TCAST: The Future of Data & AI

What is TARTLEcoin?

TARTLEcoin is a private blockchain rewards system within the TARTLE marketplace. TARTLEcoin allows individuals to earn priority of receiving bids on the marketplace as their TARTLEcoin balance accrues to a larger value than other data champions. Meaning, as the balance of TARTLEcoin in your account grows, so does the probability of receiving more bids from data buyers.

 

How do I earn TARTLEcoin?

Earning TARTLEcoin is easy! TARTLE designed the rewards system to give you specific payout rewards of TARTLEcoin when you complete certain actions and tasks when using TARTLE. Every time you interact with data packets, share your journey, or donate to a Big 7 cause, you earn TARTLEcoin! In the simplest terms, the more work you put in, the more you are rewarded, and the more priority you receive to earn potential income.

 

What else can I do with TARTLEcoin?

TARTLEcoin can be shared with others you know who are on the marketplace to help get them started on their journey. Using the email address of another TARTLE user, you may transfer TARTLEcoin from the wallet screen of the marketplace.

 

How do I get started using TARTLEcoin?

In order to start earning TARTLEcoin, you must first visit the link below to create a personal PIN number for your new TARTLEcoin wallet.

 

Wallets https://source.tartle.co/sellers/wallets

TARTLEcoin is a private blockchain rewards system within the TARTLE marketplace. TARTLEcoin allows individuals to earn priority of receiving bids on the marketplace as their TARTLEcoin balance accrues to a larger value than other data champions. Meaning, as the balance of TARTLEcoin in your account grows, so does the probability of receiving more bids from data buyers. https://source.tartle.co/sellers/wallets

Time for another episode of cool things happening in the world of environmental research. Today, we have a project that is helping us better understand the forests. The tool being used for this project? Lasers!

Researchers from the University of Gottingen have been looking into the many different kinds of structures that exist in forests around the world. Using 3D laser scanners, they went all over the globe, recording 3D models of the forests they visited over the span of two years. One of the things they specifically focused on was primeval forests; those that haven’t had their development affected by humans. Believe it or not that is still about 30% of the world’s forests. One of the things these researchers hope to accomplish by doing this is to better understand how humans affect forest development by comparing and contrasting the different structures to be found in ancient forests and those that have been altered by human activity.

This looks to be very good research. For maybe the first time, scientists are doing a study into how humans affect forest development using an actual control group. Before, we had really only been comparing past information on a given forest with what is happening now. There is nothing wrong with that and it can still be very useful, but it can be very difficult to say with certainty how things might have been different. Now, with these 3D models that have been created, being used in conjunction with satellite data, researchers can find two areas of a similar forest structure and climate, one that has been affected by people and one that has not. Then they can be tracked over a period of time to observe how their development diverges. For perhaps the first time ever, they will be able to track two similar forest structures over a period of time, providing us with excellent information on the environment and our impact on it. 

Is that really possible? Isn’t most of the primeval forest actually rainforest in the south of the world and the human influenced stuff the boreal forests in the north? Not as much as you would think. There is plenty of rainforest in Brazil that has been affected by commercial development and there are other rainforests in North America in the states of Washington and Alaska that a person could wander in for days and not find a trace of humanity. There is plenty of boreal forest in North America and Northern Asia that is also untouched by humans. People don’t realize how many millions of acres are actually protected from any kind of development. 

There are of course different levels of development as well. Some areas of forest are surrounded by heavy human development, some have small towns scattered within them. Others have been logged and replanted while others are crisscrossed with trails for various off-road vehicles. Some of these forests have been developed in some way for decades, others for just a few years. 

This new study is valuable precisely because using the researchers’ methods, it will be possible to track these various stages and types of development to actually see what the long term effects are. The results will be a huge help to understanding human impact on the environment and helping us learn the best ways to minimize it while still making it possible for people to have homes to live in as well get out and enjoy some of that nature we are talking about. 

TARTLE would also like to commend the researchers on their use of our basic philosophy. They didn’t just rely on satellites and or reports from others. Instead, they did the hard work of going to the source and getting the primary data they needed to get the best possible results. 

What’s your data worth? www.tartle.co

What happens when researchers from the University of Gottingen take a bunch of high tech lasers to forests around the world? You get awesome 3D models of the different forest structures that exist. Alex and Jason discuss how these models will be used to get a better understanding of how humans influence the development of forests. www.tartle.co

Companies spend a ton of money on studies, both internal and from third parties. These studies are meant to evaluate their products and practices. What can they do better? What is the next thing people want to see? What do they never want to see again? All of these are important questions for any organization that exists to market any kind of product or service to others, whether it be baseball bats, rockets, or a homeless shelter. 

However, often the tools they use to conduct those studies and produce those reports discussed in meeting rooms around the nation are unreliable. Not dishonest necessarily, simply the wrong tool for the job. TARTLE is proposing a tool that will allow any organization to get the information they need to get truly reliable reports, reports that will accurately reflect where the organization is at and so help provide a more reliable guide for the future. You want every report to hit it out of the park and we want to help make that a reality. If that can be possible, then you will not only be successful, you’ll be so far ahead of the competition that they’ll be wondering how you managed to pull that off. 

What is it that makes those other tools so unreliable? After all, you’re spending plenty of cash for them, you would hope they would at least be reliable. The thing is, there is every incentive for these tools (other data and research companies) to make sure they get as much money out of you as they can. That means they may not always be producing the best product. Sometimes it just means they are producing a report that looks and sounds good. Be honest, a thick stack of paper with a glossy cover full of graphs and big words is impressive. While such things might be very impressive, they don’t necessarily make for good reports. Because at the end of the day what matters is not whether or not the report looks good, what matters is that it gives you the kind of information that will help your organization make effective decisions in the future. 

There is also the fact that those reports are going through a filter, someone else’s filter. Yes, you give them instructions and maybe even have some oversight, yet, everyone has a filter, an interpretative lens that is all but impossible to completely eradicate. Wouldn’t you rather the filter be yours? Wouldn’t you rather do the analysis in the way that you want it done so that you are getting the answers you need, not the answers someone else thinks you need?

The tool TARTLE offers lets you do exactly that. You are the one in full control of what data you get and how you analyze it. You also know exactly where it is coming from. We put you in direct contact with the individuals who are the sources for that data that gets aggregated by all those third parties. Would you or would not rather get the raw unfiltered data? Doing so lets you be flexible, lets you adjust things on the fly as needed so you are getting the information you need when you need it. That allows you to make much better, much more timely decisions than are possible when you are going with giant reports that take weeks or months and thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. 

Can it be risky to make a change? It can certainly seem that way. Changing the way things are done always implies some level of risk. Yet, no one ever got better, no one ever made a breakthrough or got out in front of the pack by not taking a risk. Do you want to be a Fortune 500 company or a Fortune 1 company? Take the risk and see what happens.

What’s your data worth? www.tartle.co

How do you get better? How do you become the best, the standout, the one that makes the breakthrough? You don’t do it by doing what everyone else is doing. You do it by doing something different, by taking a chance. TARTLE offers a different way of getting data, a better, more accurate, ethical, and reliable way to get the information you need. www.tartle.co

Remember how during the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 Australia seemed like it was entirely on fire? Record wildfires spread throughout much of the continent, turning the skies red. In fact, at some point, it even rained fire. Then, back over in the United States, there were massive wildfires in Oregon, California, and Colorado. These also turned the skies red and I even saw video of a fire tornado. Yes, a fire tornado. It looked like something out of a movie. It also put enough smoke into the atmosphere that it affected the color of the sunrise and sunset as far away as Michigan for a week. I don’t care who you are, that’s impressive. 

Fortunately, there are some ways to bring at least a sliver of good out of all those fires. Researchers took advantage of the situation and studied how the smoke affected the light reaching the earth. Naturally, it was less. What was more surprising though was that the smoke didn’t so much absorb the light and thus keep the heat in the Earth’s ecosystem as much as it scattered the light. That allows the heat to dissipate, with some of it even going off into space. The net result of all those wildfires is therefore actually a net drop in temperature. 

One of the really interesting things that the researchers found was that fires in different areas of the world created different kinds of smoke and therefore different scattering effects. For example, the fires in Oregon created darker smoke that scattered more light than the fires in Australia which was mostly burning dry brush. 

This data is important in that it helps us refine our climate models. The net cooling effect was something that was unexpected, meaning that our climate models were off and needed to be refined based on the new data.

That discovery points to one of the more important philosophical underpinnings of science in general – the concept that we should question what we think we know, that we should always be searching for better data to improve our understanding. Perhaps that is nowhere more important than in the realm of climate since we are basing policy off of our climate models. Given the importance of government regulation to the environment and to the economy, it is imperative that they continue to question what they think they know. In doing so, more research happens and people are able to find unexpected things, both good and bad, leading to models that more accurately reflect reality.

In other news on improving our data sets, a different group of researchers were having a problem tracking smelt populations. As scientists tend to do when they want to track animal movements and populations they tag the animals. The problem was, when they would check up on their tagged tiny fish, they found there were far more of them gone than they had predicted, without a corresponding population decrease. They were puzzled until they looked in the belly of a heron and found some of their tagged smelt. It turns out heron loves the little fish and doesn’t discriminate based on whether or not the critters have a tag. The discovery solved the mystery of the missing tagged fish and helped the scientists better understand the local ecosystem. 

What does all of this have to do with TARTLE? What is something that both anecdotes have in common? They both involve researchers solving a problem by getting as close to the source of the information as possible. That’s exactly what we advocate here at TARTLE. We want people to be able to get to the data’s source, you. That way, they can correct whatever assumptions and biases they might be starting out with and in the end make decisions that will actually make things better for everyone. 

What’s your data worth? www.tartle.co

What do wildfires and herons have in common? There have been recent studies into both that helped correct some basic assumptions and thus improve our understanding of nature. Alex and Jason discuss the importance of being able to refine your data and correct your preconceived notions about the way things work. www.tartle.co

There are a lot of different threats to the global economy out there. Civil unrest, wars, natural disasters, disease, and probably a few other things. One of the top threats recently identified by the World Economic Forum is cybersecurity, or rather the lack of it. That makes sense. We don’t say we live in the digital age for nothing. The whole world runs off of data and the various electronic devices that process, store, generate, and transmit it. If that data is not properly secured, it poses a threat to the very people generating it. There are certain companies and countries that are so entwined with the global economy, a successful cyberattack could cause a ripple effect that would affect people around the world across a variety of industries. Just imagine the damage that could be done if data centers used by Tyson or Oscar Meyer, or Monsanto were attacked. These companies affect a lot of the world’s food. Not to mention the militaries of the United States or China. If the computer networks for either country’s military were taken down, chaos would probably ensue. 

If someone really wanted to cause economic chaos, they’d go after the stock exchanges. Over 80% of trades made these days are done by bots. A successful cyberattack could destroy the NYSE before people even knew what was happening. 

On the individual level, your data is constantly getting sent out into the ether. Every app you download involves you giving up some kind of data that could be manipulated by nefarious actors, either for very particular ends or because they just enjoy messing with people’s lives. Just think about the facial recognition software on our phones. A company develops it, puts it on their phones, uses data from scanning your face to refine the algorithm and then goes and sells that algorithm to a foreign country or a company so they can use the new and improved facial recognition for their own ends, whatever they may be. 

Cybersecurity has also been made a much bigger issue thanks to COVID. Now, many people are working from home instead of going to the office. That means individuals are doing potentially sensitive work and sharing it through their home networks, which are very likely not as secure as what they had at work. The potential for industrial espionage is massive. Files once centralized at work are now vulnerable to exploitation from malware the kids might accidentally download on their tablet, or to potentially lax security on the part of whatever cloud services are being used. 

Fortunately, for many people, this is largely common sense. Lots of people now know at least at a surface level the kinds of dangers that exist online. Lots of people know about the dangers of malware, the need for a decent password (password is not a good password by the way) and even for a VPN to protect your IP address, making you much more difficult to track through the internet. 

Many companies are fully aware of the dangers as well. If you want to really see someone serious about cybersecurity, take a look at the financial institutions. Their firewalls have firewalls.

There is something that both individuals and corporations can do to keep their data secure. They can sign up with TARTLE. In doing so, they can sync their social media and other accounts with us, funneling your data through our VPN so it doesn’t just go to any number of third parties. We secure it and protect it. That means our users get full control over their data and who to share it with and when, giving all your data an extra layer of protection in the process.

What’s your data worth? www.tartle.co

The World Economic Forum has identified cybersecurity as one of the biggest threats to global economic security. And for good reason. We live in a digital age and the dependency of developed nations and the people in them on the internet has only gotten great in the rush to go digital in the wake of COVID. www.tartle.co