I had never heard of Netlogo, which is a programming language for simulating and teaching agent based models. Agent-based modeling is important because it might be the key to real quantitative simulation in economics and the social sciences. You can keep drilling down into the links in this post from R-bloggers until you either run out of time or find out everything you want to know about it.
Lords of Finance
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
This book was kind of a hard read, but I’m glad I read it. My favorite part of the book was the last five pages, particularly these quotes explaining just how bad the Depression really was.
Anyone who writes or thinks about the Great Depression cannot avoid the question: Could it happen again? First it is important to remember the scale of the economic meltdown that occurred in 1929 to 1933. During a three-year period, real GDP in the major economies fell by over 25 percent, a quarter of the adult male population was thrown out of work, commodity prices fell in half, consumer prices declined by 30 percent, wages were cut by a third. Bank credit in the United States shrank by 40 percent and in many countries the whole banking system collapsed. Almost every major sovereign debtor among developing countries and in Central and Eastern Europe defaulted, including Germany, the third largest economy in the world. The economic turmoil created hardships in every corner of the globe, from the prairies of Canada to the teeming cities of Asia, from the industrial heartland of America to the smallest village in India. No other period of peace time economic turmoil since has even come close to approaching the depth and breadth of that cataclysm…
[The Great Depression was] a crisis equivalent in scope to the combined effects and more of the 1994 Mexican peso crises, the 1997-98 Asian and Russian crises, the 2000 collapse in the stock market bubble, and the 2007/8 world financial crisis, all cascading upon one and other in a single concentrated two-year period. The world has been saved in part from anything approaching the Great Depression because the crises that have buffeted the world economy over the past decade [writing in 2009] have conveniently struck one by one, with decent intervals in between.
“domed city” in Dubai
From this video on Youtube, Dubai is planning to enclose streets under glass and air condition them. It also looks like the concept has pedestrians and street cars at ground level and car traffic underneath. It also includes “the world’s largest mall”.
computer algorithm can identify dogs
Microsoft has posted this video on Youtube of new software that can identify a dog breed from a photo of a dog.
Why does this matter? Well, it looks like computers are getting better and better at doing things that human beings have always been better at. It’s easy to think of all sorts of disturbing intelligence and military applications, but also great scientific applications like sending a drone to inventory all the trees in a forest or fish in a lake.
nurse trees
I find the idea of “nurse trees” interesting. From Wikipedia:
A nurse tree is a larger, faster-growing tree that shelters a smaller, slower-growing tree or plant. The nurse tree can provide shade, shelter from wind, or protection from animals who would feed on the smaller plant.
Eventually the younger plant outcompetes the older one, and the older one dies, or I suppose it can be cut down by humans. I am thinking about how to apply these ecological concepts to give a helping hand in more urban areas. In my professional work on stormwater management, we often dig up urban soils and replace them with a manufactured soil mix that is more permeable to water and better for plant growth. But all that digging and trucking and waste disposal has a cost and an environmental impact, when we are doing all this to try to help downstream water quality. Maybe we can use carefully chosen trees or plants early on to loosen and add organic matter to the urban soils, then come back a year or two later and plant the trees and plants that we want for the long term. Even better if there is some plant mix where the first phase is faster growing, but then gradually gets out-competed by the second phase, just like the nurse tree concept described above.
autonomous vehicles
Here are two articles on autonomous vehicles: a short one from Streetsblog USA saying they might just mean people will choose to live even further from work, and a long one from Eno Center for Transportation going into very detailed examination of potential costs and benefits.
My thoughts on the first possibility are that this may indeed happen. Some people might try to live way off in the countryside and not mind several hours in the car each day because they can now spend it sleeping, reading, working, being entertained or being social. Some people will like this idea and some will not. Some will like it but make the decision based on financial cost. Let’s remember that government policy is important here – if we tax people in cities and use that money to subsidize highways to the countryside, more people will choose to live in the countryside because the cost (to them) is lower, while the true cost is hidden. Also, if too many people decide to live in the countryside, it will not be countryside any more.
Here’s a quote from the second article:
AVs have the potential to fundamentally alter transportation systems by averting deadly crashes, providing critical mobility to the elderly and disabled, increasing road capacity,
saving fuel, and lowering emissions. Complementary trends in shared rides and vehicles may lead us from vehicles as an owned product to an on-demand service. Infrastructure
investments and operational improvements, travel choices and parking needs, land use patterns, and trucking and other activities may be affected. Additionally, the passenger compartment may be transformed: former drivers may be working on their laptops, eating meals, reading books, watching movies, and/or calling friends – safely.
After mentioning land use in this paragraph, the report never really returns to it, focusing instead on “congestion”. I think the potential for radical land use transformation is the biggest story related to autonomous vehicles, so the fact that it is left out of a report like this illustrates how critical it is to have the urban and regional planning profession involved alongside traditional minded transportation engineers.
informal economies
I’m somewhat interested in the idea of informal economies. According to this paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists tend to think they’re bad – either a cause of poverty and slow development, or a symptom of it:
We establish five facts about the informal economy in developing countries. First, it is huge, reaching about half of the total in the poorest countries. Second, it has extremely low productivity compared to the formal economy: informal firms are typically small, inefficient, and run by poorly educated entrepreneurs. Third, although avoidance of taxes and regulations is an important reason for informality, the productivity of informal firms is too low for them to thrive in the formal sector. Lowering registration costs neither brings many informal firms into the formal sector, nor unleashes economic growth. Fourth, the informal economy is largely disconnected from the formal economy. Informal firms rarely transition to formality, and continue their existence, often for years or even decades, without much growth or improvement. Fifth, as countries grow and develop, the informal economy eventually shrinks, and the formal economy comes to dominate economic life. These five facts are most consistent with dual models of informality and economic development.
I’ve never bought into the idea that informal economies are 100% bad. I’ve been very lucky to spend some time in central Thailand, right on the edge between a rural and urban area, and to experience a mix of the informal and formal economies. It makes perfect sense that higher-tech sectors like mining, manufacturing, banking, and so forth are run by efficient, formal, corporations. But lower-tech service sectors provide a chance for “poorly educated entrepreneurs” (a pretty condescending term, actually) to provide everyday goods and services to each other at low cost and practically no overhead. Why is it “efficient” to pay $10 for a tasteless corporate meal at the mall, with most of that money going to pay rent to a real estate corporation and its army of lawyers, accountants, human resourcers, and insurance agents, plus the gas and wasted time to get there, vs. $2 for a tastier meal from a neighborhood entrepreneur? When you stop and chat with your neighbor, that’s culture and social capital, not “inefficiency”. And when something bad happens, you and the neighbor are going to lean on each other for help, not the lawyers and accountants working for the faceless corporation that runs the mall.
the killer robots are coming, seriously
Wired says the robot future is really, truly almost here:
The robots are coming, and they’re getting smarter. They’re evolving from single-task devices like Roomba and its floor-mopping, pool-cleaning cousins into machines that can make their own decisions and autonomously navigate public spaces. Thanks to artificial intelligence, machines are getting better at understanding our speech and detecting and reflecting our emotions. In many ways, they’re becoming more like us.
There are a couple new and disturbing things I learned from this article. First, military drone technology has moved to police departments and corporate security departments. One example is
the Skunk Riot Control Copter, a drone armed with plastic bullets and pepper spray. The Guardian recently reported that the South African company that builds the Skunk has been selling it to an international mining company interested in using it to suppress labor riots.
There is also a developing robot sex industry, which I suppose should not be a surprise.
green roofs
Green roofs are still pretty expensive and not all that common, at least in North America. But here’s a study in Ecological Engineering where they turned out to work better than people thought in Hong Kong, a humid subtropical area.
Urbanization replaces permeable surfaces with relatively impervious ones to intensify mass and temporal response of stormwater runoff. Under heavy rainfalls, urban runoff could impose tremendous stress on the drainage systems, contributing to combined sewer overflow and flooding. Green roof offers an on-site source-reduction sustainable stormwater management measure that mimics pre-development hydrologic functions. It can retain and detain stormwater as well as delay and suppress peak discharge. However, previous studies were conducted mainly outside the tropics. Since green-roof hydrologic performance can be notably influenced by local meteorological conditions, dedicated investigation in the tropics are necessary. Moreover, substrate depth has long been regarded as an influential factor in green-roof stormwater retention, but recent findings have implicated that such relationship may be more complex. This study (1) evaluates green roof stormwater mitigation performance and potentials in humid-subtropical Hong Kong; and (2) investigates systematically the effect of substrate depth and addition of rockwool, a high water-retention growth medium, on quantitative performance. Using multiple 1.1-m2 raised green-roof platforms placed on an urban rooftop, the effect of four substrate-depth treatments on stormwater mitigation performance was examined over a 10-month study period. The results show that, while the retention under Hong Kong’s frequent and heavy rainfall regime seems to be less effective, remarkable peak reduction and peak delay were evidently expressed even when the green-roof systems have reached full moisture-storage capacity. No statistical significance was found between treatments, despite the slightly higher mean performance of the 80-mm soil substrate. Satisfactory peak performance of the 40-mm soil substrate implies that a thin substrate can provide effective peak mitigation, especially if building loads are of concern. Extensive green roof remains as a promising alternative mitigation strategy to urban stormwater management in Hong Kong with potential application to other tropical areas.
Part of me doesn’t like using an inorganic material like rockwool. But if somebody comes up with a simple, cheap material that we can practically just staple or spray on to roofs in urban areas, it could be a quick way to restore a lot of hydrologic function – retention, evaporation, peak flow reduction, and cooling – in urban areas. It could be a transitional step on our way to restoring both hydrologic and ecological functions together – ideally we would want to capture that water and use it to grow something of use to either people or wildlife or both. But we are far from ideal today, so I’m all for some smaller steps in the right direction.
functional urban streams
If you want a functional urban aquatic ecosystem, you don’t get it just through half-hearted management measures in the area draining to the stream. You have to get in there and make a functional ecosystem, and then you might be able to protect and sustain it by managing the watershed better. The article in Restoration Ecology looks at a range of numbers from the literature that make the case pretty well:
Urban development is a leading cause of stream impairment that reduces biodiversity and negatively affects ecosystem processes and habitat. Out-of-stream restoration practices, such as stormwater ponds, created wetlands, and restored riparian vegetation, are increasingly implemented as management strategies to mitigate impacts. However, uncertainty exists regarding how effectively they improve downstream ecosystems because monitoring is uncommon and results are typically reported on a case-by-case basis. We conducted a meta-analysis of literature and used response ratios to quantify how downstream ecosystems change in response to watershed development and to out-of-stream restoration. Biodiversity in unrestored urban streams was 47% less than that in reference streams, and ecological communities, habitat, and rates of nutrient cycling were negatively affected as well. Mean measures of ecosystem attributes in restored streams were significantly greater than, and 156% of, those in unrestored urban streams. Measures of biodiversity in restored streams were 132% of those in unrestored urban streams, and indices of biotic condition, community structure, and nutrient cycling significantly improved. However, ecosystem attributes and biodiversity at restored sites were significantly less than, and only 60% and 45% of, those in reference streams, respectively. Out-of-stream management practices improved ecological conditions in urban streams but still failed to restore reference stream conditions. Despite statistically significant improvements, assessing restoration success remains difficult due to few comparisons to reference sites or to clearly defined targets. These findings can inform future monitoring, management, and development strategies and highlight the need for preventative actions in a watershed context.
So let’s focus more on function and worry less about structure in our urban ecosystems. Let’s not settle for making them less bad. Let’s make them good!