Bayes’ Theorem

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

There aren’t that many popular books on hard-core statistical approaches to predicting the future. Here is the Amazon description of this book:

Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists, “The Theory That Would Not Die” is the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest scientific controversies of all time. Bayes’ rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. In the first-ever account of Bayes’ rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years – at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information, even breaking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II, and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes’ rule is used everywhere from DNA decoding to Homeland Security. “The Theory That Would Not Die” is a vivid account of the generations-long dispute over one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of applied mathematics and statistics.

Dense as all this might seem, it matters as we enter a more data-driven future, and we need people with the knowledge and training to deal with it. We should no longer assume that steering our sons into math, statistics, and actuarial science majors means they will never get a date.

There’s a much more hard-core set of slides on Bayes’ Theorem available on R-bloggers.

 

 

1909 – Europe’s Optical Illusion

Europe’s Optical Illusion

I was just looking at this classic from 1909, in which Norman Angell argued that any major wars would be highly unlikely in the modern era of free trade and interlinked financial centers. (I’ve linked to a paperback version, but note that this is in the public domain and a free electronic version is available at archive.org.)

It’s interesting to think about all this as we approach the 100-year anniversary of the first shots being fired in World War I on July 28, 1914. There are two stories I’ve heard told about World War I – first, that Germany was itching for a fight and found its excuse in what could have been a contained confrontation between Austria-Hungary and Serbia – it was looking to grab some territory and thought it could do that quickly without provoking a major conflict; alternatively, that the whole thing was an accident, where Austria-Hungary made a bad decision that ended up sucking in Germany, Russia, France, England, and even the United States.

Today, I don’t think the rational leaders of any country would expect to enrich their country economically by provoking a major war. However, they might seek an advantage by blustering and bluffing just short of actual war. Then if a miscalculation causes one side or the other to cross that line, or some party exercises extremely poor judgment, or an accident simply happens and neither side has the good sense to back down, war can happen. The most obvious danger today is a naval confrontation between China on one side and any number of nations on the other – Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan or South Korea. Any of these would almost surely draw in the United States, and the situation could escalate from there. Let’s hope cooler heads prevail if something like this were to happen.

 

protected bike lanes

Continuing on my recent transportation theme, this article on Alternet has some really good statistics on protected bike lanes. I am convinced that biking (a.k.a. cycling) is just a more practical way to get around urban areas than cars – it gets more people from point A to point B with less infrastructure, less cost, less wasted space, and no pollution. Plus, it promotes a more healthful, active lifestyle and urban design that supports that.

But for all this to happen, we have to build cycling infrastructure that is truly safe, and the U.S. just hasn’t fully committed to that. There are signs of hope, however – here are some of the statistics I’m talking about:

  • 27% of all trips in the Netherlands are made on bicycles. The Dutch designs are not secret but are available here (although their manual costs 90 Euros and it is not clear to me whether an English version is available).
  • The “pioneering” American city in protected bike lanes is…Montreal with over 30 miles (I just remembered, Canada shares our North American continent). But New York City has caught up and surpassed them with 43 miles. Other cities are Chicago (23 miles), San Francisco (12 miles), Austin (9 miles), and D.C. (7 miles). (Here in my native Philadelphia, we have not built protected bike lanes but have closed some lanes to traffic and painted some new stripes on the streets that would allow us to eventually separate them. Philadelphia has a burgeoning cycling culture and I think eventually it will happen. We don’t like to do anything first, we always sit back and watch what New York is doing for a few years before we build up the courage to try something new.)
  • Studies are finding that bike infrastructure boosts retail sales – 49% for a street in New York, 24% in Portland – and 65% of merchants surveyed reporting positive effects in San Francisco. (I’m not surprised by this – there is less space wasted on car travel lanes and parking, less time wasted circling around looking for parking, less money spent on parking, more room for trees and fountains and sidewalk cafes – you have more people in a given space, yet less crowding, with more time and money on their hands and a nicer environment where they want to hang around.)
  • And…duh…protected bike lanes are safer for everyone, and add more capacity to move more people at much lower cost compared to new traffic lanes.

The article also links to this fantastic collection of articles and data on protected bike lanes from “peopleforbikes“.

parking design

ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking

As I mentioned recently, I will return frequently to urban design and urban infrastructure issues because I think these are key to long-term sustainability – and I am talking about sustainability in the dictionary sense of a system (in this case, our human civilization here on Earth) that is built to last. I think of urban sustainability as having two major sides, which are obviously intertwined. The first is green infrastructure, which I am convinced is the answer to managing water and ecosystems. The second is the built environment – buildings and the manmade infrastructure we need to move people and stuff around (roads, rail, pipes, electric lines, and so on).

In the short term, we might think of land use as driving the type of transportation systems we build. But in the longer term, it is really a chicken and egg problem – the way we choose to get around will have a big effect on how urban areas are built. Parking is a big part of this, because currently most cars sit idle most of the time and take up enormous amounts of space that is then taken out of the picture for any other kind of use. Not only that, but car parking takes up so much space that we then need to use cars just to cross the distances taken up by other cars – stuff is just so far apart that walking is not as practical, not to mention hot, dangerous, and deadly boring.

So on that note, here is a new book about parking. Here is the Amazon description:

There are an estimated 600,000,000 passenger cars in the world, and that number is increasing every day. So too is Earth’s supply of parking spaces. In some cities, parking lots cover more than one-third of the metropolitan footprint. It’s official: we have paved paradise and put up a parking lot. In ReThinking a Lot, Eran Ben-Joseph shares a different vision for parking’s future. Parking lots, he writes, are ripe for transformation. After all, as he points out, their design and function has not been rethought since the 1950s. With this book, Ben-Joseph pushes the parking lot into the twenty-first century.

Can’t parking lots be aesthetically pleasing, environmentally and architecturally responsible? Used for something other than car storage? Ben-Joseph shows us that they can. He provides a visual history of this often ignored urban space, introducing us to some of the many alternative and nonparking purposes that parking lots have served–from RV campgrounds to stages for “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.” He shows us parking lots that are not concrete wastelands but lushly planted with trees and flowers and beautifully integrated with the rest of the built environment. With purposeful design, Ben-Joseph argues, parking lots could be significant public places, contributing as much to their communities as great boulevards, parks, or plazas. For all the acreage they cover, parking lots have received scant attention. It’s time to change that; it’s time to rethink the lot.

 

the future of urban transportation

I like the vision of future urban transportation laid out in this article from Atlantic CityLab:

My utopian vision of how this could play out is to rededicate a lot of space in cities that was de facto applied to cars in the 1950s, after the death of the streetcars and the explosion of expressways, over to active transportation. Cars entering city limits would have to be autonomous or switched to driverless mode, as these will be deemed safe for all users of the transportation system and will operate in much less road space than drivers need now. (As a reference point, auto accidents are the leading killer of young people worldwide.) Parking needs could decrease dramatically, too, as most autonomous vehicles will be on-demand and active, compared to the 95 percent of time that current cars sit parked. We would have a transit backbone consisting of heavy and light rail/streetcars, and regional/arterial buses. The rest of the network and space would be slanted towards walking, bike-share, and other alternative modes.

I don’t necessarily think this is a “utopian vision”. I think a lot of it is just going to happen and is already happening. Enormous amounts of space that have been devoted to car maneuvering and parking are going to be available for other uses. The question is, are we just going to let all the space sit there or have a good plan for what to do with it? Some of it can be used for housing and economic activity, some for parks, wildlife habitat and movement corridors, and food growing, and some for managing water or harvesting solar energy. And of course, combinations of these are possible. But we do need to have a vision and a plan, which some can call “utopian” if they so choose.

falling fruit

This website, called Falling Fruit: Mapping the urban harvest, is attempting to be a worldwide map of harvestable food in urban areas. I think this is a great idea both for sustainability and for livability in urban areas. There must be a lot of fruit and nut trees on private land and in forgotten spaces of public land – median strips, the “tree lawn” between street and sidewalk, and so forth. But in many cases the people who own or control this land may not be interested in taking care of these trees. At the same time, I believe there are a lot of frustrated urban armchair gardeners out there who would love to take care of them, but don’t have permission to access the private property, or don’t know about or feel comfortable taking care of the trees on the public property. So a website like this could begin to connect the trees to the people who are willing to take care of the trees.

That’s just the trees we have now. If something like this took off, we could gradually replace more of our ornamental urban landscaping with edible landscaping – fruit hedges, strawberry lawns, and so on.  We could incorporate rain barrels, rain gardens, compost bins, even chickens and rabbits for people who are open to that. We could take wildlife habitat into account to, and start to take a larger view of the landscape – how patches of urban habitat can be connected, and how patches of urban habitat can be connected to larger urban parks and rural reserves.

By the way, I don’t mean for urbanism to be the primary subject of this blog. The subject is how our civilization is connected to, and impacting, and dependent on, the natural world and what that means for the future. But at the risk of stating the obvious, urban areas are where the people are so I will return to urban design and urban hydrology and urban ecology and land use and transportation topics fairly often.

EU considering ban on gasoline and diesel powered cars

According to Wired, the EU is floating the idea of a complete ban on gasoline and diesel powered cars in European city centers by 2050.

An ambitious set of goals, laid out in the document “Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area” (PDF), calls for a gradual phase-out of gas-guzzling vehicles in favour of electric vehicles and improved rail networks. The EU wants to “halve the use of conventionally-fuelled cars in urban transport by 2030” before getting rid of them entirely by 2050.

This doesn’t strike me as all that ambitious. We can and will switch to electric, natural gas, and propane powered vehicles a lot faster than that if the economics begin to favor it. And they will if, for example, distributed solar energy comes online in a big way. And I expect to see that in decade, not four decades. However, just the fact that most people and governments see it as ambitious illustrates exactly why it is good to get it out there and in peoples’ minds – it may be more likely to happen that way.

Biophilic Cities

Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning

Yesterday I mentioned Blue Urbanism by Timothy Beatley. An earlier book of his was called Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning. This echoes some of my personal ideas about building a civilization that is truly in harmony with nature. Here’s the description on Amazon:

Tim Beatley has long been a leader in advocating for the “greening” of cities. But too often, he notes, urban greening efforts focus on everything except nature, emphasizing such elements as public transit, renewable energy production, and energy efficient building systems. While these are important aspects of reimagining urban living, they are not enough, says Beatley. We must remember that human beings have an innate need to connect with the natural world (the biophilia hypothesis). And any vision of a sustainable urban future must place its focus squarely on nature, on the presence, conservation, and celebration of the actual green features and natural life forms.

A biophilic city is more than simply a biodiverse city, says Beatley. It is a place that learns from nature and emulates natural systems, incorporates natural forms and images into its buildings and cityscapes, and designs and plans in conjunction with nature. A biophilic city cherishes the natural features that already exist but also works to restore and repair what has been lost or degraded.
In Biophilic Cities Beatley not only outlines the essential elements of a biophilic city, but provides examples and stories about cities that have successfully integrated biophilic elements–from the building to the regional level–around the world.
From urban ecological networks and connected systems of urban greenspace, to green rooftops and green walls and sidewalk gardens, Beatley reviews the emerging practice of biophilic urban design and planning, and tells many compelling stories of individuals and groups working hard to transform cities from grey and lifeless to green and biodiverse.

“blue urbanism”

Blue Urbanism: Exploring Connections Between Cities and Oceans

Blue Urbanism by Timothy Beatley is about building awareness among people in cities about their impacts on the oceans. Here’s the description on Amazon.com:

What would it mean to live in cities designed to foster feelings of connectedness to the ocean? As coastal cities begin planning for climate change and rising sea levels, author Timothy Beatley sees opportunities for rethinking the relationship between urban development and the ocean. Modern society is more dependent upon ocean resources than people are commonly aware of—from oil and gas extraction to wind energy, to the vast amounts of fish harvested globally, to medicinal compounds derived from sea creatures, and more. In Blue Urbanism, Beatley argues that, given all we’ve gained from the sea, city policies, plans, and daily urban life should acknowledge and support a healthy ocean environment.

The book explores issues ranging from urban design and land use, to resource extraction and renewable energy, to educating urbanites about the wonders of marine life. Beatley looks at how emerging practices like “community supported fisheries” and aquaponics can provide a sustainable alternative to industrial fishing practices. Other chapters delve into incentives for increasing use of wind and tidal energy as renewable options to oil and gas extraction that damages ocean life, and how the shipping industry is becoming more “green.” Additionally, urban citizens, he explains, have many opportunities to interact meaningfully with the ocean, from beach cleanups to helping scientists gather data.

While no one city “has it all figured out,” Beatley finds evidence of a changing ethic in cities around the world: a marine biodiversity census in Singapore, decreasing support for shark-finning in Hong Kong, “water plazas” in Rotterdam, a new protected area along the rocky shore of Wellington, New Zealand, “bluebelt” planning in Staten Island, and more. Ultimately he explains we must create a culture of “ocean literacy” using a variety of approaches, from building design and art installations that draw inspiration from marine forms, to encouraging citizen volunteerism related to oceans, to city-sponsored research, and support for new laws that protect marine health.

Equal parts inspiration and practical advice for urban planners, ocean activists, and policymakers, Blue Urbanism offers a comprehensive look at the challenges and great potential for urban areas to integrate ocean health into their policy and planning goals.

 

California by Edan Lepucki

California: A Novel

Here’s a new entry in the apocalyptic fiction genre: California by Edan Lepucki. I haven’t read the book yet, only a review in the New York Times. Anyway here is what the NYT has to say:

…characters traverse a cross-section of mid-collapse landscape, framed by the gradual decline of civilization. This approach may seem too optimistic given dire news about melting icecaps and acidic oceans, but it does allow for a reading of the novel as satire, skewering the elements of modern life that have brought us to this tipping point…

Perhaps the world as we know it will indeed end this way for many Americans: terrified of porcupines, longing for the sound of S.U.V.s, unable to ­distinguish between an artifact and a keepsake, helped to find temporary sanctuary by the last black man on earth. If it does, we won’t be able to say that “California” didn’t warn us.

There’s also something about a turkey baster. Hmm…I’m not sure this will immediately float to the top of my reading list.