Category Archives: citizen science

In the field

Posted in amateur science, bryology, bryophytes, citizen data, citizen science, computational photography, digital camera, ecology, Olympus Tough TG-6, quantitative ecology | Leave a comment

New Meetup: Massachusetts Mosses and Lichens

I have started a new Meetup group: Massachusetts Mosses and Lichens. I am inviting anyone with an interest in mosses and lichens to join in, particularly if you live in the “greater Massachusetts area”. Because of pandemic, there’ll be no … Continue reading

Posted in ABLS, American Bryological and Lichenological Society, American Statistical Association, biology, Botany, Brent Mishler, bryology, bryophytes, citizen data, citizen science, ecology, field biology, field research, field science, Hale Reservation, Janice Glime, Jerry Jenkins, lichenology, lichens, longitudinal survey of mosses, macrophotography, maths, mesh models, mosses, Nancy G Slack, National Phenology Network, population biology, population dynamics, Ralph Pope, science, spatial statistics, statistical ecology, Sue Williams, the right to know, Westwood | Leave a comment

Moss of the Week, 2021-02-19

Actually, mosses of the week. This pair of communities are part of my longitudinal study of mosses, some Cladonia chlorophaea lichens, and a few Lycopodium obscurum individuals. This is Site 3, community instances A and B. Instance A is Mnium … Continue reading

Posted in Botany, bryology, bryophytes, citizen science, field biology, field research, field science, longitudinal field survey, mosses, National Phenological Network, phenology | 1 Comment

Review of “No … increase of Carbon sequestration from the greening Earth”

(As promised.) Introduction and Abstract This is a review, re-presentation, and report on the August 2019 article, Y. Zhang, C. Song, L. E. Band, G. Sun, (2019), “No proportional increase of terrestrial gross Carbon sequestration from the greening Earth“, Journal … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, afforestation, agriculture, agroecology, algal blooms, American Statistical Association, argoecology, being carbon dioxide, biology, Botany, bridge to somewhere, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide sequestration, chemistry, citizen science, clear air capture of carbon dioxide, climate, climate data, climate disruption, climate economics, climate mitigation, di-nitrogen oxide, ecocapitalism, ecological disruption, Ecological Society of America, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, environment, evidence, food, forests, fossil fuels, geophysics, Glen Peters, Global Carbon Project, greenhouse gases, James Hansen, John Holdren, p-value, phytoplankton, pollution, population biology, quantitative biology, resource producitivity, scholarship, science education, significance test, statistics, Steven Chu, sustainability, sustainable landscaping, wishful environmentalism | 1 Comment

On bag bans and sampling plans

Plastic bag bans are all the rage. It’s not the purpose of this post to take a position on the matter. Before you do, however, I’d recommend checking out this: and especially this: (Note: My lovely wife, Claire, presents this … Continue reading

Posted in bag bans, citizen data, citizen science, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Ecology Action, evidence, Google, Google Earth, Google Maps, goverance, lifestyle changes, microplastics, municipal solid waste, oceans, open data, planning, plastics, politics, pollution, public health, quantitative ecology, R, R statistical programming language, reasonableness, recycling, rhetorical statistics, sampling, sampling networks, statistics, surveys, sustainability | 2 Comments

Stream flow and P-splines: Using built-in estimates for smoothing

Mother Brook in Dedham Massachusetts was the first man-made canal in the United States. Dug in 1639, it connects the Charles River at Dedham, to the Neponset River in the Hyde Park section of Boston. It was originally an important … Continue reading

Posted in American Statistical Association, citizen data, citizen science, Clausius-Clapeyron equation, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, cross-validation, data science, dependent data, descriptive statistics, dynamic linear models, empirical likelihood, environment, flooding, floods, Grant Foster, hydrology, likelihood-free, meteorological models, model-free forecasting, non-mechanistic modeling, non-parametric, non-parametric model, non-parametric statistics, numerical algorithms, precipitation, quantitative ecology, statistical dependence, statistical series, stream flow, Tamino, the bootstrap, time series, water vapor | 2 Comments

climate model democracy

“One of the most interesting things about the MIP ensembles is that the mean of all the models generally has higher skill than any individual model.” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all models are created equal, that … Continue reading

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, attribution, Bayesian model averaging, Bloomberg, citizen science, climate, climate business, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, climate education, climate justice, Climate Lab Book, climate models, coastal communities, coastal investment risks, complex systems, differential equations, disruption, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, ecology, emergent organization, ensemble methods, ensemble models, ensembles, Eric Rignot, evidence, fear uncertainty and doubt, FEMA, forecasting, free flow of labor, global warming, greenhouse gases, greenwashing, Humans have a lot to answer for, Hyper Anthropocene, Jennifer Francis, Joe Romm, Kevin Anderson, Lévy flights, LBNL, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, liberal climate deniers, mathematics, mathematics education, model-free forecasting, multivariate adaptive regression splines, National Center for Atmospheric Research, obfuscating data, oceanography, open source scientific software, optimization, perceptrons, philosophy of science, phytoplankton | Leave a comment

Professor Tony Seba, of late

I love it. Professor Tony Seba, Stanford, 1 week ago. It means anyone who continues to invest in or support the fossil fuels hegemony will be fundamentally disappointed by the markets. And it serves them right. By efficiency, or momentum, … Continue reading

Posted in American Statistical Association, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to nowhere, Buckminster Fuller, Carbon Tax, Carbon Worshipers, causation, central banks, children as political casualties, citizen science, citizenship, clean disruption, climate, climate business, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, climate economics, Climate Lab Book, Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, coastal communities, coastal investment risks, coasts, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, consumption, corporate responsibility, corporations, corruption, critical slowing down, ctDNA, Cult of Carbon, David Archer, David Spiegelhalter, decentralized electric power generation | Leave a comment

‘Near classified information’ and the militarization of environmental degradation

EPA Anti-Leak Campaign EPA employees are currently receiving instruction in “unauthorized disclosure training,” teaching them not to leak classified or near-classified information. This training is part of a government-wide eradication effort following National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster’s memo to agency … Continue reading

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, anti-science, Azimuth Backup Project, Bill Nye, Boston Ethical Society, bridge to somewhere, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, citizen data, citizen science, citizenship, climate justice, Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, criminal justice, Cult of Carbon, denial, destructive economic development, Donald Trump, ecological services, ecology, Ecology Action, environment, environmental law, Environmental Protection Agency, Equiterre, fear uncertainty and doubt, Hyper Anthropocene, James Hansen, rights of the inhabitants of the Commonwealth, science, science denier, science education, United States, ``The tide is risin'/And so are we'' | Leave a comment

“You don’t have that option.”

Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think he’s awesome. Marvelous. I saw him in Boston. He and I did not get off well, at the start, because of my being awestruck, and feeling very awkward, and the short time we had … Continue reading

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Bayesian, citizen data, citizen science, Climate Lab Book, Earth Day, ecological services, ecology, environment, Hyper Anthropocene, Neill deGrasse Tyson, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, Ray Pierrehumbert, reason, reasonableness, religion, science, science education, Science magazine, scientific publishing, secularism, Spaceship Earth, sustainability, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, United States, XKCD | Leave a comment

Is the answer to the democratization of Science doing more Citizen Science?

I have been following, with keen interest, the post and comment thread pertaining to “Democratising science” at the blog I monitor daily, … and Then There’s Physics. I think the core subject being discussed is a little different from my … Continue reading

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, astronomy, astrophysics, biology, citizen data, citizen science, citizenship, data science, ecology, education, environment, evidence, life purpose, local self reliance, marine biology, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, moral leadership, new forms of scientific peer review, open source scientific software, science, science education, statistics, the green century, the right to know | Leave a comment

The Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project, in association with ClimateMirror

(Updated the afternoon of 31st May 2017.) The Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project, operating in association with ClimateMirror, is being funded via the Kickstarter available at this link. Give what you can. Thanks! See our goal statement. This is all … Continue reading

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, citizen science, civilization, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, climate education, climate justice, Climate Lab Book, cynicism, denial, Donald Trump, education, EIA, ethics, evidence, fear uncertainty and doubt, forecasting, fossil fuels, Global Carbon Project, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, NASA, NOAA, open data, open source scientific software, rationality, reason, reasonableness, risk, science, science denier, science education, smart data, statistics, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, UU, ``The tide is risin'/And so are we'' | 6 Comments

Sleeping Giant Awakening

Originally posted on Climate Denial Crock of the Week:
https://twitter.com/johnmyers/status/809097380456865792 Wikipedia: Isoroku Yamamoto’s sleeping giant quotation is a quote by the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto regarding the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by forces of Imperial Japan. The quotation is portrayed at the very end of…

Posted in adaptation, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Solar Energy Society, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, California, Carbon Worshipers, citizen data, citizen science, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, data science, Donald Trump, ecology, Ecology Action, geophysics, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, ignorance, Jerry Brown, science, sustainability, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the stack of lies, the tragedy of our present civilization | Leave a comment

Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION: A Review

(Revised and updated Monday, 24th October 2016.) Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil, published by Crown Random House, 2016. This is a thoughtful and very approachable introduction and review to the societal and personal consequences of data mining, data science, … Continue reading

Posted in citizen data, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, compassion, complex systems, criminal justice, Daniel Kahneman, data science, deep recurrent neural networks, destructive economic development, economics, education, engineering, ethics, Google, ignorance, Joseph Schumpeter, life purpose, machine learning, Mathbabe, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, model comparison, model-free forecasting, numerical analysis, numerical software, open data, optimization, organizational failures, planning, politics, prediction, prediction markets, privacy, rationality, reason, reasonableness, risk, silly tech devices, smart data, sociology, Techno Utopias, testing, the value of financial assets, transparency | Leave a comment

Polls, Political Forecasting, and the Plight of Five Thirty Eight

On 17th October 2016 AT 7:30 p.m., Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com wrote about how, as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s polling numbers got better, it was more difficult for FiveThirtyEight‘s models to justify increasing her probability of winning, although … Continue reading

Posted in abstraction, American Statistical Association, anemic data, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, economics, education, forecasting, information theoretic statistics, mathematics, maths, politics, prediction markets, sociology, the right to know, theoretical physics, thermodynamics | Leave a comment

Once more, with feeling: Responding to Kostrzewa in The Providence Journal

It’s making the rounds. Today it’s John Kostrzewa, Assistant Managing Editor of The Providence Journal, arguing the necessity of natural gas and its pipelines with his “Why R.I.’s economy needs a natural-gas pipeline”. And my response, below, which allowed me … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to nowhere, Carbon Worshipers, citizen science, citizenship, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, climate business, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, denial, disruption, distributed generation, electricity, electricity markets, energy, energy utilities, evidence, extended supply chains, FERC, fossil fuels, fracking, gas pipeline leaks, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, Joseph Schumpeter, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, methane, microgrids, natural gas, pipelines, public utility commissions, PUCs, regime shifts, regulatory capture, Rhode Island, risk, Sankey diagram, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, stranded assets, supply chains, the energy of the people, the green century, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the stack of lies, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, utility company death spiral, zero carbon | Leave a comment

“Sharon’s Water Problem” (by Paul Lauenstein)

(Click on image to see a bigger version of this figure. Use your browser Back Button to return to this blog.) The town of Sharon, MA, has a water problem. Click on the link and see Paul’s presentation about it. … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, agriculture, American Meteorological Association, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, Boston, citizen science, climate change, climate disruption, diffusion processes, drought, ecology, Ecology Action, environment, forecasting, global warming, hydrology, Hyper Anthropocene, MA, New England, Paul Lauenstein, precipitation, quantitative ecology, science, statistics, the tragedy of our present civilization, water, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution | Leave a comment

“Holy crap – an actual book!”

Originally posted on mathbabe:
Yo, everyone! The final version of my book now exists, and I have exactly one copy! Here’s my editor, Amanda Cook, holding it yesterday when we met for beers: Here’s my son holding it: He’s offered…

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, Buckminster Fuller, business, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, complex systems, confirmation bias, data science, data streams, deep recurrent neural networks, denial, economics, education, engineering, ethics, evidence, Internet, investing, life purpose, machine learning, mathematical publishing, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, moral leadership, multivariate statistics, numerical software, numerics, obfuscating data, organizational failures, politics, population biology, prediction, prediction markets, privacy, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, rationality, reason, reasonableness, rhetoric, risk, Schnabel census, smart data, sociology, statistical dependence, statistics, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the value of financial assets, transparency, UU Humanists | Leave a comment

JASA demands code and data be supplied as a condition of publication

The Journal of the American Statistical Association (“JASA”) has announced in this month’s Amstat News that effective 1st September 2016 “… will require code and data as a minimum standard for reproducibility of statistical scientific research.” Trends were heading this … Continue reading

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, citizen science, engineering, ethics, evidence, new forms of scientific peer review, numerical software, planning, rationality, reasonableness, resiliency, science, statistics, stochastic algorithms, testing, the right to know | Leave a comment

Newt Gingrich and Van Jones. Right on.

It’s the thing. And it addresses how media and people forget about the actual statistics, and focus on the White Hot Bright Light. A study by Gelman, Fagan, and Kiss A study by Freyer A counterpoint to the Freyer study … Continue reading

Posted in American Statistical Association, Bayes, Bayesian, citizen science, criminal justice, Daniel Kahneman, ethics, evidence, fear uncertainty and doubt, humanism, Lives Matter, logistic regression, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, MCMC, organizational failures, population biology, rationality, reasonableness, risk, statistics, Susan Jacoby, the right to know | Leave a comment

“What phony op-eds about climate change have in common” (reblog of Tamino’s post)

Originally posted on Open Mind:
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has published an opinion piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about the “web of denial” a number of senators have turned their focus on this week. It’s so worth reading, I reproduce…

Posted in adaptation, American Association for the Advancement of Science, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, citizen science, citizenship, climate change, climate disruption, Eaarth, environment, global warming, greenwashing, Hyper Anthropocene, meteorology, Tamino, zero carbon | Leave a comment

UnScientific Americans: Congress Aims to Cut Climate Science

Originally posted on Climate Denial Crock of the Week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QK5Kp2uM1E These guys are not joking. You wonder how great civilizations turn their back on enlightenment? Here’s how. Scientific American: Congress is considering spending bills that would significantly cut funding for…

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, atmosphere, carbon dioxide, citizen science, citizenship, climate data, denial, ecology, Ecology Action, environment, ignorance, rationality, reasonableness, science, science denier, the problem of evil, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, zero carbon | Leave a comment

Absorption of long wave, or thermal radiation by CO2 at 667 per cm

From time to time, I engage with science deniers on the Web, typically in Comment sections, and primarily regarding aspects of climate science or physics. Some think this to be a waste of time, but, as I enjoy debating (have … Continue reading

Posted in Anthropocene, astrophysics, atmosphere, Bill Nye, carbon dioxide, chemistry, citizen science, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, climate education, denial, evidence, geophysics, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, ignorance, physics, rationality, reasonableness, science, science denier, science education, spectra, SuperCorrector1, Svante Arrhenius | Leave a comment

“The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Consensus”

“The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus“, T. C. Peterson, W. M. Connolley, J. Fleck, http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1. Abstract Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s. The integrated enterprise embodied in the … Continue reading

Posted in AMETSOC, Anthropocene, carbon dioxide, citizen science, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, climate education, climate zombies, coastal communities, differential equations, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, ecology, environment, fluid dynamics, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, geophysics, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, ice sheet dynamics, investing | Leave a comment

All I do is complain, complain …

I was reviewing a presentation given as part of a short course in the machine learning genre today, and happened across the following two bullets, under the heading “Strictly Stationary Processes”: Predicting a time series is possible if and only … Continue reading

Posted in bifurcations, chaos, citizen science, convergent cross-mapping, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, engineering, Floris Takens, generalized linear models, geophysics, George Sughihara, ignorance, Lenny Smith, Lorenz, mathematics, maths, meteorology, prediction, probability, rationality, reasonableness, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search, stochastics, Takens embedding theorem, the right to know, time series | 1 Comment

dynamic linear model applied to sea-level-rise anomalies

I spent much of the data working up a function for level+trend dynamic linear modeling based upon the dlm package by Petris, Petrone, and Campagnoli, while trying some calculations and code for regime shift detection. One of the test cases … Continue reading

Posted in Bayesian, citizen science, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, dynamic linear models, floods, forecasting, Frequentist, global warming, icesheets, information theoretic statistics, Kalman filter, meteorology, open data, sea level rise, state-space models, statistics, time series | 1 Comment

House Science, Space, and Technology Committee vs National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administation

Originally posted on Open Mind:
[Climate blogger Michael Tobis has written the best summary of the Smith-vs-NOAA brouhaha that I’ve yet seen. Please read it in its entirety, then follow the link and read it again. More important, pass it…

Posted in AMETSOC, Anthropocene, bollocks, bridge to nowhere, Carbon Worshipers, citizen science, citizenship, clean disruption, climate change, climate disruption, climate justice, denial, disingenuity, education, environment, ethics, Exxon, fear uncertainty and doubt, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, games of chance, geophysics, global warming, hiatus, Hyper Anthropocene, ignorance, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, physics, politics, rationality, reasonableness, science, statistics, time series, zero carbon | Leave a comment

“Allocating a 2° C cumulative carbon budget to countries”: Gignac and Matthews

Abstract Recent estimates of the global carbon budget, or allowable cumulative CO2 emissions consistent with a given level of climate warming, have the potential to inform climate mitigation policy discussions aimed at maintaining global temperatures below 2° C. This raises … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, Boston Ethical Society, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, Carbon Tax, chance, chemistry, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, climate justice, compassion, conservation, consumption, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, ecology, education, energy, energy reduction, environment, ethics, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, geophysics, global warming, humanism, Hyper Anthropocene, ignorance, investment in wind and solar energy, IPCC, meteorology, mitigation, open source scientific software, physical materialism, physics, population biology, prediction, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, scientific publishing, sociology, solar power, sustainability, temporal myopia, the right to know, time series, UNFCCC, UU Humanists, wind power | Leave a comment

Solar installation progress, courtesy of MacSolarIndex.com

The MAC Solar Index tracks a set of solar manufacturing and installation companies. It is also the basis for the Guggenheim Investments “TAN” Exchange-Traded Fund (“ETF”, *). They recently published a progress report on global solar installations, which I wanted … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, carbon dioxide, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, ecology, economics, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, environment, exponential growth, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, geophysics, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, meteorology, microgrids, open data, optimization, physics, politics, prediction, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, solar power, sustainability, the right to know, time series, Tony Seba, wind power, zero carbon | Leave a comment

“Where most of us live (with apologies to southern-hemisphere readers)” [reblog of Tamino]

Originally posted on Open Mind:
Almost all of us live on land, not the ocean. And, most of us live in the northern hemisphere, not the southern. For the benefit of most of us, let’s take a closer look at…

Posted in Anthropocene, carbon dioxide, citizen science, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, denial, ecology, education, environment, forecasting, fossil fuels, geophysics, hiatus, Hyper Anthropocene, IPCC, mathematics, maths, meteorology, NOAA, open data, physics, prediction, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, statistics, Tamino, time series, Uncategorized, Wordpress | Leave a comment