Thanks for the fish story
Dear Echo News,
Just a quick letter to say a heartfelt thank you for the front-page article on our recent fish discovery Rare perch discovery (Echo News, May 29).
Trei and Ethan are so proud and excited to be on the cover of the local paper – we’ll definitely be framing it for our new facility when it opens later this year, and of course we’d love to invite you along.
We absolutely loved the cartoon too – having a newspaper cartoon has been a long-time dream for us, so we appreciate it so much!
It’s a very special keepsake for our team.
Thank you for consistently supporting the local community, elevating our voices and helping to share our stories. We appreciate you all so much.
Francesca Flynn
Executive Director
Bibbul Ngarma Aboriginal Association
--------------------------------------------------------------------Protecting ‘extinct’ species
Dear Echo News,
Interesting to read in recent months in the Echo News the discovery of locally extinct species.
One would think with the Department of Conservation, Biodiversity and Attractions’ (DCBA) budget of $750 million a year, this week’s quarterly budget papers revealing that this public sector union monopoly would have held someone accountable.
But the state Labor Environment Minister Matthew Swinbourn and the state Labor government are sadly the political representatives of the public sector unions at the expense of the taxpayer.
Funds go into the wages of a job for life monopoly accountable to itself.
The federal Labor government tallies up and issues a press release of the ever-growing list of threatened species and gets the blame.
Ironically the federal Labor government shovels more money out to the states without an open tender for non-profit and private enterprise to compete for funds and provide much needed competitive pressure on the union dominated DCBA etc.
Recently I contacted the failing Environment Minister in Western Australia requesting him to put in place a simple process for four alleged extinct species in WA enabling members of the public to survey for them using environmental DNA, given the appalling record of DBCA and its Parks and Wildlife division over decades.
They refused.
Not only did the Minister and his Director General not sign off on the reply it was left to the deputy director general who could not even rule out the existence of these four creatures.
The state and federal governments are more interested in their public sector union besties than getting conservation into the 21st Century.
M Moss
Rivervale
--------------------------------------------------------------------AI is here to stay
Dear Echo News,
Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay and expand with many potential changes to its use which will affect our lifestyle.
A by-product will be huge increase in data produced and the need for this data to be usefully processed.
There are currently about 27 data centres in Perth metropolitan area and with a huge, expected need for many more, the location of these needs more careful attention and planning .
A recent study in the United States indicated some 3000 operational data centres with more than 1500 in development. Currently some 87 per cent of these are in urban areas with 67 per cent of upcoming data centres to be in rural areas.
A reported study in Phoenix, Arizona, indicated a raise of four degrees temperature in areas around these centres due to waste heat generated by machines and computers needed to process the data AI generated.
The sheer magnitude of energy use and hence the heat released indicates urgent and sustained consideration and planning for the location of these data centres as well as research to reduce waste heat generated.
The electrical energy use of these centres is equivalent to that used to supply many tens (up to hundreds ) of thousands of houses.
An example of coming huge increased amounts of data needing processing is the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope being built in WA’s Murchison region.
It has been quoted that this array will generate each day of operation the equivalent amount of data as the world wide web for that day, indicating an enormous increase in the need for data processing capacity and energy consumption with resulting heat release.
Our governments (state and local) need both urgent and careful planning to appropriately cater for this coming issue considering not only socially acceptable location, but energy demand and heat generated.
D Lovelock
Swan View
