Recycled water, i.e. treating sewage back to drinking water standards, has been around for awhile and doesn’t raise many eyebrows in truly water scarce areas. Which is why it is getting more popular and less controversial in California cities. Here are some fun pictures of politicians drinking it out of beakers with big smiles on their faces.
Which, maybe because we are in mayoral election season here in Philadelphia, reminded me of this great scene from The Wire.
Negative stories:
Positive stories:
Here is some spring inspiration for the urban gardener. There are lots of videos and links here to drill down into.
This is a great example of meta-analysis in Active Living Research. There are a few things I like about it. First, it combines academic literature, other literature, and expert opinion in a very transparent and defensible way, by giving each a score. It takes a very wide array of urban design and planning choices and relates them to a number of outcomes (physical health, mental health, environmental sustainability, health and safety, and economic growth), and draws quantitative conclusions about the importance of each. Some outcomes challenge my pre-conceived notions, for example that street connectivity is bad for safety, but the methodology is very transparent, so I can dig in if I want and try to figure out whether I disagree with a particular rating, or whether I really should rethink my preconceived notion. Those of us dealing with complex planning and engineering programs (and many other complex systems) can’t realistically expect to optimize a handful of objectives any more. Instead, we can play the odds by making sure all our small, daily decisions have a better than even chance of nudging the system in a desired direction, based on the complete body of evidence out there, even with all its contradictions and confusions.
Here’s an interesting online calculator that gives you a recommendation on how big your emergency fund should be. It says I need $10,000 which is less than I would have thought. A big factor for me is that my risk of having to do an emergency car repair is precisely zero.
MIT is warning that U.S. investment in R&D has dropped enormously. I find this idea very disturbing, that in an age of accelerating science and technology, which corporations and governments should have every incentive to take advantage of, they are failing to do so.
Declining U.S. federal government research investment — from just under 10 percent in 1968 to less than 4 percent in 2015 — in critical fields such as cybersecurity, infectious disease, plant biology, and Alzheimer’s are threatening an “innovation deficit,” according to a new MIT report to be released Monday, April 27.
U.S. competitors are increasing their investment in basic research. The European Space Agency successfully landed the first spacecraft on a comet. China developed the world’s fastest supercomputer and has done research in plant biology uncovering new ways to meet global food demand and address malnutrition. Meanwhile, U.S. investment in basic plant-related research and development is far below that of many other scientific disciplines, despite the fact that the agricultural sector is responsible for more than 2 million U.S. jobs and is a major source of export earnings.
The report, entitled “The Future Postponed: Why Declining Investment in Basic Research Threatens a U.S. Innovation Deficit,” highlights opportunities in basic research that could help shape and maintain U.S. economic power and benefit society.
This article in Ecological Economics makes a link between leisure time and sustainable behavior.
The considerable gap between the individuals level of concern about climate change and the degree to which they act on these concerns is a major impediment to achieving more sustainable consumption patterns. We empirically investigate how the amount of discretionary time that individuals have at their disposal influences both what type of sustainable consumption practices they adopt and the size of this value–action gap. We contend that discretionary time has a twofold effect. Given fixed preferences, time-poor individuals tend to satisfy their preferences by adopting sustainable consumption practices that require relatively less time. Moreover, a lack of discretionary time also inhibits agents from developing preferences that actually reflect their underlying environmental concerns. Our findings support both of these hypotheses and suggest that increasing discretionary time is associated with significant reductions in the value–action gap. This suggest that policies which increase discretionary time, such as measures to improve the work–life balance, may thus help in fostering the emergence of pro-environmental preferences among consumers in the long run.
This makes some sense to me. It also makes sense to me that sustainability is partly about social capital – people having time to interact with each other through formal and informal organizations, think things through, have discussions and make ethical judgments about what kinds of actions they want to take together. When we are working 40-60 hour weeks in the single-minded pursuit of corporate profits, many of us just don’t have time and energy to engage in this sort of social capital building even if we want to.
It’s time to stop saying “inner city” as a substitute for “poverty”. In the U.S., there is now more poverty in the suburbs than in the central cities. The article also talks about how school decline is inevitably following.
I always say Philadelphia will try things about 5 years after New York tries them. Well, here’s our bike share program.
Bike-Share Comes to Philly With the Launch of Indego from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.
I support this 100%. I know having more riders out there will make it safer for everyone, and I know the statistics on bike share safety are very positive across cities so far. Still, users are going to be hurt and killed eventually, even if the accident rate is lower than other forms of transportation, and the initial instinct will be to blame the users and the program. My only point is that having bike share is not the end of the battle, we need to be demanding safe street designs at the same time. Protected bike lanes and safer turning configurations and signals are the most important things, I think.
Here is a useful (to me, at least) Hydrology and Earth System Sciences open article on spatial and temporal downscaling of climate change model output.
Information on extreme precipitation for future climate is needed to assess the changes in the frequency and intensity of flooding. The primary source of information in climate change impact studies is climate model projections. However, due to the coarse resolution and biases of these models, they cannot be directly used in hydrological models. Hence, statistical downscaling is necessary to address climate change impacts at the catchment scale.
This study compares eight statistical downscaling methods (SDMs) often used in climate change impact studies. Four methods are based on change factors (CFs), three are bias correction (BC) methods, and one is a perfect prognosis method. The eight methods are used to downscale precipitation output from 15 regional climate models (RCMs) from the ENSEMBLES project for 11 catchments in Europe. The overall results point to an increase in extreme precipitation in most catchments in both winter and summer. For individual catchments, the downscaled time series tend to agree on the direction of the change but differ in the magnitude. Differences between the SDMs vary between the catchments and depend on the season analysed. Similarly, general conclusions cannot be drawn regarding the differences between CFs and BC methods. The performance of the BC methods during the control period also depends on the catchment, but in most cases they represent an improvement compared to RCM outputs. Analysis of the variance in the ensemble of RCMs and SDMs indicates that at least 30% and up to approximately half of the total variance is derived from the SDMs. This study illustrates the large variability in the expected changes in extreme precipitation and highlights the need for considering an ensemble of both SDMs and climate models. Recommendations are provided for the selection of the most suitable SDMs to include in the analysis.
What is potentially useful to me is that they went to a one day time scale, and they defined an “extreme precipitation index” for storms expected to happen once a year or less on average. I am interested in how or whether these concepts can be applied to “typical” hydrologic conditions that happen at the more-than-once-a-year level. Drought and flooding are probably the two most concerning conditions impacted by climate change, but there are also questions being asked about water quality, and it is the “typical” conditions that most come into play.