Change

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.

I was reading about the Climate Emergency, and was thinking I have no real idea what an emergency is

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I was reading about the Climate Emergency, and was thinking I have no real idea what an emergency is. Sure, I’ve heard the word emergency used in various contexts, but I’ve never heard it actually defined.

An emergency is a situation that poses an immediate risk to health, life, property, or environment. Most emergencies require urgent intervention to prevent a worsening of the situation, although in some situations, mitigation may not be possible and agencies may only be able to offer palliative care for the aftermath.

While some emergencies are self-evident (such as a natural disaster that threatens many lives), many smaller incidents require that an observer (or affected party) decide whether it qualifies as an emergency. The precise definition of an emergency, the agencies involved and the procedures used, vary by jurisdiction, and this is usually set by the government, whose agencies (emergency services) are responsible for emergency planning and management.

In other words, an emergency is a politically-defined situation. Emergencies aren’t self-evident, they are defined substantially in the context of the problem, seen through a lens of personal and community values.

A related term would be crisis, which by definition are negative situations that require action to avoid things getting worse. I feel like I have a better idea of what a crisis is, but a definition is worthwhile to review.

A crisis (plural: “crises”; adjectival form: “critical”) is any event or period that will lead, or may lead, to an unstable and dangerous situation affecting an individual, group, or all of society. Crises are negative changes in the human or environmental affairs, especially when they occur abruptly, with little or no warning. More loosely, a crisis is a testing time or an emergency.

Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike | The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute

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Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike | The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute

The night before his assassination in April 1968, Martin Luther King told a group of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee: “We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it throughȁ (King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,ȁ 217). King believed the struggle in Memphis exposed the need for economic equality and social justice that he hoped his Poor People’s Campaign would highlight nationally.

On 1 ebruary 1968, two Memphis garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck. Eleven days later, frustrated by the city’s response to the latest event in a long pattern of neglect and abuse of its black employees, 1,300 black men from the Memphis epartment of Public Works went on strike. Sanitation workers, led by garbage-collector-turned-union-organizer T. O. Jones, and supported by the president of the American ederation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (ASCME), Jerry Wurf, demanded recognition of their union, better safety standards, and a decent wage.

Want To Rewire Your Brain For Meaningful Life Changes? Do These Things Immediately

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Want To Rewire Your Brain For Meaningful Life Changes? Do These Things Immediately

We all differ in our abilities to solve problems, learn, think logically, understand and acquire new knowledge, integrate ideas, and attain goals.

But when you change your beliefs, learn something new or become mindful of your habitual reactions to unpleasant emotions, you actually alter the neurochemistry and the structure of your brain.