Computers, Society, and Nature

The Wildlife Conservation Society and Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) have just completed a comprehensive assessment of human impacts on wildlife across the globe. Part of their goal was to find the most untouched or pristine places in the world. The most pristine place in the U.S.? Alaska, although that may not be for long if developments like drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) take place.

A nice graphic in the NYTimes article shows the varied impacts.

As posted previously on the Famine Early Warning Systems, this system also relies more on the data quality than the data analysis. Unlike FEWS, this is an entirely remoted sensed project. The NYTimes report mentions land use but it’s actually land cover, a subtle yet important distinction (see below). And the resolution in these types of analyses is small. Smaller resolutions equal big pixels. The bigger the pixel the more difficult it is to see small activities.

To give you a sense of how difficult it is to work at this scale with the data at hand, it’s as if all your data has the resolution of baseball stadiums. You’re trying to infer hotdog and beer sales from a baseball stadium sized snapshot. To get a sense of land use-land cover. The covered stadium is the akin to the land cover; what you’re trying to determine is the activity taking place under the dome–the land use.

Nothing like interpretation of remote sensed imagery to ruin your day: Scientists sound alarm on Arctic ice cap:

Satellite data for the month of June show Arctic sea ice has shrunk to a record low, raising concerns about climate change, coastal erosion, and changes to wildlife patterns. Meier says circulation patterns are bringing more storms and warmer air from the South into the region, and that’s helping to break up the ice.
…

“June is really the first big month of melt in the central Arctic Ocean and so it’s an indication that the melt is progressing faster than normal,” [according to Walt Meier of the U.S. based National Snow and Ice Data Centre.] . “And when you start melting the ice you’re leaving the open ocean there which absorbs much more solar energy and so it tends to heat up even more.”

Less sea ice means more moisture in the air and more rain.

It also leads to an increase in coastal erosion since the ice isn’t there to buffer the shoreline from waves.

Meier says the ice has retreated almost everywhere in the Arctic except for a small area in the East Greenland Sea.

I guess it’s time again for Canada to worry about its sovereignty over the Northwest Passage.

BTW, the Centre’s site contains an enormous amount of free snow and ice data on the atmosphere, biosphere, ground level, glaciers, hydrosphere, land surfaces, oceans, even paleoclimate. If only Canada could be similarly generous in its offerings. Indeed, why is this analysis coming from the U.S.?

So says a leaked proposal made to the United Nations, reported in the Wall Street Journal. As you know, every so often an extra second, called a leap second, has to be added to the clocks so that time tracks the movement of the sun. Apparently the U.S. doesn’t like it because the extra time disturbs existing computer programs and navigation systems (e.g., global positioning systems). Better to have a standardized 24 hour clock and don’t worry about the drift.

Admittedly the drift is minimal. But it is upsetting to scientists,

including the Earth Rotation Service’s leap-second chief, Daniel Gambis, of the Paris Observatory. “As an astronomer, I think time should follow the Earth,” Dr. Gambis said in an interview. He calls the American effort a “coup de force,” or power play, and an “intrusion on the scientific dialogue.”…

[The U.S. proposal] has set off a wave of passionate opposition from astronomers, who argue that removing the link between time and the sun would require making changes to telescopes, changes that would cost between $10,000 and $500,000 per facility. That’s because a fancy telescope uses the exact time and the Earth’s position for aiming purposes when astronomers
tell it to point at a specific star.

[Note that there is a whiff of anti-Europeanism here because Gambis is from France and because Britain is considered to be the centre of time.]

Of course, the problem could actually be “lazy programmers”:

Deep down, though, the opposition is more about philosophy than cost. Should the convenience of lazy computer programmers triumph over the rising of the sun? To the government, which worries about safety more than astronomy, the answer is yes. In Mr. Allen’s view, absolutely not. [Steve Allen, an astronomer from University of California, runs a website about leap seconds.] “Time has basically always really meant what you measure when you put a stick in the ground and look at its shadow,” he said.

Liam?