Category Archives: technology

The rise of the new groupthink

Posted on by
Reply

The New York Times has an interesting article about the downsides of too frequently working in teams and/or not having enough solitary work time or space.

SOME teamwork is fine and offers a fun, stimulating, useful way to exchange ideas, manage information and build trust.

But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They’re also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it.

I find this particularly relevant in working in the public sector, where it is anathema to the current trends to make decisions independently or trust the detail work of “technical experts”.  Current trends seem to be towards trusting in the ultimate wisdom of the group.  Humans are not built to resist the downside of groupthink.

The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”

The article notes that the internet and electronic communication may provide an antidote for groupthink.

The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.

Super energy efficiency for existing homes

Posted on by
Reply

 The Star Tribune has a story about the MinnePHit House in South Minneapolis.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Paul Brazelton will move his family into a 1935 Tudor in south Minneapolis that has no furnace. He’s just finished a massive renovation of the family home and even though winter’s bearing down, he removed the boiler and plans to use that basement space for his daughters’ home-school classroom.

He also took out the fireplace.

If this sounds like the most uninviting house (and classroom) in Minneapolis, there’s something else to know: Brazelton, a software engineer and passionate environmentalist, has nearly finished a retrofit of his house to the stringent engineering standards of the Passivhaus model, a German system of homebuilding that uses insulation and highly efficient doors and windows to save energy.

The finished 2,000-square-foot home could be warmed even in the dead of winter with a pair of small space heaters, Brazelton said, though the family plans to piggyback on their hot water heater and use an in-floor heating system in the basement.

The project is the renovation of an existing home to meet EnerPHit standard for energy performance. EnerPHit is a subset of the Passive House standard (hence the PH), which is an energy performance standard that requires very high levels of energy efficiency.  The Passive House Institute has a summary:

A Passive House is a very well-insulated, virtually air-tight building that is primarily heated by passive solar gain and by internal gains from people, electrical equipment, etc. Energy losses are minimized. Any remaining heat demand is provided by an extremely small source. Avoidance of heat gain through shading and window orientation also helps to limit any cooling load, which is similarly minimized. An energy recovery ventilator provides a constant, balanced fresh air supply. The result is an impressive system that not only saves up to 90% of space heating costs, but also provides a uniquely terrific indoor air quality.

Passive House is a performance standard, meaning it doesn’t specify design features like LEED, but has performance characteristics that the building must meet after construction is complete.  Namely an airtight building shell at  ≤ 0.6 ACH @ 50 pascal pressure measured by a blower door test and a total heating & cooling demand of <4.7 kBtu/sq ft/yr.  Total energy use needs to be ≤ 38.1 kBtu/ft2/yr.

In layman’s terms, this means Passive House designs are 11 times more airtight than a conventionally designed and built modern home.  As for energy use, a typical single family detached home uses 76 kBtu/sq ft/yr.  My own house was built in the 1920′s and currently has no wall insulation.  In 2010, we used 89 kBtu/sq ft/yr in total, and I think we’re fairly frugal with our electricity.  That means when the Brazelton family finishes their home, it will use less than half the total energy of my house and be 15% larger.

The Passive House standard doesn’t require or depend on renewable energy to achieve this high energy performance.  It’s focused on minimizing, to the greatest extent possible, the loss of heat and capitalizing on natural heat sources like sunlight and even body heat.  The MinnePHit house will be renewable-ready, but it won’t have renewables to start with.  Paul, the owner, puts it eloquently:

 …we decided to use our limited resources in building a house with the highest level of efficiency and durability.  If maintained correctly, solar panels can last decades.  On the other hand, insulation can last centuries.  Looking again at the long term, the best investment is using less energy, not alternate energy.

Last but not least, this home is energy efficient because it is location efficient, located in South Minneapolis with nearby access to jobs, recreation and services.  The Brazelton’s definitely don’t have to use an automobile for every trip, and they likely won’t be traveling far to their destination.  The other local example of Passive House design can’t make that claim.

St. Paul’s electric vehicle charging stations

Posted on by
1

St. Paul has a nice video introducing their electric vehicle charging infrastructure.  According to a presentation I saw at MNAPA, the City hopes to have 150 public stations available by 2015.  They also estimated that the cost for installation was anywhere between $850 in parking ramps to $6,000 in on-street spaces.

Upload shapefiles to Google Fusion Tables

Posted on by
Reply

Google has a pretty cool labs project called Fusion Tables, which I think most people don’t know about.  One great feature is the ability to create a web map from georeferenced data quickly and easily.  Great news, it’s getting even easier.  From Steven Vance, news that you can now upload shapefiles (through a third-party site).

It is now possible to upload a shapefile (and its companion files SHX, PRJ, and DBF) to Google Fusion Tables (GFT).

Before we go any further, keep in mind that the application that does this will only process 100,000 rows. Additionally, GFT only gives each user 200 MB of storage (and they don’t tell you your current status, that I can see).

  1. Login to your Google account (at Gmail, or at GFT).
  2. Prepare your data. Ensure it has fewer than 100,000 rows.
  3. ZIP up your dataX.shp, dataX.shx, dataX.prj, and dataX.dbf. Use WinZip for Windows, or for Mac, right-click the selection of files and select “Compress 4 items”.
  4. Visit the Shape to Fusion website. You will have to authorize the web application to “grant access” to your GFT tables. It needs this access so that after the web application processes your data, it can insert it into GFT.
  5. If you want a Centroid Geometry column or a Simplified Geometry column added, click “Advanced Options” and check their checkboxes – see notes below for an explanation.
  6. Choose the file to upload and click Upload.
  7. Leave the window open until it says it has processed all of the rows. It will report “Processed Y rows and inserted Y rows”. You will be given a link to the GFT the web application created.
Here is a web map I made of Minneapolis bike count figures over time, the old fashioned way (geocoding by hand).  You could also get this to work before by exporting KML from ArcGIS an importing it into Fusion Tables, but that was clunky and had inconsistent results. Google should incorporate this quickly, if they want to keep up with what you can do with ArcGIS Online.

Not-so-smart cities

Posted on by
Reply

First, I want to say I totally agree with the last half of the last sentence in Greg Lindsay’s opinion piece in the New York Times:

…the smartest cities are the ones that embrace openness, randomness and serendipity — everything that makes a city great.

The rest of the piece I don’t quite get.  Lindsay objects to the new city being built in New Mexico which will have no residents, but be used solely for testing “smart city” technology like “smart power grids, cyber security and intelligent traffic and surveillance systems”.  He objects because he feels computer simulations are not robust enough to capture human’s inherent “randomness”.  To support his case, he uses an example of a RAND corporation study, from 1968 (!), that failed to “smartly” reconfigure fire service.

Take the 1968 decision by New York Mayor John V. Lindsay to hire the RAND Corporation to streamline city management through computer models. It built models for the Fire Department to predict where fires were likely to break out, and to decrease response times when they did. But, as the author Joe Flood details in his book “The Fires,” thanks to faulty data and flawed assumptions — not a lack of processing power — the models recommended replacing busy fire companies across Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx with much smaller ones.

What RAND could not predict was that, as a result, roughly 600,000 people in the poorest sections of the city would lose their homes to fire over the next decade. Given the amount of money and faith the city had put into its models, it’s no surprise that instead of admitting their flaws, city planners bent reality to fit their models — ignoring traffic conditions, fire companies’ battling multiple blazes and any outliers in their data.

The final straw was politics, the very thing the project was meant to avoid. RAND’s analysts recognized that wealthy neighborhoods would never stand for a loss of service, so they were placed off limits, forcing poor ones to compete among themselves for scarce resources. What was sold as a model of efficiency and a mirror to reality was crippled by the biases of its creators, and no supercomputer could correct for that.

First, any good planner or engineer will tell you that models and software should be a starting point, not a finishing point.  I have no doubt that any new technology that comes out of the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation (that is the new city’s name) will be refined in the real world as it’s performance among us mammals is tested.  If the RAND corporation couldn’t (or wouldn’t) adjust in 1968, they were bad planners.

Second, we shouldn’t use technology because politics could get in the way?  Don’t fault technology, fault bad process and implementation.  Also, where does this line of reasoning lead us?

Third and finally, this is the only example Lindsay gives of a failure of “smart” systems in the real world (except for a reference to something Jane Jacobs said), and it occurred in 1968.  Lindsay omits the myriad “smart city” technologies that are already commonplace and are generally deemed to have net positive impacts.  Here is a partial list (and I’m no expert):

And coming soon:
None of the second list, and I’m pretty sure none of the first list (at least computerized versions thereof) even existed in 1968.  The fact that many of these systems currently exist, and regularly operate without massive failure, seems to refute Lindsay’s assertion that we shouldn’t continue to develop them.