Haiti

One of my supervisors, John Mutter, is a seismologist and has a recent post on the CNN blog in response to the earthquake in Haiti.

"Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings do. And the poorest constructed buildings are inevitably home to the very poorest people. Homes and other structures built way out of safe building code – if codes even exist or are known about, or minimally enforced after the building inspector is bribed for a permit – are built by people who lack the resources to build minimally safe structures if they could."

I think that both him and I find nothing surprising about what has happened in Haiti. This doesn't make it any less tragic, but rather more tragic. The fact that this was at all foreseeable suggests that we can all be guilty of not having helped mitigate risk in advance. The Heifer Project is an organization that promotes development by letting wealthy Americans buy a cow or goat for a family in a poor country. Maybe an organization can enable an American to donate money to pay for rebar in a Haitian home during reconstruction.

Aerial Photography and human development

This guy is a really cool aerial photographer that focuses on issues at the human-environment interface. His photos are a super interesting and powerful way to raise issues about development patterns in the US. I saw his new book "Over" in B&N recently and thought that I'd like to have his photos in every presentation I give from now on.

http://www.alexmaclean.com/

Open Energy Info

Haven't gotten the chance to look through all of this, but it seems like a good project to aggregate decentralized information about energy projects, practices and potential:

http://en.openei.org/wiki/Main_Page

(even after 4 years at MIT, I'm still sometimes surprised when predictions about the "power of the www" actually come true).

survey data

This website has a huge directory of survey data sets (mostly household-level, I think) that should be useful:

www.surveynetwork.org

They don't host the actual data, but it seems like a great place to see what's available.

I'll try to add it to my [short] list of places to look for data.

Matlab toolbox updated

I've updated my Matlab toolboxes here.

Some useful additions include scripts to flexibly coarsen spatial data, area or population weighted averages of global spatial data and a new (small) suite of network functions.

Sound pollution and sea mammals

This is a really interesting (and easy to read) article in Physics Today (I don't know why it's there) on the impact of sound pollution on sea mammals. It discusses, for example, the correlation of mass beachings and Naval sonar exercises.

Also, one sentence the author tosses out but caught me was:

"Biologists have used estimates of the population size and metabolic rate of sperm whales to calculate that those whales alone probably take about as much biomass out of the ocean as do all human fisheries."

welcome

Welcome to my blog, that may or may not work. We'll see. At worst it'll serve as an archive for interesting and useful things.


For starters:

I had a brief stint as a guest blogger on energy for ScienceBlogs:

A Planetary Perspective on the Next Generation [of energy]

Build the World’s Biggest Battery (Massive Energy Storage)

Should we outlaw discovering cellulosic ethanol?