Risa Madoff, PhD

Published last month: about critical zone research from the perspectives of diverse human scientists and inclusion. Could be relevant for any subfield in geoscience. doi.org/10.1029/2023...

Part of a larger issue really. Those who keep getting "boosts up" that give the experience viewed as "merit" to get more boosts up. Those left out work hard too and do so often with much less support. Why isn't that considered merit?

Need vs "merit?" Things I don't get: why someone who already has been given a postdoc is given a paid fellow for a project on top? I feel more qualified and could have really used the experience and pay of a fellow. Instead, I attend monthly meetings run by the fellows so they can say they lead.

Science academia keeps funding a ton of PhDs & post-docs (all temp labor) while its market of stable post-PhD jobs continues a long & steady collapse.

Proposal reviewers still go “Oh this proposal’s really great because it funds a ton of students!”

And no one reflects on that enormous imbalance.

Why is it so hard for those with privilege to admit things like the prestigious 4 yr lib arts college they went to, or the high ranking R1 institutes, their famous advisors, or that their parents had the college experience to pass on and then self-admit why mentors come running to their aid?

Chlöe Swarbrick on Instagram: "Poverty and environmental destruction are not inevitabilities. Huma... 90K likes, 794 comments - chloe.swarbrick on December 22, 2023: "Poverty and environmental destruction are not inevitabilities. Human beings made the rules of thi..."

Watch New Zealand MP Chlöe Swarbrick deliver an astonishingly cogent summary of the 20th century economic order and how it ruined everything.

CSDMS is excited to announce that applications for the Earth Surface Processes Institute (ESPIn) 2024 are now open!

See csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/ESPIn for more information, including a link to the application form.

The application window closes 2024 January 26, so get your application in soon!

Photo of a table of mostly white men sitting in front of a very large painting of white, mostly elderly, men

Saved this photo for my class on Historically Excluded and Underrepresented Scientists as an example of the historical and current exclusion of women and racialized scientists.

Important and scary new paper on satellite megaconstellations: we may be creating a conductive band of plasma dust around the earth arxiv.org/abs/2312.09329

“Let me speak plainly: It is not antisemitic to demand justice for all Palestinians living in their ancestral lands.”

Love this whole article.

This is an important study, I wonder if geochemistry has similar issues? It seems to me that if published data belong in a paper, of course the original pub should be cited, and far more often than not, the discussion should include context for all data presented 🧪⚒️#PaleoSky

Some NPR reporting about our work on nitrate contamination in groundwater in south-central Kansas www.kcur.org/news/2023-12...

In the realm of social/business management, that is what "evidence" means in "evidence-based decision making."

Daily Antarctic surface melt on Sat December 16, 2023. Image is auto-generated. ©2023 Dr. Mike MacFerrin, University of Colorado, and the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

Map of the sum of Antarctic surface melt days for the 2023-2024 season through Sat December 16, 2023. ©2023 Dr. Mike MacFerrin, Univ. Colorado and the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

Anomaly of Antarctic surface melt days for the 2023-2024 melt season through Sat December 16, 2023, compared to 1990-2020 historical averages. ©2023 Dr. Mike MacFerrin, Univ. Colorado and the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

Trend of Antarctic surface melt extent in Antarctica for the 2023-2024 melt season up through Sat December 16, 2023, compared to 1990-2020 historical climatological averages (in blue). ©2023 Dr. Mike MacFerrin, Univ. Colorado and the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

A few years back I coded an algorithm to compute daily surface melt in Antarctica from microwave sat. data. The NSIDC adopted the code but it isn't live yet.

Until then, I created my own "Antarctica Today" app that'll auto-post replies to this thread.

Daily surface melt extent w/ a 1-day lag.
🧪⚒️🌍

Next up! CSDMS Webinar, "IGM, a data assimilation and glacier evolution model boosted by deep-learning", presented by Guillaume Jouvet, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, 12/6 @8AM MST. Register: cuboulder.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

"Teaching evaluations are a mess." Yet academic job postings continue to request them as "evidence" for excellent teaching.

www.chronicle.com/newsletter/t...

We invite you to attend the following CSDMS-related presentations at the AGU 2023 Fall Meeting: csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/AGU2023

Anyone interested in volunteering with AGU EPSP? We have several openings on committees and are especially looking for folks to help us with social media. Come chat with me at AGU next week, or DM or email me for more info.

connect.agu.org/epsp/about/c...

Somewhere between the Abstract and the Plain Language Summary there is probably something really meaningful. Unfortunately, from what I keep seeing, it remains hidden.

I've updated the CSDMS Software Dashboard for the Landlab 2.7 release + others: csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/Softwar....

For those a bit worried of potential societal collapse & also rightly making fun of buying Cybertrucks (lol) as a way to survive it, a reminder:

The biggest predictor of survival in a disaster is the number of neighbors whose names you mutually know.

Community.

Sometimes I think, like everything else in HR, it's a legal way to have evidence for decisions based on selection committee preferences. They can use such evidence for whatever they want.

Sometimes it seems like a chess game - trying to forethink and address every possible reviewer response for every possible reviewer and what your response will be.

Deaths From Coal Pollution Have Dropped, but Emissions May Be Twice as Deadly Deaths linked to coal exhaust have dropped but coal exhaust is twice is likely to contribute to deaths as other air pollution, a new study found.

Coal kills: after a large coal-processing plant shut down in Pittsburgh in 2016, there was an immediate 42 percent drop in weekly hospital visits for heart-related problems for nearby residents. @caraNYT

New College is a warning about the price of populist incompetence What happens when inexperienced radicals can't run public services

Once you start putting these folks in charge of entire universities, a consistent pattern is very big taxpayer-funded paychecks for unqualified people who unsurprisingly do a terrible job in managing higher education.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/new-colleg...

I look forward to a day when I have something worthwhile to post going on in my life.

Graph showing daily temperature anomaly hitting peak of 2.06°C on November 17th, 2023 for the time period starting from 1940 to 2023.

There's a deep sense of sadness and loneliness seeing this record shattering graph.

November 17, 2023 was the first day in recorded history when the earth's surface was a whole 2°C hotter than pre-industrial times. Yet, there's barely any chatter about this staggering breach.

Okay boomer Winning a Nobel prize does not mean you are a smart guy. It means you have a lot of in-depth knowledge about a very specific, narrow scientific domain, and it’s bad news when people treat you…

John F. Clauser
(NOBEL Prize in PHYSICS last year)
declared

“THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS”

"His recent denial of global warming has alarmed top climate scientists, who warn that he is using his stature to mislead the public about a planetary emergency"

Maybe, he does not understand how clouds work.

Here’s a gift link to my @nytimes.com op-ed arguing that because of the tireless work of the policymakers, engineers, activists, and others who listened to the science, we now have a fighting chance for a better world
www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/o...