QuantAgri: Predictive Agricultural Insights Report

QuantAgri delivers quantitative analytics and market intelligence for agricultural commodities. Trading these markets involves substantial risk. This publication is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.

By Ryan Kmetz

This initiative began in January 2026. It is about analyzing satellite data to predict the monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) reports. Ryan proposes a novel approach and shares some eye raising stats about lead times and profitability. This episode is inspiration for how we are all equipped to process the world using free data and AI. What can you do with your geospatial basic training?

Links to items discussed:

1. SatYield https://www.satyield.com/

2. Sentinel

   1. ESA https://sentinels.copernicus.eu/web/sentinel/copernicus/sentinel-2

   2. Google Earth Engine https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/COPERNICUS_S2_SR_HARMONIZED#description

3. Landsat

   1. NASA https://science.nasa.gov/mission/landsat/

   2. Google Earth Engine https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/landsat

4. Taylor Geospatial Engine field boundaries

   1. Background https://taylorgeospatial.org/agricultural-field-boundaries-mapped-globally-for-the-first-time/

   2. Web app https://fieldsofthe.world/

5. Field boundaries from Planet https://docs.planet.com/data/planetary-variables/field-boundaries/

6. ‘As the world turns’ Blackrock geospatial podcast https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/podcasts/the-bid/geospatial-data

7. Novi

This episode elsewhere:

1. Chapter 1: Introduction.

2. Chapter 2: Definitions: several moral injury definitions exist based on the horrors confronted by soldiers and medical workers, I find the one that resonates.

3. Chapter 3: Diagnosis: I take the MIOS F to score my moral injury severity, and discuss the implications of a study showing a drop in reasoning capacity for those with moral injury.

4. YOU’RE HERE > Chapter 4: The Moral Transgression Immune Response: reflections on keeping myself from success.

5. TBC

   1. Chapter 5: The Way Out: working through the sense of betrayal that drove my moral injuries and the responsibility I assumed that wasn’t actually my weight to carry (hat tip of Moral Injury of Healthcare).

Subscribe now

INTRODUCTION

This has been tough going so far. In Chapter 1 I hit you with a couple of memorable moral transgressions in my career. Then in Chapter 2 I ran through definitions of moral injury. That helped determine the worst kind is what was put upon me - where I witnessed and/or failed to prevent such a transgression. Then in Chapter 3 we looked at tools to diagnose the severity of the injury. We also looked at the latest study I could find, it showed a significant drop in ability to reason. Something else stuck out though. A scoring item on the test was ‘I keep myself from having success’.

In the last chapter I called this the ‘moral immune response’. Having witnessed and failed to prevent horrific things happening to people, I have assumed the next step is to stop engaging. Without thinking about it anymore, that’s what my life would have been for the long term. In Chapter 1 though we came across saying these injuries are put upon us by other people (go to ~12:25):

I didn’t consent to it, and, in the context of moral injury, I understand from Dr Shay that it was leadership malpractice:

So this means the decision to disengage is subject to revision. Let’s do that revision. I will start though by witnessing the power of being in the grip of this moral immune response by looking at a string of failed initiatives in 2025. There are six meaningful examples here of keeping myself from having success.

FAILED INITIATIVES

1: FloodGPT

The first started 8 months ago with my most popular ever LinkedIn post (>300k views). It proposed a web map showing all summer camp building footprints in flood zones. The system was to automatically identify electorate boundaries owning those affected buildings and contact details of politicians. A custom GPT would consume all this location and politician information and assist the user to write to their local representative to fund flood warning systems. I had a couple of enthusiastic meetings with and Piergiorgio (PJ) Roveda. It was also a topic in a couple of Spatial Lab office hours calls and a live coding session with . Hell, even a 3D modelling guy for documentary films in Portugal reached out to me after seeing how popular the post was.

But then I stopped.

2: Enthusiastically Hosting a #NYClimateWeek Event

Second, another thing was my lacking enthusiasm as the host of a Geospatial Risk #NYClimateWeek event in September. It was supposed to be something really special: hosting an event in New York City! Hell, anything organised by Priscilla Cole, the goddess of NY GIS, is automatically cool.

But I couldn’t feel it.

3: Geospatial Stock Write Up for Yahoo Finance

Third, around the same time, invited me to submit a geospatial stock analysis for Yahoo Finance. I was initially very enthusiastic, inspecting the market for companies with low multiples and profitability combined with signs of operating leverage.

But then I stopped.

By the way, a geospatial stock that that bubbled up was which has done very well in the 6 months since I mentioned it, up 50%:

4: Follow-on Geospatial FM Episode after Spatial Stack Appearance

Fourth, after recording a Spatial Stack episode about Geospatial FM‘s World Model 500:

...I was going to then release an episode on my podcast giving more detail on what I’d discovered. I spent WEEKS preparing the slide deck.

But then I stopped.

5: Data Engineering Course

Fifth, I started doing the Spatial Lab geospatial data engineering training courses. This is an incredible resource with great tutorials and a supportive, active group sharing the journey. I have developed bonds with some group members already. I did the intro course. It was fascinating and inspiring.

But then I stopped.

6: Project Management Course

Sixth, I started Google Project Management Professional Certificate training. It is relevant to a job I had. Project managers enjoy a high entry-level salary of $107k. The instructor is charismatic. He is inspiring. He is approachable. I was building momentum. I completed 21% of the Foundations of Project Management module.

But then I stopped.

REFLECTIONS

What I have on my hands then is a multifaceted, florid display of a moral injury putting the brakes on a life. This is critical because I need to perform highly in my work. Yet I have abandoned two important, relevant training courses. I need to capitalise on networking opportunities. Yet I did not wholeheartedly embrace even New York Climate Week. In fact, and I do not resent this - it is just apt, the most meaningful connection I made was with someone from Bellingcat. We talked, in the office of an investment firm during a Data and Dumplings event no less, about FOIAs I’d submitted prompted by my moral injuries. He gave me really sensible advice on which organizations to approach next in spinning up a campaign that stock analysts may ultimately be forced to take into account when projecting income about companies involved in what I had been injured by.

It is intensely personally and professionally fulfilling to engage in projects that improve society such as a national spatial analysis about flood awareness. Or analysing the returns that we as professional, intellectual labourers deliver for investors. Critically, in turn this work enables a full recognition of our value as labourers. An important benefit is permitting a better position negotiating a salary. Yet I have abandoned three such projects.

This is the result of bearing witness to, failing to prevent and being the victim of several moral transgressions in 5 countries. At significant cost to myself and relationships important to me, I tried, but was unable to stop them. Due to naïveté, I then permitted the attachment of those transgressions to my identity. Even though I was not the legitimate authority perpetrating the transgression.

The result has been depression.

No one wins here. For example the above-mentioned failed initiatives.

These are all really great initiatives. They involve connections with great people and organisations. So it’s important they don’t fail. It is also important that I regain the reasoning capacity that Vartanian’s research indicates I have lost. This means I need to get out my mind mechanic tool kit, put my brain up on a jack, and check how many screws are loose. If I don’t, there’s always YouTube’s endless supply of car mechanic videos with literal tool kits and literal jacks and literal loose screws:

As satisfying as it is to watch Sreten from Germany repair a Bentley on a budget, unwarping an engine block and all ... I can tell you that despite watching this video and several others the joy of old vehicle restoration has not transferred to a durable repair of my moral injury.

And I have not been winning since 2012. Yeah it really is that far back. Basically the year after my international career began. Cambodia showed me how the rest of the world really lives outside the heaven on earth that is Australia. Sounds so cliched and possibly prejudiced. It is also tragic that it is true. I speak so plainly to realise a target for agency:

So that’s a taste of what tests like the Moral Injury Outcome Scale tap into. It has been real for me.

SUMMARY

Writing these chapters is useful, although the effect has taken a while to materialize. This is the second time I’m publishing them. Three months ago I began the same series on LinkedIn. It is only now after months of reflection and going over the same material again that ’s blunt email to me is getting through:

Any well-trained therapist can help you work through the sense of betrayal that drives moral injury and the responsibility you assumed that wasn’t actually your weight to carry.

I assumed a responsibility that wasn’t my weight to carry. This very simple sentence has finally begun to have an impact on me. Three months after receiving it. I confess I have assumed a responsibility that is beyond what I am capable of bearing. I did so because I saw leaders failing to bear their responsibility. Because what I observed was so bad, out of a sense of duty I decided to try to do something. It has not gone well.

I happen to agree with a February comment piece in Nature that we have achieved artificial general intelligence. As an example of its revelatory impact, here is Gemini summarizing the impact of these chapters.

With that, it is time to figure out how to respond. That will start with examining who should really bear responsibility for all this. Given it was not right to have the responsibility being on me. I will center my next steps on an invitation last month from the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights:

NAVIGATION

1. Chapter 1: Introduction.

2. Chapter 2: Definitions: several moral injury definitions exist based on the horrors confronted by soldiers and medical workers, I find the one that resonates.

3. YOU’RE HERE > Chapter 3: Diagnosis: I take the MIOS F to score my moral injury severity, and discuss the implications of a study showing a drop in reasoning capacity for those with moral injury.

4. Chapter 4: The Moral Transgression Immune Response: reflections on keeping myself from success.

5. TBC

   1. Chapter 5: The Way Out: working through the sense of betrayal that drove my moral injuries and the responsibility I assumed that wasn’t actually my weight to carry (hat tip Wendy Dean, MD of Moral Injury of Healthcare).

INTRODUCTION

The brain is only capable of processing so much at once. When I grew up as a young psychology bachelors student we were told working memory could hold 7 ± 2 items at once. In 2010 a researcher revised this limit down to:

3 to 5 meaningful items in young adults (Cowen, 2010).

This chapter is about how these limited brain resources are consumed, through the lens of moral injury. With inevitable impact on reasoning ability. I discuss an amateur effort to administer a couple of psychological tests to measure moral injury severity and post traumatic stress disorder. I’m not a clinician. So don’t put too much stock in it. I also discuss Oshin Vartanian et al’s study, mentioned in the previous chapter. They found that moral injury causes a reduction in reasoning ability and map the brain whilst it happens.

A note on disclosure. I thought about it and decided not to tell you my results. I don’t want this to be some awkward, performative thing. Heaven forbid I come across as seeking clout by oversharing about a trauma. I don’t want to be an internet whore like Alex Jones mining a tragedy for content. Another thing. The moral injury test is not, in fact, a test about me anyway. Apart from my capacity for horror. It is a test about those who put the psychological injury on me. This concept is pivotal. A quote from Dr Kuelker’s talk mentioned in the last chapter:

You’re psychologically injured. You didn’t choose this for yourself. You didn’t sign up for it. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. Someone else inflicted it on you. The hypercritical mother, the bullying boss, they put a psychological injury on you. Without your consent. Without your agreement or understanding. So, acknowledge your psychological injuries without any shame.

But it wasn’t only me the psychological injury was put upon. In fact, thousands of others in the two cases I’ve described the past 2 chapters about Kuwait Gulf Oil Company oilfield projects. I am a mirror. The test result is just a measure of the degree of their leadership malpractice.

MIOS F

The MIOS F is the full version of the Moral Injury Outcome Scale. I came upon it from MacDonald Franklin OSI Research and Innovation Centre. They mention the Moral Injury Outcome Consortium as having produced it. Visit that page for the full test and scoring instructions. Needless to say, you should use it via a clinician. What I’m doing here is to satisfy my curiosity and to detect if it looks like I should use a clinician. This is my choice and not a recommendation. I do it partly to expose as much of the mechanics of moral injury recovery as possible. Namely, going from definitions to diagnosis to impact description to healing. I want to bring as many others along with me as I can. I encourage you to click through the link above, it will take you to a PDF with a page where you can see 14 items across 2 sub-scales. This measures your moral injury severity overall and against shame and mistrust components. It then has 9 additional items afterward, the Brief Inventory of Psychosocial Functioning (B-IPF; Kleiman et al., 2020).

Vartanian et al (2026) mention a clinical threshold of ≥31 on the MIOS. In the 14 items at the top, I scored above the clinical threshold. I scored higher on the mistrust sub-scale than that for shame. An example of an item was “I keep myself from having success”. I scored the maximum on that, 4. I will go into that in detail in the next chapter. The impact then, of my moral injuries appear to have had a large impact. The effect is strongest from the perspective of trust in others.

POST-TRAUMATIC CHECKLIST(PCL-5)

Participants of Vartanian et al (2026) were also checked for post traumatic stress disorder using the PCL-5, so I went ahead and took that too:

They state the clinical significant level on this is ≥33. I scored below that. I can tell you, however, that my score would have been a lot higher years ago when the event was happening or during the ensuing 3 years. Yep. Nightmares and a state of stress for that long.

IMPORTANCE OF REASONING ABILITY

Vartanian’s study is about reasoning performance. Reasoning capacity is central to professional success. They found it deteriorates in those with moral injury. Their’s is the first study about impact on reason, with this rationale:

...we suspected that participants with higher MIOS (and perhaps also PCL-5 scores) might be more sensitive to the presence of MI-related content during reasoning, which could serve to amplify its effects on accuracy.

So what are they saying? They’re limiting their predictions. They’re not anticipating a broad impact on all reasoning. Basically they’re thinking people will be triggered when they have morally transgressive material put in front of them. This will disturb them emotionally. This distraction will make them bad at reasoning. This returns us to the issue of limited working memory resources at the top. They’re saying that thinking about memories of moral transgressions may compete with resources that could otherwise be devoted to reasoning. They expect this will reduce reasoning ability.

It lead them to these 2 hypotheses:

[Hypothesis 1] ...compared to structurally identical arguments with neutral content, participants would exhibit lower accuracy on arguments that reference [moral injury]-related content...

[Hypothesis 2] ...compared to reasoning about structurally identical arguments with neutral content, reasoning about arguments that reference [moral injury]-related content would engage regions of the brain that underlie the experience of emotions and/or episodic memory...

A quote from the study linking working memory to reasoning and how reasoning is a window on intelligence:

...there is a large literature that has shown that individual differences in intelligence and cognitive ability are correlated with reasoning ability, and that working memory in particular is a strong predictor of performance on such tasks (De Neys, 2006; Kyllonen and Christal, 1990; Süß et al., 2002).

So there we have it, they’re linking working memory directly to reasoning performance, hence my flagging that to you at the beginning.

So why should we care? Most of us need a job to live. Most jobs require us to reason. If we’re bad at reasoning, we’ll lose the job or not get promoted. Maybe even demoted. We might struggle to get a job requiring high performance. This will cap our earnings. Bluntly put, in a meritocracy we may make less money if we can’t reason well. So we should care about this study because it could tell us about how our ability to provide for ourselves and our families is affected by our moral injuries. It could tell us that we should expect to perform less well at work if we’re thinking about a moral transgression. And that the performance impact could be even stronger if we have suffered a moral injury ourselves in the past, with a triggering effect from thinking about morally transgressive things.

Again, this is a narrow prediction. It is not about reasoning under normal circumstances where one hasn’t been primed by morally transgressive stimuli.

REASONING EXAMPLES FROM THE STUDY

These are examples of what people had to reason through, which I have used Gemini to evaluate.

Moral Injury Related

Victims and Sufferers

• Premise 1: All victims are angry. (Universal set)

• Premise 2: All sufferers are victims. (Subset)

• Conclusion: Therefore, all sufferers are angry.

Evaluation: Valid. While this might feel more subjective in a real-world context, logically it is perfectly sound. The structure mirrors the athlete example exactly: if “Sufferers” is a subset of “Victims,” and the entire “Victims” set is “Angry,” the conclusion is inescapable.

Institutions and Leaders

• Premise 1: All people trust institutions. (Universal set)

• Premise 2: Some people are leaders. (Subset)

• Conclusion: Therefore, some leaders do not trust institutions.

Evaluation: Invalid (Formal Fallacy). If all people trust institutions, and leaders are a sub-set of “people,” then logic dictates that every single leader must trust institutions. You cannot derive a “do not” from a universal “all” unless one of your premises is negative.

Neutral

Athletes and Olympians

• Premise 1: All athletes are fit. (Universal set)

• Premise 2: All Olympians are athletes. (Subset)

• Conclusion: Therefore, all Olympians are fit.

Evaluation: Valid. This is a classic nested hierarchy. If the entire group of “Athletes” is contained within the “Fit” category, and the “Olympians” are entirely contained within “Athletes,” then every Olympian must, by definition, be fit.

Miners and Men

• Premise 1: All miners are tall. (Universal set)

• Premise 2: Some miners are men. (Subset)

• Conclusion: Therefore, some men are not tall.

Evaluation: Invalid (Formal Fallacy). While this might be true in the real world, it does not follow from these specific premises. We know that the men who are miners are definitely tall (because all miners are tall). However, the premises tell us nothing about the men who are not miners. They could all be tall, or they could all be short; the logic provided doesn’t give us enough information to conclude that “some are not tall.”

Control

The study also included control arguments which did not invoke the person’s reasoning capacity. They used a non-sequitur. The reason for a group of participants to take control arguments is because this was not only a study about impact of moral injury on reasoning ability, it was a brain imaging study too:

Because by definition these control arguments do not necessitate the engagement of the reasoning system to be deemed invalid, they can be contrasted with regular arguments to elucidate the neural systems that underlie reasoning.

They had moral injury related and neutral control arguments for participants to evaluate.

Moral injury related control argument example about citizens and residents:

• Premise 1: All citizens have trust issues.

• Premise 2: No residents have trust issues.

• Conclusion: Therefore, some offenders are not guilty people. (Non-sequitur)

Evaluation: Invalid (Non-sequitur) The premises establish a relationship between “Citizens,” “Residents,” and “Trust Issues” (concluding that no resident is a citizen). However, the conclusion jumps to “Offenders” and “Guilty people.” Because these terms appear nowhere in the premises, the conclusion is logically orphaned.

Neutral argument example about jury members and judges:

• Premise 1: All jury members are citizens.

• Premise 2: No judges are citizens.

• Conclusion: Therefore, some popes are not Catholics. (Non-sequitur)

Evaluation: Invalid (Non-sequitur) Similar to the previous example, the premises define the relationship between “Jury Members,” “Judges,” and “Citizens.” While we can validly conclude that “No judges are jury members,” we cannot say anything about “Popes” or “Catholics” based on this information.

It goes without saying that I need a keen reasoning capacity. Otherwise my capacity to work and to combat life’s challenges diminishes. And, like anyone else, I need all self imposed limits on success removed to the maximum extent possible. An involuntary limit on success arrests the attention. But my research on healing suggests I have the agency to remove it. Anyway, what were the results of the study? Did moral injury really affect reasoning ability? What about post traumatic stress?

RESULTS

First of all, this circumstance is funny. I’m someone apparently with a moral injury trying to understand a scientific study about it. The results of which say I should find it difficult to understand the paper because my ability to reason is diminished. I confirm this. It was hard to reason through the syllogisms. I had to turn to Gemini to help understand why each one was right or wrong. What are the headline results then?

Participants who performed highest were the ones confronted with syllogisms about neutral content that concluded with non-sequiturs. This is the ‘neutral control accuracy’ group above which got their answers right 75% of the time on average. Those who performed the worst were the ones confronted with syllogisms about morally transgressive content that did not conclude with non-sequiturs. Hence, they actually had to engage their reasoning capacity.

Returning to the start of this article, the morally transgressive content of the syllogism likely preloaded their working memory system with competing material from the emotional activation of a past moral injury. Hence, the study hypothesised, they would have less working memory available than a non-injured person to perform the actual task, reasoning through the syllogism. This played out in the results. See the ‘MI accuracy’ line in the above table. These people had an average of 52% correct. Their reasoning ability was 20% less than those presented with the nonsense arguments.

Let’s look at this as a graph:

Just look at the vertical dotted lines. What happens to the blue line after those on all plots? It drops off. What we are seeing here is the results for participants with MIOS F and PCL5 scores above the clinical thresholds of 31 and 33, respectively. This means the decline in reasoning accuracy is most pronounced for those with significant moral injury and post traumatic stress.

This makes sense. Recall the post WW2 early definition of moral injury presented in the last chapter:

unresolvable emotional conflict

One may expect individuals with significant moral injuries and post traumatic stress to come to the experiment with their minds primed to flood working memory with thoughts about what they failed to prevent. At the slightest reminder of it. Such as reasoning about a morally transgressive situation. This flood of memories will compete for slots in working memory that a reasoning process will need for stepping through a syllogism. There are only 4-5 slots available. The study says reasoning goes more smoothly with all of them devoted to it: 75% accuracy on average. This is when reasoning about neutral syllogisms that don’t apparently evoke a self reflection about the past in parallel with a reasoning effort. When this self reflection is evoked in parallel: a 20% performance drop.

I said they mapped the brain as participants did this reasoning and it is telling.

Above is the right posterior parahippocampus, a part of the brain responsible for contextual associations in episodic memory. Vartanian et al:

Regarding the parahippocampal cortex (PHC) specifically, there is converging evidence to suggest that it plays a critical role in contextual associations—defined as the “link between objects strongly associated with the same context, or the spatial relation between items, or the configuration associated with a context” (Aminoff et al., 2013).

Gemini:

System Disruption: While neutral reasoning typically engages executive control [brain] regions ... the emotional/memory weight of moral injury shifts brain activity toward regions associated with internal distress and memory, leading to logical errors.

CONCLUSION

So there we have it. Reading the brain itself shows how the load of a moral injury primes the brain to lose working memory slots when there is a reasoning task that itself has a moral weight. It’s not only that though. The researchers also found a generalised drop in reasoning performance amongst study participants who said they had been exposed to some form of morally injurious event in the past.

This only increases our concern about having a moral injury put upon us. It appears we will struggle to reason in all circumstances compared to those who have not had one put upon them. Not just morally triggering circumstances.

With this study out of the way, let’s turn next to a specific example of how a moral injury can affect a person: holding oneself back from success. Or this strange phenomenon of what I am calling the ‘moral immune response’.

CAUTION

This article contains graphic descriptions in text and video of workplace safety breaches.

NAVIGATION

1. Chapter 1: Introduction.

2. YOU’RE HERE > Chapter 2: Definitions: several moral injury definitions exist based on the horrors confronted by soldiers and medical workers, I find the one that resonates.

3. Chapter 3: Diagnosis: I take the MIOS F to score my moral injury severity, and discuss the implications of a study showing a drop in reasoning capacity for those with moral injury.

4. Chapter 4: The Moral Transgression Immune Response: reflections on keeping myself from success.

5. TBC -

   1. Chapter 5: The Way Out: working through the sense of betrayal that drove my moral injuries and the responsibility I assumed that wasn’t actually my weight to carry (hat tip Wendy Dean, MD of Moral Injury of Healthcare).

INTRODUCTION

First up, writing about this is extremely hard. I’ve been the kind of person who viewed the word ‘trigger’ as something snowflakes used. Well, in trying to write this, I was triggered. It’s real. I am trying again for the second time to write about this after getting nowhere a couple of hours ago. This is because I watched too many videos of broken soldiers crying about trauma. So, heads up, you’ll be seeing some of those videos below as part of exploring this topic.

In the introduction I gave two example events that lead to moral injuries for me. Let’s get some more material in front of us to motivate thinking about a definition. I will start actually by adding some extra details to the second example I gave in the last piece. In short, I bore witness to no one saving a likely indebted young Indian from getting fired in Kuwait after evacuating a work site because of an H2S gas leak. He and others had to go to hospital to save their lives. I also missed the chance to save him myself due to not being informed before he was sent back to India. Despite everything I tried to do anyway, such as an ethics report to the PMC (resulting in the Global Compliance Officer James B. Walker telling me he flew down to Kuwait from London), contacting Kuwait Oil Company leadership and appealing to Bibi Nasser Alsabah, a Kuwaiti princess, no justice was served. On June 29, 2017 I even emailed British Safety Council about the case (happy to provide the evidence if you ask). This is because the manpower company that fired him, NBTC Group, displayed a membership certificate on their website, signed by Lynda Armstrong and Alex Botha:

I got no response.

Once again I had the feeling of failing to be able to do anything to help. And that continued in one final fashion, 7 years later in 2024:

Source: Google Maps before NBTC Camp 4 was removed some time in 2025. At the end of the video you can see where the place mark used to be.

This video is NBTC Camp 4 burning, 50 men died. It was living quarters for employees of NBTC. Men like the fired electrician slept there. I could not escape feeling that if this company had been disciplined in the way I tried to cause in 2017, then the lax safety standards leading to this fire in 2024 killing 50 men may not have happened. For example, if British Safety Council made them take down the membership certificate after I contacted them. Until they improved their safety standards. Instead, I discovered there was an updated version of the certificate valid through March 2026, then one till 2027 currently on their website! They are signed by Mike Robinson and Peter McGettrick:

Try that for a compounding, years long moral injury. Hell, I didn’t even know about the fire until I had the bad luck of trying to put all of this behind me last year in a series of video testimonies:

... only to come across this fire in the course of researching NBTC. I felt connected to the fire. I literally felt that my failure to cause justice for this man was part of the train of events to lead up to those men dying. Really what happened though is that I failed in fighting through all the other disinterested, negligent people who lead the organisations involved. On proper reflection, they bear true responsibility for this appalling scene. Speaking of which, whilst we’re on Kuwait, try reading about this other major fire in the country’s history:

That’s right, Kuwait’s approach to marital relationships produced an enraged first wife who set 57 women and children on fire during the husband’s wedding to a second wife. The first wife was then executed. After having a miscarriage in prison. The execution happened during the last year I was there and it is only today I’m finding out about it. I believe you now have a wholistic understanding of how Kuwait is a robust, high velocity production line for moral injuries. And how an institution from another country, British Safety Council, has failed to put a stop to some of them. A quote from all membership certificates:

[NBTC Group] is committed to keeping people safe and healthy at work.

These membership certificates, over a 10 year period, have accompanied the unjust firing of a vulnerable young staff member for following his safety training, and the subsequent deaths of 50 men after my efforts to blow the whistle fell on deaf ears.

Now, I was going to diligently put before you examples from other people of traumas that lead to moral injuries but I think I have enough material to move directly to definitions. What I will do though is throw a few videos in front of you. If you want to watch soldiers testify so you understand the meaning of grit and a sense of humanity:

A telling quote from Joshua: “Shame, powerlessness, betrayal and guilt. When those emotions are allowed to manifest, they can do so in a catastrophic fashion that can have devastating consequences on your personal life, your families, your friends and your loved ones.” Oh how I know. He now runs West Breath.

One final dose of soldier testimony:

We will use a slide from Steve’s talk below when discussing definitions. This gentle man.

DEFINITIONS

As stated by Joshua above, moral injury creates a profound drain on a person. You would not believe how much enthusiasm it can snuff out (this will be detailed in part 4). The definition of moral injury has evolved over time, this is from Dr Shay, responding to traumatized veterans:

Source: (now shuttered) Shay Moral Injury Center started by Rita Nakashima Brock at Volunteers of America:

In further work with veterans, a new definition was offered by Professor Brett Litz (source):

You can see this newer definition lacks the punch and pragmatic language of Dr Shay’s one. It offers acknowledgement, however, that such an injury can happen to unexpected groups: those who fail to do something in response to, or who witness betrayals of what’s right. On the cause, see below quote from Professor Litz. It appeared in Steve’s talk shown above, source:

The concept ‘failing to prevent’ is exactly what happened to me. You can see it in my repeated failures to help a young man who was fired under circumstances that were a textbook betrayal of what is right. The item ‘bearing witness to’ also applies to me and hundreds of others at the PMC where I worked. This occurred when we got news of the man who hung himself at a worksite in combination with the leadership betraying what is right by saying it was not a workplace incident. Oh, along with the simple horror of knowing that we worked for an organisation that did not shutdown the worksite in the presence of a hanging body.

Looking at the most up to date definition I can find, the latest study on moral injury is The impact of moral injury-related content on reasoning and its neural correlates: Data from the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). It was lead by Oshin Vartanian. It begins with this definition:

...the functionally impairing psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioural, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or being a victim of acts that transgress deeply-held moral beliefs and expectations.

We are at a definition resonates with me. As already stated, the ‘failing to prevent’ and ‘bearing witness to’ aspects speak to my injury. Over a 16 year multinational career in some terrible places I have, it is important to say, not been a soldier. I do not wish to steal any valour. Shay’s definition does not therefore apply to me. I had a choice to disobey orders. And I vigorously did so. Soldiers cannot disobey orders. This puts them at the mercy of leadership malpractice: legitimate authority figures betraying what is right in high stakes situations.

What does apply to me is the evolution of the definition by Professor Litz and applied here by Vartanian. Regarding acts that transgress moral beliefs and expectations about the dignified treatment of others that any person would have, I have variously failed to prevent them (despite desperately trying), and I have born witness to them. I saw this in the guilt and shame I experienced in failing to prevent the Indian electrician getting fired and sent home. You can also see this in the traumatic horror I experienced as a witness to the shocking case of a man hanging himself on a worksite and its not being shut down for the day. Whilst the body swung from a pipe rack waiting for the police to pick it up.

In the course of failing to prevent a moral betrayal affecting others, I have also experienced moral betrayal against myself by those in a position of authority during 2023-2024. Yes, I was victimised in standing up for others. Hence the aspect ‘being a victim of acts’ applies to me also. I am still figuring out how to write about this. I’ll leave it for now. I have at least begun by recording a couple of videos about NEOM and and a couple of Dallas cowboy engineering outfits, AECOM/Jacobs:

Right, so now that we’ve gotten through some definitions and identified the parts of a contemporary one that relate to me, it’s worth turning our attention to a talk by Professor Zachary Steel:

An incredible amount of work has gone into this presentation, such as the slide on definitions that he pulled from Moral Injury and Definitional Clarity: Betrayal, Spirituality and the Role of Chaplains (J Relig Health (2017) 56:1212-1228):

This shows the broad range of work conducted in this field and it is gratifying to reach each definition to see which resonates. What is not included in that table is Steel’s delivery during the presentation of the most efficient definition -

unresolvable emotional conflict

He said this was one of the themes that emerged in a summary of psychiatric literature about WW2 veterans. Really, these three words speak well to the generalised sense of emotional torture and limping through life unable to get away from it.

Regarding treatment efficacy for psychological conditions involving guilt, depression, dissociation and anger, he offered this slide lifted from Key patterns and predictors of response to treatment for military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder: a growth mixture modelling approach (Psychol Med 2018 Jan;48(1):95-103):

He observes that the chart shows these conditions are the most treatment resistant. He also observed that guilt, depression, dissociation and anger are particularly strongly activated in moral injuries where people failed to prevent, or bore witness to, a betrayal of what’s right. Zeroing in then on the significance of bearing witness to or failing to prevent betrayals of what’s right, he provides the next slide lifted from Distinct Trauma Types in Military Service Members Seeking Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (J Trauma Stress 2018 Apr;31(2):286-295):

It shows that 7% of soldiers do seek treatment for PTSD when they committed a moral betrayal. Notably, however, more than twice as many seek treatment where they witnessed the commission by others, a category of involvement in moral transgressions by omission. Professor Steel advises that

a lot of what we talk about trauma is witnessing things or being unable to do things yourself

So, there is both commission and omission in relation to an event involving a moral transgression. Commission is where you committed the transgression. Circumstances are clear. The mind is not left to worry about responsibility. Curiously, the intensity of guilt or shame is higher amongst those who found themselves involved by omission. Quoting from his presentation again:

Acts of omission have a lot of interpretive confusion around them. It’s ‘I wasn’t able to do something. I didn’t do something I thought I should do.’ And you know what? It’s invisible to everybody else. It’s invisible to your colleagues. It’s invisible to the people around you. And yet the moral burden that comes from perceived acts of omission - of a failure to do what you thought you should have done - are [associated] with very high levels of ongoing distress.

This is EXACTLY what happened to me. I have only nightmares, sleepless nights, and a toiling rage that developed its own personality, determined to rout every single positive experience it could find ever since 2017.

SIDE QUEST 1: MEDICAL PROFESSION

We have come full circle. I came across the concept of moral injury only 3 months ago when Steve Eisman interviewed Warris Bokhari, MD about Claimable, Inc.:

It is interesting to observe this concept making its way around the medical profession in America. It appears to provide doctors with the power to name what is wrong with the lack of universal healthcare. It causes them to betray what is right by, for example, sending patients home before they’ve recovered. Here is Elisabeth Potter, MD going viral about it:

@drelisabethpotterIt’s 2025, and navigating insurance has somehow gotten even more out of control… I just performed two bilateral DIEP flap surgeries and two bilateral tissue expander surgeries. During one of the DIEP cases, I was interrupted by a call from United Healthcare—while the patient was already asleep on the operating table. They demanded information about her diagnosis and inpatient stay justification. I had to scrub out mid-surgery to call United, only to find that the person on the line didn’t even have access to the patient’s full medical information, despite the procedure already being pre-approved. It’s beyond frustrating and, frankly, unacceptable. Patients and providers deserve better than this. We should be focused on care, not bureaucracy. I just have no other words at this point

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

There is an element of leadership malpractice or a legitimate authority directing the betrayal also. For example medical administrators, politicians and insurance executives producing a system that is too hard for doctors to fight in trying to uphold what is right for patients. It is a high stakes situation also - simply put, Americans have a shorter lifespan than those in other rich countries with universal healthcare:

Needless to say, it is really important that doctors are finally able to uphold their oath to care for the sick in America. It is gratifying then to see doctors summoning the rage with this concept, such as Zubin Damania, MD:

Another is Wendy Dean, MD who started Moral Injury of Healthcare. As an indication of her dedication to the cause, she even traded a couple of emails with me and was very straightforward:

Any well-trained therapist can help you work through the sense of betrayal that drives moral injury and the responsibility you assumed that wasn’t actually your weight to carry.

It really helps having a leader not engaging in malpractice! Just reading that simple statement helps me recognise I did in fact attempt to carry a weight that wasn’t mine to carry.

The final stop on this brief tour of moral injury in health care is an exquisite talk by Alina Bennett on Moral Injury on the Front Lines: Lessons From Healthcare:

Two points about helping people recover stood out for me in this excellent talk:

1. Communalise the trauma - sharing with others who’ve experienced something similar. Trusted listeners are required. These are willing and able to be transformed by a story of someone being sent berserk by a dramatic moral transgression left unmitigated by an authority figure. Why is it necessary that there is willingness to be transformed? She doesn’t make that clear but due to personal experience I understand why. A moral transgression by an authority figure in a high stakes situation REQUIRES CHANGE. That is why someone goes berserk - a loss of inhibition occurs in seeking to cause change because the situation is an emergency. So, the person ideally needs listeners from the community performing the moral transgression who are willing to be transformed.

2. Ethical listening - others who demonstrate a will and willingness to hear the story. Google DeepMind provides a definition:

...[listening] to grasp meaning, intent, and underlying values, fostering connection and preventing misunderstandings by focusing on the speaker, considering diverse perspectives, and withholding judgment. It involves being present, attentive, and open-minded, recognizing that true understanding serves collective goals and builds stronger relationships and communities.

I have a career of failing to encounter ethical listeners when it comes to leadership malpractice and its attendant moral injuries. I look forward to finding better people through this writing.

SIDE QUEST 2: ADVERSE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES

During this research another side quest emerged from Nadine Burke Harris (first to serve in the Office of the California Surgeon General). It is about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) explaining disease in adulthood:

A great psychologist, Dr. Eric Kuelker, reinforces her points:

I strongly recommend watching both brief talks and then measuring how many ACEs you’ve had using this resource. It. is based on this incredible research by the CDC. A further incredible piece of work by Dr Kuelker is his newsletter about one of the physical illnesses that can result from psychological injury, cancer:

Unknown Weapon

A psychologist equips you with an unknown weapon in your struggle against cancer.

By Eric Kuelker, Ph.D. R.Psych.

CONCLUSION

So, I have taken you on quite a tour. Let’s distil it. I promised a definition. Moral injury is

...the functionally impairing psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioural, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or being a victim of acts that transgress deeply-held moral beliefs and expectations.

Unexpectedly, it is acts by omission such as failing to prevent or bearing witness to a betrayal of what is right that produce the most intense psychological injuries. Boy do I know this. And how incredibly useful it has been to conduct this research and write about it. For, finally, after 9 years, I am getting a handle on this situation.

Indeed, what I witnessed and failed to prevent did not produce transgressions that were my weight to bear. Leaders engaging in malpractice were everywhere to be seen. The only relevance to me is that, should I ever be required to lead, I will do so in a way that affords emotional equanimity. Importantly, if I cannot achieve this affordance for those whom I lead, I will give up my leadership.

See you in the next one about diagnosis using the MIOS F.

NAVIGATION

1. YOU’RE HERE > Chapter 1: Introduction.

2. Chapter 2: Definitions: several moral injury definitions exist based on the horrors confronted by soldiers and medical workers, I find the one that resonates.

3. Chapter 3: Diagnosis: I take the MIOS F to score my moral injury severity, and discuss the implications of a study showing a drop in reasoning capacity for those with moral injury.

4. Chapter 4: The Moral Transgression Immune Response: reflections on keeping myself from success.

5. TBC -

   1. Chapter 5: The Way Out: working through the sense of betrayal that drove my moral injuries and the responsibility I assumed that wasn’t actually my weight to carry (hat tip Wendy Dean, MD of Moral Injury of Healthcare).

INTRODUCTION

Let me describe one of several moral injuries that has happened in my career. It was 2017 on a construction site for a Middle East country’s national oil company. The project management consultancy that employed me was a top 5 multinational engineering firm. A large, multi-storey, factory-sized oil processing facility was being built. One weekend, a construction worker hung himself on it. When his body was discovered, the worksite was not shut down. Staff were invited to leave if they wished to. Unthinkably, not all did. A perimeter was put up around the body. Whilst they waited for the police to arrive that afternoon. Despite that, from some parts of the site, workers could still see his hanging body. Compounding the moral transgression, it was declared by the oil company not to be a safety incident. Justified as occurring on the weekend. The operations director at the project management consultancy (PMC) stated, during a subsequent town hall in front of 300 people, that the company would not contest this assessment. The thought of a swinging dead body at a site where one might be working haunts me to this day.

By the way, if you want more detail on all of this you’re in luck. Here is my earlier testimony about the parts of my career in Phnom Penh and Kuwait:

The link should start the video at 42:22. Skip forward to that point if it doesn’t. The testimony continued here:

Let me describe another moral injury. Same year. Same client. Same project management consultancy. There was a young Indian electrician employed by a staffing agency. He’d only been in the country 4 months. As his training required, he caused an evacuation of 160 workers due to detecting an H2S gas leak. If you don’t understand the significance, Landman explains:

He and 4 others went to hospital on account of beginning to choke on the gas. His life was saved. He was then fired. When I checked, there was no record of the incident put in the client’s safety database.

Using his personal email account, he appealed the injustice of his dismissal to client, PMC and staffing agency leadership. He attached hospital records verifying he would have died without treatment. The buck was passed around. He was deported from Kuwait back to India. 20 days later his email made its way to me via safety staff colleagues. I was mindful that most Indians go to Kuwait with a debt to Indian recruiters of a year’s anticipated salary in Kuwait. Far higher than in India. I was haunted for years by his never replying to my several attempts to reach out via his personal email address. I was mindful of his being confronted with having to repay that debt on a pitifully low salary back in India. Further, I was mindful of his likely being ashamed of returning home merely 4 months after departing. With nothing, indeed less than nothing, to show for it. The thought crossed my mind, with his failure to respond to my emails, that this young man may have chosen to end his life. Like several others had during my time at that PMC.

If you want extra detail on this, skip forward to 8:09 here:

These are just two of several moral injuries that have occurred in a career spanning 6 countries since 2011. A moral injury is haunting and life destroying. Its impact on me has been powerful and complex. I was not the only one affected. Therefore, another reason to spend the time here to speak out publicly is that it may benefit more than just myself. I have a 5 part plan and, don’t worry, the definition of moral injury is next:

1. Chapter 1: Introduction (you’re here).

2. Chapter 2: Definitions: several definitions exist based on the horrors confronted by soldiers and medical workers, I find the one that resonates.

3. Chapter 3: Diagnosis: I take the MIOS F to score my moral injury severity, and discuss the implications of a study showing a drop in reasoning capacity for those with moral injury.

4. Chapter 4: The Moral Transgression Immune Response: reflections on keeping myself from success.

5. Chapter 5: The Way Out: working through the sense of betrayal that drove my moral injuries and the responsibility I assumed that wasn’t actually my weight to carry (hat tip Wendy Dean, MD of Moral Injury of Healthcare).

Thanks for joining in, see you in the next part.

Stop 30-Year Mortgage Servitude

Copilot Runs Your Meeting

Have We Reached AGI v1?

See traffic & CCTV live

COMMENTARY

This was quite the episode! We return for Round 2 with Nelson Roque. He is Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State. He walked us through OpenClaw. As established in the first episode with him, he is an amateur geospatial data analyst:

Nelson is an incredibly useful guest because he is able to cover both podcasts I have run - The Behavioral Investor and this one, Geospatial FM. A significant message from The Behavioral Investor was the effect of delay discounting or hyperbolic discounting. This is the decay in appeal of even fantastic outcomes when there is a significant delay until they happen. A formula is available here and here. Applying the formula shows that receiving a billion dollars in 3 generations, 108 years from now, only feels like $10,000 right now. The feeling decays with delay.

Episodes about it from The Behavioral Investor here

and here

Summaries of relevant research and ideas:

Billion Dollar Behavior

S1E2 What a Psychologist Says About Hacking the Dopamine Reinforcement System to Compound Your Way to $1B

Tom Watts is a clinical psychologist. We interviewed him in order to learn from a master of human nature. His practice can be found here…

Listen now

6 years ago · Geospatial FM

and here

Billion Dollar Behavior

S3E2 ✔️ Merle van den Akker: Compounding Investments, Alone, Won’t Fix Poverty.

Listen now

5 years ago · 1 like · Geospatial FM

There are a couple of ways to defeat hyperbolic discounting. One is episodic future thinking. This is a way to juice the dopamine reward system by a multimodal, multisensory imagining of what one might see, hear, smell, think, touch and feel upon achieving a financial goal. Turns out that, of course, AI has been applied to help here. Another that I came up with is instant, constant feedback about the reduction in amount of money one can pass to the next generation with each spending decision you make. What do I mean?

Let's work with the $600 you might splurge on a smartwatch. The US market has compounded at 7% annually, adjusted for inflation and including dividends, the past 150 years. Imagine you are 42 and have a life expectancy of 72. You've therefore got 30 years of compounding $600 at 7% annually. This becomes $4,500 if you invest it in a low cost US market index fund with a 0.05% fee.

So, you could enjoy the $600 watch or consider that in splurging on it you are effectively saying to your child you don't want to give them $4,500 when you die. Another motivation to think about this is if you want to give your child a fantastic house deposit of $200,000 when they turn 18. You can do this by putting $20,000 into the market when they're born, and adding $300 a month for 18 years. If you delay the start by just 1 year, you'll only be able to hand them $182,000.

So what I'm proposing is an app to make the effect of long time periods on investing outcomes visible. I've been wanting to make this app for years and now with an AGI agent, like others I have been able to bring it to life.

Please watch the episode as Nelson walks through producing this live with an AGI agent orchestrator called OpenClaw. He also profiles some geospatial situation monitoring apps (e.g. this). These were inspired by the incredible @bilawalsidhu . He was able to give a geospatial data replay of the Iran strikes:

Map the World by Bilawal Sidhu

The Intelligence Monopoly Is Over. Creating a God's Eye View of the Iran Strikes.

A week ago, I built WorldView — basically a geospatial command center that fuses open-source intelligence feeds onto a 3D globe. It was a weekend project. The internet went kind of crazy over it. One person joked I’d “vibe-coded Palantir.” The actual co-founder of Palantir…

Read more

2 months ago · 73 likes · 16 comments · Bilawal Sidhu

and here

It is amazing how far we've come since Nelson's sceptical comments in the first episode with Nelson 9 months ago about whether or not we have AGI. Nelson still may not think we have AGI, in constrast with a comment piece in Nature last month, but at least in his own words, he said it's the most fun he's had spending $600 when he bought a Mac Mini 2 weeks ago and set OpenClaw to work.

Let's check back on his opinion of AGI in another 9 months.

THIS EPISODE ELSEWHERE

CLIPS

Why 'notebook hell' breaks teams:

No Reskill, No Rework:

No more orphan SQL scripts:

Governance from day one:

THIS EPISODE ELSEWHERE

First up, another live event is planned for this Saturday, 2pm New York time. It will be with Rakesh Kumar, about data engineering. He has a managed service called Geoharbor which takes customers from notebook hell to an organised, coordinated data engineering team. Sign up on LinkedIn or Discord. Or save the Calendly link yourself.

DISCORD SERVER

Speaking of which, we have a Discord server!

CLIPS

Rejected then rewarded: a startup lesson:

Why gov’t apps miss the mark:

No open data policy — the real barrier:

Find your camp with bookmarks:

EPISODE

We are privileged today to share an episode with a Pakistani geospatial firm, Seerab Technologies. Zulkifil is a co-founder and has been with the company nearly 10 years. They have their own platform for real estate developers to help customers understand the context of proposed property purchases. He gave a simple example, a property with a large hole in it is hard to spot if you don’t have a terrain map. Seerab provides that to users. He also stepped through a few prizes they have won, including from Uber. Nice to have some lessons learnt from a firm all the way over in Pakistan telling us how product development is done.

What was most interesting to hear is the timeless advice he shared applies everywhere. We’re so used to hearing it from Silicon Valley, but his is a story of applying it successfully a world away - Seerab has been in business for years.

Finally, Zulkifil talks about doing good. According to Gemini:

The Hajj is one of the world's largest annual gatherings, with over 1.8 million to 2.5 million pilgrims converging on Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for five to six days of rituals. It is a mandatory, once-in-a-lifetime duty for all adult Muslims who are physically and financially capable.

One may imagine with so many people scrambling across a relatively small area on foot, in an unfamiliar place, there is a risk of getting lost. So Zulkifil showed us a solution based on listening to Pakistani pilgrims going to the Hajj.

Thanks Zulkifil for taking the time!

Think of weather models as databases:

ML turned weather into latent queries:

800 Years of Climate in One Day:

ML weather forecasts for data-poor regions:

EPISODE

This is episode 3/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena. In this episode, Alex steps through system characteristics of weather foundation models and how we can approach building them. Toward the end, the episode touches on an example of applying these approaches to a simulation of the Earth’s weather over a period of 800 years. The approaches Alex has been talking about enable the use of a GPU to process this simulation in only one day. We conclude with the values that drive Alex’s work.

THIS EPISODE ELSEWHERE

Date: TODAY 21st January

Time: 8pm ET

Live event link

Big models beat decades of research:

When ML Beat Physics-Based Forecasts:

Lorenz’s two-week dogma questioned:

The Tiny GNN That Shook Weather Forecasting:

EPISODE

This is episode 2/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena. In this episode, Alex steps through ML weather models, their history and how they work.

Links to items discussed

1. ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5): https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5

2. I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taught me:

Understanding AI

I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taught me

I’m excited to publish this guest post by Nick McGreivy, a physicist who last year earned a PhD from Princeton. Nick used to be optimistic that AI could accelerate physics research. But when he tried to apply AI techniques to real physics problems the results were disappointing…

Read more

a year ago · 401 likes · 66 comments · Nick McGreivy

THIS EPISODE ELSEWHERE

It was detailed and driven by what interested me. I will run a live event this time before preparing the 2025 report. I want to get feedback from you on what signals you need from the noise. We are up to 500 stocks now. This is a lot of noise. For example - see the X list:

You can scroll on forever and not glean much insight on trends, who won and who lost.

So let’s have a brief huddle to consider what you want to know about what happened in the world model or geospatial stock market in 2025.

Then I’ll produce the report.

I look forward to an engaging discussion.

Live event link here
Date: Tuesday, February 3
Time: 8:30pm ET
Topic: we will learn from Molly Freeman about how to start a geospatial consultancy. Based on her experience as CEO of whereabouts. Let's demystify entrepreneurship.

Whereabouts is an Esri Partner, and a certified Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE). The agenda is simple. We will demystify starting a consultancy. She will talk honestly about the steps to set one up, how to get clients and how to gain the certifications and partnerships mentioned.

Looking forward to this live session with Molly!

For those who can't attend, the recording will be on the podcast as usual.

Predicting floods saves lives — if we act:

Hybrid AI model helping farmers in India:

The 64,000-Person Weather Factory:

Why Weather Data Is ‘Sparse’:

EPISODE

This is episode 1/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena. In this episode, Alex steps through the background on doing weather prediction, from early efforts around a century ago to numerical and physics based models. This prepares us for later episodes on machine learning or AI based approaches.

Links to items discussed:

Pangeo, a community for open, reproducible, scalable geoscience.

Alex's Google Scholar profile.

Episode with Sergei Nozdrenkov on a coral reef foundation model:

Global Climate Data Collaboration: The Intentional Dream by George Dyson:

Hurricane Melissa.

Arham Ansari on GeoRiskAI:

What can a technologist do about climate change.

THIS EPISODE ELSEWHERE

AI Will Replace Tasks, Not Responsibility

Hype Clears Tech Debt

Who Gets the Budget

Waymo drove straight into a flood

EPISODE

Mark Munsell is Distinguished Fellow of Artificial Intelligence at Lindenwood University and Executive Director at GeoSTL. He is also Former Chief AI Officer at the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. As such, he has rich experience for us to mine. We used it to navigate the AI hype and transition from LLMs to world models. If you want to get an impression of him outside this episide, here he is at SC25 talking about Pixels, Petabytes, Predictions (and Possibilities!):

He was also recently published in The Cypher Brief.

EPISODE TOPICS:

1. What Mark achieved as an inventor.

2. His reflections on hype cycles after a career in geospatial.

3. Using this experience to examine the meaning of world models.

4. Notable achievements by world model companies.

5. GEOINT use case: Venezuela and the US.

6. Mark's ambitions for St Louis: GeoSTL.

7. How the World Model 500 can help.
   

Just to let you know this event is starting in 10 minutes.

Lethal Force to Build The Line

Top Firm Called Out by the UN

Buying condemnations

Courage vs. Silence

EPISODE

The Geospatial FM podcast topic profile:

1. Data engineering for geospatial

2. GEOSPATIAL FOR WORLD MODELS (foundation models are so last week)

3. GEOSPATIAL IN PREDICTION MARKETS (spatial finance is so 2022)

4. In this context, stocks, globally

5. Human rights outcomes of these stocks

Item 5 is always number 1. So we are finishing the year with that focus. Let's look at this BBC article about a murder of a tribal landowner to make way for the world's largest dictator vanity project, The Line in Saudi Arabia. Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti spoke in this video before he was murdered:

One thing he predicted was being framed by the government surrounding his dead body with weapons. They did report finding his body in such a state. Another BBC article profiles Col Rabih Alenezi. He said he was a security force leader who was asked by the government to, if necessary, kill villages who resisted eviction. He refused and escaped to the UK. Whoever replaced him obviously was not so upstanding, and Abdul Rahim al-Hwaiti was killed.

So we have a suitably arresting human rights issue to examine for the podcast. I then used The UN's Communication Report and Search tool to find out about the western companies involved, an issue flagged by the BBC in the second article and also here:

In the database I found a UN Letter of Urgent Appeal to AECOM . The communication search tool shows the CEO, Mr Rudd, does not appear to have responded to the letter. It is significant that AECOM was a recipient, because they're the best international design firm according to Engineering News Record. Last year it was Jacbos, also involved in NEOM, but they have not received a letter of urgent appeal.

In the letter, reference is made to an earlier one about the killing of Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti. The UN accompanied that letter a week later with a summary for the public.

In tying up loose ends, I observed that another recipient of such a letter was Solar Water. They announced in 2019 what they were doing for NEOM. Five years later, however, after receiving the letter, they gave up $100 million by cancelling the project. The CEO Malcolm Aw is to be congratulated.

AECOM has done no such thing. They could not even bear to respond to the letter. Despite being a signatory to the UN Global Compact.

AECOM is in the Consultancy vertical of the World Model 500. The podcast remains faithful to its 5 topics. Topic 5, human rights, is always number 1.

Please accept, dear Mr. Rudd and AECOM, the assurances of my highest consideration.

Event link: LinkedIn, Calendly.
Date: Monday, January 5th, 2026.
Time: 1:30pm US Eastern Standard Time, 8:30pm Central European Standard Time.

You are invited to a live online event with Mark Munsell. See links above. He is Distinguished Fellow of Artificial Intelligence at Lindenwood University and Executive Director at GeoSTL. He is also Former Chief AI Officer at the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

As such, he has rich experience for us to mine. We will use it to navigate the AI hype and transition from LLMs to world models.

If you want to get an impression of him before this event, here he is at SC25 talking about Pixels, Petabytes, Predictions (and Possibilities!) - from 47 minute mark:

He was also recently published in The Cypher Brief.

AGENDA:

1. What Mark achieved as an inventor.

2. His reflections on hype cycles after a career in geospatial.

3. Using this experience to examine the meaning of world models.

4. Notable achievements by world model companies.

5. GEOINT use cases.

6. Geospatial in agriculture*.

7. Geospatial for ad tech.

8. Mark's ambitions for St Louis: GeoSTL.

9. How the World Model 500 can help.

Looking forward to hosting you all for this live event. Come prepared with questions at the end. It will be recorded and posted on YouTube not long afterward.

*The agriculture item continues a theme started in Nadine Alameh’s episode:

In a hero’s journey like so many who have come to America over the centuries, this man escaped prison to New York City where he sold newspapers on a street corner. A few generations later we have Ryan to tell this story and remind us that things happen in cycles.

By using a translation service you can read more about this family member here.

Ryan also told us about another family member who adds to the picture of unrest like we see now occurring in cycles, and how cynical political figures can exploit underprivileged groups in society to distract the population from the real causes of their issues. I recommend listening to find out more about that family figure.

After mentioning the work of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle…

…Ryan then turned the mic toward me for a summary of what I have observed in my career from the perspective of exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. It was a chance to step through what I covered about a modern version of The Jungle, to do with migrant worker abuse, earlier in the year in 8 episodes starting here:

We then used this material about cycles of exploitation of the vulnerable in society across the centuries, examples from his family history of how to deal with that, and evidence of this pattern continuing in my career across the world to make the case for a new way of worker participation in the economy.

That new way is expanding democratic participation via owning shares. When you own shares you can vote on how a company is run. This could involve community organising and we can use a prior guest Frank Romo for inspiration here:

Ryan and I perceive there is an opportunity to assert ourselves in the industry to direct our work to favour the poor and marginalised.

I look forward to your own reflections on this matter and working with you to build up a force for justice here.

• 0:00 - Motivation for Microsoft to compete with Esri

• 1:20 - Who is Rakesh and data engineering services of SketchMyView

• 6:40 - Deploying a land and planning GIS for the UK government with Microsoft Synapse

• 22:25 - Is there a similarity between Synapse and Fabric?

• 26:26 - ACID compliance, delta files, lakehouses, bronze, silver, gold layers

• 35:18 - Apache Sedona in Fabric tutorial

• 57:20 - Why is it worth it to use Apache Sedona in Fabric?

• 1:00:44 - SedonaDB

CLIPS

No More Esri Tax: Open Geospatial Alternatives:

Is Microsoft the Next GIS Powerhouse?

The Wild World of Geospatial Complexity:

How Delta Lake Prevents Data Catastrophes:

EPISODE

Apache Sedona is a way for a regular Apache Spark using data analyst to acquire geospatial capabilities. With Sedona, if you know SQL, you know GIS:

⁠Rakesh Gupta⁠ is Principal Consultant at ⁠SketchMyView ⁠in London. He tells us about how to set up Apache Sedona in Microsoft Fabric in 2 lines of code. It was a privilege to have his time for this tutorial as he showed how easy it is to get up and running with a powerful, free spatial analysis system that leverages Apache Spark for scalable compute. He also touched in the new SedonaDB, released last month:

This is a significant development for the geospatial economy because it is a database created with geospatial data as a first class citizen. This means we have our own database library that is only a pip install away:

pip install “apache-sedona[db]”

Something to consider as a replacement for DuckDB. ⁠More here⁠ and ⁠here⁠.