[Robert Stavins' blog ] Today, I wish to take a brief hiatus from reflecting on the current status of climate change policy, whether in the often traumatic context of policy pronouncements – or rather, Twitter messages – from U.S. President Trump and his administration, or in the broader, longer-term context of global actions.  Rather, I want to seize on this mid-summer opportunity to think about the past rather than the present.... Read more about Environmental Economics – A Personal Perspective

Press Release:

First Prototype ‘Sprites’ – Precursors to Eventual ‘StarChip’ Probes – Achieve Low Earth Orbit

San Francisco – July 26, 2017 – Breakthrough Starshot, a multi-faceted program to develop and launch practical interstellar space missions, successfully flew its first spacecraft – the smallest ever launched.

On June 23, a number of prototype “Sprites” – the world’s smallest fully functional space probes, built on a single circuit board – achieved Low Earth Orbit, piggybacking on OHB System AG’s ‘...

Harvard Gazette | A new joint Harvard-MIT study uses computer vision algorithm to study Google Street View images to show urban shifts. Among the collaborators: Harvard faculty members Scott Duke Kominers, MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, and Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics.

The Gazette notes that "using Street View images to track urban change isn't a new idea. In 2014, then-doctoral student Jackelyn Hwang [now Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University] and Robert Sampson, the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard, published a study that employed volunteers to analyze Street View images and locate signs of gentrification across 3,000 city blocks in Chicago." The new study takes this "a step further by using artificial intelligence to automate the process."