Connect with us

Published

3 months ago

on

When Molly Burhans first started trying to map the Catholic Church’s global property holdings so the land could be put to work fighting climate change, the idea seemed so obvious to her that she was sure someone else must be doing it already.

Burhans, a cartographer, was then an ecological-design grad student who had recently been introduced to geographic information system (GIS) mapping. But she was also a devout Catholic who liked spending time with nuns. It was on a visit to a monastery with a vast, underutilized lawn that she started thinking about how much land the church owns, and what an impact that land could make on the climate if managed responsibly.

“The Catholic Church is the largest nongovernmental provider of health care, largest nongovernmental provider of education, and second-largest network of humanitarian aid—only surpassed if you include all the member organizations of the UN put together—in the world,” she says, fingering a necklace that portrays her confirmation saint, the medieval polymath Hildegard of Bingen. “I was like, ‘They must have the largest conservation network in the world. I’m gonna go find out who is running that.’”

What she found instead, when she began her work in 2014, was that not only did the church have no such network, but most of the parishes she contacted didn’t even have records of what land they owned—a function of the institution’s age and decentralization. The problem went all the way to the top: when Burhans managed to score an audience at the Vatican to seek access to records that would help her flesh out the maps she’d begun building using public data, with help from Yale student volunteers, she found that none of the Vatican’s own maps had been updated since 1901.

That’s the gap Burhans, who is now 33, has been trying to fill with her organization GoodLands, she tells me from an empty auditorium in the architecture building at Columbia University, where we met and where she now teaches. She uses the GIS program ArcMap and machine learning to map the church’s holdings, categorize them by type, and suggest responsible land management practices. Though no one knows exactly how much land the global church owns, some estimates have put it at 177 million acres worldwide. GIS is so powerful in part because of how it brings together different kinds of data: instead of having separate maps for an area’s property values, watersheds, ownership boundaries, soil types, Indigenous lands, tree cover, and endangered-species habitats, ArcMap allows GoodLands to bring all that information and more into a kind of super-map.

“The interconnection between human activity and the planet is one area where mapping and analytics are helping to solve the challenges posed by climate change,” says Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Esri, a prominent GIS company. Burhans’s work is remarkable, he says, for how it “applies these technologies to more sustainable land management.”

To use mapping information in service of conservation, GoodLands starts by identifying what land a particular diocese might own, assigns the site to a category (hospital, university, or retreat center; urban and flat or rural and mountainous), and then uses machine learning to suggest responsible land management options, giving the priests or abbesses or other decision-makers a starting point as they try to discern what might be right for their community.

In practice, the decisions GoodLands assists with might be as straightforward as deciding where to plant trees: if a diocese wants to help reforest its region with limited funds, GoodLands can use GIS maps to help leaders understand their holdings and make suggestions about where to focus for maximal environmental benefit. “If you plant 500 trees in a suburban parish that already has a lot of forest canopy, you’re going to have magnitudes less impact than if you plant 15 trees on an urban parish that has no urban forest canopy around it,” Burhans says.

Since GoodLands was founded in 2015, Burhans’s efforts have earned her the attention of the pope and the World Economic Forum, and a host of laurels that include the UN’s Young Champion of the Earth award, an Ashoka Fellowship, and the Sierra Club’s EarthCare award.

“Looking at the world not as countries, but as institutions—she was the only one who had done that,” says Carl Steinitz, a Harvard professor emeritus of landscape architecture and planning. “It’s a big idea for a big institution from a very young, intellectually aggressive investigator, with an enormous potential payoff globally, both to the Vatican and to society at large.”

“We need to have policy coming out of [the Vatican]. I shouldn’t be the one-woman National Geospatial Intelligence Agency of the Catholic Church.”

Molly Burhans

“My vision initially was ‘I’m going to help dioceses map their land and find conservation

Read More

————

By: Whitney Bauck
Title: The Catholic cartographer who wants to help the church fight climate change
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/22/1074262/cartographer-fights-climate-change/
Published Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://mansbrand.com/maximize-your-eth-investment-the-ethphoria-vault-by-pods/

Total
0
Shares
Share 0
Tweet 0
Pin it 0
Share 0
Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Tech

These scientists live like astronauts without leaving Earth

Published

17 hours ago

on

September 22, 2023

By

201009 B2 exterior 0005 scaled

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

In January 2023, Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier, a 74,000-square-mile mass of frozen water in West Antarctica. She arrived with an international research team to study the glacier’s geology and ice fabric, and how its ice melt might contribute to sea level rise. But while near Earth’s southernmost point, Sweeney kept thinking about the moon.

“It felt every bit of what I think it will feel like being a space explorer,” said Sweeney, a former Air Force officer who’s now working on a doctorate in lunar geology at the University of Texas at El Paso. “You have all of these resources, and you get to be the one to go out and do the exploring and do the science. And that was really spectacular.”

That similarity is why space scientists study the physiology and psychology of people living in Antarctic and other remote outposts: For around 25 years, people have played out what existence might be like on, or en route to, another world. Polar explorers are, in a way, analogous to astronauts who land on alien planets. And while Sweeney wasn’t technically on an “analog astronaut” mission — her primary objective being the geological exploration of Earth — her days played out much the same as a space explorer’s might.

For 16 days, Sweeney and her colleagues lived in tents on the ice, spending half their time trapped inside as storms blew snow against their tents. When the weather permitted, Sweeney snowmobiled to and from seismometer sites, once getting caught in a whiteout that, she said, felt like zooming inside a ping-pong ball.

On the glacier, Sweeney was always cold, sometimes bored, often frustrated. But she was also alive, elated. And she felt a form of focus that eluded her on her home continent. “I had three objectives: to be a good crewmate, to do good science, and to stay alive,” she said. “That’s all I had to do.”

None of that was easy, of course. But it may have been easier than landing back on the earth of El Paso. “My mission ended, and it’s over,” she said. “And how do I process through all these things that I’m feeling?”

Then, in May, she attended the 2023 Analog Astronaut Conference, a gathering of people who simulate long-term space travel from the relative safety and comfort of Earth. Sweeney had learned about the event when she visited an analog facility in the country of Jordan. There, she’d met one of the conference’s founders, Jas Purewal, who invited her to the gathering.

The meeting was held, appropriately, at Biosphere 2, a glass-paneled, self-contained habitat in the Arizona desert that resembles a 1980s sci-fi vision of a space settlement — one of the first facilities built, in part, to understand whether humans could create a habitable environment on a hostile planet.

wide view of the Biosphere 2 facilities
The 40-acre Biosphere 2 campus in Oracle, Arizona. It was one of the first facilities built for analog astronaut missions. UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

A speaker at the conference had spent eight months locked inside a simulated space habitat in Moscow, Russia, and she talked about how the post-mission period had been hard for her. The psychological toll of reintegration became a chattering theme throughout the whole meeting. Sweeney, it turned out, wasn’t alone.

Across the world, around 20 analog space facilities host people who volunteer to be study subjects, isolating themselves for weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, or even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. These places are intended to mimic how people might fare on Mars or the moon, or on long-term orbital stations. Such research, scientists say, can help test out medical and software tools, enhance indoor agriculture, and address the difficulties analog astronauts face, including, like Sweeney’s, those that come when their “missions” are over.

Lately, a community of researchers has started to make the field more formalized: laying out standards so that results are comparable; gathering research papers into a single database so investigators can

Read More

————

By: Sarah Scoles
Title: These scientists live like astronauts without leaving Earth
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/22/1080035/scientists-live-like-astronauts-without-leaving-earth/
Published Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2023 15:38:48 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://mansbrand.com/making-sense-of-sensor-data/

Continue Reading

Tech

Making sense of sensor data

Published

19 hours ago

on

September 22, 2023

By

Kinetica web ready 16 9 cover

Consider a supply chain where delivery vehicles, shipping containers, and individual products are sensor-equipped. Real-time insights enable workers to optimize routes, reduce delays, and efficiently manage inventory. This smart orchestration boosts efficiency, minimizes waste, and lowers costs.

Many industries are rapidly integrating sensors, creating vast data streams that can be leveraged to open profound business possibilities. In energy management, growing use of sensors and drone footage promises to enable efficient energy distribution, lower costs, and reduced environmental impact. In smart cities, sensor networks can enhance urban life by monitoring traffic flow, energy consumption, safety concerns, and waste management.

Kinetica web ready 16 9 cover 1

These aren’t glimpses of a distant future, but realities made possible today by the increasingly digitally instrumented world. Internet of Things (IoT) sensors have been rapidly integrated across industries, and now constantly track and measure properties like temperature, pressure, humidity, motion, light levels, signal strength, speed, weather events, inventory, heart rate and traffic.

The information these devices collect—sensor and machine data—provides insight into the real-time status and trends of these physical parameters. This data can then be used to make informed decisions and take action—capabilities that unlock transformative business opportunities, from streamlined supply chains to futuristic smart cities.

John Rydning, research vice president at IDC, projects that sensor and machine data volumes will soar over the next five years, achieving a greater than 40% compound annual growth rate through 2027. He attributes that not primarily to an increasing number of devices, as IoT devices are already quite prevalent, but rather due to more data being generated by each one as businesses learn to make use of their ability to produce real-time streaming data.

V2 Kinetica web ready 16 9 quote 1

Meanwhile, sensors are growing more interconnected and sophisticated, while the data they generate increasingly includes a location in addition to a timestamp. These spatial and temporal features not only capture data changes over time, but also create intricate maps of how these shifts unfold across locations—facilitating more comprehensive insights and predictions.

But as sensor data grows more complex and voluminous, legacy data infrastructure struggles to keep pace. Continuous readings over time and space captured by sensor devices now require a new set of design patterns to unlock maximum value. While businesses have capitalized on spatial and time-series data independently for over a decade, its true potential is only realized when considered in tandem, in context, and with the capacity for real-time insights.

Download the report.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

Read More

————

By: MIT Technology Review Insights
Title: Making sense of sensor data
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/21/1079924/making-sense-of-sensor-data/
Published Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Continue Reading

Tech

The Download: inverse vaccines, and Microsoft’s big deal

Published

21 hours ago

on

September 22, 2023

By

This is today’s edition of The Download our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

How inverse vaccines might tackle diseases like multiple sclerosis

On the whole, typical vaccines prime the immune system to respond. But scientists are also working on “inverse vaccines” that teach the immune system to stand down.

Last week Jeffrey Hubbell and his colleagues at the University of Chicago reported that an inverse vaccine they developed had successfully reversed a disease similar to multiple sclerosis in mice. Hubbell has tested this approach before, but only as a way of preventing the disease—not curing it.

These immune-dampening shots could lead to a whole host of therapies to treat autoimmune diseases. And in fact, Anokion, a company Hubbell cofounded, has already launched clinical trials to test whether this type of inverse vaccine might help people with multiple sclerosis and celiac disease. Read the full story.

—Cassandra Willyard

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and health newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

To learn more about vaccines, why not check out:

+ What to know about this autumn’s covid vaccines. New variants will pose a challenge, but early signs suggest the shots will still boost antibody responses. Read the full story.

+ Who benefits most from the new covid vaccines? Data show that older adults and people with underlying illnesses need the vaccine most. Read the full story.

+ What’s next for mRNA vaccines. mRNA vaccines helped us through the covid-19 pandemic—but they could also help defend against many other infectious diseases, offer universal protection against flu, and even treat cancer. Read the full story.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The UK is revisiting Microsoft’s offer to acquire Activision
But it’s not a done deal yet. (WSJ $)
UK regulators have accepted Microsoft’s tweaks to the deal, in principle. (FT $)

2 The US has granted Ukraine a lot more military hardware
But long-range missiles, which Ukraine covets, won’t be included in the package. (ABC News)
The US equipment will plug the gap now Poland has ceased sending weapons. (Economist $)+ Decoy weapons are successfully fooling Russian troops. (FT $)
Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines. (MIT Technology Review)

3 The blockchain’s future looks surprisingly crypto-free
Startups have more modest goals now, ideally without legal complications. (Rest of World)+ Crypto parties are still raging if you know where to look, though. (Bloomberg $)

4 These law geeks are taking us inside Google’s antitrust trial
Google may have stopped the trial from being live streamed, but it can’t prevent members of the public from sitting in. (Wired $)

5 People are still queuing to buy the new iPhone
Lines of eager customers in China, the UK, Dubai and Australia suggest Apple’s appeal is as strong as ever. (Bloomberg $)

6 A man-made organism defies the rules of biology
In theory, using unnatural amino acids could make organisms less prone to viral infections. (Proto.Life)

7 Your intimate health information is just data to Big Tech
Data that can generally be sold onto willing advertisers. (The Atlantic $)
How your brain data could be used against you. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Gen Z isn’t immune to online scams
In fact, in many cases, they fall for them more than boomers. (Vox)

9 Absolutely nobody loves PowerPoint
Nonetheless, it persists. (FT $)
Next slide, please: A brief history of the corporate presentation. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Don’t throw out your used coffee grounds
They can become the foundation for all sorts of 3D-printing projects instead. (Ars Technica)
Watch this team of drones 3D-print a tower. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“It feels bad, you feel hurt. Then you give yourself time to grieve, you find someone else and you get excited again.”

—Rowan Rosenthal, a former principal product designer for Grindr, likens the decision to leave the company because of its strict return-to-office mandate to the end of a relationship, they tell the Washington Post.

The big story

California’s coming offshore wind boom faces big engineering hurdles

7pOBQSa 1 g6Wmm0vaaGfCKh agnOh5X8fvo0szO5tQj76IoJnZj t wPj1lCwX1A2cpHFhzI3Nguwd51VMtbMqRxFWKc4NZx8lRc1SmxplS W8cyjmrKecjVXWAmQA7NDWoz6 Y TRdCG3zXQ5vCZo

December 2022

Last December, dozens of companies fought for the right to lease the first commercial wind power sites off the coast of California in an auction

Read More

————

By: Rhiannon Williams
Title: The Download: inverse vaccines, and Microsoft’s big deal
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/22/1080043/the-download-inverse-vaccines-and-microsofts-big-deal/
Published Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2023 12:10:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://mansbrand.com/bolstering-enterprise-llms-with-machine-learning-operations-foundations/

Continue Reading

Trending