8 Myths About India’s Growth – By Daniel Altman | Foreign Policy

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Rashid Faridi

8 Myths About India’s Growth – By Daniel Altman | Foreign Policy.

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Earthquakes Deposit Gold in Fault Zones by Flash Evaporation

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Rashid Faridi

Gold deposits may be created in a flash. Along fault zones deep within Earth’s crust, small cavities filled with fluids rich in dissolved substances such as gold and silicate minerals can grow suddenly to as much as 130,000 times their former size during a major earthquake, a new analysis suggests.Pressure drops accordingly, driving a process the scientists call flash evaporation. And when the pressure in the cavity suddenly drops, the solubility of minerals in the water there drops also. Along with substantial quantities of quartz, large earthquakes could deposit as much as 0.1 milligrams of gold along each square meter of a fault zone’s surface in just a fraction of a second (gold-flecked chunk of quartz from the Red Lake Mine of Ontario, inset). Because mineral-rich waters continually infiltrate cavities along the fault, ore deposits accumulate with each passing quake. Typical rates of seismicity along a fault, such as the San Andreas fault zone shown in the main image, could generate a 100-metric-ton deposit of gold in less than 100,000 years. More than 80% of the world’s gold deposits may have been formed via flash evaporation along fault zones, the researchers estimate. The new model may even lead to a new style of mineral exploration.

source: science shot

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Social Justice and the City – CFP for Hong Kong Conference

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Rashid Faridi

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

Call for Papers: An International Conference on Social Justice and the City

Organised by Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University, on 4th – 6th December, 2013

at Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

In Memory of Neil Smith, Who Had Devoted His Life to Social Justice

The Objective

Since the publication of David Harvey’s seminal work Social Justice and the City in 1973, discussion about social justice has grown into a burgeoning literature. There has been research to query procedural justice in various forms and for different classes. Research has also been carried out to operationalise the more philosophical debates about justice, with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city being the prominent case in point. Finally, there is a growing literature addressing the interrogation of social justice from the spatial perspective such as Mustafa Dikeç’s spatial dialectics of injustice. All these discussions are so relevant to…

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Biodiversity Informatics:Bolivia Digitises its Biodiversity

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Rashid Faridi
The Tailed Jay (Graphium agamemnon) is a predo...

The Tailed Jay (Graphium agamemnon) is a predominantly green and black tropical butterfly that belongs to the swallowtail family. The butterfly is also called Green Spotted Triangle, Tailed Green Jay or the Green Triangle. It is a common, non-threatened species native to India, Sri Lanka through Southeast Asia and into Australia. Several geographic races are recognized (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bolivia has taken a giant step ,its more than 50,000 recently digitised records on the vertebrate fauna of Bolivia are now available to the public and specialists at the first Geospatial Center for Biodiversity of Bolivia (CGB). The record is available on  net and they allow access to technical data sheets of threatened species, geographical and spatial distribution, natural history, conservation status .

Biodiversity informatics

Biodiversity Informatics is the application of information techniques to biodiversity information for improved management, presentation, discovery, exploration and analysis. It typically builds on a foundation of taxonomic, biogeographic, or ecological information stored in digital form, which, with the application of modern computer techniques, can yield new ways to view and analyse existing information, as well as predictive models for information that does not yet exist . It is a relatively young discipline ( coined  around 1992) but has hundreds of practitioners worldwide, including the numerous individuals involved with the design and construction of taxonomic databases. The term “Biodiversity Informatics” is generally used in the broad sense to apply to computerized handling of any biodiversity information; the somewhat broader term “bioinformatics” is often used synonymously with the computerized handling of data in the specialized area of molecular biology.

Global list of all species

One major issue for biodiversity informatics at a global scale is the present absence of a complete master list of currently recognised species of the world.

Scenario in India

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is mentoring the Wildlife Institute of India to build a node for aggregating and sharing data about Indian biodiversity.This Indian data node will connect to other countries and agencies currently contributing to GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Informatics Facility.

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