Category Archives: Soapbox

Are we all free riders?

6 Replies

girl in smogThe ‘tragedy of the commons’ is an economic theory founded on the idea that when there is unregulated use of a shared resource then the rational consumer, acting independently and in their own interests, will maximise their consumption leading to the depletion or destruction of the resource.  For example, if there is no cost or limit to grazing sheep on common land then a rational shepherd would maximise their flock size in order to maximise profit.  Eventually, the commons’ ability to sustain the sheep is overwhelmed and it becomes a wasteland.  Are we all taking a free ride on the world’s ecosystem?  Our cars and houses freely pump out huge quantities of carbon dioxide that are overwhelming our ecosystem.  Most of us do nothing – either because we refuse to believe the evidence, or we believe it is not in our interests to act, or we don’t think it is our problem, or we don’t know what to do, or a combination of these excuses.

This might seem a low priority to you.  But, for the 40% of the world’s population that live in the five countries with the worst air quality, it is a high priority.  If you visit these countries, you experience days when it is difficult to breathe because the pollution is so bad and it is hard to read your smartphone because the air is so thick with particles.  We are all part of a single ecosystem on the planet, Gaia if you like, and we are joined to one another through a myriad of connections.  So we ignore this issue at our peril, or the peril of our grandchildren.

It seems unlikely that our leaders will take effective coordinated action and so grass roots action is needed as suggested by Kofi Annan.  Assess your carbon footprint now and think about ways to become carbon neutral.  If you want to find out the carbon footprint of your organization then the Carbon Trust has useful information and services.

Sources:

The Economist Pocket World in Figures 2015 edition, Profile Books Ltd, London 2014

Thumbnail: http://blogs-images.forbes.com/benjaminshobert/files/2015/01/China_Smog2-1940×1293.jpg

Not all who wander are lost

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moelfamauSometime ago, when lost in Edinburgh, I came across the line in the title painted on the gable end of a building. It is a line from a poem recited by Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of Rings by JRR Tolkein.  At the time, it struck a chord with me because I was lost, though not wandering, but I am an advocate of mind-wandering, which it seemed to characterize nicely [see my post entitled ‘Mind-wandering’ on September 3rd, 2014]. This week I am on leave. I will be wandering the hills, though hopefully not lost, and I am optimistic that this will induce some mind-wandering.  If you don’t have the opportunity for a vacation, then at least ‘Slow down, breathe your own air‘ [see my post on December 23rd, 2015].

Sources:

JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1954

What a waste

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20120609_wom915Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc², does not influence everyday interactions of energy, E and mass, m.  The speed of light, c is 299 792 458 m/s which is very big number and implies a huge amount of energy is required to create a small amount of mass.  This means that energy and mass are independently conserved.  For energy, this is the first law of thermodynamics while the law of conservation of mass is usually attributed to Antoine Lavoisier.  On a planetary scale, the conservation of mass implies that we can assume that the quantity of matter is constant.  Can we apply the second law of thermodynamics to matter as well as energy?  One interpretaton of the second law is that Gibbs energy, or the energy available to do useful work, must decrease in all real processes.   This also applies when matter moves through our economic system.  For instance, we must do work to convert mineral ores into useful products which gradually degrade through use and natural processes, such as corrosion, until they become scrap and we must expend more resources to recycle them and make them useful again.  The sun provides us with a steady supply of useful energy, so that in energy terms planet Earth can be considered an open system with energy flows in and out.  Conversely in mass terms, planet Earth is effectively a closed system with negligible mass flow in or out, so that we do not have a steady supply of new matter from which to manufacture goods.  However, most of us behave with open-world mindset and throw away matter (goods) that are no longer useful to us when we should be repairing and recycling [see my post entitled ‘Old is beautiful‘ on May 1st 2013].  Maybe we can’t reach the zero-waste status aimed at by people like Bea Johnson, but most of us could do better than the 2.2 kg of solid waste produced each day by each of us in OECD countries. That’s 2.1 tonnes per year for an average OECD household (2.63 people)!

Sources:

The New Sustainable Frontier – principles of sustainable development, GSA Office of Governmentwide Policy, September 2009.

Daniel Hoornweq & Perinaz Bhada-Tata, What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management, World Bank No.15, 2012.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/06/daily-chart-3

Models as fables

3 Replies

moel arthurIn his book, ‘Economic Rules – Why economics works, when it fails and how to tell the difference‘, Dani Rodrik describes models as fables – short stories that revolve around a few principal characters who live in an unnamed generic place and whose behaviour and interaction produce an outcome that serves as a lesson of sorts.  This seems to me to be a healthy perspective compared to the almost slavish belief in computational models that is common today in many quarters.  However, in engineering and increasingly in precision medicine, we use computational models as reliable and detailed predictors of the performance of specific systems.  Quantifying this reliability in a way that is useful to non-expert decision-makers is a current area of my research.  This work originated in aerospace engineering where it is possible, though expensive, to acquire comprehensive and information-rich data from experiments and then to validate models by comparing their predictions to measurements.  We have progressed to nuclear power engineering in which the extreme conditions and time-scales lead to sparse or incomplete data that make it more challenging to assess the reliability of computational models.  Now, we are just starting to consider models in computational biology where the inherent variability of biological data and our inability to control the real world present even bigger challenges to establishing model reliability.

Sources:

Dani Rodrik, Economic Rules: Why economics works, when it fails and how to tell the difference, Oxford University Press, 2015

Patterson, E.A., Taylor, R.J. & Bankhead, M., A framework for an integrated nuclear digital environment, Progress in Nuclear Energy, 87:97-103, 2016

Hack, E., Lampeas, G. & Patterson, E.A., An evaluation of a protocol for the validation of computational solid mechanics models, J. Strain Analysis, 51(1):5-13, 2016.

Patterson, E.A., Challenges in experimental strain analysis: interfaces and temperature extremes, J. Strain Analysis, 50(5): 282-3, 2015

Patterson, E.A., On the credibility of engineering models and meta-models, J. Strain Analysis, 50(4):218-220, 2015