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How to Talk to Climate-Minded Investors About Data Centers

This week’s conversation is with Colette Lamontagne, senior director for electric power at the sustainability finance advocacy group Ceres. Her team just released a shareholder engagement guide for the utility space around data center development. I’ve been wondering when the ESG crowd would enter into the AI infrastructure fray, so I asked if I could chat with Colette about what the guide could teach my lovely readers and whether the data center backlash portends a new wave of boardroom fights between electric companies and institutional investors. Our conversation was lightly edited for clarity. What is the big message of this guide? If you were to talk about this over a coffee, what would be the topline takeaway? These data centers are coming, but they can be done right. They don’t have to be done in a way that negatively impacts energy, water, and communities, and we need to slow down just enough to be able to do it right. It’s not a guide about what data centers should do — it's a guide on the risks to the electric power sector. The biggest risk is the magnitude of power needed and the timing — how quickly it’s needed. Because of...

www.universetoday.com

Astronomers Find a New Object from the Early Universe Using Webb Data

On July 12th, 2022, the first images acquired by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were released to the public. The collection showcased the high-resolution and incredible imaging ability of the infrared observatory. They also highlighted how advancements since the days of the venerable Hubble Space Telescope could provide deeper and clearer views of the cosmos. This was especially evident with the galaxy cluster MACS J0308.9+2645, a deep field image originally taken by Hubble showcasing galaxy clusters and several gravitational lenses. These lenses, in turn, revealed even more distant galaxies that existed 13 billion years ago, when the Universe was just 1 billion years old. These galaxies appear as distorted "gravitational arcs" in the image, their light having been warped and amplified by the MACS J0308.9+2645 cluster's gravitational field. As it turns out, there were more galaxies remaining to be found. In a recent paper, astrophysicist Homer Dávila Gutierrez identified another gravitational arc candidate in the galaxy cluster MACS J0308.9+2645. Dr. Gutierrez is the founder and director of SKYCR.ORG, the leading Spanish-language news source for astronomy and space exploration, the first Costa Rican elected Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (FRAS), and a member of the European Astronomical Society (EAS)...

heatmap.news

How the National Park Service Wound Up in a Data Center Deal

A national park site and Civil War conflict area in Virginia is now a battleground in the fight over data center development on federal real estate — and Congress is starting to get involved. On July 23, the Prince William Times reported that Trump’s National Park Service is “considering a land swap” to allow “at least four data centers” on land within the boundaries of Prince William Forest Park in northern Virginia, one of the largest green spaces in the Washington D.C. metro area and a flashpoint during the Civil War. Since then, my colleagues and I have confirmed based on interviews with sources familiar with the plan, public lobbying disclosures, and previously unreported correspondence from Congress to the Park Service that, indeed, there has been a concerted behind-the-scenes effort to make this swap happen, going back more than a year. Many of those concerned about the idea of this exchange told me they’ve been unable to get clear answers from the Park Service on the likelihood of the swap. Here’s what we do know: A data center development company, Highland Digital, under an LLC registered by their legal counsel, has sought permission from Prince William County to build a...

news.northeastern.edu

When human knowledge has been exhausted, where will AI get its data?

Graduate student Harsh Raj explores cutting-edge LLMs in search of data that could one day help them think like a Nobel Prize winner. As AI large language models, or LLMs, grow in power and sophistication, where will their architects turn when, someday — as experts predict — algorithms outgrow the limits of general human knowledge and begin craving information possessed by only the world’s most elite thinkers and creators? Worrying as it might seem, this quest for the next frontier of data is already underway, spearheaded by research engineers in the technology industry, according to Harsh Raj, a graduate student in Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Raj is one such intrepid explorer. As part of his two, high-profile co-ops, Raj has plumbed the depths of the most cutting-edge LLMs in search of data that could one day help them think like a winner of a Nobel Prize or Fields Medal — the highest prize for someone in mathematics — he said. LLMs are a type of artificial intelligence trained on massive amounts of data so that they can understand and create human-like writing. They can process text, summarize lengthy documents or write code in accordance with specific prompts...

www.newswise.com

Research Data Infrastructure: Getting More Insights from Every Experiment

Newswise — Research data is the basis of scientific knowledge. However, valuable measurement results often remain unused after a project has ended or can hardly be related to data from other disciplines. The National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) sets standards and creates services so that researchers from different disciplines can easily find and reuse data. Knowledge is no longer lost, but can be incorporated into new research projects. This is why the German federal and state governments have decided to fund the ten consortia involved in the second NFDI funding round with roughly EUR 71 million until the end of 2028. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) participates in five of these consortia that manage data from individual disciplines. The five consortia where KIT is involved cover a broad range of research topics including environment and climate, materials sciences, and physics fundamental research...

urbn.is

The American Affordability Tracker

Timely data on Americans’ finances and the cost of basic needs by state and congressional district.

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Building EHS Management Systems for the AI Era, Online, August 25, 2 - 3 pm ET - Green Building Events - Rate It Green

AI is transforming the way organizations manage risk, compliance, and performance. However, establishing a strong foundation before adopting advanced...