lawlessness in academic journals, understood the highway’s dangers and uncertainties better than most. He had been threatened in anonymous calls and messages — then abducted in November 2020 and told to keep quiet.
Another researcher documenting the destruction received this text: “You’re going to burn in the fire. It will be a barbecue. Message delivered.”
But Ferrante, 33, believed traveling here was worth the risk. He had come to see this highway, a reddish gash scarring a quilt of green, as one of the Amazon’s last stands. A photographer and I had now joined him on this journey to its further reaches.
BR-319 begins along the banks of the Amazon River and runs more than 500 miles, slicing through the largely preserved core of the Brazilian Amazon to connect the cities of Manaus and Porto Velho.
Scientists argue that the only thing protecting this reserve — one of the region’s last bastions of contiguous forest — is the profound deterioration of the road itself.
Its decay has for years left much of it impassable, repelling criminal land grabbers and helping to preserve an area scientists say is vital to the survival of the entire forest.
But that protective barrier is now being paved over.
Stretches of the highway have been improved in recent years, making travel easier and unleashing a surge of deforestation. Many in the rainforest want the government to complete the job. President Jair Bolsonaro, who has worked to ease and undermine environmental regulations to promote development, says paving the highway would fulfill “a wish of the Amazonian people.” His vice president, a general in reserve, said he’d eat his own military beret if current officials don’t get it done.Take a data-first approach. Once we realize the importance of these data management products, we should redesign them with a data-first approach. Although they're data products, they shouldn't be built with only a workflow-centric approach in mind, in which effort is purely put into making a better user interface with some element of machine learning. The data that currently goes into and comes out of these systems isn't typically used effectively because the systems are often built on a weak data backbone. We should reinvent these products by ensuring that the data capture, storage, processing and distribution happen in the most effective manner with impeccable data lineage and easy data governance. As an example, data reconciliation is one of the most important processes in any organization. The quality of data that goes into reconciliation platforms is usually top-notch and what comes out is fully reconciled data: the single source of truth. Do we harvest it? Do we use this source for regulatory, client and financial reporting? Often, the answer is "no."
4. Consider distributed ledger technology. Distributed ledger technology (DLT; i.e., blockchain) can process, store and distribute data with effective traceability and immutability. We can use DLT to build an enterprise data backbone to manage all the data life cycle events. DLT can help make data lineage, data ownership and data governance easier and facilitate building a federated and collaborative model of data management. It can also allow multiple data sources to contribute to data management, instead of relying only on a centralized data management platform.
We've spent enough time and energy building new data infrastructure, big data stores for aggregating data and moving the often costly infrastructure to the cloud waiting for the magic to happen. It's time to take a step back and look at the basics of our data management products—to reimagine, rethink and reinvent them so the data in motion can be effectively harvested. Rather than sending data from multiple platforms in the business ecosystem to the data lake and keeping our
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