This post on ROpenSci has links to a ton of open data sources, many with R packages to help download and clean up the data. There particularly appears to be a lot of ecological data here.
open source scientific data
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Category Archives: Online Tools / Apps / Data Sources
native plant and pollinator gardening in Pennsylvania
This post has a ton of information on gardening with native plants and gardening for pollinators in Pennsylvania – sources of plants and seeds, recommended species and combinations of species for various conditions, and links to a variety of government and non-profit organizations that can provide even more information.
one more covid tracker
I thought I was over covid trackers, but I just can’t help it. I know this isn’t my first “one more”, and it might not be my last. This one plots new cases over the past week on the vertical axis vs. total confirmed cases on the horizontal, the animates over time. You can add any country or U.S. state. The simulation starts whenever 10 cases were reported in that location, and you can see them grow at first exponentially and then deviate from the line when they start to get it under control. You can pick a log or arithmetic axis – log is good for the math, but it kind of lets you forget that there is a difference between 10 people dying and 10,000 people dying. Anyway, it’s nice and thanks to this person for posting it for free.
Comet ATLAS
And now for something fun and, by definition, not coronavirus related. Not that some people won’t see this as a concurrent sign of the apocalypse. But there is an unusually bright comet called ATLAS out there, and we might be able to see it with the naked eye sometime in April or May.
As to how bright Comet ATLAS will get, that’s anybody’s guess. It might become faintly visible to the naked eye under dark sky conditions by mid- or late April. By mid-May, when it disappears into the bright evening twilight, perhaps it will have brightened to second magnitude — about as bright as Polaris, the North Star.
Space.com
I thought I remembered seeing Halley’s comet in the 1990s, but after reading up on it, I probably remember people talking about Halley’s comet in the 1980s (when I was in elementary school) and then saw either Hyakutake or Hale-Bopp in the 1990s (when I was in college). I live in a brightly lit city now, and am not allowed to leave my house, but back then I lived in Central Pennsylvania and if I drove for 10 minutes in any direction it would get pretty dark.
Anyway, Atlas is supposed to be visible in the North to Northwest sky. I wouldn’t mind learning to read star charts if I ever get the time, but I recently discovered that there are a ton of astronomy apps out there. I’ve been using Sky View, and it’s great but just one of many. You just point your tablet at the sky and it labels whatever is there for you. You can convince yourself it is accurate just by pointing it at the moon. It actually works just fine in the daytime, on a cloudy night, or if you point it down at the ground and want to know what a person looking up at the sky in the Australian outback might be seeing. Space is predictable like that, and GPS works that well on the average device owned by the average Joe. Pretty neat.
And as for the Apocalypse, nobody is suggesting this thing is actually headed anywhere near earth. This article says it will be 273 million miles from the Sun. The Earth is about 90 million miles from the Sun, so that is only three times the distance, but I don’t know if the Earth is on the same side as the comet right now, so it might be more. It’s far and we have plenty of other things to worry about here on our little blue dot.
could coronavirus lead to food shortages?
The coronavirus is a worldwide tragedy, but for the moment at least, most of us seem to have a reliable supply of water, energy, and food (at least, those of us who normally have these things – some people in the world clearly do not and that is not equitable or fair in the best of times).
But could the coronavirus situation somehow lead to food shortages? Well, there are a few ways. One is if countries that normally export food decide to stop doing so, at least temporarily. This would hurt countries that import a significant amount of food – small, densely populated nations come to mind, as do populous nations in inhospitable environments like deserts. Bloomberg says there are some indications this process has started, but only on a small scale so far.
Kazakhstan, one of the world’s biggest shippers of wheat flour, banned exports of that product along with others, including carrots, sugar and potatoes. Vietnam temporarily suspended new rice export contracts. Serbia has stopped the flow of its sunflower oil and other goods, while Russia is leaving the door open to shipment bans and said it’s assessing the situation weekly.
Bloomberg
The problem would not be an absolute lack of food, but a possible lack of workers to pick specific crops at specific times. Then there could be supply chain problems as the crisis impacts truck drivers, warehouse workers, grocery store workers, etc.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization maintains a food price index, updated monthly. At the end of February, the index was a relative low indicating ample supply and smoothly functioning trade and supply chains.
So it sounds to me like the food supply may weather this particular storm unless we are unlucky enough to have major droughts, storms, floods, heat waves, etc. in key food growing regions at the same time.
When it comes to electricity, Wired says the U.S. supply is safe for the time being. One concern there is that mostly automated power plants are run by a relatively small number of highly skilled people, and if significant numbers of them were to get sick at the same time it would cause problems. Add to this the possibility of severe weather putting further strain on the system, and again we need a certain amount of luck to get through this.
Relying on luck is not the hallmark of robust, resilient, long-lasting systems.
online learning resources mentioned by Bill Gates
The Bill Gates article mentioned a few online learning resources: ” Khan Academy, CommonLit, Illustrative Mathematics, Zearn, and Scholastic“.
hospital capacity data visualization
I was going to stop posting coronavirus tracker apps but this one looks really useful. Now that we know most infected people aren’t tested, the number of confirmed cases isn’t all that helpful as a metric except maybe to look at trends over time. The number of people in the hospital, on the other hand, is a hard number, and comparing that number to hospital capacity is very useful. This app from the University of Washington does that. It also forecasts future hospitalizations and gives a confidence range (which is quite wide, but there it is to ponder.)
This is by state, which is a slightly big and arbitrary geographic unit. Looking at my home state of Pennsylvania, things look almost reassuring, but then looking at New Jersey, they look dire. It would take me five hours to drive to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but I could almost spit on Camden, New Jersey. There will clearly be pressure to move patients across state lines within and between nearby metro areas, and in fact that is already in the news this morning.
The situation in New York looks just awful. I didn’t look at all 50 states, but a quick sampling suggests that states with large cities (and by proxy, probably large hospital systems), and states that started social distancing relatively early, are likely to do a lot better. People might think they would be safer in more rural areas, and perhaps it is true that your odds of infection are much lower, but your chances of survival if you do get infected could also be much lower. This is partially speculation and based on a few anecdotes I have heard, but I do know that this trend holds for car accidents and gun shot wounds.
To this water resource engineer, the differences in capacity use between states and the differences in the timing of available capacity suggest that you could move patients around, or move equipment and medical staff around, between regions in an organized way and save lives. Maybe somebody should get on that if they haven’t already.
yet another coronavirus tracker
Here’s another tracker someone has put together, allowing comparison of countries based on days since their first case of the virus. For the US, it has state and county-level features although it appears data is not available for all of these. Metro-area data would be even more awesome, but now I’m asking too much in an app someone has put together and posted to the world for free!
another coronavirus tracking tool
I like the Johns Hopkins tool, but either it doesn’t let you break down the data by both geography and time, or it is not obvious how you would do that. At a first glance, this tool from weather.us appear to do that, and produce the data in a table that you could play with yourself.
Why does this matter? It might be nice to get a sense of when you think your city or region is starting to turn the corner from an exponential growth curve to an S-shaped curve that will eventually level off. The news media might or might not provide that information in the form you would like to see it on a given day.
coronavirus stats by metro area and normalized for population
I like this City Observatory approach to coronavirus stats. They are reporting numbers by metropolitan statistical area and normalizing them per 100,000 population. They are also reporting the rate at which cases are growing in each metropolitan area. They are using static tables and graphs but I think these provide much better information than the fancy maps and dashboards I have seen. The fancy maps and dashboards are updated more often – the ideal approach would blend all this together. As long as I am making a wish list, it would be nice to see the number of people hospitalized in each metro over time. That is the number we are looking for – the stock of available beds to first reappear as a positive number, then start to grow. When that happens I think we will start to see more public and political pressure to get people back to work. I expect high risk people to have to hide in their homes for quite some time after that, which is sad but I think that is the balance our society is likely to strike. If there comes a point later in the year where that stock of available hospital capacity starts to shrink or disappear in a given metro, that is when we might see shorter, more geographically targeted social distancing orders come and go.