Dot Earth Blog: An Earth Day Thought: Litter Matters

My maternal grandfather, I. Henry Stern, was the person in my life who most impressed on me the merits of cleaning up after yourself — and others if need be. When you enter a room, he'd say, leave it better than you found it. Click here for more Dot Earth trash talk. Here's an Earth Day weekend Twitter post showing one way such attitudes matter:

I'm at @eaglehillschool to talk for #EarthDay. Ms. Mechaley shows impacts of plastic trash. https://t.co/UuXVC2m9C7 http://t.co/fCTGs3pK96

— Andy Revkin (@Revkin) 19 Apr 13

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Unboxed: Big Data, Trying to Build Better Workers

BOSSES, as it turns out, really do matter — perhaps far more than even they realize.

In telephone call centers, for example, where hourly workers handle a steady stream of calls under demanding conditions, the communication skills and personal warmth of an employee's supervisor are often crucial in determining the employee's tenure and performance. In fact, recent research shows that the quality of the supervisor may be more important than the experience and individual attributes of the workers themselves.

New research calls into question other beliefs. Employers often avoid hiring candidates with a history of job-hopping or those who have been unemployed for a while. The past is prologue, companies assume. There's one problem, though: the data show that it isn't so. An applicant's work history is not a good predictor of future results.

These are some of the startling findings of an emerging field called work-force science. It adds a large dose of data analysis, a k a Big Data, to the field of human resource management, which has traditionally relied heavily on gut feel and established practice to guide hiring, promotion and career planning.

Work-force science, in short, is what happens when Big Data meets H.R.

The new discipline has its champions. "This is absolutely the way forward," says Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "Most companies have been flying completely blind."

Today, every e-mail, instant message, phone call, line of written code and mouse-click leaves a digital signal. These patterns can now be inexpensively collected and mined for insights into how people work and communicate, potentially opening doors to more efficiency and innovation within companies.

Digital technology also makes it possible to conduct and aggregate personality-based assessments, often using online quizzes or games, in far greater detail and numbers than ever before.

In the past, studies of worker behavior were typically based on observing a few hundred people at most. Today, studies can include thousands or hundreds of thousands of workers, an exponential leap ahead.

"The heart of science is measurement," says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. "We're seeing a revolution in measurement, and it will revolutionize organizational economics and personnel economics."

The data-gathering technology, to be sure, raises questions about the limits of worker surveillance. "The larger problem here is that all these workplace metrics are being collected when you as a worker are essentially behind a one-way mirror," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group. "You don't know what data is being collected and how it is used."

Companies view work-force data mainly as a valuable asset. Last December, for example, I.B.M. completed its $1.3 billion acquisition of Kenexa, a recruiting, hiring and training company. Kenexa's corps of more than 100 industrial organizational psychologists and researchers was one attraction, but so was its data: Kenexa surveys and assesses 40 million job applicants, workers and managers a year.

Big companies like I.B.M., Oracle and SAP are pursuing the business opportunity. So is eHarmony, the online matchmaking service. It announced in January that it would retool its algorithm for romance so it could examine employee-employer relationships, and enter the talent search business later this year.

THE penchant for digital measurement and monitoring seems most suited to hourly employment, where jobs often involve routine tasks. But will this technology also be useful in identifying and nurturing successful workers in less-regimented jobs? Many companies think so, and can point to some encouraging evidence.

Tim Geisert, chief marketing officer for I.B.M.'s Kenexa unit, observed that an outgoing personality has traditionally been assumed to be the defining trait of successful sales people. But its research, based on millions of worker surveys and tests, as well as manager assessments, has found that the most important characteristic for sales success is a kind of emotional courage, a persistence to keep going even after initially being told no.

The team of behavioral and data scientists at Knack, a Silicon Valley start-up firm, uses computer games and constant measurement to test emotional intelligence, cognitive skills, working memory and propensity for risk-taking. Early pilot testers include the NYU Langone Medical Center, Bain & Company and a unit of Shell, says Guy Halfteck, Knack's C.E.O.

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Florida Sues BP Over Gulf Oil Spill

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — The state of Florida filed a lawsuit Saturday against the oil company BP and the cement contractor Halliburton over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, becoming the fourth state to seek damages for the 2010 disaster.

The suit, among other things, faults BP for not changing the batteries on the rig's blowout preventer. It also accuses Halliburton of installing faulty cement barriers.

The complaint by the Florida attorney general, Pam Bondi, was filed in United States District Court in Panama City. The federal court has jurisdiction under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.

Florida is the fourth state to sue over the spill; Mississippi sued on Friday, joining Alabama and Louisiana, which are part of a federal trial in New Orleans against BP and its contractors.

A BP spokesman declined to comment and press officers from Halliburton could not be reached.

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California Failed to Spend Millions on Water Projects, E.P.A. Says

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — California has failed to spend $455 million of federal money meant to improve water infrastructure in the state, while thousands of people rely on groundwater laced with nitrates and other contaminants, federal regulators said Friday.

The state has received more than $1.5 billion for its Safe Drinking Water State Revolving Fund over the past 15 years, but has failed to spend a large part of it in a timely manner, according to a noncompliance letter from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to the state's public health department. The amount is the program's largest unspent sum in the nation, the EPA said.

The fund gives out loans to public and private water systems for drinking water infrastructure improvements, including treatment facilities, pipelines and other projects. In recent years, California has received an estimated $80 million in federal money annually for the fund. The state provides a 20 percent match and manages the loan repayments which helps replenish the fund.

"It's really unacceptable," EPA's regional administrator, Jared Blumenfeld, said of the unspent funds. "It's not like there is a lack of projects. It's a lot of money in this day and age."

The $455 million includes money that has been committed to projects but has not been spent because the projects are not shovel-ready, said Blumenfeld. But because the money is already committed, other water systems that are in need cannot apply for it, he said.

The EPA also found that California also lacks a good system of financial oversight and accountability for the fund. As a result, the state did not accurately calculate revenue from ongoing loan repayments into the fund, the EPA said, meaning an additional $260 million is available for water projects.

In response to the EPA, Department of Public Health director Ron Chapman wrote in a letter, "I acknowledge the seriousness of the notice and will take all steps necessary to address the compliance issues identified in the letter."

The state has 60 days to come up with an improvement plan — or the EPA may suspend future payments.

By the end of 2012, the EPA said California has disbursed 63 percent of its federal safe drinking water funding, while the national average was 81 percent.

Part of California's struggle to spend the money, Blumenfeld said, is that the state prefers funding projects from medium and large water systems that are years away from being launched. He said the state should make more money available to smaller communities that are in immediate need — especially those struggling with contaminated drinking water.

More than half of California's population relies on a drinking water supply contaminated by arsenic, nitrates and other contaminants, though most communities blend or treat their water to make it safe, according to the State Water Resources Control Board.

Nitrate contamination of drinking water is one of the most pervasive problems, especially in California's agricultural heartland and will intensify in coming years, according to a University of California, Davis study released last March.

The study — covering the Salinas Valley and Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern counties — found that half of the 2.6 million people in those areas live in communities where raw drinking water sources have registered nitrate levels exceeding the standard.

While many of those communities blend or treat their water, drill a new well or provide another alternative source, one in 10 people in the study area rely on untreated groundwater that may exceed the nitrate standards. Most are residents of small, poor agricultural communities.

Scientists have linked high levels of nitrates to "blue baby syndrome," reproductive disorders and cancer. Infants who drink water that exceeds the nitrate standard could become seriously ill and die, according the EPA.

Many of the residents whose water is contaminated pay for their own bottled water for drinking and cooking, in addition to paying for the contaminated water.

Accessing this kind of funding means the difference between having safe drinking water or not in many communities, said Laurel Firestone, co-director of the Community Water Center, a nonprofit advocating for safe drinking water in the Central California.

"Many of the communities we work with have gone a decade or more trying to make their way through the funding bureaucracy to access these funds," she said. They "have lacked access to safe drinking water in their homes and schools. ... Their applications for funding seem to be in a never-ending game of Chutes and Ladders."

Last year, California was the first state to pass the Human Right to Water Act, which established as state policy that every Californian has a human right to safe, clean, affordable and accessible drinking water. The state, Firestone said, has a long way to go to making that a reality.

According to federal regulators, California needs $39 billion in capital improvements through 2026 for water systems to continue providing safe drinking water to the public. That includes both updating old infrastructure and building new infrastructure to deal with water contamination problems.

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Fertilizers Meet Fire, With Disastrous Consequences

Adrees Latif/Reuters

An aerial view of the aftermath of a huge explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Tex. The blast on Wednesday night was caused by a fire inside the plant.

While it is still not clear what caused the explosion at a fertilizer plant that destroyed or damaged much of West, Tex., on Wednesday, the disaster is a reminder that for all the good that fertilizers do in increasing crop yields, they can also prove lethal under certain conditions.

The plant had large amounts of two commercial fertilizers, anhydrous ammonia and ammonium nitrate. Both chemicals have been linked to explosions in the past.

Anhydrous ammonia is a colorless, corrosive gas that is stored as a liquid under pressure; farmers inject it into the soil. "People mostly think of it as a toxic chemical that can cause breathing problems," said Sam Mannan, a professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University. "But it's also a flammable and explosive material."

The gas must mix with air in relatively high proportions to ignite, so it is less dangerous than natural gas or gasoline under ordinary conditions. But Dr. Mannan suggested one way an anhydrous ammonia explosion might occur: If during a fire an ammonia tank were to be breached, the gas would mix with the air until it reached the proper concentration, at which point it would be ignited by the fire. The catastrophe at the West plant began with a fire.

Ammonium nitrate, which is usually sold in granular form, can be mixed with fuel oil to become a powerful explosive that is used often in industry and occasionally by terrorists. But Dr. Mannan said that even by itself the chemical can explode under the right conditions — if it is heated in a confined space during a fire, for example.

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Mississippi Suing BP Over Gulf Oil Spill

Mississippi has become the third state to sue BP over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. State Attorney General Jim Hood said on Friday that the state had filed suits in federal and state court. Mr. Hood said he wanted to settle, but he said BP refused to negotiate. A spokeswoman for BP did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Louisiana and Alabama sued BP earlier and are participating in a federal trial in New Orleans to determine the liability of BP and its contractors. Mississippi had not been participating because it had not sued.

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Two Promising Places to Live, 1,200 Light-Years From Earth

American Association for the Advancement of Science

An artist's impression of a sunrise on Kepler 62f. The two outer planets of the Kepler 62 system may lie in the habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface.

Astronomers said Thursday that they had found the most Earth-like worlds yet known in the outer cosmos, a pair of planets that appear capable of supporting life and that orbit a star 1,200 light-years from here, in the northern constellation Lyra.

They are the two outermost of five worlds circling a yellowish star slightly smaller and dimmer than our Sun, heretofore anonymous and now destined to be known in the cosmic history books as Kepler 62, after NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which discovered them. These planets are roughly half again as large as Earth and are presumably balls of rock, perhaps covered by oceans with humid, cloudy skies, although that is at best a highly educated guess.

Nobody will probably ever know if anything lives on these planets, and the odds are that humans will travel there only in their faster-than-light dreams, but the news has sent astronomers into heavenly raptures. William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center, head of the Kepler project, described one of the new worlds as the best site for Life Out There yet found in Kepler's four-years-and-counting search for other Earths. He treated his team to pizza and beer on his own dime to celebrate the find (this being the age of sequestration). "It's a big deal," he said.

Looming brightly in each other's skies, the two planets circle their star at distances of 37 million and 65 million miles, about as far apart as Mercury and Venus in our solar system. Most significantly, their orbits place them both in the "Goldilocks" zone of lukewarm temperatures suitable for liquid water, the crucial ingredient for Life as We Know It.

Goldilocks would be so jealous.

Previous claims of Goldilocks planets with "just so" orbits snuggled up to red dwarf stars much dimmer and cooler than the Sun have had uncertainties in the size and mass and even the existence of these worlds, said David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, an exoplanet hunter and member of the Kepler team.

"This is the first planet that ticks both boxes," Dr. Charbonneau said, speaking of the outermost planet, Kepler 62f. "It's the right size and the right temperature." Kepler 62f is 40 percent bigger than Earth and smack in the middle of the habitable zone, with a 267-day year. In an interview, Mr. Borucki called it the best planet Kepler has found.

Its mate, known as Kepler 62e, is slightly larger — 60 percent bigger than Earth — and has a 122-day orbit, placing it on the inner edge of the Goldilocks zone. It is warmer but also probably habitable, astronomers said.

The Kepler 62 system resembles our own solar system, which also has two planets in the habitable zone: Earth — and Mars, which once had water and would still be habitable today if it were more massive and had been able to hang onto its primordial atmosphere.

The Kepler 62 planets continue a string of breakthroughs in the last two decades in which astronomers have gone from detecting the first known planets belonging to other stars, or exoplanets, broiling globs of gas bigger than Jupiter, to being able to discern smaller and smaller more moderate orbs — iceballs like Neptune and, now, bodies only a few times the mass of Earth, known technically as super-Earths. Size matters in planetary affairs because we can't live under the crushing pressure of gas clouds on a world like Jupiter. Life as We Know It requires solid ground and liquid water — a gentle terrestrial environment, in other words.

Kepler 62's newfound worlds are not quite small enough to be considered strict replicas of Earth, but the results have strengthened the already strong conviction among astronomers that the galaxy is littered with billions of Earth-size planets, perhaps as many as one per star, and that astronomers will soon find Earth 2.0, as they call it — our lost twin bathing in the rays of an alien sun.

"Kepler and other experiments are finding planets that remind us more and more of home," said Geoffrey Marcy, a longtime exoplanet hunter at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kepler team member. "It's an amazing moment in science. We haven't found Earth 2.0 yet, but we can taste it, smell it, right there on our technological fingertips."

A team of 60 authors, led by Mr. Borucki, reported the discovery of the Kepler 62 planets on Thursday in an article published online in the journal Science and at a news conference at Ames.

As if that weren't enough, a group led by Thomas Barclay of Ames and the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute also reported the discovery of a planet 1.7 times as big as Earth hovering on the inner, warmer edge of the Goldilocks zone of Kepler 69, a star almost identical to the Sun, 2,700 light-years distant. At the news conference, Dr. Barclay described the planet as perhaps a "Super-Venus." The group's paper was published on Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 18, 2013

A headline on an earlier version of this article misstated the distance of the newly discovered planets from earth. They are 1,200 light-years away, not 12,000 light-years away.

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Dot Earth Blog: On Pipelines, Pulitzers and Independent Online Journalism

I encourage you to take a few minutes to watch and weigh in on the illuminating online chat I had yesterday with Inside Climate News publisher David Sassoon, editor Susan White and reporter Lisa Song.

We explored the comprehensive series of articles on environmental risks from America's fast-growing maze of oil pipelines that earned the tiny, foundation-supported Web site the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on Monday.

This is the third online news outlet to win a Pulitzer (one prize for Huffington Post and two for Pro Publica). There'll surely be more.

In our Google+ Hangout, we talk about the site's reporting package, which charted the causes, impacts and significance of a million-gallon spill of diluted bitumen in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan in 2010 but expanded to look at the outdated rules for pipeline monitoring and safety. Bitumen is the very crude oil extracted from Canada's enormous deposits of oil sands. Early on, Inside Climate News began using the shorthand "dilbit" for this substance and the name is catching on, including in the title of the new e-book consolidating the reporting — "The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You've Never Heard Of."

One of my questions:

Is the solution to ban pipelines or to have more rigorous oversight?

Susan White replied:

The idea that we're building pipelines using rules and regulations that are out of date is appalling. Forget whether you want pipelines or you want Canadian crude oil. That's a separate debate…. More than 10,000 miles of new or repurposed pipelines are planned for the United States in the next few years. Why aren't we making sure that they're safer?

I noted that it appeared to me that prominent environmental groups don't want to discuss safer pipelines:

As soon as you say you want to make it safer you're basically saying it's okay.

Sassoon said this dynamic exists, and shifted the chat toward the pipeline of the moment, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline extension that would allow more Canadian oil to flow to American refineries:

We don't have an energy and climate policy in this country. So Keystone is the fulcrum around which that discussion is happening, even though it's not a particularly deep discussion.

He called for President Obama to hit the "pause" button, given the big environmental stakes and implications for climate change. [Please have a look back at Sassoon's 2012 Op-Ed article for The Times, "Crude, Dirty and Dangerous," for more.]

Lisa Song described the technologies that are available, at a cost, to improve pipeline reliability and safety. The final piece in the Pulitzer submission noted that the Keystone plan doesn't include advanced spill-protection technology.

Then we shifted into a discussion of the financial model for Inside Climate — which was launched with grants from the Energy Foundation, Grantham Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other philanthropies — and mused on whether this kind of media outlet can be sustained and replicated.

White, in part, said:

I think the ones that survive and prosper will be the ones that focus on what we try to focus on — following the basic core tenets of good journalism and building that trust over time.

There's much more.

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Senate Committee Approves Ernest J. Moniz, Energy Secretary Nominee

WASHINGTON — The Senate energy committee formally approved the nomination of Ernest J. Moniz to be energy secretary, the committee announced on Thursday.

The 21-to-1 vote is an indication that Mr. Moniz, who served as an undersecretary in the Energy Department in the Clinton administration, will have no trouble being confirmed by the full Senate. Some opponents had complained that an energy initiative he leads at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is financed heavily by the oil industry and other conventional energy industries. Mr. Moniz is a physicist and strong advocate of natural gas and nuclear power as cleaner alternatives to coal.

The dissenter was Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, who had tried during Mr. Moniz's confirmation hearing to pin him down on a major project at a nuclear facility near Aiken, S.C., to convert plutonium from retired nuclear weapons into fuel for power reactors. The project has turned out to be far more difficult than first envisioned, and may be canceled. Mr. Scott has been urging its completion.

Mr. Moniz would not say whether the project would be finished. About $6 billion has been spent on the plant. Mr. Moniz was involved in negotiating the treaty with Russia on destruction of plutonium, and the project in South Carolina is supposed to uphold the American end of that deal.

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Fish’s DNA May Explain How Fins Turned Into Feet

Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Scientists who have decoded the genome of the coelacanth say the results suggest that another lobe-finned fish, the lungfish, is closer to the ancestral fish that first used its fins to walk on land. Here, a coelacanth caught by Kenyan fishermen in 2001 was examined by members of the National Museum of Kenya.

In the hope of reconstructing a pivotal step in evolution — the colonization of land by fish that learned to walk and breathe air — researchers have decoded the genome of the coelacanth, a prehistoric-looking fish whose form closely resembles those seen in the fossils of 400 million years ago.

Often called a living fossil, the coelacanth (pronounced SEE-luh-canth) was long believed to have fallen extinct 70 million years ago, until a specimen was recognized in a fish market in South Africa in 1938. The coelacanth has fleshy, lobed fins that look somewhat like limbs, as does the lungfish, an air-breathing freshwater fish. The coelacanth and the lungfish have long been battling for the honor of which is closer to the ancestral fish that first used fins to walk on land and give rise to the tetrapods, meaning all the original vertebrates and their descendants, from reptiles and birds to mammals.

The decoding of the coelacanth genome, reported online Wednesday in the journal Nature, is a victory for the lungfish as the closer relative to the first tetrapod. But the coelacanth may have the last laugh because its genome — which, at 2.8 billion units of DNA, is about the same size as a human genome — is decodable, whereas the lungfish genome, a remarkable 100 billion DNA units in length, cannot be cracked with present methods. The coelacanth genome is therefore more likely to shed light on the central evolutionary question of what genetic alterations were needed to change a lobe-finned fish into the first land-dwelling tetrapod.

The idea of decoding the coelacanth genome began six years ago when Chris Amemiya, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, acquired some samples of coelacanth tissue. He asked the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., a biological research institute in Cambridge, Mass., to decode the DNA and invited experts in evolutionary and developmental biology to help interpret the results.

Dr. Amemiya's team has sifted through the coelacanth's genome for genes that might have helped its cousin species, the ancestor to the first tetrapod, invade dry land some 400 million years ago. They have found one gene that is related to those that, in animal species, build the placenta. Coelacanths have no placenta, but they produce extremely large eggs, with a good blood supply, that hatch inside the mother's body. This gene could have been developed by land animals into a way of constructing the placenta.

Another helpful preadaptation is a snippet of DNA that enhances the activity of the genes that drive the formation of limbs in the embryo. The Amemiya team focused on the enhancer DNA sequence because it occurred in the coelacanth and animals but not in ordinary fish. They then inserted the coelacanth enhancer DNA into mice.

"It lit up right away and made an almost normal limb," said Neil Shubin, meaning that the coelacanth gene enhancer successfully encouraged the mouse genes to make a limb. Dr. Shubin, a member of the team, is a paleontologist at the University of Chicago.

Present-day coelacanths are ferocious predators that live in a twilight zone about 500 feet deep where light barely penetrates. They lurk in caves during the day and emerge at night to attack surface fish as they descend and deep-sea fish as they rise to the surface. They have no evident need of fins that might help them walk on land.

"This is probably an unusual habitat for this lineage," said Axel Meyer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany and a member of the team. "Other coelacanths lived in more shallow, estuarylike environments 400 million years ago, and you can envisage them using the fins more like walking legs."

The Amemiya team reports evidence that the coelacanth's genes have been evolving more slowly than those of mammals, possibly because of "a static habitat and lack of predators." But its environment must have changed quite considerably over the last 400 million years, Dr. Meyer said. Its principal habitat at present is the caves beneath the Comoro Islands in the Indian Ocean, but since these are extinct volcanoes a mere 5 million to 10 million years old, they must be a quite recent home for the coelacanth.

The Amemiya team does not possess a full coelacanth — these are endangered species — and decoded the genome from tissues obtained from Rosemary Dorrington of Rhodes University in South Africa. Dr. Dorrington supplied DNA kits to the Comoro Islands fishermen who occasionally snag coelacanths by accident. When a coelacanth was captured in 2003, they preserved blood and tissues, which were given to Dr. Dorrington and kept frozen, Dr. Amemiya said.

The specimen was preserved in Moroni, the capital of the Comoro Islands, but Dr. Amemiya has been unable to find out where it is now because of the constant state of civil war in the islands, he said.

Can he be certain, then, that the tissue came from a coelacanth? "Oh, no question," Dr. Amemiya said. "We have DNA from several other coelacanths, from Africa and Indonesia, which is very similar to this one." The one caught in 2003 was identified as a coelacanth by Said Ahamada, a South African expert, Dr. Amemiya said.

Because the original specimen is not available and the DNA sequencing is incomplete, the Amemiya team does not know its sex.

Lobe-finned fish like the coelacanth and lungfish are known to zoologists as sarcopterygians, meaning fleshy fins. Tetrapods, including people, are descended from this group, and the coelacanth is more closely related to people than to other fish. "Evolutionarily speaking, we are sarcopterygian fish," Dr. Meyer said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 17, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified the year in which a coelacanth, then believed to be extinct, was recognized in a fish market in South Africa. It was 1938, not 1908. 

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