Are "rights of way" key to better mega-cities? Plus science news!

First….

My talk at TEDx San Diego-2013 -- What's Next? The Horizon of our Dreams --  is now posted for viewing by all.  It was very popular, but challenging for the smart audience, as I took them on a rapid tour of human history, society, evolution… and our galactic destiny… all in  12 minutes!

Rumors abound that Elon is dickering for Apple to buy or collaborate with Tesla Motors and -- of course -- create the "iCar."

Sounds cool…

...though my only real comment is this illustration from my 2010 graphic novel about American industry called TINKERERS.

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== Aggressive help to vitalize "mega-cities." ==

Here is a fascinating article about the dilemma of megacities... and some innovative new, technological approaches that might help make them livable: Our Fragile Emerging Megacities: A Focus on Resilience, by Kevin C. Desouza.

Riffing off of this piece, I have long believed that one key, seldom-mentioned aspect for saving megacities is the problem and opportunity of rights-of-way (RoW).  Any of these megacities could be vitalized by a process that -- at first sight -- will seem brutal, but that does not have to be.  It is the demolition of -- and rebuilding upon -- a 200 meter wide corridor extending from the port, to the urban center, then out to the industrial parks and airport and then countryside.

Within this razed band, every major, revitalizing service can then be inserted at very low cost, using simple trenching methods: utilities, sewer systems, water, underground metros and a grand boulevard.  There would also be room for new-innovative services like pneumatic tube delivery of goods, eliminating much of the truck traffic that clogs streets.

Atop the easily-trenched service corridors might not only be a grand boulevard but also farmers markets, booth-bazaars and a slim but beautiful urban park… that incidentally would allow cheap and trivial access to utilities for repair or upgrade, a terrible design problem in most legacy cities.  The land on both sides would skyrocket in usability and value, for more than a kilometer in both directions, a linear approach to urban development that worked so well along Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles.

The efficiency of this system would bring huge returns to investors, despite having to carefully allow for: 
(1) dealing with corrupt governments and 
(2) setting aside 1/3 ownership rights in the new commercial frontages to the original inhabitants who were uprooted.  

Indeed, the biggest challenge, requiring great care, would be acting covertly in advance to secretly discover and document every person living along the RoW -- even in slums and favelas -- and vesting them in their shares before local elites get a chance to interfere or cheat… and then providing housing for the displaced until fill-in is completed.

Sorry, but I've been thinking about this for decades, developing  details, waiting for some "I want to change the world" billionaire to come to me for my list of ways to both re-shape tomorrow for the better… and get even richer doing it. This particular one would seem an opportunity of almost transcendent importance, requiring deep pockets and even deeper guts.

But some zillionaire could change the world, and get every penny back, ten-fold.

== About… us… ==

The Evolution of Fairness through Spite:  A study done by philosophers Patrick Forber of Tufts University and Rory Smead of Northwestern University, suggests fairness in societies evolves out of a fear of spite from others, rather than due to an increase in altruism.  Interesting how this resonates with both my short story "The Giving Plague" (free online) and this contrarian perspective on whether altruism might pervade the universe, as some fervently believe.

Is this related?  A major study has found quite significant correlations between Internet trolling behavior and general personality nastiness.  Specifically, trolls score highly in personality traits that fall in the so-called Dark Tetrad: Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others).

Internet trolls (who are frequently anonymous) have a polarizing effect on audiences, leading to politicization, rather than deeper understanding of scientific topics. This puts a strong incentive on the rest of us to explore potential alternatives to pure, accountability-free anonymity.  Proposals for sheltered pseudonymity are on the table, which could provide all the benefits of anonymity -- freedom to explore and reduce inhibitions/fears -- without making malignancy outcome-free.

Only a fraction of trolls self-identify -- the focus of this study. But a majority believe that their passion is always and inherently justified, an indignant state that they return to, far too readily and frequently to be anything other than an epiphenomenon of addiction. See my article: An Open Letter to Researchers of Addiction, Brain Chemistry and Social Psychology.

Ah… but then there are the relatives of trolls… wargs.  War-fighters And Gossip Spreaders. They move in packs, leaving scorched earth. And they feel no need for anonymity.

== Space! and Tech==

A fatwa—an interpretation based on Quranic scripture—issued by the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment in the United Arab Emirates, has declared that the Mars One endeavor, to hurry a mission to Mars by making it a one-way attempt at colonization, is too close to suicide to be permitted.

How will humans adapt to space -- and cope with the stresses of continuous close contact in a space module? Support the IndieGogo campaign: A One-year Mars Simulation in the Canadian Arctic. Why aim for Mars? See Robert Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet... and Why We Must. 

Penn State University chemists and engineers have, for the first time, placed tiny synthetic motors inside live human cells in a lab, propelled them with ultrasonic waves, and steered them magnetically.

Google is offering advice to Google-Glass users: don't be glass-holes.

The Bluetooth Orb is a a Bluetooth finger ring with scrolling display, built in microphone, and the ability to transform between a ring and an earpiece. Early versions wowed audiences and electronics shows… then it vanished! (I have better things in mind, anyway.)

Synthetic muscle made of fishing line is 100 times stronger than the real thing.

Frequency of random events on xkcd: mesmerizing!

Dangers of ... sitting? Regardless of exercise, too much sedentary time is linked to major disability after age 60.

== Transparency News ==

Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande will review plans to build up a trustworthy data protection network in Europe. The challenge is to avoid data passing through the U.S. after revelations of mass NSA spying in Germany and France.

Merkel has been one of the biggest supporters of greater data protection in Europe since the revelations that the U.S. tapped her phone emerged in a Der Spiegel news report in October -- based on information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Hm… I am skeptical it'd work.  But variety is spice.

See also my interview on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd dealing with issues of Transparency on BlogTalkRadio.

== Wonders ==

See pictures of swirling tornado-like forms which turned out to be thousands of fish in the midst of a reproductive courtship.

Really interesting… how wolves change rivers.

Human and dog brains both have dedicated 'voice area.'

And finally… Compost-fueled cars: A hilarious send-up of TED talks, from the Onion!

Urban Planning from the Ruins

In the latest issue of Newsweek, President Barack Obama explains  "Why Haiti Matters," offering reasons -- from moral to pragmatic -- for Americans to care about that unlucky nation. Indeed, were it possible to wave a wand and transform that hellish place into an upward-rising land of hope, health, education, enterprise and opportunity, while re-planting its ravaged hillsides, who wouldn't?

Lacking magic wands, we have another tool -- money -- in limited amounts. That, combined with ingenuity and goodwill, can take care of some short term things.  Stop the dying.  Provide food, shelter and basic sanitation.  Help the Haitians to restore basic utilities and bury their dead. Repair the ports and roads enough to get commerce flowing again. So far, no arguments.

It's when we start talking about longer-term solutions that the discussion gets clouded by preconceptions, dogmas and real world practicalities.  Sixty years after the Marshall Plan proved that foreign assistance can work, some of the time, we still find our best-meant schemes mired by bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, and unintended consequences. Nor does any political side have a perfect recipe. If the American left has often shown itself to be treacly and naive, the right is already back to its old, cynical sneer, deriding "the failed and discredited utopian fantasy of so-called Nation Building" -- an actual neoconservative mantra, up till the very month that they plunged the U.S. into the most costly, inefficient, corruption-ridden and ill-conceived nation-building exercise ever undertaken.

In contrast to Iraq, Haiti has several traits that make it seem a rather good candidate for national makeover.  It is small, nearby, desperate -- and yet peaceful -- enough to be a possible test case. (Our misadventure in Somalia showed how necessary the "peaceful" component is.)

On the downside, you have a near total lack of infrastructure, education or reliable civil law. Still, despite the challenges, suppose we wanted to really accomplish epochal and effective change in Haiti?

Aside from humanitarian aid, what endeavors would be most helpful over the long run?

1) Cooking. It sounds simple, even banal.  But a major driver of Haiti's tragic deforestation is the chopping of wood for cooking fuel. For years we've seem efforts to offer solar cookers to people in developing nations -- a worthy endeavor, but not very popular among the poor women who need to boil up the rice and bean now -- without spending hours worrying about clouds.

Amore prosaic palliative might be to establish communal kitchen facilities all over the island, where families could not only get food aid, but have access to shared, gas-fired stoves and ovens to prepare it. But whatever approach is chosen, we need to be clear about one unintended consequence of food aid. Distributing uncooked rice is tantamount to killing trees.

2) Reward self organization. Infrastructure projects and jobs should flow toward those neighborhoods that manage to organize themselves to better benefit from the aid. For one thing, this is the simplest way to bypass corrupt national officials, relying instead on simple metrics, right there on the ground.  For another thing, it would leverage upon islands of enthusiasm and competence, without imposing any preconceptions upon HOW the locals organize themselves.  (See an article in the LA Times about such neighborhood committees, already in motion.)

However they do it - via communes or coops or by working with local landowners, those that remove the trash and set up kitchens and have work crews ready for labor every day, and who present a fait accompli structure that can be relied upon, those should get top priority.
    The lesson would spread.

3) Empower law and civil society.  Go look up the work of Hernando de Soto (not the explorer, but the radical economist-reformer). The nation of Peru instituted his plan to get the people  clear title to their land, so they can then improve or borrow against it. The resulting surge in the market economy proved that left and right could work together, when not trapped in idiotic dogma, resulting in a boom in Peru. Peru's reform laws should be instituted in Haiti, with the one proviso that they be translated into French.

Unfotrtunately, right now is the very time when those with property rights in Port-au-Prince are most likely to be bought out, cents on the dollar, by Haiti's own oligarchs. (See a silver lining to this, below.)

4) Take advantage of the quake. Now, with the capital city in ruins, is the time for urban planning in Port-au-Prince.

Sure, those words sound pathetically sixties-ish.  But I am not talking about utopian nit-picking, meddlesome zoning regulations or over-specifying architecture -- (though there are modern alternatives to cinder-block construction that could be cheaper, faster and much more quake resistant... and this would be a good time to start setting up firms over there, trained in these alternative methods.)

No, what I mean by "urban planning" is the very basics.  Core essentials that are utterly pragmatic and that would best be done now, at the very moment that Port-au-Prince lies shattered.

As soon as people are being fed and all the children are safe, even next month, corridors and rights of way should be laid down and razed -- wide swaths stretching from the port to downtown, to the airport, and to the factory zone.

Yes, superficially it sounds horrible -- plowing aside the tottering shops that still stand along such broad paths.  But the benefits -- to all Haitians -- would be overwhelming. If done well, such corridors would allow very cheap installation of the organic elements needed by a modern city, the circulatory, pulmonary, lymphatic, nervous and other systems of a future, healthy metropolis.  I'm talking about mass transit, sewer, water, fiber-optics, gas, electricity, sewers...

ALL of these services are fantastically expensive -- in nations like the U.S. -- primarily due to right-of-way costs and having to insert and maintain them through already-existing streets. The actual conduits themselves (rails, sewer pipe, water pipe, optical fiber) are fairly cheap, if laid down in a linear fashion. (Commuter trolley lines can be established aboveground at first. But if the land-siting is done right, a trenched subway can go in, later, at trivial added expense.)

Combine this with the laying down of several grand boulevards and parks, and you could have the makings of a great and impressive city, rising from the ashes, drawing commerce and (even more important) proud confidence among its citizens.

Note that this needn't be done rapaciously. e.g. imagine if the poor and displaced got shares in the soon-to-be valuable plots that front upon these new boulevards, and first-options at the resulting apartments.  Is such fairness really likely, especially in Haiti?  Of course not.  Already the country's few-dozen elite, oligarchic families are swooping in -- partly to perform beneficent acts of noblesse oblige, and partly to seek opportunities within the chaos.  If my suggestion were undertaken entirely on the oligarchs' terms, with elites owning all the utilities and boulevard frontages, excluding even the people who used to live there, it would be a travesty.

But travesties are normal for Haiti.  In this case, at least there'd be boulevards, parks, utilities, sanitation, trolleys fiber-broadband, WiFi and commerce.  The elevated people could then engage in politics -- the torts and rights and wrongs -- later.

 Anyway, what if foreign influences leaped onto this project first, with strong intent to insert fairness as a priority? Note that a single billionaire could, right now, offer to do this in Port-au-Prince. His share, downstream, could be worth billions, without incurring any bad karma because, with just a little care to note who lived where, the chief beneficiaries would still be the poorest citizens of Haiti.

And the result... making money by increasing the value of a city that becomes a wonder and source of pride for all... would seem worth pondering.

==See an updated version of this article: Urban Planning Amid the Rubble in Salon