Recentemente è stato reso disponibile l'aggiornamento della serie temporale di mappe globali annuali di uso e copertura del suolo LULC (Land User / Land Cover) alla versione 3 con una risoluzione globale di 10m per il periodo 2017-2023.

Le mappe sono derivate dalle immagini Sentinel-2 dell'ESA con una risoluzione di 10m. Ogni mappa è un composito di previsioni LULC per 9 classi durante l'anno, al fine di generare una rappresentazione rappresentativa di ciascun anno. Questo dataset è stato generato da Impact Observatory, che ha utilizzato miliardi di pixel etichettati manualmente (curati dalla National Geographic Society) per addestrare un modello di deep learning per la classificazione del suolo.

La mappa globale è stata prodotta applicando questo modello alle collezioni annuali di scene Sentinel-2 sul Microsoft Planetary Computer.  Ognuna delle mappe ha una precisione media valutata superiore al 75%. 

Le novità di questa mappa sono: l'utilizzo di un modello aggiornato rispetto al modello a 10 classi e la combinazione delle classi Prato (precedentemente classe 3) e Arbusti (precedentemente classe 6) in una singola classe di Pascolo (classe 11). La collezione originale LULC Esri 2020 per la Copertura del Suolo

Wolfe writes that an evolving understanding of time and place must be based on the premise that every newcomer must respond humbly to land other than their own — even if it means abandoning expectations imported from elsewhere.

He illustrates his story through Johnny, a mover whose family has been in the area since Santa Fe’s founding in 1610, with repeated experiences with those who visit Santa Fe on vacation, fall in love with its surface beauty and promptly decide to relocate to the “City Different” with an imported NIMBY (not in my backyard) point-of-view:

His grandparents—in their mid-80s— live in a neighborhood his family has called home for generations. Increasingly, they find themselves surrounded by newcomers who express discomfort with their long-standing ways. 

Something as simple as front yard parking—a practice that predates zoning laws and, to some, is simple and practical community life—has become a point of contention. Johnny explained that these new neighbors often arrive with rigid preconceptions of how a historic neighborhood “should look,” missing that his grandparents have maintained the practice for years.

In conclusion, he underscores what should be a first principle for today's planners: Genuine appreciation and administration of a place require a deeper understanding and respect for its complex and intermingled ecosystems (built, natural, and cultural) and a responsibility to approach them as thoughtful participants in a continuing story.

• Gentrification
• Migration
• NIMBY
• Historic Preservation

1. Commentary: New Bill Holds Key to Solving US Housing Crisis. We Just Have to Pass It.

In this exclusive Planetizen feature story, architect Jordan Rogove explains how two bills pertaining to how HUD defines “manufactured homes” that are currently moving through Congress could make mass production of prefabricated, affordable housing possible on a large scale.

2. Evaluating Transportation Affordability: How Planners Can Better Respond to Demands for Lower Cost Travel

According to Planetizen blogger Todd Litman, affordability is an important but often overlooked transportation planning issue. He reviews a new report that provides practical guidance for evaluating transportation affordability and achieving affordability goals. 

3. Over and Over, Studies Show Bike Lanes Don’t Cause Congestion

A CBC article highlights research from cities around the world that shows that, despite popular misconceptions, bike lanes do not increase traffic congestion.

4. How the Built Environment Affects Your Mood

Planetizen blogger Marcelo Remond explores how choosing an environment that enhances quality of life can make a significant difference in people’s mental health.

5. NJ Transit Struggles, Leaving Riders Stranded

Curbed takes a deep a deep dive into New Jersey Transit’s troubled recent history, delving into the reasons why the agency has, in some cases, left passengers stranded in trains for hours — even after raising fares by 15 percent.

6. Proposed Alabama Bill Would Fund Public Transit

Lack of transportation is one of the main reasons Alabama residents can’t participate in the workforce, according to the state senator who introduced a new bill to fund public transit, reports Alabama Daily News.

7. Housing Measures on the Ballot in November

Multifamily Dive offers a survey of housing-related measures on state and local ballots this election season.

8. California County Approves Underground Carbon Storage Project

CALmatters reports on Kern County supervisors’ vote to support a groundbreaking (no pun intended) carbon storage project that will inject climate-warming gases into a former oil and gas field.

9. Opinion: I-5 Expansion EIR Deludes Itself

In an op-ed for The Urbanist, Ryan Packer says the environmental impact report for a massive highway project in the Pacific Northwest ignores the reality of induced demand.

10. America’s 10 ‘Greenest’ Cities

A new analysis from WalletHub ranks cities based on their environmental quality, energy consumption and production, transportation, density, and other factors.

• A new analysis from the Pew Research Center takes a comprehensive look at the state of affordable housing across the U.S., which 69% percent of Americans said they were “very concerned” about. (Pew Research Center)
• Converting buildings isn’t easy. Flexible architecture could help future-proof new construction. (Commercial Search)
• Do we really need solar farms? (Clean Technica)
• Executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Amy Hanauer says it’s time to modernize the transportation tax code by raising gas taxes and using proven tools like congestion pricing and vehicle delivery fees. (Bloomberg Law)
• Planning efforts in Newark, New Jersey; Austin, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; and South Baltimore, Maryland have been recognized as winners of the 2024 National Planning Awards. (American Planning Association)

Election Day is just days away. Check out Planetizen’s rundown of Where 2024 Presidential Candidates Stand on 12 Issues Important to Urban Planners before you head to the ballot box.

• Planetizen Week in Review

By any metric, the New York Marathon is an immense production. The 50,000+ runners who are starting the race on Sunday November 3 make this the world’s largest marathon. Their route will take them through all five of the city’s boroughs, from the starting line on Staten Island up through Brooklyn and Queens, across the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, north into the Bronx and then back down along the east side of Central Park to the finish line in the Park itself.

Ensuring that the whole thing goes off without a hitch is a remarkable feat of organization. The race relies on a small army of volunteers, who do everything from staffing the water stations at every mile marker and making sure runners don’t get lost to offering medical expertise.

Perhaps more than anything else, though, coordinating an event with so many moving pieces requires reliable, efficient communications. Volunteers play a critical role here, too, including one very specific group: local amateur radio (or “ham radio”) operators.

Donni Katzovicz is a ham radio enthusiast who has volunteered at the Marathon since 2018 through Event Hams, a group that has coordinated the Marathon’s use of amateur radio spectrum for the last decade. He explains that ham radio essentially plays two key roles during the marathon.

The first is as a route for communications that don’t require the use of official channels. “Obviously,” he says, “The marathon has commercial [radio] licenses and [its own communications infrastructure]. You [also] have all the local emergency services—FDNY, NYPD, EMS. The National Guard gets involved. The Secret Service gets involved. And they all have their [own] radios and equipment.”

However, he continues, “New York City is a big place. And if there’s, say, a runner who’s violating the uniform policy, or who’s holding too big of an inflatable donut, the best use of resources for the NYPD radio is maybe not to be tied up [handling] that.”

As well as chasing down people with overly extravagant costumes, however, ham radio also stands ready to play a second, more critical role: providing a reliable and resilient backup method of communications if primary channels go down for whatever reason. Katzovicz says, “If there was a major failure of all the major, super-critical systems, [organizers know] that there’s still a backup there.”

At the most basic level, ham radio is any radio that operates on the radio bands reserved for amateurs. As Katzovicz explains, enthusiasts come up with all manner of uses for their little corner of the electromagnetic spectrum: “The hobby itself is really, really, incredibly broad and encompasses a lot of different parts of science and technology. Some people … have handheld walkie talkies and to talk to other licensed people in their neighborhood; others make their own radios or make their own Rube Goldberg-esque devices to listen and transmit, and others coordinate with local civil bodies and provide backup communications during planned and unplanned events.”

Ham radio is well-suited to the latter role because, as Katzovicz explains, “It’s incredibly resilient.” This is because radio is a fundamentally simple technology that hasn’t changed a great deal in decades.

In essence, all you need to communicate via radio are a transmitter and a receiver, and both are devices that enthusiasts can build themselves. A basic walkie-talkie, for instance, simply encodes a message and broadcasts it at a given frequency via the built-in antenna. Anyone else within range can tune to the same frequency and pick up that message. In a scenario where, say, all a city’s power was out, battery-powered walkie talkies would still work just fine, whereas cell phones would be useless.

[ Related: The rich history of ham radio culture ]

It’s this lack of need for supporting infrastructure that makes ham radio so resistant to disruption. Even other forms of radio are, by their nature, more centralized. A large commercial radio station, for instance, requires powerful long-range transmission equipment. Such equipment is expensive, so multiple stations often share use of a single transmitter. (At one point during the 1960s, all New York City’s FM stations used the same array atop the Empire State Building.)

This is efficient in that it saves each station having to build its own transmitter, but it also provides a single point of failure: if a transmitter went down, so would all the stations that use it. (In practice, most stations today have backup transmission arrangements, but nevertheless, commercial radio continues to rely on a relatively small number of transmitters when compared to the number of stations that use them.) More generally, the point remains that there are many conceivable scenarios where damage to vital centralized infrastructure could either damage or completely take down the capacity to communicate.

Sadly, more so than many cities, New York has first-hand experience of this. The World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 dealt a crippling blow to the city’s communications infrastructure, not least because the twin towers were home to several large cell phone and TV towers. The attacks also exposed flaws in the equipment used by first responders, which were exacerbated by the fact that a critical repeater on which that equipment relied was also located in one of the towers—as was the Office of Emergency Management itself.

“Ham radio operators and the local volunteer groups did help out during that time,” Katzovicz says. And while 9/11 gave rise to a whole host of changes to ensure more resilient communications infrastructure, ham radio continues to be recognized as an excellent tool for emergency situations, its role summarized in a truism that’s popular in amateur radio circles: “When the phones are down, the hams are up.” This fact has been illustrated vividly during the recent natural disasters in the southern USA: small local radio stations and individual operators have proven vital in providing emergency updates, and one operator reports that several colleagues were airlifted into affected areas to restore communications with isolated communities.

All being well, the ham enthusiasts volunteering during this year’s Marathon won’t be required to do anything more taxing than chase down oversized donuts. But if for whatever reason their emergency backup services are required, the city’s ham enthusiasts are on hand to ensure that the show can go on.

Ham enthusiasts interested in volunteering their services should contact Event Hams.

The post Meet the ham radio enthusiasts who help keep the New York Marathon running smoothly appeared first on Popular Science.

A group of New Jersey municipalities is asking a court to suspend the state’s affordable housing law until their lawsuit agains the state is resolved, reports Mike Hayes in Gothamist. “The towns claim the law unfairly requires them to build more and more housing without accounting for how much development they can truly support,” a common complaint from cities in New Jersey and other states where similar legislation is in place, such as California. 

The towns also claim the law is unconstitutional because it exempts some urban centers designated as “urban aid municipalities.” These are cities with certain characteristics such as high unemployment rates, lower-than-average incomes, or high population density. “Many of these towns are also already home to public housing developments and income-restricted units.” These urban communities are still required to create over 40,000 new homes by rehabilitating existing units.

• Mount Laurel Doctrine
• Housing Supply
• State Preemption
• Affordable Housing

A groundbreaking image of mouse brain tumor cells took top honors at the 2024 Nikon Small World Competition. At first glance, the image (seen below) might look like a sci-fi plant structure, but it’s actually the actin, microtubules, and nuclei of the cells. “This image reveals how disruptions in the cell’s cytoskeleton–the structural framework and ‘highways’ known as microtubules–can lead to diseases like Alzheimer’s and ALS,” a press release explains.

The image was taken by Dr. Bruno Cisterna, with assistance from Dr. Eric Vitriol. Capturing the image took a considerable amount of patience for the Augusta University research scientists. “I spent about three months perfecting the staining process to ensure clear visibility of the cells,” Cisterna said. “After allowing five days for the cells to differentiate, I had to find the right field of view where the differentiated and non-differentiated cells interacted.This took about three hours of precise observation under the microscope to capture the right moment, involving many attempts and countless hours of work to get it just right.”

The Nikon Small World Competition celebrates its 50th year in 2024 with more than 2,100 entries submitted from 80 countries. Organizers call the awards the “leading forum for recognizing the art, proficiency, and photographic excellence involved in photomicrography.”

(Click on images to expand to expand their beauty.)

The post Invisible to the naked eye: 15 gorgeous images captured under a microscope appeared first on Popular Science.

Warning: This holiday season, you might be subjected to endless slideshows of blurry vacation photos from the ‘70s (again) … unless you take action. The family’s been talking about digitizing those photos for years, so why not make that your gift to them? 

The Kodak Slide N Scan helps you digitize slides at home. If you get one now, you could have the whole stash converted into digital copies by the holidays—and almost eliminate the risk of sitting through one of Grandma’s slideshows. Everyone is getting these for gifts, so order yours for $179.99 before they’re gone (reg. $224.99).

It’s so easy to convert slides to digital that Grandma could do it herself. Instead of going through all the work, you might just give her, or Mom and Dad, the Kodak Slide N Scan itself.

But if you’re feeling the holiday spirit, here’s how to work the machine:

1. Find and insert the slide adapter or those for 135, 110, or 126 film.
2. Select the matching type on the 5-inch LCD screen.
3. Slide the photo into the gadget.
4. Adjust the quality, color, and brightness.
5. Hit “OK” to save the photo to an SD card (not included).

This fast-loading process makes it easy to go through a huge pile of slides or film—which is probably what your family has been hoarding in the basement. Get cracking.

Instead of gathering the family around the old projector, get them around the TV to watch you preserve old photos. Just connect the Kodak Slide N Scan with the included HDMI cord so they can view the images on the big screen and reminisce together.

This might just be the best gift for grandparents and parents this year, even though you might not escape that slideshow after all. Get your Kodak Slide N Scan for $179.99 (reg. $224.99) before they’re gone!

Kodak Slide N Scan Film & Slide Scanner – $179.99

See Deal

StackSocial prices subject to change.

The post How to gift Grandma digital versions of her old slides appeared first on Popular Science.

You’re browsing the web, and come across a page you want to save or share with someone else: Whatever the reason, you need a webpage screenshot. It’s not too difficult to capture webpages wholesale, but the exact process varies depending on the browser you’re using.

This is slightly different than capturing a normal screenshot, whether it’s Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS. Here we’re talking about grabbing the content of whatever’s on the web page itself, without any of the browser toolbars, menus, and other interface elements around the edges.

Google Chrome for the desktop does have a built-in screenshot feature, but it’s hidden away in the browser’s developer tools. With the page you want to capture on screen, press Ctrl+Shift+I (Windows) or Cmd+Option+I (macOS) to bring up the developer tools pane. From there:

• Click the three dots in the developer tools pane (top right).
• Choose Run command.
• Type “screenshot” to bring up the screenshot options.
• Click Capture full size screenshot to grab the page in its entirety.
• Click Capture screenshot to grab the visible section of the page.

After a moment, a save dialog pops up so you can save your screenshot wherever you like. If you find the built-in option a bit too cumbersome, there are plenty of third-party screenshot tools out there: Both Webpage Screenshot and GoFullPage are hugely popular and free to use, and give you a wide choice of options (the former is a little more advanced, the latter a little more streamlined).

As for mobile, there’s a built-in option for Chrome for Android, though with Chrome for iOS you have to rely on the standard screenshot process. On Android, navigate to the page you want to capture, then tap the three dots (top right), Share, and Long screenshot.

As with Google Chrome, the screenshot tools in Safari for macOS are hidden away in the developer options for the browser, so you need to enable them first: Choose Safari > Settings > Advanced and check the Show features for web developers box. With that feature enabled:

• Open the Develop menu and select Show Web Inspector.
• Switch to the Elements tab if it’s not already open.
• Right-click on the top line of code (starting with an HTML tag).
• Choose Capture Screenshot from the pop-up menu.

You’ll get a save dialog where you can choose where to store the screenshot. This will be a full, scrolling screenshot, taking in the whole of the webpage—there’s no option to just save the visible section of it.

There are no good-quality screenshot extensions for Safari for macOS that we know about. It’s also not a feature available in Safari for iOS—though you can take a scrolling screenshot in the normal way, which will capture the entire page for you.

Microsoft Edge for the desktop comes with a screenshot tool integrated into the browser, so getting a screengrab isn’t difficult. With the page you want to capture open on screen, click the three dots (top right), then Screenshot.

You’ve then got three options, which appear at the top of the page: Capture Area (capture one area of the page, set by dragging out a rectangular selection), Capture Screen Area (capture whatever is currently on screen), or Capture Full Page (capture the whole page).

Your screenshot will then pop up in a separate window: You can then annotate the screenshot with a simple pen tool, if you need to. Up in the top right corner of the window, you’ve got icons for copying the screenshot to the system clipboard, or saving it to disk.

Edge is based on the same code foundation as Chrome of course, so you can access all of the same extensions if you need something beyond what the built-in tool is capable of. Again, Webpage Screenshot and GoFullPage are worth a look in this regard.

On mobile, Edge follows the Chrome template: On Android, there’s a screenshot tool you can find by tapping the menu button (three lines, bottom right), then Share and Scrolling Screenshot. On iOS, you need to rely on the approach built into the system software.

Firefox on the desktop comes with its own screenshot tool as well. Right-click on the webpage you’re looking at, then choose Take Screenshot.

From there you’ve got three options: You can click and drag over a certain area of the page, or you can click either the Save visible or the Save full page buttons in the top right corner. You get a preview window, and options to Copy or Download the image.

Of course, Firefox is one of the best browsers around when it comes to extension support. If the integrated option doesn’t give you what you need, you can turn to add-ons such as Easy Screenshot, Lightshot, and Awesome Screenshot. They’re all highly rated, with intuitive and straightforward interfaces.

As for the mobile apps, neither Firefox for Android or iOS have built-in screenshot capabilities, so you need to stick to the standard screenshot options. On Android though, you can save pages as PDFs: Tap the three dots (top right), then the share icon at the top, then Save as PDF.

The post How to take screenshots (and scrolling screenshots) of webpages appeared first on Popular Science.

• AirPods Pro 2 for $179.00 at Amazon ($70 off)


• AirPods 4 for $114.00 at Woot ($15 off)

• Everything You Should Know About Image Playground


• All of the New Features in iOS 18.2


• 10 New Things Your iPhone Can Do in iOS 18.2


• Everything You Need to Know About Apple Intelligence


• iOS 18.2 Apple Intelligence Features