The Alan Turing Institute and the Council of Europe: Primer – Artificial Intelligence, Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law: “…It is a remarkable fact that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven technologies over the last two decades have placed contemporary society at a pivot-point in deciding what shape the future of… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Climate Change
Groundwater Gold Rush
Bloomberg [no paywall]: “Banks, pension funds and insurers have been turning California’s scarce water into enormous profits, leaving people with less to drink…Some of the world’s largest investment banks, pension funds and insurers, including Manulife Financial Corp.’s John Hancock unit, TIAA and UBS, have been depleting California’s groundwater to grow high-value nuts, leaving less drinking… Continue Reading
Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community
ODNI, February 2023: Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community: “During the coming year, the United States and its allies will confront a complex and pivotal international security environment dominated by two critical strategic challenges that intersect with each other and existing trends to intensify their national security implications. First, great powers, rising regional… Continue Reading
Visualizing California’s Wildflowers
Center on Data Innovation – “The Wall Street Journal has created a visualization tracking wildflower observations in southern California from 1876 to 2023 [subscription req’d – right click on photo to open in new window w no text]: The visualization shows poppies as orange dots, suncups as yellow dots, lupins as blue dots, pincushions as… Continue Reading
A gobal approach for natural history museum collections
Popular Science – Is there a way to keep track of all the items held in natural history museums? By Charlotte Hu: “Natural history museums offer amazing portals into worlds miles away from our own, and into eras from the distant past. Comprised of fossils, minerals, preserved specimens, and much more, some collections are of… Continue Reading
Geographic information systems: a use case for journalists
DataJournalism.com: “…Speak with a few GIS professionals and a common theme will emerge: they struggle to explain to their loved ones exactly what it is they do. Many of us understand superficially that GIS has something to do with ‘mapping’ and ‘geography’, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Similar to how tools… Continue Reading
The People’s Plan for Nature
“This document describes the creation of the People’s Plan for Nature – the direct output of the UK’s largest ever public conversation about the future of nature. The People’s Plan for Nature sets out the public’s vision for the future of nature in the UK, and the actions we all need to take to protect… Continue Reading
2022 Fossil Fuel Finance Report
Banking on Climate Chaos – Any bank supporting any company that is expanding fossil fuels is driving climate chaos: “Fossil fuel financing from the world’s 60 largest banks has reached USD $4.6 trillion in the six years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, with $742 billion in fossil fuel financing in 2021 alone. This… Continue Reading
Visualizing the Arrival of Spring
Washington Post: “When will spring come? Or has it already? Look up where you live. All across the east, naturalists are exasperated. As the rest of us luxuriated in this winter’s uncommon mildness, gardeners and wildlife biologists watched with rising pique as one of the earliest springs in recent memory threw nature’s rhythms out of… Continue Reading
Live stream of IPCC press conference to launch the Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will hold a hybrid press conference to present the Summary for Policymakers of Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report, subject to approval by the Panel. The press conference is scheduled to start at 14.00 CET (13.00 GMT) on Monday, 20 March 2023. It will follow the closure of the… Continue Reading
Artifical Intelligence and Climate Change
Quoted from: Couillet, Romain, Denis Trystram, and Thierry Ménissier. “The submerged part of the AI-ceberg.” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, September 2022. Via No Tech Magazine – “The energy consumption of a single training run of the latest (by 2020) deep neural networks dedicated to natural language processing exceeds 1,000 megawatt-hours (more than a month of… Continue Reading
These Interactive Tools Reveal Your Home’s Future Flood, Heat, and Wind Risk
Lifehacker: “Floods are the most expensive natural disaster in the United States, costing over $1 trillion since 1980 (when you take inflation into account), according to Flood Defenders. And while many people use FEMA flood maps to check whether their home has a high flood risk, they are outdated by a decade, according to Scientific… Continue Reading
