Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

vaccines without needles

New technology may deliver vaccines without needles. Actually, there are needles but they are so small and short you can’t feel them.

But with if a vaccine could be delivered by simply applying a patch? That’s Mark Prausnitz’s goal: creating a nickel-sized bandage-like device covered with 100 microscopic needles that would puncture the skin, then dissolve to get the vaccine into the body.

Maybe that sounds scary — 100 needles instead of one. But Prausnitz says you can’t really feel the needles. “It wouldn’t be like sandpaper or scratching,” he says. “You would have a hard time feeling a difference between the needles being there or not being there.”

compendium of inspiring planning practices

Move over Agenda 21, we have a new contender for the world’s most boring urban planning related conspiracy theory, Resolution 24/3! Seriously, don’t read it. It’s boring. However as a supporting study, the UN has put together a book of case studies on planning best practices in cities around the world, which is actually interesting. I found the Melbourne case study particularly interesting, and would like to dig into it more:

Melbourne developed a new approach to urban planning, through an ecosystem-based climate adaptation programme, embracing what the City refers to as ‘nature sensitive’ urban design and planning. This approach emphasises the services that nature provides to the city and focuses on how it can be protected, restored, created, enhanced and maintained within the urban setting. The urgency posed by the current impacts of climate changes resulted in the City creating a multi-million dollar integrated ecosystem-based climate change adaptation program in 2010 – the ‘Urban Landscapes Adaptation Program’.

The primary goal of this programme was to reduce drought vulnerability and to cool the city by 4°C in an effort to safeguard its citizens and the ecosystem services of its environmental assets from the impacts of climate change. The programme is underpinned by two strategies: the Open Space Strategy, which aims to increase green space by 7.6% and the Urban Forest Strategy, which is projected to double the City’s tree canopy to 40%.

recycled water

Recycled water, i.e. treating sewage back to drinking water standards, has been around for awhile and doesn’t raise many eyebrows in truly water scarce areas. Which is why it is getting more popular and less controversial in California cities. Here are some fun pictures of politicians drinking it out of beakers with big smiles on their faces.

Which, maybe because we are in mayoral election season here in Philadelphia, reminded me of this great scene from The Wire.

 

April 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

Positive stories:

  • Mr. Money Mustache brought us a nice post on home energy efficiency projects. This was a very popular post.
  • Biotechnology may soon bring us the tools to seriously monkey with photosynthesis. (This is one of those stories where I struggle between the positive and negative columns, but clearly there is a potential upside when we will have so many mouths to feed.)
  • Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, is retiring. That might sound bad, but his ground-breaking ideas are continuing on and actually seem to be going mainstream.
  • Lee Kuan Yew, who took Singapore “from third world to first” in one generation, passed away (in March, but I wrote about it in April. Let me be clear – I am an admirer and it is his life I am putting in the positive column, not his death.)
  • Donella Meadows explained how your bathtub is a dynamic system.
  • Robert Gordon offers a clear policy prescription for the U.S. to support continued economic growth.
  • I explain how a cap-and-trade program for stormwater and pollution producing pavement could work.
  • Joel Mokyr talks about advances in information technology, materials science and biotechnology.
  • Some U.S. cities are fairly serious about planting trees.
  • Edmonton has set a target of zero solid waste.
  • Saving water also saves energy. It’s highly logical, but if you are the skeptical type then here are some numbers. Also, urban agriculture reduces carbon emissions.
  • Peter Thiel thinks we can live forever. (positive, but do see my earlier comment about mouths to feed…)
  • A paper in Ecological Economics tries to unify the ecological footprint and planetary boundary concepts.
  • Philadelphia finally has bike share.

meta-analysis on designing active cities

This is a great example of meta-analysis in Active Living Research. There are a few things I like about it. First, it combines academic literature, other literature, and expert opinion in a very transparent and defensible way, by giving each a score. It takes a very wide array of urban design and planning choices and relates them to a number of outcomes (physical health, mental health, environmental sustainability, health and safety, and economic growth), and draws quantitative conclusions about the importance of each. Some outcomes challenge my pre-conceived notions, for example that street connectivity is bad for safety, but the methodology is very transparent, so I can dig in if I want and try to figure out whether I disagree with a particular rating, or whether I really should rethink my preconceived notion. Those of us dealing with complex planning and engineering programs (and many other complex systems) can’t realistically expect to optimize a handful of objectives any more. Instead, we can play the odds by making sure all our small, daily decisions have a better than even chance of nudging the system in a desired direction, based on the complete body of evidence out there, even with all its contradictions and confusions.

U.S. Innovation Deficit

MIT is warning that U.S. investment in R&D has dropped enormously. I find this idea very disturbing, that in an age of accelerating science and technology, which corporations and governments should have every incentive to take advantage of, they are failing to do so.

Declining U.S. federal government research investment — from just under 10 percent in 1968 to less than 4 percent in 2015 — in critical fields such as cybersecurity, infectious disease, plant biology, and Alzheimer’s are threatening an “innovation deficit,” according to a new MIT report to be released Monday, April 27.

U.S. competitors are increasing their investment in basic research. The European Space Agency successfully landed the first spacecraft on a comet. China developed the world’s fastest supercomputer and has done research in plant biology uncovering new ways to meet global food demand and address malnutrition. Meanwhile, U.S. investment in basic plant-related research and development is far below that of many other scientific disciplines, despite the fact that the agricultural sector is responsible for more than 2 million U.S. jobs and is a major source of export earnings.

The report, entitled “The Future Postponed: Why Declining Investment in Basic Research Threatens a U.S. Innovation Deficit,” highlights opportunities in basic research that could help shape and maintain U.S. economic power and benefit society.

 

leisure time and sustainability

This article in Ecological Economics makes a link between leisure time and sustainable behavior.

The considerable gap between the individuals level of concern about climate change and the degree to which they act on these concerns is a major impediment to achieving more sustainable consumption patterns. We empirically investigate how the amount of discretionary time that individuals have at their disposal influences both what type of sustainable consumption practices they adopt and the size of this value–action gap. We contend that discretionary time has a twofold effect. Given fixed preferences, time-poor individuals tend to satisfy their preferences by adopting sustainable consumption practices that require relatively less time. Moreover, a lack of discretionary time also inhibits agents from developing preferences that actually reflect their underlying environmental concerns. Our findings support both of these hypotheses and suggest that increasing discretionary time is associated with significant reductions in the value–action gap. This suggest that policies which increase discretionary time, such as measures to improve the work–life balance, may thus help in fostering the emergence of pro-environmental preferences among consumers in the long run.

This makes some sense to me. It also makes sense to me that sustainability is partly about social capital – people having time to interact with each other through formal and informal organizations, think things through, have discussions and make ethical judgments about what kinds of actions they want to take together. When we are working 40-60 hour weeks in the single-minded pursuit of corporate profits, many of us just don’t have time and energy to engage in this sort of social capital building even if we want to.