A Study on Illegal Dumpimg Prediction

There is an interesting note about GIS model for illegal dumping occurrence prediction. Researches had an assumption that high accessibility of the site and its low visibility will determine the probability of illegal dumping occurrence. They reported that unfortunately this assumption was wrong and there are no significant influence of these factors on illegal dumping. 

Actually such result is not a surprise for me. Most of the huge dumping sites in St. Petersburg and Leningrad region I'm aware of do not have very high accessibility, I would say that their accessibility is somewhat moderate. Relatively low accessibility affects "visibility" of the dumping sites and I think that these two parameters are correlated. Also it isn't clear if researchers defined the amount of waste that separates illegal dump from just litter. It seems that they haven't used such parameter so their studies could be affected by litter, which can be found almost anywhere.

No Place for Russia

There is no such country as "Russia" in the witpress registration form))) Romania is absent too... Still I'm happy that Rwanda is not forgotten ;-)

Responsibility of Scientists in Climate Change "Issue"

At the the last week I've spent 5 days amongst Baltic Sea related scientists (there were almost 600 of them) at 8-th Baltic Sea Scientific Congress. The congress was interesting indeed even if I'm not a marine or meteorological scientist. There were a plenty of presentations on climate, winds, curves, salinity modelling, environmental risk assessment and governance (a lot of scientists do have problems with risk assessment). And I had a poster about illegal dumping monitoring.

But I would like to show you the presentation of Hans von Storch about "Knowledge generation vs. decision processes - the issue of regional climate service" which I liked the most. It concerns responsibility of the scientists for the knowledge they provide.  Let me start from the end of the presentation and if you will find yourself interested in further reading - hit the "read more" button. All pictures are clickable.