Category Archives: Online Tools / Apps / Data Sources

Living Planet Report 2022

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WWF’s Living Planet Report is out. They mean this at least in part as a report card on the UN’s “Decade on Biodiversity”, and the grade is a failing one. A few things caught my eye:

  • They have a discussion of “connectivity conservation”, which is intended to reduce fragmentation by connecting protected areas.
  • They determined there is an average 69% global decline in abundance of monitored vertebrate populations between 1970 and 2018. The situation in the tropics is much worse than this average.
  • Populations of corals and sharks in particular are crashing.
  • The “Amazon as we know it” may cease to exist in less than a decade.
  • They give an update on the global ecological footprint from the “National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, 2022 edition”. Maybe I’ll have a more detailed look at this another day. The value they give is in hectares per person and I find it hard to interpret given that the population is not constant. They seem most interested in showing that people in more developed countries are using more than their fair share of the planet’s “biocapacity”. Previously, I understood the unit to be the number of planet Earths needed to sustain humanity’s current level of consumption and waste production long-term. A value less than 1 would be sustainable long term, while a value greater than 1 indicates a drawdown of natural capital, creating a debt that will eventually come due.

Audubon native garden designs

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For people like me with limited artistic sense (visual anyway, and you don’t want me to dance in public, although I was once upon a time a well-trained and active musician), these visual garden designs from Audubon are helpful. Basically, you put the tall plants and flowers in the middle and shorter ones more toward the edges, I think, and then you can consider colors and timing of the flowers. Easy to think about, harder to do.

identifying birds by their songs

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This is pretty cool – basically, something called “Haikubox” is a microphone that records bird songs around your house and sends them to a computer at Cornell, which identifies them and sends them back to an app on your phone that tells you what is going on. My immediate reaction was do I really need to buy this high tech microphone? Couldn’t I just make recordings with whatever I have lying around and send those to the computer? And yes, there is an app for that too called “Merlin Bird ID”. I guess the advantage of buying the hardware is that it is always on and processing and transmitting the recordings without extra effort from you.

new CDC mask guidance

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In my coronavirus trackers and simulations revisited post, I have updated the CDC link o their new “COVID-19 by County” page based on guidance issued Friday, February 26 (it’s 2022 in case you are an anthropologist reading this thousands of years in the future.) The updated recommendation is to mask indoors if new cases in your county are 200,000 per 100,000 population per week, AND if the number of people entering the hospital and/or in the hospital is above certain thresholds. It’s a little hard to find the data and figure out yourself, so if you trust the CDC (and who wouldn’t?) you can just type in your county and they will tell you if it is high/medium/low. My home county of Philadelphia is in the medium category, indicating we don’t need to mask indoors, but the city will be slow to react and the school district will be even slower if they react at all.

College Football? There’s an API for that

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I’ve always wondered if there is a public source of college football stats to play with, and there is (at least one) called the College Football Database. There’s also an R package that taps it.

Of course, don’t think for a second that you can crunch these numbers and make money through gambling. Only large “professional gamblers” can consistently make money through gambling, by (legally, as I understand it, at least in certain states) cornering the market by manipulating betting spreads. The idea there is that you can bet a large amount of money on the underdog in a contest that is not getting a lot of attention, which will move the spread in favor of the underdog. You can then bet an even larger amount of money on the favorite. If you are able to manipulate the odds in your favor, you will lose this bet less than half the time, and over time you will make money off the backs of us poor schmucks who take bets with expected values less than what we put in. Don’t try this – there are smarter, richer people than you doing it and you can’t beat them. Also, don’t take my word for it that it would be legal. Finally, think of making small, occasional, close-to-even-money bets as a source of cheap entertainment and you’ll be okay, and then only if you do not have a tendency to become addicted.

An API, by the way, is an Application Programming Interface.

In contrast to a user interface, which connects a computer to a person, an application programming interface connects computers or pieces of software to each other. It is not intended to be used directly by a person (the end user) other than a computer programmer who is incorporating it into software. An API is often made up of different parts which act as tools or services that are available to the programmer. A program or a programmer that uses one of these parts is said to call that portion of the API. The calls that make up the API are also known as subroutines, methods, requests, or endpoints. An API specification defines these calls, meaning that it explains how to use or implement them.

Wikipedia

Wired on the technology of 2021

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The Wired Gadget Lab podcast asked what the important (consumer) technologies of 2021 were, and came up with cloud gaming, e-scooters, Peloton, and “unplugging from the internet”. Someone also mentioned the Covid-19 vaccine, which I would tend to agree with.

On cloud gaming, I am looking forward to getting back into video games (I’m middle aged and still call them that) when and if my intensive child rearing years start to slowly and gradually wind down. I used to be a fan of “real time strategy” games, and just assumed I had missed a lot of awesome ones over the last decade or so. But according to another Wired article that is not the case, as the genre has been overshadowed by other, more profitable types of games. Hopefully they will come back, because I think lots of people like them. I can also imagine hybrid games where you take direct a large-scale, long-term strategy but get to zoom in and take part in a battle or other short-term simulation when you want. Sure, this would take a lot of programming and computing power, but the technology is getting there right?

I’ve hit the Wired paywall. I like Wired, but I just can’t subscribe to everything piecemeal and have 99 little charges on my credit card each month that add up to all my money. Can somebody come up with some sort of clever cross-platform discounted bundling service for magazines, newspapers, apps, games and other subscriptions?

Okay, on e-scooters, my position is they are a menace on the sidewalk and have no place on the street. I don’t think I am turning into a grumpy old man – what I mean is our streets and sidewalks are designed with no safe place for them, except where we have safe, well-designed “bike lanes” and signals, which is almost nowhere in the United States. They’re a menace to themselves in the main travel lanes, and people zipping around on fast battery-powered devices have become pretty threatening to pedestrians on our narrow sidewalks. I am not particularly excited about getting an e-scooter, but if their proliferation means we get more safe protected lanes for bikes and scooters, I am all for them. If we get to a place where maybe one in ten people traveling from point A to point B in a city is inside a one-ton steel killing machine, but they are still taking up 90% of the space and killing our children, will our ignorant, cynical politicians and bureaucrats give us safe streets? I will try to be optimistic.

On Peloton, it looks fairly neat. I’d still prefer to exercise outside, but maybe one day I’ll give it a try, or if someone else in the house were to express an interest that might tip the scales in its favor.

I’m trying to think of a technology that changed my life in 2021. When the Apple podcast app glitched out on me after an update, I switched to Overcast and haven’t looked back. I wouldn’t call that life changing. I love my Audible audiobooks and my Kindle from 2013 that is still working just fine. I am still totally addicted to RSS feeds – Feedly is still my go-to app and I hope it and the feeds never go away (they are, though, one by one). I’m been using Microsoft OneNote for years at work. In 2021 I figured out there is a magic button that generates a meeting note template for any Microsoft Outlook meeting, with the date, subject, attendees, etc. all pre-populated. I started using OneNote for personal notes before 2021, but in 2021 I found myself using it more and more and using it across platforms. It all syncs pretty well, and being a helplessly compulsive list maker all my life I love being able to jot down a note anywhere, anytime. I use Philadelphia’s public bike share system, Indego, which works pretty well except a month or so ago I misplaced by bike helmet and haven’t gotten around to replacing it (I’ve dropped a hint with family members I hope have a line to Santa). I use a number of fitness and health tracking apps – including but not necessarily limited to Apple Health (for tracking steps and weight), Virgin Pulse (required by my employer, not necessarily recommended), LoseIt (for calorie counting), MyLimit (for blood alcohol, which to be clear is 0 most of the time but it’s interesting and useful to understand how alcohol affects the mind and body), and MyChart (for medical records). Each of these has a reason behind it, but taken together they are too much. For the month of December, I have decided to just try to maintain healthy habits but not actually track anything. I’d like to find more automated ways of collecting data on these things and reviewing it occasionally so I can consider some healthy adjustments, without opening half a dozen apps and typing things into them every day. And finally, I bought something dumb, expensive and fun called Twinkly, which is an app-controlled string of LED lights.

what’s new with fish?

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Our World in Data has a sprawling and data-dense article on everything to do with fish, fisheries, and aquaculture. It’s well worth digging into if you have five or six hours, but I could stare at the pictures alone for an hour if I actually had that kind of time.

Here were a few highlights for me:

  • Some species are really in trouble, sharks in particular, but on balance the overfishing situation has improved significantly over the past decade or two. When looked at by weight, about 80% of fishing is sustainable, and when looked at by individual fisheries (which vary in size), about 2/3 is sustainable. Tuna, in particular, is pretty well managed these days.
  • They dug into a particular paper which the media summarized as “the oceans will be empty by 2048”, explain why that didn’t even make sense as a summary of what the authors intended at the time, and then explain why this conclusion no longer holds with better data on fish stocks as opposed to just fish catch.
  • Fish catch has largely stabilized over the past few decades while aquaculture has boomed. Aquaculture has become much more efficient – some wild fish are still used to feed animals, but this has declined and animal feed has become more plant-based. Also, environmentally-motivated not-quite-total vegetarians should feel pretty good about eating farmed mussels, clams, and oysters.
  • The most damaging forms of fishing, such as bottom trawling, have declined, although they are still in wide use in developing countries.

Fish are the classic example often used to teach stocks and flows – they illustrate how time lags and feedback loops can lead to counterintuitive results if you are just eyeballing the trend in one particular flow, rather than gaining an understanding of the underlying system structure and how that explains its behavior. This is one reason why the simplistic science communication we have had during the Covid crisis has been ineffective, in my view. Unfortunately, data (sometimes called “facts”, but that assumes we can accurately measure the state of the world, which we never can with 100% uncertainty) doesn’t just transform itself into good policy and good decisions. The media seems to create this expectation in people, and then I think they are disappointed and confused when the story seems to change and evolve from day to day. At some point, they conclude that a made-up opinion is as likely to be accurate as the garbled message coming from the scientists/or and policymakers. And then of course, some cynical people exploit this disillusionment for their own cynical purposes.