Panelists for ISER's webinar on the Permanent Fund: Past, Present and Future
Read More
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $2.3 million dollars to a project team led by ISER researcher Dr. Jennifer Schmidt to assess fuel treatments as a strategy to reduce wildfire risk in the boreal forest of Alaska and western Canada. Of the total amount, $856,000 will go to the University of Alaska. Eleven researchers from the University of Alaska Anchorage, Northern Arizona University (NAU), the University of Colorado (UC), Tanana Chiefs Conference (TCC), and the Wildfire Research Center (WiRē) will work on the four-year project, “Socio-ecological considerations for sustainAble Fuel treatments to Reduce wildfire Risk (SAFRR).”
Read More
A team of researchers at UAA and UAF led by Dr. Dayna DeFeo will collaborate on a four-year project funded by the National Science Foundation to learn more about factors that contribute to retention of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) teachers in high-need schools. The project, “Sufficient COmpensation for Retention and Equity” (SCORE), will examine how compensation, working conditions and other factors encourage teachers to stay.
Read More
Advances in technology have made it no longer possible to achieve dueling mandates required of the Census Bureau, said Professor Matthew Berman in a recent presentation. It's not possible to protect individual privacy and provide accurate population counts. The Census Bureau is implementing a new strategy, "differential privacy," for the 2020 Census to protect individuals' privacy. This creates data that are not usable, said Berman, and 16 states have filed lawsuits against the Bureau so far.
Read More
Join ISER’s Dr. Matthew Berman on Monday, May 17 from 12-1 pm for a discussion of the issues involved in balancing privacy and accuracy of Census Bureau data. Dr. Berman will provide a brief overview of the Census Bureau’s approach to protecting privacy, why they chose it, and how it could affect Alaska and other states. He will also describe litigation from states cannot resolve the problem in the long run, and potential pathways for permanent solutions nationally and locally.
Read More
ISO 37120 is an international list of standards that measure sustainability in urban cities. It boasts 49 equally-weighted core indicators, along with 59 supporting indicators and 24 profile indicators. Gathering all of this data can give cities insight into their sustainability, but does it work for Anchorage, Reykjavík or Yakutsk as well as it does for Seattle and São Paolo? In a recent study, ISER's Matthew Berman and co-author Robert Orttung analyzed how ISO 37120 could be improved to make it an effective tool for the Arctic.
Read More
Would you like more information about Ballot Measure 1? If so, are not alone. The “Fair Share Act”, the initiative to change the State of Alaska’s oil production (severance) tax, has many Alaskans puzzled about how oil taxes work now, how the initiative would change how they work, and what issues to think about before voting.
The Anchorage Association for Energy Economists (AAEE) and the University of Alaska Anchorage Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), invite you to participate in a live Zoom forum on the ballot measure from 12:00 noon – 1:30 pm, Monday October 12.
Read More
A new paper by ISER faculty, Professors Matt Berman, Bob Loeffler, and Jennifer Schmidt, describes some of the long-term effects of the Red Dog Mine on local workers and communities. The researchers used a unique data set to follow workers at the Red Dog Mine from local villages for 14 years. The research focused on these questions: what percentage of the mine workers live within the region, and what percentage of the total payroll do local workers receive?
Read More
In a new education publication, Dayna DeFeo, Matthew Berman, Alexandra Hill, and Diane Hirshberg examine how Alaska’s K-12 spending compares to other states in the US. In Alaska’s fiscal crisis that has drawn increased attention to education spending, this report shows that after taking into account higher Alaska prices for items largely beyond local school districts' control, Alaska's per pupil spending is about average among all the US states.
Read More
This summer, Alaska’s high temperatures broke records causing more Alaskans than ever to experience the effects of widespread wildfires. Wildfires, along with unstable permafrost, and rain-in-winter are natural hazards of climate change that put residents and property at risk. Assessing the costs, risks, and actions necessary to adapt to or mitigate damage from these hazards in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Whitehorse in the Canadian Yukon, is the subject of a newly funded 4-year, $1.1 million National Science Foundation project, led by ISER’s Jennifer Schmidt.