Bizarro world of radar

After spending a few months of my life working on ways to remove biological echoes from weather radar scans, it's ironic that I'm now listening to someone explain how he's using weather radar to study migration and roosting patterns of birds.

Quite interesting, but bizarre nevertheless.

Morose thoughts after the Alabama outbreak

There was horrendous (207 at last count) loss of life in Alabama yesterday.  The storms were forecast very well and hours in advance: in fact, many schools in the affected areas closed in the morning itself.  The media were transmitting footage and updated warnings all day. So, the number of people who died is simply inexplicable. The property damage is immense, but can not be completely avoided. However, I'd thought that such loss of life would not happen in this day and age.

On the left:  The azimuthal product created in real-time from WSR-88D data is a product of the research done by our group at NSSL.  Two of my graduate students are working on projects to improve this product further. But, on a day like this, I wonder:

What is the point of our research and warnings if, ultimately, the public doesn't take heed?

Ganges in Queens, and not in a good way

Anyone who's seen how filthy the Ganges is around Varanasi would be worried if they read this in the New York Times:

As the Hindu population has grown in Queens over the last decade, so too has the amount of ritual debris — clothing, statues, even cremation ashes — lining the banks of the bay in Gateway National Recreation Area.

How could anyone who's seen the filth around the ghats of Varanasi (or Rameswaram, to not pick on North Indians) even think about throwing stuff into the water? It turns out that the culprits are not immigrants from India, it's immigrants from the West Indies. Since they are several generations removed from India, their cultural memory is of a relatively cleaner 1800s India and the religious milieu of that time.  


Fortunately, outreach to the local temples seems to have helped:

The beach was “really disgustingly filthy,” said Nagassar Ramgarib, a retired electrician and a leader at a Queens temple, Shiva Mandir. “I was deeply ashamed of what my culture, Hinduism, has contributed to.” He rallied several members of his temple to help clean up, and he began working with park officials ... “They should understand we are in a different country now,” said Pandit B. Rishi Misir, a Brooklyn priest who leads a Hindu group, USA Pandits’ Parishad. “Our scripture does mention that we should follow the country’s rules and regulations. But some people are very stubborn.”

But, it's still a problem without an end in sight:

And many Hindus have obliged. But as new immigrants arrive, unaware of the rules, and others refuse to change their ways, park rangers have intermittently forsaken good-cop sensitivity for bad-cop force: installing signs, closing the parking lot at night and threatening to hand out $75 fines, to little avail.

Identifying cities that have sprawled

The exam for my class on automated analysis of spatial grids was to take North American population density grids in 1990 and 2010 and use them to identify which cities had grown spatially. The motive was not to find which pixels had experienced large increases in population; instead, it was to find out which cities had dealt with large increases in population by spreading out.

Of course, before I gave it to the students, I tried it out first.

San Diego has exploded, but Los Angeles is still about the same size

I found major urban areas and determined which of those areas grew in size. You can see the result overlaid on Google Maps by clicking on this link: US cities: sprawl [Google Maps].  In the map, red shows cities that have grown in size, while green refers to cities that have remained stable in size between 1990 and 2010. Again, this is not about population growth, but about population sprawl.  Thus, San Diego has sprawled, but Los Angeles has remained about the same size. Interestingly, New York city hasn't sprawled, but Toronto (!) has.

 If we rank the cities (I considered only cities larger than about 80 sq. kms and having an urban core of at least 30,000 residents per sq. km) by the percent growth in metropolitan area, the ranking is:

1. San Jose, CA: the king of sprawl with its high-density urban region increasing from about 300 sq. km to about 500 sq. km between 1990 and 2010
2. San Juan, Puerto Rico
3. San Diego, CA
4. Washington, DC

Interestingly, considering all that we think Canada is about, Toronto is one of the cities that has sprawled the most.  Next only to Mexico City.

But ... but, I can hear you asking. What about Phoenix? You can see city extents in 2010 according to my methodology by clicking on this link: US cities: high-density urban areas [Google Maps].  Cities like Phoenix have suburbs that are so sparse that they don't even meet my "urban" criteria of 30K residents per sq. km. Hence, they are not identified as having grown.  I used internal measures of the data to identify what "urban" means. So, if you find an official definition of suburban population density, let me know and I can rerun my analysis with the lower threshold.

You can see a longer description of my methodology, and the approaches followed by different students here: sprawl methodology [PDF file] .

Gender is a minefield

The editor-in-chief of Surgery News, a trade journal, wrote an editorial for Valentine's Day. The editorial read in part (read the whole thing here):

It’s been known since the 1990s that heterosexual women living together synchronize their menstrual cycles because of pheromones, but when a study of lesbians showed that they do not synchronize, the researchers suspected that semen played a role. In fact, they found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient. Female college students having unprotected sex were significantly less depressed than were those whose partners used condoms (Arch. Sex. Behav. 2002;31:289-93). Their better moods were not just a feature of promiscuity, because women using condoms were just as depressed as those practicing total abstinence. The benefits of semen contact also were seen in fewer suicide attempts and better performance on cognition tests.

People (presumably with no sense of humor or proportion) complained, and the whole issue of the magazine was retracted. The editor-in-chief had to resign his post and his elevation to be head of the professional society is under review.

I don't see what the problem is. In fact, it sounds very human and is even footnoted. Presumably, the people who published those studies used high falutin' language, so none quite noticed what they they were saying. But then, I didn't quite see what the whole hullabaloo about Larry Summers' comment was either.  I suppose that I have a tin ear to these things. Good thing that my work doesn't involve, even tangentially, anything about gender. I would never be able to avoid these minefields!

High-falutin' writing

A friend forwarded me an article about a new historical book on how "sramanic" religions like Buddhism played an important role in South India. The book certainly sounds interesting, but the review was very, very hard to read. I had to read it twice before I got what it was saying. It appeared that the writer wouldn't use 1-syllable words when he could find 5-syllable ones to say the same thing. Sort of Hemingway in reverse. Sample paragraph from the review:

The empirical pre-eminence in the study of history in inscription-rich Tamil Nadu and a modern outlook on historiography combine to provide a fresh understanding of the past in a book launched here on Tuesday.

The ironic thing is that The Hindu, the paper in which the review appeared, is read by a bunch of folks for whom English is, at best, a second language. What are the writers of pieces like this thinking?

The lawyer vs. the aristocrat

At the beginning of the civil war, three slaves made their way to a Union camp.  At the time, US law said that escaped slaves had to be returned to their masters. A Southern officer duly made his way to the Union camp under a truce flag.  Cary is the Southern officer while Butler is a New England lawyer who's been in the army for all of four weeks. I will let Adam Goodheart take over:

Cary got down to business. “I am informed,” he said, “that three Negroes belonging to Colonel Mallory have escaped within your lines. I am Colonel Mallory’s agent and have charge of his property. What do you mean to do with those Negroes?”“I intend to hold them,” Butler said.
“Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”
Even the dour Butler must have found it hard to suppress a smile. This was, of course, a question he had expected. And he had prepared what he thought was a fairly clever answer.
“I mean to take Virginia at her word,” he said. “I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”
“But you say we cannot secede,” Cary retorted, “and so you cannot consistently detain the Negroes.”
“But you say you have seceded,” Butler said, “so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”

 "Contraband". This term turned out to be a masterstroke. Conservatives could rest easy that escaped slaves were not being set free, merely being held until the end of the war. Liberals could be satisfied that slaves were not being returned. Yet, it changed conditions on the ground,  causing hundreds of thousands of slaves to make to it to union camps where they did a lot of menial labor, freeing the soldiers to fight. In turn, all those blacks living peaceably quieted many Southerners' fears and allowed for Lincoln's Emancipation declaration.

Adam Goodheart argues that the inspired off-the-cuff, lawyerly argument by Butler brought down slavery.  It sounds very cool. The book is on my wish list.