H.T. Odum

I promised some posts about H.T. Odum this year, so here goes.

First, because I’m cheap, I bought a used copy of his 1983 book Systems Ecology: An Introduction, that a library was getting rid of. This book was reissued in 1994 as Ecological and General Systems: An Introduction to Systems Ecology. My 1983 copy has some typos and endearingly quaint references like this:

The amount of memory within the computer useful for storing programs is usually between 8000 and 64,000 bytes.

He probably updated that in the 1994 version, but whatever it was updated to probably still sounds endearingly quaint today. It reminds us how far we have come.

The 1983 book has a chapter on “analog computers”. Digital computers have come so far and are so powerful that I guess we have forgotten that this sort of thing used to be useful. An analog computer is basically a circuit, and you can simulate almost any kind of system with a circuit – in a hydraulic system, water flow is analogous to electric flow and friction is analogous to electric resistance, for example. Essentially, he took the idea that energy flows through any kind of system and drew beautiful circuit diagrams of how those systems work. Almost any kind of system between the sub-atomic scale and the astronomical scale – mechanical systems, cells, organisms, ecosystems, cities, farms, economies, etc. Although the systems can get pretty complex, in both structure and behavior, they are all based on a set of surprisingly simple core building blocks, and the same set of core building blocks can describe any of these seemingly very different systems.

All the systems are concerned in some way with controlling the flow of energy and using it to do useful work. This concept is fairly obvious in electrical and mechanical systems, but it is also present in my body right now, where electrons are being passed through a series of complex chemical bonds that allow my body to operate its various organs, maintain my temperature, and repair tissues as they break down and build new tissues (hopefully not too much more, at this point.) A rainforest, a coral reef, a city, and the global economy are similarly engaged in controlling the flow of energy and using it to perform useful work. One of his key concepts was that systems try to maximize “power”, or find the right flow rate of energy that can be converted into the most useful work. Extracting the most work always involves controlling or limiting the flow in some way, which always results in some dissipation as heat. (I should mention, he doesn’t use the word “work” in exactly the same sense that I am, but I find it useful to think of work as the amount of energy that was converted into something useful.)

Another core concept was “embodied energy”, which I think of as the sum of all the useful work it took to get to a certain point in a system. For example, a fish has more embodied energy than the plants it ate, and an eagle more than the fish it ate, and a city more than the farms and mines that produced the raw materials to sustain its people and its economy.

can/should machines run the world?

From “futureoflife.org“, here is a short excerpt on future directions of artificial intelligence research.

What policies could help increasingly automated societies flourish? For example, Brynjolfsson and McAfee [12] explore various policies for incentivizing development of labor-intensive sectors and for using AI-generated wealth to support underemployed
populations. What are the pros and cons of interventions such as educational reform, apprenticeship programs, labor-demanding infrastructure projects, and changes to minimum wage law, tax structure, and the social safety net [26]? History provides many examples of subpopulations not needing to work for economic security, ranging from aristocrats in antiquity to many present-day citizens of Qatar. What societal structures and other factors determine whether such populations flourish? Unemployment is not the same as leisure, and there are deep links between unemployment and unhappiness, self-doubt, and isolation [34, 19]; understanding what policies and norms can break these links could signifi cantly improve the median quality of life. Empirical and theoretical research on topics such as the basic income proposal could clarify our options [83, 89].

Please follow the link if you would like to see the references.

Also see The Evitable Conflict, the last story in Asimov’s I, Robot. No, not the Will Smith movie! Just put that out of your head and read the book, it’s short. Anyway, in that story humans have handed control of the global economy over to “Machines”, artificial intelligences which are supposed to smooth everything out and keep everything perfectly balanced. Only it doesn’t work out exactly that way, and the humans are trying to figure out why not, and whether or not they should try to do anything about it. This story was written in 1950, so it should be in the public domain soon. Another great old story that is in the public domain is Forster’s The Machine Stops. In that story (from 1909!), a machine runs the entire world, and is supposed to smooth everything out and keep everything perfectly balanced. Only it doesn’t work out exactly that way. Or, it does for awhile, but then the machine… well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s free and it’s short, so give it a read!

simple, 9-part safety instructions for crossing a Philadelphia street

131 pedestrians died in New York City in 2014, which is below the average of about 250 and the lowest recorded since 1910. However, the vision is zero. Here in Philadelphia we are not quite as advanced in our thinking, but when New York does something we will predictably try it 5-10 years later.

Mayor Bill de Blasio made Vision Zero a key policy priority for his first year. “Our top responsibility is protecting the health and safety of our people… From tougher enforcement to more safely-designed streets and stronger laws, we’ll confront this problem from every side,” remarked de Blasio upon the launch of his initiative last January.

I would put the majority of effort into safely-designed streets. I’ve been thinking recently about how I am going to teach my son to cross a Philadelphia street. It can’t just be “cross in the crosswalk when you have a walk signal” because that would mean certain death. No, it’s something like this:

  1. Using your eyes, try to locate where the crosswalk used to be before the paint wore off.
  2. If nobody is coming at you really fast, consider taking a step into the crosswalk just before the walk signal turns green, because the light for turning drivers will turn green at the same time, and turning drivers will gun their engines when they see that green light, or even a second or two before they think it is going to turn green (especially taxis).
  3. But before you take that first step, you better check for drivers who are going to gun their engines through the intersection just after their light turns red. Anyone can do this, but taxi drivers are especially bad. Don’t assume a police car or city bus won’t do it.
  4. Especially watch out for drivers in a left turn lane. They are going to gun their engines to make a quick left in a gap of traffic. They have a green light at the same time you have your walk signal. They are focusing all their attention on oncoming traffic and not on you. They will gun their engines on yellow and for several seconds after the light turns red, too.
  5. Watch out for drivers making fast right turns on green too, especially on wide streets with long, rounded corners.
  6. You know what, forget it. If you have a red “don’t walk” signal and nobody is coming, that is the safest time to cross because you know the turning cars also have a red light and have to stop – or realistically, at least slow down and look. But jaywalking in the middle of a block when nobody is coming is even safer. Just watch out for parked cars about to peel out.
  7. By the way, if a police officer is directing traffic, do not assume they will not direct that traffic to kill you. They will! They are directing traffic, not you.
  8. Always pay close attention to what drivers are doing. Always try to guess what they are going to do next, assume they are going to do something stupid or homicidal and have a sense of what you are going to do if they do that.
  9. But never let them know you’re paying attention. If they catch you paying attention, glare or make rude gestures, unless you suspect they are armed. Better yet, don’t be angry. Take a picture of the asshole and start a website called “I almost killed a pedestrian today and my license plate is…”

Never mind, I can’t explain this to a small child. I guess I just won’t let him walk on the street alone, ever. Come to think of it, I won’t let any of his grandparents or any friends visiting from the suburbs walk on the street alone either.

How can we accept a system that gives children a signal telling them to walk when it is not safe to walk??? It’s morally incomprehensible! We can design and build safe streets. But before we do that, we can start with simple, cheap fine tuning of the streets we have now. Turn off stop lights in favor of stop signs as much as possible. Where we think we have to have stop lights, allow absolutely no left turns on green, anywhere, ever – use turn arrows instead, with the pedestrian signal red when the turn arrow is green. Use curb extensions so right turns on green can be done only at a slow crawl. These simple things will help most drivers who are not actually homicidal maniacs, but just trying to get places on time or not accustomed to driving around pedestrians. For the remaining bad apples, get more police officers out there on foot and punish dangerous driving like the violent antisocial behavior it is. What, the police are too busy with other things? In New York City lately they have 250 pedestrian deaths a year and something like 300 murders, so they are in the same range as causes of violent death. I don’t have the stats on how many are children and the elderly in each category, but I am willing to bet those stats would fall more on the pedestrian side. So we need to think about what our priorities should be.

City Accelerator Guide

This City Accelerator Guide for Embedding Innovation in Local Government says surprisingly little. However, one thing caught my eye:

The innovation team should run a large number of projects in order to sustain a robust pipeline. It is unknown which innovations will be successful and which ones won’t, so the team always needs to be building plenty of partnerships and pursuing many pilots. Having many irons in the fire ensures that regardless of whether projects succeed or fail, there are always new innovations in development. In some ways this may happen naturally, given the “stretched-thin” nature of local government teams, but a little extra nudge here and there can really help keep things moving. It is also important to think strategically about the range of projects we are engaged in from the perspective of a portfolio so that we can manage risk and reward effectively.

Does this mean your innovation team is running a pyramid scheme, constantly starting more projects every day than it can finish, so that the whole thing collapses under its own weight? Well, the advice there is “most projects won’t need to have a high level of polish until they are quite advanced, and only a subset of projects will reach that stage.” So, I guess you take a large number of small risks, loudly publicize the successes, and let the failures die a quiet death.

hottest year on record

Thank you, junky weather site wunderground.com for this headline: 2014: Hottest Year in Recorded Human History. Actually this is a pretty good post with a lot of interesting graphs that you can stare at for a long, long time.

According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, global surface temperatures in 2014 were 1.24°F (0.69°C) above the 20th century average, highest among all years in the 1880-2014 record, easily breaking the previous records of 2005 and 2010 by 0.07°F (0.04°C). Using independent measurement techniques but mostly the same set of surface stations, NASA also rated 2014 as the warmest year on record, as did the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA).

This article talks briefly about the idea that “The rate of global warming since 2000 has been slower than in the 1980s and 1990s…” If you stare at the graphs long enough, you can understand how both of these things are true. From around 1980 to 2000, air temperatures got a lot hotter. From 2000 to now, they have stayed about the same, which is to say constantly very hot. So it is easy for a given year to edge a tiny bit higher than the year before and be the new hottest year ever.

 

Planetary Boundaries 2

Johan Rockstrom and company have published a sequel to their original “planetary boundaries” work. Here’s a summary from the Stockholm Resilience Center:

Four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed as a result of human activity, says an international team of 18 researchers in the journal Science (16 January 2015). The four are: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).

Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are what the scientists call “core boundaries”. Significantly altering either of these “core boundaries” would “drive the Earth System into a new state”.

“Transgressing a boundary increases the risk that human activities could inadvertently drive the Earth System into a much less hospitable state, damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of human wellbeing in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries,” …

Nine planetary boundaries
1. Climate change
2. Change in biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and species extinction)
3. Stratospheric ozone depletion
4. Ocean acidification
5. Biogeochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles)
6. Land-system change (for example deforestation)
7. Freshwater use
8. Atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms)
9. Introduction of novel entities (e.g. organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).

And for the video watchers, here is Mr. Rockstrom himself on Youtube:

external costs

Here’s a clear explanation of the rationale for regulating or taxing external costs:

Environmental regulation addresses a particularly striking example of market failure. Markets are generally efficient if companies’ revenues correctly reflect all the benefits that their output bestows on third parties, while their costs reflect all the harms. In this case, maximizing profit leads to maximizing social welfare.

But if production entails environmental damage for which companies do not pay, incentives are distorted; companies may turn a profit, but they function inefficiently in economic terms. So the state “corrects” firms’ incentives by levying fines or issuing bans.

I find this elegant as long as the external costs are relatively small compared to the costs that are reflected in the market. However, what if the costs priced by the market represent only a small fraction of the total cost. Then the idea of taxing the external cost wouldn’t work.

more on oil

Here’s an argument that oil prices are likely to stay low for awhile. Basically, the argument is that the OPEC countries will keep pumping at full capacity and allow prices to fluctuate, thereby forcing the fracking companies to cut production every time prices fall below their costs. This article puts those costs at something like $50.

the only way for OPEC to restore, or even preserve, its market share is by pushing prices down to the point that US producers drastically reduce their output to balance global supply and demand. In short, the Saudis must stop being a “swing producer” and instead force US frackers into this role.

Any economics textbook would recommend exactly this outcome. Shale oil is expensive to extract and should therefore remain in the ground until all of the world’s low-cost conventional oilfields are pumping at maximum output. Moreover, shale production can be cheaply turned on and off.

Competitive market conditions would therefore dictate that Saudi Arabia and other low-cost producers always operate at full capacity, while US frackers would experience the boom-bust cycles typical of commodity markets, shutting down when global demand is weak or new low-cost supplies come onstream from Iraq, Libya, Iran, or Russia, and ramping up production only during global booms when oil demand is at a peak.

Sounds okay except I figure demand will continue to rise, slowly but surely, and drilling technology will continue to get cheaper, slowly but surely. So maybe this will go on for awhile, but one day fracking may be as cheap as traditional oil, and/or the traditional fields may start to run out faster than new ones are being found. Or maybe renewable energy will come to our rescue – I hope so, but cheap oil and gas aren’t going to make that day come any sooner. An international carbon price putting a floor on fossil fuel costs would do it, of course, and would create predictability for everyone, but at the moment it is hard to envision the political will materializing for that.

Exxon’s 2015 Outlook for Energy

Here is Exxon’s 2015 Outlook for Energy report. They talk about the importance of fossil fuels in the progress in living standards over the past couple centuries. They talk about the rise of the middle class in developing Asia, and how that is going to lead to rising living standards and health, but also big increases in demand for energy, food and materials. Now, you can’t begrudge people rising living standards and health, which are wonderful things. However, I wouldn’t equate progress just with more traffic, concrete and shopping malls full of designer hand bags. I would equate it more with things like safe drinking water, affordable food and health care. And air conditioning – I would never begrudge any human being in the tropics air conditioning.

They make a crucial logical error – using the rate of carbon emissions, rather than accumulation of emissions in the atmosphere, as a proxy for ecological footprint. They say the rate of global emissions is expected to peak around 2030.

While every country faces a unique set of priorities and resource
constraints, we expect that most every nation, regardless of circumstance, will seek solutions that help curb emissions without harming the prospects of greater prosperity for its own citizens.
Toward this objective, two of the most effective solutions are improving energy efficiency across the economy (also referred to as reducing energy intensity) and reducing the CO2 content across the energy mix. Through 2040, each will play a powerful role in slowing emissions growth, and ultimately reversing what had been a decades-long rise in global CO2 emissions. In fact, we expect global energy-related CO2 emissions will rise
by about 25 percent from 2010 to 2030 and then decline approximately 5 percent to 2040.

In absolute terms, global CO2 emissions are expected to be about 6 billion tonnes higher in 2040 than they were in 2010. While that increase is significant, it is only about half the level of emissions growth seen from 1980 to 2010. This is all the more remarkable considering the growth in economic output from 2010 to 2040 will be about 150 percent more than the prior 30-year period.

Stabilizing the rate of emissions will not do the trick, unless the rate of emissions is below the rate the atmosphere can absorb without permanent harm to the environment or economy. That’s like saying the amount of credit card debt you add each month is the same each month. You are still spending more than your income, and one day this is going to “harm your prospects of greater prosperity”.

We will have really turned the corner if our rate of emissions is reduced to the point where the concentration in the atmosphere is stable or declining. And even if we manage to do that, we need to think about other impacts – nutrient pollution, soil depletion, groundwater and glacier loss, biodiversity and habitat loss, ocean acidification, and the list goes on.

open source street noise model

Here’s an open-source code for modeling street noise propagation. It’s written in R and open source database and GIS tools.

This paper describes the development of a model for assessing TRAffic Noise EXposure (TRANEX) in an open-source geographic information system. Instead of using proprietary software we developed our own model for two main reasons: 1) so that the treatment of source geometry, traffic information (flows/speeds/spatially varying diurnal traffic profiles) and receptors matched as closely as possible to that of the air pollution modelling being undertaken in the TRAFFIC project, and 2) to optimize model performance for practical reasons of needing to implement a noise model with detailed source geometry, over a large geographical area, to produce noise estimates at up to several million address locations, with limited computing resources. To evaluate TRANEX, noise estimates were compared with noise measurements made in the British cities of Leicester and Norwich. High correlation was seen between modelled and measured LAeq,1hr (Norwich: r = 0.85, p = .000; Leicester: r = 0.95, p = .000) with average model errors of 3.1 dB. TRANEX was used to estimate noise exposures (LAeq,1hr, LAeq,16hr, Lnight) for the resident population of London (2003–2010). Results suggest that 1.03 million (12%) people are exposed to daytime road traffic noise levels ≥ 65 dB(A) and 1.63 million (19%) people are exposed to night-time road traffic noise levels ≥ 55 dB(A). Differences in noise levels between 2010 and 2003 were on average relatively small: 0.25 dB (standard deviation: 0.89) and 0.26 dB (standard deviation: 0.87) for LAeq,16hr and Lnight.