data

This Earth Day, Focus on 21st Century Conservation

By Joe S. Whitworth / On April 21st, 2016

April 22 is not a moment to celebrate the wonder of this unique planet. It’s an opportunity to recognize what next steps we need to take to secure a better future.

On the need for better water data

By John Fleck / On April 14th, 2016

A student in one of our University of New Mexico Water Resources Program classes asked last week what the magic trick was to finding water data. We’d asked the students to do some really challenging modeling of the flow of water through New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande watersheds, and one of the biggest difficulties was finding usable data to plug into their models.

Who Bikes and Walks? And Why?

By Alliance for Biking & Walking / On October 6th, 2014

Cross-posted with permission from the Alliance for Biking & Walking's blog. Does everybody walk and bike, or are there differences in gender, income, age, and race? In this excerpt from the 2014 Benchmarking Report, we take a look at who bikes and walks in the United States. How much do people bike and walk? First, it's important to understand where our data co

The Natural Side of Big Data

By Rafe Sagarin / On August 21st, 2012

“Big Data” is getting big coverage. For example, this recent column in the New York Times that captures the emergence of Big Data as a cultural meme. Usually, people take a primarily a technophilic view of Big Data. The Times article, for example, describes Big Data as, “applying the tools of artificial intelligence, like machine learning, to vast new troves of data beyond that captured in standard databases.