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SEC hit by lawsuit barrage over climate disclosure rule

ClimateWire News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 6:56am
Agency attorneys defended the regulation in a court filing Wednesday, saying the "rules fit comfortably within the commission’s long-standing authority."

Wildfires used to die down after dark. Drought has changed that.

ClimateWire News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 6:54am
About 20 percent of large wildfires in North America now burn overnight, straining firefighting resources.

Pa. governor's plan would shake up renewable energy, CCS

ClimateWire News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 6:54am
The proposal would take the state out of a regional cap-and-trade system.

Lawmakers warn Export-Import Bank against fueling ‘climate chaos’

ClimateWire News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 6:53am
The bank is expected to decide Thursday whether to finance an oil and gas project in the Middle East.

California’s wildfire insurance problems are getting worse

ClimateWire News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 6:52am
The state's last-resort insurer increased its risk exposure by $15 billion in February.

Europe must quicken green efforts after election, EU climate chief says

ClimateWire News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 6:51am
The bloc should "focus just as much and probably more" on climate in the coming years, Wopke Hoekstra told POLITICO.

Sick of EU red tape? Bring your green money here, Ukraine says.

ClimateWire News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 6:50am
Russia tried to destroy the country’s energy sector, but Kyiv is offering great deals to foreign investors willing to build it back up.

EU takes the ax to green farming rules

ClimateWire News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 6:49am
The European Commission’s move to slash environmental requirements for farmers comes as top scientists are urging just the opposite.

In Vietnam, lure of city living grows stronger amid climate shocks

ClimateWire News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 6:48am
The call of factory jobs, which promise better salaries than farming, is often too hard to resist for the Mekong Delta's 17 million inhabitants.

Researchers help robots navigate efficiently in uncertain environments

MIT Latest News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 12:00am

If a robot traveling to a destination has just two possible paths, it needs only to compare the routes’ travel time and probability of success. But if the robot is traversing a complex environment with many possible paths, choosing the best route amid so much uncertainty can quickly become an intractable problem.

MIT researchers developed a method that could help this robot efficiently reason about the best routes to its destination. They created an algorithm for constructing roadmaps of an uncertain environment that balances the tradeoff between roadmap quality and computational efficiency, enabling the robot to quickly find a traversable route that minimizes travel time.

The algorithm starts with paths that are certain to be safe and automatically finds shortcuts the robot could take to reduce the overall travel time. In simulated experiments, the researchers found that their algorithm can achieve a better balance between planning performance and efficiency in comparison to other baselines, which prioritize one or the other.

This algorithm could have applications in areas like exploration, perhaps by helping a robot plan the best way to travel to the edge of a distant crater across the uneven surface of Mars. It could also aid a search-and-rescue drone in finding the quickest route to someone stranded on a remote mountainside.

“It is unrealistic, especially in very large outdoor environments, that you would know exactly where you can and can’t traverse. But if we have just a little bit of information about our environment, we can use that to build a high-quality roadmap,” says Yasmin Veys, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this technique.

Veys wrote the paper with Martina Stadler Kurtz, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and senior author Nicholas Roy, an MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The research will be presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Generating graphs

To study motion planning, researchers often think about a robot’s environment like a graph, where a series of “edges,” or line segments, represent possible paths between a starting point and a goal.

Veys and her collaborators used a graph representation called the Canadian Traveler’s Problem (CTP), which draws its name from frustrated Canadian motorists who must turn back and find a new route when the road ahead is blocked by snow.

In a CTP, each edge of the graph has a weight associated with it, which represents how long that path will take to traverse, and a probability of how likely it is to be traversable. The goal in a CTP is to minimize travel time to the destination.

The researchers focused on how to automatically generate a CTP graph that effectively represents an uncertain environment.

“If we are navigating in an environment, it is possible that we have some information, so we are not just going in blind. While it isn’t a detailed navigation plan, it gives us a sense of what we are working with. The crux of this work is trying to capture that within the CTP graph,” adds Kurtz.

Their algorithm assumes this partial information — perhaps a satellite image — can be divided into specific areas (a lake might be one area, an open field another, etc.)

Each area has a probability that the robot can travel across it. For instance, it is more likely a nonaquatic robot can drive across a field than through a lake, so the probability for a field would be higher.

The algorithm uses this information to build an initial graph through open space, mapping out a conservative path that is slow but definitely traversable. Then it uses a metric the team developed to determine which edges, or shortcut paths through uncertain regions, should be added to the graph to cut down on the overall travel time.

Selecting shortcuts

By only selecting shortcuts that are likely to be traversable, the algorithm keeps the planning process from becoming needlessly complicated.

“The quality of the motion plan is dependent on the quality of graph. If that graph doesn’t have good paths in it, then the algorithm can’t give you a good plan,” Veys explains.

After testing the algorithm in more than 100 simulated experiments with increasingly complex environments, the researchers found that it could consistently outperform baseline methods that don’t consider probabilities. They also tested it using an aerial campus map of MIT to show that it could be effective in real-world, urban environments.

In the future, they want to enhance the algorithm so it can work in more than two dimensions, which could enable its use for complicated robotic manipulation problems. They are also interested in studying the mismatch between CTP graphs and the real-world environments those graphs represent.

“Robots that operate in the real world are plagued by uncertainty, whether in the available sensor data, prior knowledge about the environment, or about how other agents will behave. Unfortunately, dealing with these uncertainties incurs a high computational cost,” says Seth Hutchinson, professor and KUKA Chair for Robotics in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, who was not involved with this research. “This work addresses these issues by proposing a clever approximation scheme that can be used to efficiently compute uncertainty-tolerant plans.”

This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Labs under the Distributed Collaborative Intelligent Systems and Technologies Collaborative Research Alliance and by the Joseph T. Corso and Lily Corso Graduate Fellowship.

Study finds workers misjudge wage markets

MIT Latest News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 12:00am

Many employees believe their counterparts at other firms make less in salary than is actually the case — an assumption that costs them money, according to a study co-authored by MIT scholars.

“Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage,” says MIT economist Simon Jäger, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study’s results.

As a top-line figure, the study indicates that workers who would experience a 10 percent wage increase by switching firms only expect a 1 percent wage increase instead, leading them to earn less than they otherwise might.

That is one of multiple related findings in the study, which also shows that workers in lower-paying firms are highly susceptible to underestimating wages at other companies; and that giving workers correct information about the salary structure in their industry makes them more likely to declare that they intend to leave their current jobs.

The study also has implications for further economics research, since economists’ job-search models generally assume workers have accurate salary information about their industries. The study was performed using data from Germany, although it quite likely applies to other countries as well.

“Misperceptions about outside options have substantial consequences on wages,” says Nina Roussille, an economist at MIT and also a co-author of the paper. “The intuition is simple: If low-wage workers do not know that they could make more elsewhere, then these workers stay put in low-wage firms. In turn, these low-wage firms do not feel the competitive pressure from the external labor market to raise their wages.”

The paper, “Worker Beliefs about Outside Options,” appears in advance online form in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The authors are Jäger, the Silverman Family Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Economics; Christopher Roth, a professor of economics at the University of Cologne; Roussille, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Economics; and Benjamin Schoefer, an associate professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Updating beliefs

To conduct the study, the researchers incorporated a survey module into the Innovation Sample of the German Socio-Economic Panel, an annual survey of a representative sample of the German population. They used their survey questions to find out the nature of worker beliefs about outside employment opportunities. The scholars then linked these findings to actual job and salary data collected from the German government’s Institute for Employment Research (IAB), with the prior consent of 558 survey respondents.

Linking those two data sources allowed the scholars to quantify the mismatch between what workers believe about industry-wide salaries, and what wages are in reality. One good piece of evidence on the compression of those beliefs is that about 56 percent of respondents believe they have a salary in between the 40th and 60th percentiles among comparable workers.

The scholars then added another element to the research project. They conducted an online experiment with 2,448 participants, giving these workers correct information about salaries at other companies, and then measuring the employees’ intention to find other job opportunities, among other things.

By adding this layer to the study, the scholars found that a 10 percentage point increase in the belief about salaries at other firms leads to a 2.6 percentage point increase in a worker intending to leave their present firm.

“This updating of beliefs causes workers to adjust their job search and wage negotiation intentions,” Roussille observes.

While the exact circumstances in every job market may vary somewhat, the researchers think the basic research findings from Germany could well apply in many other places.

“We are confident the results are representative of the German labor market,” Jäger says. “Of course, the German labor market may differ from, say, the U.S. labor market. Our intuition, though, is that, if anything, misperceptions would be even more consequential in a country like the U.S. where wages are more unequal than in Europe.”

Moreover, he adds, the recent dynamics of the U.S. job market during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many workers searched for new work and ended up in higher-paying jobs, is “consistent with the idea that workers had been stuck in low-paying jobs for a long time without realizing that there may have been better opportunities elsewhere.”

Data informing theory

The findings of Jäger, Roth, Roussille, Schoefer stand in contrast to established economic theory in this area, which has often worked from the expectation that employees have an accurate perception of industry wages and make decisions on that basis.

Roussille says the feedback the scholars have received from economics colleagues has been favorable, since other economists perceive “an opportunity to better tailor our models to reality,” as she puts it. “This follows a broader trend in economics in the past 20 to 30 years: The combination of better data collection and access with greater computing power has allowed the field to challenge longstanding but untested assumptions, learn from new empirical evidence, and build more realistic models.”

The findings have also encouraged the scholars to explore the topic further, especially by examining what the state of industry-wide wage knowledge is among employers.

“One natural follow-up to this project would be to better understand the firm side,” Jäger says. “Are firms aware of these misperceptions? Do they also hold inaccurate beliefs about the wages at their competitors?”

To this end, the researchers have already conducted a survey of managers on this topic, and intend to pursue further related work.

Support for the research was provided, in part, by the Sloan Foundation’s Working Longer Program; the Stiftung Grundeinkommen (Basic Income Foundation); and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy.

“Imagine it, build it” at MIT

MIT Latest News - Thu, 03/14/2024 - 12:00am

MIT class 2.679 (Electronics for Mechanical Systems II) offers a sort of alchemy that transforms students from consumers of knowledge to explorers and innovators, and equips them with a range of important new tools at their disposal, students say.

“Topics which could otherwise feel intimidating are well-scoped each week so that students come out knowing not only what a concept is, but why it’s useful and how to actually implement it,” says graduating senior Audrey Chen. “I could consistently come in with no background and come out with practical experience I could use in future projects. I’d describe the class as a series of small crash courses [each of which] answers, simply, ‘what do I need to know to do or use this thing?’”

The course takes students through the process of design, fabrication, and assembly of a printed circuit board (PCB). Ultimately, that process, which has twists and turns depending on each student’s project idea, culminates in incorporating the PCB into a device — in a sense animating that device to perform a certain function.

“The design intent of 2.679 is to empower students to ‘imagine it, build it,’” says Tonio Buonassisi, professor of mechanical engineering. "Between those two is a universe, and the purpose of this class is to aid aspiring engineers to bridge that gap.”

Senior Jessica Lam marvels at how much she learned in the course over its one short semester, attributing that flood of education to the class labs being “incredibly well-structured.”

“I’ve found that in a lot of other labs and project-based classes, they throw a lot of information at you at once with the expectation that you already have some experience with certain software or hardware, and most of it is scaffolded and feels like a black box,” without much understanding of what is actually happening, Lam says. “In 2.679, Steve Banzaert has a better understanding of what we already know and how to build on that.”

After taking 2.679, she says she feels “a lot more confident in designing electrical systems, and I have a more comprehensive understanding of how to integrate mechanical systems and electronics.”

Banzaert, technical instructor for the course, says the class is designed to guide students along their own chosen paths of discovery, showing them that they are able to address the challenges they encounter along the way.

“Every semester we get to see really lovely examples of growth, not just in the course material but, in the best cases, in students’ understanding of what they’re really capable of,” he says.

Chen, a mechanical engineering major who is graduating early to start a position as a hardware project manager at Formlabs, agrees that the class did just that.

“Students are given tremendous freedom to pick their own final projects, allowing them to explore topics which are of special interest to them. And because each project is unique, there is less pressure to ‘perform’ in a traditional sense,” she says. “Rather, each student is learning different skills and is encouraged to get as far along with the project they choose as possible. Steve emphasized that the scope of our projects would inevitably change, because at the start you simply don’t yet know what you don’t know, and that’s totally okay!”

Banzaert says, “We try to make it very clear that, yes, we are talking about important general concepts in theory and analysis, but that’s because they are tools that engineers use to solve problems. I think maybe this focus helps remind the students of what got them here in the first place — that the reason you’re an engineer is because there’s something about the world you wish was better, that you’re the person to do it (or at least help), and, if you want to do it well, you’re going to have to learn a bunch of things so you have more tools in your toolbox.”

Senior Yasin Hamed designed a car in the class that uses computer vision to follow along a black line. The car has an attached camera that captures images and relays them to a Raspberry Pi computer that is also attached to the car. Processing the images in real time allows the car to locate the black line and turn or go straight while controlling the car’s speed.

Although Hamed, who is majoring in mechanical engineering with a minor in computer science, had built another similar system in a previous class, he says the focus in the prior class was on the software. With his 2.679 car project, he learned about “the underlying foundation,” meaning “the design of the power electronics and control circuitry which is necessary for everything else to work.”

“I derived much of the ‘enlightenment’ from this class from the little electronic bits and pieces of information I picked up along the course of the class, like learning/practicing soldering, understand how to use integrated circuits, learning how to design a PCB, etc.,” he says. “It was the collection of all of these things that benefited me the most.”

Jordan Parker-Ashe, also a senior, appreciated how 2.679 combined lessons about electronics with research and presentations from Buonassisi’s lab. “It’s great seeing engineering applied in research,” she says.

Although many of the skills she learned in the course were new to her, one was “an old foe,” she says, that 2.679 allowed her to befriend. Parker-Ashe, who is majoring in nuclear engineering, had used a computer vision program called OpenCV in her first Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project as a first-year undergraduate.

“It was the hardest thing ever, and it really felt like an insurmountable obstacle then,” she says. “Now, to be using OpenCV in labs and homework effortlessly — It was a very full-circle moment.”

She says the class has opened up a whole new field to her, with Banzaert having “directly inspired” her to also take class 6.131 (Power Electronics), “which has been life-changing,” she says.

“2.679 helped me believe in myself, which inspired me to take 6.131, a notorious electrical engineering capstone, which has made me realize that my future lies as a nuclear-electrical engineering engineer, not just a nuclear engineer,” Parker-Ashe says. “I want to pursue electrical engineering in my future, and that just wasn’t on the table beforehand.

“Not to mention that it’s opened the doors to very rich landscapes for project ideas, creating explorations, art, stepping into new roles in group projects, etc,” she says. "I'm so glad that I've been able to find opportunities in Course 2  that helped give me hands-on, applied engineering experience."

SXSW Tried to Silence Critics with Bogus Trademark and Copyright Claims. EFF Fought Back.

EFF: Updates - Wed, 03/13/2024 - 7:01pm

Special thanks to EFF legal intern Jack Beck, who was the lead author of this post.

Amid heavy criticism for its ties to weapons manufacturers supplying Israel, South by Southwest—the organizer of an annual conference and music festival in Austin—has been on the defensive. One tool in their arsenal: bogus trademark and copyright claims against local advocacy group Austin for Palestine Coalition.

The Austin for Palestine Coalition has been a major source of momentum behind recent anti-SXSW protests. Their efforts have included organizing rallies outside festival stages and hosting an alternative music festival in solidarity with Palestine. They have also created social media posts explaining the controversy, criticizing SXSW, and calling on readers to email SXSW with demands for action. The group’s posts include graphics that modify SXSW’s arrow logo to add blood-stained fighter jets. Other images incorporate patterns evoking SXSW marketing materials overlaid with imagery like a bomb or a bleeding dove.

Days after the posts went up, SXSW sent a cease-and-desist letter to Austin for Palestine, accusing them of trademark and copyright infringement and demanding they take down the posts. Austin for Palestine later received an email from Instagram indicating that SXSW had reported the post for violating their trademark rights.

We responded to SXSW on Austin for Palestine’s behalf, explaining that their claims are completely unsupported by the law and demanding they retract them.

The law is clear on this point. The First Amendment protects your right to make a political statement using trademark parodies, whether or not the trademark owner likes it. That’s why trademark law applies a different standard (the “Rogers test”) to infringement claims involving expressive works. The Rogers test is a crucial defense against takedowns like these, and it clearly applies here. Even without Rogers’ extra protections, SXSW’s trademark claim would be bogus: Trademark law is about preventing consumer confusion, and no reasonable consumer would see Austin for Palestine’s posts and infer they were created or endorsed by SXSW.

SXSW’s copyright claims are just as groundless. Basic symbols like their arrow logo are not copyrightable. Moreover, even if SXSW meant to challenge APC’s mimicking of their promotional material—and it’s questionable whether that is copyrightable as well—the posts are a clear example of non-infringing fair use. In a fair use analysis, court’s conduct a four-part analysis, and each of those four factors here either favors Austin for Palestine or is at worst neutral. Most importantly, it’s clear that the critical message conveyed by Austin for Palestine’s use is entirely different from the original purpose of these marketing materials, and the only injury to SXSW is reputational—which is not a cognizable copyright injury.

SXSW has yet to respond to our letter. EFF has defended against bogus copyright and trademark claims in the past, and SXSW’s attempted takedown feels especially egregious considering the nature of Austin for Palestine’s advocacy. Austin for Palestine used SXSW’s iconography to make a political point about the festival itself, and neither trademark nor copyright is a free pass to shut down criticism. As an organization that “dedicates itself to helping creative people achieve their goals,” SXSW should know better.

Life on Mars, together

MIT Latest News - Wed, 03/13/2024 - 5:00pm

Earlier this year, Madelyn Hoying, a PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, and Wing Lam (Nicole) Chan, an MIT senior in aeronautics and astronautics, were part of Crew 290 at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), the largest and longest-running Mars analog facility in the world. Their six-person crew completed a two-week simulation under the name Project MADMEN (Martian Analysis and Detection of Microbial Environments) — an analog of potential Martian search-for-life missions. 

The mission evolved from Hoying’s NASA Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (NASA RASC-AL) challenge submission, Project ALIEN, during her time as an undergraduate student at Duquesne University. After the challenge concluded, she and her colleagues refined the mission concept and created a test plan that could be conducted in a Mars-analog environment. 

Hoying served as the crew’s commander and health and safety officer, and Chan as the crew’s journalist, documenting daily activities and how the crew experienced life on Mars. The other members of Crew 290 featured three from the original project: Hoying, Rebecca McCallin from Duquesne University, and Benjamin Kazimer from MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Chan, Anja Sheppard from the University of Michigan, and Anna Tretiakova from Boston University joined the team in the next phase. Hoying and Chan had worked together once before in 2022 in another RASC-AL competition. 

“I was initially a bit skeptical of spending two weeks in the middle of nowhere and simply being tasked with writing about what happens every day,” says Chan. “What happens on extravehicular activities (EVAs)? How and where do we live every day? What will we be eating? These doubts all went away with the adrenaline and curiosity of seeing the Martian-esque landscape and especially after putting on the EVA helmet for the first time. It truly felt like I was living on Mars and I very quickly immersed myself in the mission.” 

A unique leadership opportunity

Hoying has participated in other analog missions through MIT’s RASC-AL challenge submissions, specifically 2023’s Pale Red Dot. “I have led an analog mission in the past with [MIT AeroAstro colleague] George Lordos. We led a total crew of 11 in a dual-site mission architecture, where George led one habitat and I led the other. Pale Red Dot and Project MADMEN emphasized different features of a Martian mission, so certain aspects of this, like the extravehicular activity procedures and reporting requirements for mission support, were different.”

As commander, Hoying managed logistics, including balancing the scientific objectives of the multiple projects the crew set out to complete. “The two field experiments were soil collection for Project MADMEN and field operation of REMI, the ground-penetrating radar robot. Sometimes this led to competing requirements for EVAs, as REMI’s mass would reduce the distance that our rovers could cover before running out of battery and therefore limit the terrain types that could be reached for soil collection.” 

Hoying’s main focus was balancing the crew’s requirements for data with safety, including such considerations as who had recently been on EVA, who needed a break from carrying the heavy EVA suits, how far the team could safely travel, and how the weather impacted different areas. “The decisions for what the science goals of an EVA were, who would go on each EVA, and where they would be to collect from came down to me. Ultimately, we were able to balance all of these and satisfy the collection requirements of both field projects, even with last-minute changes due to things like weather.”

The crew makes the mission

Project MADMEN involved conducting onsite field tests of geological samples and robotic experiments for landing site selection. But the success of the mission hinged on more than just in-lab results. Hosting the mission at MDRS allowed the MADMEN crew to gain valuable insights on how individuals and teams might actually experience life on Mars, psychologically and socially. 

“We had a great crew, and as a result we had a great mission,” says Hoying. She managed the psychosocial aspect of the mission using daily questionnaires, studying the effects of contingency and emergency scenarios on metrics like quality of life.

The main living quarters for the crew is a two-story, 8-meter diameter cylinder called the “Hab.” The lower deck comprises the EVA prep room, an airlock, bathroom facilities, and a tunnel to the other structures. The upper deck houses the living quarters, including a kitchen and bunks. The close quarters only served to solidify the crew’s enthusiasm for the mission and support of each other.

“We shared almost every meal together and used the time to bond and talk about our interests. We often ended the day with social activities, whether it be talking about our backgrounds or future plans, playing games, or stargazing,” says Chan. “The most challenging part for me personally was stepping out of my comfort zone. Prior to this mission, I have not lived communally or camped before. It took me a bit to get used to living in close quarters with other people and balancing chores and tasks. I soon got used to the routine and enjoyed trying things for the first time, which made my experience a lot more rewarding, too.”

By day (or “Sol”) 3, the crew had assigned nicknames to each other in a call-sign ceremony. “It’s a tradition in other field experiences I’ve been a part of, and I wanted to carry that through for this crew. Assigning these was a night full of storytelling, laughing, and new memories, and we all agreed that the reasoning behind each nickname assignment would remain between the crew,” says Hoying (“Melon”); Chan’s call sign was “PODO.” 

Crew 290’s Martian journals close with a reflection from Chan on their out-of-this-world experience: “As we get to work tonight, we reminisce about our time here on Mars, from the first time setting foot in the station to the first time suiting up for EVAs. We’re all so grateful to be here and have learned a lot about what it takes to be a Martian during the past two weeks.” Read all of Chan’s journal updates here.

The mission was primarily sponsored by Duquesne University and the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium, with some travel support provided by the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium.

Letting the Earth answer back: Designing better planetary conversations

MIT Latest News - Wed, 03/13/2024 - 4:30pm

For Chen Chu MArch ’21, the invitation to join the 2023-24 cohort of Morningside Academy for Design Design Fellows has been an unparalleled opportunity to investigate the potential of design as an alternative method of problem-solving.

After earning a master’s degree in architecture at MIT and gaining professional experience as a researcher at an environmental nongovernmental organization, Chu decided to pursue a PhD in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “I discovered that I needed to engage in a deeper way with the most difficult ethical challenges of our time, especially those arising from the fact of climate change,” he explains. “For me, MIT has always represented this wonderful place where people are inherently intellectually curious — it’s a very rewarding community to be part of.”

Chu’s PhD research, guided by his doctoral advisor Delia Wendel, assistant professor of urban studies and international development, focuses on how traditional practices of floodplain agriculture can inform local and global strategies for sustainable food production and distribution in response to climate change. 

Typically located alongside a river or stream, floodplains arise from seasonal flooding patterns that distribute nutrient-rich silt and create connectivity between species. This results in exceptionally high levels of biodiversity and microbial richness, generating the ideal conditions for agriculture. It’s no accident that the first human civilizations were founded on floodplains, including Mesopotamia (named for its location poised between two rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris), the Indus River Civilization, and the cultures of Ancient Egypt based around the Nile. Riverine transportation networks and predictable flooding rhythms provide a framework for trade and cultivation; nonetheless, floodplain communities must learn to live with risk, subject to the sudden disruptions of high waters, drought, and ecological disequilibrium. 

For Chu, the “unstable and ungovernable” status of floodplains makes them fertile ground for thinking about. “I’m drawn to these so-called ‘wet landscapes’ — edge conditions that act as transitional spaces between land and water, between humans and nature, between city and river,” he reflects. “The development of extensively irrigated agricultural sites is typically a collective effort, which raises intriguing questions about how communities establish social organizations that simultaneously negotiate top-down state control and adapt to the uncertainty of nature.”

Chu is in the process of honing the focus of his dissertation and refining his data collection methods, which will include archival research and fieldwork, as well as interviews with floodplain inhabitants to gain an understanding of sociopolitical nuances. Meanwhile, his role as a design fellow gives him the space to address the big questions that fire his imagination. How can we live well on shared land? How can we take responsibility for the lives of future generations? What types of political structures are required to get everyone on board? 

These are just a few of the questions that Chu recently put to his cohort in a presentation. During the weekly seminars for the fellowship, he has the chance to converse with peers and mentors of multiple disciplines — from researchers rethinking the pedagogy of design to entrepreneurs applying design thinking to new business models to architects and engineers developing new habitats to heal our relationship with the natural world. 

“I’ll admit — I’m wary of the human instinct to problem-solve,” says Chu. “When it comes to the material conditions and lived experience of people and planet, there’s a limit to our economic and political reasoning, and to conventional architectural practice. That said, I do believe that the mindset of a designer can open up new ways of thinking. At its core, design is an interdisciplinary practice based on the understanding that a problem can’t be solved from a narrow, singular perspective.” 

The stimulating structure of a MAD Fellowship — free from immediate obligations to publish or produce, fellows learn from one another and engage with visiting speakers via regular seminars and events — has prompted Chu to consider what truly makes for generative conversation in the contexts of academia and the private and public sectors. In his opinion, discussions around climate change often fail to take account of one important voice; an absence he describes as “that silent being, the Earth.”

“You can’t ask the Earth, ‘What does justice mean to you?’ Nature will not respond,” he reflects. To bridge the gap, Chu believes it’s important to combine the study of specific political and social conditions with broader existential questions raised by the environmental humanities. His own research draws upon the perspectives of thinkers including Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, Peter Singer,  Anna Tsing, and Michael Watts, among others. He cites James C. Scott’s lecture “In Praise of Floods” as one of his most important influences.

In addition to his instinctive appreciation for theory, Chu’s outlook is grounded by an attention to innovation at the local level. He is currently establishing the parameters of his research, examining case studies of agricultural systems and flood mitigation strategies that have been sustained for centuries. 

“One example is the polder system that is practiced in the Netherlands, China, Bangladesh, and many parts of the world: small, low-lying tracts of land submerged in water and surrounded by dykes and canals,” he explains. “You’ll find a different but comparable strategy in the colder regions of Japan. Crops are protected from the winter winds by constructing a spatial unit with the house at the center; trees behind the house serve as windbreakers and paddy fields for rice are located in front of the house, providing an integrated system of food and livelihood security.”

Chu observes that there is a tendency for international policymakers to overlook local solutions in favor of grander visions and ambitious climate pledges — but he is equally keen not to romanticize vernacular practices. “Realistically, it's always a two-way interaction. Unless you already have a workable local system in place, it’s difficult to implement a solution without top-down support. On the other hand, the large-scale technocratic dreams are empty if ignorant of local traditions and histories.” 

By navigating between the global and the local, the theoretical and the practical, the visionary and the cautionary, Chu has hope in the possibility of gradually finding a way toward long-term solutions that adapt to specific conditions over time. It’s a model of ambition and criticality that Chu sees played out during dialogue at MAD and within his department; at root, he’s aware that the outcome of these conversations depends on the ethical context that shapes them.

“I've been fortunate to have many mentors who have taught me the power of humility; a respect for the finitude, fragility,  and uncertainty of life,” he recalls. “It’s a mindset that’s barely apparent in today’s push for economic growth.” The flip-side of hubristic growth is an assumption that technological ingenuity will be enough to solve the climate crisis, but Chu’s optimism arises from a different source: “When I feel overwhelmed by the weight of the problems we’re facing, I just need to look around me,” he says. “Here on campus — at MAD, in my home department, and increasingly among the new generations of students — there’s a powerful ethos of political sensitivity, ethical compassion, and an attention to clear and critical judgment. That always gives me hope for the planet.”

Protect Yourself from Election Misinformation

EFF: Updates - Wed, 03/13/2024 - 2:22pm

Welcome to your U.S. presidential election year, when all kinds of bad actors will flood the internet with election-related disinformation and misinformation aimed at swaying or suppressing your vote in November. 

So… what’re you going to do about it? 

As EFF’s Corynne McSherry wrote in 2020, online election disinformation is a problem that has had real consequences in the U.S. and all over the world—it has been correlated to ethnic violence in Myanmar and India and to Kenya’s 2017 elections, among other events. Still, election misinformation and disinformation continue to proliferate online and off. 

That being said, regulation is not typically an effective or human rights-respecting way to address election misinformation. Even well-meaning efforts to control election misinformation through regulation inevitably end up silencing a range of dissenting voices and hindering the ability to challenge ingrained systems of oppression. Indeed, any content regulation must be scrutinized to avoid inadvertently affecting meaningful expression: Is the approach narrowly tailored or a categorical ban? Does it empower users? Is it transparent? Is it consistent with human rights principles? 

 While platforms and regulators struggle to get it right, internet users must be vigilant about checking the election information they receive for accuracy. There is help. Nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica published a handy guide about how to tell if what you’re reading is accurate or “fake news.” The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions infographic on How to Spot Fake News is a quick and easy-to-read reference you can share with friends:

how_to_spot_fake_news.jpg

To make sure you’re getting good information about how your election is being conducted, check in with trusted sources including your state’s Secretary of State, Common Cause, and other nonpartisan voter protection groups, or call or text 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) to speak with a trained election protection volunteer. 

And if you see something, say something: You can report election disinformation at https://reportdisinfo.org/, a project of the Common Cause Education Fund. 

 EFF also offers some election-year food for thought: 

  • On EFF’s “How to Fix the Internet” podcast, Pamela Smith—president and CEO of Verified Voting—in 2022 talked with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about finding reliable information on how your elections are conducted, as part of ensuring ballot accessibility and election transparency.
  • Also on “How to Fix the Internet”, Alice Marwick—cofounder and principal researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s Center for Information, Technology and Public Life—in 2023 talked about finding ways to identify and leverage people’s commonalities to stem the flood of disinformation while ensuring that the most marginalized and vulnerable internet users are still empowered to speak out. She discussed why seemingly ludicrous conspiracy theories get so many views and followers; how disinformation is tied to personal identity and feelings of marginalization and disenfranchisement; and when fact-checking does and doesn’t work.
  • EFF’s Cory Doctorow wrote in 2020 about how big tech monopolies distort our public discourse: “By gathering a lot of data about us, and by applying self-modifying machine-learning algorithms to that data, Big Tech can target us with messages that slip past our critical faculties, changing our minds not with reason, but with a kind of technological mesmerism.” 

An effective democracy requires an informed public and participating in a democracy is a responsibility that requires work. Online platforms have a long way to go in providing the tools users need to discern legitimate sources from fake news. In the meantime, it’s on each of us. Don’t let anyone lie, cheat, or scare you away from making the most informed decision for your community at the ballot box. 

Burglars Using Wi-Fi Jammers to Disable Security Cameras

Schneier on Security - Wed, 03/13/2024 - 7:07am

The arms race continues, as burglars are learning how to use jammers to disable Wi-Fi security cameras.

Germany looks to help industry's heavy emitters with carbon contracts

ClimateWire News - Wed, 03/13/2024 - 6:52am
The country is the first in the European Union to launch the "carbon contracts for difference."

Six years after climate action plan, Iceland's green bond set to debut

ClimateWire News - Wed, 03/13/2024 - 6:52am
The country is pursuing decarbonization across nine sectors, including transport and chemical use.

Indonesia understates mining's methane emissions, report says

ClimateWire News - Wed, 03/13/2024 - 6:51am
The world’s third-biggest coal miner undercounts methane emissions from production of the fuel by six to seven times, according to energy think tank Ember.

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