Cross-pollination among neuroscience, psychology and AI research yields a foundational understanding of thinking

If you want to build a true artificial mind, start with a model of human cognition. DrAfter123/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images


 CONVERSATION
Published: July 25, 2022 9.07am EDT

Progress in artificial intelligence has enabled the creation of AIs that perform tasks previously thought only possible for humans, such as translating languages, driving cars, playing board games at world-champion level and extracting the structure of proteins. However, each of these AIs has been designed and exhaustively trained for a single task and has the ability to learn only what’s needed for that specific task.

Recent AIs that produce fluent text, including in conversation with humans, and generate impressive and unique art can give the false impression of a mind at work. But even these are specialized systems that carry out narrowly defined tasks and require massive amounts of training.

It still remains a daunting challenge to combine multiple AIs into one that can learn and perform many different tasks, much less pursue the full breadth of tasks performed by humans or leverage the range of experiences available to humans that reduce the amount of data otherwise required to learn how to perform these tasks. The best current AIs in this respect, such as AlphaZero and Gato, can handle a variety of tasks that fit a single mold, like game-playing. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is capable of a breadth of tasks remains elusive.

Ultimately, AGIs need to be able to interact effectively with each other and people in various physical environments and social contexts, integrate the wide varieties of skill and knowledge needed to do so, and learn flexibly and efficiently from these interactions.

Building AGIs comes down to building artificial minds, albeit greatly simplified compared to human minds. And to build an artificial mind, you need to start with a model of cognition

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This robot, powered by an AI called Rosie, learned how to solve this puzzle from a human who communicated to the robot using natural language. James Kirk, CC BY-ND

From human to Artificial General Intelligence

Humans have an almost unbounded set of skills and knowledge, and quickly learn new information without needing to be re-engineered to do so. It is conceivable that an AGI can be built using an approach that is fundamentally different from human intelligence. However, as three longtime researchers in AI and cognitive science, our approach is to draw inspiration and insights from the structure of the human mind. We are working toward AGI by trying to better understand the human mind, and better understand the human mind by working toward AGI.

From research in neuroscience, cognitive science and psychology, we know that the human brain is neither a huge homogeneous set of neurons nor a massive set of task-specific programs that each solves a single problem. Instead, it is a set of regions with different properties that support the basic cognitive capabilities that together form the human mind.

These capabilities include perception and action; short-term memory for what is relevant in the current situation; long-term memories for skills, experience and knowledge; reasoning and decision making; emotion and motivation; and learning new skills and knowledge from the full range of what a person perceives and experiences.

Instead of focusing on specific capabilities in isolation, AI pioneer Allen Newell in 1990 suggested developing Unified Theories of Cognition that integrate all aspects of human thought. Researchers have been able to build software programs called cognitive architectures that embody such theories, making it possible to test and refine them.

Cognitive architectures are grounded in multiple scientific fields with distinct perspectives. Neuroscience focuses on the organization of the human brain, cognitive psychology on human behavior in controlled experiments, and artificial intelligence on useful capabilities.

The Common Model of Cognition

We have been involved in the development of three cognitive architectures: ACT-R, Soar and Sigma. Other researchers have also been busy on alternative approaches. One paper identified nearly 50 active cognitive architectures. This proliferation of architectures is partly a direct reflection of the multiple perspectives involved, and partly an exploration of a wide array of potential solutions. Yet, whatever the cause, it raises awkward questions both scientifically and with respect to finding a coherent path to AGI.

Fortunately, this proliferation has brought the field to a major inflection point. The three of us have identified a striking convergence among architectures, reflecting a combination of neural, behavioral and computational studies. In response, we initiated a communitywide effort to capture this convergence in a manner akin to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that emerged in the second half of the 20th century.

This basic model of cognition both explains human thinking and provides a blueprint for true artificial intelligence. Andrea Stocco, CC BY-ND

This Common Model of Cognition divides humanlike thought into multiple modules, with a short-term memory module at the center of the model. The other modules – perception, action, skills and knowledge – interact through it.

Learning, rather than occurring intentionally, happens automatically as a side effect of processing. In other words, you don’t decide what is stored in long-term memory. Instead, the architecture determines what is learned based on whatever you do think about. This can yield learning of new facts you are exposed to or new skills that you attempt. It can also yield refinements to existing facts and skills.

The modules themselves operate in parallel; for example, allowing you to remember something while listening and looking around your environment. Each module’s computations are massively parallel, meaning many small computational steps happening at the same time. For example, in retrieving a relevant fact from a vast trove of prior experiences, the long-term memory module can determine the relevance of all known facts simultaneously, in a single step.

Guiding the way to Artificial General Intelligence

The Common Model is based on the current consensus in research in cognitive architectures and has the potential to guide research on both natural and artificial general intelligence. When used to model communication patterns in the brain, the Common Model yields more accurate results than leading models from neuroscience. This extends its ability to model humans – the one system proven capable of general intelligence – beyond cognitive considerations to include the organization of the brain itself.

We are starting to see efforts to relate existing cognitive architectures to the Common Model and to use it as a baseline for new work – for example, an interactive AI designed to coach people toward better health behavior. One of us was involved in developing an AI based on Soar, dubbed Rosie, that learns new tasks via instructions in English from human teachers. It learns 60 different puzzles and games and can transfer what it learns from one game to another. It also learns to control a mobile robot for tasks such as fetching and delivering packages and patrolling buildings.

Rosie is just one example of how to build an AI that approaches AGI via a cognitive architecture that is well characterized by the Common Model. In this case, the AI automatically learns new skills and knowledge during general reasoning that combines natural language instruction from humans and a minimal amount of experience – in other words, an AI that functions more like a human mind than today’s AIs, which learn via brute computing force and massive amounts of data.

From a broader AGI perspective, we look to the Common Model both as a guide in developing such architectures and AIs, and as a means for integrating the insights derived from those attempts into a consensus that ultimately leads to AGI.

Authors

Paul S. Rosenbloom
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of Southern California

Christian Lebiere
Research Psychologist, Carnegie Mellon University

John E. Laird
John L. Tishman Professor of Engineering, University of Michigan

Disclosure statement

Paul S. Rosenbloom currently receives no funding.

Christian Lebiere receives funding from AFOSR, ARL, DARPA, IARPA and the Department of Defense Basic Research Office.

John Laird receives funding from ONR and AFOSR. I'm Chairman of the Board and stock holder of Soar Technology a company that does AI research for the government. I'm also founder and co-Director of the Center for Integrated Cognition, a non-profit that does basic research on AI.
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CHESS                   
Magnus Carlsen Is Giving Up The World Title. But The Carlsen Era Lives On.


By Jake Lourim
JUL. 26, 2022

In announcing he won’t defend his World Chess Championship title, five-time champion Magnus Carlsen joins the ranks of other greats who have stepped away from competition early.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY DAN DAO / GETTY IMAGES

The chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen announced last week that he will not defend his world championship next year. There are two ways to look at this news: One is with shock, given that Carlsen is maybe the greatest chess player of all time, at arguably the peak of his powers, with a good chance to win a sixth world title in 2023. But the other is without, given that Carlsen hinted several times that he had played his last world championship match in December.

Announcements like Carlsen’s aren’t uncommon across the sports world — see, for example, Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps or Ashleigh Barty — but they always seem surprising. At this point, though, maybe they shouldn’t be, given the diminishing incentives for a great player to keep defending their place at the top.

Carlsen confirmed his intentions on Wednesday in the first episode of his podcast, “The Magnus Effect.” He said he had mulled his world championship future for more than a year, even before defeating Ian Nepomniachtchi for his fifth title, and that he was “pretty comfortable” with his decision to step aside. He confessed that he was “not motivated to play another match,” that “I don’t particularly like it” and that “I don’t have any inclination to play.” He added, “I don’t rule out a return [to world championship matches] in the future, but I wouldn’t particularly count on it, either.”

Carlsen’s legacy is largely secure: Many consider him the best player of all time. Chess has used the Elo rating system to rank players for more than a century, and by that metric, Carlsen is the GOAT. He surpassed Garry Kasparov’s record mark of 2851 after winning the London Chess Classic in December 2012, and he has stayed above that peak for most of the past decade.

But as in any other sport, comparing players of different eras is complicated. Robert Hess, a grandmaster and commentator for Chess.com, suggested that if you could pit today’s Carlsen — with today’s knowledge and today’s tools, having beaten today’s competition — against previous greats like Kasparov or Bobby Fischer, Carlsen would likely win.

“I’ve made this argument before, that essentially the high school physics teacher that you and I had knew more than Isaac Newton,” Hess said. “And that’s not to say that Isaac Newton wasn’t more talented. Isaac Newton just didn’t have the resources. Because of [their] predecessors, these players are better, and that’s true in most disciplines.”

Today’s chess champions study not only from books and historical games but also using the chess engine Stockfish and the neural network NNUE, which weren’t available to Kasparov and Fischer in their primes. But is Carlsen the best player of all time, adjusted for technological advancement? That’s impossible to say.

The arc of Carlsen’s world championships is the clearest proof of how his development has paralleled the advancements in how humans understand the game. In 2013, he wrested his first title from the reigning champ Viswanathan Anand. That was a best-of-12 series, but Carlsen only needed 10 games, winning 6.5 to 3.5. The next year, Anand challenged Carlsen for the title and even defeated him in one game, but Carlsen still won in 11 games, 6.5 to 4.5. In 2016, Carlsen appeared vulnerable, as challenger Sergey Karjakin earned the match’s first victory in Game 8. Carlsen evened the score in Game 10, though, and eventually won two rapid games as a tiebreaker. But the gap appeared to be narrowing.

Finally, in 2018, Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana completed one of the most impressive feats in chess history. The two grandmasters, ranked first and second in the world, played 12 straight draws before switching to the rapid format to break the tie. Carlsen won all three rapid games, but the match was otherwise a dead heat. On his podcast last week, Carlsen called his 2018 victory “the most fun” and “the most interesting.”

Carlsen’s 7.5 to 3.5 rout of Nepomniachtchi last fall was his most lopsided win yet, but Stockfish and NNUE told a fuller story of the skill on display. The match began with five straight draws, and Game 7 was, according to Stockfish, the most flawlessly played game in World Chess Championship history. Games 3 and 10 were tied for the second-most-accurate games played in championship history. The match shifted late in Game 6 when Carlsen won a record 136-move marathon that lasted nearly eight hours.

Training at that level is both mentally and physically draining; committing to another world championship would have meant six more months of that grind, followed by a rematch with Nepomniachtchi.1 That would have left Carlsen with something to lose and little to gain. “From a purely enjoyment perspective, I think that checks out,” Hess said. “I think from a competitive standpoint, it also makes a lot of sense.”

Elite competitors in Carlsen’s position have often found that there’s more to be lost than gained at the top — it’s even baked into the mathematical formula for Elo ratings. The system assigns each player a rating based on past results, and those ratings change based on players’ prematch win probabilities. Because Carlsen is the higher-ranked player in every game he plays, his wins only add a limited number of points to his rating, and his draws usually decrease his rating. Even after last year’s world championship, where he won 7.5 of 11 games against the fifth-ranked player in the world (rated 2782), Carlsen’s rating jumped by just 9 points, from 2856 to 2865.

When Carlsen reflected on his journey last week, he recalled playing in the Candidates Tournament on “a whim,” hoping only to win one world championship and lacking motivation to defend it as early as 2016. “I feel like I mostly played that match because other people sort of relied on it, expected me to,” he said. He admitted his next thought would sound strange to people who spend their lives trying to win one world championship. “[Going from] four championships to five, it didn’t mean anything to me. It was nothing. I was satisfied with the job that I’d done. I was happy not to have lost the match. But that was it.”

Even after abdicating his world championship, Carlsen will continue to occupy a unique space in the chess zeitgeist. The game has existed for centuries, contested often by little-known individuals who laid the foundation for much of modern strategy. It’s also experiencing a boom in popularity, driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and experienced by many people who have never played chess on a physical board. Carlsen is the link between chess’ past and its future. He earned the title of grandmaster at age 13, the same year he beat former world champion Anatoly Karpov and drew a game with Kasparov, almost beating the longtime world No. 1. He holds that connection to his predecessors — Kasparov was among those who wished him well last week — but he also resonates with the modern audience. He may be the biggest celebrity in chess since Fischer.

Through his business and his sponsorships, Carlsen is the rare multimillionaire in chess. This summer, he played the World Series of Poker Main Event. He advised the Golden State Warriors’ Klay Thompson and made a cameo with Daryl Morey, the Philadelphia 76ers’ president of basketball operations. He played chess with Bill Gates on a Scandinavian talk show and won in nine moves. He cracked jokes on an episode of “The Simpsons.” He was a guest on “The Colbert Report.” He appeared in a Porsche commercial alongside Muhammad Ali and Maria Sharapova. He was one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in 2013, the year of his first world championship. “If he can rekindle the world’s fascination with the royal game,” Kasparov wrote at the time, “we will soon be living in the Carlsen Era.”

How prescient those words were. In the end, Carlsen’s true legacy will be the effect Kasparov described — he became a global ambassador to chess and, with his international renown, helped bring it into mainstream popular culture.

Perhaps Carlsen will be back on the world championship stage again someday, like Jordan and Phelps were. Either way, he has a busy schedule and has said his next goal is to become the first player to achieve a 2900 rating. If anyone can do it, it’s Carlsen — and there’s no better time than the present, given how much the realm of what’s possible in chess has expanded since Carlsen became the face of the sport.

Jake Lourim is a freelance writer in Washington. He most recently worked for the Louisville Courier-Journal. @jakelourim

Where have all the workers gone? Don't blame COVID, economists say

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Boomers are exiting the workforce in droves, leaving more

 job vacancies than there are people to fill them

Alistair Steele · CBC News · Posted: Jul 23, 2022 

According to Statistics Canada, the unemployment-to-job vacancy rate is at a historic low across the country, indicating there are currently more available jobs than there are workers to fill them. (Chris Wattie /Reuters)

Canada is in the throes of a serious labour shortage, but economists say it's not all the pandemic's fault — it's the inevitable culmination of a seismic demographic shift decades in the making.

"It's the slowest-moving train on the planet. It was predictable 60 to 65 years ago, and we have done nothing about it," said Armine Yalnizyan, an economist and Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers. "We knew this transition was going to happen."

• The labour shortage isn't over — and employers are having to lower their hiring expectations

The numbers behind all those help wanted signs are startling.

According to Statistics Canada, the unemployment-to-job vacancy ratio — a key measure comparing the number of Canadians looking for work to the number of available jobs — is currently hovering at a historic low in every province. In fact, the ratio is significantly lower now than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

The reason isn't that there are fewer jobs opening up — remember the help wanted signs? It's that there are fewer workers available to fill them. And the reason for that, economists say, can be traced back to the post-war baby boom.

Construction workers prepare a form in downtown Toronto in May. According to Statistics Canada, their industry is the among the hardest-hit by the current labour shortage. (Alex Lupul/CBC)

Not enough replacements

While those 55 and older have been steadily exiting the Canadian workforce — an exodus that some economists believe was accelerated by the pandemic, as many older workers opted for early retirement — there simply aren't enough younger workers to replace them.

In fact, participation in the workforce among those ages 25-54 approached 88 per cent in May, up more than one percentage point from February 2020, before the pandemic had taken hold in Canada.

"That's what happens when a baby boom finally starts exiting from stage left, and there's not enough people entering from stage right," Yalnizyan said. "We've actually got a higher share of the working-age population working than ever."

Armine Yalnizyan is an economist and Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers. (Christopher Katsarov/The Atkinson Foundation)

That contradicts the theory that some sort of "great resignation" among working-age Canadians, many of whom took advantage of pandemic income supports, is to blame for all those job vacancies, according to Ian Lee, associate professor at Carleton University's Sprott School of Business.

"I just found that very suspicious because unless you're independently wealthy … most of us have to have income to survive," Lee said. "It just didn't make sense."

"Your first suspicion as a labour economist is, well, are people just not in the labour force anymore?" said Gordon Betcherman, professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa's school of international development and global studies. "But that's not the case. It's back up to levels that we had before COVID."

An employees' market

Instead, economists say the data points to the emergence of an employees' market where workers are enjoying an enormous amount of leverage over employers.

"It's undeniable this trend we're in where the balance between job seekers and job vacancies has definitely shifted," Betcherman said.

According to Statistics Canada, that has led to virtually unprecedented labour shortages across nearly every employment sector.

There just aren't enough people willing to do poorly paid jobs that are marginal at best.- Armine Yalnizyan, economist

In particular, the construction and manufacturing sectors are having a difficult time recruiting skilled workers, followed closely by accommodation and food services, which includes hotels, restaurants and bars. 

"People are finding other places to work. There just aren't enough people willing to do poorly paid jobs that are marginal at best," Yalnizyan noted. 

"Workers have a lot more choices now," Lee agreed. "If you have more choices and you don't have to work in that industry, you'll go and work in an industry where there's a better career stream and where the wages are higher and the hours are more predictable."

That could force employers in certain industries to raise wages, Lee said.

"I'm not suggesting that the demand for these jobs is going to go away. It's not," he said. "It suggests to me that we're going to see some pretty serious wage inflation in these industries over the years ahead."

The restaurant sector is also struggling to attract new hires as many opt for higher-paying jobs with better working conditions. (Paige Parsons/CBC)

Wages predicted to rise

According to Yalnizyan, this competitive new environment means employers in certain sectors will need to raise wages if they hope to retain skilled workers.

"We are losing people who are trained as early childhood educators because we won't pay them more than we pay pet groomers. Well why would they stay if they can get a better job in some other sector?"

That's borne out by Statistics Canada data showing the reservation wage — the minimum hourly rate at which job seekers are willing to accept a position — surpassing the current offered wage in nearly every sector, whereas Canadian workers have historically been willing to settle for less.

Economists believe there are other possible outcomes — increasing automation to fill the vacuum left by the labour shortage, for one. Some industries could also bring in more temporary foreign workers to help fill gaps at the lower end of the labour market, potentially blunting the gains made by domestic workers.

Ian Lee is an associate professor at Carleton University's Sprott School of Business. (CBC)

But Yalnizyan said rising wages could help erase some of the inequalities caused by a labour market that has for years paid some workers well and the rest poorly.

"If we actually improve wages and working conditions, particularly at the bottom, we could be creating the conditions for making a more resilient middle class that can actually afford to buy stuff. That's what we've been missing out on for quite a while now," she said.

"Population aging can be our friend, not our enemy. But we have to treat it as something more than just a labour shortage for business. We have to treat it as an opportunity to make every job a good job."                                                                                      

New Brunswick

They fought a rent increase and won, then received an eviction notice

Landlord says eviction for Fredericton couple is 'absolutely necessary to save our investment'


Jeanne Armstrong · CBC News · Posted: Jul 25, 2022 

Pauline Tramble, 67, and Charles Tramble, 85, are getting evicted after appealing a rent increase for an apartment they've lived in for 33 years. (Jeanne Armstrong/CBC)

Pauline Tramble's 85-year-old husband Charles has dementia. Every day since June, "three, four, five times a day," she's had to explain that they're getting evicted.

Tramble says her biggest concern is whether her husband will be able to adapt to a new environment, after 33 years in their second-storey unit on Shore Street in Fredericton.

"Some of the places have elevators and long halls. He'd be so confused. That's what really bothers me. He knows his directions [here], he goes for his walks. So it's just an ideal situation that way for us.

Landlords must prove Airbnb conversions aren't retaliation against tenants

It's the latest chapter in the rental woes for the couple, who faced a 67 per cent increase in their rent last December. That story prompted the New Brunswick government to beef up tenant protections, and put in place a one-year rent cap.

The Trambles were relieved to see a rent cap. But in June, everything changed when the eviction notice came.

"I just feel lost," the 67-year-old said through tears. "We're so uncertain of where we're going to go."
From 'courtesy letter' to 'notice of termination'

On June 13, DNV Properties Inc. sent the Trambles a "courtesy letter" letting them know they should start looking for somewhere else to live, because their unit was being converted into a short-term rental.

But on June 30, the Trambles received a new letter. It was a provincial "Notice of Termination to Tenant." It claimed that "the landlord or their immediate family intends to live in the premises," and it gave the Trambles until Sept. 30 to vacate the unit.

The reason provided is one of four exceptions that would allow a landlord to terminate a tenancy in New Brunswick.

The Trambles will have to leave their second-storey unit in Fredericton this fall.

 (Jeanne Armstrong/CBC)

Pauline Tramble said she was devastated by the letter, but she was also confused by their reasoning, because there are currently empty units in the building.

"The front apartment is available. That's supposed to be an Airbnb. And our neighbour's apartment is going to become available. … Why would they decide to come and live in this apartment?"

When Tramble tried to call her landlord, Neda Veselinovic, to ask her more about the termination, she was rebuffed.

"I tried to reach her when she dropped off our termination of rent, so I wanted to call her and ask her, why, you know? And she saw my number coming up, and she said she couldn't answer at the time, she was busy, and she said from now on, all our communications will be by email."

Pauline has to say goodbye to her home after she received an eviction notice in June. (Jeanne Armstrong/CBC)

In a subsequent email, Veselinovic told Tramble: "We understand that you are having a hard time finding a place to live, however we have tried to explain to you numerous times that we absolutely have to continue with our plan. ... The changes we are making are absolutely necessary to save our investment. Please understand this is not personal."

Requests for comment made by CBC News by email and by phone received no immediate response from DNV Properties Inc.

Tribunal 'actively reviewing this case'

Pauline said she's anxious to hear from the Residential Tenancies Tribunal.

In a statement to CBC, Service New Brunswick Minister Mary Wilson said the tribunal is "actively reviewing this case which was filed in early July."

"If the reason is due to the landlord or an immediate family member moving into the unit, supporting evidence will be required and the Residential Tenancies Tribunal will follow up in two months to ensure the landlord has followed through with the change."

In an interview with Information Morning Fredericton in June, Wilson, who refers to the tribunal as the RTT, said the province's Residential Tenancies Act offers protection against retaliatory rent increases or terminations.

"Is [this] a retaliatory change? Are they acting in good faith, or not? So at the end of the day, the RTT can deny, can delay or confirm termination," she said.

Pauline said the tribunal decision will dictate whether they're able to stay or go. The tribunal has not made a decision on the case yet, but a residential tenancies officer sent Pauline Tramble an update late last week.
Fredericton s

eniors told to vacate apartments for Airbnb-style conversions

More double-digit rent hikes in New Brunswick renew calls for limits

The officer sent the Trambles two digital pamphlets. One was titled "Housing & Homelessness," and it included a list of phone numbers for shelters, outreach workers and the Social Development Department.

The other digital pamphlet was titled "Food & Meal Resources," and it listed contact information for food banks, churches, and other charities.

The emails didn't give Pauline much hope.

"I am so anxious and afraid."

Pair using regenerative organic practices crowned as outstanding young farmers in Sask.

Farmers say their approach helped them improve soil, survive drought for 2 years

CBC News · Posted: Jul 24, 2022 

  

Cody Straza, left, and Allison Squires, right, were crowned outstanding young farmers this year for their work at Upland Organics, a farm they own in southwest Saskatchewan. (Upland Organics/Instagram)

A family of Saskatchewan producers have been crowned the province's most outstanding young farmers this year for their innovative practices.

Allison Squires and Cody Straza own Upland Organics in Wood Mountain, a village about 170 kilometres southwest of Regina.

The two earned their regional awards in a recent farm show in June by Canada's Outstanding Young Farmer's program, which recognizes excellent adult farmers under 40.

"It means quite a lot actually, it came as a bit of surprise," Squires told Shauna Powers, host of CBC's Saskatchewan Weekend.

"Being nominated by your peers and then recognized in such a way is pretty special and we're very excited about it."

A news release from the program said through "innovation and outreach, Upland Organics Ltd. have become leaders in organic agriculture."

Most importantly, their farm operations helped them survive a pair of back-to-back droughts that have devastated or hindered southern prairie farmers this year and last.

From drought relief to filling streams, heavy rain proves beneficial in Sask.

Sask. farmers using trees, winter crops to combat climate change-driven heat

Squires said the farm operates as a regenerative organic farm, and that's improved their soil and helped them weather the drought.

"Things are much better this year, although that is a pretty low bar," Straza said.

"We do still need to restore all the soil moisture .... it's in deficit right now, and we're always working on improving our soils."

LISTEN | Married couple named outstanding young farmers for organic produce farm talk about their practices:

Saskatchewan Weekend

11:01

Upland Organics named Saskatchewan's Outstanding Young FarmersAllison Squires and Cody Straza do things a little differently at their farm in Wood Mountain. Upland Organics works hard to build soil health and it's paying off: with their crops and their recognition. Recently they've been awarded the title of Saskatchewan's outstanding young farmers. Host Shauna Powers learns more about what that recognition means to them.

The two met at the University of Saskatchewan. Straza was an engineer who grew up on a farm in the Wood Mountain area, and Squires was a toxicologist from Newfoundland.

They got married and a few years later in 2010, and chose to buy the first parcel of land that would lead to Upland Organics.

"Learning from others and through their own on-farm experimentation Cody [and] Allison have successfully adopted farming techniques that include reduced tillage, intercropping, cover cropping, pollinator strips and rotational grazing," the release said.

"Using these practices, they have shown it is possible to improve their soil and be excellent stewards of the environment while also realizing financial benefits."


A national program event for 2022 is set to be held in Saskatoon in late November, where they'll learn if they've earned the national title as well.

"We show very well in the categories across the [nomination] application," Straza said.

Even 'net zero' aviation could still cause significant global warming

Efforts to make flying greener mostly count carbon dioxide emissions only, but modelling shows this ignores 90 per cent of future flights’ contribution to climate change

ENVIRONMENT 25 July 2022

By Adam Vaughan

Planes queueing for take-off in Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport, China

Jingying Zhao/Getty Images

Future flights will endanger the goals of the Paris climate agreement if efforts to achieve net-zero aviation fail to account for the warming effect of streaks of clouds created by planes, a study has found.

The research comes just days after the UK government announced its Jet Zero Strategy on 19 July, with a target of reducing carbon emissions from flights to net zero by 2050.

Nicoletta Brazzola  at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and her colleagues found that even if such efforts to reduce carbon emissions succeed, the aviation sector worldwide could increase global average temperatures by between 0.1°C and 0.4°C. Because the world has already warmed 1.1°C since the industrial revolution, Brazzola ’s team says the extra warming could compromise the Paris deal’s aim of holding temperature rises to 1.5°C.

The warming comes from the ways flights heat the atmosphere beyond the carbon dioxide emitted by burning jet fuel, which are the only emissions currently counted by international and most national efforts to decarbonise aviation. The main one of these non-CO2 effects is the contrails that form because of the soot, aerosols and water vapour released by aircraft engines.

“We found the mitigation efforts needed to get aviation to a place where it’s compatible with the Paris agreement are enormous,” says Brazzola.

Her team explored different future scenarios of demand for flights, technologies to power them and how much CO2 would need to be removed from the atmosphere by trees or machines to hit net zero. “Without a very strong reduction in demand and without very rapid, almost infeasible switches to clean technologies, we would in all cases need to deploy carbon removal to a very large extent,” she says.

                                                                                                

The team’s modelling suggests that failing to account for aviation’s non-CO2 effects, as most policy-makers are, would ignore 90 per cent of future flights’ contribution to climate change.

Read more: The aviation industry has a plan to make planes green. It won't work

Paul Williams at Reading University, UK, says: “This new study makes a compelling case for moving away from carbon-neutral aviation as the main policy goal, and focusing on climate-neutral aviation instead. This would be a radical change of direction, but I think it is long overdu  e.”

The study indicates that new fuels and flight technologies, from hydrogen to batteries, will need to be developed and deployed rapidly to stand a chance of reaching climate neutrality.

It also suggests that the aviation sector’s landmark short-term plan for reducing its impact on climate change – a carbon offsetting scheme that was watered down during the pandemic – won’t be enough.

Her team found that even with only a moderate increase in demand for flights, the status quo of jet fuel and offsetting would require an area the size of Germany to be planted with trees to compensate for the planes’ emissions. That amount of CO2 removal is very large and may be unfeasible, she says.

“Continuing flying with passenger jet fuels and offsetting carbon removal is a very unviable pathway,” says Brazzola. The results also show how difficult it will be to meet that new goal without curbing the world’s future appetite for more flights too, she adds.

Journal reference: Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/s41558-022-01404-7

The hidden science of weather and climate change Simon Clark at New Scientist Live this October                                                                                                                                    

Starling's Environmental Impact Report Finds Carbon Produces 16x More CO2 Than Steel

Jul 25, 2022
by Ed Spratt

Starling has joined the growing list of companies providing research
into its environmental impact as it launches its first report.

The headline-grabbing statistic from the report is that carbon fibre frame production produces about 16 times the CO2 emissions as steel frame production. To help Starling with this portion of the report, the National Composite Centre (NCC) made a comparison between steel, thermoplastic carbon composite and epoxy carbon composite. It is interesting to note that aluminum was not included in these statistics. Using our own armchair math from Trek's report last year we found that a carbon Trek frame had around three times the emission of alloy.

In the investigation, the NCC found a German steel frame produces 4.2kg CO2e and an Asian steel frame sees a slight increase at 6.2kg CO2e. For a carbon epoxy frame, these figures jump significantly to 68.1kg CO2e for a frame made from Korean fibres or 47.1kg CO2e for Japanese fibres. Thermoplastic frames see a slight reduction but still high numbers with 51.7kg CO2e for Korean fibres and 34.2 CO2e for Japanese ones.


Of course frame, material alone isn't only the big contributor to environmental damage. Just like last year's Trek report Starling's report also looked into the impact of shipping bike parts. Starling's report states that air freight produces 500g CO2e per km per kg, road transport at 60-150g per km per kg, and sea freight only 10-40g per km per kg. Starling does state in the report that its greatest impact is air freighting and it needs to find ways to reduce this.

Interestingly, looking at the emissions from transportation, a steel frame shipped by air could be far worse than a carbon frame shipped by sea freight. While the frame material can clearly make a difference in emissions, I think the biggest takeaway from Starling's report should be the impacts of the method in which bikes are transported. Is the speed of air freight really worth the extra environmental cost?

With the release of the report, brand owner Joe McEwan said: "A small number of brands are taking environmental impact seriously right now, but many just don't seem to acknowledge it. Our products encourage people to spend time in nature; to ignore our impact on the environment just doesn't sit right. This process is the first step in helping us understand how sustainably we operate as a business and what we need to do to improve.

"We’ve learned a lot from this process but in many cases, the answers aren’t straightforward. We’ve identified areas for improvement and now we need to find out how to make those changes."

As with all reports on the environment in the bike industry, it's worth adding that the best way to help the planet is to stick with what you currently ride now.

You can read the full report here.