Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Project Syndicate predictions for 2021

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And now the 2021 predictions are starting to roll in. I blew my one free Project Syndicate article for the month on this, which seems like an okay choice.

  • Covid-19 will recede as vaccines roll out, and the economy will recover. This seems to be a near-consensus, although there is one minority report. And the average growth rate of course hides inequalities, which have gotten worse.
  • As you might expect, lots of speculation about U.S. politics and what Biden will do, but most people expect a return to the pre-Trump status quo at the UN, WHO, Israel and Palestine, the Iran nuclear deal, the climate deal, and democracy/human rights rhetoric we mostly fail to live up to. Of course, there are newfound doubts about U.S. political stability in the medium- to long-term.
  • Renewable energy will continue to be cheap and competitive with fossil fuels.
  • Electric vehicles come up a couple times – the market is pulling, and there may be a big push because the U.S. is significantly behind many other countries on adoption. (My take: The electric and auto industries are behind this, and the oil industry presumably is not but nobody seems to care. Could this break their backs?)
  • U.S.-China tensions will ramp up! Or they’ll die down…the crystal ball is murky on this one.
  • North Korea likes to test new U.S. Presidents with a missile test or two.
  • Poverty and violence have gotten worse in Africa while the rest of the world has been distracted by other things.
  • The effects of food insecurity and extreme weather events are getting worse in developing countries.
  • Cash may be dead, and if so there is at least a three-way race to replace it – “private tokens, central bank digital currencies, and efforts to upgrade the current system”.

finally, (some) hard numbers on schools and Covid spread

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This article from The Intercept cites some recent research studies that put some numbers behind what level of community spread would make opening schools unsafe. The basic idea is that school (especially elementary school) is pretty safe when the level of infection in the community is relatively low, because kids coming to school are not that likely to be infected. But when the level of infection in the community rises, kids coming to school are more likely to be infected and further accelerate the spread.

Even educated people in the general public have a hard time with unit conversions, and this article switches between various units within the article. Come on, guys. Anywhere, here are the numbers from a variety of sources in the article. I’ve done the unit conversions (correctly, I think, but this blog post does not constitute medical advice…)

  • 36-44 per 100,000 population per week (~5-6 per 100,000 per day)
  • 147 per 100,000 per week (21 per 100,000 per day)
  • 35 per 100,000 per week (5 per 100,000 per day)

That seems like a pretty big range, and I am also suspicious whether the reporters have carefully checked the math, given how they jump around even within the article. But let’s assume they have it right. The threshold is somewhere between 35-147 cases per 100,000 per week. The Pennsylvania Department of Education recommends a threshold of 100 cases per 100,000 per week to consider in-person K-12 school. (Although private and parochial elementary schools have been open throughout the pandemic, and public school districts are hit or miss.) The official number for Philadelphia county at the moment (I’m writing this on January 7), which they only update once a week, is 225.9 per 100,000 per week and falling. My unofficial 7-day running average of the numbers the Philadelphia Health Department reports in its daily press releases is 235.0 per 100,000 per week and falling (but looking at a plot, I would say it’s bouncing around and not clearly rising or falling this week). Those of us with children in public school have not had the option of in-person school so far during this school year.

2020 Human Development Index Report

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You could spend a lot of time going through any one sprawling UN report like the Human Development Index Report. Then you could spend a lifetime digging into the underlying sources. Here are a few things I gleaned from a light skim and looking at some of the pictures:

  • Amartya Sen says the index was designed as an alternative to be looked at alongside GDP, and the intent is to identify shortcomings of GDP, draw attention using a single aggregate number which doesn’t really mean much, and then hope news media and individuals dig into the underlying information. He thinks this has been reasonably successful.
  • The index crashed in 2020 due to Covid-19.
  • They have made a significant effort to incorporate ecological risks into the index. There are interesting chapters on planetary boundaries and relationships between the overall level of development and ecological risks across countries. Of course, the countries with higher development levels tend to contribute more to the global risks, which then fall on the countries with lower levels of development. So the goal would be to reduce the impact from the more developed countries, while moving the less developed countries up the development ladder without creating even more risk globally. This is hard to do.
  • Chapter 2 summarizes the magnitude of overall human impacts compared to the scale of the planet’s natural systems, the planetary boundaries concept, and the biodiversity collapse. Not a bad introduction if anyone is new to these issues.
  • Food security risks have increased significantly, and not just due to Covid-19 but due to flooding, droughts, heat, and natural disasters clearly driven by climate change. There are a lot of intertwined issues out there, but if we were going to pick only one to pay attention to globally, this would be it. See pp. 56-58. Flashing warning lights here!
  • There is an essay on existential threats to the species and civilization somewhere towards the back. One way to estimate the risk is to look at how long the species has been around, how long some of our ancestral Homo species were around, and then the annual risk of extinction. Interesting, but I wonder how hard it would be to measure/model progress against this metric or the potential impact of any one action. Even if we don’t go extinct, the category of existential threats includes an unrecoverable collapse of civilization or merely a partial collapse to an “unrecoverable dystopia”. Let’s try to avoid any of these.
  • Of course, the UN has to balance all the doom and gloom stuff with an equal word salad of things we could try to do to make it better. There are a lot more facts, figures, and scientific references in the first part, and a lot more anecdotes and case studies in the second part. TLDR, but hopefully there is some stuff in there that could trickle down to actual policies and actions at the national and local level.

novel writing software, Scrivener, and R Bookdown

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This is a pretty niche post, but a couple years ago I briefly entertained a fantasy of becoming a novelist. After I tried to write a novel, my the wisdom of not quitting my day job was affirmed. But in the course of that, I briefly investigated software that novelists are using to organize their books and research. The most popular is called Scrivener. I was thinking though that it would be neat if someone would customize the R packages Markdown or Bookdown for writing, because then especially if you are writing non-fiction you could have all your data, analysis code, tables, figures, references etc. in one place along with your prose. This post describes a system that allows the author to actually combine the use of Scrivener and R Bookdown.

New Urbanism: Past, Present, and Future

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I basically agree with the principles of new urbanism (which were based on old urbanism). Communities where people can take most work, school, shopping, and entertainment trips by walking or biking are better for the planet and better for our physical and mental health. With good planning and design, there is plenty of room in the spaces we have already developed to accommodate whatever population growth we are expecting, without continuing to chew up land that could be left wild or used as farmland. The trick is to establish a virtuous cycle where gradually more people buy into the idea of life without private cars taking up half the space. And then some of that space saved has to be invested in good public infrastructure, access to recreation and nature to offset some of the negative effects of density. I think New Urban ideas have blunted suburban sprawl and car-dependency a little in the United States, but only a little unfortunately. There just aren’t that many walkable neighborhoods to choose from, and so people either aren’t familiar with them, and can’t imagine a non-car-dependent lifestyle, or else they assume people of average means can’t afford them, which is true in general of desirable things in short supply.

New Urbanism: Past, Present, and Future

The New Urbanism, initially conceived as an anti-sprawl reform movement, evolved into a new paradigm in urban design. Recently, however, some researchers have argued that the popular appeal of New Urbanism has eroded, the movement has lost its significance, and critical research on the broader theme has tapered off. In response, this article investigates whether the movement has lost its currency and explores the future of New Urbanism in the context of contemporary circumstances of development. The article begins with a brief description of the conceptualization of New Urbanism as an exception to the development trends of the time. Collaborative efforts of its protagonists that have contributed to the integration of New Urbanist concepts into other programs, policies, and development regulations are presented in the next section to describe its expansion, to clarify its mainstreaming, and to call attention to its broader impact. The concluding section presents contemporary circumstances of development and changes that are intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, including those related to the nation’s demographics, climate change, technological advances, rapid growth of the digital economy, and acceleration of e-commerce to explore the significance of New Urbanism for future development.

Urban Planning open access journal

sperm counts and clean chemistry

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Yes, according to one study from 2017, sperm counts are crashing and if you just extrapolate out in time it leads to disaster for the human race. Now, I had heard that sperm counts have dropped steadily over the decades, and we still have plenty of sperm for now, but we don’t know where the trend is headed next. I know about the concerns with endocrine disrupters. We also know that fertility is down for a variety of reasons, beginning with women around the world having more choices in terms of education and career.

This comprehensive meta-regression analysis reports a significant decline in sperm counts (as measured by SC and TSC) between 1973 and 2011, driven by a 50-60% decline among men unselected by fertility from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Because of the significant public health implications of these results, research on the causes of this continuing decline is urgently needed.

Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis

I assume we are probably headed for a world of more technologically-assisted reproduction for a variety of reasons, beginning with just wanting to have more control over our fertility at various stages of our lives. But endocrine disrupters are potentially bad news for humans and for ecosystems. We don’t really try very hard to look for safer and equally functional chemicals before we put lots of them in the environment and in our bodies. I believe better living through chemistry does make our lives better on balance. For example, get rid of food preservatives or water disinfectants and we would instantly cause massive amounts of suffering and death. But get rid of most of the weird stuff in my shampoo, and I would still be able to wash my hair just fine. Building materials are a tough one. The tar on my roof and siding on my house are highly functional and beneficial, but they both cause pollution in production, manufacturing, and most likely cause water and air pollution. We can say similar things for materials used to build our streets and highways. We should look for clean but equally functional substitutes for all of these. And in the meantime, we should probably impose taxes to offset the impact these materials cause. This could both fund research into alternatives and provide some incentive to adopt alternatives as they become available.

advertising shits in your head

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Some books just have good titles. And this one is called Advertising Shits in Your Head: Strategies for Resistance. From the publisher:

Advertising Shits in Your Head calls adverts what they are—a powerful means of control through manipulation—and highlights how people across the world are fighting back. It diagnoses the problem and offers practical tips for a DIY remedy. Faced with an ad-saturated world, activists are fighting back, equipped with stencils, printers, high-visibility vests, and utility tools. Their aim is to subvert the adverts that control us.

“PM Press is an independent, radical publisher of books and media to educate, entertain, and inspire.”

Really, they had me at the title. But it seems to me that the main way to counter the shit is to teach children from a young age to evaluate the source and quality of information they are taking in, expose themselves to multiple sources of information, think critically, draw their own conclusions, discuss their conclusions with other informed people, and be open minded.

Somewhat related is this new browser plug-in Newsguard, which provides “Trust ratings for all the news sites that account for 95% of engagement” and is “Written by journalists, not secret algorithms.” Sounds okay, although I think I have too many browser plug-ins already.

attribution science, and some thoughts on computer modeling

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This Slate article explains how attribution science works. It depends on modeling. Basically, scientists model an event (like a storm, flood, fire, whatever) using a hypothetical condition where the event did not occur, and compare that to the data from our actual universe where it did occur.

I do a fair amount of modeling in my job, and there are always skeptics (some more informed than others). Why would anyone trust a computer model? Isn’t empirical measurement always better? Well, we model things we can’t measure, often things that could or would have occurred if things were different, or things that might happen in the future. To trust a model, first, somewhat obviously, you need to say what the model is for, clearly. Second, you need to be confident that it is adequately representing the real-world processes underlying the system you are interested in. Whether this is true requires expert judgment, and the expert needs to really understand the system. If the expert is confident in this, and the expert knows what they are doing, the model has some usefulness even if there is no data. (Purely empirical models like regression equations don’t represent processes, and therefore have limited predictive value if conditions change significantly.) But we always want data. Third, the modeler will compare what the model predicts to some real data. The modeler needs to be aware that there is always uncertainty in how well measurements represent the real condition of the actual physical universe, and that this uncertainty will propagate through the model (the uninformed often think of this as “model error”.) If the prediction is reasonably accurate without tweaking, you may have a pretty good model. Often the modeler will do a little tweaking to improve the fit, but the more tweaking the more you are moving toward an empirical model with less predictive value. In a somewhat old-fashioned (according to me) but common approach in the engineering field, the modeler will set a portion of the data aside while doing the tweaking, then compare the tweaked model to the portion they set aside. I don’t usually do this, because there is never enough data. I tend to use it all, then check the model again when more data becomes available in the future.

Finally, we have a model that we are confident represents underlying processes, matches real-world measurements reasonably well, and is suitable for its stated purpose. We can use the model for that purpose, be clear about the known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and draw some conclusions that might be useful in the real world. We have some information that can inform decisions better than guesses alone could have, and that we couldn’t have learned from data alone.

China and Taiwan

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What would a China-Taiwan military conflict look like, and could it happen in 2021 or in the relatively near future? Would the U.S. necessarily get dragged in?

I don’t really trust what I read in the media about China. It’s not that I assume everything I read is outright lies, but I assume there are layers of misunderstanding and intentional bias along with facts. For one thing, we know the U.S. military-industrial complex needs enemies to continue sucking in a quarter or so of our tax payments and our government’s spending. Then there is just the general American lack of ability to see things from other peoples’ and countries’ points of view. It can help to read accounts from international sources, although they will also have biases. Anyway, this particular account is from The Diplomat, which seems to be a reputable news source from what I can tell, and the author is a Taiwanese academic. So exercise your own judgment in evaluating the source, but here is my summary:

  • China’s official stated goal is “peaceful unification”.
  • China is engaged in propaganda, disinformation, and putting pressure on other countries in the region. (I would imagine this is true of both sides, and in fact most countries in any kind of conflict.)
  • China’s goal in a military conflict would be for any conflict to be over quickly, before other countries have much chance to react.
  • China is currently engaged in what the author calls a “gray zone strategy”, in which it uses ships and aircraft to harass and threaten Taiwan without actually attacking. It might also be doing things underwater in “blind spots that Taiwan’s surveillance and reconnaissance systems fail to cover.”
  • Further escalation could be to blockade offshore islands claimed by Taiwan, and possibly occupy them.
  • The next major escalation could be stopping ship traffic to and from Taiwan, which would cut off energy supplies and trade.
  • China would likely amass a large number of troops nearby, whether or not it had immediate plans to use them. The initial goal would be to intimidate politicians in Taiwan in hopes they would agree to negotiate.
  • The Taiwan military and leadership would have to decide at this point whether to defend itself militarily, which could launch an all-out war.

This article doesn’t quite hold together for me. A protracted blockade seems like exactly the thing that would give Taiwan time to appeal internationally for help, and other countries time to decide what to do.

24 million people live on Taiwan, and they have many more people who care about them all over the world. The human cost of any military conflict would be horrific. Let’s hope none of this ever comes to pass!