Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

the killer robots are coming, seriously

Wired says the robot future is really, truly almost here:

The robots are coming, and they’re getting smarter. They’re evolving from single-task devices like Roomba and its floor-mopping, pool-cleaning cousins into machines that can make their own decisions and autonomously navigate public spaces. Thanks to artificial intelligence, machines are getting better at understanding our speech and detecting and reflecting our emotions. In many ways, they’re becoming more like us.

There are a couple new and disturbing things I learned from this article. First, military drone technology has moved to police departments and corporate security departments. One example is

the Skunk Riot Control Copter, a drone armed with plastic bullets and pepper spray. The Guardian recently reported that the South African company that builds the Skunk has been selling it to an international mining company interested in using it to suppress labor riots.

There is also a developing robot sex industry, which I suppose should not be a surprise.

green roofs

Green roofs are still pretty expensive and not all that common, at least in North America. But here’s a study in Ecological Engineering where they turned out to work better than people thought in Hong Kong, a humid subtropical area.

Urbanization replaces permeable surfaces with relatively impervious ones to intensify mass and temporal response of stormwater runoff. Under heavy rainfalls, urban runoff could impose tremendous stress on the drainage systems, contributing to combined sewer overflow and flooding. Green roof offers an on-site source-reduction sustainable stormwater management measure that mimics pre-development hydrologic functions. It can retain and detain stormwater as well as delay and suppress peak discharge. However, previous studies were conducted mainly outside the tropics. Since green-roof hydrologic performance can be notably influenced by local meteorological conditions, dedicated investigation in the tropics are necessary. Moreover, substrate depth has long been regarded as an influential factor in green-roof stormwater retention, but recent findings have implicated that such relationship may be more complex. This study (1) evaluates green roof stormwater mitigation performance and potentials in humid-subtropical Hong Kong; and (2) investigates systematically the effect of substrate depth and addition of rockwool, a high water-retention growth medium, on quantitative performance. Using multiple 1.1-m2 raised green-roof platforms placed on an urban rooftop, the effect of four substrate-depth treatments on stormwater mitigation performance was examined over a 10-month study period. The results show that, while the retention under Hong Kong’s frequent and heavy rainfall regime seems to be less effective, remarkable peak reduction and peak delay were evidently expressed even when the green-roof systems have reached full moisture-storage capacity. No statistical significance was found between treatments, despite the slightly higher mean performance of the 80-mm soil substrate. Satisfactory peak performance of the 40-mm soil substrate implies that a thin substrate can provide effective peak mitigation, especially if building loads are of concern. Extensive green roof remains as a promising alternative mitigation strategy to urban stormwater management in Hong Kong with potential application to other tropical areas.

Part of me doesn’t like using an inorganic material like rockwool. But if somebody comes up with a simple, cheap material that we can practically just staple or spray on to roofs in urban areas, it could be a quick way to restore a lot of hydrologic function – retention, evaporation, peak flow reduction, and cooling – in urban areas. It could be a transitional step on our way to restoring both hydrologic and ecological functions together – ideally we would want to capture that water and use it to grow something of use to either people or wildlife or both. But we are far from ideal today, so I’m all for some smaller steps in the right direction.

 

functional urban streams

If you want a functional urban aquatic ecosystem, you don’t get it just through half-hearted management measures in the area draining to the stream. You have to get in there and make a functional ecosystem, and then you might be able to protect and sustain it by managing the watershed better. The article in Restoration Ecology looks at a range of numbers from the literature that make the case pretty well:

Urban development is a leading cause of stream impairment that reduces biodiversity and negatively affects ecosystem processes and habitat. Out-of-stream restoration practices, such as stormwater ponds, created wetlands, and restored riparian vegetation, are increasingly implemented as management strategies to mitigate impacts. However, uncertainty exists regarding how effectively they improve downstream ecosystems because monitoring is uncommon and results are typically reported on a case-by-case basis. We conducted a meta-analysis of literature and used response ratios to quantify how downstream ecosystems change in response to watershed development and to out-of-stream restoration. Biodiversity in unrestored urban streams was 47% less than that in reference streams, and ecological communities, habitat, and rates of nutrient cycling were negatively affected as well. Mean measures of ecosystem attributes in restored streams were significantly greater than, and 156% of, those in unrestored urban streams. Measures of biodiversity in restored streams were 132% of those in unrestored urban streams, and indices of biotic condition, community structure, and nutrient cycling significantly improved. However, ecosystem attributes and biodiversity at restored sites were significantly less than, and only 60% and 45% of, those in reference streams, respectively. Out-of-stream management practices improved ecological conditions in urban streams but still failed to restore reference stream conditions. Despite statistically significant improvements, assessing restoration success remains difficult due to few comparisons to reference sites or to clearly defined targets. These findings can inform future monitoring, management, and development strategies and highlight the need for preventative actions in a watershed context.

So let’s focus more on function and worry less about structure in our urban ecosystems. Let’s not settle for making them less bad. Let’s make them good!

restoring the American Chestnut

I like this abstract in Restoration Ecology on the most efficient way to reseed the American Chestnut to eastern forests.

Efforts are underway to return the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) to eastern forests of North America following its decline due to the introduction of the chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica). Approaches include developing blight-resistant chestnut lines through breeding programs and via genetic engineering. Reestablishment of resistant chestnut to eastern forests would produce one of the most extensive ecological restoration transformations ever attempted. However, this undertaking is costly and optimization of reintroduction methods is needed. We used the computer program NEWGARDEN to model whether some patterns of founder placement (regular vs. random spacing at differing densities) produce more rapidly expanding populations across a range of gene dispersal distance conditions (via both offspring and pollen). For a simulated introduction project employing 169 founders, placing founders randomly in a square of side 0.85 km produced higher rates of predicted population growth compared with larger or smaller squares under near gene dispersal conditions; this side distance was 1.0 km under far gene dispersal conditions. After 100 population bouts of mating and under near gene dispersal conditions, the trial with founder placement producing the greatest population expansion rate exhibited a 314% increase in census size compared with the founder pattern yielding the slowest expansion. Neither loss of alleles nor inbreeding or subdivision was significantly increased under the founder placement patterns yielding the most descendants. Exploring different numerical and geometrical founding scenarios using NEWGARDEN can provide first estimates of founding patterns or stand manipulations that will return the most descendants produced per founder planted in restoration projects.

So it is possible to give an ecosystem a helping hand. Maybe we can use similar principles not just to restore species and ecosystems that used to exist, but to create truly functional ecosystems in rural, suburban, and urban areas and the transitions between them.

“a single, supple mesh of mobility”

I wrote recently about European cities considering a complete ban on private cars by 2050, and I said that didn’t sound so ambitious. Well, according to The Guardian, Helsinki has a plan “to transform its existing public transport network into a comprehensive, point-to-point “mobility on demand” system by 2025 – one that, in theory, would be so good nobody would have any reason to own a car.”

Helsinki aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use.

Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitting everything from driverless cars and nimble little buses to shared bikes and ferries into a single, supple mesh of mobility. Imagine the popular transit planner Citymapper fused to a cycle hire service and a taxi app such as Hailo or Uber, with only one payment required, and the whole thing run as a public utility, and you begin to understand the scale of ambition here.

Now, that’s ambitious! I love the vision. It’s not just about transportation – imagine, if all these transit vehicles are in motion, they won’t be parked. When they do park, they can do it in small, out-of-the-way spaces. If they are autonomous, they won’t need so much space to maneuver around each other and around people. If this is the city of the future, what are we going to do with all the extra space?

So it looks like the race to develop the most sustainable transportation vision is a race to the Finnish! Sorry.

21st Century Cosmopolis

This guy, Steven Colatrella, has drafted a new constitution for the world that abolishes nation-states in favor of city-states. It also abolishes debt, credit, wages, and big business. In short, it sounds like a return to the original concepts of idealized socialism or communism. I don’t know about all that, but there might be a few ideas worth pulling out. I do like the idea of treating metropolitan areas as our society’s core economic and social units – clearly that is what they already are, and our political system is not consistent with that. Another idea that is somewhat interesting is that each city has its local currency, with a universal currency available but used only in transactions between cities.

Bayes’ Theorem

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

There aren’t that many popular books on hard-core statistical approaches to predicting the future. Here is the Amazon description of this book:

Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists, “The Theory That Would Not Die” is the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest scientific controversies of all time. Bayes’ rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. In the first-ever account of Bayes’ rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years – at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information, even breaking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II, and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes’ rule is used everywhere from DNA decoding to Homeland Security. “The Theory That Would Not Die” is a vivid account of the generations-long dispute over one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of applied mathematics and statistics.

Dense as all this might seem, it matters as we enter a more data-driven future, and we need people with the knowledge and training to deal with it. We should no longer assume that steering our sons into math, statistics, and actuarial science majors means they will never get a date.

There’s a much more hard-core set of slides on Bayes’ Theorem available on R-bloggers.

 

 

1909 – Europe’s Optical Illusion

Europe’s Optical Illusion

I was just looking at this classic from 1909, in which Norman Angell argued that any major wars would be highly unlikely in the modern era of free trade and interlinked financial centers. (I’ve linked to a paperback version, but note that this is in the public domain and a free electronic version is available at archive.org.)

It’s interesting to think about all this as we approach the 100-year anniversary of the first shots being fired in World War I on July 28, 1914. There are two stories I’ve heard told about World War I – first, that Germany was itching for a fight and found its excuse in what could have been a contained confrontation between Austria-Hungary and Serbia – it was looking to grab some territory and thought it could do that quickly without provoking a major conflict; alternatively, that the whole thing was an accident, where Austria-Hungary made a bad decision that ended up sucking in Germany, Russia, France, England, and even the United States.

Today, I don’t think the rational leaders of any country would expect to enrich their country economically by provoking a major war. However, they might seek an advantage by blustering and bluffing just short of actual war. Then if a miscalculation causes one side or the other to cross that line, or some party exercises extremely poor judgment, or an accident simply happens and neither side has the good sense to back down, war can happen. The most obvious danger today is a naval confrontation between China on one side and any number of nations on the other – Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan or South Korea. Any of these would almost surely draw in the United States, and the situation could escalate from there. Let’s hope cooler heads prevail if something like this were to happen.

 

protected bike lanes

Continuing on my recent transportation theme, this article on Alternet has some really good statistics on protected bike lanes. I am convinced that biking (a.k.a. cycling) is just a more practical way to get around urban areas than cars – it gets more people from point A to point B with less infrastructure, less cost, less wasted space, and no pollution. Plus, it promotes a more healthful, active lifestyle and urban design that supports that.

But for all this to happen, we have to build cycling infrastructure that is truly safe, and the U.S. just hasn’t fully committed to that. There are signs of hope, however – here are some of the statistics I’m talking about:

  • 27% of all trips in the Netherlands are made on bicycles. The Dutch designs are not secret but are available here (although their manual costs 90 Euros and it is not clear to me whether an English version is available).
  • The “pioneering” American city in protected bike lanes is…Montreal with over 30 miles (I just remembered, Canada shares our North American continent). But New York City has caught up and surpassed them with 43 miles. Other cities are Chicago (23 miles), San Francisco (12 miles), Austin (9 miles), and D.C. (7 miles). (Here in my native Philadelphia, we have not built protected bike lanes but have closed some lanes to traffic and painted some new stripes on the streets that would allow us to eventually separate them. Philadelphia has a burgeoning cycling culture and I think eventually it will happen. We don’t like to do anything first, we always sit back and watch what New York is doing for a few years before we build up the courage to try something new.)
  • Studies are finding that bike infrastructure boosts retail sales – 49% for a street in New York, 24% in Portland – and 65% of merchants surveyed reporting positive effects in San Francisco. (I’m not surprised by this – there is less space wasted on car travel lanes and parking, less time wasted circling around looking for parking, less money spent on parking, more room for trees and fountains and sidewalk cafes – you have more people in a given space, yet less crowding, with more time and money on their hands and a nicer environment where they want to hang around.)
  • And…duh…protected bike lanes are safer for everyone, and add more capacity to move more people at much lower cost compared to new traffic lanes.

The article also links to this fantastic collection of articles and data on protected bike lanes from “peopleforbikes“.

parking design

ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking

As I mentioned recently, I will return frequently to urban design and urban infrastructure issues because I think these are key to long-term sustainability – and I am talking about sustainability in the dictionary sense of a system (in this case, our human civilization here on Earth) that is built to last. I think of urban sustainability as having two major sides, which are obviously intertwined. The first is green infrastructure, which I am convinced is the answer to managing water and ecosystems. The second is the built environment – buildings and the manmade infrastructure we need to move people and stuff around (roads, rail, pipes, electric lines, and so on).

In the short term, we might think of land use as driving the type of transportation systems we build. But in the longer term, it is really a chicken and egg problem – the way we choose to get around will have a big effect on how urban areas are built. Parking is a big part of this, because currently most cars sit idle most of the time and take up enormous amounts of space that is then taken out of the picture for any other kind of use. Not only that, but car parking takes up so much space that we then need to use cars just to cross the distances taken up by other cars – stuff is just so far apart that walking is not as practical, not to mention hot, dangerous, and deadly boring.

So on that note, here is a new book about parking. Here is the Amazon description:

There are an estimated 600,000,000 passenger cars in the world, and that number is increasing every day. So too is Earth’s supply of parking spaces. In some cities, parking lots cover more than one-third of the metropolitan footprint. It’s official: we have paved paradise and put up a parking lot. In ReThinking a Lot, Eran Ben-Joseph shares a different vision for parking’s future. Parking lots, he writes, are ripe for transformation. After all, as he points out, their design and function has not been rethought since the 1950s. With this book, Ben-Joseph pushes the parking lot into the twenty-first century.

Can’t parking lots be aesthetically pleasing, environmentally and architecturally responsible? Used for something other than car storage? Ben-Joseph shows us that they can. He provides a visual history of this often ignored urban space, introducing us to some of the many alternative and nonparking purposes that parking lots have served–from RV campgrounds to stages for “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.” He shows us parking lots that are not concrete wastelands but lushly planted with trees and flowers and beautifully integrated with the rest of the built environment. With purposeful design, Ben-Joseph argues, parking lots could be significant public places, contributing as much to their communities as great boulevards, parks, or plazas. For all the acreage they cover, parking lots have received scant attention. It’s time to change that; it’s time to rethink the lot.