Steven Ramage

Founder and CEO Réseau Consulting Board @climatepolradar @GEOBON_org

[Steven Ramage @Steven_Ramage]

@RebelGeo @JamesMelville I hear it often at the rugby! 🏉

[Steven Ramage @Steven_Ramage]

@HayleyMcQueen (And obviously your dad, Dalglish, Rioch, Rough, Macari and all the other greats! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿)

[Steven Ramage @Steven_Ramage]

@HayleyMcQueen Love this. My dad took me to watch 1978 World Cup in a church in Stonehaven (got to love Scottish holidays) - about 30 of us crammed around an old telly. All I remember is Archie Gemmill and the smell of McEwan's. Dad is dead one year next month. He would be incredulous…

[Scottish Banter @1scottishbanter]

Introducing the Scottish-American travel dictionary 🇺🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

We’ve put together this guide to keep the Tartan Army out of trouble in the States.

Read carefully to avoid confusing the locals, deeply offending the country, or being interrogated by Homeland Security over a sandwich.

[OroraTech @OroraTech]

The energy of last year’s OroraTech International Wildfire Conference is still with us.

Now, we’re getting ready for what’s next!

🚨Applications are open for the 4th edition.
⏰ October 12–13 2026.
📍 Miesbach, near Munich, Germany.

Request a seat 👉 https://t.co/pDx9t2ItFb

[Digital Earth Africa @DEarthAfrica]

We are hiring a User Engagement/Capacity Development Lead.

Senior Consultancy Role | Nairobi /Remote | Closes 15 June 2026

10+years experience in engagement, partnerships or cap dev within geospatial /development programmes required.

Apply here: https://t.co/Zj9DhDCRpw

[Instituto Humboldt @inst_humboldt]

🌿 Invitación | Webinar sobre Planificación Espacial y la Meta 1 del Marco mundial Kunming-Montreal de la diversidad biológica 🌎

📅 jueves 4 y viernes 5 de junio
🕗 8:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. (Hora Colombia)
💻 Modalidad virtual

🔗 Registro previo: https://t.co/dBTWI1KmjZ

[OroraTech @OroraTech]

We achieved first light from @KeplerComms 🛰

The four thermal sensors we integrated into @KeplerComms satellites are scanning the earth, giving you a first glimpse of what a global #thermallivestream could look like!

Discover more about the mission!
👉 https://t.co/50zd2kn26S

[Steven Ramage @Steven_Ramage]

It’s a long time since I sat in a cinema when people screamed and laughed almost as much #Obsession was like Nightmare on Elm Street with elements of Pulp Fiction and something else sprinkled on top #ObsessionMovie

[Yohan @yohaniddawela]

A new geospatial foundation model can now estimate how poor your neighbourhood is, track how fast that's changing, and do it without anyone filling out a single survey form.

A team of Stanford researchers just published Tempov, a foundation model trained on three million pairs of Landsat images spanning two decades. It takes raw satellite imagery and predicts asset wealth at the village level, across entire continents, updated in near real-time.

The benchmark numbers are worth sitting with. In Malawi and Mozambique, the model explains 87% and 74% of the variation in household wealth from satellite imagery alone. That's from six spectral bands. No census forms. No field enumerators. No mobile phone metadata.

The harder problem is tracking change, not just level. Most existing models are trained to predict a static snapshot. When you ask them to predict how wealth shifted between 2008 and 2018 in the same locations, performance collapses to near-random. Tempov holds at R² = 0.69 for Malawi and 0.46 for Mozambique on that same change-tracking task.

What makes the difference is how the model was pretrained. The researchers constructed bitemporal image pairs that maximise seasonal variance, then forced the model to learn representations that are stable across seasons but sensitive to genuine long-run economic shifts. The learned embeddings spontaneously delineate road networks, urban structure, and agricultural patterns from natural background, without ever being told to.

The scarcity problem is where it gets interesting for development economics. The standard tools for measuring poverty rely on the Demographic and Health Surveys. DHS data is spatially sparse and resurveyed infrequently. The correlation between asset wealth in Malawi's earlier and later censuses is only 0.42. In Mozambique it's actually negative: -0.71.

Tempov gets around this with a two-stage adaptation. Train on historical census data, then fine-tune to the target year using only 5% of contemporary survey points. With that 5% adjustment, it outperforms geospatial foundation models that were given 100% of available survey data. Combining a strong historical prior with minimal contemporary calibration can substitute for the full survey investment.

The researchers then deployed it continent-wide. Five models trained under cross-validation on all 34 African countries with recent DHS surveys, averaged into a single ensemble, producing 6 km × 6 km wealth maps for the entire African continent in 2015 and 2025. Roughly 80% of measured wealth inequality across the continent is within countries, not between them.

The decadal change map shows wealth gains concentrated in West and East Africa and substantial declines across parts of Southern and Central Africa. Country-level factors explain only about a third of the variation in wealth change. Local temperature trends and nearby conflict events predict the changes better than institutional-quality proxies do.

For the applied economics side: the model achieves competitive performance with 10% of available survey samples where baseline foundation models need 100%. That's not a modest efficiency gain. That's a different cost structure for poverty measurement entirely.

DHS survey rounds are already under funding pressure. The World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Surveys have become increasingly irregular. The status quo is a slow degradation in the quality and frequency of ground-truth data on living standards in the places that most need monitoring.

What Tempov suggests is that the role of household surveys may be shifting from the primary measurement instrument to the calibration anchor. You don't stop running surveys. You run fewer, target them better, and use them to tune a model that fills in the rest from orbit.

The code and weights are open-source. The continent-wide wealth maps are public. The methodology is reproducible by a national statistics office with a laptop and a moderate AWS bill.

The hard part was always getting data out of places that couldn't afford to collect it. That constraint just got significantly looser.

Link to paper: https://t.co/lNbIJp3mn6

[Amina J Mohammed @AminaJMohammed]

150 million lives saved in 50 years.

6 lives every minute, every day, for five decades.

Vaccines work. They always have.

And this #WorldImmunizationWeek, we reaffirm our commitment to a healthy life for every person, in every generation, everywhere.

[Steven Ramage @Steven_Ramage]

@GlobalDecker @Esri Think I’m in one of those photos from over a decade ago!

[Amina J Mohammed @AminaJMohammed]

On #EarthDay, we are reminded that the health of our planet and the wellbeing of our people are inseparable.

From climate shocks to biodiversity loss, the warning signs are clear. But so are the solutions.

Let's act with urgency and solidarity, protecting our planet and our future.

[Yohan @yohaniddawela]

The UN estimates there are roughly 4 billion buildings on Earth.

Researchers have just released the first open dataset providing 3D models for 2.75 billion of them at 3m resolution:

[Steven Ramage @Steven_Ramage]

#NewProfilePic #MoreGrey

[Steven Ramage @Steven_Ramage]

Human Interoperability & the technology translation gap https://t.co/2KlTCm9tjh

[OroraTech @OroraTech]

The Hellenic Fire System, a dedicated satellite constellation for Greece, will be in orbit in a month, opening a new chapter in wildfire intelligence from space.

🛰️ Built to protect. Designed to see through challenging conditions.

A shared project with @MinDigitalGr and @esa.

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

The name Glasgow, that of Scotland's largest city, is so old that it predates the time when Gaelic was spoken. It is, rather, a derivation from Brittonic, a language related to Welsh. It was spoken for over 1,000 years in the Glasgow area. The name Glasgow means:

1.

[Steven Ramage @Steven_Ramage]

@bluewmist Weightlifting and walking, eat healthy with less alcohol

[Planet Rugby @PlanetRugby]

😳 Wow. Just. Wow.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland EMPATHICALLY end France's Grand Slam bid. #SCOvFRA