From the brilliant Richard Florida in CityLab - The Self-Confident City (Big cities are a powerful draw for confident people, who in turn benefit the most form their opportunities and resources):
"Self-confidence is a main factor in who moves to big cities. It’s self-confident young people, after all, who have the chutzpah to leave small towns behind. (An increase of the self-confidence percentile by one standard deviation raises the probability of initially moving to a big city by 12 percent, according to the study.) This decision compounds over time as younger workers in big cities gain the experience and background they need to get ahead in their careers and earn more money. Highly confident people with lesser abilities benefit the most here, since they gain access to the opportunities, networks, and experiences that these big cities provide."
Interesting article from the NY Times regarding criminal behavior modification and police helicopter utilization in Los Angeles. From the article: "Crime shapes cities — even Paris, the “City of Light,” takes its nickname, according to one story, from streetlights first instituted as part of a 17th-century police operation — but the reverse is also true. Cities get the types of crime their design calls for. This logic extends even down to their bedrock: Tunnel jobs are almost unimaginable in granite-based Manhattan, for example, but the soft sedimentary rocks of Los Angeles — a former seabed — make it more susceptible to subterranean crime. Infrastructure also plays a major role in permitting or preventing entire classes of criminal activity. The construction of the city’s freeway system in the 1960s helped to instigate a later spike in bank-crime activity by offering easy getaways from financial institutions constructed at the confluence of on-ramps and offramps. This is a convenient location for busy commuters — but also for prospective bandits, who can pull off the freeway, rob a bank and get back on the freeway practically before the police have been alerted. The maneuver became so common in the 1990s that the Los Angeles police have a name for it: a “stop-and-rob.”"
"In addition to the actions we have detailed, one of the defendants is also charged with illegally obtaining access to the supervisory control and data acquisition system of the Bowman Dam in Rye, New York. At the time of his alleged intrusion, the dam was undergoing maintenance and had been disconnected from the system. But for that fact, that access would have given him the ability to control water levels and flow rates – an outcome that could have posed a clear danger to the public health and safety of Americans. I would like to thank the Department of Homeland Security and the city of Rye, New York, for their assistance in managing this incident."
Our world is increasingly full of "wicked" interdisciplinary problems that demand interdisciplinary solutions. The matrix of modern business management is fundamentally about understanding the historical context, economic, social, cultural, and political dimensions of your environment. Having a strong liberal arts outlook is increasing important for today's unusually uncertain world.
From The Dallas Morning News today by Nicole Head - Why We Need Students With Liberal Studies Degrees:
"Indisputably, some of the most effective solutions to social problems of our age come from thinkers educated in liberal studies programs, because these people have the ability to holistically analyze multifaceted problems and understand the big-picture implications on humanity and relationships. We’ve seen the consequences when we ignore the intersectionality of problems plaguing our world with the recent surge in Zika and Ebola. Human rights and social justice experts are the first responders to global health crises, risking their safety to help others by working in disaster relief to create solutions for homelessness, violence, trafficking and other problems."
From The Dallas Morning News today - Fixing America's Water Problems Could Cost Trillions of Dollars:
"To fix our water systems, we need prices that lead to more rational water use and invite needed investment, data to track water resources and usage, and much more research and development.
Water prices should rise or fall according to supply and demand. The idea that the price should be the same in the dry season as the wet season is nonsense."
From the macro political/economic/demographic nexus - -
between 2016 and 2050 is going to be a strategic planning/vision nightmare.Trump could be the start (and frankly mildest
version) of the road ahead around the globe - - global Trumpism marked by
nationalism and populism.
Four huge forces that are problematic for the United States
and many parts of Europe - - (1.) The exponential rise and expansion of
automation and the Era of Robotics that will create huge pressure on
traditional middle class jobs and communities, (2.) The disruptive and
transitional shift from Majority White to Minority White between 2040 and 2050,
(3.) The highly anticipated generational battles over paying for the past
(i.e., public pensions, Medicare, Social Security) versus investing in the
future (i.e., education and infrastructure), and (4.) Global inequality with a
widening separation between haves and have nots.
The good news for our industry is the broad consensus among
policy makers and economists (Larry Summers is the leader of this school of thought)
regarding the need and power of investing in public infrastructure.In some form or fashion - - increasing
infrastructure investing (and probably more and more embedded with the P3
delivery system) helps to mitigate parts of the four disruptive trends from
above.The way forward is rather clear -
- the collective will and leadership is not.Increasing infrastructure investment is no gimme putt given the uncertainty
associated with the disruptive nature of the political/economic/demographic nexus.
There are no perfect models for strategic optimization in
this new world.Increasing uncertainty
regarding the political/economic/demographic nexus will place a premium on
flexibility, agility, and resiliency.Being organizationally good at weighting the merits of various choices
with potentially risky outcomes will separate the winners from the losers.A new world that trades in terms of risks and
probabilities is the only way forward regarding managing increasing uncertainty.
I really enjoyed Charles Duhigg's Smarter Faster Better. My current vote for non-fiction book of the year.
The story below highlights the power of engineers - not just to be designers and builders - but to bring engineering problem solving skills to the classroom to address some of our more "wicked" social problems:
"So the school district shifted its focus for high school students. Alongside the Elementary Initiative, the district began creating engineering classes within Western Hills High and other schools in partnership with local universities and the National Science Foundation. The goal was a "multidisciplinary approach to education that encourages students to leverage the technology they use in their daily lives to solve real world problems," a summary of the program read. Ninety percent of students at Western Hills lived below the poverty line. Their classrooms had peeling linoleum floors and cracked chalkboards. "Leveraging technology" was not what most students worried about. Delia [Delia Morris, a high school sophomore at Western Hills High in 2009] signed up for an engineering course taught by Deon Edwards, whose introductory remarks reflected the reality that surrounded all of them.
"We're going to learn how to think like scientists," he hold his class. "We're going to leave your parents and friends behind and learn to make choices with clear eyes, without the baggage everyone wants to put on you. And if any of you didn't have anything to eat this morning, I keep energy bars in my desk and you should help yourself. There's nothing wrong with saying you're hungry."
The real focus of Mr. Edwards class was a system for decision making known as "the engineering design process," which forced students to define their dilemmas, collect data, brainstorm solutions, debate alternative approaches, and conduct iterative experiments. "The engineering design process is a series of steps that engineers follow when they are trying to solve a problem and design a solution for something; it is a methodical approach to problem solving," one teacher's manual explained. The engineering design process was built around the idea that many problems that seem overwhelming at first can be broken into smaller pieces, and then solutions tested, again and again, until an insight emerges. The process asked students to define precisely the dilemma they wanted to solve, then to conduct research and come up with multiple solutions, and then conduct tests, measure results, and repeat the procedure until an answer is found. It told them to make problems more manageable until they file into scaffolds and mental folders that were easier to carry around.
The class's first big assignment was to design an electric car. For weeks, students in Mr. Edward's class arranged themselves into teams and followed flowcharts detailing each engineering design process step. The classroom had few materials to work with. But that was okay, because the real point of the exercise was to learn how to squeeze information from your environment, no matter where it comes from. Soon students were visiting car dealerships, going to mechanics' shops, and raiding aluminum cans from recycling bins to make battery-testing kits from instructions they had found online. "My first job it to teach them to slow down a little bit," Deon Edwards told me. "These are kids who solve problems all day long. They deal with missing parents and violent problems all day long. They deal with missing parents and violent boyfriends and classmates on drugs. Everything they experience says they have to choose quickly. I just want to show them that if you have a system for making choices, you can afford to slow down and think.
Midway through the semester, after the class had completed their car designs and moved on to building marble sorters. Delia's twenty-one-year-old sister had a baby. The child's father was out of the picture and Delia's sister, exhausted, begged her to babysit in the afternoons. If felt like a request that was impossible for Delia to refuse. The right decision, Delia's dad told her, was obvious. This was family.
So one day in Mr. Edward's class, Delia pulled the engineering flowchart from her binder and, with her group, put her dilemma through the design process's steps. If she babysat, what would happen? One of the first tasks in the engineering design is finding data, so Delia began making a list of experiences than seemed germane. Another sister, Delia told the group, had taken an after-school job a few years earlier and the family had quickly come to rely on that paycheck, making it impossible for her to quit and putting her hopes of community college on hold. If Delia started babysitting, something similar would happen, she suspected. That was data point one.
Then Delia began writing out what her schedule might look like if she was responsible fro an infant every afternoon. School from 8:30 to 3:30. Babysitting from 3:30 to 7:30. Homework form 7:30 to 10:00. She would be tired after watching her nephew and would probably end up watching television instead of doing her math or studying for a test. She would become resentful and make bad choices on the weekends. Data point two.
As her group walked through the flowchart, they broke her dilemma into smaller pieces and brainstormed solutions and role-played conversations while the rest of the class discussed how to separate colored marbles from clear ones. Eventually, an answer emerged: Babysitting seemed like a minor sacrifice, but the evidence suggested it wasn't minor at all. Delia prepared a memo for her father listing the steps she had gone through. She wouldn't be able to do it, she told her dad.
Psychologists say learning how to make decisions this way is important, particularly for young people, because it makes it easier for them to learn from their experiences and to see choices from different perspectives. This is a form of disfluency that allows us to evaluate our own lives more objectively, to offset the emotions and biases that might otherwise blind us to the lessons embedded in our pasts. When the animators behind Frozen were trying to figure our their film, the Disney system pushed them to look to their own lives as creative fodder. But it's not just creative material we can mine from our experiences - we can find data in our pasts, as well. We all have a natural tendency to ignore the information contained in our previous decisions, to forget that we've already conducted thousands of experiments each time we made a choice. We're often too close to our own experiences to see how to break that data into smaller bits.
But systems such as the engineering design process - which forces us to search for information and brainstorm potential solutions, to look for different kinds of insights and test various ideas - help us achieve disfluency by putting the past in a new frame of reference. If subverts our brain's craving for binary choices - Should I help my sister or let my family down? - by learning to reframe decisions in new ways."
Abstract from ScienceAdvances - Rapid assessment of disaster damage using social media activity:
"Could social media data aid in disaster response and damage assessment? Countries face both an increasing frequency and an increasing intensity of natural disasters resulting from climate change. During such events, citizens turn to social media platforms for disaster-related communication and information. Social media improves situational awareness, facilitates dissemination of emergency information, enables early warning systems, and helps coordinate relief efforts. In addition, the spatiotemporal distribution of disaster-related messages helps with the real-time monitoring and assessment of the disaster itself. We present a multiscale analysis of Twitter activity before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy. We examine the online response of 50 metropolitan areas of the United States and find a strong relationship between proximity to Sandy’s path and hurricane-related social media activity. We show that real and perceived threats, together with physical disaster effects, are directly observable through the intensity and composition of Twitter’s message stream. We demonstrate that per-capita Twitter activity strongly correlates with the per-capita economic damage inflicted by the hurricane. We verify our findings for a wide range of disasters and suggest that massive online social networks can be used for rapid assessment of damage caused by a large-scale disaster."
Someone needs to tackle this book and project - - projecting out to 2050 and look at the political implications of (a.) the rise of automation and robotics and the impact on employment - especially those with only a high school degree, and (b.) the coming decline of the white majority and transition to the new white minority.
From the City of Toronto: "MyWaterToronto is a convenient way to view your water use information anytime, anywhere, from your computer or mobile device. Log-on to MyWaterToronto and view your total and average water use by day, week, month or year in an easy-to-read graph or chart format. Check the boxes to add in extra details, such as temperature and precipitation, to better understand why you may have used more or less water during a particular time period."
From Schumpeter - Businesses are embracing the idea of working in teams: "Companies are abandoning functional silos and organising employees into cross-disciplinary teams that focus on particular products, problems or customers. These teams are gaining more power to run their own affairs. They are also spending more time working with each other rather than reporting upwards. Deloitte argues that a new organisational form is on the rise: a network of teams is replacing the conventional hierarchy. The fashion for teams is driven by a sense that the old way of organising people is too rigid for both the modern marketplace and the expectations of employees. Technological innovation puts a premium on agility. John Chambers, chairman of Cisco, an electronics firm, says that “we compete against market transitions, not competitors. Product transitions used to take five or seven years; now they take one or two.” Digital technology also makes it easier for people to co-ordinate their activities without resorting to hierarchy. The “millennials” who will soon make up half the workforce in rich countries were reared from nursery school onwards to work in groups."
From Medium - Eight important lessons for designers:
"The best designers I know excel at communication. This is because they apply the same theories of designing products — imagining how the person on the other side will think and feel as they encounter the design work — to telling the story of the design. They think deeply about what hooks would best get and keep someone’s undivided interest. They consider what is critical to convey up front, and what details can be saved for later. They use easy-to-understand language, visuals, storyboards or animations to convey what the outcome of the idea will be.
Being a designer is like having a superpower that allows you to show other people the future. You can help make a bunch of abstract concepts tangible through your work. You can help other people visualize what a better version of the world might look and feel like. This is an incredible thing to be able to do. But wielding the power effectively means the work must be paired with a strong narrative. And the first step is recognizing that clear, succinct and compelling communication is a key skill to master as a designer."
"Buses are much safer than cars, by about a factor of 67 [1] but they're not very popular. If you look at situations where people who can afford private transit take mass transit instead, speed is the main factor (ex: airplanes, subways). So we should look at ways to make buses faster so more people will ride them, even if this means making them somewhat more dangerous.
Here are some ideas, roughly in order from "we should definitely do this" to "this is crazy, but it would probably still reduce deaths overall when you take into account that more people would ride the bus":
Don't require buses to stop and open their doors at railroad crossings.
Allow the driver to start while someone is still at the front paying.
Allow buses to drive 25mph on the shoulder of the highway in traffic jams where the main lanes are averaging below 10mph.
Higher speed limits for buses. Lets say 15mph over.
Leave (city) bus doors open, allow people to get on and off any time at their own risk.
Other ideas? If we made buses more dangerous by the same percentage that motorcycles are more dangerous than cars, [2] they would still be more than twice as safe as cars. (I wrote something similar a few years ago, focusing on cost instead of speed.) [1] See Comparing the Fatality Risks in United States Transportation Across Modes and Over Time (2013). They find buses have a fatality rate per billion passenger miles of 0.11 while it's 7.3 for cars. (pdf) [2] Motorcycles are 29 times more dangerous than cars, with a fatality rate per billion passenger miles of 212."
"Inhalió delivers Dry Air Scent on Demand, improving the in-store at the counter experience for the world of Personal Fragrance. Ending annoying sprays and impossible paddles, Inhalió delivers up to 400 different fragrances, engaging consumers. It’s an experience that’s both enjoyable and measurable.
Our Dry Air USB, takes the store to the consumer. In the privacy of their home, it deploys Scent on Demand and takes them to a web landing page where they can order the product."
From the current issue of Engineering, Inc. by Calvin Hennick - One Person, One Hour At a Time: Freese and Nichols challenges its employees to volunteer 100 hours or more for worthy causes each year:
"Ultimately the volunteering program is good not just for the nonprofit that receive help or for the employees who participate, it also benefits Freese & Nichols itself. The program boosts the company's reputation with clients, prospective hires and the communities where the firm works, and it helps establish a positive culture that lives up to the firm's lofty guiding principles.
"It's absolutely a positive thing for the company," says Pence [Bob Pence, president and CEO]. "People want to be part of an organization that goes beyond just what their business is. They want to feel good about whom they work for, and they want to feel good about the company's role in the community. It's a big piece of our culture.""
Interesting how this interfaces with the management of millennial talent. From the current issue of Fortune - Five Things You Can Do to Attract Millennial Talent:
Forget the 9-to-5 schedule
If you want them to stay, offer training resources
Don't wait for the next annual review for feedback
Report from the National Bureau of Economic Research:
"In most cities, the taxi industry is highly regulated and utilizes technology developed in the 1940s. Ride sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, which use modern internet-based mobile technology to connect passengers and drivers, have begun to compete with traditional taxis. This paper examines the efficiency of ride sharing services vis-à-vis taxis by comparing the capacity utilization rate of UberX drivers with that of traditional taxi drivers in five cities. The capacity utilization rate is measured by the fraction of time a driver has a fare-paying passenger in the car while he or she is working, and by the share of total miles that drivers log in which a passenger is in their car. The main conclusion is that, in most cities with data available, UberX drivers spend a significantly higher fraction of their time, and drive a substantially higher share of miles, with a passenger in their car than do taxi drivers. Four factors likely contribute to the higher capacity utilization rate of UberX drivers: 1) Uber’s more efficient driver-passenger matching technology; 2)the larger scale of Uber than taxi companies; 3) inefficient taxi regulations; and 4) Uber’s flexible labor supply model and surge pricing more closely match supply with demand throughout the day."
From the Wall Street Journal today - A New Way to Train Workers, One Small Bite at a Time (As attention spans shrink, companies turn to short digital lessons) by Lora Kolodny):
""The way that people learn has shifted," says Calvin Ng, director of learning and development at Pernod Ricard USA. "Employees are not necessarily engaged by sitting down in a classroom and looking through hundreds of slides and being talked at today," he says. "And time is a big concern, with regards to training." There's never a good time to take an employee out of a busy workday, but training is still requested and people want to feel like the company cares about their development, Mr. Ng says."
"But those future generations will be better off owing lots of money in long-tern bonds at low rates in a currency they can print than they would be inheriting a vast deferred maintenance liability."
Rachel Kuhr is a UT educated mechanical engineer who helps contestants and companies on Shark Tank with product innovation and development. She is profiled in the Dallas Morning News today in the Cheryl Hall column - The Innovator's Innovator.
Her tips on becoming a better innovator, engineer, and designer:
Take an improv class. This process of letting the situation evolve is similar to starting a company. You come in with an idea and see how people react. You have to turn it into something that everybody wants.
Create discomfort. If you have no reason to innovate, you won't. Needle yourself to feel a little less comfortable and actually want something.
Widen your horizons. Talk to people you wouldn't outside your circle of friends. Travel. Push yourself to try something new and different every day, even if it's something tiny.
Have the courage to toss out wild "what if" ideas. Don't take it personally when your concept doesn't fly. Let people beat it up, move it around and expand it.
Ease into risk-taking. Start with baby steps. You will be amazed at how you can talk yourself into taking on bigger and bigger opportunities overt time.
Maybe a wall to keep out the machines. From the current issue of Rolling Stone - The Rise of Intelligent Machines Part 2 by Jeff Goodell:
"If any company could be a poster child for how robots are transforming American manufacturing jobs, its Boeing. According to Reuters, Boeing is turning out 20 percent more planes, but with one-third fewer workers, than it did in the 1990s. In just this past year, it replaced hundreds of employees with 60-ton robots. Boeing says they work twice as fast as people, with two-thirds fewer defects. The impact of automation on the company's workforce has been dramatic. In 1998, the company made 564 planes a year, employing roughly 217 people per plane. In 2015, it made 762 planes, using about 109 workers per plane. Not surprising, a recent White House economic report concluded that labor productivity gains from robotics are similar in magnitude to the productivity gains from steam engines in the 19th century."
"Oil Movements reports on current and near term sea borne oil flows, looking at events through the window provided by visible activity in the spot tanker market. The weekly review gives timely signals of change in global oil flows, and implications for the crude oil market.
The point of looking at the spot tanker market is to get a forward view of crude oil flows, looking 1-4 weeks ahead. We have developed methods of predicting major oil flows from available tanker market information, using our extensive historical databases on global tanker movements, and spot fixture reports.
Oil Movements has attracted a wide audience for its analysis of oil exports (tanker sailings) two weeks ahead; oil in transit, and regional imports. For long haul crudes, prospective imports into the key Atlantic basin markets are sized up four weeks ahead.
We have published a weekly newsletter since late 1987, and built an industry wide reputation on this platform (see press references). Six years ago, in the course of a commercial dispute with a leading maritime information supplier – which put their data sources out of reach - we rethought our strategy. We had achieved good coverage of events in the recent past, but had not achieved our primary aim - “reading” the tanker market to get a view forward. History is great, but we’ve been there. The question everybody wants answered is - what happens next? This is where the new Oil Movements focuses attention."
Problem classification according to Adam Kucharski in The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling:
If we know an object's exact state - such as its position and speed - and what physical laws it follows, we have a textbook physics problem to solve. Termed the first degree of ignorance.
If we know the physical laws but don't know the exact state of the object, or cannot measure it accurately. Engineering in this case must either improve the measurements or limit predictions to what will happen to the object or system in the year near future. This is the second degree of ignorance.
The third degree of ignorance is the most extensive form of ignorance. This is when we don't know the initial state of the object or system or the physical laws. Engineering can also fall into the third level of ignorance if the laws are too intricate to fully unravel.
Sony's Xperia might be your AI support assistant in your ear during the project management meetings. Link to the article.
"The device features a proximity sensor that informs a wirelessly linked Android smartphone when it is in the user's ear.
An app on the phone then provides location and time-based prompts about the weather, diary appointments, social media posts, missed calls and the news.
It can also respond to voice commands for internet searches, navigation directions and message dictations.
The idea is to free users from having to handle their phone so often.
Its battery life is limited to three-and-a-half hours of active use, but Sony suggests this will be enough for most people most days."
From the AWWA - A new analysis published by the American Water Works Association estimates 6.1 million lead service lines remain in U.S. communities, suggesting progress in lead service line removal over the past two decades but indicating an estimated $30 billion challenge remains.
From Hamilton - - "Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of a country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighborhood of the town. They are, upon that account, the greatest of all improvements.They encourage the cultivation of the remote, which must always be the most extensive circle of the country. They are advantageous to the town, by breaking down the monopoly of the country in its neighborhood. They are advantageous, even to that part of the country. Though they introduce some rival commodities into the old market, they open many new markets to its produce. Monopoly, besides, is a great enemy to good management, which can never be universally established, but in consequence of that free and universal competition, which forces every body to have recourse to it for the sake of self-defence. It is not more than fifty years ago that some of the counties in the neighborhood of London petitioned the parliament against the extension of the turnpike roads into the remoter counties. Those remoter counties, they pretended, from the cheapness of labor, would be able to sell their grass and corn cheaper in the London market than themselves, and they would thereby reduce their rents, and ruin their cultivation. Their rents, however, have risen, and their cultivation has been improved since that time."
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