Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

critical vs. creative thinking?

This article suggests we need less critical thinking and more creative thinking. This may be true if we are interpreting the word “critical” the way it is often used in everyday speech, to mean oppositional, argumentative, closed minded, cynical. But I don’t think that is the intended meaning of critical thinking at all. Critical thinking is about using the powerful analytical tools of reason, logic, induction, provided by fields such as science, engineering, economics, even philosophy. You need analytical tools to decide which options are better than others for solving a given problem or achieving a given goal. But before you can apply the analytical tools, you need creativity to come up with a wide range of possible ways to achieve the desired outcome, ranging from dumb to brilliant. Then you use the analytical tools to separate the dumb from the brilliant. Without creativity, that needle-in-a-haystack brilliant idea will never be in the mix.

To solve tomorrow’s complex problems, we can’t be forcing today’s kids to make a false choice between creative and critical thinking. They have to learn how to combine both, every day. Einstein didn’t make that choice, he was an avid violinist and even credited music as inspiration for his theories. Sherlock Holmes was also an avid violinist. Only he wasn’t real, he was a fictional character, the product of a creative mind, who engaged in highly logical inductive reasoning, in lateral, non-traditional, and very creative ways. It takes some creativity to wrap your head around that one.

the lowline

This article has some really fascinating renderings of “The Lowline”, a proposed underground park in an abandoned subway station in New York City. This could work really well in Philadelphia’s Broad State transit concourse, which is still open but looks like something New York would have abandoned decades ago.

The technology behind the project has a kind of irresistible science fiction appeal: A series of parabolic mirrors stationed aboveground collect the sun’s rays and direct them below through a series of “irrigation tubes,” which pipe the sunlight across an undulating canopy that works as a fixture to splash the light across the terminal space. In the days following its online debut, the project’s psychedelic renderings and intriguing pitch for innovative, public green space became a mini-sensation and birthed a wave of stories on sites from CNN toInHabitat to Web Urbanist. The Architect’s Newspaper said it “could become the next park phenomenon”; Business Insider reported that the “ambitious underground oasis” had “New Yorkers buzzing with excitement.”

The project has encountered some predictable challenges, which the article goes into, one of which is how to use corporate funding without it just becoming another underground mall. This is also an important step toward our inevitable “malls in space” future as a species.

 

those Philadelphia streets

Philadelphia is one of the most walkable U.S. cities. And yet, it could be so much better and safer. I snapped this picture in frustration after waiting through a whole light cycle of buses blocking the crosswalk, only to have them block a second whole cycle.

IMG_0278

I would love for the culture to improve or human beings to just decide to behave better. I know better street designs exist and U.S. cities are negligent in not adopting them immediately. But until human nature and political will improve, some law enforcement could help here today. It turns out, it is not just my impression that Philadelphia police don’t enforce traffic laws.

Officers are writing a third as many tickets for moving violations as they were in 1999, when they issued 418,881 citations. Last year, it was down 14 percent, and it continued dropping in the first half of 2015 – down 12 percent, compared with the same period the previous year.

Police officials privately concede that traffic enforcement is a low priority in the city, where crime has been on the rise.

Because killing a flesh and blood human with your car is not a crime, it’s an “accident”. They don’t belong there, because you are in a car and the streets are for you, not them.

Just out of curiosity, I compared the murder rate in Philadelphia (246) to the rate of traffic fatalities (89), including pedestrians (40? – these are pedestrians “involved in fatal accidents”, which is slightly ambiguous). These are 2013 numbers. So there are more murders, but I still don’t see why the police automatically prioritize one form of violent death over another. Which type of violent death is more preventable? Which type is more likely to affect society’s most innocent and vulnerable – children, the elderly and disabled? In which case are the perpetrators sitting in vehicles with easily identified numbers on them and often caught on camera?

life expectancy

NPR has a tabulation of life expectancy in hundreds of countries. What jumps out to me is that, outside of Africa, the gap between developed and developing countries is not all that great – most countries are in the 70s for men, and only a small handful (Andorra, Iceland, Israel, Japan) crack 80. Women consistently outlive men by a few years (Afghanistan and Zambia are the only two exceptions on the list, and Russia jumps out as a country where women outlive men by more than 10 years).

Just as a sample, here are the numbers for men in countries I have set foot in:

  • Australia: 79
  • Belgium: 77
  • Canada: 79
  • Indonesia: 68
  • Malaysia: 71
  • Netherlands: 78
  • Norway: 79
  • Singapore: 79
  • South Korea: 77
  • Sweden: 79
  • Thailand: 71
  • United Kingdom: 79
  • United States: 76

What accounts for the differences? I don’t know, but let me speculate. At first glance, national wealth seems to be an excellent predictor. But there are probably many nuances to the data. For example, infant mortality rates can make average life expectancy a little misleading. If the numbers were based instead on life expectancy for those who make it to age 5, they might be a little different. Don’t get me wrong, infant mortality is an awful thing, but the measures needed to reduce it are different from the measures needed to keep adults healthy. Beyond that, universal and affordable health care almost certainly plays a role in the list above (hello, U.S., you stand out clearly as the sickest rich country on this list). Diet, obesity, and smoking all must play a role.

benefits of cycling infrastructure

From New Zealand, here’s a cost-benefit analysis of cycling infrastructure based on a participatory system dynamics model.

Methods: We used system dynamics modeling (SDM) to compare realistic policies, incorporating feedback effects, nonlinear relationships, and time delays between variables. We developed a system dynamics model of commuter bicycling through interviews and workshops with policy, community, and academic stakeholders. We incorporated best available evidence to simulate five policy scenarios over the next 40 years in Auckland, New Zealand. Injury, physical activity, fuel costs, air pollution, and carbon emissions outcomes were simulated.

Results: Using the simulation model, we demonstrated the kinds of policies that would likely be needed to change a historical pattern of decline in cycling into a pattern of growth that would meet policy goals. Our model projections suggest that transforming urban roads over the next 40 years, using best practice physical separation on main roads and bicycle-friendly speed reduction on local streets, would yield benefits 10–25 times greater than costs.

causal loop diagram

Hugo Awards

The Hugo Award winner for best novel is:

From Amazon:

The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple award winning phenomenon from China’s most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin.
Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

the case of the missing mammals

Where would the large mammals be if humans hadn’t come along?

How would the world look if humans had never spread out across the Earth? For a start, we’d have a lot more forest, much less pollution, and the stars would look unbelievably bright. But, as a new map shows, the planet would also be absolutely teeming with large mammals, from the Serengeti to Northern Europe and all the way across the Americas. Researchers at Denmark’s Aarhus University have created a global map which shows the distribution of large mammals as it may have been if humans had never left Africa…

The Americas used to be home to 105 large mammal species, including sabre-toothed cats, mastodons, giant sloths and giant armadillos, which all disappeared in the last 100,000 years or so. A previous study by the Aarhus University research team showed that human activity was responsible for this mass extinction…

“The reason that many safaris target Africa is… that it’s one of the only places where human activities have not yet wiped out most of the large animals,” said Postdoctoral Fellow Søren Faurby, lead author on the study.

The highest levels of diversity would be in central regions of north and south America, especially parts of Texas, the U.S. Great plains and regions of Brazil and Argentina.

environmentalists and poor communication

Here a marketing person criticizes the communication strategies of scientists and environmentalists.

our side likes complexity. And in communications, only simplicity works. Our side doesn’t like simplicity because they view it as manipulative or not capturing the truth. Without simplicity, people don’t remember anything. Another thing: The research shows and common sense tells you that that this is a really tough, depressing issue to get your head around. So they really can’t do it unless they know what can be done about it. And we don’t put forward a clear solution. Go out on the street and ask people, “What can we do about climate change?” They won’t know. So we have to make this a lot simpler…

Public interest types, across the board — we think because we’ve said something, know something, or done something, that everybody else knows it. We don’t realize the bubble we live in.  It’s only when you’ve said something so many times that you’re utterly and completely sick of it that someone has even heard it. Marketers understand this. Scientists and people from the humanities less so — they get bored by it. “We already had our op-ed in the New York Times! The world knows!” But it takes so much more repetition than that.

I mean, as a country, even the intelligentsia has not fully realized that we are in a planetary emergency and we are running rapidly out of time.

Actually, I get criticized by my fellow engineers almost daily for oversimplifying complex issues and for repeating myself to the point of annoyance. It turns out, maybe I have some communication instincts after all!

climate change and mass migration

This article tries to make a link between current mass migrations of people and climate, giving Syria as one example.

There is not a migrant or refugee crisis. We’re in the midst of a global migration shift. While its unrelenting realities of forced displacement, whether from war, persecution or economic despair originate from disparate causes, they all share a singular fact: The nascent stages of this historical migration shift require long-term planning, not short-term designation.

Nearly 60 million people fled their homes in 2014, according to a recent UN report. Within a generation, according to estimates by numerous climate scientists and the international organizations dealing with migration, 150-200 million people could be displaced by the fallout of severe drought, flooding and extreme climate.

As the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted in a recent study, “the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought,” which has triggered some of the largest displacements of refugees across the Mediterranean, are a significant part of the roots of the Syrian civil war itself.

Zakaria on Singapore

Fareed Zakaria thinks Singapore has more “social harmony” than the U.S. Uncritically quoting a deputy prime minister:

I asked the country’s deputy prime minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, what he regarded as the country’s biggest success. I imagined that he would talk about economics, since the city-state’s per capita GDP now outstrips that of the United States, Japan and Hong Kong. He spoke instead about social harmony.

“We were a nation that was not meant to be,” Shanmugaratnam said. The swamp-ridden island, expelled from Malaysia in 1965, had a polyglot population of migrants with myriad religions, cultures and belief systems. “What’s interesting and unique about Singapore, more than economics, are our social strategies. We respected peoples’ differences yet melded a nation and made an advantage out of diversity,” he said in an interview, echoing remarks he made at the St. Gallen Symposium last month in Switzerland…

I believe that Singapore is an example of a diverse society that has been able to live in harmony and that we could learn something from.

I had similar impressions when visiting Singapore. I had a very different impression when I lived there for three years. My impression was that families in Singapore are very, very strong, but relations between strangers, regardless of race or religion, are very, very weak. People don’t love or hate each other, because they don’t care about each other or have any interest in each other at all. I didn’t spend a lot of time around groups of Americans while I was there, so when I would occasionally find myself in a group of Americans, what always struck me was the sort of easy banter and camaraderie that Americans have, even when they are strangers to each other. Despite our despicable racial history, this is deeply engrained in our culture at this point and it is something we take completely for granted until and unless we spend some time in a society where it is not there. My conclusion from my personal experience was that Singapore may be pleasant and peaceful, as long as things are going well economically, but that social glue is not there, particularly for the younger generations who have known nothing but wealth seeking and consumerism as the dominant culture. I am not sure the country will be resilient some day when adversity finally comes, as it always does. I think people may turn on each other. Lee Kuan Yew, who led the country through the difficult times the deputy prime minster mentions above, understood this when he repeatedly cautioned that Singapore is not yet a true nation. Incidentally, he would point to China and Japan (not the U.S. or other western countries) as examples of “true nations” that always come through no matter what. I hope the current leadership understands what he meant. I wish Singaporeans all the best.