construction productivity

The construction industry has languished in terms of productivity growth for decades. But there are ideas, some of which are mentioned in this white paper from UK firm Balfour Beatty. Many are organized around the idea of prefabricating as many components as possible offset, then bringing them in for assembly. Another way of looking at it is that construction is basically a form of (inefficient, risky and very site-specific) manufacturing, and can try to learn some lessons from other manufacturing industries.

…we know this is an industry that lives on thin margins, is plagued by time and cost overruns and inherently operates in one of the higher risk environments of any sector – risk in terms of cost, time and, above all, human safety. But do we also think of this as an industry with one of the largest opportunities of any sector to transform its model? Can we think of many industries where the size of the prize is to shift 25% of current output to a solution that radically improves speed, quality and safety – all while creating (not destroying) jobs?

Today a new generation of industrialised construction methods, including offsite and modular building techniques, are increasingly being recognised as the best way for the UK construction industry to boost productivity and plug skills shortages. And moving to these methods drives better outcomes for all stakeholders: for the customer, reducing onsite construction times and waste; for the construction supply chain, by improving quality, repeatability (and
therefore output) of infrastructure; for the workforce above all, by raising safety performance and securing long-term employment.

 

forestry robot

Here’s a robot that can help forestry scientists collect data in the field.

Mikhailov is a 16-year-old student atITMO University, the renowned science and technology institution in St. Petersburg, Russia. As a member of the school’s Youth Robotics Lab, he was perfectly positioned to bring his idea to life. With a full team working on the the project, the robot won the gold medal at last year’s World Robot Olympiad; it can record tree locations within a forest, identify their species, measure the widths of their trunks, and even identify if a tree is healthy or not.

Its name is Forester, and most of its job is to explore forests and hit trees with its mallet. It’s a robotic adaptation of a technique that human tree experts often use, called “sounding,” to help their appraisal of a tree’s health.

gene-edited soybean oil

Gene editing is starting to move into food, using CRISPR and something new (to me) called TALENs.

Calyxt’s soybean is the first of 23 gene-edited crops the Agriculture Department has recognized to date.

Scientists at Calyxt, a subsidiary of the French pharmaceutical firm Cellectis, developed their soybean by turning “off” the genes responsible for the trans fats in soybean oil. Compared with the conventional version, Calyxt says, oil made from this soybean boasts far more “healthy” fats, and far less of the fats that raise bad cholesterol…

Tripodi likes to say the product is akin to olive oil but without the pungent flavor that would make it off-putting in Oreos or granola bars. It has earned praise from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group that says public health will benefit from ingredients with less trans and saturated fats, regardless of how they were developed.

I’m not really afraid of genetically engineered food, but when we monkey with whole foods in this way, it almost never ends up being healthier. Two good cases in point are vitamin pills and baby formula. If you want to be healthy, you should eat the actual soybeans rather than the Oreos or granola bars with soybean oil in them, whether genetically modified or not. And I happen to like olive oil, by the way.

My other concern is biodiversity. The more patented, altered, and homogeneous our food supply is, I wonder if it is more vulnerable to some pest or disease coming out of left field and wiping out the vast majority of it. This concern is not limited to genetic engineering either.

“pro-growth education for Japan”

I was ready to rail against this article about “pro-growth education“, thinking from the title that it would be all about STEM and teaching job skills rather than thinking skills. But it turned out to be more about thinking skills, and went over some research on early childhood education with an emphasis to music, even giving a shout out to the Suzuki and Kodaly methods of teaching music to young children.

infrastructure decay like “hidden debt”?

This article describes the U.S. lack of needed investment in infrastructure and (including maintenance) and renewable energy as a “hidden debt” that will come due. They liken it to not disclosing to a home buyer that your roof needs repairs, which if disclosed would reduce the expected selling price of the home. I don’t know about the accounting questions involved, but as a communication approach maybe this could work.

The federal government also has debt that has not been accounted for, and which one doesn’t often hear about. The debt that has been accounted for is the $15.6 trillionheld by the public in the form of US Treasury bonds. The debts that have not been accounted for include the deferred costs of maintenance on roads, water systems, and 54,560 structurally deficient bridges, as well as the yet-to-be-built low-carbon energy systems necessary to mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change. And these are just two broad examples.

So, just how much hidden US debt is there? At this point, we must rely on rough estimates. For example, according to a 2016 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), upgrading the country’s crumbling infrastructure would cost $5.2 trillion. And, according to a 2014 International Energy Agency (IEA) report and our own calculations based on the US share of global CO2 emissions, transitioning to a clean-energy system will cost an additional $6.6 trillion. All told, that is $11.8 trillion in unaccounted-for non-inflation-adjusted liabilities.

AAA study finds car ownership better than ride sharing

My headline above is true, but misleading. What AAA really did is answer the question under what conditions owning a car is cheaper than ride sharing, and there are some. AAA found that owning a car can be more cost-effective than ride sharing…for people who drive about a thousand miles a month, have “free” parking, and choose a used car. That may indeed describe the average suburban American, and I am not criticizing people who choose that life style. But in my opinion, many people do not choose it but default to it without realizing other options are possible.

I live in a dense city (in a single family home with a small front and back yard, not a high rise apartment.) My family walks for most work, school, and shopping trips. Street parking is cheap but scarce, and garage parking is very expensive (you can’t have cheap, abundant parking and high density together.) Ride sharing has been a great innovation for the occasional trips where a car is the best option, and particularly great for getting home from somewhat far-flung places where calling a taxi used to be a very unreliable and expensive option. We simply don’t worry about getting stranded places any more, which used to be the single most annoying thing about not owning a car. I guess that means we take a few trips now that we wouldn’t have in the past, and if enough people are doing that it explains why ride sharing has increased traffic a little bit – and why that is a good thing.

Anyway, my point is that the AAA conclusion is not a general one that would apply to my situation. And my situation is one that anyone can choose to be in, maybe not tomorrow but if you want to live in a high-density, walkable residential area you can plan that and make it happen within a few years.

we know what killed the dinosaurs, right?

Well, apparently there is a loose scientific consensus but still plenty of debate, summarized in this article in The Atlantic.

Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other, similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz—death by boredom. These theories fell by the wayside when, in 1980, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and three colleagues from UC Berkeley announced a discovery in the journal Science. They had found iridium—a hard, silver-gray element that lurks in the bowels of planets, including ours—deposited all over the world at approximately the same time that, according to the fossil record, creatures were dying en masse. Mystery solved: An asteroid had crashed into the Earth, spewing iridium and pulverized rock dust around the globe and wiping out most life forms.

Their hypothesis quickly gained traction, as visions of killer space rocks sparked even the dullest imaginations. nasa initiated Project Spacewatch to track—and possibly bomb—any asteroid that might dare to approach. Carl Sagan warned world leaders that hydrogen bombs could trigger a catastrophic “nuclear winter” like the one caused by the asteroid’s dust cloud. Science reporters cheered having a story that united dinosaurs and extraterrestrials and Cold War fever dreams—it needed only “some sex and the involvement of the Royal Family and the whole world would be paying attention,” one journalist wrote. News articles described scientists rallying around Alvarez’s theory in record time, especially after the so-called impacter camp delivered, in 1991, the geologic equivalent of DNA evidence: the “Crater of Doom,” a 111-mile-wide cavity near the Mexican town of Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. Researchers identified it as the spot where the fatal asteroid had punched the Earth. Textbooks and natural-history museums raced to add updates identifying the asteroid as the killer…

While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the extinction, Keller remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals, has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data. “Gerta uncovered many things through the years that just don’t sit with the nice, simple impact story that Alvarez put together,” Andrew Kerr, a geochemist at Cardiff University, told me. “She’s made people think about a previously near-uniformly accepted model.”

 

Charles Bukowski on bullshit jobs

If a bullshit job is defined as one that is unfulfilling but pays well (see my post the other day), where does that leave all the people with unfulfilling jobs that don’t pay well? I recently came across this amusing but not so optimistic letter from Charles Bukowski:

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did? …

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

So the answer is quit and become a bum? I’m not quite so sure. I’ll have a good look at my fingernails and give it some thought.

non use values

This paper mentions the importance of including non-use values in ecosystem services valuation.

Evidence of a Shared Value for Nature

Ecosystem service analysis aims to expand the accounting of human values for nature, yet frequently ignores or obfuscates a category of human values with potentially large magnitude, namely nonuse or passive use values. These values represent the satisfaction derived from the protection or restoration of species, habitats and wilderness areas, even if people never use them in any tangible way. The shunting of nonuse values to the background of ecosystem service analysis appears, in part, to be an attempt to avoid the perceived elitism of environmental values. To examine whether such values are the purview of the elite, we explore three types of evidence of who holds nonuse values. We find that when people are asked to 1) commit money via stated preference instruments, 2) respond to tweets, or 3) express opinions via surveys they demonstrate a significant willingness to protect and restore natural resources, regardless of their own use of those resources. Such values are represented in all socio-demographic groups that encompass race, ethnicity, immigration status, income, political affiliation, geographic location, age or gender, although the magnitude can vary among groups. The implications are that omitting nonuse values in ecosystem service analysis will tend to underestimate values, particularly for remote sites with limited use, and fail to represent important tradeoffs.

ASLA on sustainable transportation

The American Society of Landscape Architects has put together a website with a lot of resources and references for transportation design. This is a nice complement to the more traditional engineering side of transportation planning and design, and underlines the value you can get from a well-functioning interdisciplinary design team even if it costs a bit more upfront. Here’s an excerpt from the street design page.

Bicycle lanes and sidewalks should be physically separated from vehicle traffic by trees, bollards, buffers, parked cars, or curbs wherever possible. Research has shown that physically-separated bike lanes yield the greatest safety gains for cyclists and, as a highly-visible piece of infrastructure, even have the potential to attract new cyclists. Vegetated buffers can further protect cyclists from harmful air pollution and should be incorporated whenever possible.

Green infrastructure should be widely used. Bioswales, rain gardens, and permeable pavement can be used to manage stormwater runoff and reduce flooding as well as create more aesthetically-pleasing streets. New construction should incorporate as many green streets features as possible, and existing infrastructure should be retrofitted to include green infrastructure. In Edmonston, Maryland, a 2/3 mile stretch of road was retrofitted with bioretention systems that now capture 90 percent of the first 1.33 inches of water on-site, helping to mitigate flooding and improve local water quality.