure required for population replacement. The result has been a vast and rapid increase in single-occupancy of houses, empty houses throughout the country, especially in older buildings and isolated communities.

As a researcher working in the Japanese education system, I can attest that there is also a severe shortage of graduate research students to use and maintain the current research and teaching infrastructure of Japan.

While the Japanese government has been very reluctant to accept refugees from any country, including Syria in its current crisis, it does provide significant encouragement for foreign students to study in Japan.

Refugees who can legitimately identify themselves as capable students may have a good chance at gaining entry to Japan, and support for at least a year of study. Accommodation for students here can be very cheap... rental agencies have more properties available than potential tenants. I cannot give detailed advice, but there are many university websites in Japan with English-language pages and information for prospective international students.

I'll end this ramble with best wishes for the elderly everywhere - they are often refugees in their own country - and best wishes for all refugees of the world, young and old.

Dear (Co-op member),

I see that you are using the Research Cooperative to post content that is in some way relevant to the Co-op, while also including links or copy that promote various businesses that I presume are paying you (or an agent) to produce copy.

That's OK so long as the content you post stays relevant, and that the businesses you promote are not ethically contrary to what the Research Cooperative stands for.

In a recent blog post, you included a link to a business that advertises g*ostwriting services for students and other writers.

Such a business is VERY contrary to the aims of the Research Cooperative.

If authors choose to work with other people to write something, then the other people should be acknowledged as coauthors. There is nothing wrong with coauthorship in situations where it is permitted (most research publications).

School kids and university students are meant to be learning how to think and write independently. Encouraging them to fake their work is something that I cannot tolerate (as Co-op admin.).

Please remove the blog post in the next few days. Alternatively, I can delete your membership.

Please understand my stance on this.

Thanks, Peter (Co-op Admin)

Many fictional robots have achieved literary and cinematic fame. I am sure the following list should be longer. Please add a comment with your own list!

Why robots? The working kinds that already occupy factories around the world are merely unthinking machines, but there is serious discussion of what might happen if truly thinking robots are invented. The challenge is scientific, ethical, and philosophical all at the same time.

Has anyone produced a philosophical robot, in fact or fiction?

Will IBMs' Watson ever have it's own philosophical point of view, or will it merely be a tool ("cognitive assistant") that can be used for good or bad purposes?

Famous Robots (with a Japan-located bias)

Astro Boy in the Mighty Atom cartoon series (Japan)

Baymax in Big Hero 6

Bokko-chan in Bokko-Chan, The story of a B-girl who didn't have a heart of gold

R2D2 in Star Wars

Gundam in Mobile Suit Gundam

Doraemon in Doraemon series

Evangelion in Neon Genesis Evangelion

Wall-E in Wall.E

Sonny in i-Robot

Ava in Ex Machina

After reading the story of the mindless but dangerous Bokko-chan, I wonder if she was a literary ancestor for the very mindful and dangerous Ava.

The Research Cooperative has been set up as an NPO but lacks funding to develop effectively and to become a registered, officially recognised NPO.

Our network still appears to attractive to many people, but could be more useful with more activity of various kinds.

So... if any of our members has time and energy, I encourage them to look at the Philanthropy University , which has recently opened shop with a range of free online courses for philanthropists, fundraisers, and NPO organisations.

The courses have been developed by the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Please have a look, and if you can learn anything of potential use for the Research Cooperative, please report back to us!

Thanks, Peter