Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Geoff Lawton

Here’s a Youtube play list of 200 videos with Geoff Lawton the Permaculture guy. I’ve embedded just one below.

Permaculture is great – it’s about sustainable agriculture and sustainable living in the dictionary sense of sustainability – entwined ecosystems and human settlements that can work together and persist for the long term. On a more practical level, it’s about farms and gardens that function as self-sustaining ecosystems, feeding people with very low inputs of energy and effort. The only possible criticism of it might be that perhaps its scientific core could be shored up a bit. But it really is a system-based ecological design philosophy that could be incorporated into a lot of mainstream programs, from small-scale farming to large-scale agribusiness to urban parks and trees.

automated aggregation of scientific literature

I am intrigued by this example from Stanford of computerized review and synthesis of scientific literature:

Over the last few years, we have built applications for both broad domains that read the Web and for specific domains like paleobiology. In collaboration with Shanan Peters (PaleobioDB), we built a system that reads documents with higher accuracy and from larger corpora than expert human volunteers. We find this very exciting as it demonstrates that trained systems may have the ability to change the way science is conducted.

In a number of research papers we demonstrated the power of DeepDive on NMR data and financial, oil, and gas documents. For example, we showed that DeepDive can understand tabular data. We are using DeepDive to support our own research, exploring how knowledge can be used to build the next generation of data processing systems.

Examples of DeepDive applications include:

  • PaleoDeepDive – A knowledge base for Paleobiologists
  • GeoDeepDive – Extracting dark data from geology journal articles
  • Wisci – Enriching Wikipedia with structured data

The complete code for these examples is available with DeepDive.

Let’s just say an organization is trying to be more innovative. First it needs to understand where its standard operating procedures are in relation to the leading edge. To do that, it needs to understand where the leading edge is. That means research, which can be very tedious, and time consuming. It means the organization is paying people to spend time reviewing large amounts of information, some or even most of which will not turn out to be useful. So a change in mindset is often necessary. But tools that could jump start the process and provide short cuts would be great.

This is my own developing theory of how an organization can become more innovative: First, figure out where the leading edge is. Second, figure out how far the various parts of your organization are from the leading edge. Third, figure out how you are going to bring a critical mass of your organization up to the leading edge – this is as much a human resource problem as an innovation problem. Fourth, then and only then, you are ready to try to advance the leading edge. I think a lot of organizations have a few people that do #1, but then they skip right to #4. Then that small group is way outside the leading edge while the bulk of the organization is nowhere near it. That’s not a recipe for success.

November 2014 in Review

At the end of October, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2.  I’ll give November posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-6):

  • There is mounting evidence that the world economy is slowing, financial corporations are still engaged in all sorts of dirty tricks, and overall investment may be dropping. Financial authorities are trying to respond through financial means, but the connections are not being made to the right kinds of investments in infrastructure, skills, and protection of natural capital that would set the stage for long-term sustainable growth in the future. (-2)
  • Public apathy over climate change in the U.S. may have been manufactured by a cynical, immoral corporate disinformation campaign over climate change taken right out of the tobacco companies’ playbook. It’s true that the tobacco companies ultimately were called to account, but not until millions of lives were lost. Will it be billions this time? (-2)
  • Glenn Beck has gone even further off his rocker, producing a video suggesting the U.N. is going to ration food and burn old people alive while playing vaguely middle eastern music. One negative point because some people out there might not laugh. (-1)
  • The new IPCC report predicts generally negative effects of climate change on crops and fisheries. The good news is it doesn’t seem to predict catastrophic collapse, but we need to remember that the food supply needs to grow substantially in the coming decades, not just hold steady, so any headwinds making that more difficult are potentially threatening. (-1)

Positive trends and predictions (+6):

  • A lot is known about how to grow healthy trees in the most urbanized environments. But only a few cities really take advantage of this readily available knowledge. (+0)
  • As manufacturing becomes increasingly high-tech, automation vs. employment is emerging as a big theme for the future. The balance may swing back and forth over time, but in the long term I think automation has to win. New wealth will be created, but the question is how broadly it will be shared. The question is not just an economic one – it depends on the kind of social and political systems people will live under in various places. This might be why the field of economics was originally called “political economy”. So I’m putting this in the positive column but giving it no points because the jury is out. (+0)
  • Google is working on nanobots that can swim around in your blood and give an early diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. (+1)
  • Economic slowing is probably the main reason why oil prices are way down. Increased supply capacity from the U.S. also probably plays a role, although there are dissenting voices how long that is going to last. I find it hard to say whether cheaper oil is good or bad. I tend to think it is just meaningless noise on the longer time scale, but you won’t hear me complain if it brings down the price of transportation and groceries for a year or two. (+0)
  • Millennials aren’t buying cars in large numbers. I don’t believe for a second that this means they are less materialistic than past generations, but I think a shift in consumption from cars to almost anything else is a net gain for sustainability. (+2)
  • I discovered the FRAGSTATS package for comprehensive spatial analysis of ecosystems and habitats. This gives us quantitative tools to design green webs that work well for both people and wildlife. Bringing land back into our economic framework in an explicit way might also help. (+1)
  • “Perennial polyculture” gardens may be able to provide food year round on small urban footprints in temperate climates. (+1)
  • A vision for smart, sustainable infrastructure involves walkable communities, closing water and material loops, and using energy wisely. Pretty much the same points I made in my book, which I don’t actively promote on this site;) (+1)

Hope for the Future Index (end of October 2014): -2

change during November 2014: -6 + 6 = 0

Hope for the Future Index (end of November 2014): -2 + 0 = -2

Scratch

“Scratch” is another programming language supposedly aimed at children.

Scratch Overview from ScratchEd on Vimeo.

If you watch the TED talk in the first link, there is an analogy I like – just because you use technology created by others (web browsing, texting, etc.) doesn’t make you fully literate in that technology. It is akin to being able to read but not able to write.

Michael Graves’s linear cities

I had forgotten about this idea for long, linear cities laid out along transportation corridors.

It’s interesting. I’m a little skeptical for a few reasons. First, I can imagine it being a cold, corporate world. Who would own the buildings and transportation systems? From my little row house I can walk in many different directions and engage in many different activities on little parcels of land owned or controlled by many different entities. Would this linear city be more like living in a mall, where everything is ultimately controlled by one owner and sanitized for my protection? Also, a line is by definition a one-dimensional world – in a linear city it seems to me like I would have only two choices of direction and that sounds boring. Although the prospect of being close to a natural or agricultural landscape is intriguing. A final concern would be the capacity of the transportation system. As the city keeps getting longer indefinitely, it seems like you might come up against a finite transportation capacity and bottlenecks could develop in the system.

I’m also reminded about a couple works of science fiction, both of which are dystopian. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is laid out along “linear cities” that are definitely not cold, corporate, sanitary or mall like (or safe). They are more like trashy interstate truck stops. Paul McAuley’s Invisible Country alludes to enormous “ribbon arcologies” where most people live. They don’t have to work because they have slaves, so apparently they spend most of their time tripping on drugs and virtual reality, and don’t really go out much. So the linear city is an interesting idea, but we need to be a little cautious how it unfolds.

10-foot lanes

Here’s an article arguing compellingly for 10-foot lanes on city streets. 12-foot lanes might save time and lives on highways, but on city streets they waste space and kill people.

On city streets, most drivers ignore posted speed limits, and instead drive the speed at which they feel safe. That speed is set by the cues provided by the environment. Are there other cars near me? Is an intersection approaching? Can I see around that corner? Are there trees and buildings near the road? Are there people walking or biking nearby? And: How wide is my lane?

All of these factors matter, and others, too. The simplest one to discuss, and probably the most impactful, is lane width. When lanes are built too wide, many bad things happen. In a sentence: pedestrians are forced to walk further across streets on which cars are moving too fast and bikes don’t fit.

I think we need to move toward safe, multi-modal streets on the Dutch and Danish models worldwide. This will be truly sustainable – safe, healthy, low-energy, low-carbon, and supportive of creative, innovative urban ecosystems where people can come together to solve problems. These are major capital investments with tax dollars, so a cost-effective way to do them is to develop the new standards, adopt them as business as usual, and then upgrade our streets to the new standards as they wear out.

That is a vision, but I see some cheap, easy short-term retrofits that could be done right away without major capital investment. Repainting with narrower lanes (streets need to be painted periodically anyway), and giving the saved space to pedestrians, bicycles, and green infrastructure would be pretty easy. Once streets get repainted, the next incremental step is bollards or other physical protections for pedestrians and cyclists. Some more short-term parking and loading zones would be helpful in a lot of cities – if we had more of those in Philadelphia you wouldn’t have so many people blocking the bike lanes we do have. Another short-term thing that could be done is to turn off stoplights and go back to stop signs on a lot of lower-traffic streets – this should even save a little energy and money. Stop signs are much safer for pedestrians, because all the vehicles have to stop or at least almost stop. You don’t have people gunning the engine on a yellow light to clear the intersection or make a quick turn – that is when pedestrians and cyclists die. Finally, on higher-traffic streets, light signals can be reprogrammed so that pedestrians are not in conflict with cars. Left turns on green just absolutely have to go away. I think right turns on green can be made a lot safer by  small curb extension requiring a sharper turn, but we should think seriously about whether we want any turns on green. Let’s think about the pedestrian scramble model, where all traffic stops and pedestrians can cross diagonally. Cyclists could be allowed to treat this like a stop sign. Then, add turn arrows for all turns and it’s pretty safe for everyone.

extreme climate pessimists

On the opposite end of the spectrum from climate deniers are voices predicting that abrupt and irreversible climate change will cause collapse or even human extinction in the relatively near future:

First, James Lovelock, who is best known for the Gaia Hypothesis:

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem – the bigger challenge will be food. “Maybe they’ll synthesise food. I don’t know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco’s, in the form of Quorn. It’s not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it.” But he fears we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects “about 80%” of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100.

Second, former University of Arizona ecology professor Guy McPherson. This is part of a long, rambling article that cites a lot of evidence, although most of it is newspaper and magazine articles, lecture notes and videos, rather than published peer reviewed articles:

On a planet 4 C hotter than baseline, all we can prepare for is human extinction (from Oliver Tickell’s 2008 synthesis in the Guardian). Tickell is taking a conservative approach, considering humans have not been present at 3.5 C above baseline (i.e., the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, commonly accepted as 1750). I cannot imagine a scenario involving a rapid rise in global-average temperature and also habitat for humans. Neither can Australian climate scientist Clive Hamilton, based on his 17 June 2014 response to Andrew Revkin’s fantasy-based hopium. According to the World Bank’s 2012 report, “Turn down the heat: why a 4°C warmer world must be avoided” and an informed assessment of “BP Energy Outlook 2030” put together by Barry Saxifrage for the Vancouver Observer, our path leads directly to the 4 C mark. The conservative International Energy Agency throws in the towel on avoiding 4 C in this video from June 2014 (check the 25-minute mark). The 19th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 19), held in November 2013 in Warsaw, Poland, was warned by professor of climatology Mark Maslin: “We are already planning for a 4°C world because that is where we are heading. I do not know of any scientists who do not believe that.” Among well-regarded climate scientists who think a 4 C world is unavoidable, based solely on atmospheric carbon dioxide, is Cambridge University’s Professor of Ocean Physics and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics, Dr. Peter Wadhams (check the 51-second mark in this 8 August 2014 video), who says: “…the carbon dioxide that we put into the atmosphere, which now exceeded 400 parts per million, is sufficient, if you don’t add any more, to actually raise global temperatures in the end by about four degrees.” Adding to planetary misery is a paper in the 16 December 2013 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluding that 4 C terminates the ability of Earth’s vegetation to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide.

I’m not sure what it means to plan for 4 C (aka extinction). I’m not impressed that civilized scientists claim to be planning for it, either. But I know we’re human animals, and I know animals require habitat to survive. When there is no ability to grow food or secure water, humans will exit the planetary stage.

genetic sequencing: what’s it good for?

Do you find genetic sequencing interesting, but you’ve been struggling to find a practical application? Look no further:

According to Hutchinson, Sweet Peach will provide women with kits allowing them to swab their vaginas at home, then mail the swab into a lab which will sequence the genomes of their vaginal bacteria. Sweet Peach will then create a personalized probiotic — targeting UTIs and yeast infections — based on each woman’s swab. Women will be able to purchase a monthly regimen or a longer “subscription” based on their needs. More information will be available when the company launches their crowdfunding campaign this coming week.

“It’s nothing about scent,” Hutchinson told The Huffington Post in a phone interview. “A vagina should smell like a vagina, and anyone who doesn’t think that doesn’t deserve to be near one.”

Okay, touche, nothing about scent… but I can think of plenty of applications above the waist that do involve scent. Bad breath and armpit odor are caused mainly by sulfate reducing bacteria, I think, so introduce another harmless organism that can out-compete them, and problem solved – in fact, showering too often might tend to disrupt your perfectly balanced armpit ecosystem. How about some genetically customized pro-biotic mouthwash and deodorant? You could come back from your next camping trip smelling better than when you left! Or on a more serious note, how about healthy teeth and gums without brushing?

not so fast, says Paul Krugman

Not so fast with the backslapping on the U.S. economy, says Paul Krugman:

On Dec. 16, 2008, the Fed set its interest target between 0 and 0.25 percent, where it remains to this day.

The fact that we’ve spent six years at the so-called zero lower bound is amazing and depressing…

It’s true that with the U.S. unemployment rate dropping, most analysts expect the Fed to raise interest rates sometime next year. But inflation is low, wages are weak, and the Fed seems to realize that raising rates too soon would be disastrous. Meanwhile, Europe looks further than ever from economic liftoff, while Japan is still struggling to escape from deflation. Oh, and China, which is starting to remind some of us of Japan in the late 1980s, could join the rock-bottom club sooner than you think.

In other inflation news, the price of Thanksgiving was up slightly this year:

– The American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual price survey found the average cost of this year’s Thanksgiving meal for 10 is $49.41, a 37-cent increase from last year.

– Don’t blame the turkey for the slight uptick. The AFBF says the typical 16-pound turkey will cost $21.65. That’s an 11-cent decrease from last year.

– In fact, cranberries, stuffing and pie shells are down in price. The slight rise in total meal cost can be blamed on higher prices for sweet potatoes, milk and whipping cream.