Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

To be totally honest, the project itself was tedious. Digitizing slides and attaching their metadata, especially in the days before good open source relational databases existed, was a sloooow process.

The page itself was an image map (remember those?) that was a world map. Clicking on it triggered a cgi-bin program written in C (pointers are terrible, thank you for coming to my ted talk) that translated where you clicked into an approximate lat/long & looked for nearby photos.

This was before automated testing was really a thing, and it was written by students, so...you can perhaps imagine how high-quality it was. But nobody really noticed. It was such new tech that everyone was just REALLY impressed that it actually (occasionally) worked.

So that was pretty neat, but also fiddly & irritating because there were no docs on anything. Summer ended & I went back to my structural engineering classes. Then a few months later the professor who ran the lab forwarded me an email she’d gotten from a colleague in Brazil.

This was the mid-90s, & environmental scientists in Brazil were battling with their government over rainforest deforestation. Loggers were clear-cutting immense columns of rainforest, but in locations so remote that the government was able to deny it was happening at all.

This scientist who wrote to us had used our web page (despite the bugs) to find two photos of the same location in the remote Brazilian rainforest, taken 10 years apart.

The earlier photo was pretty, but unremarkable. The later one, though, showed clear, long scars, like claw marks through the forest, where loggers had clear-cut. So big that they were visible from space.

This scientist had used these two photos - official US government photos, so difficult to dismiss as fakes - to help convince some of the ministers in the government that clear-cutting was actually happening - despite the logging industry’s assurances to the contrary.