The Rhiza Feed

The Virginia Earthquake generated a lot of media coverage and interest because of both the magnitude of the seismic event (5.8) and the fact that it happened in an area that historically does not have large earthquakes. It was felt up and down the East Coast of the US, and even shook our offices here in Pittsburgh, PA.

One of the other parts of this story is that the epicenter of the quake was within a few miles of a major nuclear reactor, known as the North Anna Power Station, which is operated by Dominion. According to Reuters, the plant lost power and three diesel generators were required to cool the reactor, while according to the report, “a fourth diesel unit failed“. This caused me to immediately think about the Fukoshima nuclear disaster which also started as a result of an earthquake.

Given the failure of one of the diesel generators, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where others also failed and cooling of the reactors was not possible (as happened at Fukushima). To understand the potential impacts of this, I find it useful to turn to data visualization. I used our Rhiza Insight software to import the previous 24 hours of seismic data from the USGS and then overlaid another dataset that we already had in our system for the location of nuclear reactors in the US. The result is below:

Some interesting things that I see in this map:

• There have already been a bunch of fairly sizable aftershocks. The 5.8 earthquake is not an isolated event. It will be interesting to see how this data evolves over the next several days.
• Richmond and Charlotte are two major cities that would, under a similar evacuation scenario as Fukoshima, would have to be evacuated. According to the US Census Bureau, there are over 200,000 people in the city of Richmond, VA alone.
• If you zoom out on the map a bit, you’ll see there are a lot of other nuclear power plants in the region. What other seismic surprises will the earth have for them, and will we be prepared for a Fukoshima-like catastrophe?

For over a year, I’ve been serving on a working group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Our working group was comprised of leaders from educational and non-profit institutions, as well as corporations large and small, who all had expertise in matters of ecosystem preservation, environmental economics and information systems. During this time I’ve had the privilege of working with these people to draft a set of policy recommendations that were recently presented to President Obama.

The result of our work, titled Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy, has now been published and is available online. While the details in the report are quite dense, the content is quite important for several reasons.

First, there is a clear focus on explaining the measurable economic value of ecosystem preservation which goes far beyond the traditional arguments for protection that focus on nature’s intrinsic values. The report explains that the deterioration of “natural capital” (or ecosystems) has led to large scale economic impacts on society. Some examples include the degradation of wetlands leading to massive flooding and damage to the built environment, depletion of fisheries from coastal wetland destruction and rising healthcare costs due to increased exposure to toxins. These are all issues that many of us who have worked on ecological issues know, but bringing them to the forefront of national policy debate at the Presidential level is very important.

Another important point that is made in this report is that the solutions to these problems need to involve federal government action. In my opinion, far too many short-sighted people rush to the conclusion that because there may be waste in some government budgets, that government’s role in solving some of humankind’s largest problems must be reduced. Waiting for industries to self-regulate to adequately protect the public commons that ecosystems represent is not a prudent path forward. The report makes several recommendations for specific improvements to government agencies that oversee ecosystem protection and reporting, while also outlining multiple ways that corporations and non-profits need to be involved.

The area of the report that I had the most influence on has to do with the collection, analysis and reporting of ecological data. Many of our recommendations in this area are focused on how to make ecological data more accessible, published in a timely manner and flow among federal agencies as well as the private sector. I am especially proud of the inclusion of many of the tenets of open and transparent data that were promoted to the top-level recommendations the report makes. Agencies can save tremendous amounts of money by pooling technical resources, conducting data collection and publishing in an open and transparent manner. For example, the report included detailed recommendations that included publishing data in machine-readable, interoperable formats and promoting best practices in data interoperability such as the use of universally unique identifiers for data records. Further, the report points out that many agencies that deal with ecosystem data are not making use of existing open data initiatives such as Data.gov. Further recommendations are included for improving Data.gov so that it is more widely adopted and useful. I never expected these type of “in the weeds” recommendations to be included, but am very happy to see how seriously they are being taken.

While publishing a report itself is not going to change the world, I was very heartened throughout my interactions with White House staff, policy makers and agency leaders, at how open they were to new approaches to solving these problems. There is a deep level of scientific knowledge and curiosity that exists at the highest levels of our government, which gives me hope that we may soon get on the right track towards triple bottom line policies that equally value preserving ecosystems, human health and our economy.

I would also like to thank the many staffers at the White House and the Office of Science and Technology Policy that helped our working group at every step of the way. The interactions with my fellow working group members, as well as the PCAST members who helped guide us, made this experience a truly rewarding one.

Today is Take Your Child to Work Day, but that’s every day for me! Rhiza has a great “Babies to Work” program which means that our employees can take their infants to work with them up until they are six months old. Ada is nine weeks old and she has been coming to work with me since her third week. I have paid maternity leave, but rather than take it all at once, I chose to taper up my time at work, going from very part time to nearly full time. I’ve managed to keep up with work projects, but keep my schedule to infant-sized portions.

Ada eats, naps, and plays at the office. Most of my programming work and testing gets done when she’s sleeping or eating, but I also spend plenty of time rocking her or taking her for walks. She spends a lot of time strapped to me in her baby Bjorn so she can be as close as possible and I can still have two hands for typing.

Thanks to flex time I don’t worry too much about squeezing 100% productivity out of my workday. I can always save work time for evenings when I have my husband to take over care.

However, I would say that this is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done (I’ve stopped to feed her twice just in the time it’s taken to write a few paragraphs). Software Engineering is certainly challenging and combining it with something even more difficult like, say, parenting a tiny child is kind of nuts. Ada has done her best to be an accommodating baby, she sleeps at night and isn’t much of a crier, but I’m still thankful that there is a private nap room that I can hide in for the worst stuff.

Still, I feel like I have the best of both worlds. I get to spend all day with my baby and I get to do my awesome job.

Is there anyone else out there who mixes babytime with work? How does it work for you?

From our friends at Pitt’s Center for Healthy Environments and Communities comes news that several researchers have won awards as a result of their work with FracTracker.org, which is powered by Rhiza Insight.

The researchers and their projects were:

• Samantha Malone, BCHS – “Implementation of FracTracker.org: A GeoWeb platform to manage and communicate shale gas information” – Poster | PowerPoint
• Drew Michanowicz, EOH – “Temporal Trends and Spatial Distribution of Air Quality in Western Pennsylvania in the 2000s” – Poster
• Kyle Ferrar, EOH – “Natural Gas Wastewater Treatment: Effluent characterization” – The case study mentioned in Dr. Volz’s recent Senate Hearing Committee presentation. – Poster

On the day of the Deans Day awards ceremony, April 15th, Samantha received the Rosenkranz Award for the project judged to be the most significant contribution to the public health field, as well as the overall Dean’s Day third place award in the doctoral category. Drew received the EOH Keleti Award for environmental excellence. Congratulations and keep up your important work!

If you’d like to learn how you can win awards by using Rhiza Insight software, please contact us and we’ll be happy to let you know how to get started!

We love it when our customers sing our praises! A really interesting non-profit organization in Toronto, Canada called Framework has been using our Rhiza Insight software to help in the mapping and measurement of people’s Civic Footprint.

You can read about their experience using Rhiza Insight to take all of the 2010 Calgary Vital Signs data to see emerging trends for the city. It’s great to see our software being used by so many innovative organizations in the non-profit, for-profit and government sectors!

If you have something to say about your experience using Rhiza Insight, please let us know!

We’re very proud to announce a new partnership with Onix Networking, who will now be reselling our Rhiza Insight software, with a focus on government sales. Rhiza’s a software should appear on the GSA Schedule and several other government contracts very soon. The official release is below:
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Earlier this week, I published a map that showed where all of the power plants were in the United States and the last seven days of seismic activity globally. I received a lot of great comments from people, both here and on our Facebook Page. The biggest request seemed to be for more earthquake data that covers a larger time period. I finally found a source of this data that shows all major earthquakes since 1973 tracked by the USGS.

I took that data and used our Rhiza Insight software to visualize the data. You’ll see that I segmented the earthquakes by Richter Scale, and made each segment very transparent. The result of doing this causes areas with lots of repeated earthquake events to appear “brighter” than those with isolated events. Here’s the map:

I’m still looking for actual structured data about the location of nuclear power plants around the world, so please let me know if you have found a good source for them. I’d also love to hear your feedback about this map, and encourage you to get into our demo Rhiza Insight website and try playing around with the data and visualizing it yourself.

For the data/visualization geeks out there, the data being visualized in this map contains 28,000+ unique earthquake events and over 100 US nuclear power plants. We’re quite proud of the rendering speed that we’ve been able to achieve with large data like this and would be happy to talk to you about how your company, agency or organization could use Rhiza Insight to visualize and analyze your data!

I needed a break from refreshing the news constantly about the Japanese earthquake disaster. So here’s a little something that really has no great importance in the larger scheme of things: a picture of where the power schools for NFL players sit.

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With Japan’s nuclear reactors on the brink of potential meltdown, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nuclear power plant that is about 20 miles from my house… and the over 100 nuclear power plants that are spread throughout our country. Many of these are located near some of the most densely populated areas in the United States, and most are fairly old. What would happen if a natural disaster like the one that struck Japan, struck here? I don’t have any expert answer to that question, but I did think that it might be useful to fire up our Rhiza Upshot web app and start looking at some data.

I imported a dataset of (approximate) locations for where the nuclear power plants are in the US, and also imported a real-time feed of data from the USGS of seismic events within the past week, globally. The map below is the result of that effort:
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We’ve all been watching the news from Japan with concern. I’ve personally found the imagery and video footage completely overwhelming, both emotionally and from the perspective of trying to understand exactly what happened. One bit of information that I kept hearing was that aftershocks to the main earthquake event were happening as frequently as several times per hour. I wondered what it would look like to visualize all of the seismic activity in Japan, and of course went online to get the answer.

I went to the Earthquake Hazard Program of the USGS and found a dataset of all seismic events globally that measured over 2.5 on the Richter Scale in the past 7 days, and then imported that dataset into Rhiza Insight.

I then created a map that showed where all of the earthquakes happened near Japan in the past 7 days, with the size and color of the circles representing the values of the seismic events on the Richter Scale. Read more »