MIT has posted some free “management flight simulators” (aka games) online. It didn’t sound that interesting to me until I noticed that one of them is the “fish banks” game originally developed by Dennis Meadows who, I now recall, was from MIT. Other games simulate a clean energy startup and climate change negotiations.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
LED lightbulbs
There is officially no reason not to be buying LED lightbulbs now. The purchase price is no longer higher than other types of bulbs, and the operating cost is much lower. NPR has nice charts that make all this pretty clear.
Now, normally I don’t link to products other than books on this site, but I’ve been buying these and replacing older bulbs as they burn out, and so far I am happy with them:
the sharing economy
In an IGM Forum poll of whether economists agree or strongly agree that services like Uber and Lyft are good for the economy, only 56% strongly agreed. The other 37% only agreed. (Some didn’t respond.) Meanwhile, the Guardian has printed an op-ed by one grumpy old man who hates the sharing economy:
Given vast youth unemployment, stagnating incomes, and skyrocketing property prices, today’s sharing economy functions as something of a magic wand. Those who already own something can survive by monetising their discomfort: for example, they can earn cash by occasionally renting out their apartments and staying with relatives instead. Those who own nothing, on the other hand, also get to occasionally enjoy a glimpse of the good life – built entirely on goods they do not own.
You don’t get it, grumpy old man. If the knowledge that you own an object sitting in your basement or garage gives you some feeling of pleasure or status, then more power to you and nobody should take that away from you. But for most people, I don’t think it does. The point is to get the same utility out of less stuff taking up less space. Cars are a particularly important example, because they take up such enormous amounts of space when most of them are just sitting there most of the time.
solar roads
I clicked on this article from Woodhouse about new paving technologies expecting to hear about porous pavement. But it turned out to be all about paving with solar panels:
The company’s aim is to reduce carbon emissions by paving currently tarmacked surfaces with solar panels, turning a previously unproductive landmass into a renewable energy powerhouse.
The solar energy collected by the smart surface could be used to feed the grid during the day time, or even power things such as heating elements under the surface to clear ice and snow from the roads in the winter. Eventually, it might be possible to power electric cars as they drive along.
Pavement covers enormous areas in our cities, so this could be huge. On the other hand, the lack of any mention of stormwater worries me slightly. There is a lot more time and effort going into developing better materials to capture energy than to manage water, when both are important. In fact, when it gets to the point (now in some places, very soon in others) where people can make serious money installing solar panels on their rooftops and paved surfaces, that could even come into conflict with stormwater management opportunities (green roofs and porous pavement being two examples). On the other hand, my water bill has been creeping up to the point where it is not that much less than my electric and natural gas bills. So where the economic drivers have been overwhelmingly on the side of energy until recently, water may be catching up. Of course, we want to find materials and approaches that do both, so let’s get to work on that.
new vs. old economy in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania – we’re not always known as the most progressive of states, at the forefront of the major trends – but even here, the old business as usual economy is fighting against the new, more sustainable one. At the moment, traditional electric utilities seem to be winning their battle to limit the amount of solar energy homeowners can sell back to the grid. But at the same time, Uber and Lyft seem to be making progress in their battle against the filthy sleazy old taxi companies. One thing Uber has now that taxis never have even considered – car seats! I would support it for that reason alone.
Ryan Avent on Automation
In this Economist podcast, Ryan Avent talks about how automation is leading to a “hollowing out” of the workforce. Basically, the concept is that as computers and machines get better at performing more and more skilled jobs (book-keeping is one example given), there is gradually less demand for the medium-skilled workers who used to do those jobs. High-skilled workers like computer programmers are doing very well, although I presume the automation will gradually creep higher and higher up the chain, so today’s safer jobs will be less safe tomorrow.
At the same time these medium-skilled workers in developed countries are getting squeezed out, developing countries are not benefiting like they used to from their large pools of low-skilled workers as manufacturing becomes more and more automated, and can be done cost-effectively closer to consumers in richer countries.
trees!
Here’s a long document from the “Trees and Design Action Group” in the UK about everything to do with planting trees in the city. Of particular use to me are some good references on dealing with underground utilities, species selection, and just lots and lots of great pictures. Even some nice stats on the odds of being killed by a tree compared to car accidents and cancer (the odds are very low, but not zero). Trees really can be done a lot better than most American cities do them.
automation
Longreads has an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
The historian Thomas Hughes, in reviewing the arrival of the electric grid in his book Networks of Power, described how first the engineering culture, then the business culture, and finally the general culture shaped themselves to the new system. “Men and institutions developed characteristics that suited them to the characteristics of the technology,” he wrote. “And the systematic interaction of men, ideas, and institutions, both technical and nontechnical, led to the development of a supersystem—a sociotechnical one—with mass movement and direction.” It was at this point that what Hughes termed “technological momentum” took hold, both for the power industry and for the modes of production and living it supported. “The universal system gathered a conservative momentum. Its growth generally was steady, and change became a diversification of function.” Progress had found its groove.
We’ve reached a similar juncture in the history of automation. Society is adapting to the universal computing infrastructure—more quickly than it adapted to the electric grid—and a new status quo is taking shape. The assumptions underlying industrial operations have already changed. “Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically,” explains W. Brian Arthur, an economist and technology theorist at the Santa Fe Institute. “They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital.” As an example, he points to freight shipping. Not long ago, coordinating a shipment of cargo across national borders required legions of clipboard-wielding functionaries. Now, it’s handled by computers. Commerce of all sorts is increasingly managed through, as Arthur puts it, “a huge conversation conducted entirely among machines.” To be in business is to have networked computers capable of taking part in that conversation. Any sizable company has little choice but to automate and then automate some more. It has to redesign its work flows and its products to allow for ever-greater computer monitoring and control, and it has to restrict the involvement of people in its supply and production processes. People, after all, can’t keep up with computer chatter; they just slow down the conversation.
“Living Planet Report”
WWF has released a new edition of their “Living Planet Report”. I like this report, for one thing, because it has kept the idea of ecological footprint alive. Ecological footprint was originally developed, or at least widely publicized, in this book in the 90s:
Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth
Ecological footprint may be the most intuitive way of explaining the idea that humanity is overdrawing the Earth’s resources. The new report puts the ecological footprint at 1.5, meaning 1.5 Earth’s would be required to support our current level of natural resource consumption and waste production indefinitely. To understand how this is possible, imagine you are lucky enough that your parents put a massive trust fund in your name the day you are born. Being born on the Earth is like this. If you are smart, you can live your entire life on the interest, and so can your children and children’s children, as long as they are as smart as you. If you are dumb, you can live an extravagant lifestyle for some period of time, maybe a long time, but eventually it will catch up to you. An ecological footprint of 1.5 suggests that humanity is using up about 1.5 times the amount of natural capital each year that the Earth can support in the long term. Natural capital is the obvious things like fossil fuels and fish, but also less tangible things like fertile soils and the ability of the oceans and atmosphere to absorb our waste products.
The accuracy of Wackernagel’s methods can be endlessly debated, and have been, but the WWF report also has a reader-friendly summary of more recent academic work on “planetary boundaries”. These look at carbon emissions, loads of nitrogen pollution, crop land as a percent of ice-free land, and humanity’s appropriation of primary productivity, among other things. And generally, I think they converge on a pretty similar conclusion that we are living beyond our means and eventually we are going to pay. Normally I try not to shamelessly promote my book, but for my book I made what I think is a pretty cool and useful graphic, which I am sharing below.
Summary of Ecological Footprint and Planetary Boundary Literature
And just in case you think I might be making this stuff up, here are my references:
Rockstrom, J. et al., 2009. Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Ecology and Society 14, 32.
Running, S.W., 2012. A Measurable Planetary Boundary for the Biosphere. Science 337, 1458–1459. doi:10.1126/science.1227620
Wackernagel, M. and W. Rees, 1996. Our ecological footprint: reducing human impact on the earth, New catalyst bioregional series. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC ; Philadelphia, PA.
super mosquitoes
According to the BBC, now mosquitoes can purposely be infected with a natural virus that out-competes Dengue fever:
The bacteria Wolbachia is found in 60% of insects. It acts like a vaccine for the mosquito which carries Dengue, Aedes Aegypti, stopping the Dengue virus multiplying in its body.
Wolbachia also has an effect on reproduction. If a contaminated male fertilises the eggs of a female without the bacteria, these eggs do not turn into larvae.
If the male and female are contaminated or if only a female has the bacteria, all future generations of mosquito will carry Wolbachia.
As a result, Aedes mosquitoes with Wolbachia become predominant without researchers having to constantly release more contaminated insects.
In Australia this happened within 10 weeks on average.
A statistic that caught my eye:
Brazil leads the world in the number of Dengue cases, with 3.2 million cases and 800 deaths reported in the 2009-2014 period.
Doing the math, that adds up to a death rate of 0.025%.