Group items tagged

UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller and others were looking at the so-called urban heat island effect - the notion that because more urban temperature stations are included in global temperature data sets than are rural ones, the global average temperature was being skewed upward because these sites tend to retain more heat. Hence, global warming trends are exaggerated. Using data from such urban heat islands as Tokyo, they hypothesized, could introduce "a severe warming bias in global averages using urban stations." In fact, the data trend was "opposite in sign to that expected if the urban heat island effect was adding anomalous warming to the record. The small size, and its negative sign, supports the key conclusion of prior groups that urban warming does not unduly bias estimates of recent global temperature change."

Lowering energy consumption associated with computer data storage (specifically, cloud computing) and saving millions of dollars are possible now, thanks to new memory technology, a field that researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have been exploring through a four-year, $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded in 2009 titled, "Large: Storage Class Memory Architecture for Energy Efficient Data Centers."

The European Union's Working Party on Data Protection has issued five recommended requirements for the protection of personal privacy in a time of Smart Meters in the home (PDF). Below is what the group says needs to happen in order to gain the benefits of Smart Metering data while minimizing the risk and cost to personal privacy. 

"Cornell computer scientists have proposed an innovative wireless design that could greatly reduce the cost and power consumption of massive cloud computing data centers, while improving performance."

Last month the extent of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean declined to the second-lowest extent on record. Satellite data from NASA and the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder showed that the summertime sea ice cover narrowly avoided a new record low.

In November 2010 the World Economic Forum gathered in Dubai to discuss issues on the global agenda. Before the forum, the 700 members of each of the 72 Global Agenda Councils were asked which other councils they would benefit from interacting with. This data was then released to the public as part of a visualization challenge organized by visualizing.org. Shown here is one of the honorable mentions, an interactive visualization created by Daniel McLaren that shows a map of the strongest collective responses between the councils. It uses the analogy of energy, as described by McLaren: "Starting at the selected node, energy travels outward and is divided among each connection and dissipates when crossing weak connections." Not all responses are displayed because the data has been filtered to show only the strongest relationships.

ESRI and the US Department of the Interior announced a new website today that makes it easy for anyone to view 30 years of global satellite data and changes in vegetation world-wide. Called the ChangeMatters Viewer, the project democratizes access to the multi-billion dollar, multi-decade, multi-agency project of monitoring global ecological well-being from space.

"Dendrochronologists have shown that tree-ring data produce a remarkably accurate history of droughts and other climate changes. Combined with reliable drought indices and historical descriptions of climate conditions, dendrochronology - the technique of dating events and environmental change by relying on characteristic patterns of tree-ring growth - can provide a climate perspective on important events such as large-scale human migration and even the rise and fall of entire civilizations."

Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS) scientists recently used long-term data from the Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory (Coweeta) in Western North Carolina to examine the feasibility of managing forests for water supply under the changing weather conditions forecast for the future.

Do you have an embarrassing moment in your past? Did it turn out to be newsworthy? There is a good chance it made it to the Internet and now is forever searchable by Google and the other search engines. Google is being hit with a "Right To Forget" lawsuit in Spain as the country's Data Protection Agency has ordered the Web giant to take down search links on 90 people. According to The Associated Press, Google is fighting five of those lawsuits in Spain's National Court and in January refused Spain's request on all 90 of the claims.

We tend to think of our cell phones as our own person technological domains. They are the places where we can store our digital life and keep an eye on the things that we need to, while we are on the go. But, what if your data is not you own, what if it is used against you in a court of law?

For the first time, the melting of glaciers in Greenland could now be measured with high accuracy from space. Just in time for the tenth anniversary of the twin satellites GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) a sharp image has surface, which also renders the spatial distribution of the glacial melt more precisely. The Greenland ice shield had to cope with up to 240 gigatons of mass loss between 2002 and 2011. This corresponds to a sea level rise of about 0.7 mm per year. These statements were made possible by the high-precision measurements of the GRACE mission, whose data records result in a hitherto unequaled accurate picture of the earth's gravity. One of Newton's laws states that the gravity of an object depends directly on its mass. "When the mass of the Greenland ice sheet changes, so does the gravity there," explains Dr. Frank Flechtner from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. "The GRACE gravity field measurements therefore give us information on mass changes, including climate-related ones."

Climate change could mean unthinkable loss for South Africa, which hosts talks on global warming that will bring government negotiators, scientists and lobbyists from around the world to the coastal city of Durban next week. Guy Midgley, the top climate change researcher at the South African National Biodiversity Institute, said evidence gleaned from decades of recording weather data, observing flora and fauna and conducting experiments makes it possible for scientists to "weave a tapestry of change."

Both climate change and humans were responsible for the extinction of some large mammals, like the musk ox in this photo, according to research that is the first of its kind to use genetic, archeological, and climatic data together to infer the population history of large Ice-Age mammals. The large international team's research, which will be published in the journal Nature, is expected to shed light on the possible fates of living species of mammals as our planet continues its current warming cycle.

The 2011 Arctic sea ice extent maximum that marks the beginning of the melt season appears to be tied for the lowest ever measured by satellites, say scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Applications on modern wireless devices make demands on data rate and connectivity far beyond anything experienced in the past. One way to meet these stringent requirements is to give the device multiple antennas or multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology. The problem of physically accommodating these additional antennas in the latest consumer products is investigated in new research from the University of Bristol.

Web-connected devices, not just mobile phones and 3G tablets but everything from home electronics to consumer packaged goods instrumented to transmit data to the Web, have become a part of every major speech here at the wireless industry's giant conference in Orlando, CTIA. "All devices that can benefit from connectivity will be connected," Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson, said in a keynote, predicting that the world's nearly 5 billion mobile phone subscribers today will be surpassed by 50 billion connected non-phone devices in 10 years.

A study recently released by a team from Northwestern University and the University of Arizona shows that religion and religious affiliations may be on the verge of extinction in the nine countries studied. Utilizing a mathematical model of nonlinear dynamics, the team analyzed data from censuses taken in nine different countries dating as far back as a century.

Carbon emissions are at their highest ever levels, stoking fears of a global temperature rise over the "dangerous" two degrees Celsius threshold, according to data cited by the Guardian newspaper.

Neala Kendall, a graduate student from the University of Washington in Seattle, after studying cannery data on sockeye salmon harvested from Bristol Bay in Alaska, has discovered that the length of the average sockeye caught there, has been dropping for the past half century.