Ted at TED

Ted Miguel gives a TED talk explaining our work on climate and conflict.



I've been waiting a month to use that title.

The Anthropocene

If I had to make a movie to advertise this blog and also had animation superpowers, this is the video I would make.

Not just us humans

I saw this BBC video from Planet Earth on a flight to Asia. Very startling.

Social Impacts of Climate Change and Climate Variability

We had an excellent session at AGU last week, thanks to everyone who contributed. Here's a video of the talks, which are succinct, interesting and nicely delivered.



U53F : AGU Fall Meeting 2011 from American Geophysical Union on Vimeo.

Mountain bike races as commentary on urban infrastructure?

I don't think the organizers of this meant for this to be commentary, but what does it say about the design/organization of your urban infrastructure when professional athletes are using it as a venue for mountain bike racing?  A corollary: if professional athletes find your "walk to school/work" this challenging, what does that mean for normal people who are just trying to get themselves or their goods/services to market?







[I hope my cynicism doesn't ruin these videos for you, since they are amazing athletic/artistic feats.  Thanks to Mina for sending these.]

Personal accounts of climate-related conflict

MediaStorm produced for this nice video story for Yale's Environment 360 (there is a written discussion here as well).

For people like me who study climate-induced conflict with statistics and mathematical models, it's important to stay in touch with these personal stories of the people who suffer through these events.

As temperatures rise and water supplies dry up, semi-nomadic tribes along the Kenyan-Ethiopian border increasingly are coming into conflict with each other. When the Water Ends focuses on how worsening drought will pit groups and nations against one another. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/clients/when-the-water-ends-for-yale360

Catching up on some TED talks

I was recently catching up on TED talks and I found these ones thoughtful.

Hans Rosling (the founder of Gapminder) on infant mortality statistics and the Millenium Development Goals.  [I particularly like his point that Sweden never had declines in its infant mortality rate fast enough to satisfy the MDGs]

Also, David Bismark on verifiable electronic ballots.

Displaying Matlab data in Google Earth

[ONE UPDATE AT BOTTOM]

It struck me the other day that Google Earth would be good platform for sharing my data with other people and found out that lots of people display their own data on the platform. Google even has a website to distribute Google Earth files that they like (this one, of the world population, was one of my favorites).  

So then I looked around to see if anyone had written code to help people convert Matlab data into Google Earth files.  The Google Earth Toolbox (recommended by my colleague Amir) worked great. It allows you to display data using functions very similar to standard Matlab functions (eg. imagesc()) only the output image is projected onto the planet and can be explored using Google Earth.  The image above is a map of the tropical cyclone climatology that I imported to Google Earth with only two lines of code. 

A = ge_imagesc(LON, LAT, flipud(DATA));
ge_output('FILENAME.kml', A);

[As indicated, the only bug I found was that some of the functions flipped the data vertically, which is easy to fix with one usage of the function flipud().]

It seems to me that one huge advantage of this presentation method is that pretty much anybody can view and explore global data-sets, since the interface is entirely intuitive and requires no manipulation (similar, in many respects to the contribution of Gapminder).

With a little extra work, I made the data-set dynamic in Google Earth, so that users can view data from different dates using a slider (see code below), and made this movie for use in presentations:

Below the fold is the script I used to make a Google Earth data set that changes over time.  Making the movie above required two additional steps.

1. Add a "Tour" in Google Earth (under "Add") which just records your browsing of your data in a movie that plays back in the Google Earth Application.
2. Use a screen capture program to record that movie as it plays back. (My friend Pam recommended this screen capture software, which works nicely and is easy to use). 

UPDATE:  SINCE I'VE REPEATED THIS PROCESS A FEW TIMES NOW, I'VE WRITTEN A FUNCTION IN MATLAB THAT GENERATES THE GOOGLE EARTH FILE.  ITS SIMILAR TO THE SCRIPT BELOW, BUT IS EASIER TO USE FOR AN ARBITRARY DATASET. DOWNLOAD IT HERE.

Haiti in "This American Life"

This American Life has an insightful (albeit depressing) story on some of the troubles facing economic development in Haiti.  Listen to it for free here.  I highly recommend it.

Some of the issues are related to the recent earthquake, some are not.

The statement that struck me the most was along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing):

"Haitian farmer X could get much better prices on her mangoes that she sells to the US if she took steps to prevent them from bruising. However, farmer X doesn't mind bruises on her mangoes, and she cannot even conceptualize an American consumer that is picky about bruises on her mangoes.  So farmer X does not take the simple, cheap steps prevent her mangoes from bruising."

I can't decide if I think this statement is true or not.  The idea that farmer X cannot imagine her consumer is important and interesting, but whether this information should be conveyed through price signals in her market does not seem obvious. Theory would predict that farmers should simply be offered higher prices for those mangoes she has that are less bruised, and thus she would learn that she can make more money if she doesn't let her mangoes bruise.  If this is not happening, why is that?  The inability to conceptualize her consumer does might explain why she is not proactive about preventing mango bruises before she is offered prices, but it doesn't explain why the price mechanism is failing in this instance.  Perhaps someone will do research on this problem so it can be effectively addressed.

Time Lapse of Eyjafjallajokull Erupting

Want to see what hundreds of tons of aerosols being ejected into the atmosphere looks like in time lapse video? Of course you do. First commenter to suggest a way to use this as an instrument for something worthwhile gets all the fermented shark they can eat.

Hi, I'm Jesse, and I'm now blogging with Sol.

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.