more on the western U.S. drought

I knew about low rainfall and depleted groundwater in California, loss of snowpack in Colorado, and the not-at-all-surprising lack of water in Las Vegas. I didn’t know that Oregon is in the early stages of beginning to feel the drought. From Wired:

Snow-starvation might seem like a PR tactic invented by Oregonians to dissuade out-of-staters keen on moving in, but it’s a real problem. Though known for rain, most of the state relies on snowpack to sate its thirst throughout the year. But Oregon’s last three winters have been too warm, and the much of the expected snow has instead fallen as rain, devastating more than just the state’s ski industry. (To be fair to Oregonians, a busted ski season is a huge bummer.) Without melting snow, the rivers are coming up short, and many farmers are having to rely on groundwater. But even in soggy Oregon, there isn’t always enough to go around.”The way water is portioned out in the American west is that if you got here first you get to use it first,” says Kathie Dello, a climate researcher at Oregon State University. When there’s a shortage, then farmers with so-called “junior rights” get their water use cut off early in the season. This has led some farmers to look south for clues about what their future might be like.

All this comes to a head because Oregon is currently the peak influx of any state in the nation. “The biggest fear of most Oregonians that Californians are going to flood the state,” says Dello. (Not a water-flood; a people-flood.) But the fear of being bred out by Golden State refugees might soon be supplanted by an even worse threat: being invaded by California’s drying climate.

technologies to watch

What are the big technologies to watch going forward? Everybody has an opinion, so here are just a few.

Dominic Barton, global managing director of McKinsey & Company:

Fortunately, today’s private-sector labs are bursting with innovations that could spark major productivity-enhancing technological and operational improvements. Advanced materials like nanolaminates (edible lipids) can, when sprayed on food, provide protection from air or moisture and reduce spoilage. Carbon-fiber composites are making cars and airplanes both more resistant and lighter, reducing their fuel consumption. And the “Internet of things” will rationalize production processes by detecting potential failures early, boost crop yields by measuring the moisture of fields, and dramatically reduce the cost of remotely monitoring patients’ health.

Just a little further out on the productivity frontier are commercially viable self-driving cars and trucks. Likewise, synthetic biology will be possible before too long, with scientists using the huge amount of increasingly available and inexpensive genetic data to design DNA from scratch – a practice that has applications in medicine, agriculture, and even biofuel production.

Wait a second… “nanolaminates (edible lipids) can, when sprayed on food, provide protection from air or moisture and reduce spoilage”…where have we heard something like this before?

Susan Hockfield, President Emerita and Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

An accelerating convergence of the biological, physical, and engineering sciences promises a stunning array of new technological solutions. Imagine a coal-fueled power plant that emits only water and clean air. Inside the plant, designer yeast cells transform the carbon dioxide released during the coal’s combustion into raw materials for floor tiles and other construction supplies.

Or imagine a simple and inexpensive urine test that can diagnose cancer, eliminating the need for a surgical biopsy. And, when cancer treatment is needed, its toxic punch hits cancer cells selectively, with far fewer damaging side effects.

Or imagine a future with plentiful food and fuel crops. Through improved seed stocks and more efficient water management, we can have crops that require less water, grow at higher density, and thrive in wider temperature ranges. And data-driven agriculture supply chains will move them more effectively to the market. These advances will enable us to feed and provide power – at a lower economic and environmental cost – to the anticipated 2050 population of nine billion people.

Guy Ryder, Director-General of the International Labor Organization:

In the midst of a major employment crisis, technology continues to reduce the labor needed for mass production, while the automation of routine legal and accounting tasks is hollowing out that sector of the job market as well. The science of robotics is revolutionizing manufacturing; every year, an additional 200,000 industrial robots come into use. In 2015, the total is expected to reach 1.5 million. Adapting the labor market to a world of increasingly automated workplaces will be one of the defining challenges of our era.

Finally, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks report 2015:

The pace of technological change is faster than ever. Disciplines such as synthetic biology and artificial intelligence are creating new fundamental capabilities, which offer tremendous potential for solving the world’s most pressing problems. At the same time, they present hard-to-foresee risks. Oversight mechanisms need to more effectively balance likely benefits and commercial demands with a deeper consideration of ethical questions and medium to long-term risks – ranging from economic to environmental and societal.

robot library of the future

This is an interesting article by Philadelphia Inquirer critic Inga Saffron about the new library at Temple University, which is going to use robots to retrieve books. This allows the books to be stored in a very small space, and the rest of the building to be used for technology, meeting rooms, collaborative work spaces, and social spaces. This is based on warehouse technology used by Amazon and others, and has already been implemented at the North Carolina State University library.

Joe Lucia, Temple’s dean of libraries, believes these buildings are the most inclusive spaces at a university and serve as an “academic Switzerland.” An engineering student may never wander into the humanities building, he explained, but all students need to consult a library’s holdings. The library’s location on the new central quad will cement its place as Temple’s community center. Besides the glass reading room, the building will be packed with study rooms, seminar rooms, digital work spaces, as well as a ground floor café-and-study area that will be open 24 hours.

The wealth of work spaces is made possible by the automated book-retrieval system. The new library will be about 200,000 square feet, roughly the same as the existing Paley Library, built in 1966 by Nolen-Swinburne. (It will probably be retrofitted for classrooms.) But because the automated system allows the new library to store books in tightly packed trays, storage will take up just 10,000 square feet. The ratio is almost the reverse at Paley, which has open stacks. Because the books will be protected in their own concrete room, the new library can have many more windows. It is sad that the one place where windows are scarce is on the side facing Liacouras walk. Long blank walls could be off-putting on such a pedestrian stretch, and Temple officials say they are exploring some design changes.

One of the good things about the automatic book-retrieving system is that it’s already been tested at Snohetta projects such as the Hunt Library at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. The system delivers the books within five minutes, and it’s become such an attraction that students are known to take selfies with the robot.

This also makes me think about the future of urban retail. Who will need big box stores with shelves packed full of duplicate items? Instead you can have showrooms with just one of each item, or even holograms, for people who want an up-close look at an item they have already seen on the internet at home. The actual items to be purchased can be stored very compactly in the back, basement, or second floor of the store, and retrieved in minutes by a robot. For that matter, why would you want to carry a bulky item home if it can be delivered to your door within a few hours. In that case, it doesn’t matter if the warehouse is down the street, on the edge of town, or out by the airport or rail station or factory that actually makes the items. Each retailer doesn’t need to operate its own warehouse and delivery system. If 3D-printing technology really comes into its own, this system would get even more interesting.

The Sixth Extinction

Here’s a half hour Fresh Air interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, who wrote the book The Sixth Extinction. Her descriptions of ocean acidification and amphibian extinction are particularly eye-opening. The whole thing is worth a listen (better to listen than try to read this transcript), but I especially liked this exchange:

GROSS: So this is going to sound like a horrible question, but, you know, I don’t get to see barrier reefs. I don’t get to see coral. I live in the city. What impact does it have on my life if coral reefs can’t grow anymore and if they start declining because of the acidification of the oceans?

KOLBERT: Well, I guess I’d give you two answers. The first answer is, you know, we are effectively undoing, you know, the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world, which has taken tens of millions of years to reach this point. We’re sort of unraveling that. And if that is something that you just say, well, I don’t care about, then I guess I’d say, well, what do you care about?

(LAUGHTER)

KOLBERT: But on another, on a more, you know, personal sort of like, OK, I want to know how – you know, what’s it mean to me, I guess my answer would be we’re not sure. You know, no one’s – we haven’t done this before. You don’t get to sort of see this experiment run over and over again. So we’re doing, it’s often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don’t know what the end point’s going to be.

grand bargain?

I don’t normally wade into politics on this blog, and certainly not Middle East politics. Then again, I occasionally discuss issues of war and weapons, because certainly these are important to the future of our civilization. Anyway, this caught my attention in Obama’s state of the union speech:

Our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran, where, for the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material. Between now and this spring, we have a chance to negotiate a comprehensive agreement that prevents a nuclear-armed Iran; secures America and our allies – including Israel; while avoiding yet another Middle East conflict.

In other news stories, I have heard him give a 50% chance of a deal with Iran. Around 10 years ago, Iran supposedly proposed a “grand bargain“, in which they would give up any attempts to acquire nuclear weapons, and make peace with Israel, in return for normalized relations with the United States. (Have a look at the various original documents posted with the 2007 New York Times column in the link above, some of which supposedly came directly from the Iranian government at the time.)

Today, we have a much messier situation with a series of loosely related civil wars involving three or four ambiguous sides, and it is not clear whether a deal like this would actually result in more political stability for the region overall. But it certainly would be a nuclear proliferation victory, de-escalating tensions between Iran and Israel, and between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which is rumored to have a small nuclear arsenal on order from Pakistan. From the BBC in 2013:

Saudi Arabia has invested in Pakistani nuclear weapons projects, and believes it could obtain atomic bombs at will, a variety of sources have told BBC Newsnight.

Even scarier than a nuclear conflict between state actors would be if irrational extremists were to gain control of a nuclear arsenal in any one of these countries. When so many people are suffering and dying already, it seems a little selfish to worry about the impacts on those of us in relatively peaceful countries outside the region. But a nuclear winter caused by even a relatively contained nuclear exchange there would be no laughing matter for anyone on Earth. From Scientific American in 2009:

Because as other nations continue to acquire nuclear weapons, smaller, regional nuclear wars could create a similar global catastrophe. New analyses reveal that a conflict between India and Pakistan, for example, in which 100 nuclear bombs were dropped on cities and industrial areas, only 0.4 percent of the world’s more than 25,000 warheads would produce enough smoke to cripple global agriculture. A regional war could cause widespread loss of life even in countries far away from the conflict.

Professor Peter Piot

No, he didn’t pick a peck of pickled peppers. He “co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976“. And in 2015, just now, he said this:

“Our world is getting more vulnerable to big epidemics, because of population expansion, huge mobility and more intense contact between animals and people.

“My concern,” he said, “is that when [the Ebola outbreak] is over we will just forget about it. We need to be better prepared and we need to invest in vaccines and treatment.

“It’s like a fire brigade – you don’t start to set up a fire brigade when some house is on fire.”

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.