Welcome to A Very Spatial Podcast, Episode 734, March 24th, 2024.
Hello. Welcome to A Very Spatial Podcast. I'm Jesse.
I'm Sue.
I'm Barb.
And this is Frank.
And this week we are going to talk about something we haven't come up with yet. We'll get there in a minute, but I did want to point out that partially because Apple made it happen, and partially because it's something we have meant to do for a very long time, we are now including transcripts. With the podcast if you're on Apple podcasts I'm not sure if you have the choice between the auto generated and the curated version You you may just get the curated version.
You might get both choices So up to you which one you want to go with I try them, you know, I leave out punctuation I don't worry about that. But I do try to at least make sure the words are correct and Transcripts.
So yeah that has been going on for a few weeks and I have some older transcripts You And I'm going to try to keep doing older episodes, transcripts I'll probably go through and do the ones that get downloaded the most because those are probably being used by classes, but I will hopefully at some point in time, have an AI go through and do all of it, which is of course, what we're doing is doing that. So yeah, you can check those out.
And I think I've been, I'm curious, have I been including them in? I did not. So sometimes I do, sometimes I do don't post them in the show notes, but if you click on the direct, no wait, that wouldn't do it either way. If you're listening to it in most apps now, I think but especially Apple podcasts, you will get access to the, to the transcript and I'll try to be better at making sure to attach them in the show notes. The show notes as well,
Very exciting and very wanted, not easy to do until, you know, technology did it caught up
still not necessarily easy to do
a lot easier than I remember looking, trying to find things that could do older episodes and just, there was nothing short of, you know, paying someone a lot of money that would make it workable.
It is the reason why that I started making sure that it also went up on YouTube. And I can't remember how many of that was. I think that's like 15, 20 episodes ago now. So a little over a year or maybe almost a year. So if you do want to find older episodes that we don't have ones up yet and Apple podcasts that have transcripts, you can go and You know, listen to the podcast on YouTube youtube.com/veryspatial, I believe, or @VerySpatial.
I can't remember if both of those work cause ours is an older one, but and you can also subscribe. So we only have 253 subscribers on YouTube. So if you want to boost our numbers over there, I think that's the first time we've talked about subscribing to RSS or YouTube or anything in like a decade. So that's, yeah,
definitely. And it really helps if you, you know, smash that like button.
Yeah. Forget what you were saying, it's all about ring the bell. And that's what it is.
There's something about analytics. I don't know. It's a whole thing.
I don't, I don't look at any of that, but so that it would be auto transcribed and again, there, I didn't go through and check the transcription afterwards, but it, it is at least still there. So let's see if I go to videos and I scroll down, we've been doing this automatically since, let's see, there were a couple of gaps, but definitely at least since four
years. Oh, those are the TV ones. Yeah, those were the actual. Yeah, it's all on the same channel.
Very Spatial TV. Yeah, I've just, I created a podcast category on the Very Spatial TV. YouTube channel. Gotcha. So it's
a efficient Oh, I see it. Yeah,
don't, don't, I don't, I don't pretend to understand some of this, but I, I do this because hey, says there's
only one podcast in the podcast tab.
Does it? Yeah. So it's possible
they're all in the other one.
It's coming up as a video, so I'll go through and, and, and redirect those so they're also showing up in the podcast feed. Sorry about that. Like I said, I don't really pay attention to it. I'm, I'm happy with our, you know, 19 year old RSS feed and that's still going over on feed burner and, but I will, I will fix this so that if you do subscribe to podcasts in YouTube, that you'll be able to do that and get. More than just episode 720.
Oh, is that how that works? Okay. So that does matter for that then, huh?
If you want it to show up in podcasts and YouTube. Yeah. Gotcha. Maybe we should talk about some news.
On to the news. Yes. First up the news, the FCC has raised the speeds for broadband from the relative, in my opinion, relatively antiquated 25 megabits per second download, three megabits per second upload. Okay. To 100 megabits per second download and 20 megabits per second upload. Now that's important because so much of the things we do require bought broadband in some form or fashion to function at all, in my opinion.
So having that minimum barrier of entry for companies to say, look, if you want to label this as broadband, this is the minimum barrier that you have to hit. Is critical to making sure that underserved areas in particular get access to the speeds necessary to sort of live in the 21st century.
And so, yeah, I, I think one of the big things there is that, you know, it was only four years ago that it got around four years ago, four or five years ago that it got shifted to 25 three and we were somewhat excited, but a little bit tentative then, just like I think we're somewhat excited, but a little bit of tentative now about the hundred slash 25.
Which I'm just thinking about time, you know,
yeah, well,
I mean, for me, it's, it's, I was just looking at my, my broadband and you know, it's got the ubiquitous up to on, you know, everything. So my broadband is significantly higher than that, but it's, you know, up to so how much am I actually getting as long as this is a floor, then it's. Good, you know, it could be better.
Well, and whenever you talk about 4G, it's generally about that 5G significantly fashion that depending on which type of 5G you're on. Yeah. So even for the, for the, you know, wireless, we're talking about speeds that are better than that. And whenever we're talking about, you know, a lot of places have gone to fiber half a gigabit, gigabit, not out of the blue. Realm of possibility as kind of your standard.
Well, you know in theory I'm getting over a gig at 1. 2 It's up to 1. 2 gig megabits per second was 1 1. 2 gigabits per second 1, 200 megabits per second, which really? I don't actually believe you That's what it says. That's what the plan says
Ours is a is 500 and whenever I do the test I can get down at like 5560 to 600. So, you know, and, and again, it is take yours with a grain of salt because the they're all commercial companies, but some are, you know, more commercial than others. So we're on a cooperative. And so I think they tend to kind of undersell what they're offering you. Whereas, you know, The other big names tend to oversell.
Yeah. Right now this is a little slower than I'm used to getting. Normally I'm bouncing around a hundred, but right now we're getting about 50 to 60, you know, on theory I'm paying for up to 1. 2 gigabit. So, you know, I just, I don't, I call me skeptical. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, but, but it's great that they're putting this, this floor down there to say, no, you got to get above that, which is wonderful.
Cause that means in theory, I'll be getting up to a hundred over a hundred instead of 50
also means that now we're going to have to wait for the, the new set of broadband maps that reflect the new numbers,
it would be good to have, you know, even any broadband.
Google has just announced that it's used, been using AI to successfully predict river line floods. And so. It's one of those things that you have to have sample data, you have to create training sets, you have to have these for specific areas. So it's not like they've been doing this across the globe. They've been doing this in very specific areas that they've been using as test cases and had data to build this.
And so it's something that, Long term, hopefully we'll be able to be used to, you know, help better understand what's going on on a broader scale on global scale. But kind of 1 of the things that we got to wait and see long term, how these localized training sets can be kind of an influence for broader areas. And of course, as we get better training data for more areas, we'll be able to. That see more going on outside of these specific areas they were looking at.
You know, I think that this is exciting, but also I'm kind of curious on the, you know, the problem you ha have in flooding is everything is precipitated, pardon the use the term there, but on the past being. An accurate predictor for the future and as we know, in the age of climate change, that's simply not true anymore. The problem is we don't have a great having increasingly better, but not a great understanding of how inaccurate it is.
So it's inherently it's training data is going to be inaccurate. So, but hopefully it can account for that enough to be useful.
Well, interestingly this has been going on for a little, a little while. They also, they already have their proprietary flood hub, which goes back to what, 2022, I think it is that they said, but this is out. It seems to be outside of locations where you might normally get weather forecasting and flood forecasting. So they made their forecast available in their search engine in Google maps and Android notifications. But that's outside of kind of more traditional ways.
And so I'm curious who they're working with. I mean, there's long history of, of. Flood, flooding research from a lot of different organizations and, and, you know, researchers and, and so how they built the models and stuff. There's, there's I mean, I was only vaguely aware of this at all myself, right? So it's not a place I would go to say where, you know, Google tell me my, my flood forecast.
But yeah, I mean, it's interesting research and clearly they're already applying it, but I would want to look into it more myself.
Well, I think one of the big things here is that whenever we're talking about this being AI, AI is very broad. And right now, whenever we talk about AI, people are thinking generative AI, but no, this is. The algorithms, the AI models that have been neural network expert systems that have been built much like the weather prediction software algorithms to, you know, respond to certain sets of expectations.
And so whether we're talking about Google specific machine learning algorithms that they were using, or the more traditional flood. Modeling and expert systems that have existed. You know, it's, it's not like this is completely new and it's not like there isn't already flood predictions that have been around that are separate from what Google's doing here. It's just utilizing different approaches compared to what has traditionally been done. I
think the extent, you know, going to 80 countries is admirable but also in, you know, like I said, Jesse, this modeling like this has been around the, what they're trying to do is something I think in the emergency management community is going to take a Time to step back, to take a, a step back and, and look to see how, how this accuracy is effective over time. You know, the, the effectiveness and it is in how it's used.
And like you said, it's, you know, there's a difference between broadly applicable and for your, your local area or immediate needs.
And it does highlight right a problem across the board in, in emergency response and management. And that is the time you need to prepare. So, you know, by. Moving that what they want, you know, hope to remove that reliability back by what they say, five days. And so that gives you five days ahead, you know, they said some of their models as much as seven days, but, but that's really where emergency management and response, right?
Needs to claw back more is time to prepare, to implement plans and that goes for lots of different events that can happen. And so, you know, that's kind of the, the focus of a lot of this. And. So interesting, interesting to see how they continue to develop it.
NASA has made contact. They've sent a quote unquote poke a command out to Voyager, the Voyager one probe, and they've received a response which gives them some hope that there is a possibility of re engaging contact with Voyager one.
So we're not going to see Star Trek one. Anytime soon, as far as we know,
I was just thinking the same thing. I was just thinking about that. And I mean, how long it's been, right? Voyager one and two together launched in, in 1977. And they're still going through like the outer solar system stuff. Amazing.
For me, it was funny. Cause like there, there was a lot of talk in different articles about, you know, the commands that we're sending out to, to try to get that response, but everything just resulted in, you know, well, they poked it.
Which is still amazing that they, yeah, that they were able to, to determine that they were in touch with it. So I guess they're actually, they're in interstellar space. I guess they're, they're kind of in whatever it is just past the solar system before they get to other stuff. It's a long time before they get to other stuff. Yeah, exactly.
And that's it for the news.
This week, we're going to talk about Citizen Science Month and Earth Day, both events that are going to be taking place in April. So, what are we planning to do and what do we think about them?
Or just what they are. What is Citizen Science Month?
Citizen Science Month was started by the International Citizen Science Association. I believe they're out of Australia. And they have expanded worldwide. And you will find also other groups, but Citizen Science Month is a celebration of Of and a call for people to do citizen science, which is citizens contributing to science projects using a lot of times location based devices on their phones and contributing to the work of scientists and others worldwide.
And making an impact in their community because a lot of times these are things being done by your local state agencies, your volunteer organizations, such as Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and a lot of times your local environmental groups. So it could be even physical, such as water testing. There is a quote about it being one of the biggest changes in science has been the use of volunteers to be able to shorten the amount of time that it takes to collect and analyze data,
of course, that doesn't mean that all the data is perfect. And that's, you know, one of the things that we kind of accept, whether we're talking about something like OpenStreetMap or the, oh, I just forgot the name of the bird thing out of Cornell.
I was just thinking about the bird count and,
you know, and, and tons of other citizen science things that have been going on, not just for the last, you Two decades, but you know, some of them even longer, but it's about just having more data and that's, you know, as people who want to be able to use data to answer questions. It's great. Whenever a government agency has the bandwidth to create data sets. It's great whenever they're tasked when doing that by legislation, they're creating those data sets for very specific purposes.
And just because we can use that data, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the data that we need. And so if we can find other routes to get access to data. Such as bringing more people in than what we have in our own teams to help us create these data sets. It just makes it better. Data is good.
Well, and I think too, some of it is right. Opportunity. So, you know, we live in the coastal area and I know that, and some of these, there are organized efforts for particular projects and sometimes they're just requests to report. So that. You know, monitoring can go on. So I know for example, along the coastal areas people often report if they have sightings of marine life or things on the beach, like nests for sea turtles and stuff, and, and of course just stay away from them.
I can remember, and it's interesting, right, because when you're a researcher trying to, to understand and observe things. You just, sometimes you can't be in the right place at the right time too. And I can remember a long time ago in upstate New York, when I worked at Fort Drum it was so much frustration of the wildlife biologists and others when those of us doing archeology surveys would often report back some of the, the fauna that we would see.
And they're like, wait a minute, please report it. And they would, they actually gave us a form and said, please help. So it's not, it's pre sort of awareness of citizen science, but those are the types of things, right? Is, is we can't always observe the things we want to do as researchers, but if somebody else is in the right place at the right time, maybe they can make an observation that you know, can ultimately help us. And so.
You talk Sue and Jesse, you mentioned the bird count when you talk about something like Audubon, that the bird observations have been happening for more than 100 years. But then you went from the form to, you know, keeping it in a journal, a written journal to now being transcribed, and now us being able to do it with, you know, with our phones to automatically. Be sent to the correct people.
But yeah, it is a matter of, of timing so that if you have them aggregated on, you know app such as iNaturalist or SciStarter, or, you know, in many cases, lots of governments have their own for citizen science related to the work being done by different agencies in the U S. It's I think. Citizen science. gov just literally written out that it, it gives you an opportunity to go in there and, you know, record things that you have access to that other people might not see.
And in West Virginia, there was one for recording. I think it's mink. They're like an otter, but not an otter. I haven't ever seen one in the wild.
They're mink. They used to be pretty common where I grew up. Well, not during my life.
Thanks to the coats.
Highly specific to your region. Because I know where I grew up, you know, it wasn't mink. It was the kingfishers, I think. Is that it? The, the big mammals.
You know, citizen science isn't just biology. So if it's not your thing, if that's, it's not something you're interested in, or you don't, you know, you're not wanting to go walking in the woods or along the coast or something like that. There are a lot of other things you can get involved in with citizen science.
I think arguably it wasn't called this, at least I don't think it was ever called this, but the SETI program, where, you know, you could donate your computing power to, to trying to scan the night skies. That was that's a good example of citizen science, just, you know, sort of offshoring a bit of the hardware. Requirements needed to do that level of analysis.
And in fact the majority of the things that we can see in the night sky that may be of concern for the planet earth and for impacts and that sort of thing is often discovered and reported by citizens because there's a lot of sky, there's just not enough scientists to watch all of it and scan all of it, but when you dole that out among all the amateur astronomers out there and an old friend of the Podcast Jeff Dunn, he is big into doing this.
Then, you know, you can see a lot more out there, no pun intended, and detect it and, you know, categorize it and watch it and make sure it's you know, you got your priorities straight. So there's a lot of other things out there beyond, you know, looking for little critters. That's not your thing
to go along with SETI at home at the same time that that that was going on. You also had fold at home that was looking at chemical and cancer research. So basically, you know, subsets that would take a while on a supercomputer. If you distribute the processing over across thousands of idle PCs, playstations, whatever other devices had it running on it, you know, you're talking about a massive amount of compute time for a lot of these projects.
And so, yeah, whether you were actively involved or just providing service for, you're still supporting the scientific activity.
And one of the problems out there, I would say one of the challenges going on, you know, is that because this has become increasingly popular method of interacting with the public is that you have to look at the quality of what. People are collecting, but also what people are putting out there, what they're creating. It's become a specialty area for making sure that like, you know, the, the data you're collecting is the data that you want.
And that the it's almost become a job, a part of the profession within a lot of organizations that are out there. And partially sometimes you see it and it's related to marketing. You're like, Oh, I feel like this is citizen science, but also it's just a way to get some marketing to, to what this company is doing.
You know, I'm curious if there's, you know, so you have instructional design, right? That's a degree you can get where you're helping coming up with a way to teach, you know, effectively concepts. I wonder if you can get a degree in citizen science design or something like that.
There are not necessarily specific degrees in it, but there are definitely people who are doing graduate work that's specifically focused on it. So, yeah,
that would be an interesting, you know, 'cause the way you set up a citizen science project is obviously it's, you know, science. So there is a scientific processee behind it or processes behind it that you have to meet. But also the way to minimize the, the noise or the, or the ambiguity, the data. You gotta set those things up well, so that, that is not gonna. Junk up your results or at least minimize the amount of junk you get in your results.
So that's a, that's a skill and a pretty noteworthy skill. And, and, you know, Barbara mentioned PR and it, I think it's definitely related to interactions with the public and, and the marketing side of things and, and making the science a little sexier and a little more visible. So I think it's an interesting area and I, and I'd like to see more people involved in it because with the.
Handheld computing craze, there's a lot of opportunity for people to get involved and for scientific efforts to engage with the public more, more proactively instead of, you know, a news article with a headline that's flashing.
Well, I think it's a follow on. So Barb had mentioned citizen science. gov here here for the U. S. and actually within the federal community, there actually are people that are very much kind of working on how. you would implement this sort of thing, how to you know, we can get funding for it. So all those types of things for for example, the fed, so the, the federal government has a federal community of practice for crowdsourcing and citizen science.
So that's essentially where the practitioners within the government, you know, get together and talk about the very things we're talking about in terms of, you know, how you implement these things you know, how. You handle maybe challenges and in addition there are also agencies, citizen science and crowdsourcing coordinators for a number of federal agencies.
So this is obviously one small area where crowdsourcing and citizen science are implemented, but there are a number of agencies within government. I mean, NASA comes to mind and others that have been really good. as this movement has gained steam, right? I've been really good at figuring out how to do it for lots of projects. So, so there are places you can actually go to, to see how this goes down.
And for me, I think one of the things that so my background, archaeology is a one where we're somewhat protective of what we are eventually going to destroy through archaeology. But at the same time, we want to destroy it In a way that is very data intensive where we can, you know, collect information about where X, Y, and Z is in a 10 centimeter level within this one by one meter area. And so whenever we're doing that, we have, you know, certain expectations.
And then on the other hand, you have the National Park Service folks who have to interact with. A very broad public who are bringing them information about where sites are, who are going out and doing things like metal detecting in places where they probably don't Probably technically shouldn't be metal detecting.
But you, you have to, like Frank was saying, you have to have this sense of how to set these things up and how to respond to these conversations and not just kind of go with your knee jerk reaction of you shouldn't be doing that. And instead saying, okay, well, how can we help you do this in a way that is, you know, respectful of the materials, making sure that you know, those things that are on public lands end up with the correct agency and organization, those types of things.
And so it is a communication. It's not just citizens helping us do science. It's also, you know, from the other end, the scientists. figuring out how to have better conversations with the communities. And, you know, if you've ever done any field work, you know, that that's a, an issue because you're there to do one thing, but you're going to have to talk to everybody who comes up to you.
And as an archeologist, it was always, so you're looking for gold, you're looking for dinosaur bones and you gotta just say whatever it is that will, Work that day to make you comfortable talking to somebody
it's it's a dialogue, right? I mean not just a dialogue with somebody but it's a dialogue with the public where you've got to say Okay, this has value and you have a place in this not just for science which is this sort of fuzzy thing over there. You know, it's a, okay, this is for us all. This is a good benefit for us all. And you can get engaged in that. And that's, that's exciting.
If you think about it to, to say, this is not science in the abstract, this is for the betterment of all of us and you can help. That's cool.
Yeah. I, I see citizen science as a form of geographic literacy. Again, oftentimes you don't see the word spatial or geography in it. Yeah. With citizen science, but it's, it's location based. It's, it's absolutely pertains to geographic concepts. And also it has its own levels of competencies. I took a there's often webinars and courses offered.
I took one last summer on photography for a naturalist, and I found out a lot of professional photographers for fun will do photography of things like mushroom spores. For these and that, you know, they use their skills as professional photographers. So I thought that was pretty cool. I know there are a lot of other things. I know a lot of nursing students who are doing projects related to health because it's their background and it gives them a chance to practice it.
Yeah, there's also a lot of projects that, as you say, are location based. So think about if you remember when this first started, it's been going on for years now. The did you feel it for earthquake? ShakeMap, so it helps in there. Lots of other things, the air sensor toolbox. So this one was an air quality measuring. But there are even some that are in areas you might not think of.
And I've actually participated in and this is more crowdsourcing than true science science because this is just your kind of visual inspection. But I participated in some of the Library of Congress and others transcription projects, right? Where your transcripts. Transcribing historical documents, and some of those, by the way, are scientific journals and diagrams and things like that. So it's a wide range, but,
even the data is social science data. Yes. That's correct. Even if you were thinking of it in your historical humanities brain.
Yes, I was thinking of it in a historical humanities kind of way, but yes, it is also. Data in that sense that's building data sets. So there's just, there's just so many, there's so many ways that this could be really valuable.
And perhaps one of the most important upcoming ways is how people can get involved with the earth around them. Yes. That's right. Not just, you know, one day a year, but every day, but you know, every year we take and, and talk about it for a day. So as Barb said, this conversation isn't just about citizen science, it's also about things like Earth Day. which is coming up.
So Earth Day, you know, the, the celebration of the Earth based on a lot of the, the knowledge that we gained when we saw planet Earth from space and saw where we are in the universe. And then it led to that groundswell of support for an environmental change in protections leading to Earth Day. And I'm avoiding saying the date because I don't remember the date off the top of my head.
It's April 22nd for this year for Earth Day, by the way. So Earth Day often has themes, although, you know, just looking at some ways to better understand and help the planet Kind of is consistent through Earth Day, but this year they're really looking at the very, very big problem of plastics and their impacts on the planet. So if you want to check out earthday. org for some info on those types of things, but that seems to be what they're highlighting for this year's Earth Day.
But again, every day should be Earth Day.
So remember, Earth Day doesn't have to be just one day. But, you know, it's extra nice if you go ahead and celebrate it and try to think about Earth Day on the 22nd, get involved in your local community and continue your involvement throughout the year.
Also, the eclipse coming up.
That's right. Observations of the eclipse. If you are in the track of, of significant eclipse viewing though, don't forget to have the appropriate protection. So I've still got my goggles from last time when South Carolina was in, in the zone, but it was cloudy that day. So we didn't really see much.
And NASA has Eclipse 2024 citizen science, if anyone's interested in combining the two.
Yes. NASA, NASA does amazing things with citizen science. They're really good at it.
Of course. If you'd like us to add your events, nobody sent us anything this week. We didn't go out and look for them this week, but if you want us to talk about your event, send us an email at the podcast, at VerySpatial.com
if you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at Sue at VerySpatial.
com. I can be reached at Barb at VerySpatial. com.
You can reach me at Frank at VerySpatial. com.
I'm available at Jesse at VerySpatial. com, and of course you can find all of our contact information over at VerySpatial. com slash contact.
As always,
we're the folks from Very Spatial.
Thanks for listening.
And we'll see you in a couple weeks.