Category Archives: Web Article Review

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

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.

Inca Roads

NPR has an interesting article about Inca roads. It’s a reminder that there were some very advanced, densely populated civilizations in the Americas before the European arrival.

The Inca road began at the center of the Inca universe: Cusco, a city in the Peruvian Andes, said to be built in the shape of a crouching puma. It actually was not a single road but a network of royal roads, an instrument of power designed for military transport, religious pilgrimages and to move supplies…

Schoolchildren around the world learn about the ancient Roman roads and the Great Wall of China — but most people have heard little about the great Inca Road. Kevin Gover, the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, says the road is largely forgotten because it just doesn’t fit into a typical Western narrative.

“Indians play one of two roles in that narrative,” he says. “They are either the opponents of civilization or they are literally part of the nature that was there to be settled and conquered. We’re not taught that some of these were very advanced civilizations, because that means this wasn’t a wilderness. And that means somebody had to be displaced. And it wasn’t necessarily a noble endeavor.”

 

where good ideas come from

The other day I was talking to someone about how the members of an engineering team can be so busy doing their jobs that they have no time to discuss new ideas. That reminded me of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From. Which is a book by the way, but here is the TED talk version:

The take-home is that you might have a lone genius come up with a brilliant idea every once in awhile, but much more often it is seemingly small ideas being connected to each other that end up turning into a big idea. So everyone, especially engineers, needs to find 15 minutes out of their day to discuss ideas, and leaders need to encourage a work culture where that happens.

I didn’t entirely like being reminded that GPS, which obviously has been a very positive technology for the world, was invented to allow accurate delivery of nuclear weapons. But it’s the truth and there it is.

you’re stupid, Joel Kotkin

Seriously, I take no pleasure in pointing out that Joel Kotkin is stupid. If he ever says something that is not stupid, I will take great pleasure in proclaiming it to the masses. In this article he again claims that only rich, young, childless couples live in cities.

As H.G. Wells predicted well over a century ago, cities now depend in large part on affluent, childless people, living what Wells labeled a life of “luxurious extinction.” Jacobs’s contemporary, the great sociologist Herbert Gans, already identified a vast chasm between suburbanites and those who favor urban core living who he identified as “the rich, the poor, the non-white as well as the unmarried and childless middle class.”

He is sitting in the suburbs making up lies about me. I know this because I am sitting in a single family home in a major U.S. city right now, with my middle class family and a young child. I walk to work and to buy 99% of the things I need. And I have thousands of neighbors doing exactly the same thing and planning to raise our children here. It’s a great lifestyle, but the problem is there are very few neighborhoods in American cities that are as great as mine. And things that are great but in short supply tend to be more expensive than things that are mediocre and in great supply, like the endless suburbs. Joel Kotkin, for whatever weird ideological reason, doesn’t want Americans to have a variety of great neighborhoods to choose from. Don’t listen to him.

pneumatic chutes

They have pneumatic chutes on Roosevelt Island, in New York City’s East River. I think this technology has promise, especially in a high-density urban future. A long time ago, we decided we wanted our sewage out of site in tubes underground, but for some reason we are still trucking garbage around on the surface. Theoretically, you could have one tube system to collect all the organic waste (human waste, kitchen waste, yard waste) and take it to a central point for aerobic composting or anaerobic digestion, yielding useful products like energy (electricity, heat, natural gas) and fertilizer. Mixing high-carbon sewage and yard waste with high-nitrogen kitchen waste can also create a more balanced waste stream for digestion. Using suction instead of gravity to transport sewage opens up a new world of no- or low-water transport of waste, which is simply the direction we have to be headed in many warming, drying, and densely populated parts of the world. And sucking stuff through a tube has to be cleaner, safer, and quieter than a fleet of diesel-powered trucks.

Taking this even further, if you generate methane gas you could feed it into a fuel cell, creating electricity and clean water, and potentially sequestering carbon although I don’t fully understand where the technology is at the moment. But this seems to me like a very nice water-energy-waste system that could work at a building, institutional, or neighborhood scale, not exactly a closed loop but much more efficient than the production-use-disposal system we have now.