Category Archives: Web Article Review

enjoying the festive papal atmosphere

Here is some helpful advice from the state of Pennsylvania (our friends in rural Pennsylvania, I’m thinking) on how to enjoy yourself at the papal visit.

If you get caught up in a crowd of people:

  • Try to walk around crowds, rather than through them.
  • Stay on your feet – do not sit down or bend down to pick up something.
  • If you fall down, get back up on your feet as quickly as possible.
  • Move with the flow of people, rather than against the flow.
  • Carefully and safely make your way toward the edge of the crowd.

It bears repeating – when in the big city, be aware of your surroundings at all times, tuck your wallet into one of your socks, and do not…repeat…do not under any circumstances bend over.

Brad Pitt at the World Meeting of Families

Today was a pretty tranquil scene in Philadelphia. Although parts of the city resembled a sort of soft military occupation – police, uniformed soldiers (who were polite and helpful), TSA and border patrol (who weren’t), it was actually quiet in the absence of traffic and with a lot of people staying home from work. In the morning, people seemed to confine themselves to sidewalks out of habit, then gradually during the day, they fanned out into the streets.
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Contrast this with what is expected tomorrow…

Okay, so that’s the Philadelphia scene from World War Z… which was actually filmed in Scotland with some Philadelphia landmarks photo-shopped in.

happiness and boredom

In this FInancial Times article, John Kay accuses happy cities of being boring.

Liveability and happiness are complex concepts. The happiest countries identified by the UN are those of “Jante Law”, the stifling conformity described by Danish author Aksel Sandemose: “You are not to think you are anything special, you are not to think you can teach us anything.” Yet there is much that is good about social homogeneity, shared values, peaceful coexistence and honest government. Life in unhappy countries — Myanmar, Syria, Zimbabwe — is not boring, but much of the population desperately wishes it was.

Yet boring is not enough. Security, hygiene, good public transport — the factors that enter the assessment of liveability — are necessary for a fulfilling life, but they are not sufficient for it. That is why so many young people from Melbourne or Toronto go to London or New York in search of the excitement and creativity of the great, rather than the liveable, city. For the technology writer Jonah Lehrer, cities are the knowledge engine of the 21st century. And he wasn’t talking about Düsseldorf.

The most intriguing studies of the determinants of happiness are those of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The moments at which people are happiest are when they are in “flow” — when they are engaged in a challenging task and doing it well: the lecture in which you realise the audience is hanging on your ever word, the tennis game in which every shot takes the ball where you want it to go. For many people, bringing up children is a source of endless demands and frustrations, but taken as a whole it is one of the most satisfying experiences of their lives. There is more to the good life than clean water and trains that arrive on time.

I don’t know. I like a little excitement when I travel, but I like a certain calmness and predictability when it comes to the broad strokes of my day in my home city. Then I can enjoy the fun and interesting little happenstances that happen within that larger sea of calmness. Provide some walkable streets, some small-scale commerce, some open space and some contact with nature and I think you can create this atmosphere. And I don’t know why he picks on Myanmar, they might be able to teach us Westerners a thing or two about happiness.

Edward Tufte

Here’s a fun interview with Edward Tufte, insult comic and author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Here are a couple of his snappy retorts:

…highly produced visualizations look like marketing, movie trailers, and video games and so have little inherent credibility for already skeptical viewers, who have learned by their bruising experiences in the marketplace about the discrepancy between ads and reality (think phone companies)…

…overload, clutter, and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. So if something is cluttered, fix your design, don’t throw out information. If something is confusing, don’t blame your victim — the audience — instead, fix the design. And if the numbers are boring, get better numbers. Chartoons can’t add interest, which is a content property. Chartoons are disinformation design, designed to distract rather than inform. Thus they reduce the credibility of your presentation. To distract, hire a magician instead of a chartoonist, for magicians are honest liars…

Sensibly-designed tables usually outperform graphics for data sets under 100 numbers. The average numbers of numbers in a sports or weather or financial table is 120 numbers (which hundreds of million people read daily); the average number of numbers in a PowerPoint table is 12 (which no one can make sense of because the ability to make smart multiple comparisons is lost). Few commercial artists can count and many merely put lipstick on a tiny pig. They have done enormous harm to data reasoning, thankfully partially compensated for by data in sports and weather reports. The metaphor for most data reporting should be the tables on ESPN.com. Why can’t our corporate reports be as smart as the sports and weather reports, or have we suddenly gotten stupid just because we’ve come to work?

It’s a very interesting point, actually, that people are willing to look at very complex data on sports sites, really study it and think about it, and do that voluntarily, considering it fun rather than boring, hard work. It’s child-like in a way – I mean in a positive sense, that for children the world is fresh and new and learning is fun. What is the secret of not shutting down this ability in adults. I think it’s context.

Peter Singer

Here’s an interesting article by Peter Singer, who teaches ethics at Princeton University. It’s an interesting question – if you really want to do the most good, should you work less and spend your time doing something really good, should you try to find a job where you get paid to doing something sort of good, or should you find a job that’s not that good but pays well, and give your money to people who are really good at doing good? Should you help one person who is suffering today, or save your money and effort so you can help more people tomorrow, maybe even people who haven’t been born yet, or even animals or plants. Do you do good things to the point of exhaustion and risk burnout, or do you take a little break and endulge yourself today, thereby conserving your mental fortitude to be good tomorrow? Everybody has to answer these questions for themselves, but the most important thing is that everyone needs to be taught from an early age to be challenging themselves with these questions. We need to think about whether each of our daily decisions and actions is ethical or not, and if not, to at least make the choice consciously and understand and accept the consequences. This may be our best defense against accidentally letting our world fall apart while we are distracted by mindless consumerism.

Two years later Wage graduated, receiving the Philosophy Department’s prize for the best senior thesis of the year. He was accepted by the University of Oxford for postgraduate study. Many students who major in philosophy dream of an opportunity like that—I know I did—but by then Wage had done a lot of thinking about what career would do the most good. Over many discussions with others, he came to a very different choice: he took a job on Wall Street, working for an arbitrage trading firm. On a higher income, he would be able to give much more, both as a percentage and in dollars, than 10 percent of a professor’s income. One year after graduating, Wage was donating a six-figure sum—roughly half his annual earnings—to highly effective charities. He was on the way to saving a hundred lives, not over his entire career but within the first year or two of his working life and every year thereafter…

Effective altruism is based on a very simple idea: we should do the most good we can. Obeying the usual rules about not stealing, cheating, hurting, and killing is not enough, or at least not enough for those of us who have the good fortune to live in material comfort, who can feed, house, and clothe ourselves and our families and still have money or time to spare. Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.

Most effective altruists are millennials—members of the first generation to have come of age in the new millennium. They are pragmatic realists, not saints, so very few claim to live a fully ethical life. Most of them are somewhere on the continuum between a minimally acceptable ethical life and a fully ethical life. That doesn’t mean they go about feeling guilty because they are not morally perfect. Effective altruists don’t see a lot of point in feeling guilty. They prefer to focus on the good they are doing. Some of them are content to know they are doing something significant to make the world a better place. Many of them like to challenge themselves to do a little better this year than last year.

Coursera has a version of Peter Singer’s Princeton course here.

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.

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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?