If I May Brag

In which my daughter makes an appearance in this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req): Nora Heineman-Fleck, social networking liaison for the University of New Mexico and a frequent user of online networks, has learned to tailor her personal networks like Facebook to make them more useful. “I very rarely actually ‘unfriend’ people,” she says. “I usually …

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This is not a graph of the water level in Lake Mead

This is a graph of the declining construction employment in Nevada, not the declining water levels in Lake Mead. In fact, if we were statistically clever enough, we could no doubt find a negative correlation between the two. As construction booms, more houses are built, and our friends in Vegas consume more water. Construction up, …

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Climate Coverage: A Cheap Media Case Study

Science magazine has two very interesting papers in Friday’s issue related to climate and energy. One looks at a potentially significant climate change problem, and the second looks at a potentially significant energy system solution. The first, by Natalia Shakova and colleagues, looks at the possibility that methane is venting faster than expected from the …

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Toward a More “Patient-Centered” Climate Science

Academia’s institutional culture fails to reward the critical work of tailoring climate science to the people who most need to understand its implications, according to a fascinating new paper by Kristen Averyt, in press at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Averyt is deputy director of the Western Water Assessment, a University of Colorado-based …

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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Teaching About Nature Around Us

From this morning’s newspaper, a piece about the Bosque Environmental Monitoring Program (sub/ad req). I’ve been hearing great things about BEMP for ages, and finally did what I should have done years ago, which is call up Dan Shaw, one of the program’s directors, and ask if I could come hang out and do a …

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