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Daily Archives: March 6, 2018

Manhattan Tree Map: A Data Through Design exhibit

Data Driven Journalism: “On January 9th of 2017, the official Twitter account of MillionTreesNYC (@MillionTreesNYC) announced that they had reached the initiative’s ambitious goal to plant and care for one million new trees across the City’s five boroughs. Starting in April of 2007 as a joint venture between the city’s Parks Department, private organizations, residents, and community organizations, it took almost 10 years to increase New York City’s urban tree population by an astounding 20%. As of today, there are 5.2 million trees and 168 different species in New York City, providing numerous environmental, economic, and social benefits for all. Trees have been shown to lower surface air temperatures by providing shade, absorb and retain stormwater, and remove air pollutants. The Parks Department, with the help of legions of volunteers, conducts a decennial census of the City’s street trees: those that line sidewalks and roads, as opposed to those inside parks. The 2015 Street Tree Census, a dataset publicly available on the NYC Open Data Portal provides an inventory of the 683,788 street trees across all five New York City boroughs. Each tree is geo-coded and classified by its species, health, and maturity. This data is the backbone of the Park Department’s internal forestry management database…”

Emails – Oil Was Central in Decision to Shrink Bears Ears Monument

The New York Times: “Even before President Trump officially opened his high-profile review last spring of federal lands protected as national monuments, the Department of Interior was focused on the potential for oil and gas exploration at a protected Utah site, internal agency documents show. The debate started as early as March 2017, when an… Continue Reading

Future Workforce Report – How Companies are Embracing Remote Teams to Get Work Done

“With freelancers predicted to become the U.S. workforce majority in the next decade, companies are thinking beyond their city limits to access the talent they need to compete. This report, conducted by an independent research firm and commissioned by Upwork, surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. hiring managers to show how businesses are adapting to the… Continue Reading

The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized

Scientific American – Scott Barry Kaufman – March 1, 2018: “What does it take to succeed? What are the secrets of the most successful people? Judging by the popularity of magazines such as Success, Forbes, Inc., and Entrepreneur, there is no shortage of interest in these questions. There is a deep underlying assumption, however, that… Continue Reading

People With Disabilities Are Finding More Work, But There’s A Long Way To Go

FastCompany – “While the vast majority of Americans with disabilities want to work, just over one-third are able to find jobs, according to a recent survey from RespectAbility,  a nonprofit that works to empower and increase opportunities for people with disabilities. That creates a major societal problem: Without gainful employment, more than 12 million people… Continue Reading

The Data Culture Project – Use our videos, guides to run one activity a month at brown bag lunches in your org

“Today, my colleague Rahul Bhargava and I are pleased to launch the Data Culture Project. This is the latest evolution of our DataBasic.io work, now focused on helping organizations build a data culture in creative, hands-on ways. We often talk about data literacy as if it’s an individual capacity, but what about data literacy for… Continue Reading

What happened to US diplomats – On Cuba, Diplomats, Ultrasound, and Intermodulation Distortion

Manuscript. March 1, 2018. On Cuba, Diplomats, Ultrasound, and Intermodulation Distortion. University of Michigan Tech Report CSE-TR-001-18 Chen Yan, Kevin Fu and Wenyuan Xu, Department of Systems Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Michigan – “This technical report analyzes how ultrasound could have led to the AP news recordings of… Continue Reading