medardocevallosucg-blog

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What is the most serious consequence of overconsumption in your opinion?

Consuming more than we need creates a demand that the planet can't cope with. Natural resources are being gobbled up faster than the Earth can replenish them. It's also struggling to cope with the resulting waste and emissions. We take too much stuff from nature, make it into stuff we use – from chemicals to plastics to fertiliser to smart phones to meat – and then dispose of it carelessly into the atmosphere, the oceans and the land.

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Are Ecuadorian indigenous communities protected by the law?

Indigenous people in Ecuador say their territorial rights are being systematically violated, according to a top United Nations official. Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, is urging the Ecuadoran government to form a “truly plurinational and multicultural society” in accordance with its constitution and international law.

Indigenous leaders cite a lack of progress toward addressing key problems impeding their fundamental rights, according to Tauli-Corpuz. That includes a lack of free and informed prior consent before implementing resource extraction projects. The leaders are also concerned about the activation of several mining and oil concessions.

While Tauli-Corpuz has praised the current Ecuadoran government for advancing constructive dialogues with indigenous people over territorial rights, she criticized it for maintaining a status quo established by predecessors that failed to recognize, respect or protect the fundamental rights of indigenous communities.

“The future of Ecuador’s indigenous people as well as the country’s forest ecosystems are at stake,” Tauli-Corpuz said in an interview with Mongabay. “The government has eliminated the autonomous institutions within the state that represented indigenous people, which means the national development plan is being developed without meaningful participation on the part of the indigenous.”

During a recent trip to Ecuador, Tauli-Corpuz met with the country’s top officials, including President Lenín Moreno, high-ranking ministers, and representatives from the legislative and judicial bodies.

The former president, Rafael Correa, borrowed billions of dollars from China to pursue his national development agenda from 2007 to 2017. That left Moreno with a massive budget deficit when he took office last year. To close the deficit, Ecuador signed contracts worth $1.6 billion in October to increase oil production at sites in the northeastern Amazon basin. The country is expected to increase metal mining investment from $1.1 billion this year to $7.9 billion in 2021, according to a BMI Research report.

“The government feels that the country is in an economic crisis with high debt,” Tauli-Corpuz said. “Therefore they’re pushing economic ventures to raise revenue to pay off their foreign debt.”

On her trip, Tauli-Corpuz reviewed a report put together by indigenous leaders that covered five emblematic cases in the Amazon Basin involving Chinese capital and investment. The extractive projects and infrastructure covered in the report were carried out without adequate human rights protection of indigenous peoples in countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and Brazil, creating concerns over China’s rising influence in the region.

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What is race? What isn't race? Tarea

More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of "white" and "black" as discrete groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.

Science would favor Du Bois. Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. And yet, you might still open a study on genetics in a major scientific journal and find categories like "white" and "black" being used as biological variables.

In an article published today (Feb. 4) in the journal Science, four scholars say racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out

They've called on the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to put together a panel of experts across the biological and social sciences to come up with ways for researchers to shift away from the racial concept in genetics research.

"It's a concept we think is too crude to provide useful information, it's a concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding of human genetic diversity and it's a concept that we are not the first to call upon moving away from," said Michael Yudell, a professor of public health at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Yudell said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox, which is that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics.

"Essentially, I could not agree more with the authors," said Svante Pääbo, a biologist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who worked on the Neanderthal genome but was not involved with the new paper.

"What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded," Pääbo told Live Science. "It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions."

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Have social networks always existed?

Social media has been around for the best part of 40 years ,  Although these Usenets and similar bulletin boards heralded the launch of the first, albeit very rudimentary, social networks, social media never really took off until almost 30 years later, following the roll out of Facebook in 2006.

The state of social media in 2018

When we first published this blog, back in January 2017, the stats showed that, as of July 2015, the total worldwide population was 7.3 billion, around half of which (3.17 billion) are active internet users, while around a quarter (2.3 billion) are social media users.

Things have moved up a notch since then.

The latest figures from Brandwatch show that the global population is now 7.6 billion, and more than half of that number (4.2 billion) are active internet users. And the number of social network users is now 3.3 billion – a staggering increase of one billion active users in just under three years.

Facebook is still far and away the most popular social network, with 2.072 billion users (up from 1.71 billion users in 2015), followed by Wechat, with 1.12 billion users – the same number as was using it back in 2015.  YouTube now has 1.5 billion users, while  WhatsApp has 900 million.

Twitter is, somewhat surprisingly, way down the list with 330 million users (and increase of 10 million users since 2015), behind both LinkedIn, which has 500 million users (up from 450 million in 2015) and Instagram, which has been the real social media success story, doubling the number of users from 400 million to 800 million in just three years.

Even so, Twitter is still arguably the most popular social network among business users, with 83% of all Fortune 500 companies having a presence on Twitter. In contrast, just 4% have a Facebook page.