Am I Talking Out of Both Sides of My Mouth?

Posted on April 16, 2013 by climatechangefork

Last week’s blog was dedicated to Jim Hansen’s retirement and the central role that he has played in the Climate Change debate. It immediately garnered several comments from readers, none of which had anything to do with the blog.

All three comments focused on my personal life, referring to a local issue in which my wife played a major role, while I played a relatively minor one. The impression I got from the comments was that the individuals were attempting to get to her through me. Since this is my blog, and I am also the moderator, I could have easily blocked these comments.

However, the comments raised a few issues that are relevant to the main focus of this blog, so I will try to address them here. Some of these issues are personal and some are more general.

Some history:

On June 2010, the City of New York decided to narrow a street (Prospect Park West, Brooklyn, NY) and construct a two-way protected bike lane, as shown below.

Prospect Park West Bikelane

The city’s argument for the change was safety: the claim was that the multi-lane street caused speeding, which in turn led to traffic accidents. The street borders a large urban park (Prospect Park) that is already popular with bikers, especially during weekends.

The trend of replacing car lanes with bike lanes is not confined to New York City — it is global, and, almost everywhere, it triggers conflicts between car owners, bikers and pedestrians on how to share the common real estate. Two local organizations were formed to try to oppose the city’s change: “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” and “Seniors for Safety.” My wife is the president of the first organization and I am a member of the second. My wife and I happen to live in an apartment on the street in question, and our apartment was used to host a few of the meetings.

A common complaint raised in almost every such conflict – this one in Brooklyn being no exception – is that of a NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) mentality. NIMBY, according to Wikipedia, is “a pejorative characterization of opposition by residents to a proposal for a new development because it is close to them, often with the connotation that such residents believe that the developments are needed in society, but should be further away.”

Reading through the recent comments on my blog, I found common theme was an accusation that I am talking out of both sides of my mouth – preaching for the need to take steps to minimize the impact of Climate Change, while at the same time, fighting to block them if such steps take place near where I live.

In 2010, I was teaching an honors course in my College that was related to Climate Change with an emphasis on students’ investigation of NIMBY phenomena in New York City. The product of the students’ investigation can be seen at http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/tomkiewiczs11/.

As part of this course, I wanted to discuss the bike lane and try to figure out if such struggles can be classified as NIMBY. I wanted to invite my wife and the head of the local biking organization that was supporting the change to talk to the class. I couldn’t do it because the issue was litigated but I tried to address the issue through data analysis that included publicly available data that were collected by the pro-bikers group. The main question that I wanted to address with the class was whether or not this was an environmental issue in the first place. The city never claimed that it was an environmental issue; they claimed that this was a safety issue. Safety issues need to be backed by data. According to the groups that oppose the move, the data were not there. An environmental assessment of the move was never performed. If use was supposed, as the comments claim, to lower carbon footprints – there were strong arguments that it might achieve the opposite.

In terms of carbon footprints, NYC is one of the most sustainable cities in the United States. A recent inventory of NYC greenhouse gases is shown below:

GHG Emissions for C40 Cities

About 75% of NYC’s total emissions come from buildings, with another 22% coming from transportation. Among NYC’s commuters, 55% use public transportation. In fact, 54% of households are without cars and 10% of residents walk to work. The relative contribution from bikes is rather small in this area. Also, most of the bikers that use this bike lane are recreational bikers – not commuters.

Surprisingly, slowing traffic speed to below the average of 30 mph (the speed limit in residential streets in NYC), actually increases gas consumption by about 30%.

Analysis of the environmental impact of such a change doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, thus making it difficult to characterize this issue as a NIMBY issue. As a safety issue, on the other hand, is a completely local issue that needs to be supported by data. The main argument in this debate is that the data do not support the claim. NIMBYism is a major obstacle for policy implementation of steps that are designed to mitigate impacts. I did discuss many aspects of this in previous blogs (June 18, July and August 27 – 2012), but this doesn’t mean that conflicts between local communities and government should be avoided. The constant scrutiny is beneficial and actions that impact communities need to be supported by data and the data should withstand scrutiny.

Now that I have addressed this issue, I hope that my little fight over a road near my apartment will disappear as a topic from this blog. It doesn’t belong here.

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Jim Hansen’s Tipping Point

Posted on April 9, 2013 by climatechangefork

Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference – Little Brown – 2000) defines a Tipping Point as, “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” Since Gladwell’s publication, the term has been “adopted” in various disciplines, some of which have applied more quantitative descriptions. The Tipping Point term plays an important role in Climate Change (see my June 25, 2012 blog), forming a set of markers to hopefully help us make changes, before we reach the point of no return that we are all trying to avoid. In a recent survey in Science magazine (Marten Scheffer et al. (11 co-authors) – Science – 19 October 2012, Vol 338, p. 344), Tipping Point was defined as a “Catastrophic Bifurcation,” a term which was taken from mathematical Chaos Theory, and has its own well developed definition. Bifurcation indicates a splitting into two branches; the “fork” in the title of both my book and this blog refers to the same phenomenon. Tipping Points are predictable, an aspect that attracts a great deal of interest for obvious reasons. The financial markets have seen intense activity in this area (see James Owen Weatherall’s The Physics of Wall Street, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), with attempts to predict upcoming financial bubbles. The main premise behind the ability to predict bifurcation is that one monitors the driving forces that tend to restore a system to its state of equilibrium. As the system approaches the tipping points, these restoring forces tend to decrease until they completely disappear.

Last week, Jim Hansen announced that he is retiring (he is 72) from NASA to continue pursuing political and legal efforts to limit greenhouse gases. His retirement has attracted widespread attention (Justin Gillis – New York Times – 4/02/2013). Hansen has been known for both his scientific work and his efforts to bring public attention to the inherent dangers of humanity’s current effects on changing the physical environment. He has focused primarily on climate change in both of these settings. Hansen has been the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) since 1981. In this capacity, he pioneered both the measurement of the Global Mean Temperature and the development of the General Circulation Model. These allowed for comparison between predictions and experiments, aiding in projecting the future under various scenarios. Hansen was shocked by what he saw, and gave his testimony before a congressional committee in 1988 to warn the rest of the world. That same year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by two United Nation organizations: the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nation Environmental Program (UNEP). The IPCC published its first official assessment report in 1990. It then convened at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June of 1992 to establish the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This served as the precedent for the beginning of the Kyoto Protocol, whose implementation and progress have now more or less stalled.

Throughout this time Hansen was wearing two hats simultaneously: that of the “objective” scientist, whose work was scrutinized and refereed by the scientific community, and that of a “Cassandra,” warning us of the consequences of our current actions. NASA administrators and many scientists criticized him for his dual role (see my May 7, 2012 blog). Some in NASA have argued that NASA should not involve itself in trying to predict the future, worrying that any mispredictions might lead to a loss of credibility for the agency. Opponents claim that his science is colored by a political agenda. He was, however, one of the first to fully realize that with upwards of 7 billion people, each striving for a better standard of life, the future of science and political activities cannot remain separate. We are now part of the physical system. We are part of science. I often use one of the most important principles in science, called Le-Chatelier’s Principle, that states:

 Any system in chemical equilibrium, as a result in the variation in one of the factors determining the equilibrium, undergoes a change such that, if this change had occurred by itself, it would have introduced a variation of the factor considered in the opposite direction.

The equilibrium between humans and the physical environment is now being disturbed, and one possible way the system could restore its own equilibrium would be to wipe us from the face of the Earth.

In this sense, “objective” scientists must become more like physicians. It is not enough to investigate the patient’s symptoms; we have to find out what went wrong and how to cure it. The “patient” in this case is the planet and Jim Hansen is trying with all his might to cure it. The political process is part of that cure. He is one of the earliest “scientist – healers,” and I wish him the best in all his endeavors.

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Guest Blog Post: Randee Zerner: Learning From Our Children through Learning with Our Children

Posted on April 1, 2013 by climatechangefork

In mid January, while attending the AAAS meeting, I got an email from a friend that her grandson (a 4th grader) “needed” to do some science research for school and that the research was competitive and he would like very much to win a prize. Could I help? My first thought was to try an environmental “Paper Clips” (June 11, 2012) in the form of an energy audit and calculation of a carbon footprint. I had no idea if this would work with a fourth grader, but decided to put forward the suggestion and see how it played out. Through interactions with the parents, grandparents and indirectly with the fourth grader, the project eventually took shape.

Here is the result, followed by a guest blog written by the kid’s mother:

4th Grade Science Fair Project: Electricity Audit

 Guest Blog Post: Randee Zerner:

My son, who is in the 4th grade, is required to participate in a science fair project. Last year, we did a composting project, were he received honorable mention. This year, his goal was to surpass that and win the chance to go to Brookhaven Labs. So naturally, we asked our friend Professor Tomkiewicz what environmental project he would suggest. The recommendation was an energy audit of our home, with ideas for ways to reduce our carbon footprint. We then asked another of my mother’s coworkers, and she suggested a study about snails. My son, being who he is, chose the more complex project.

For the next 6 weeks, the energy audit became the central activity of our home. We first had to list all of the light sources in all the rooms in the house and record the wattages for each bulb. In order to get a seven day average of our electricity usage, my son put a piece of paper on every light switch in the house. For seven days, every member of the family had to write down the time the light was turned on and off in every room. At first we had fun calling out to each other, “Did you write down the time?” As the days passed, at times, we either kept the lights on (A rare occurrence, since we are very conscious of turning off the lights when leaving a room), or did not turn them on at all. Which led to our going to the bathroom in the dark more often than not (for boys, not an easy task).  Over time, we learned that the natural light during the day was usually sufficient for most activities.

My son used a Kill-A-Watt meter provided by Professor Tomkiewicz. We connected this device to our refrigerator, garage refrigerator, deep chest freezer, microwave, toaster, computer, TV/cable box, apple device charger, and telephone. We were unable to do this with the dishwasher, oven, washer and dryer, so we took the information from those appliances and asked our energy guru to help figure the kWh of these appliances.

Then the real fun began, and we did all of the math problems and converted the watts into kW and then into kWh (After figuring out the average time the lights were on). After many emails back and forth with Professor Tomkiewicz to make sure our formulas were right, we then figured out the sum of the kWh for both lights and appliances. At this point, we were calling our guru to check our work (Wondering if maybe, at this point, he regretted helping out?). We then compared our final sum of kWh usage to our electrical bill. The emails were going back and forth at a rapid pace – we were trying to show all of our work and to double-check everything. We were so proud of everything… and then our guru dropped the bomb: “Where is the carbon footprint?” At which point, my son and I looked at each other and said, “How do we figure that out?” As usual, we were then given yet another formula (I’m so happy my son loves math). My son then typed up some suggestions for us to do as a family to decrease our energy use.

The board was finally put together and handed in; we celebrated by leaving on some lights for a little while, (Shh, don’t tell anyone). Tuesday night, we went to school to see the board presented along with 100 others.  Of course, we thought ours was the best, but we had to admit there were some other great projects. The teacher told my husband and me that she recommended our son’s project for honorable mention; been there, done that – hoping for more! We will find out tomorrow.

We would like to thank Professor Tomkiewicz for all of his time and patience, and most of all, for not screening his calls!!

Posted in Climate Change | 5 Comments

Educational Transition II

Posted on March 25, 2013 by climatechangefork

The previous two blogs (Feb 25 and March 4) discussed some of the issues in our K-12 education that have attracted my attention during the special session of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) meeting in Boston. My most recent blog (March 18) extended to colleges and universities, and was anchored on Tom Friedman’s Op-Ed (New York Times – March 6, 2013) reaction to a conference on online learning that he attended.

Here I will continue on my line of reasoning.

I am about to experience the excitement of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). The session that I will teach on the Vanderbilt Virtual School’s website has nothing to do with Climate Change or Physics, and is directed not at college students, but at K-12 students all across the United States. The topic is the Holocaust and I will join forces with Matt Rozell, the History teacher from Hudson Falls, who brought to light the liberation of the train that carried me (together with 2500 other inmates) from Bergen-Belsen to Theresienstadt concentration camps. His World War II Living History Project put me in touch with other survivors from the same train, as well as one of our liberators.

This will be my first experience with the impact of this technology. The virtual school that I will take part in does not compete with regular class activities. Each session is a unique event that students would not be able to experience without the technology. While Friedman was writing about a system in which, at best, schools would supplement technology, in this case, the session will instead serve as a supplement for schools. The Vanderbilt Virtual School serves as an additional instrument for learning, making direct use of existing dissemination technologies like TV and the internet in order to function.

There are already MOOC courses on sustainability, with sessions on Climate Change. For example, here is the Illinois course description:

The course is completely free, and delivered online. There will be a mixture of readings, short lectures, quizzes, collaborative projects and discussions. All participants who successfully complete the required activities (and tests!) will earn a completion badge.

As described, the course is not part of a degree program but an effort to educate willing members of the general public. Successful completion entitles the participants to a certificate of completion. There are online courses, all throughout the educational horizon, that are already part of the degree-granting curriculum. The discussions regarding these are in high gear in almost every academic institution. Pedagogic considerations are not the only issue. Budgetary considerations come into play as well, including online courses’ ability to accommodate larger student populations, saving a considerable percentage of the classroom space that is so tight in many educational institutions. Adding to the debate, are faculty fears that any objections they make to the new layout will be overridden by the State (A bill to this effect is already under consideration in California).

Let me now go back to Tom Friedman’s Op-Ed, where he shifts from his message to describe the man who drove him to the conference:

You may think this MOOCs revolution is hyped, but my driver in Boston disagrees. You see, I was picked up at Logan Airport by my old friend Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student “Justice” course at Harvard, which is launching March 12 as the first humanities offering on the M.I.T.- Harvard edX online learning platform. When he met me at the airport I saw he was wearing some very colorful sneakers.

“Where did you get those?” I asked. Well, Sandel explained, he had recently been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been translated into Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a popular figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a professional baseball game — and gave him the colored shoes to boot! Yes, a Harvard philosopher was asked to throw out the first pitch in Korea because so many fans enjoy the way he helps them think through big moral dilemmas. Sandel had just lectured in Seoul in an outdoor amphitheater to 14,000 people, with audience participation. His online Justice lectures, with Chinese subtitles, have already had more than 20 million views on Chinese Web sites, which prompted The China Daily to note that “Sandel has the kind of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and N.B.A. players.”

There is no question that Prof. Sandel is a successful and great teacher. The description of his activities covers two separate elements: his upcoming teaching of the joint 1000 – student “Justice” course as the first humanities offering on the MIT-Harvard edX online learning platform and his “pop-star” treatment in South Korea where, among other honors, he was asked to lecture in an amphitheater to 14,000 people and the presentation of his lectures on Chinese web sites with an estimated 20 million viewers.

The MIT-Harvard edX platform that was recently launched is based on existing, faculty approved courses in both universities. As such, they can count towards a degree, whether they are being delivered online or in person. The objective of the platform is to expand it to be used in other universities. It is at the discretion of the faculty in every university to use such a platform either directly, by making use of the same courses, or indirectly, by posting their own courses on the platform. In either case, the courses have to be approved by the faculty to count for credit. The universities have access to the identities of their students so they can follow their learning goals, assisting and modifying the various aspects in order to optimize learning. Faculty will have the option to either act as “teaching assistants,” as Friedman’s Op-Ed implies, or to use the platform to assist their own teaching.

Prof. Sandel’s experience in South Korea and China are a different issue. In those cases, nobody has control or knowledge of who the students are. If some testing is performed and a certificate is given, the identity (name) of the student will be known only by the computer. The lecture and the associated tests are uniform for every participant. Since there are no prerequisites, and no prior knowledge is required, Harvard, MIT or any other university cannot use these courses to accredit these students without losing their reputation and their ability to charge students $50,000 tuition. These students now become part of the “general public,” whom the MOOC courses aim to educate on issues of national concern. Hopefully, this will have a positive influence when these students are asked to contribute to the collective decision-making process through voting. Public education can and should be available as a life long activity. As such, the technology presents new and expanding opportunities to educate the general public, ultimately contributing to better collective (political) decisions, and benefiting us all.

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Educational Transition

Posted on March 18, 2013 by climatechangefork

In my previous two blogs (Feb. 25 and March 4), I discussed some of the issues in our K-12 education that attracted my attention during the AAAS special session meeting in Boston. My focus was on what seems to be a fossilized course subject structure through the grades, that doesn’t allow multidisciplinary topics that relate to our interaction with the physical environment to be addressed. Since most of us become eligible to vote upon finishing high school, it becomes incredibly important that we understand the issues that we are being asked to vote on.

In the US, enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased by 11% between 1990 and 2000. It then increased another 37%, from 15.3 to 21 million between 2000 and 2010. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of 18-24 olds in the country increased from 27.3 to 30.7 million, an increase of 12%. The percentage of students in this age bracket enrolled in college rose from 35% in 2000 to 41% in 2010.  Even accounting for the roughly 500,000 young adults that are enrolled in non-degree-granting institutions, for more than half of our 18-24 olds, K-12 classes constitute the final level of their education; one that needs to prepare our children to participate in our collective decision-making.

The recent technological revolution has attempted to contribute to the success of the educational process at all levels. Recently, News Corporation began vying for the public school market. They have announced (New York Times, March 8, 2013) the new Amplify Tablet for K-12 schoolchildren. In addition to tablets and curriculum, Amplify will store students’ data. The capability that most attracted my attention, was, as mentioned in the NY Times piece,

If a child’s attention wanders, a stern ‘eyes on teacher’ prompt pops up. A quiz uses emoticons of smiley and sad faces so teachers can instantly gauge which students understand the lesson and which need help.

Since my wife’s expertise used to be eye tracking in infants, this got my full attention. Teachers, with their crowded classrooms, cannot compete on that level.

The same New York Times issue also covered the other half of the 18-24 population: those that continue their educational experience beyond K-12, to attend college.

Thomas L. Friedman, in an Op-Ed article titled “The Professors’ Big Stage” (New York Times – March 6, 2013) reported on a conference that was organized by MIT and Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education.” Friedman posed the following question: “How can colleges charge $50,000 a year if my kid can learn it all free from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)?” For perspective, at my school (City University of New York (CUNY)), the tuition for New York State residents is $5,430 for a senior college and $3,900 for community college. For non-residents, the corresponding tuitions are $14,550 for the senior colleges and $7,800 for community colleges.

His key take-away message from the conference was:

Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. And therefore it will not pay for a C+ in chemistry, just because your state college considers that a passing grade and was willing to give you a diploma that says so. We’re moving to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you acquire the competency – in an online course, at a four-year-college or in a company-administered class – and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency.

How he thinks universities should adapt?

Therefore, we have to get beyond the current system of information and delivery — the professorial “sage on the stage” and students taking notes, followed by a superficial assessment, to one in which students are asked and empowered to master more basic material online at their own pace, and the classroom becomes a place where the application of that knowledge can be honed through lab experiments and discussions with the professor. There seemed to be a strong consensus that this “blended model” combining online lectures with a teacher-led classroom experience was the ideal. Last fall, San Jose State used the online lectures and interactive exercises of M.I.T.’s introductory online Circuits and Electronics course. Students would watch the M.I.T. lectures and do the exercises at home, and then come to class, where the first 15 minutes were reserved for questions and answers with the San Jose State professor, and the last 45 were devoted to problem solving and discussion. Preliminary numbers indicate that those passing the class went from nearly 60 percent to about 90 percent. And since this course was the first step to a degree in science and technology, it meant that one-third more students potentially moved on toward a degree and career in that field.

As it happens, the challenges online education presents to the traditional university structure are not restricted to schools with a $50,000 tuition. The primary driving forces are economical, not educational.

As Charles M. Blow observes in the New York Times Op-Ed (March 9, 2013):

As college tuitions rise and state and local funding for higher education falls — along with median household incomes — students are taking on staggering levels of debt. And many can’t find jobs that pay well enough to quickly pay off the debt.

The proposed adaptation mechanism is easily applied to many aspects of life and education. For instance, I am now taking part in my school’s effort to improve classroom instructions through Team Based Learning (TBL). This structure is completely disconnected from economic considerations, and is based instead on observations that students learn better from each other. The changes also emphasize collective problem solving. As with Friedman’s adaptation to MOOC, students read the assigned material on their own, then come to class to work in groups and do almost exactly what Friedman describes. In both cases, as in some other “revolutionary” approaches, the content, and its delivery methods, seem to be secondary, while everything shifts to the broaden students’ opportunities to engage with what they are learning.

In the next blogs I will try to focus how these transitions can be used to expand educational opportunities on all levels, to facilitate addressing complex, interdisciplinary, topics such as Climate Change.       

Posted in Climate Change | 4 Comments

Guest Blog Post: Christopher Bohl

Posted on March 11, 2013 by climatechangefork

Last week, I mentioned my class on Physics and Society, and the open blog where I have my students posting. This week, I thought I’d try something new, so I have invited one of my students, Mr. Christopher Bohl, to expand on his class blog entry here, as a guest blog post.

Christopher Bohl is a graduate student in adolescent science education at Brooklyn College. He grew up just north of New York City and received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2007 from Tufts University. Following his undergraduate studies, he spent several years as a professional poker player, but has recently rededicated himself to the pursuit of science knowledge and education, specializing in physics.

The entry follows:

In Professor Tomkiewicz’s February 11th blog, he spoke of modeling economic growth using the growth of sourdough bread and then using the expansion of foams to fill the holes.  This methodology is admittedly not something I’ve spent much time thinking of, but my recent research on income/wealth distribution has opened my eyes to this type of system modeling. Physicists have recently begun using systems of flow to describe how money moves amongst people. By thinking of wealth as a measure of people, we can think of monetary transactions as a type of flow through the system of humans, similar to how water flows through a river or electric current through lightning bolts.  This model draws on the so-called Constructal Law, which holds that:

“For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.” –Adrian Bejan

We see this law in action on a daily basis – in the way that trees spread nutrients between trunks and leaves, how lungs transmute and distribute gases from the trachea down to the alveoli, or how raindrops combine on our windshield to form tiny streams. In these systems, you may note, maximum efficiency is achieved (i.e. energy use is minimized) by having one or two large structures coupled with progressively smaller and increasingly numerous subsidiary elements. This is the applied structure of Constructal Law: a few large elements and many small ones. Look around you and you will begin to notice the pattern everywhere in nature – a few huge animals and millions of tiny ones, a few huge trees and lots of tiny plants. Indeed, humans have modeled our systems in the same way, from the way we distribute water to the way we organize our roads. It is worth taking a moment to ponder whether these human systems are any different from their natural counterparts and if they too, are evolving organically in time to improve flow.

The necessary consequence of applying Bejan’s model to wealth distribution, of course, is that there are a few very wealthy people and a great many poor.  At a time when wealth is more easily accessible than ever (ATM’s everywhere and an over-abundance of loans), it seems that flow is increasing and that the wealth disparity is thus being cemented. As a society, we are then left with the choice of either letting this “living” system of wealth naturally maximize flow or intervening (that is, deciding that there are more important aspects to our economy and society than simply having money move easily). We clearly have made efforts throughout history to more evenly distribute wealth in order to create social and political equality, but, as it’s been reported all over the media, this distribution has become increasingly imbalanced of late. When we allow markets to be deregulated, or “flatter” taxes to be implemented, we are removing our barriers to wealth flow and inviting a distribution that reduces equality of opportunity and, I believe, reduces our potential as a species.

Professor Tomkiewicz’s February 4th blog mentioned that the means to sustainability is to endeavor to create equality of opportunity, and I’m inclined to agree. The way to accomplish this is to not simply “redistribute” wealth then, but to fund social programs that enable people to access equal education. It’s interesting to consider this equalizing process through the lens of Constructal Law: perhaps what we need to work on is a way to maximize the flow of knowledge by removing the social constraints that make equal education impossible today. But if knowledge too can be thought of as a relatively finite system, then by Constructal Law, this means that knowledge thrives when we have a few geniuses and a great many idiots, which doesn’t seem ideal. So, I’m left wondering if this is really a “flow” that we should allow to move as freely as possible or if there is perhaps another way to model the system of opportunity that can help us learn to distribute it equally.

For more on Constructal Law now, check out: The Constructal Law of Evolution and Design in Nature, which I referenced in writing this post.

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Education and Authority: Where do We Learn to Think?

Posted on March 4, 2013 by climatechangefork

In the previous blog (February 25, 2013), I focused on K-12 school standards. I emphasized the difficulty in using such standards to ensure that graduates are able to understand and exercise their vote on issues that require collective action, such as energy use and climate change.

As it turns out, I am certainly not the only one concerned about this issue. This semester at Brooklyn College, I have started teaching a new course that focuses on Physics and Society. The students’ inquiries will be posted on an open blog, inviting comments both from other students and from the world at large. We will then discuss them in class. One of the students in the course, Ms. Jenna Peet, posted her first blog on education. The blog was triggered by a short article in a recent issue of Scientific American (the Forum section of the March 2013 issue) by Dennis M. Bartels, the Executive Director of the Exploratory Museum in San Francisco. I am a subscriber, and just received the issue, but I had so far missed this article, and I am thankful to Jenna for the referral. The title of the article is “What is the Question? Critical thinking is a teachable skill best taught outside the K-12 classroom.” The article starts with the following two sentences:

A democracy relies on an electorate of critical thinkers. Yet formal education, which is driven by test taking, is increasingly failing to require students to ask the kind of questions that lead to informed decisions

The rest of the article focuses on the premise that some skills are better suited to be taught outside the classroom. The concrete example discussed is a controlled attempt to answer the question “what type of ecosystem supports eagles.” The article makes the point that museums’ settings are more suitable for accomplishing such an objective.

As was discussed in the last blog, federal attempts to make a national standard are a work in progress. All states have standards at least in core subjects. I have chosen the Washington State report on science standards as an example. The standards are partitioned by grades, methods (systems, inquiry, applications, etc..) and disciplines (Physical Sciences, Earth and Space Science and Life Science).

 Mathematical standards are mentioned separately, with attempts to use them to support appropriate science standards in the higher grades.

A typical result for the Physical Science is shown in the table below:

K-12 Washington Physical Science Standards

The helical structure of Force and Motion through the grades is shown in the graph below. It is typical of most of the entries.

Force and Motion Helix Model - K-12 LearningBy the time that the student finishes high school, (s)he will be familiar with Newton’s laws, as well as likely being familiar with other laws and facts. However, as Dennis Bartels mentioned, it doesn’t look like (s)he will be learning to ask questions and search for the answers. When the student comes to Brooklyn College, regardless of whether (s)he majors in Physics (the next blog will focus on the General Education program in Brooklyn College) (s)he will study Newton’s Laws again. Unfortunately, I have no way of incorporating Climate Change, Genetic Engineering, healthcare issues and other politically important science-centered topics into such a curriculum.

By the age that students finish high school, regardless of how they choose to proceed in life, they will be called upon to vote on such issues and collectively determine our future. Dennis Bartels is right- an isolated classroom is not the place where students acquire the skills to ask the necessary questions and look for corresponding answers. Neither is the museum, although both can be partners in this important task. Science museum visitors are a “biased” audience (see the July 9, 2012 blog). The outside world can, however, be brought into the classroom to be fully analyzed.

In previous blogs (June 4 and June 11, 2012) I have referenced examples of teaching models such as the use of paperclips to teach young children about the Holocaust. I wrote that I was searching for the “equivalent” environmental paperclips to teach about issues such as Climate Change – I am still looking. A friend, a grandmother of a 4th grader, gave me a suggestion.  It involved her grandson, Chapin. Chapin’s teacher asked the class to come up with a 6-week-long research project. His parents, grandparents and I gave him some initial help in brainstorming, but he had veto power. His chosen project requires him (with some parental help) to map the use of all the light sources in his house, as well as measuring the energy use of all other electrical utilities, using a gadget such “Kill a Watt.” He must then compare his home’s use of electricity with the electricity bill, and suggest saving strategies. Parallel to that he is also reading an online summary of Climate Change that was written for 4th graders. From what I’ve heard so far, the family is having fun with this project. I will keep you posted as I learn more.

What I’m trying to establish here, is that we need a combination of sources for teaching. It is problematic that in the current system, students aren’t learning critical thinking in school. Teaching to the test does not encourage inquisitiveness, which is exactly what we need our future generations to have in plentiful supply, especially if we want new solutions to current and upcoming problems. Schools have their part to play in education (one whose standards will hopefully improve), but in order to maximize student potential and encourage understanding, we need to supplement that role with other sources. This includes institutions such as museums, but it also includes bringing learning home, making it a fun family activity.  After all, “It takes a village…”

Posted in Climate Change, Education | 3 Comments

School for Voting

Posted on February 25, 2013 by climatechangefork

A few days ago, I attended a special session of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) in Boston. The session was titled “International Teacher-Scientist Partnership Conference,” and emphasized collaboration. I attended the session in my role as Co-Director of my school’s GK-12, NSF funded, program. The program is focused on a combined effort between graduate students and a few of our local high schools. It is a very successful program that is about to end because of budget constraints. Both our participating graduate students and a few of the high school teachers that are working with us took part in the conference.

Suzanne Donovan, Executive Director of the Strategic Education Research Partnership Institute and Heidi Schweingruber, Deputy Director at the National Research Council, delivered the first plenary presentations at this meeting. Their talks focused on the role of partnership in education, with an emphasis on K-12 education standards.

Every state now has its own school standards, at least in core subjects. The continuous debate is about the desirability of federal standards. The talks discussed federal standards in science and math. The main argument supporting the need for national standards rests on the discrepancy between state standards and our lag in international competitiveness.

I was listening politely, waiting to hear if part of the discussion would center on participation in important policy decisions that require an understanding of science. It did not. The main issue that I was concerned about was Climate Change, but the need for understanding applies to many more issues, including general environmental policy, health care, and genetic engineering. All of these are affected by political decisions regarding both the allocation of resources and regulation of activities. In order to make informed decisions to ensure a better future, the policymakers must first have an in-depth understanding of the subjects.

I grew up in Israel, where, after high school, at age 18, almost everybody is drafted into the army. At the same age, we are also entitled to vote.

The two figures below compare the global voting age distribution with the global distribution of military conscription.

 Map of Voting Age by Country

 

Map of Military Conscription Policy by Country

In the US, the compulsory draft ended in 1973, but males between 18 and 25 are still required to register to the Selective Service System in case a reintroduction of conscription becomes necessary.

When a youngster enters military service, he or she goes through basic training that can be very demanding. If he or she desires or is assigned to a leadership position or a specialized role, he or she must first undergo further training before being allowed to take part in any combat activity.

The age threshold for voting in most countries is 18. The preparation, in the optimum case is high school. I am absolutely not trying to advocate a reintroduction of literacy tests for voting. I do, however, think that we should use every opportunity available to educate our children on the nature of the choices on which they are being asked to vote.

Since I didn’t hear any mention in the talks about including voters’ education as part of the standards, I asked the speakers to comment on this with an emphasis on Climate Change.

The answer that I got was that the speakers are aware of the issue but in their opinion, to address it properly, we need to revisit our entire educational system and make broad changes – changes for which we are not yet prepared.

Next week I will try to make the case that in many instances, we are not only not addressing ignorance at the voting booths but we are also fossilizing disciplinary boundaries that make it very difficult to acquire the necessary education on our own.

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Conflicts and Navigation

Posted on February 18, 2013 by climatechangefork

The perspective of sustainability that I have advocated in the last three blogs was aimed toward the horizon and focused on maintaining equilibrium with the physical environment. I proposed reaching this equilibrium through a combination of recycling our resources, a shift to sustainable energy sources, and internal growth to globally equalize individual opportunities for a better future. Quoting President Obama, the horizon was defined not in terms of fixed time span but as an aspiration to be balanced by present needs. The need to satisfy present needs while at the same time trying to ensure the needs of future generations will be met, often constitutes conflicts that require great societal skills.

Such conflicts are not new. Many economists tend to discount the future (John Maynard Keynes – “In the future we are all dead…” February 4 blog) yet most environmental regulation requires an aspect of economic impact analysis. On a related note, one of the main topics occupying decision makers today is how to rein in the federal deficit without slowing growth. If we truly discount the future, however, both of these become unnecessary exercises – after all, in such a case all environmental regulations are unnecessary, not to mention – why worry about the deficit? When most of us invest, whether in the stock market, real estate or in any other form, our main objective is to secure a future return on our investment, while at the same time minimizing the risk that should things turn sour, we will find ourselves without our much-needed resources. Here, it is the same principle, only with much larger stakes.

On January 16 – 2013, the New York Times conducted an online debate on its forum “Room for Debate.” The subject of the debate was “When Growth is not a Good Goal.” Four opinions were presented with short descriptions given below:

What was completely missing in the debate was the notion of reaching and maintaining all four objectives simultaneously.

I have discussed the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) phenomenon in previous blogs (June 18, July 2, August 27, December 3) – it’s one of the main obstacles that we encounter in trying to put any framework for a sustainable future into practice. It revolves around the conflict between perceived adverse impacts on the individual or a community versus the agreed upon benefit to the larger community. This affects international agreements – if the impact is global, why should we mitigate while others are doing nothing? Or, to once again quote Governor Romney’s excuse for advocating inaction, (December 24 blog) “Climate Change is called Global Warming not American Warming.” In other words, it embodies the oft-used sentence, “why me?” To resolve the NIMBY phenomenon in this instance, we need to be able to navigate seemingly conflicting interests and gain the ability to look at the horizon, as difficult as we may find this task.

I have been trying to address some of these conflicts through games. Recently, I have been collaborating with Prof. Lori Scarlatos from Stony Brook University to develop games that are designed to compare the real world with a simulated world whose conditions change based on the players’ decisions. The players must balance immediate local interests with long-term societal interests. They then have the ability to “check” how they are doing against real data. We have named such efforts “Reality Based STEM Instructions with Participatory Learning Systems.” Not surprisingly, our first example focuses on energy choices and is titled “Intelligent Energy Choices” (IEC) (See for example, Micha Tomkiewicz and Lori Scarlatos, “Bottom-up Mitigation of Global Climate Change”; The International Journal of Climate Change: Impact and Responses; Volume 4, pages 37 – 48, 2013). The game is designed to engage the general public (and possibly educators at high school and college levels) with an interactive, interesting, tool that allows users to “control” their countries and by doing so, control the fate of the world. The conclusion from playing and observing IEC is that Millennium Development Goals can be satisfied while both the countries that they rule and the world at large prosper. IEC is an agent-based simulation/game in which the world’s twenty-five most populous countries are represented either by autonomous agents (simulation) or players. IEC is focused on energy use and climate change and their global and national impact on climate and prosperity. The algorithm corresponds to a choice between purchasing the lowest cost energy sources or a Cap and Trade mechanism in which global emissions are regulated to constantly decline and the price of a “unit” of carbon dioxide is collectively adjustable. The reference year is taken as 2003 so data are available for comparing the bottom-up results of the world controlled by the players and the top-down recent data.

The players face a conflict between generating sufficient wealth in the country they control, while at the same time ensuring the world’s long-term survival. Players are graded on both ends. We know how to evaluate the game in instructional settings. The usual tool to gauge its effectiveness with the general public is to measure its popularity, however this is often a misleading criterion for an educational tool. Popular does not always relate to effectiveness or instructional value. The effectiveness as an educational tool for the general public should be tested in the ballot box. This issue is starting to receive some attention and will be discussed in the next blog.

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Economic Growth and Problems With My Sourdough Bread.

Posted on February 11, 2013 by climatechangefork

One of the three conditions that I have previously (blogs January 28 and February 4) identified as necessary for sustainable society is that we must maintain equilibrium with the physical environment.

Merriam Webster dictionary defines equilibrium in the following way:

equilibrium – a state of balance between opposing forces or actions that is either static (as in a body acted on by forces whose resultant is zero) or dynamic (as in a reversible chemical reaction when the rates of reaction in both directions are equal)

A related term, “steady state,” is defined as:

steady state: a state or condition of a system or process (as one of the energy states of an atom) that does not change in time; broadly : a condition that changes only negligibly over a specified time

The definition of equilibrium emphasizes the opposing forces, while the definition of steady state emphasizes the lack of change with time. These exemplify a cause and effect which in economic terms we might almost characterize as advocating stagnation.

Almost everybody hates stagnation, but this is especially true of Americans. Stagnation is for losers. The word “growth” is a battle cry in the mouth of every politician, irrespective of political affiliation. Investments in innovation, technology and education are justified with the arguments that these are proven vehicles for growth.

In previous blogs (October 22 and 29) I have advocated that the perception of an inevitable limit to growth because of limits in our capacity to innovate is hubris. Here, I am not contradicting myself. There is a limit to unbounded exponential growth when we use the physical environment for both input and output (source of material and garbage bin). With seven billion human inhabitants, we have reached that limit.

My third requirement for sustainable living was the need to maximize individual opportunities on a global scale. In my opinion, this is where the desired growth should take place. One of the main arguments for the United States’ decision not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol was that it excludes developing countries from the commitment to reduce greenhouse gases. During the recent election campaign, Governor Romney justified many of his policy statements on Climate Change with the position (December 24 blog) that as long as a large fraction of the global population is exempted from taking steps to reduce environmental impacts of their economic growth, the United States should stay an observer. This position is gaining strength now since China overtook the United States as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, yet the average Chinese person emits only a small fraction of what the corresponding average American emits (December 3 blog).

An average American earns close to 50 times more than an average Indian, and close to ten times more than an average global citizen. Global zero growth policy would freeze this disparity.

Global zero growth is not an option. Neither is a “back to the cave” policy, given a population of 7 billion people that will grow to 9 – 16 billion by the end of the century.

We need a new growth mechanism that will be consistent with the requirement for equilibrium with the physical environment.

The idea came to me from a different area of my interest – bread. I love good fresh bread, and sourdough is my favorite. I usually buy my bread at a corner store in my neighborhood that gets its bread from the best bakeries in Brooklyn. Over the last few weeks, however, I have encountered serious problems with my sourdough bread. The taste is great, as usual, but the bread came out with huge holes that were annoying and made it very unwieldy to spread my favorite jam– disaster :-(.

My brain made some connections, and it came to me – the growth mechanism that we need is an internal growth in which dense parts of the dough fill up empty parts – brilliant :-). Well – I don’t know much about baking sourdough bread, so I asked a friend who is my baking guru (she is a professor of history, not a professional baker). She thought that I would be doing the baking, so she gave me few hints, while admitting that she is not an expert on sourdough. With a few more inquiries, I ended up with a list of steps to try that quickly convinced me that baking sourdough is more of an art than a science.

Then I thought that a better example might be foam – an area of bubbles surrounded by plastic (in the case of Styrofoam, that polymer is polystyrene). Styrofoam growth is a topic that scientists are interested in. For example, Moris Amon and Costel D. Denson try to determine the growth mechanism of foams in their work, “A study of the dynamics of foam growth: Analysis of the growth of closely spaced spherical bubbles” (Polymer Engineering and Science, 24, 1026-1034 (1984)).

To my mind, a factor of 50 in income disparity per person can be called an “empty” bubble. The growth needed to fill up the bubbles and maximize career opportunities cannot be translated into redistribution of wealth from givers to takers. The material that comes out of such a process is different – in fact, for many applications it is better. We must strive to maximize opportunities, not outcome. We can maximize opportunities through universal services such as health care, education, law enforcement and “peace on Earth.”  Accomplishments empower individuals, democratize decision-making and maximize individual contributions to great ideas that benefit us all. I am not qualified to suggest how to accomplish such an internal growth to the benefit of everybody – we need to use our collective wisdom to figure this one out.

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