What if on the day we learned 1 in 6 women experienced sexual violence the media gave it this much attention. #rapeculture—
  (@johnknefel) April 19, 2013

I am particularly chafing at having to miss:

• From Dangling Cranes to Flooded Tunnels: Hurricane Sandy and the geographies of Twitter
• Community-based Flood Preparation and Damage Assessment – Hurricane Sandy
• Paper Session on Environmental and Spatial Justice (nb: this is less “chafing” and more “tearing out hair and wailing”)
• Megaregions: Structures, Functions, Patterns

The latter two include participation from members of the Superstorm Research Lab at NYU, a fab group of people I am hoping to work with when I get to NYC. Wahhh, I have serious academic FOMO.

Of course any day where I’m bouncing off the walls with excitement involves randomized interwebbing, so here are some of the things that caught my eye today: PhD students get really, really depressed; How to ask for a reference letter; Elsevier is buying Mendeley (or as this article puts it, “The Empire is buying the Rebel Alliance“); Sea Shepherd has had a very productive whaling season (good job folks); more bad news for bats.

An inspection of the bark of these trees reveals garden snails grazing on thin, vertical lawns of lichens, yeasts and algae. Like the trees, each sexually mature snail makes both egg and sperm. Mating among these gastropods is charged with romantic tension; two males and two females are caught up in every embrace. Downstream from the Mall, at the outlet of the Potomac, marine snails called slipper shells add yet another twist: they begin life as males, before maturing into females.

@KHayhoe @th3Derek @afreedma @ClimateOfGavin

That's really condescendingly smug Ms. Hayhoe.—
Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) March 26, 2013

She did exactly what I would have done if I had gotten that response, which was block Watts from following her. As far as I can tell, Watts is essentially a troll who enjoys harassing and insulting members of the reality-based community until they ignore him and then he accuses them of “refusing to engage in debate”. But Watts has no interest in debating the ideas; blocking him is a refusal to engage in the kind of petty bickering a number of climate skeptics seem to enjoy so much. Richard Tol, an environmental economist, responded with a “nice work” and a link to the page on Watts’ blog where Watts is clearly trying to shame Hayhoe or goad her into a response or whatever it is that people do when they’re all pissy because they insulted someone and got blocked for it.

@KHayhoe I was being sarcastic.—
Richard Tol (@RichardTol) March 29, 2013

Because it was late and I was insomniac and bored, I chose to step in here and ask what exactly he was trying to do here, other than being snide. I know that Tol works with Bjorn Lomborg to discourage people from taking action, I know where he stands, but I was genuinely curious as to what his rationale was here. He argued that

@RichardTol Like, the authority of having better things to do than entertain climate-birthers?—
Erin CB (@erinacb) March 29, 2013

He then claimed that, because he is paid with public money and thus engages with any citizen who wants to talk to him about climate change no matter who they are. Which (1) I doubt and (2) being an academic who studies climate change in Europe is very very different from being one here. Anyway. What have I learned from this ridiculous online tiff?

@RichardTol I respectfully disagree. There is no more debate to be had over anthropogenic climate change, so rehashing it is waste of time.—
Erin CB (@erinacb) March 29, 2013

I don’t think it’s a good use of time to engage with trolls like Watts who was clearly just trying to pick a fight. I don’t think it’s a good use of time to engage with people who refuse to accept rational engagement with the issue, clinging instead to ideological blindfolds. The end result is, at best, agreeing to disagree. At worst, sustained harassment. i’ve seen both.

I’m happy to talk to Tol about whether or not the costs of adaptation are merited by the gains in resilience to an expected increase in risk from natural hazard. But I’m not willing to trip down the rabbit hole of whether climate change and global warming are occurring, whether they are anthropogenic, whether we can take action to ameliorate the problem. Engaging an argument is a mark of respect, and though it doesn’t signify agreement it is a mark of legitimacy. I don’t think people who are consciously ignorant of the reality – that our planet is changing and it’s because of the way our society lives beyond its environmental means – are making legitimate arguments any more. And as time and intellectual inquiry goes on, I think it will be almost impossible to make a rational argument that humans shouldn’t put on their big-girl-pants and start preparing.

I think that Tol has a point, though. Academics in general are seen as arrogant and closed off from regular public life, and I think that reputation is often warranted. I do think that being funded by public money – which, let’s be honest, all academics are to a greater or lesser extent – does oblige you to work in the public interest and engage with the people who pay the taxes. But I don’t think that latter obligation is unlimited. I think there are basic standards for rational debate: decorum and respect. When these rules are consistently violated, it poisons the whole marketplace of ideas. We see it in American politics on both sides and we see it in the climate change debate on both sides. It’s sad. It’s harmful. It degrades the good work that people do. Educators and thinkers should remain open-minded to, tolerant of, and thoughtful about disagreement. But this doesn’t imply the same about disrespect.

Maybe this does make me an aloof egghead, but I don’t think it does. I put a lot of effort into treating people the way that I want to be treated, and I think that goes both ways. In life, in debate, in the workplace, in the exchange of ideas, in general. Including on Twitter.

Reblogged from :

By ~bananagram, via IFLS.

I recommend turning down the music a bit, expanding it to full size, and leaning forward.

The striking thing about the map, which includes all areas of New York and New Jersey affected by the storm surge, is how close the contours of the estimates were to reality. Though the degree of damage varied from place to place, flipping back and forth from projection to reality is an affirmation of how well-informed we were about what a storm surge would look like — and, despite that, ill-prepared.

The larger question, I think, is what we imagine preparedness to be. Is it having the information? Is it ensuring distribution? Is it making the plan? Is it making sure the plan has enough money behind it? Is it forcing people to leave the evacuation areas? Is it changing or expanding the evacuation areas to account for errors in the GIS number-crunching? Many deaths, particularly on Staten Island, were related to people who either did not receive the order to evacuate (solvable) or refused to leave (much more problematic).

And, of course, it’s worth remembering the blame game that gets played after every disaster* – to the extent that the city, state, or FEMA up the ante in terms of the preparation that people can expect, they can then be blamed when the disaster response fails to live up to those expectations. Not to mention the way people also get angry at the Red Cross for failing to meet everyone’s needs – a prime example of the way ostensibly public functions (disaster relief) have defaulted to private organizations in the absence of government resources (or in the presence of government ineptitude). At least in this instance nobody will be living in contaminated FEMA trailers.

Much love to the team at WNYC who assembled the map: John Keefe, Steven Melendez and Louise Ma. You can follow them on Twitter (@datanews) or Tumblr.

* It’s also worth mentioning the scientists who were jailed for failing to predict the L’Aquila earthquake in Italy.

Going to New York to do some field prep and scoping
Before the field there is …scoping! I’m planning to do some volunteering for Post-Sandy cleanup, try to meet some people who can point me in the right research direction, and get the lay of the land. This involves things which are scary to an introverted nerdy person, i.e. meeting new people.

Fellowship applications
To do research, I will need money. Especially if I want to live somewhere in New York City that doesn’t involve making friends with the local roach population (a known public health hazard!) or sleeping in a bunk bed. What makes the funding applications that I’m working on more entertaining is the fact that all those deadlines are actually pushed up by 1-2 weeks. Everything that I submit has to be approved by the University’s Sponsored Projects Office, which administers grants. And even before that, it has to be reviewed by my department’s own grant administrators. I don’t actually think that much of this is unnecessary bureaucracy – it is, probably, necessary bureaucracy, especially when it comes to government grants. If I can make the time (nb: it’s 11:25pm on New Year’s Eve – as you can tell I have a hopping social life), maybe I’ll write more about this. For anyone who’s not actually being wracked by the convolutions of the NSF grantwriting process, this shit is probably pretty funny.