Sustainable Development at Columbia University

We've launched our new website for the Sustainable Development Doctoral Society for our PhD program at Columbia University:

www.columbia.edu/cu/sdds

We're aiming to maintain it well with active research updates.

Blindness interventions

This is a pretty inspiring story of field work for children with treatable blindness in India, and neurological research that goes alongside treatments:

http://www.ted.com/talks/pawan_sinha_on_how_brains_learn_to_see.html

and another great story of work in the field on blindness (my classmate Mark Orrs is working with him).

http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/best-of-adventure/geoff-tabin/1

Nomads in India, redistribution and Nash equilibria

This month's NGM has a nice article on nomadic groups in India. The basic story is that there are castes of nomads (an estimated 80M people total) that have traditional nomadic lifestyles and they are apparently "trapped" since they seem unwilling to settle, the gov't has difficulty providing them with services unless the settle, and settled populations are unwilling to let them settle. There are the usual undertones of discrimination and bureaucracy, but otherwise this seems like an unfortunate example of a classical Nash problem interfering with progressive redistribution.

I'm not entirely convinced by the gov'ts argument that they must settle in order for them to receive political rights or some forms of gov't benefits, such as basic healthcare, but I've also never tried administering an Indian municipality.

Climate change and extremes

A lot of folks ask me what's going to happen with tropical cyclones or heat waves, etc with climate change. If you're not someone with any atmospheric science background, but want a single, easy few-page article to read, I'd recommend this one.

One of my advisors, Adam Sobel, gave me a copy of "Climate change, picturing the science", a coffee table book on climate change that he wrote a chapter for. His chapter on what we expect for extremes is very nice. Its honest about what we know or don't, and why, but it doesn't expect you to have thought much about the subject before. You can read it on google books here.

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?