City Pulse Captured for Real-Time Tripping

Crowds. Traffic jams. Bus and train delays. Pollution. Life in the big city can sometimes bog you down.
Now for the first time, researchers are working on a dynamic, public transportation program that could improve your commute.
The CityMotion project, being coordinated through the MIT-Portugal Program, will capture a variety of real-time digital data already being produced or recorded for other reasons and re-purpose it to enhance mobility in Lisbon and Porto.
Such a system could help make planning the best route easier for a range of people from city officials to disaster evacuation planners to supply-chain managers to average commuters.
The first application will be a customized trip planner in which citizens can choose their journey based on the quickest, cheapest or most environmentally friendly path possible.
"Every few minutes, we get a big chunk of data that says, 'at this point in the city there are this many people.' It's a method of sensing the city," explained Assaf Biderman, assistant director of the SENSEable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Biderman and colleagues at MIT have teamed up with researchers at the University of Porto, the University of Coimbra and the Instituto Superior Tecnico as part of the program's three-year timeline.
To sense congestion information in the cities, Biderman and his colleagues will pull data from sensors already distributed throughout a city.
For example, highways already have roadside sensors that regularly record the passing of cars. Tollbooths are able to calculate the number of cars passing through, based on vehicles using radio frequency identification tags for automatic payments. Location information about bus, subways and trains is already captured by public transportation authorities to manage schedules.
And many cities already have a network of pollution sensors distributed throughout neighborhoods to monitor air quality.Crowd information can also be gleaned from mobile phone use. Biderman and his colleagues from the SENSEable City Lab already initiated a separate project in Italy, called WikiCity Rome that produces an interactive map showing the location of people in real time based on anonymous and aggregated data collected from cell phones and GPS devices.
Processing the wide variety of sensed information involves customized algorithms that are able to strip the digital data down to its essential message (such as, "Is it the location of a bus?" or, "What is the amount of pollution on the north side of town?"). Once that information is discovered, it is plugged into computer models that can make predictions about traffic and crowd flow.
That way, when a user makes a query such as "what's the fastest route from A to B," the program can analyze the overall system to make the best prediction.
On one day, the fastest route might involve taking a bus because track maintenance is slowing down the subways. On another day, the fastest trip might be by foot, because a parade has closed down a main street used by the bus.
How the user gets the information has to do with the third and final layer: information dissemination.
"It will start on the Web, but ideally it could be on in-car navigation systems, mobile devices or interactive urban furniture," said Assaf
But before they get to that point, they'll have to overcome a couple of hurdles.
"I would find two big challenges. One is putting all of the data providers in agreement. The other big challenge is to make people interested in the system," said Carlos Lisboa Bento, professor of information engineering at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.
The team is working on moving toward agreements particularly with telecommunication and transportation partners. Getting the public interested will involve proving that there is a real advantage to the system.
"One important aspect is that she or he perceives that the system is safe in terms of privacy and security," said Bento.
At the end of three years, Biderman and his team hope to have those problems resolved.

by Tracy Staedter

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/02/11/city-motion-traffic-02.html

Lava and Water Battled at Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon was not just carved by water -- it has also been the scene of periodic wars between the Colorado River and volcanic eruptions which dammed the river and then burst.
New airborne elevation survey data and radioisotope dating of lava the Grand Canyon's lava flows sheds new light on the battles between water and molten rocks there over the last 725,000 years.
Among the conclusions: Over that time there have been no less than four lava flows that dammed the river in the western Grand Canyon. Some of these dams were breached by dramatic floods and others may have been simply eroded away as the river flowed over their tops.
What's more, there have been many more lava floods into the canyon which did not necessarily dam the river. The trick for geologists has been sorting all the lava flows out, since the terrain is particularly hard to work in.
"The area is extremely rugged and the relief extreme," said Ryan Crow, a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico and lead author of a paper on the new data in the February issue of Geosphere. "It's extremely difficult to get around."
The same rugged canyon country and eons of erosion have dismembered the lava flows -- making them very difficult to reconstruct.
"Maybe hundreds of (lava) flows have cascaded into the canyon," said Crow. There have even been small cinder cone volcanoes erupting right inside the canyon, he said.To sort out all the lava flows, Crow and his colleagues used light detection and ranging (LIDAR) data that was originally collected for the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center (GCMRC) in the spring of 2000.
The LIDAR survey data allowed the team to map out the lava flows in relation to sea level, making it easier to identify the tops and bottoms of the lava flows seen pasted on the walls of the canyons.
As for exactly how the lava dams worked, how far they backed up water and how violently they failed, that's all still largely a matter of conjecture.
"There are many possible scenarios and explanations for how the dams were formed or were destroyed, and it's likely that we'll never know them all," said Cassandra Fenton, a geochemist at GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam in Potsdam, Germany.
Fenton has studied what may be some of the largest lava dams in the Grand Canyon and their outburst floods.
"It makes you wish you could have been standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon watching it all happen when those lavas were damming the river, or see when the river finally overtook the dams," she said.

by Larry O'Hanlon

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/02/12/grand-canyon-lava-02.html

Where Hunger Will Hit in 2030

Some of the world's poorest regions could face severe food shortages in the coming decades thanks to climate change, say researchers who have consulted the most sophisticated climate models to predict where crop losses are likely.
According to those models, the world's average temperature could rise by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 20 years. The difference may seem small in abstract, but coupled with changes in rainfall, it could have dramatic effects on the growing seasons of important crops.
Most of the world's 1 billion poor depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, points out David Lobell, lead author of a new paper on the predictions and a senior research scholar at Stanford University's Program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE).
"Unfortunately," he said in a statement, "agriculture is also the human enterprise most vulnerable to changes in climate."
To figure out which regions might be hit the hardest, Lobell and his colleagues used 20 climate models, focusing on poor regions in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Central and South America. Their findings will be published in the Feb. 1 issue of the journal Science.
"We decided that a systematic look at the data might be helpful in identifying which crops and regions have the worst, or best, prospects," Lobell told Discovery News.
Though more rain -- and more crops -- are predicted for a few of those regions, the vast majority are drying up.
The researchers also compared the climate projections to past data on what people eat. Like a farmer's almanac, information on how temperature swings and rainfall patterns have affected growing seasons in the past gave them an idea of what to expect in the future.
The prospects are grim.
Their analysis revealed two "hunger hotspots" -- southern Africa and South Asia -- where regional staples such as maize and rice could drop by 10 percent or more.Dealing with the problem could be cheap in some places, where farmers can plant earlier or later in the growing season. But the best solutions, said Lobell, require investment in technologies to pipe in more water and turn fallow land fertile.
Aid agencies, said Lobell, need advance warnings of potential hunger situations. To make this happen, the United States Agency for International Development has created a discipline-crossing program called FEWS NET (for Famine Early Warning System Network).
"Climate change is an opportunity to do the work we should have been doing all along, helping farmers to increase their agricultural productivity," said FEWS NET researcher Molly Brown, of the Biospheric Sciences Branch at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
In a paper accompanying Lobell's study in Science, Brown and co-author Chris Funk of the University of California, Santa Barbara, call for more attention to predictions like Lobell's.
"A changing climate will force the political and economic systems to change so that people can continue to live and work in semi-arid regions. We see it as an opportunity to improve the food security of the poorest and most vulnerable," Brown told Discovery News.
"The Lobell study highlights some very significant red flags in terms of global food production," said Funk, adding that his own work suggests an even "more pessimistic precipitation outlook" than Lobell's.
"On the other hand, I firmly believe that effective responses to these issues are possible," he said. "What will be needed, however, is real political commitment to change, both by the international community and by individual countries in the developing world."

By Sarah Goforth

http://dsc.discovery.com/news

Cambodian Dam Threatens Protected Forest

Cambodia's two largest dam projects threaten to flood huge swathes of protected forests, a conservation group has said, urging reform in the country's burgeoning hydropower sector.
International Rivers Network, in a report released late Monday, said that the Kamchay and Stung Atay dams, which seek to provide much-needed electricity to the country, will instead wreak havoc on local communities and slow development.
The U.S.-based group targets in particular Chinese investment in the sector, which it said is powering forward through close ties between Cambodia's government and Beijing, unchecked by public scrutiny.
The projects highlight the "growing interest in large-scale hydropower dam development by Cambodian decision-makers backed mainly by Chinese project developers and financiers," the group said.
"Chinese investment in Cambodia's hydropower sector is threatening some of the country's most precious ecosystems and the livelihoods of thousands of people."
Funded largely by a $600-million Chinese aid package, the Kamchay Dam is located entirely inside Cambodia's Bokor National Park and will flood 5,000 acres of protected forest, the group said.
Once completed in 2010, it will also force local residents from the area, stripping them of their livelihoods, and could threaten downstream tourist sites, International Rivers said.Protected forests in Cambodia's Cardamom mountains will also be submerged by the Stung Atay Dam, which is expected to come online in 2012, and four others currently under consideration.
"Cambodia's free-flowing rivers and abundant natural resources are invaluable assets," said Carl Middleton, Mekong program coordinator with International Rivers.
"Poorly conceived hydropower development could irreparably damage these resources and undermine Cambodia's sustainable development."
Only an estimated 20 percent of households have access to reliable electricity in Cambodia, one of the world's poorest countries.
Spiralling utility prices, driven by this lack of supply, are a major obstacle to attracting foreign investment, and the government has struggled to find a way to bring down the cost of power.
International Rivers urged Cambodia to seek alternate power sources, or adopt international standards within its own utilities sectors.
"Cambodia has many choices for meeting our electricity needs, including renewable and decentralized energy options that must be explored" said Ngy San, deputy executive director with the NGO Forum on Cambodia.

By AFP

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/01/29/cambodia-dam-china.html