earthDECKS Overview

earthDECKS articles:
Economic Strategies

Engagement Strategies

FullerVision: Telecom Futures

Gaming the Future

Human Health Impacts of Plastic & Other Pollutants

Human Innovation & the Plastic Challenge

Mapping and Visualization

Ocean Health: Metric for Planet Health

Problem-Solving Methods & Tools

Saving Our Oceans from Plastic

Beat the Microbead
Enshrouded in Plastic
Nature’s Innovators: plastic consumers
Ocean Ingenuity
Plastic-Eating Enzyme

Security from Climate Change

Smart Cities

Transdisciplinary Initiatives

Celebrating the power of media to influence the public –
5 minute animation

Intro

More than fifty years ago Dustin Hoffman was advised in The Graduate: “One word. PLASTICS.” The power of the media made plastics a hot career. As The Graduate foretold, plastic production has boomed to twenty times what it was fifty years ago and now has changed our civilization and environment in significant ways. Our five minute short film PLASTIC is a fast montage citing the classic clip from The Graduate, ending with the realization that “We’ve got to clean up this plastic.”

The media can impact the future by focusing a mass audience. 50 years ago the media used its influence to make PLASTIC into a hot career. Now that media power can make the public aware of the great environmental problems arising from our overuse of plastic for disposable products, which end up in our oceans and ultimately in our own food chain.

DECKS in earthDECKS refers to a Distributed, Evolving, Collaborative, Knowledge System. DECKS are comprised of digital knowledge-cards (i.e., short stories, media portals, and other information resources about a topic) and user profiles, which integrate explicitly and implicitly collected information about each user, organizing a diversity of social signals.

Players make choices about the DECKS that they assemble and the methods they choose to “make media actionable.” These choices are aggregated into the user’s profile, which is represented as a generalized “avatar” or icon on the earthDECKS platform. Projects on the earthDECKS platform serve as hubs around which to generate stories, which are organized and connected into DECKS. Knowledge-cards within a DECK (as well as across DECKS) are correlated and tracked through both manual and automated meta-tagging, clustering, and activity logging. Our hybrid human-AI recommender system uses this information to refine its capacity to provide recommendations and social media services to users based on their profiles.

Human pattern recognition acts on recommendations (choosing either to follow them or not), which enables machine learning to adapt and improve capacity to recommend. In this way, the earthDECKS Learning Engine evolves as users navigate diverse paths through this ecosystem, browsing projects, commenting on stories, engaging with other users, attending real-world events, and performing tasks in the real world that are reported back and tracked online. There are many stories worth telling from many points of view:

The Circular Economy • Ellen MacArthur Foundation

On May 18, 2017 Dame Ellen MacArthur announced a $2 Million Plastic Innovation Prize to keep plastic out of our oceans, jointly sponsored by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation with the Prince of Wales’ Sustainability Unit and funded by philanthropist Wendy Schmidt.

The day after setting a world speed record in her solo sail around the world, Ellen MacArthur was named Dame Ellen MacArthur of the British Empire, the youngest person ever to be named to that title. She is still racing full speed around the world, no longer as a solo sailor but growing a collaborative intelligence network to keep plastic out of our oceans.

In her TED talk, Dame Ellen MacArthur tells her story. The person with the courage to sail solo around the globe, set a world record, withstand a near collision with a whale, and the other risks of the open ocean, is also the person to take on a mammoth global challenge – her joint venture with The Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit to launch a $2 million design competition to keep plastics out of the ocean, which we anticipate will trigger a wave of supporting activities. More here: Circular Economy: Dame Ellen MacArthur

Already there is industry promotion of this major challenge. The American Chemistry Council is promoting the $2 Million Plastic Innovation Prize to keep plastic out of our ocean. See Industry Response to the Plastic Challenge.

See our two articles on the Plastic Innovation Challenge:

Mission Blue • Sylvia Earle

Dr. Sylvia Earle was formerly chief scientist of NOAA, and is the founder of Deep Ocean Exploration and Research, Inc. and founder of Mission Blue and SEAlliance. Her foundation Mission Blue is developing a global network of protected land and ocean areas to maintain biodiversity and resiliency in response to accelerating climate change.

National Geographic Society Explorer-in-Residence Dr. Sylvia A. Earle is an oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer and director for corporate and nonprofit organizations, including the Kerr McGee Corporation, Dresser Industries, Oryx Energy, the Aspen Institute, the Conservation Fund, American Rivers, Mote Marine Laboratory, Duke University Marine Laboratory, Rutgers Institute for Marine Science, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, and Ocean Futures.

In addition to her PhD. from Duke University, she holds 22 honorary degrees and has authored more than 190 scientific, technical, and popular publications; lectured in more than 80 countries; appeared in hundreds of radio and television productions and led more than a hundred expeditions. In July 2012 she set a record for solo diving in 1,000-meter depth.

Earle is the recipient of more than a hundred national and international honors and in 2014 was named a Glamour Woman of the Year. Other honors include the 2011 Royal Geographical Society Gold Medal, 2011 Medal of Honor from the Dominican Republic, 2009 TED Prize, Netherlands Order of the Golden Ark, Australia’s International Banksia Award, Italy’s Artiglio Award, the International Seakeepers Award, the International Women’s Forum, the National Women’s Hall of Fame, Academy of Achievement, Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year, medals from the Explorers Club, Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, Lindbergh Foundation, National Wildlife Federation, Sigma Xi, Barnard College, and Society of Women Geographers.

The PLASTIC BANK: Blockchain meets Plastic Trash

David Katz aimed to reveal the value in plastic and to make plastic waste too valuable to enter the ocean. With Co-Founder Shaun Frankson they announced the concept of Social Plastic®, traveled to Peru and Colombia to learn from those who recycle for a living. By mid 2014, The Plastic Bank successfully inspired a million person Social Plastic® movement with supporters asking companies to use #SocialPlastic.

Our global innovation challenge is to turn millions of tons of plastic waste, clogging our landfills and oceans, into a resource. Plastic Packers, such as Greiner Packaging, are now partnering with the Plastic Bank.

Plastic trash, removed from beaches, is being turned into products, from clothing to sunglasses, even roads.

PLASTIC ASPHALT: Better, Cheaper Roads & Less Plastic Trash

40 million kilometers of roads were made using 100s of millions of barrels of oil for asphalt, a petroleum product. Suppose we had a substitute?

The Scottish startup company, MacRebur, has developed plastic asphalt using recycled plastic, which saves oil AND produces stronger, better, cheaper roads. Their mission is to reduce plastic in landfills by using it for roads. An immersive, fast-paced animation can show both the clever uses of plastic and tragedy of our plastic-filled ocean. An EcoWatch Report warned that there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. Industry has rallied. We’ll explore the power of media to awaken the deep insights experienced by Laurie Penland, diver with the Smithsonian, and other swimmers and divers, and to inspire their empathy for the ocean in others.

earthDECKS celebrates Game•Changers and their innovations. Below is an interactive, clickable user interface.