Hi everyone, I’m Brian Tomaszewski and I am a researcher and assistant professor interested in how GIS can help with disaster management – for example, humanitarian crises resulting from war, or in the aftermath of a hurricane – and I am the author of the textbook Geographic Information Systems for Disaster Management (learn more about me here). I have recently worked at the Za’atari Refugee Camp in Jordan, which is home to more 80,000 refugees of the Syrian Civil War, as part of a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project to map resources and infrastructure at the camp. I have also conducted refugee research in Rwanda. Things happen so quick in the aftermath of a disaster that there can be a lot of miscommunication and mistakes and I aim to use mapping to help with more effective disaster response and decision making. Ask me anything about ways in which mapping can be used to help us better respond to or even prevent disasters. I will be back at 11 am ET (8 am PT, 3 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything! Edit: Hi everyone, Brian Tomaszewski here, let’s get started! I’ll be answering questions through 1pm! Edit: 1:10pm -Wow thank you so much to everyone who participated and for all of your insightful questions. I have to sign off now but I really enjoyed talking GIS with all of you. I encourage everyone to check out the resources and links mentioned today and get more involved in the GIS and disaster response communities. Have a good weekend! - Brian T.

Hi everyone, I’m the chief meteorologist for WXshift and Climate Central. I also run our National Science Foundation-funded program with that provides climate information to more than 250 on-air TV meteorologists. In previous lives, I was a meteorologist for Accuweather and on TV in Baltimore. I’m a proud Penn State alum (We are…!) and card-carrying weather geek. I’m part of a team that just launched WXshift, a new weather site, this week. It offers something no other weather site has — relevant, localized trends in rainfall, snowfall, temperatures and drought in the context of your daily forecast. We couldn’t be more excited about it and I would love to answer your questions about the site, how we crunched data from 2,000 weather stations, local (or global) climate change, weather or any other burning meteorology questions you have. I’ve brought along a few friends to join, too. Brian Kahn, a senior science writer here at Climate Central, Eric Holthaus, a writer at Slate and fellow meteorologist, and Deke Arndt, the head of climate monitoring at the National Centers for Environmental Information, are here to chat, too. We’ll be back at 2 pm ET (11 am PT, 6 pm UTC) to answer questions, ask us anything! EDIT: Hey Reddit, Bernadette and Brian here! It’s 2 p.m. ET, and we’re officially jumping in to answer your questions along with Deke and Eric. Look forward to chatting! EDIT #2: Hello everyone! Just wanted to send out a HUGE thank you to all of your for participating and for all of your questions. We are really sorry that we can’t answer each and every one of them, but we tried to cover as much as we could today before signing out. Also, a BIG thanks to the other members of this AMA Deke and Eric. Until next time… Bernadette and Brian

A document by PLOSScienceWednesday . Click on the document to view its contents.

Santiago Ortiz is a mathematician, data scientist, information visualization researcher and developer. He uses his background in mathematics and complexity sciences to push the boundaries of information visualization and data based storytelling. In 2005 he co-founded Bestiario (Barcelona), the first company in Europe devoted to information visualization. He currently leads Moebio Labs. Moebio Labs is a team of data scientists, data visualization developers and designers. We develop advanced interactive visualization projects that connect with huge data sets. Our methodology and projects are designed to get deep insight from data in collaboration with the client, solve real problems and answer strategic questions. We work for clients around the world. To see my work check Moebio.com — there is a navigation widget on the bottom left. These are my projects from the past 3 years. I recommend seeing Lostalgic and Twitter using Twitter. Now Moebio is a team, and we are delivering similar interactive experiences as in these experimental projects, except that: data is real (with people in companies as opposed to people in islands), we aim to align with companies’ strategies and goals, and we are infusing predictive modeling into the visualizations. It’s not only that we visualize prediction model results, but that the visualizations allow users to modify and tune the models. Our goal is to help companies becoming collaborative-data-driven. We’re about to open the Moebio framework, a JS framework for data wrangling, exploration and visualization (working hand in hand with Bocoup on this). We’re also close to start sharing Lichen (mail subscription), our modular environment, in which data projects (wrangling, modeling, analysis, visualizations) can be built in seconds, even by non-developers… and developers can add their own technology-agnostic modules. Here’s proof that it’s me. I’m here to talk about managing teams of data scientists, working with big data, predictive modeling, or anything else. Ask Me Anything! Today, coinciding with this AMA, we are releasing the free open source version of the Moebio Framework. Ask Me Anything about this as well! Thanks everyone for the clever questions, It was very interesting and fun! Always happy to continue conversations via twitter: https://twitter.com/moebio

A document by AmerChemSocietyAMA . Click on the document to view its contents.

Who has the better sustainability profile, a vegetarian who drives a Hummer or a meat-eater who drives a Prius? Is it always better to buy local produce? Is a new innovation – really “more sustainable” than the existing alternative in the grand scheme of things? The answers are complicated. The reality is that people make choices daily around what they perceive to be a more sustainable option, but the real answer is often not intuitive. In this AMA, we’d like to talk about the concept of life cycle thinking as a framework for understanding sustainability holistically. We have spent our careers assessing the products people make or buy, from raw materials to end-of-life, from “cradle to grave.” We will discuss Life Cycle Assessment, a specific science that measures the mass and energy flows to determine the potential impact of “stuff.” There are also simpler tools that you can use to incorporate life cycle thinking into a much broader range of decisions – from questions around R&D investments, to what to buy the next time you stop at the store. RICH HELLING: I am chemical engineer (Sc.D. from MIT) and the Director of Sustainable Chemistry at Dow. I have been with the company for nearly 30 years, and for the last decade, I have concentrated on how to use life cycle thinking – in particular applying LCA and related tools to identify opportunities for innovation and to differentiate new products in the marketplace. I have authored 23 papers and hold two patents. I am a certified LCA Professional, a member of Michigan’s Green Chemistry Roundtable and active in working groups of The Sustainability Consortium. HAN ZHANG: I am the Sustainability and Advocacy Manager for one of Dow’s business units and have extensive experience managing the company’s sustainability reporting, including publication of our Global Reporting Index (GRI) G4 Annual Sustainability Report and annual submissions to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Previously, I worked in life cycle assessment, biofuels development and strategic implementation of alternative energy plans in the energy industry. I hold a PhD from the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and the Environment, as well as master’s and bachelor’s degrees in thermal engineering from Tsinghua University in China. We will be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything! Thanks for the many questions and the great discussions! It’s great to see the excitement and insights about life cycle and sustainability topics. We have to go now, but will try to get back to some of the questions!

There are two things I consider more important than sleep: air and water. We spend more time sleeping than engaging in any other single activity, but we know very little about how day-to-day sleep behavior is regulated. My lab uses human genetics to gain a better understanding on this topic. We’ve found that sleep behavior is heavily influenced by our genetic makeup. Just like many other traits — height, weight, body shape — sleep behavior is at least partly inherited. In 2009, we discovered a mutation in the DEC2 gene that allows some people to sleep only four to six hours a night and feel completely refreshed. We study such efficient sleepers in hopes to understand why sleep is so important! Ask me anything about how genes affect sleep and why we need to pay attention to sleep! Here’s my lab at UCSF Here’s a recent UCSF article about the impact of sleep-deprivation: Short Sleepers Are Four Times More Likely to Catch a Cold Here’s a BBC article about the sleep gene, The People Who Need Very Sleep I will be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC) to answer your questions, AMA! EDIT: Good morning everyone. Thanks for all the great questions and lets get to the answers! EDIT: Thanks for all the great questions. I enjoyed it very much. I am signing off!

A document by Alain_Laederach . Click on the document to view its contents.

Hi Reddit, My name is Dr. Stuart Kim and I am professor at Stanford University. My research focuses on genes that contribute to extreme longevity, such as supercentenarians that live to be over 110 years. I recently published a study titled “Whole Genome Sequencing of the World’s Oldest People” in PLOS ONE. Supercentenarians are the world’s oldest people, with just 17 or so alive in the United States at any time. Supercentenarians often show a remarkable delay in aging, such as one that worked as a physician in Georgia until age 103 and another that worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street until age 109. In order to begin to find the genetic basis for extreme longevity, we sequenced the genomes of 17 supercentenarians. The full genome sequences of the supercentenarians are available as supplemental data from the paper, and we hope that our data contributes to future research to unlock the secret for extreme longevity. Thank you everyone for your questions, it was a pleasure to answer your questions. I think trying to understand the biology of aging is really interesting and I hope you find it interesting too. I’ve signed off for now. Best wishes, Stuart Kim

Hey-o! I created D3, a popular open-source JavaScript library for visualizing data. Until recently, I was also a graphics editor for The New York Times, where I helped produce a variety of data visualizations (such as Is It Better to Rent or Buy? and 512 Paths to the White House), maps (The Most Detailed Maps You’ll See From the Midterm Elections), and articles (A Game of Shark and Minnow). I write occasionally (Visualizing Algorithms, How To Scroll). You can see more of my work on my website and Twitter. I studied information visualization at Stanford, though it seems increasingly unlikely that I will finish my PhD. I got my BSE in Computer Science from Princeton, and I worked at a handful of tech companies prior to my stint as a newspaperman. The first code I wrote was a chat program for the TI-82 graphing calculator; you could send one letter at a time over a 2-foot serial cable. It wasn’t very useful. The last code I wrote was to compute the smallest enclosing circle for a set of circles. So far, that hasn’t been very useful either. These days I’m focused on the next major release of D3. My wife and I had our second child in July, though, so most of my time lately has been just takin’ care of the family. Here’s proof it’s me. So, yeah. I like infovis, maps, algorithms, javascript, design, video games, pretty colors that move… Ask me anything! I’ll be back at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT to answer your questions. Edit: Wow, so many questions! Thank you. I’m starting to answer now. Keep ’em comin’! Edit 2:30 PM ET / 5:30 PM ET: Still here, still answering questions! Sorry I’m slow. Edit 4:15 PM PT: Thanks for all the questions! I gotta go now, but I’ll try to answer more questions later tonight. If I missed your question, I apologize. I’m @mbostock on Twitter if you want to ask anything else.

A document by AmerChemSocietyAMA . Click on the document to view its contents.

Hi everyone, I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Memphis and an affiliate with the Institute for Intelligent Systems which is a center for interdisciplinary research https://sites.google.com/site/stephaniehuette/ . I study language processing as it unfolds using eye tracking and motion tracking technologies. Words have a profound impact on behavior, changing everything from perception, to judgements and decisions we make every day, all the way up to political viewpoints (e.g. http://news.sciencemag.org/2010/10/politicians-watch-your-grammar for discussion of a colleague’s work along these lines). I specifically study negation and usage of modal verbs “should” and “must” and how these words are used, affect learning, and activation dynamics in the lexicon (your mental dictionary). While many people are aware Cognitive Science has made many advances in Natural Language Processing in machine learning areas and are being used actively on projects like IBM’s jeopardy playing Watson, less well known are the advances we’ve made in the understanding of how people develop and process linguistic information at both a millisecond, hourly, and yearly timescale. I will be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC) to answer questions, Ask me anything about how you process language (fleeting milliseconds that make differences in how we understand cognition in general), or how negation hyperbolizes the perception of truth of a statement (a recent finding in my lab!)