by David Maddox
Sound Science LLC
“It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandilion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.”
Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) is legendary for his watercolor landscapes, painted near his Buffalo, NY, home. His paintings are typically about nature: swamps and forests and backyards that include plants and birds and insects and rays of light. They are full of shapes and living things. His late period pictures, especially, are intense and even hallucinatory. There is an exhibit of his work at the Whitney Museum in New York City this summer.
He was also a great journalist and over his lifetime wrote over 10,000 pages in various handmade volumes. It is there, on 5 May 1963, that he wrote: “It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandilion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.” Continue reading →
by Cindy Salo
Sound Science LLC
This piece appeared previously on Sagebrush and Spuds
Ecologists have accused “climate deniers,” who do not believe that the world’s climate is changing, of “not thinking” and have described them as “angry.” Climate deniers cause heart burn in ecologists who are documenting changes in our climate and developing strategies for dealing with the impacts of warmer and more variable weather.
Understanding the apparent intransigence of climate deniers, how they think and why they respond the way they do, can help ecologists present their message more effectively and reduce anger and heart burn. When both sides communicate clearly and calmly we can meet in the middle to solve the serious challenges facing us. Continue reading →
David Maddox
Sound Science LLC
I participate in lots of discussions about data, and information, and how to design databases. Sometimes a database is just a repository of data – a place to store it for some future use. More often, though, a database is meant to be an active information delivery system. Let’s call such a thing an IDS.
And what’s the most important function of an IDS? It is the delivery of (1) information that users want and (2) in a form that users can use for their purposes. Maybe I should say that this really is the ONLY useful function of an IDS. Continue reading →
David Maddox
Sound Science LLC
“How we doing?” asked the Ecological Manager? “Pretty well”, replied the Ecologist. “How much is pretty well?”, asks the Manager, since that’s what s/he needs to know. And not even just how much, but rather how much relative to what they wanted to accomplish in the first place.
Whether they are called “Measures of Success”, “Theories of Change”, or “Impact Monitoring”, or just “monitoring”, organizations should know whether their actions are effective, and whether they are making progress toward their organizational goals. They need to evaluate both the effectiveness of individual projects and the overall impact of their work; that is, they need to seek to understand how effectively their mission is being achieved. Such assessments involve specifically devised measures of success that are matched to institutional goals and rely on objective, transparent, and repeatable measurement methods. Continue reading →
