In statistical significance testing, the p-value is the probability of obtaining a test statistic at least as extreme as the one that was actually observed, assuming that the null hypothesis is true.[1] One often "rejects the null hypothesis" when the p-value is less than the significance level α (Greek alpha), which is often 0.05 or 0.01. When the null hypothesis is rejected, the result is said to be statistically significant.

A closely related concept is the E-value,[2] which is the average number of times in multiple testing that one expects to obtain a test statistic at least as extreme as the one that was actually observed, assuming that the null hypothesis is true. The E-value is the product of the number of tests and the p-value.

Although there is often confusion, the p-value is not the probability of the null hypothesis being true, nor is the p-value the same as the Type I error rate, alpha.[3]

By Alan AtKisson
Alternatives and Complements to GDP-Measured Growth as a Framing Concept for Social Progress

2012 Annual Survey Report of the Institute for Studies in Happiness, Economy, and Society — ISHES (Tokyo, Japan)

The Folly of Fools
Self-deception in the service of deceit
by Robert Trivers, Ph.D.

Water users and managers are responsible water stewards, who protect and enhance freshwater resources for people and nature. (certification by WWF and TNC)

I spoke with Scholz last month as I was researching my June cover story on green transformation; we then followed up with another chat this week. (The Facebook IPO was just a happy coincidence.) In the past few years, Ecotrust has been developing or co-developing its own digital tools, several focused on nurturing a more sustainable, or resilient, marine and fisheries sector. “The questions we were asking weren’t addressed by Windows or Google, so we decided to build them ourselves,” Scholz says.

These tools include Digital Deck, a mobile technology tool that provides real-time access to catch information — collected from the boat deck — to help consumers, wholesalers and conservationists learn if fish is sustainably harvested. Another is Marine Map, a web-based open source platform that helps users, including fisherman and conservationists, visualize social ecological, and regulatory features of the marine environment.

In the spirit of science as a process of constructive disagreement, Evolution: This View of Life is pleased to feature a critique of my previous article "The New Atheism and Evolutionary Religious Studies: Clarifying Their Relationship" by evolutionist and prolific blogger PZ Myers, titled "You Want Evidence that Religion is Bad for Our Species? OPEN YOUR EYES." Unfortunately, Myer's critique raises the issue of whether he is functioning as a scientist at all on the subject of religion.

Whenever I hear that tripe about the beneficial effects of religion on human cultural evolution, it’s useful to note that the world’s dominant faiths all hardcode directly into their core beliefs the idea that women are unclean, inferior, weak, and responsible for the failings of mankind…that even their omnipotent, all-loving god regards women as lesser creatures not fit to be intermediaries with him, and that their cosmic fate is to be subservient slaves to men, just as men are to be subservient slaves to capital-H Him.

Don’t get me wrong: I am a great fan and promoter of sustainable development. I have written (in The Sustainability Transformation) in defense of both these terms, “sustainability” and “sustainable development”: I point out their differences, their complementarity. They are both essential to understanding the nature of our times, and what to do about global problems. I love them equally.

But notice, we used “sustainability” in the title of my book. And I am also observant of the discipline of the market. So I have to ask the question: despite this clear preference that the world seems to have for “sustainability,” why are we still holding global summits on “sustainable development”?

And when will we start holding global summits on “resilience”?

The way things are going, we are certainly going to need more of that.

In 2011, we launched our groundbreaking new Plan with one clear goal: to be the most socially responsible business in the UK. Now, in 2012, the International Year of Co-operatives, we’re taking Our Ethical Plan even further, to inspire more people than ever to change their world.

Download Our Ethical Plan or read about the initiatives behind our Plan and the ways to get involved.

Mike Vandenbergh is Professor of Law, and Director of the Environmental Law Program and Climate Change Research Network at Vanderbilt University Law School.

In the fall of 2009 I was approached by Hal Clifford, executive editor of Orion Magazine, and asked to write an essay about American philanthropy, especially in relation to environmentalism. From the first I was dubious about the assignment. I said, “Not-for-profit organizations like you cannot afford to attack philanthropy because if you attack one foundation you may as well attack them all. You’ll be cutting your own throat.”

Hal assured me that while all this might be true someone had to take up the issue, and Orion was willing to do so. And I was the right person to write the essay precisely because I was not an insider but simply an honest intelligence. So, with many misgivings I said I’d try.

Growth and Prosperity

Public policy often based on unsupported assumptions

By Eben Fodor

Most cities in the U.S. have operated on the assumption that growth is inherently beneficial and that more and faster growth will benefit local residents economically. Local growth is often cited as the cure for urban ailments, especially the need for local jobs. But does the empirical evidence show that growth is actually providing these benefits?

Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.

If you’re scared out of your mind, try to remember this Air Force mantra: Hug The monster. Wrap your arms around fear, wrestle it under control, and turn it into a driving force in your plan of attack.

On March 26, 2012, the USW, Mondragon, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC) announced its detailed union co-op model for developing sustainable jobs using the combination of worker ownership and the collective bargaining process.

The Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland, Ohio are pioneering innovative models of job creation, wealth building, and sustainability. Evergreen’s employee-owned, for-profit companies are based locally and hire locally. We create meaningful green jobs and keep precious financial resources within our community. Our workers earn a living wage and build equity in their firms as owners of the business.

Some 100 social scientists, communications experts, and climate scientists convene at University of Michigan’s Erb Institute/Union of Concerned Scientists session to better understand, improve climate communication dialogue.

In the wake of Heartland’s unibomber billboard campaign, 11 donors representing roughly 35% of the organization’s funds for 2012 pulled support, according to the advocacy organization Forecast the Facts. The pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly said such tactics “were not consistent” with how the company “engages in public debate.”

WASHINGTON, May 24, 2012 — A top USDA Rural Development official this week met with local leaders and business owners in the Midwest to highlight rural small business accomplishments and observe " National Small Business Week".

"We know that to build a strong foundation for our country, we must continue to invest in rural communities and small businesses that create new economic opportunities for those who call rural America home," said John Padalino, Acting Administrator of USDA Rural Development's Rural Business-Cooperative Service (RBS). "We've seen continued growth in rural business development and the Obama Administration will continue working to strengthen local economies throughout the country."

Padalino met this week with business leaders in Iowa and South Dakota and highlighted ways RBS business and cooperative programs help improve rural economic conditions by providing guaranteed loans and development grants for projects that help create and save jobs.

Nationally, from 2009 through 2011, RBS provided 12,214 guaranteed loans, direct loans and grants that assisted more than 50,000 businesses and helped create or save more than 266,000 jobs.

For example, Morris Manufacturing and Sales Corporation, a family-owned automotive parts manufacturer, had to lay off 100 of its 135 employees when two major automakers closed down production and reorganized. With the assistance from USDA Rural Development, Morris Manufacturing located in Brazil, Ind. secured four B&I loan guarantees totaling $10.2 million, which it used to restructure debt and purchase new equipment. As a direct result of these loans, the company rehired its laid off workers, built a new production facility, expanded its product line, and hired over 60 new employees.

The Montana Wagyu Cattle Company is a family-owned and operated business that raises cattle and provides USDA Grade-A beef and specialty beef products to restaurants, stores, and consumers throughout the region. In 2009, the company used their $49,900 Value-Added Producer Grant (VAPG) to grow and expand their business by selling products over the internet.

Today, the company sells and ships custom-ordered cuts of beef (steaks, roasts, and specialty cuts) to consumers and businesses all over the United States.

In 2010, Ecotrust of Portland, Oregon, used their $249,340 Rural Business Opportunity Grant to market their FoodHub internet website – an online directory and marketplace that connects regional farmers, grocers, restaurants, and wholesales – to food producers and buyers. The FoodHub website helps agricultural producers tap into the growing local foods market by shortening the supply chain between producers, sellers, and consumers. The RBOG will also be used to provide training and assistance to businesses that want to sell through the website.

In June 2010, 550 companies used FoodHub. Today, almost 3,600 businesses in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and California use FoodHub to market their products.

Since taking office, President Obama's Administration has taken historic steps to improve the lives of rural Americans, put people back to work and build thriving economies in rural communities. From proposing the American Jobs Act to establishing the first-ever White House Rural Council – chaired by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack – the President is committed to using Federal resources more efficiently to foster sustainable economic prosperity and ensure the government is a strong partner for businesses, entrepreneurs and working families in rural communities.

USDA, through its Rural Development mission area, administers and manages housing, business and community infrastructure and facility programs through a national network of state and local offices. Rural Development has an active portfolio of more than $165 billion in loans and loan guarantees. These programs are designed to improve the economic stability of rural communities, businesses, residents, farmers and ranchers, and to improve the quality of life in rural areas.

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Why is government in America so hack-worthy now? There is a giant literature on how interest groups have captured our politics, with touchstones texts by Mancur Olson, Jonathan Rauch, and Francis Fukuyama. The message of these studies is depressingly simple: democratic institutions tend toward what Rauch calls "demosclerosis" -- encrustation by a million little constituencies who clog the arteries of government and make it impossible for the state to move or adapt.

David Michelson, University of British Columbia, looks at the communication and information technologies that are required to add intelligence to the existing electricity system.

Enter another professional body who have well and truly debunked this myth a good 20 years ago – Myth of the Ford Pinto Case is from Rutger’s Law Review, 1991 volume 43:1013. You can download the Myth of the Ford Pinto Case from PointofLaw (link on the right side of their page). You can also read Grimshaw v Ford Motor Company (1981) online.

You may not have time to read all of this in one sitting. This is compiled from numerous reputable sources over the last decade or so (some of it pre-internet), like Automotive News, Wall Street Journal, Rutger's Law review, etc. I'm just condensing it here to be more compact (yes, this is compact...)

Remarkably, the affair of the "exploding" Ford Pinto--universally hailed as the acme of product liability success--is starting to look like hype. In a summer 1991 Rutgers Law Review article Gary Schwartz demolishes "the myth of the Pinto case." Actual deaths in Pinto fires have come in at a known 27, not the expected thousand or more.

More startling, Schwartz shows that everyone's received ideas about the fabled "smoking gun" memo are false (the one supposedly dealing with how it was cheaper to save money on a small part and pay off later lawsuits... and immortalized in the movie "Fight Club"). The actual memo did not pertain to Pintos, or even Ford products, but to American cars in general; it dealt with rollovers, not rear-end collisions; it did not contemplate the matter of tort liability at all, let alone accept it as cheaper than a design change; it assigned a value to human life because federal regulators, for whose eyes it was meant, themselves employed that concept in their deliberations; and the value it used was one that they, the regulators, had set forth in documents.

In retrospect, Schwartz writes, the Pinto's safety record appears to have been very typical of its time and class. In over 10 years of production, and 20 years that followed, with over 2 million Pintos produced, no more people died in fires from Pintos as died in fires from Maximas...

Naomi Klein’s Capitalism vs. the Climate is both excellent and remarkable. Though, when I saw it sourced (by the new climate blog Planet3.0) as being from “the American hard-left magazine The Nation” I almost choked. I am, I confess, a man of a certain age, and I remember what “hard left” used to mean.

I don’t think of The Nation as being “hard left.” Nor Klein for that matter.

Anyway, her title is catchy, but also a bit misleading. Most of her case isn’t against capitalism in itself, but against “capitalism-as-usual,” or “contemporary capitalism,” or “the corporate sector, with its structural demand for increased sales and profits.” Which is I suppose what you’d expect, this being a reasonable piece. Because it’s not at all clear that we’re up against capitalism in itself. What we know for sure is that we’re up against this capitalism. That we either fix it or it’s “game over,” as Jim Hansen recently put it.

Klein touches only lightly on the really tough issues in the climate and capitalism debate (yes, there is one!), which she does – cleverly? strangely? — in the “Ending the cult of shopping” section. This is where we get the problem of “growth” (the most confusing abstraction of them all) and the reference to Tim Jackson’s definitional book Prosperity without growth (download the original report here for free). The problems of redistribution, and of desire (the democratic disciplining of desire) are only suggested. In other words, there’s not really much here about the problems of capitalism in itself.

Which is fine with me, at least for now.

There are people out there writing books about how capitalism (the thing itself) is absolutely and intrinsically incompatible with the continuation of human civilization as we know it – and Klein, at least to my mind, has done us a major service by taking a different tack. It seems to me that she’s not taking an abstract position, but speaking, concretely, for renovations so grand and sweeping that we’d have a hard time recognizing them as “reforms,” in the old sense.

I should speak for myself. And my view is that, while the climate crisis is a crisis of capitalism, it’s also a manageable one. Which is to say that we’re not already doomed. But to save ourselves, we have to create a different kind of capitalism. Nothing more is possible in the limited time left before us – the climate clock really is ticking – but it’s actually quite a lot. Recognizing this is radical enough for me.

This project documents, through a series of case studies, the advantages of Low Impact Development (LID) in the economic terms of how municipal land use decisions are commonly made.

The “Banking on Green” report also provides a list of 479 green infrastructure case studies organized by state. It does a nice job compiling current research that explains and quantifies the many problems caused by polluted runoff, and it offers the most effective solutions for addressing these problems. But it’s not everything I could hope for.

For seven years the Ford Motor Company sold cars in which it knew hundreds of people would needlessly burn to death.

By Mark Dowie | September/October 1977 Issue

Exposing the Red Roots of the Green Movement -- Eco-Tyranny

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just understand something the left still doesn’t get.
* * *
The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”
Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.
But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products and creating clever markets in pollution. …
So when the Heartlanders react to evidence of human-induced climate change as if capitalism itself were coming under threat, it’s not because they are paranoid. It’s because they are paying attention. …

Culture, after all, is fluid. It can change. It happens all the time. The delegates at the Heartland conference know this, which is why they are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence proving that their worldview is a threat to life on earth. The task for the rest of us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different worldview can be our salvation.

McCright says, up to 40 percent of all white males in the study sample believe in hierarchy, are more trusting of authority and are more conservative. Conservative white males' motivation to ignore a certain risk -- the risk of climate change in this case -- therefore, has to do with defending the status of their identity tied to the white male establishment.

Interview : Micah L. Sifry
Interview: Prof. Susan Crawford

Decision Commons is a research initiative of the University of Washington’s Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies. The project was created from the desire to design a revolutionary way for urban govern- ments to make decisions around difficult infrastructure and land use issues, with funding from HUD’s Sustain- able Communities Regional Planning Grant program.

Everyone is very excited about the new crowdfunding-for-securities law. Crowdfunding is a great idea–in concept. And now we have a new law which is about to make crowdfunding for securities a reality, at least in some sense. The trouble? The law is onerous. It is going to be difficult and expensive to comply with. The burdens of the new law are plenty, but the benefits of the new law are capped. In short, the crowdfunding law as currently written is, in my opinion, needs to be fixed.
I don’t mean to be just negative here. Crowdfunding enthusiasts should take their enthusiasm back to Congress to try to get the law fixed. Here are a few of my complaints about the law as it currently stands and recommendations for improvements.

Are you tired of counting parking spaces or calculating residential densities?

CityCAD is a new computer-aided-design application for conceptual urban masterplanning of sites from 1 ha up to 200 ha and more in size.

Unlike other CAD tools, CityCAD has been created specifically for the needs of the city design and planning community and enables integrated, holistic analysis of your urban masterplans in the early design stages.

sense. predict. act.

The week of May 21, the U.S. Navy will launch MMOWGI, a massively multiplayer online game for securing the Navy's energy future.

At the end of June, a two-day Great Green Fleet demo has been planned for the Pacific near Hawaii. The nuclear aircraft carrier USS Nimitz will be accompanied by the destroyers USS Chafee and Chung Hoon. The destroyers and the F/A-18 jet aircraft will be powered by a 50/50 blend of traditional oil-based fuels and an alternative fuel made from waste fats and greases and algae. A full Green Fleet deployment is scheduled for 2016 and Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus has said that the service would get half of its energy from sources other than oil by 2020.

At the beginning of May, the House Armed Services Committee voted to cut off the $12 million funding for such experiments, the Committee’s Republican leaders passed an amendment stopping the entire Defense Department from using any alternative fuels, for any purpose, if they’re more expensive than oil, and ordered that the Defense Department be exempt from the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 which forbids federal agencies from buying alternative fuels that are more polluting than conventional ones.

We are learning that context matters. The elements of success include local demand for valuation, a clear policy question, strong local partnerships, access to decision-makers, good governance and study areas with a high dependence on coastal resources. It is also clear that methodology matters. Valuation should be done on a scale appropriate to the policy question, with efficient implementation, possibly including use of standardized methods that are matched to the policy question, and with strong stakeholder engagement throughout. Absolute accuracy is not always essential, as many stakeholders use valuation results as a ballpark figure to guide decision-making.

Since ocean and climate systems unite us all, they form an heritage of humanity. To organize this interdependence requires an alternative to the “Market” or the “State”. We propose as a third way an accounting system both fair and reciprocal, which allows for collective action.

when is the future?

"Wisdom" has an intriguing status in relation to "knowledge" and "information". This is especially so because of its traditional role in relation to governance. Whilst the highest levels of governance may be dependent on their information services, and the specialized knowledge of their experts, ultimately it is on the "wisdom" in making decisions when confronted with strategic dilemmas that the reputation (and survival) of a governor (or government) depends. Given his considerable experience in government, there is value to the distinctions made by Harlan Cleveland (Information As a Resource. The Futurist Dec. 1982: 34-39): Information is horizontal, knowledge is structured and hierarchical, and wisdom is organic and flexible.

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