A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it. Named after the legendary character "Crazy Eddie" in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Expect news and views about culture, politics, economics, technology, and science fiction.
Showing posts with label Columbia University. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Columbia University. Show all posts
A program affiliated with Colorado State University marked the two-year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy in a special way: On Oct. 29, high school students in New York City posed questions about life during and after a catastrophe to a very particular group of experts – high school students in the Gulf Coast who experienced the BP Oil Spill and lived through as many as six hurricanes in the past decade, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Their youth-led rapid video project, “The Katrina/Sandy Youth Dialogue, Part 1,” is a product of the SHOREline program, a national youth-empowerment project developed at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute and at the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University.
It has been two years since Superstorm Sandy struck the East Coast and nearly ten years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. At SHOREline, we took this moment to reflect upon the issues of response and recovery it raised among the members of our SHOREline network – high school students at five Gulf Coast schools and one New York City school.
How are Katrina and Sandy similar? From the perspective of young people, what can they learn from one another about such catastrophic events? Ninth and tenth graders at NYC’s Urban Assembly School for Emergency Management developed questions that they posed to their Gulf Coast counterparts in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
I'm taking a break from examining current research in health and outreach in health policy to present three news items about health in history that I've included in Overnight News Digest on Daily Kos the past two weeks. I begin with a release from Columbia University that fits in with the theme of campuses on the campaign trail, as Columbia is located in New York City, which elected a new Mayor last month.
The examination of mental disorders would seem to be the almost exclusive domain of psychiatrists and psychologists, not humanities scholars. Yet William V. Harris, the William R. Shepherd Professor of History, has spent his time in recent years studying his chosen field—the history of ancient Greece and Rome—through the lens of mental illness.
Harris, director of the Columbia Center for the Ancient Mediterranean, has explored subjects in ancient times ranging from war and imperialism to literacy and economic history. More recently, he began to focus on emotional states, in books such as Restraining Rage: the Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity in 2002, and Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity in 2009. “I’ve always been interested in psychiatry and psychology, which I see as a quite natural interest for historian,” he said.
Over at Daily Kos, I place psychology in between health and archeology. The above article shows exactly why I do this.
Follow over the break for two more health stories from the ancient and historical world.
During a news briefing at NASA headquarters officials and scientists discussed MAVEN, the agency's next mission to Mars. Scheduled to launch November 18 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, MAVEN will study the history and change of Mars' atmosphere, climate, and planetary habitability. Also, Bolden visits Langley, Power Up, Solar Flares, A busy time!, Free flight and Ice Flight!
I concluded PBS NewsHour on Hurricane Sandy one year later by writing, "I'll have more about the anniversary of Sandy's landfall from Columbia University and other sources after Midnight. Stay tuned." As promised, here it is.
I begin with this video from PBS NewsHour, which features a Columbia University faculty member, so I decided it counts.
Klaus Jacob, a special research scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, explains how climate change will turn events like Hurricane Sandy into more frequent and more disastrous events."One weather event like Sandy does not make climate change. But it is a symptom with many other events that will show yes there is something going [on] and we call it climate change," Jacob said.
The year since Hurricane Sandy blew ashore in the New York area has been one of rebuilding and searching for how best to prevent the level of destruction and death it brought with it.
Columbia, with experts across multiple schools and disciplines and broad expertise in climate science, has played an important role in the recovery. “We have 700 people in the Earth Institute working on this,” said Steve Cohen, the institute’s executive director. “The Lamont Doherty Observatory has close to 100 doctoral level scientists working on this all the time.”
Columbia students and staffers helped communities rebuild. Scores of Columbia scientists have been explaining the causes behind the storm in hundreds of media interviews. Columbia professors serve on government panels that study how to prevent future damage and make recommendations to elected officials on preparedness and infrastructure changes.
Follow over the jump for more Hurricane Sandy and other climate news from Boston University via its NPR station WBUR, Columbia University, Rutgers University, and New York University, all of which I shared in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Eclipse, Sandy Anniversary, and Fall Back), plus one story I was planning on including in that diary on Daily Kos but left out by mistake.
Follow over the jump for health research and outreach from Boston University, Columbia University, Rutgers University, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech.
Yet again, I've hit the wall of "I can't be all doom all the time." To combat burning out from the sense of impeding dread, I'm changing the subject to science awards, just like I did last year at this time.
Every year at a gala ceremony in Harvard's Sanders Theater the Ig Nobel prizes are awarded for achievements in science that first make people laugh, then think. Actual Nobel laureates are drafted to present awards to research into subjects like the effects of opera on mouse heart-transplant patients and the phenomenon commonly known as "beer goggles."
My wife and I are both sure that's Paul Krugman wearing the "emergency bra."
That's the ridiculous part. Follow over the jump for stories about the MacArthur Awards AKA the "genius grants" from campuses on the campaign trail as well as some informed speculation about the winners of the Nobel Awards.
Have a question that's always confounded you about Earth's climate? Wonder why it matters that the climate is changing now if it has changed before? Or how scientists know changes seen in recent decades are the result of human activities, not natural causes?
Go ahead. Ask a climate scientist.
NASA scientists will be recording video responses to some of the questions we receive. The responses will be posted to the NASAExplorer YouTube channel.
To submit a question, record a short, 10-15 second video with your question and upload it to YouTube -- and be sure to tag the video "#askclimate" so that we can find it. You can also simply post a question on Twitter with the same hashtag, "#askclimate."
NASA has at least one answer video that I'll post later this week or early next.
CAMDEN — On the surface, glaciers are massive bodies of ice that continue to slowly carve out the Earth’s landscape, but what goes unseen beneath these frozen rivers are entire communities of microbial life that could be playing a key role in glacial melting.
“Glaciers are an interesting thing to study to try and understand an entire ecosystem in its full complexity, from microorganisms to algae to animals,” says Andrey Grigoriev, a professor of biology at Rutgers–Camden. “We want to determine what species live there and to figure out the structure of the glacial ecosystem.”
In the first stage of his project, Grigoriev is taking an intimate look at Alaska’s Byron Glacier, located some 48 miles south of Anchorage (and more than 4,000 miles from Rutgers–Camden).
Rutgers scientists aren't the only ones from campuses on the campaign trail studying the effect of climate change on glaciers. New York University does as well in Antarctic Reseach Details Ice Melt Below Massive Glacier. September 12, 2013
An expedition of international scientists to the far reaches of Antarctica’s remote Pine Island Glacier has yielded exact measurements of an undersea process glaciologists have long called the “biggest source of uncertainty in global sea level projections.”
The research, which appears in the latest issue of Science magazine, was conducted by scientists at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, Calif., the University of Alaska, Pennsylvania State University, NASA, and the British Antarctic Survey.
The article details the landmark results of the Pine Island Glacier expedition, giving scientists an extensive look beneath the ice at one of the most remote research sites on the planet – a site whose fate could affect the lives of millions.
“Intensive melting under the Pine Island ice shelf, as observed in our study, could potentially lead to the speed up and ultimate break-up of the ice shelf,” says David Holland of NYU’s Courant Institute and one of the paper’s co-authors. “That’s important, as this ice shelf is currently holding back inland ice, and without that restraining force, the Pine Island catchment basin could further contribute to global sea-level rise.”
A massive landslide in Alaska’s snowy Wrangell-St. Elias mountain range in July may have been caused by a summer heat wave making some slopes more vulnerable to collapse, says the scientist who first discovered the avalanche.
“Most of the big landslides that I’ve worked on in Alaska from 1999 to now have been south-facing, summer-time failures,” Colin Stark, a geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory told NASA’s Earth Observatory. “My suspicion is that this landslide was probably caused by sustained daytime warming and progressive melting of rock permafrost.”
I told my students in Environmental Science this week that climate change would be most visible near the poles. This research shows what I said is true.
Cindy Sickora runs a mobile healthcare program in Newark. Suzanne Willard heads a wellness center. Together, two leaders of Rutgers nursing schools are striving to make healthcare accessible to city residents, who are among the most underserved in the nation.
