November 2019, ScientificAmerican.com 17currents and other forces can cause water to
“pile up” along certain local coastlines, making
sea surfaces higher in some areas. The more
typical approach is to use a global benchmark
for zero elevation, which may not reflect local
sea-surface height. By combining average rates
for sea-level rise and for subsidence, Minder-
houd estimates the water will effectively rise by
0.8 meter on average in 57 years.
A similar fate may await other major deltas.
Heri Andreas, a researcher at the Bandung
Institute of Technology in Indonesia, says Jakar-
ta—coastal home to 10 million people and one
of the fastest-sinking cities on earth—has been
modeled extensively with lidar. Scientists esti-
mate that almost all of the city’s northern dis-
trict could be submerged by 2050, and Presi-
dent Joko Widodo announced plans to build a
new capital on the island of Borneo. “But many
other cities in Indonesia are also experiencing
subsidence, and we don’t have accurate eleva-
tion models for most of them,” Andreas says.
Although the locally measured elevations
are disturbing to outside experts, Nguyen main-
tains that they were not a surprise to scientists
in Vietnam. He also says the Vietnamese gov-
ernment is developing what he claims is a new
and even more precise elevation map. As for
relocation, Nguyen says he is unaware of any
plans to that effect. “The challenge is to con-
vince people if the prediction is reliable enough
to take action,” he says. —Charles Schmidt85 percent of individuals who used the
tool completed all their tasks; the rate was
only 56 percent for those not using it.
The difference in completion rates was
“quite impressive,” says Mike Oaksford,
a psychologist at Birkbeck, University of
London, who was not involved in the
study. “That seems to me to be a convinc-
ing demonstration that procrastination is
something that this strategy [can] help
with quite a lot.”
Lieder says one of the current tool’s
limitations is that it can handle only short
to-do lists, so he and his team are trying
to scale it up for a larger number of tasks.
At the same time, they are working with
a company called Complice to integrate
the tool into an existing to-do list app.
The researchers also plan to run field
experiments to see how well their cogni-
tive prosthesis fares in the real world.
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