

Ski Resorts Exaggeration of Snowfall Reduced Sharply Because of iPhone App - dean
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122084539&ps=cprs

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s3graham
My Dad used to work for IDRC (www.idrc.ca) and he told me a story about one of
his earliest (and happiest) development projects. It's very simple: broadcast
actual market price information over radio to farmers in remote rural African
areas. In this way, the farmers had enough information to tell the middle man
to stuff it when they were offered extremely low (< 1%) of market value for
their food. Their wages increased ~10x over the next season.

tl;dr: information symmetry is good for the end of the chains (initial
producers, end consumers)

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cwan
That's a pretty cool program that's evolved with other NGO's using SMS
messages to cell phones. The proliferation of mobiles and utility of cheap
cell phones has been a massive boost to productivity in rural areas. One of
the key market barriers continues to be consistent logistics given the shelf
life of agricultural products which means some of these middlemen still have a
significant upper hand.

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anotherpaulg
Gentlemen,

Let me introduce you to the power of online snowfall telemetry stations. They
usually report air temperature, wind speed & direction, precipitation, snow
depth and water content in real time on an hour-by-hour basis. Find one or two
nearby your local ski hill and study them for a season, comparing them to your
in-the-field perceptions of ski conditions.

You'll soon be telling your friends about the "8 inches of cold dry powder
that's just fallen on soft layer that was laid down last week" and
distinguishing that from the "8 inches of heavy wet snow that just fell and
then refroze onto the ice layer from last week".

For bonus points, take an avalanche safety course in your area. They will
introduce you to a wealth of unbiased data sources. Mountain guides use these
sources to maintain a deep understanding of the snow pack as it evolves
throughout the winter season.

In the Seattle area, see <http://www.nwac.us/weatherdata/map/>

In the Bay Area, see:
[http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snotel/California/california.ht...](http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snotel/California/california.html)

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jpwagner
while the measurement may read "inches" it's actually on an arbitrary scale.
in other words, to a skier, "14 inches" means _compare-the-conditions-to-the-
last-time-you-went-and-we-said-14-inches_.

not to mention the obvious fact that measurements done in different places
with different methods will differ.

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fohlin
I can't decide if I like it or not, but one commenter really takes the
opportunity to promote his website:

> I believe "crowdsourcing" is the future of how we'll tap into and retrieve
> much of the information we desire, in real-time. We designed our entire web
> site/application (liveskiconditions.com) around the fact that people want to
> know the current snow conditions [...].

Spam or not?

~~~
hallmark
Not spam.

His comment and website appear very relevant to the radio program, which talks
about real-time information from iPhone users suppressing the ski resorts'
false reports (say that five times fast).

I would consider it spam if he copied his comment text and pasted it in every
NPR summary page that mentioned skiing or snowboarding.

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elbac
What do people consider a fair ski conditions report site?

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blhack
twitter seems like it could be useful for this:

"At purgatory, snow is AWESOME!"

"park city snow is SHIT today!"

"ahhh #snowbowl, when are you going to get freaking snow machines already!"

etc. etc.

