Category: Environment

The goal of the Re-Wind Network is to compare sustainable end–of–life (EOL) repuposing and recycling strategies for composite material wind turbine blades.

Research is being conducted four areas:

• Wind Energy and Society,
• Design for the Built Environment,
• Structural Mechanics, and
• Geographic Information System (GIS).

The objective of this research is to develop a methodology for use by relevant stakeholders, which include national and local energy and waste management policy makers, wind energy company executives, wind turbine manufacturers, and installers and community members.

The network is a partnership between Georgia Tech, Queen’s University Belfast, The City University of New York, and University College Cork (Ireland). It’s funded by Investi/Department for the Economy, Science Foundation Ireland, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

May 17, 2021, noon-1 pm
More information

The climate in Illinois is changing rapidly. Illinois is already warmer and wetter than it was a century ago and climate change will continue to drive rapid changes across the state. A new report from The Nature Conservancy – the first-ever, comprehensive climate assessment for Illinois – details these changes and more. The report projects how temperature, precipitation, and extreme weather are expected to change and explores how the state’s key resources and sectors are likely to be affected by climate change.

Join us on Monday, May 17 to hear from leading climate experts and Illinois scientists about the results of the new report. Learn how predicted changes could affect Illinois, including impacts to water resources, agriculture, public health, and natural ecosystems.

Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford will facilitate the panel, which includes the following presenters: 

• Don Wuebbles, Professor of Atmospheric Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and co-author of the climate report
• Jim Angel, former Illinois State Climatologist and co-author of the climate report
• Momcilo Markus, Principal Research Scientist, Hydrology, Illinois State Water Survey
• Ben Gramig, Associate Professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Elena Grossman, Research Specialist, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health
• Jim Miller, Professor, Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

For more information on the report, please visit nature.org.

Join Zoom Meeting (Meeting ID: 813 1897 9676; Password: 945509)

Join by Skype for Business

by Chirag Shah (University of Washington)

Search engines are one of society’s primary gateways to information and people, but they are also conduits for misinformation. Similar to problematic social media algorithms, search engines learn to serve you what you and others have clicked on before. Because people are drawn to the sensational, this dance between algorithms and human nature can foster the spread of misinformation.

Search engine companies, like most online services, make money not only by selling ads, but also by tracking users and selling their data through real-time bidding on it. People are often led to misinformation by their desire for sensational and entertaining news as well as information that is either controversial or confirms their views. One study found that more popular YouTube videos about diabetes are less likely to have medically valid information than less popular videos on the subject, for instance.

Ad-driven search engines, like social media platforms, are designed to reward clicking on enticing links because it helps the search companies boost their business metrics. As a researcher who studies the search and recommendation systems, I and my colleagues show that this dangerous combination of corporate profit motive and individual susceptibility makes the problem difficult to fix.

How search results go wrong

When you click on a search result, the search algorithm learns that the link you clicked is relevant for your search query. This is called relevance feedback. This feedback helps the search engine give higher weight to that link for that query in the future. If enough people click on that link enough times, thus giving strong relevance feedback, that website starts coming up higher in search results for that and related queries.

People are more likely to click on links shown up higher on the search results list. This creates a positive feedback loop – the higher a website shows up, the more the clicks, and that in turn makes that website move higher or keep it higher. Search engine optimization techniques use this knowledge to increase the visibility of websites.

There are two aspects to this misinformation problem: how a search algorithm is evaluated and how humans react to headlines, titles and snippets. Search engines, like most online services, are judged using an array of metrics, one of which is user engagement. It is in the search engine companies’ best interest to give you things that you want to read, watch or simply click. Therefore, as a search engine or any recommendation system creates a list of items to present, it calculates the likelihood that you’ll click on the items.

Traditionally, this was meant to bring out the information that would be most relevant. However, the notion of relevance has gotten fuzzy because people have been using search to find entertaining search results as well as truly relevant information.

Imagine you are looking for a piano tuner. If someone shows you a video of a cat playing a piano, would you click on it? Many would, even if that has nothing to do with piano tuning. The search service feels validated with positive relevance feedback and learns that it is OK to show a cat playing a piano when people search for piano tuners.

In fact, it is even better than showing the relevant results in many cases. People like watching funny cat videos, and the search system gets more clicks and user engagement.

This might seem harmless. So what if people get distracted from time to time and click on results that aren’t relevant to the search query? The problem is that people are drawn to exciting images and sensational headlines. They tend to click on conspiracy theories and sensationalized news, not just cats playing piano, and do so more than clicking on real news or relevant information.

Famous but fake spiders

In 2018, searches for “new deadly spider” spiked on Google following a Facebook post that claimed a new deadly spider killed several people in multiple states. My colleagues and I analyzed the top 100 results from Google search for “new deadly spider” during the first week of this trending query.

It turned out this story was fake, but people searching for it were largely exposed to misinformation related to the original fake post. As people continued clicking and sharing that misinformation, Google continued serving those pages at the top of the search results.

This pattern of thrilling and unverified stories emerging and people clicking on them continues, with people apparently either being unconcerned with the truth or believing that if a trusted service such as Google Search is showing these stories to them then the stories must be true. More recently, a disproven report claiming China let the coronavirus leak from a lab gained traction on search engines because of this vicious cycle.

Spot the misinformation

To test how well people discriminate between accurate information and misinformation, we designed a simple game called “Google Or Not.” This online game shows two sets of results for the same query. The objective is simple – pick the set that is reliable, trustworthy or most relevant.

One of these two sets has one or two results that are either verified and labeled as misinformation or a debunked story. We made the game available publicly and advertised through various social media channels. Overall, we collected 2,100 responses from over 30 countries.

When we analyzed the results, we found that about half the time people mistakenly picked as trustworthy the set with one or two misinformation results. Our experiments with hundreds of other users over many iterations have resulted in similar findings. In other words, about half the time people are picking results that contain conspiracy theories and fake news. As more people pick these inaccurate and misleading results, the search engines learn that that’s what people want.

Questions of Big Tech regulation and self-regulation aside, it’s important for people to understand how these systems work and how they make money. Otherwise market economies and people’s natural inclination to be attracted to eye-catching links will keep the vicious cycle going.

Chirag Shah, Associate Professor of Information Science, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read the full story from NPR.

The massive spending package just passed by Congress includes the most significant climate legislation in more than a decade, along with significant changes in energy policy.

It was easy to miss, nestled among pandemic relief payments, the annual spending bill, new Smithsonian museums and protection from surprise medical billing. But pull out the energy provisions alone, and the bill is remarkable: It includes $35 billion in funding for basic research, extensions of tax credits for renewable energy companies, and a long-delayed mandate to reduce the use of a particularly damaging greenhouse gas.

by Lisa Sheppard

Populations of the endangered spotted turtle in Illinois are holding up better than those in other states, based on 30 years of data at the University of Illinois. Still, only two populations remain, and the predictions are poor.

The small, semi-aquatic spotted turtle (Clemmys guttata) lives in sedge meadows, cattail marshes, and wet prairies, and in Illinois is found only in the northeast. Female turtles can live up to 110 years and reproduce all their adult lives.

Today, only two populations have survived. Researchers at the Natural History Survey (INHS) and the Forest Preserve District of Will County have collaboratively studied nearly 1,000 turtles in two communities since 1988.

In one population, population growth rates remained stable, but they declined slightly for the second, according to INHS ecologist Mike Dreslik. Despite threats from limited habitats, predators, poaching, and traffic, Illinois populations are not experiencing the steep declines occurring throughout the remainder of the turtle’s range in the United States.

Under the worst-case scenario, INHS scientists project both Illinois populations to decline in the future, with numbers bottoming out in 10 to 15 years for the more vulnerable community.

“The spotted turtle population doesn’t disappear from the landscape quickly, but when populations decline, they do take a long time to respond to conservation and recovery efforts,” Dreslik said. “You don’t want the populations to get below the threshold of no return. Our results show we have time to manage and recover the populations, but not too much time.”

The juvenile survival rate for the spotted turtle is fairly high compared to other turtle species, but management actions targeting adult survival will have the greatest impact on the population growth rate, Dreslik said. In Illinois, adult survival should be increased or at least maintained.

“If you lose one adult female, you not only lose 40 or so clutches she would have had in her lifetime, but you also lose the clutches her offspring would have produced,” Dreslik said. “The loss of just a few reproductive females could cause the population to decline.”

The positive outlook the results show is really a best-case scenario, according to Christina Feng, the primary author of the journal articles published in Diversity and in Herpetological Conservation and Biology.  

“With such high stakes for the species, we can’t assume persistence is guaranteed without intervention,” Feng said. “Conservation strategies need to be implemented immediately, if they have not been already, and they need to be ongoing.”

Some management actions involve predator control, such as controlling predator levels and increasing and restoring suitable habitat. The researchers also notch the turtles’ shells to monitor individuals over time, helping to discourage poaching.

It is highly unlikely the spotted turtle will ever fully recover in Illinois, given that only two populations remain and they are located close to each other. Local changes to the water supply or quality would affect both sites.

“Even if both existing populations were to double or triple in size, having more individuals doesn’t negate the fact only two populations have survived,” Feng said. “However, growing the populations will make the population at each site more secure against local extinction, which is a worthy goal on its own.”

Media contact: Mike Dreslik, 217-300-0970, dreslik@illinois.edu
news@prairie.illinois.edu

This post originally appeared on the Prairie Research Institute Blog. Read the original post here.