post katrina new orleans - focusing on what could be?

Video - The Sunken City: Rebuilding Post-Katrina New Orleans

UrbanLandInstitute | The city can keep its momentum going through careful consideration of how and where it grows, so that it continues to 1) become more accessible to residents and workers of a variety of incomes, age groups and household composition; and 2) more responsive to growing consumer demand for more energy-efficient and environmentally conscious places to live and work. This means sticking with a comprehensive strategy for development (and redevelopment) that conserves land and reduces the need to drive -- emphasizing development that integrates housing in a variety of price ranges, is close to employment and shopping, and is connected by transit.

Data from the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) offers a glimpse at where New Orleans stands in this regard. Earlier this year, the center released new data measuring location costs for more than 330 metro areas across the U.S., including combined housing and transportation expenses, miles traveled for local trips, and vehicle carbon emissions. Although New Orleans is not among the nation’s priciest markets, CNT found that the housing-transportation burden for the metro area remains high, totaling at least 45 percent of the income for the vast majority of residents.

The data also show the extent of car dependency in New Orleans: while those in the inner core drive less than 12,000 miles per year, those in the neighborhoods from just outside the core to the outlying edges drive 16,000 miles, even 18,000-plus miles per year for work and errands (nearly twice the national average). While 14 percent of downtown residents use public transit, the percentage drops to one percent or less for the suburbs. And, not surprisingly, the households farthest from major employment nodes have the highest carbon emissions. What this shows is the impact of sprawl in the suburbs, even in close-in suburbs, and even in a city with distinct land constraints.

As New Orleans continues the rebuilding process, how its suburbs grow is pivotal. Suburban growth in the 21st century does not have to be sprawl, not in New Orleans or other urban areas. In metro areas across the United States, the suburbs are where the growth will be, and in the suburbs, less land will have to be used to accommodate more people.

The need for more housing that is close to jobs, and the link between land use, driving, and environmental preservation all make a strong case for changing development patterns throughout urban regions, in the outlying areas as well as urban cores. In many ways, New Orleans is a city like no other, but in this regard, it is no different.

more than a feeling

Sciencenews | “It’s like the brain is on fire when you’re listening to music,” says Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In terms of brain imaging, studies have shown listening to music lights up, or activates, more of the brain than any other stimulus we know.”

That music can activate so many brain systems at once is the reason it packs such a mental wallop. It exerts its most profound effect in the brain’s emotional core, the limbic system. There, music changes virtually all areas of the brain responsible for regulating emotion, as neuroscientist Stefan Koelsch of Freie Universität Berlin describes in the March Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Music automatically engages areas essential to pleasure and reward. So much so, in fact, that the same pleasure centers in the brain light up whether you’re listening to a favorite tune, eating chocolate or having sex.

These dramatic effects make music a valuable instrument for probing the brain’s emotional circuitry. Koelsch and others are now using music as a tool to see how the brain processes a wide range of feelings such as sorrow, joy, longing and wonder. (Click here for a link to audio clips from some of Koelsch's experiments.) Some of these emotions, so easily felt in response to music, are otherwise difficult to evoke in an experimental setup. Other researchers are using music to explore how children with autism spectrum disorders process emotion. While these kids often have difficulty recognizing how others feel, they readily respond to the sentiments of a song.

Using music to study and stimulate the brain’s emotional circuits may lead to new therapies for treating a wide range of emotional disorders, including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, scientists say. By understanding how music activates and coordinates the various emotional mechanisms in the brain, scientists may find ways to rewire a brain affected by illness or injury, or provide a work-around for damaged or underperforming brain regions.

Despite the long list of potential benefits for health and happiness, Koelsch contends that the deep, complex experience that music delivers is primarily a social, rather than an individual, phenomenon (see “Not just a pleasant sound,”). Ages before people walked around with little wires in their ears to listen to music anytime, anywhere, tunes piped on flutes and reeds were probably used in tribal rituals to unify hunters and warriors about to do battle. Today, music helps pull people together at weddings, funerals and countless social events.

Music is universal. It occurs in all human cultures in some form, and extends deep into human history. Archaeologists have unearthed flutes made of bone that date back nearly 40,000 years. And scientists say that long before someone went to the trouble of carving a flute, humans banged out tunes using sticks and stones. Given that music gave early flutists and their fans no direct biological advantage over rival creatures — sweet melodies couldn’t put food on the stone slab or guarantee grandchildren — researchers have long wondered why humans developed the capacity to perform and enjoy it.

Though music may not have evolved for survival purposes, modern-day imaging techniques reveal that it can have the same effects on the brain as many survival-related activities. In 2001, neuro­scientists Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre of McGill University in Montreal asked people to listen to music deemed so moving by these participants that it “sent shivers down the spine.” Blood, now at Harvard, and Zatorre showed that music activates neural systems of reward and emotion similar to those stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs.

divorced before puberty

NYTimes | For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”

Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.

Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.

He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son.

Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.

“I want to talk to the judge,” the book quotes Nujood as forlornly telling a woman in the courthouse.

“Which judge are you looking for?”

“I just want to speak to a judge, that’s all.”

“But there are lots of judges in this courthouse.”

“Take me to a judge — it doesn’t matter which one!”

When she finally encountered a judge, Nujood declared firmly: “I want a divorce!”

Yemeni journalists turned Nujood into a cause célèbre, and she eventually won her divorce. The publicity inspired others, including an 8-year-old Saudi girl married to a man in his 50s, to seek annulments and divorces.

As a pioneer, Nujood came to the United States and was honored in 2008 as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Indeed, Nujood is probably the only third grader whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described as “one of the greatest women I have ever seen.”

Nujood’s memoir spent five weeks as the No. 1 best-seller in France. It is being published in 18 other languages, including her own native language of Arabic.

do intelligent people have novel values?

ScienceDaily | More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."

"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "evolutionarily familiar."

"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles." Fist tap Dale.

blackouts and byzantine delusions

ViewfromBrittany | Europe has another problem, which largely monoethnic America tends to overlook. It is not culturally homogeneous. America certainly has varied regional cultures and a number of dispersed minorities, but on the whole it has the same general culture from Boston to Los-Angeles. The territorial minorities are tiny and far between. The only sizable one is the Navajo nation, numbering 180.000 and while American routinely talk about secession and civil war, very few regional entities have enough legitimacy and political clout to actually secede. As for the secessionist organizations which surface sometimes in the news... let's say that my own organization is present in the regional government, and we are not particularly big by European standards.

Europe, on the other hand, is divided into some thirty nation states and a larger number of stateless nations, people and territorial communities, some of them quite large. As the amount of resource available to European societies decrease, this mix of deep-rooted internal divisions and of very advanced depletion may prove deadly. The existence of reasonably large sub-state territorial communities will provide future post-collapse polities with a stability those born from the beak-up of an homogeneous society will lack, but conflicts between a failing but still control-avid state and its territorial minorities can be incredibly destructive, especially if the border are not well defined or in areas of mixed identities or ethnicity.

In fact, if Europe has a counterpart in the late Roman Empire, it is poor, dependent and tribal Britain.

This fascination with an Europe which is quite likely to collapse quicker and deeper than America, tells in fact more about the delusions of some activists than about the supposed advantages of the European model. Those who feel that the current system doesn't give them what they deserve – and those are often the same as those who wishes it to collapse – often look away to some far away country – the farther the better, which, in their eyes, embodies all the virtues their homeland supposedly lacks.

as sewers fill, waste poisons waterways

NYTimes | It was drizzling lightly in late October when the midnight shift started at the Owls Head Water Pollution Control Plant, where much of Brooklyn’s sewage is treated.

A few miles away, people were walking home without umbrellas from late dinners. But at Owls Head, a swimming pool’s worth of sewage and wastewater was soon rushing in every second. Warning horns began to blare. A little after 1 a.m., with a harder rain falling, Owls Head reached its capacity and workers started shutting the intake gates.

That caused a rising tide throughout Brooklyn’s sewers, and untreated feces and industrial waste started spilling from emergency relief valves into the Upper New York Bay and Gowanus Canal.

“It happens anytime you get a hard rainfall,” said Bob Connaughton, one the plant’s engineers. “Sometimes all it takes is 20 minutes of rain, and you’ve got overflows across Brooklyn.”

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health.

But despite those upgrades, many sewer systems are still frequently overwhelmed, according to a New York Times analysis of environmental data. As a result, sewage is spilling into waterways.

In the last three years alone, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems — including those in major cities — have reported violating the law by dumping untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency.

But fewer than one in five sewage systems that broke the law were ever fined or otherwise sanctioned by state or federal regulators, the Times analysis shows.

the victory of the commons

Yesmagazine | The biggest roadblock standing in the way of many people’s recognition of the importance of the commons came tumbling down when Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Over many decades, Ostrom has documented how various communities manage common resources – grazing lands, forests, irrigation waters, fisheries— equitably and sustainably over the long term. The Nobel Committee’s recognition of her work effectively debunks popular theories about the Tragedy of the Commons, which hold that private property is the only effective method to prevent finite resources from being ruined or depleted.

Awarding the world’s most prestigious economics prize to a scholar who champions cooperative behavior greatly boosts the legitimacy of the commons as a framework for solving our social and environmental problems. Ostrom’s work also challenges the current economic orthodoxy that there are few, if any, alternatives to privatization and markets in generating wealth and human well being.

The Tragedy of the Commons refers to a scenario in which commonly held land is inevitably degraded because everyone in a community is allowed to graze livestock there. This parable was popularized by wildlife biologist Garrett Hardin in the late 1960s, and was embraced as a principle by the emerging environmental movement. But Ostrom’s research refutes this abstract concept with the real life experience from places like Nepal, Kenya and Guatemala.

“When local users of a forest have a long-term perspective, they are more likely to monitor each other’s use of the land, developing rules for behavior,” she cites as an example. “It is an area that standard market theory does not touch.”

Garrett Hardin himself later revised his own view, noting that what he described was actually the Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons. Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, also a Nobel winner, commented, “Conservatives used the Tragedy of the Commons to argue for property rights, and that efficiency was achieved as people were thrown off the commons…What Ostrom has demonstrated is the existence of social control mechanisms that regulate the use of the commons without having to resort to property rights.”

america's share of the climate crisis

Greenpeace | Some key findings of the “America’s Share of the Climate Crisis” report include:

* Historically, no nation has emitted more global warming pollution than the United States. From 1960-2005, the U.S. emitted 213,608 MtCO2, 26% of total global emissions. The next biggest polluter, China, emitted 88,643 MtCO2 over the same time frame, 10.7% of global emissions.

* The U.S. also exceeded almost every other nation in per capita emissions. Per capita, the U.S. emitted 720 tons of CO2 per person per year from 1960-2005. This is more than ten times China’s per capita emissions(68 tons of CO2) during the same period, and ninety times the per capita emissions of Kenya (7.7 tCO2). Even considered individually, the 50 U.S. states are among the nations that are the largest emitters of carbon dioxideon earth.

* Even considered individually, the 50 U.S. states are among the nation as that are the largest emitters of carbon dioxideon Earth.

* The average U.S. state emitted 4,449 MtCO2 from 1960-2005, which would rank 30th among the nations of the world. The combined historic emissions of just seven states-Texas, California, Illinois, New York, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio-totalled 96,517 MtCO2, more than any other country in the world, including China (92,950).

* If Texas were its own country, it would rank sixth out of 184 countries in the world in total emissions, trailing just China, Russia, Germnay, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

* The overwhelming majority of global warming pollution in the U.S. comes from burning fossil fuels for energy. In 2007, CO2 emissions from combustion of coal, oil and natural gas accounted for 80% of total U.S. global warming pollution, with total CO2 emissions accounting for over 85% of U.S. global warming pollution. Power plants are the nation’s largest source of carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption, contributing 42% of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and 34% of global warming emissions overall.

* The transportation sector is the next largest source of carbon dioxide, contributing 33% of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and 26% of global warming emissions overall. The remaining 25% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy sources comes from the direct consumption of fossil fuels in the commercial, industrial, and residential sectors.

authorities study differences in flu's severity

WaPo | Health authorities raced yesterday to unravel the many mysteries about the ominous new swine flu spreading around the world, including how widely the virus might cause the severe form of illness that so far has been restricted to the epicenter of the outbreak in Mexico.

As the number of confirmed infections in the United States jumped again and cases were confirmed for the first time in Britain, New Zealand and Israel, researchers searched for clues as to how readily the virus causes the pneumonia that has hospitalized and killed patients in Mexico. Only a handful of patients in the United States and elsewhere outside Mexico have been hospitalized, severe complications have been relatively rare, and no one has died.

"We still do not have a good explanation for why the pattern of cases in other countries appear relatively mild while the pattern of cases in Mexico appear to be much more severe," said Keiji Fukuda of the World Health Organization. "This will be the object of a great deal of research and attention, but at this time, we can't say why there appears to be a difference."

Experts said there are several possibilities: Victims in Mexico may be more vulnerable because of nutritional deficiencies, other infections or some other factor; medical care may be better in the United States and elsewhere; the virus could be weakening as it spreads; or too few cases may have occurred outside Mexico for severe illnesses to emerge.

"This is the mystery," said Arnold Monto, an influenza expert at the University of Michigan. "You could speculate about so many things. It's an incredibly important question."

a non-formal look at the non-formal economy

Real World Economics Review | Non-formal economic exchange is not a relic of the distant past nor is it a practice limited to the most underdeveloped and economically “backward” of modern times. It is ubiquitous, yet frequently overlooked; under various guises, non-formal economies exist today alongside and intermixed with formal markets, even in the most advanced capitalist countries. From the trading of snacks in an elementary school playground to the trafficking of people all around the world, the workings of non-formal economies are embedded in our daily lives, actively shaping everything from bank policies to foreign policies. The world we know floats atop a tumultuous ocean of non-formal economics. It’s about time economists—and the ordinary person on the street—take a look.

Every day, in the privacy of their homes people produce goods and services which are theoretically “non-economic”. Every year almost three trillion dollars is laundered worldwide––also “non-economic” (Lilley 2007, 32). The “non-economic” are consigned to the margins of analysis by the definitional poverty of mainstream economics; it is the “other” of economics, existing outside of the formal purview. Mainstream economic analysis shines its dissertational light on an exceedingly narrow and superficial field. But the distinctions erected by the mainstream discourse are purely conceptual and often don’t hold in reality; households depend on their informal activities such as non-wage labor to sustain their formal ones, and similarly, money launderers depend on formal banking institutions to transform their non-economic (i.e. illegal) activities into economic profits (Nordstrom 2007, 21). Non-formal economies do not operate independently of their formal counterparts, yet the idea of “co-existence” does not grasp the complex engagement and interplay between the two. The formal and non-formal face each other as dependants, each working with and through the other. In his analysis of modern black markets, R.T. Naylor finds that “what has emerged today is a set of interrelated, mutually supporting black markets (still usually thin and imperfect) within which there exists a mix of individual entrepreneurs along with ‘firms’ large and small, all engaged in essentially arms-length commercial exchanges. No longer isolated, these black markets are institutionally embedded in the legal economy” (Naylor 2005, 3). The mutually constituting realms of the formal and non-formal economies can no longer be clearly distinguished. Their boundaries overlap and obscure; economic reality is a messy one

Question of the Week - No. 1

Who do you know and what do you know (institutions, systems, companies, things) that will thrive during the pending period of national and global Greatest Economic Depression?

everything after that is really just conversation, but in the interest of engaging repartee,

please state who or what you know of that you believe will not only survive, but thrive during the pending Greatest Economic Depression?

Hat tip to Mahndisa for making me think about water efficiency, free markets, fremen warriors , and alternative currency systems.

Hat tip to Ed Dunn for writing at length about what's around that signpost up ahead, what you need to be thinking about and doing to get ready for it, and keeping it all extra trill, practical, and very humorous.

Explaining the Monoculture?

In which Jonathan Haidt examines what makes people vote Republican?

Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.

Drawball