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xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

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71–75 of 75 posts

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#71
post #7

On one hand this effort sounds like a good way to generate some interesting concepts. On the other hand, as a long-time resident of a rural, wildfire-prone area, it's also important to educate the public and politicians that there is a large body of proven land management best practices that can already significantly improve prevention, control and mitigation. While we can always do better, we often aren't sufficient…

yep. xprize is a pile of money thay billionaires threw around to avoid taxes and get rockets... then forgot about.

some craft ong parasites infiltrated it and now it's a huge money maker for them. and they sell the prizes to anyone needing PR. did you just leaked oil near first world waters? let's do a xprize on oil clean up drones ny highschoolers!

the org chart is a bunch of VPs taking home a cool mi a year, with a bunch of sales person underneath (director of charity. director of giving. etc. look at their open positions page at any point in time. they churn these fast too.)

they will not focus on any meaningful result, like you outlined. only on the innovation as a cult PR.

for example, their rain forest one can be solved tomorrow by keeping the US out of couping countries with rainforest, if you were to trust data. but i guess that won't get the vote of a Hollywood actor or a swiss professor who literally have a course on using drones for ecology preservation.

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#73
post #69
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I think they’re more than “a bit of a pain” in Australia. Bushfire season always kills a few people every year, but it’s only because of us taking fires very seriously and having defense in depth and early evacuation protocols that it doesn’t kill way more. There are cases like 2009 where more than 170 people died, which still may not sound like much for a population of 20 million, but it was mostly in the Kingla…

Yeah I grew up in rural Australia. I get why it would be useful. Just travelling opened my eyes to much bigger fire problems is all. The pollution caused by slash and burn is estimated to cause ~11k deaths a year in Thailand alone, I imagine the numbers are much worse in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. I'm not saying I don't appreciate improvements in detecting and maybe preventing bush fires just trying to raise awarene…

I am a bit wary of arguments from pollution or other indirect deaths due to fire. (I do accept them, but I am still wary.)

For example, the 2019-20 bushfire season is cited as 33 direct and 417 indirect deaths. Direct deaths vary mostly with fire detection, response, and evacuation. Indirect deaths vary mostly with fire volume and wind patterns (19-20 killed so many because the weather abnormally pushed pollution into heavily populated areas, and kept it there for an abnormally long time). It seems hard to control fire volume (and really hard to control weather patterns), while it seems easy to control detection, response, and evacuation.

I do take your point that it seems easy to control fire volume specifically for slash-and-burn agriculture in South East Asia, as those are mostly artificially created fires and we could stop them from doing that.

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wildfire suppression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_suppression#Tactics History of wildfire suppression in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wildfire_suppressio... Controlled burn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn > A controlled or prescribed burn, also known as hazard reduction burning, [1] backfire, swailing, or a burn-off, [2] is a fire set intentionally for purposes…

> Water-based batteries have less fire risk FWIU CAES Compressed Air Energy Storage and Gravitational potential energy storage also have less fire risk then Lithium Ion batteries. FWIU we already have enough abandoned mines in the world to do all of our energy storage needs? Could CAES tanks filled with air+CO² help suppress wildfire?

> FWIU we already have enough abandoned mines in the world to do all of our energy storage needs?

Here's a prompt for this one, for the AI:

"Let's think step-by-step: how much depth or volume of empty mines are needed to solve for US energy storage demand with gravitational potential energy storage drones on or off tracks in abandoned mines? Please respond with constants and code as Python SymPy code with a pytest test_main and Hypothesis @given decorator tests"

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#75
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good list of useful links. From my experience as a home owner in a high-risk area, I'd add some of the things which can make a big difference are often surprisingly simple. In addition to managing your own land properly, make sure you have a large enough water tank to support firefighters in protecting your land. We got a well tank five times bigger than our typical usage needs. Another key thing is to put y…

Great comments and advice. My neighborhood burned in the #GlassFire [0]. While our property was severely damaged, our home survived, due to many of the hardening techniques you mentioned and great work by CalFire. We had evacuated the night before and were staying in a local hotel watching the flames advance on our house via our security cameras. (Redundant net connections and a generator kept everything online). As…

TIL about building materials and fire hazard:

Fire resistance rating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-resistance_rating

R-value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-value_(insulation)

Here's a prompt to help with selecting sustainable building materials: """Generate a JSON-LD document of data with citations comparing building materials by: R-value, Fire Resistance Rating, typical structural integrity longevity in terms of years, VOCs at year 1 and year 5, and Sustainability factors like watt-hours and carbon and other pollutive outputs to produce, transport, distribute, install, and maintain . Include hempcrete (hemp and lime, which can be made from algae), rammed earth with and without shredded hemp hurds, wood, structural concrete, bamboo, and other emerging sustainable building materials.

Demonstrate loading the JSON data into a Pandas DataFrame and how to sort by multiple columns (with references to the docs for the tools used), and how to load the data into pygwalker."""

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