Change 📍

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Upon Further Thought and Reflection ….

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Upon Further Thought and Reflection …. 💭

I decided to stay in town this weekend. Why? It looks like I will be on call if not remote working this weekend, and while I could go out to Madison County and the Cherry Ridge Camping Area and get good cell reception up there for remote work, the truth is working while camping isn’t that much fun as you spend most of the day doing work stuff and evenings are relatively short. Plus the road is likely to be icy up there, and there may be a fair amount of snow up there after the most recent storm. While it looks like the rain may be winding down, tomorrow is going to be cold and the weather is only going to get nicer as spring approaches. And honestly, I’d much rather be in the remote country of the Adirondacks then a campground.

Active and Inactive Landfills in New York - State Heat Map

 

Mapping Two Decades of Landcover Change in the U.S.

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Mapping Two Decades of Landcover Change in the U.S.

It’s no surprise to say that the landscape of U.S. has experienced dramatic changes in some areas since the beginning of the 21st Century – but it’s been difficult to consistently quantify just how much things have changed.

Until now.

For years, the Living Atlas has included a few analyses from the National Land Cover Database, developed by the Multi-Resolution Land Cover Characteristics Consortium (MRLC) – a group of federal agencies, led by the USGS, and tasked with using remote sensing to analyze land cover changes across the nation. However, there has not been a seamless timeseries of this data for detailed analysis. This year, MRLC released a timeseries of harmonized data, and this new generation of NLCD is now available in the Living Atlas.

Why Doing Good Makes It Easier to Be Bad

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Why Doing Good Makes It Easier to Be Bad

You might wonder how people who seem so good by occupation could be so bad in private. The theory of moral licensing could help explain why: When humans are good, it says, we give ourselves license to be bad.

In one paper, economists at the University of Chicago reported that working for a socially responsible company motivated employees to act immorally. In one experiment, people were hired to transcribe images of short German texts and paid 10 percent upfront, with the remaining payment being delivered if they completed the transcriptions, or if they declared the documents too illegible to transcribe. When they were told that, for every job completed or marked illegible, 5 percent of their wages would be donated to Unicef’s educational programs, the instances of cheating rose by 25 percent, compared to where no charitable donation was offered. Cheating manifested in both workers not completing jobs (taking the 10 percent upfront fee and running) and also workers saying that documents were too illegible to transcribe (and so receiving the full fee).

NPR

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For The First Time In 56 Years, A ‘Bloody Sunday’ Without John Lewis : NPR

This weekend marks 56 years since civil rights marchers were attacked by Alabama state troopers on a day now known as "Bloody Sunday." The annual commemoration will be different this year — there's a pandemic, a new president and perhaps most notably, one missing voice.

On March, 7 1965, the late John Lewis and other civil rights leaders led a march from Selma to Montgomery to demonstrate for voting rights. While crossing onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the peaceful demonstrators, including Lewis, were brutally beaten by police.