Data Project May Drive Policy for Hyperlocal Flooding in NYC
Work in New York City collects systematic data on street-level flooding, partnering with local agencies to design real-time flood sensors and an open code that other cities can build on.
MetroLab Network has partnered with Government Technology
to bring its readers a segment called the MetroLab Innovation of the Month Series, which highlights impactful tech, data and innovation projects underway between cities and universities. If you’d like to learn more or contact the project leads, please contact MetroLab at info@metrolabnetwork.org for more information.
In this month’s installment of the Innovation of the Month series, we highlight a project called FloodNet.nyc: Street-level Flood Sensing and Data Sharing for Urban Resilience. As high tides and high-intensity rainstorms are projected to occur more frequently due to climate change, this team aims to monitor and record frequent, hyperlocal street-level floods in
By Scott Rogers February 24, 2021
An illustration of a Purgatorius, the oldest known primate. (Courtesy of the Burke Museum)
Though it doesn’t quite corroborate
The Flintstones, a new study featuring UF geology assistant professor Courtney J. Sprain confirms that the earliest known primates did walk with the dinosaurs.
Published in
Royal Society Open Science, the study analyzed 65.9 million-year-old fossils of the early primate Purgatorius, the oldest genus in a group of primates called plesiadapiforms. The study found that these small mammals, who mainly lived off a diet of insects and fruits, likely emerged in the Late Cretaceous, just before the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Reasonable regulation is democratic, but the moral panic around big tech is muddying the waters.
Australia’s new News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code will force platforms like Facebook and Google to pay local media outlets and publishers to link their content in news feeds or search results. The Australian law is being seen as one of the early shots fired in the coming battle by countries to regulate tech giants to take back some of the control they have on global communications.
But is it an ideal regulatory model? Won’t regulating the platforms affect free speech? Is regulating platforms the way to save the news media business that is in the doldrums? Here we discuss the issue.
Date Time
Researchers show how disgust evolved as an emotion
Next time a refrigerator door opens to the smell of rotting uncooked chicken, consider the moment as an odorous encounter with the origin of disgust. That repulsion is linked to an evolved human emotion that helps avoid exposure to something sickening.
In a project that blended anthropology, biology and psychology, a University of Oregon team explored disgust by studying how Ecuador’s indigenous Shuar people, living in communities with differing levels of market integration, respond to revolting things.
The research was detailed in a paper published online Feb. 23 ahead of print in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Thursday, February 25, 2021
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This year’s Community Engaged Scholarship Forum, titled “Progress through Partnerships: Advancing Community Resilience,” will bring Pitt students, faculty, staff and community members together with leaders in higher education and community development to discuss topics including basic needs, civic participation, digital access and inclusion, education, health equity, criminal justice reform, and relationships and the social fabric.
Registration for the March 2 virtual event is open through Friday, Feb. 26. While programming runs from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET, participants have the flexibility to choose to attend as many or as few sessions as they’d like and can come and go throughout the day and evening. Sessions are grouped around themes including relationships and our social fabric, critical and liberatory practices in community engagement, health equity and criminal justice reform.