BioInteractive by HHMI

So I finally looked at BioInteractive by HHMI which is a compilation of free resources for science education. As the name implies most of the resources focus on biology and medicine, but there are several lectures, videos, and animations quite useful for teaching and learning about climate change in their Changing Planet: Past, Present, Future series from 2012 (mobile-friendly site).

• Earth's Climate: Back to the Future (1 hour 27 minutes) by Daniel Schrag. This is crazy long...but the online video includes a nice clickable table of content so you can pick-out selected sections and themes.
• Climate Change: How Do We Know We're Not Wrong? (58:29 minutes) by Naomi Oreskes. Also quite long, but also with a nifty interactive table of content.
• Building Scientific Knowledge: The Story of Plate Tectonics (57:59 minutes) by Naomi Oreskes. As before - the first 7-minutes nicely discuss the role and process of science.
• Paleoclimate: A History of Change. This is an excellent 27-slide presentation with linked videos to offer additional context.
• 200 Million Years of Continental Movement (1:01 minutes, narrated animation).
• Plate Tectonics (1:16 minutes, narrated animation)

A GIS Career!

What is a GIS career and what are the Top-5 skills you need to be successful in a GIS career? Have a look at the webinar GIS Career: The Top 5 Skills. Topics include: how GIS is changing, how and why to be a part of this ever-evolving career field, and why these skills will be even more important as the “geospatial revolution” continues to have a growing impact on our society.

"Managing GIS" is a related (and short!) article about GIS jobs by Jennifer Egan in ArcNews (Summer 2014).

Want a third opinion? Joe Kerski from Esri discusses his Top-5 Skills (plus additonal skills) in three YouTube videos.

SchoolDigger

Need information about a school - any school? Checkout SchoolDigger.com. The interactive data and graphs for every school are pretty impressive and even includes private schools. Here, for example, is Greenfield High School.

Why we should trust scientists!

Naomi Oreskes - truly one of the smartest people out there - explains in this TED video in under 20 minutes Why we should trust scientists (transcript). Here are some more of her publications, lectures, and interviews:

• Merchants of Doubt
• The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
• The American Denial of Global Warming (58:36 minutes)
• Interview with Naomi Oreskes (4:30 minutes)
• Climate Change: How Do We Know We're Not Wrong? (58:29 minutes)

The Arctic in the Anthropocene

I hate that term 'anthropocene' - that's another example of science-babble that only serves to further alienate the broader public. Let's use some direct and common language: Global Warming and the Disappearing Arctic. Here's a new report from the National Academy of Science

• The Arctic in the Anthropocene: Emerging Research Questions (2014) - Full Report
• The Arctic in the Anthropocene: Emerging Research Questions (2014) - Report in Brief
• The Arctic in the Anthropocene: Emerging Research Questions (2014) - YouTube video (4:54 minutes)

Blitzortung

This is another one of these great German words to mess with non-native speakers - go ahead...try pronouncing it correctly! In English: lightning locator and Blitzortung.org is global, real-time, community-based lightning detection network - fun! Check-out LightningMaps.org for a fancier web map. You can get involved yourself and they'll send you everything you need at-cost (not sure how much that is).

10 Important Programming Concepts

There you have it: Coding for journalists: 10 programming concepts it helps to understand. Now head over to Codeacademy and teach yourself some Python or Javascript!