Beth Tellman
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socialpixel.bsky.social
Beth Tellman
@socialpixel.bsky.social

floods, satellites, maps, social justice, co-founder and chief scientist Floodbase and asst. prof University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-founder @umbela-org https://beth-tellman.github.io https://www.floodbase.com https://umbela.org .. more

Environmental science 52%
Geography 15%
Pinned
Excited to share me and (part of!) the Social Pixel Lab has moved to University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Ill be joining new faculty also hired under the RISE-Earth cluster to strengthen sustainability science, ed and outreach at UW rise.wisc.edu/rise-earth/
RISE-EARTH
By investing in the next generation of faculty leaders through RISE-EARTH, UW-Madison will be well poised to make even greater contributions to sustainability research, education and problem-solving i...
rise.wisc.edu

When people ask me about the biggest challenges for ai- data centers is the answer. It’s not about some algorithm development challenge or something- all ai scientists should be freaking out that the methods we use are causing massive environmental justice issues and we gotta figure it out
In Morrow County, healthy adults were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases that usually afflicted the elderly.

In a survey of 30 homes, at least 25 miscarriages and a half dozen people living with one kidney were reported.

🔗 www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...
We @uam-umd.bsky.social won. Faculty packed town halls, talked to their colleagues and collected hundreds of petition signatures. Now UMD is coughing up $8.75m, during a deficit, to fund faculty whose research is under attack. Not enough, but a helluva thing for a union the state calls illegal.
$8.75M Investment Supports ‘Research Resilience’… | Maryland Today
UMD, MPower Funds Combine to Help Preserve Institutional Capabilities, Lab Operations and More
today.umd.edu
In Morrow County, healthy adults were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases that usually afflicted the elderly.

In a survey of 30 homes, at least 25 miscarriages and a half dozen people living with one kidney were reported.

🔗 www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...
WE JUST KEEP WINNING. (UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program RESTORED!!!!)

The mural also shows the border wall along the Rio grande, the history of agricultural labor, the development of homes electricity education and other futures, the resistance and fight for better healthcare and labor conditions and wages. And so much more!

Mural outside the LUPE offices (La union del Pueblo entero) by Alexandra Ramirez and Norma Perez showing the valley’s history- you see depicted the agricultural and irrigation development- which shapes flood vulnerability today when the canals overflow www.texastribune.org/2024/09/19/l...
At this South Texas political convention, everyone has a voice, regardless of legal status - The Texas Tribune
Inspired by the work of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, the biennial “cumbre” helps South Texans organize for political change.
www.texastribune.org

Always wonderful to spend time in the Rio Grande Valley with @lucasbelury.bsky.social reading the landscape grateful to spend time in colonias and with community based org ARISE grounding flood dynamics we see from space with lived experiences for the March 2025 floods and role infrastructure plays

@mirelagtulbure.bsky.social I am really excited to see your terremind results!! :)

Reposted by Clark Gray

join us with the Global Flood Partnership next Wednesday am for our ALL WOMEN remote sensing and flooding webinar! @mirelagtulbure.bsky.social @ekta-aggarwal.bsky.social and I discuss AI and flood mapping +applications re: migration + emergency response www.globalfloodpartnership.org/events/gfp-2...
GFP 2025 fall webinar series | Global Flood Partnership
www.globalfloodpartnership.org

Reposted by Beth Tellman

Job alert!! Project Drawdown is hiring for 3 roles:

🌐 Program Manager, Global Strategic Partnerships (deadline: Nov 7)
🔬 Research Fellow (deadline: Nov 2)
💹 Senior Analyst, Climate Philanthropy & Investing (deadline: Nov 19)

🔗 View the position descriptions here: drawdown.org/careers
#ClimateJobs
https://drawdown.org/caree…

and by images I mean labeled images- ones you can use to go test and train your own algorithms. go poke our results and test your own models. test another foundation model. try some few shot experiments etc! see if alphaearth does anything meaningful. and do let us know what you find!

latest out from our lab- led by Saurabh Kaushik- we find at least one geofoundational model (just testing Privthi here) is outperforming CNNs and transformers for mapping glaciers (esp. termini and snouts). we released a dataset with >1800 global images with it too! doi.org/10.1016/j.sr...
Redirecting
doi.org

launching the AI for a planet under pressure report with @sthlmresilience.bsky.social and Google's Deep Mind this Wednesday am- Ill be speaking about the role of AI in flooding and climate justice- link here- I will be teaching an undergrad class on this content spring 26! su.bmc.nu/Modules/Even...
AI for a planet under pressure PUBLIC EVENT
su.bmc.nu
The western end of Jamaica where #Melissa is projected to make landfall has the least well-built structures of anyplace on the island. Graphic is from a 2021 paper, "Poverty and hurricane risk exposure in Jamaica": www.researchgate.net/publication/...
BREAKING: economist discovers “second shift,” a concept coined by sociologists almost 50 years ago; gives it new, stupider, and less explicitly labor-oriented name

Social pixel lab social last month. Someone said to me in my first week the uw memorial union is the best place to get a beer on any college campus in the us. I’m pretty sure that’s true :) lake life!!!

Organizers: Beth Tellman (University of Wisconsin Madison), Bertha Hernandez Aguilar (National Laboratory of Sustainability Sciences, Institute of Ecology, UNAM). Sponsored by the Human Dimensions of Global Change and Hazards Specialty Groups

Reposted by Clark Gray

Do you work on vulnerability and or dimensions of power or politics in cities? We'd love you in our #aag2026 session email us by oct 31 with your abstract->The role of formal and informal power structures in shaping vulnerability and risk in cities from the Global North to the Global South.
Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.
Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory
An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC
www.bbc.co.uk
News that shocks no one: Carbon offsets do nothing for climate.
Carbon offsets fail to cut global heating due to ‘intractable’ systemic problems, study says
Analysis of 25 years of evidence shows most schemes are poor quality and fail to lower emissions
www.theguardian.com

another consequence of failing to take action before the shutdown- the national flood insurance program lapsed on Sept 30- which insures 5M us homes www.realtor.com/advice/finan...
www.realtor.com

Horrific and wrong we cannot let this continue to happen in our country
According to eyewitnesses, armed ICE agents dragged kids out of their beds in the middle of the night, zip tied them and put them in rented vans while raiding an * entire apartment building* on the South Side of Chicago.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOXO...
‘F--- them kids’: ICE agents drag children out of bed, ransack Chicago building
YouTube video by MSNBC
www.youtube.com
According to eyewitnesses, armed ICE agents dragged kids out of their beds in the middle of the night, zip tied them and put them in rented vans while raiding an * entire apartment building* on the South Side of Chicago.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOXO...
‘F--- them kids’: ICE agents drag children out of bed, ransack Chicago building
YouTube video by MSNBC
www.youtube.com

I know yall do and I feel so lucky to be somewhere with so many internal grants to access :) it’s why I’m writing so many!!

when designing an index- check out multiple sources of data to see what converges or diverges before designing a policy. You might need multiple indices to increase your confidence you pay out in the right floods and lower your basis risk. using a simple rainfall index could fail to trigger beware!

TLDR. satellite, rainfall, stream gauge data all tell you something different about floods and if you pick one for index insurance- that matters! the AI based satellite product we developed (MODIS+S1) has lower uncertainty (would could make premiums cheaper) and pays out sooner than others

But damn this is exhausting and maddening. I don’t do science anymore I just perma-fundraise for what was lost. Instead I could have been making flood maps and training more people and organizations to make them. But now I just beg for money to do these things. Hopefully something hits!!

Wrapping up my 8th and 9th grant since April when almost all my labs funding was terminated. $1.1M. So far got $330k funded by rewriting a grant for work I was supposedly funded to do. This is the least fun I have had in this job. I know I am sadly not alone and more important things are defunded