commonchaffinch @commonchaffinch@qoto.org
English/中文
Environmental scientist looking at global ecohydrological change using data analysis and modeling tools.
Joined May 2022
Processed some geospatial data today. There was an index that had one entry in my left, geopandas dataframe, and twelve entries in my right, ordinary pandas dataframe. After joining, there were 1236 entries under that index!
Solved the problem by writing the code in a different way but still scratching my head on the issue.
As a person with mild dyslexia, I dearly wish all the scientific journals could switch to sans serif font for their PDFs.
commonchaffinch
boosted
I'm finding it a little hard to work today with this in my head.
Antarctic ice extent is now 6.4 standard deviations below the mean. That is, I'm reliably told, a one in 13 billion year event.
We're about to see a lot of shit hit a lot of fans. And we are far from ready.
Business as usual is over. Politics as usual is over. We need to be putting our effort into building systems that can help us survive what greed and power and wilful blindness have wrought.
Reading a paper this morning and saw two graphs that demonstrates how powerful the ocean currents are in shaping the climate. The Gulf of Alaska and the western part of high-latitude Eurasia are both next to warm currents. They both experience higher precipitation than the eastern parts of the respective continents, and have virtually nowhere with average temperature below 1 degree Celsius in winter.
(images from internet and the paper below)
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015JD024546
commonchaffinch
boosted
I'm beginning to see where the comparative advantage is between myself and current-generation #AI tools.
For tasks that I perform on a daily basis, I have developed enough techniques to optimise my workflow that AI tools don't add much for me. Most obviously with regards to research mathematics, but also for instance in composing emails; I installed a plugin that lets GPT4 write email responses for me at the click of a button, but I almost never use it, because I already can write suitable email responses rapidly through decades of practice.
For tasks that I have some expertise in, but little practice, AI tools are helpful: often I can use them profitably to create a first draft of the output, which I can then verify and polish, or at least use as inspiration. (In some cases the inspiration is due to deficiencies in the AI product, in the spirit of Cunningham's law, but it can still be a more productive process than if I tried to work things out on my own). Examples in this category include data processing, translating to a foreign language, or writing text in a format that I rarely use (e.g., a public speech, a rules document, etc.)
For tasks that I have little expertise in, and do not require extremely high quality and reliable output, one can simply ask the AI tool and follow its advice more or less blindly. Here the AI functions as a slightly more convenient version of a traditional search engine.
Finally, for tasks that I do not have expertise in, but for which quality and reliability are needed, neither the AI or myself can resolve the task, and I have to consult a human expert. An example would be a repair of a complicated, expensive, and delicate piece of equipment.
commonchaffinch
boosted
RT @ESA_EO
To achieve food security for all we need to know which crops are growing where and how🌾🌿
Launching today, @ESA_WorldCereal provides highly accurate seasonally updated cropland and crop-type maps at 10-metre spatial resolution at a global scale: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Introducing_World_Cereal
commonchaffinch
boosted
You have to read this fascinating obituary of the brilliant woman who invented multi spectral satellite imaging for LandSat and defined the way we now understand spaceborne mapping imagery of Earth
commonchaffinch
boosted
@stworg @rahmstorf @johnfocook @MichaelEMann of course, chatGPT doesn’t actually access URLs (https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/10/chatgpt-internet-access/ ) and has never actually seen the report.. nevertheless a good summary which perhaps speaks to the fact that we as a society should have been prepared for this for some time
commonchaffinch
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How ChatGPT summarizes the latest climate report by the #IPCC!
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RT @stworg
chatGPT rocks -- arguably does a better job than IPCC https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/04/the-summary-for-policymakers-of-the-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change-sixth-assessment-reports-synthesis/ @SciBeh @MichaelEMann @NaomiOreskes @johnfocook @RasmusBenestad @Sander_vdLinden @MaibachEd
https://twitter.com/STWorg/status/1644604195599790083
commonchaffinch
boosted
Aerial image of a forming thermokarst lake in western #Alaska. Ice wedges in the ground are melting, the ground is sinking/subsiding and water is ponding in the newly formed depressions. This process will likely continue and accelerate and eventually form a #lake
The image is around 370m wide and taken from about 1000m altitude in one of our flight campaigns in 2021.
164.535°W; 66.532 °N
#aerial #aviation #eochat #landscape #remotesensing #earthart #science #permafrost #arctic #geography
@freemo @Paulos_the_fog @johnabs @rbreich Right, I can see your point now. It seems you are arguing for more fundamentally changing the system so that wealth gap can no longer cause problem.
@freemo @Paulos_the_fog @johnabs @rbreich I agree with the scenario you described, but I think having 1000 people who are a bit less wealthy is better than having 1 people who is extremely wealthy, because 1000 people can reach out to a larger part of society.
@freemo @Paulos_the_fog @johnabs @rbreich I guess our disagreement is in whether it is possible to prevent people from re-writing rules with money without setting checks on wealth gaps.
@freemo @Paulos_the_fog @johnabs @rbreich What I am arguing for is that a large enough wealth gap - I do not mean wealth gap categorically - naturally causes the people that have more money to be able to re-write the rules. These rules can be numerous and outside the political realm (e.g. higher maintenance fees of bank accounts for poorer people) such that it is difficult to fix them with government policies (and undesirable since a high degree of political interference breeds authoritarian government). Therefore, fixing democracy requires having mechanisms that limit the degree of of economic inequality in the society, among many other things.
@freemo @Paulos_the_fog @johnabs @rbreich But don't you think when the wealth gap becomes very large, the wealthy has too much power to rewrite the rules so that it benefits themselves? And it will not be because the wealthy have worse morals. It is human nature to want to do better for themselves compared to the baseline that they are used to - and the baseline is simply higher for the wealthy. Wealth gap also creates invisible culture gaps because of the difference in education, work environment, etc., making it more difficult for people across classes to agree on policies. I agree that the existence of wealth gap is a natural phenomenon, but the size of the wealth gap matters, and the existence of all the other issues cannot be divorced from the size of the wealth gap.
commonchaffinch
boosted
10 days after the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, officials insist the air is OK to breathe, despite it continuing to make some people sick.
And don't drink the water, officials now say, changing their story from the initial claims there was no water pollution. 3500 dead fish beg to differ & a contaminant plume moving down the Ohio River beg to differ.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/14/ohio-train-derailment-toxic-chemicals/
#Risk #Pollution #EastPalestine #Ohio #train #derailment #AirQuality #WaterQuality
@hasmis Thanks for the explanation. Is it a form of cybersecurity attack? Alas I cannot set up the forwarding anymore for this one, but good to know for the future.
@hasmis Sorry, I am confused. What is the standard method to find active email addresses?
I wish all the university email systems can send a "this email no longer exists" notice to anything sent to an deactivated email address. Since leaving my last job, I have missed quite a few emails from collaborators.
commonchaffinch
boosted
UH GEO Professor Qi Chen is the P.I. of HawaiiView, a nonprofit organization to promote remote sensing data and technology in Hawaiʻi. HawaiiView recently released the first statewidemap of Uluhe with Landsat-8, hawaiiview.org/data/uluhel8/.
English/中文
Environmental scientist looking at global ecohydrological change using data analysis and modeling tools.
Joined May 2022
