The Bottleneck Retirement Plan

I do not have a voluntary retirement plan or a pension. I have the means to put money away specifically for retirement, but I choose not to. Instead, I use an investment strategy that has been described as "the most and least insane thing I've ever heard". Here is that strategy:

 

Offsetting the carbon emissions of the blog, and then some.

Worrying about climate change is wearing down my sanity, and I'm know I'm not alone. I wanted to find a way let others reduce the amount of CO2 and methane in the air that didn't cost them money. One way is to buy carbon offsets with money from advertisements, like the ones that roughly 10% of you see at the top and side of this blog.

Is that futile?

How much carbon emissions are produced by a visit to a website like this? How does that compare to the cost of offsets? This is going to be a rabbit-hole of citations and unit conversion, so buckle in.

Creating Homework Material for Statistical Writing Classes and Workshops.

This summer, I'll be offering a workshop on statistical writing to the graduate students in the SFU Stats department. In the year that follows, I hope to teach SFU's Stat 300 course, an undergraduate writing course that is mandatory for all statistics majors. I want this course to be offered at more universities, but since the typical undergrad degree in stats is already overloaded, this would need some additional motivation, so here's my anecdotal hook:

When graduate schools ask for a letter about your motivations for applying, or about your general background, there's a few things that are being examined. First, different graduate supervisors have different specialties, and they may be looking at your letter for signs of a good match. Second, the letter is a means of seeing firsthand your personal ability to communicate in English. They ask for something personal rather than a set topic to discourage plagiarism. They are not interested in your level of motivation; everyone says they are highly motivated.

I've recently been writing reference letters and filling out graduate school reference forms for students that have been in my previous 300-level classes. All of these schools are asking about the ability to write. Many statistics undergrads are applying to fields outside of pure statistics, for example economics, medical science, and business. All of them are asking their references about skills in English, often spoken English and always written. Likewise, the Statistical Society of Canada asks referees about spoken English as a part of their A.Stat accreditation.

In order to develop these skills in a program that usually focuses on mathematical theory and programming ability, I've sketched out some projects and exercises that could fit into a workshop or course.

The instructor (me) would ask colleagues from other fields that use quantitative data, such as sociology, anthropology, biology, business, ecological restoration, and history for reports from previous or current projects.

The students would read the reports and identify what the sampling method was, what analysis was done, and to check the assumptions on those methods to the data. They would interpret the results in their own words (not in the words of the discussion or conclusion section), and compose a couple of questions about the research that weren't answered. These questions don't have to pertain to the domain; they should pertain to the methodology. These would be questions like: were there any outliers that affected your results? Did you consider multiple testing? Did you consider regression/anova?

For example, for this research report, Water Quality of Stoney Creek and its Effects on Salmon Spawning, by SFU undergrads by Oak, Tony; Thai, Michelle; Orgil, Indra; Ngo, Kevin; Lu, Jerry , available at http://summit.sfu.ca/item/12770

A writing assignment could be:

• What were the parameters to be estimated?
• What biologically important thresholds or critical values are mentioned for the parameters being estimated?
• What sampling method was used? How many sampling units are there?
• Were there any null hypotheses being tested? If so, were they rejected? Should they have been?
• Describe the qualitative differences between the four sites. Use the map and Figs 4,5,6, and 7.
• In your own words, summarize the quantitative data described in Figures 2 and 3.
• Compose two suggestions or questions about the analysis that may not have been considered.
• Describe one way you could build upon (e.g. expand, follow up) this study, the type of information you would collect from this new work, and what additional conclusions you could make if the data matched your expectations.

(Note: Please don't take these questions as a criticism of this research report. It was selected to show how material is available within one's on campus. Even a quick skim of the report will show it's truly excellent work for undergrads.)

Another exercise I'm thinking of doing is to have students copy edit some scientific writing. This could be a publication or a blog post. I would do this twice; once with a well written work, and once in something of questionable quality like the unedited papers that come out of discount publishers. If I used something from ArXiv, with the authors' permission, I could use later, more complete versions of the same work as a 'key'. However using ArXiv is untenable for graded work because the 'key' is publicly available.


Also, there are the reading comprehension exercises.The ones I had posted earlier (here and here) were meant to be done in less than 2 hours, and had questions focused on specific statistical topics. Another possibility is to write more such assignments that require less statistical expertise, but more in-depth composition.

2016 did not suck.

The idea 2016 sucked is an indication of the triumph of media over statistics.

In the United States, which I use because their data is very open and thorough, national unemployment is less than 5% and has been steadily dropping. Of those unemployed, most of them are either between jobs by choice, or have not yet ever had major employment. We know this because the proportion of the workforce on unemployment assistance is below 1.20%, the lowest rate in more than 40 years.
 
Also in the US there was also a record low number (not proportion, raw number) of teenage pregnancies. That means both fewer abortions AND fewer unwanted births. So if you're pro-choice or pro-life, your side is winning.

Globally, the birth rate is falling faster than previously forecast, largely because of faster-than-forecast improvements to the quality of life in India. Last month, the Indian government target for solar power capacity was raised dramatically foe the 3rd time in 6 years because the bringing clean energy to people keeps getting easier and cheaper at a rate faster than anyone could reasonably expect.

Compared to 2015, worldwide sales of electric cars has increased 55%, worldwide use of coal has decreased. Anthropogenic (Man-made) carbon emissions were the same as 2015, despite the world economy growing.  This is an indication that we could get climate change under control.

A lot of the problems of the last couple of years were either mitigated well in 2016, or outright handled.

Remember Ebola? The outbreak is officially over, and was close to over for most of 2016. There is a vaccine that's currently in use, and if something goes wrong, we have another vaccine candidate in Phase III (late human-equivalent testing) trials to take its place. This was the ultimate Ebola outbreak - not just the biggest but the last we will ever see.

Remember the Fukushima disaster? Radioactivity in most (not within a km of the damaged reactor) of the region has dropped to levels fit for permanent human habitation. After the disaster, Japan shut down all their nuclear power plants for years for safety upgrades, and 2016 saw the last of them come back online. What happened with the Fukushima reactor was extraordinary, and problem of that magnitude is impossible for CANDU modern reactors.

Remember Zika? The outbreak has been contained. There are scattered reports of new cases, but it's not showing up all over the world as was predicted after the Rio Olympics. On that note, the Rio Olympics seemed unremarkable as far as mishaps and problems are concerned. I saw Rio de Janerio in October. It looked like it has survived well enough.

Remember that war that started in 2016? Me neither. A cursory search finds no armed conflict between two or more different countries that started this year.

You can remember 2016 as the year we lost Alan Rickman, but 40 million people will remember it as the year they got access to clean water. 

Biochar farming idea

Here's an idea I hope gets stolen if it's good, and shot down early if it's bad. Also, I claim no expertise in biology, apiary science, or soil ecology, so this could be drastically off the mark.



1. Pyrolyze massive amounts of organic waste to make biochar.
2. Use the biochar to make a soil that mimics land after a forest fire.
3. Grow high-value crops that grow best after a forest fire.
4. Incorporate secondary processes like beehives.

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First, pyrolysis is a technique for burning lingen-rich plant matter (i.e. wood, bamboo, corn stalks) in a low oxygen environment. Pyrolysis can produce a stable, porous form of charcoal called biochar. Biochar is commonly applied to soil to improve its capacity to store water and nutrients. Soil with large amounts of biochar can approximate a very high quality topsoil call terra preta.

Also, the process of creating biochar is carbon-negative. The carbon in the biochar is effectively locked out of the atmosphere more permanently than it would be if the biological matter is left to rot. It certainly keeps carbon out of the atmosphere more effectively than simple burning.

What happens, however, when the soil is mostly biochar, with just enough other parts (or a layer on top) to keep it from blowing away? I suspect that you would have a soil similar to what would be found on the ground after a forest fire.

Pioneer species are the first organisms to thrive after a forest fire. These include valuable plants like morel mushrooms, and, particularly, fireweed. Specifically, I've heard that honey derived from fireweed is valuable. However, the cultivation of fireweed honey is difficult because it has to be done in areas of recent forest fires, and therefore can't be done in the same place for very long.

My idea is to make soil that mimics the ground after a recent fire, and maintain that state with frequent renewal of  biochar. Then, I want to use that soil to cultivate pioneer species.

With enough biochar, my hope is to have some farmland that can grow fireweed every year, and have permanently installed beehives amongst the fireweed. Rather than move the hives to where the land is suitable, I will work to maintain the land in a suitable state. With luck, the practice will pay for itself in harvests of fireweed honey, morels, and excess biochar.

If this works, then it can become a business that is both long-term profitable and carbon negative. There is an established demand for morels, and with more consumer awareness there could be a large demand for fireweed honey, so there is room for lots of people to try this.

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One potential issue is that bees prefer some flowers to others, and growing fireweed near the beehives doesn't guarantee that those are the flowers that will be used. Having a honey with a precursor that was part fireweed and part wildflowers may be acceptable, but it even guaranteeing that would mean influence an area much larger than the farmland.

Another issue is a sustainable supply of lingen-rich organic matter. Piles of slash and scrap wood are unreliable, one-time sources. Corn husks work nicely, but aren't available everywhere. Low-grade wood chips, called hog, would also work, but those are already used by pulp mills for energy. The city of Vancouver is already collecting organic waste for industrial composting, so it may be possible to tap into that pipeline. It will take some research to find how to use whatever is regularly available from local food processing and agriculture.


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ADDENDUM: user Osageandrot on Reddit, who does research on biochar for soil restoration, was kind enough to critique this idea and give some input. It was enough to show that this idea needs a major rework before anything more goes forward with this

First, any fresh biochar would need to be pre-aged by mixing with existing soil. This is because Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) are in too high of a concentration originally, and these will suppress microbal life.

Second, fresh application of biochar may not be necessary anyways. Most pioneer species are simply fast growers that need anything else that grows slower, but to a higher maximum, to be gone. Forest fires are not a necessary ingredient for a lot of these, but they just happen to provide the necessary conditions; clearcutting would do the same thing.

The end of jobs

A friend recently asked me if I foresee any chance of "jobs", or in his words "the economic trade of labour in return for payment" becoming so unsustainable that we as society would abandon it. My response is below.

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No.

The term "chance" implies that I'm not certain about the unsustainability.

There will NEVER be enough meaningful jobs for everyone. Unemployment is only in a 'healthy' range around 6-7% right now because of a system stretched to its utter limit to create jobs, often at the cost of getting meaningful work done.

First, self employment is counted as jobs in this statistic, as is part time work. So the proportion of people that trade their labour for payment likely a lot smaller than official surface figures.

There are also a large portion of jobs that simply shouldn't be.

- Literally pointless jobs like full-service gas pumps. Really gas stations could be fully automated and could behave like large vending machines.

- Parasitic jobs such as car salespeople, day traders and arbitrageurs. I separate these from pointless jobs because they do perform a service, but only because of legacy systems that mandate that these services are necessary.

- Fields where the output of the field is only loosely related to the number of people working in the field, such as marketing. From the perspective of companies, if half of all ads disappears, the only real effect would be for each remaining ad to be twice as effective. Likewise, the benefit to the consumer, knowledge of a product, would be just as large with perhaps only 10% of ads retained. In that sense, 90% of the work in advertising, from ad creation to posting billboards, is parasitic.

Then there are the jobs that won't be for much longer.

- Physical jobs that are due for automation, such as semi-truck driving.

- Small manufacturing jobs that can be simply replaced by on-demand 3D printing.

- Technical jobs that routinely get automated, like how much search engines have supplanted librarians.

- Many service jobs are a fixed portion of the population, such as teaching, haircutting, and child care. However, the population of countries in the developed world are either flat, declining, or dependant upon immigration to maintain the population increase that modern economics relies upon so dearly.

- Many resource-based jobs are at risk to better energy efficiency, better labour efficiency, and automated landfill harvesting and reclaimation. Even argiculture is being turned upside down by cultured meat. With it, there goes shipping.

Finally, the work that NEEDS to be done such as environmental restoration, medical services, and the development of space technology, simply doesn't work well under an exchange-for-payment system because economically 'rational' people and corporations either won't or can't pay for it.

I would refer you to the 20 minute video "Humans Need Not Apply" for a compelling argument about how this is inevitable. My best resources for universal basic income and on post-scarcity are the novels Accelerando and Red Mars touch on these topics.

Abstract Thoughts About Concrete

The production of cement is a major source of anthropogenic (i.e. human-made) carbon dioxide. In fact, its impact is comparable to that of using fossil fuels to transport goods and heat buildings.

It uses limestone, which contains carbon dioxide that has been locked away for a geologic time, and a portion of this is released in the process of cooking it into a material called clinker. Eventually, the cement will re-absorb some, but not all of the CO2 released this way. Cooking the limestone to 1500 C takes a lot of energy too, and in an intensity that makes it difficult to produce cleanly. There's also the costs and impact of the limestone quarrying and transportation to consider.


Another problem is disposal: Construction waste makes up a large part of what goes into landfills, and cement products like concrete and mortar potentially make up a large part of that. This is from buildings being demolished or renovated, from road construction, and from the occasional truckload of concrete that is mixed but can't be poured at the right time.

So I wonder, in my limited understanding, if it's possible to take cement products and reclaim some of the cement. Currently, concrete is recycled to reduce its landfill impact and the need to mine gravel and other fill. However, that seems to be all it's used for - simple rocks rather than the magic gluestone stuff that holds skyscrapers up.

Curing is a one-way chemical process (I think), and that there's a lot of fill that's added to cement to make concrete, so maybe it's just too hard to be profitable. Fresh cement powder is so fine that it would be a stretch to call it dust, so a tremendous amount of mechanical grinding would be necessary to get concrete down to a point where the fill could be removed from what was cement powder before curing.

Has anyone given serious thought to a chemical or biological means of doing this however? If lichen can break down solid rock, could concrete gravel be broken down or separated into something finer with a plant, enzyme, or type of bacterium? Can the curing process be undone by similar means that leaves behind clinker as a waste product?

Similarly, could wet concrete mix be saved for another time in the cases where it spoils from water contamination or when it can't be poured when intended? Could aging or damaged infrastructure be reinforced or renewed by drilling into it and injecting something to force it to re-cure?

Just some thoughts from someone ignorant on the limitations of infrastructure.  Comments, corrections and discussion about this would be very welcome.

Here's a general statement to close -- climate change won't simply be fixed by driving hybrids and using recycle bins. It's a complex problem and solving it will be the great work of this and the next generation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_recycling