The Intertidal Update - August 2024
Our big news this month is two trainings we’re cohosting in September with Creative Commons. Over the last year, Creative Commons has been digging into the world of ocean and climate sharing so we’ve teamed up with them to explain what licenses are, what they can and can’t do, and how to make them work for you. If you have amazing ocean data you want other people to be able to reuse, or you’re working with a bunch of different ocean data and wondering how to combine them, this training is for you.
In each of these free, 3-hour sessions we’ll walk through the basics of licensing data and data products, with hands-on examples. Space is limited, so register today if you’re interested, and please pass this on to others.
Session 1: Tuesday, September 17
13:00 - 16:00 UTC // 09:00 - 12:00 Eastern Time
Session 2: Wednesday, September 25
13:00 - 16:00 Pacific Time // 10:00 - 13:00 Hawaii Time
We’ve also been talking about this Bloomberg piece on the real-world impacts of different climate flood risk models, trained on different data and producing different threat assessments. Kate has a paper in press on the need to explore data collaboratives for training data for fisheries AI, in part to be able to interrogate proprietary models. Dartmouth’s Dr. Justin Mankin, who wrote an Op-Ed on the need for public climate data in January, has this quote in the Bloomberg article:
Ultimately, there is plenty more science to do. The question is whether it should occur “in an open source context or in a walled garden in a profit-driven corporation,” Mankin says. “I think that choice matters.”
Should the focus be on keeping data open, so that more people (and companies) can build models? Or on making the underlying models open, where the competitive advantage goes to those who can generate data no one else has? Or both? The waters around AI policy for public natural resources are still murky. We’re tracking this topic to see how the sediment settles out.
We’ll close out this end-of-our-summer newsletter with some dance moves. If you caught any of the 2024 Olympic Breakdancing, you probably saw the debates over Australian B-Girl Raygun’s performance. Maybe you also noticed that some of her moves seem to come from this year’s Dance Your PhD winner: Kangaroo Time. Fair warning - the tune is pretty catchy.
- Kate & Rachael