Saturday, April 26, 2008

Barrelin' down the Boulevard...

I can't wait for the next time that I fill up my gas tank. Sean (my son) has motivated me to do some hypermiling, and I am eager to see the results. It all started when he sent me an email after my post about cars and my complaint that Honda seemed to be regressing in their fuel efficiency designs. Sean came to Honda's defense, "I was just scanning through your blog...You need to consider that an '08 Fit has all kinds of extra safety features like air bags, ABS brakes, power steering etc. that add weight to the vehicle. It probably also has A/C, power windows and locks, and more than an AM radio with two speakers. It might even have a digital clock which is well known to be an energy hog. Anyway, today's lower fuel economy ratings are not as bad as they seem. If Honda was to build the '85 Civic today it would get a horrible safety rating and no one would buy it. As it is, they make cars that are much safer and more comfortable without sacrificing much fuel economy."

Good points, all (nice to see Sean putting that engineering education to good use). I would still trade the power windows and the digital clock (why does that use so much energy?) for a Fit that got 10 more MPG, but I admit I'm not your typical car buyer. Sean went on to tell me about hypermiling, which is a combination of car modifications and driving techniques which enable one to get much better gas mileage than the certified MPG posted on the sticker. I visited a couple of hypermiling web sites, which are run by gas-sipping fanatics, to learn how I can "hypermile". They make some fairly ridiculous suggestions, such as to follow 1-2 car lengths behind a tractor-trailer, to benefit from the draft effect. Picturing this reminded me of that old joke, "Why do bulldogs have flat noses?" for which the answer is "From chasing parked cars.". I think I'd like a lot more than 1-2 car lengths between me and a speeding 18 wheeler. There are also suggestions to park in the highest spot in the parking lot, so as to be able to get off to a rolling start (which led me to imagine parking lots designed by M.C. Escher, which always lead down hill no matter where you park), and a suggestion to jettison all unnecessary weight (alas, no more driving around with a bull moose strapped to the hood), as more poundage means less mpg.

I took three tips to heart, and have implemented them this week. These are:
* coasting whenever possible,
* avoiding jack-rabbit starts & stops, and
* inflating tires well above the standard 32 PSI.

Coasting (taking my car out of gear and taking my foot off the gas) is a piece of cake for me, since I drive over Temple Mountain twice a day. The mountain provides me with two lengthy down-hill slopes to support my free-wheeling. If I ignore the speed limit I can coast a good 6-7 miles (fully one-third of my trip) on the way to work and 3-4 miles on the return home (
because the east side of Temple is a bit less steeply inclined). The speed limit is a problem. If I hit the brakes to keep my speed close to the posted 50 MPH on the steeper stretches, then I lose too much momentum to make it over the one or two little rises that break the otherwise continuous 7 mile downhill run from Temple to Wilton. I'm thinking of suggesting that speed limit laws be modified for hypermilers, as it seems to me that conserving kinetic energy is more valuable than safety.

I'm having a harder time with not being a jack-rabbit. I can still hear my mother repeating (endlessly, it seemed, when I was young) "patience is a virtue". She did her best in a futile attempt to help me become more zen-like. I remain decidedly un-zen, especially when in my car. I view driving as a competitive event, the goal of which is to get somewhere faster than the other people with whom I am forced to share the road. I "game" stop-lights when there are two lanes, trying to guess which lane will move more quickly when the light turns green (a general rule of thumb is to pick the shorter line, unless there is a big truck in it). I hate passing someone slow and then ending up in the wrong lane and watching them pass me again. It's like I've gone backwards. In any case, I'm working on driving like the Dalai Lama (does he drive, or teleport?). It is not easy.

Lastly, I've inflated my tires, up to 40 PSI (the owner's manual suggests 30-32 PSI, for a soft, comfortable ride). From what I read on the hypermiling sites 40 PSI is a good place to start. T
he hypermiling web sites caution readers that higher tire pressures may result in a stiffer ride, but I didn't notice any difference. I am going to check the tire manufacturer's recommendations and maybe go up to 45 PSI, or even higher.

So here I am, impatient (I hear you, mom) to go to the gas station and fill 'er up. My tank holds a little more than 11 gallons, and I was getting 38-40 MPG before I tried a little hypermiling. The hypermiler web sites talk of gains of 10% to 50% (the higher numbers come from those tail-gating drivers with the flat noses). Right now the tank is about half -full (not half-empty) and I've gone 280 miles. I may not be able to wait until it's empty. Come to think of it, driving with a half-full gas tank all the time, because of its lower weight, might be another technique to achieve higher MPG. Or I could buy bigger tires for the rear wheels, so that I'd be going downhill all the time:) What other things should I try?

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Bitter Suite

There's been a lot of attention paid recently to the mood of blue collar Americans (aka Reagan Democrats) in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania. The presidential candidates are full of praise for the noble American worker, promising them that they'll stem the "theft of American jobs by those damn furriners". The political conversation about global trade and jobs tends to go no deeper than "NAFTA sucks!" and "China cheats!". Hillary tries to win the "bitter" blue collar demographic by saying "NAFTA and the way it's been implemented has hurt a lot of American workers...". Hillary forgets to mention that NAFTA was authored by hubby Bill during the years she was working at his side, getting all that White House experience. Obama counters "...that he has always opposed NAFTA, and that the trade deal should be amended and renegotiated.", again conveniently forgetting that he used to support NAFTA. Both Obama and Clinton, speaking at the Pennsylvania Forum on Manufacturing, maintained that "...the policies President George W. Bush has supported have outsourced thousands of jobs all over the world but mainly to China, ultimately affecting the U.S. manufacturing industry." Whether they supported free trade in the past, both Obama and Clinton now agree that it was NAFTA and China who laid off all those American factory workers. In 2008 xenophobia is an easier sell than free trade.

The problem is, all this focus on NAFTA and China as the primary causes of lost American jobs is a load of baloney.
No one can dispute that there are a lot of middle-aged Americans who've lost high paying manufacturing jobs over the past 20 years. They had found those jobs in the plants that bloomed in the United States after World War II. In the 1960s Americans only had to graduate high school and show up at the local factory to land a plant floor job with great pay and benefits. But those jobs did not last forever. Over the past couple of decades the news has been full of stories about US layoffs and plant closings on the one hand, and NAFTA trade agreements and the boom of manufacturing in China on the other. It's only natural to assume that a "giant sucking job vacuum" was siphoning jobs from Detroit and Gary directly into Tijuana and Shanghai. The problem is, that's not what happened. Americans didn't lose those jobs to Mexico or China. They lost them to productivity.

When we talk about the decline of manufacturing in the US we equate the loss of manufacturing jobs with a decline in manufacturing output. But manufacturing in the United States is not declining. US manufacturing output, as a % of GDP, is as high as it's ever been in the past 50 years. Unfortunately for Obama's "bitter" workers, while US Manufacturing output has remained strong, productivity growth has eliminated many of their jobs. Productivity in manufacturing has grown 2.8% per year since the 1960s, meaning that manufacturers only need 1 worker in 2008 to do the work that 4 did in 1968. In some industries, like automobile manufacturing, productivity gains have been even higher.

A walk through downtown Detroit provides ample evidence of closed plants and lost jobs. But Detroit autoworkers didn't lose nearly as many jobs to Mexico as they lost to the much more efficient plants run by Toyota and Honda (and even Saturn) in places like Tennessee and Kentucky. The loss of jobs in Detroit had little to do with globalization, they were lost because of the intransigence of autoworker unions, coupled with management incompetence at GM, Ford and Chrysler. Americans are still building cars. There are more automobiles being produced now in the United States than during the 1960s heydays of the big 3 automakers, but they're not being produced in old-line, union manufacturing cities like Detroit and Gary, Indiana. And they're being produced by far fewer workers.

The same is true of steel. In 1964 the US produced 126 million tons of steel while employing 515,000 steel workers. In 2001 the US produced 100 million tons of steel while employing 161,000 steel workers. Total US steel consumption fell about 20% during that time period, due to a shift to lighter-weight materials in cars and other products (weight costs money & energy, and steel is heavy). Note that while steel production and consumption dropped about 20%, steel worker employment dropped 68%. In 2001 the US steel industry produced 100 million tons of steel with 1/3 the number of workers that were needed to produce 100 million tons in 1964.

Displaced factory workers should be blaming computers, and robots, not China and Mexico. The digital revolution has created amazing efficiencies on the shop floor, in the warehouse, and in the supply chain. We love efficiency, it's a beautiful idea, but the reality of efficiency is that it saves labor, which means it eliminates jobs. That's what efficiency is all about. Not only are job losses in the US not China's fault, but in fact American workers and Chinese workers are in the same boat. Between 1995 and today China has lost about 15,000,ooo manufacturing jobs, even as their manufacturing output has soared. Automation, productivity and efficency are equally harsh mistresses for workers on either side of the Pacific.

Hillary's and Obama's xenophobic NAFTA and China bashing will do nothing to restore those lost manufacturing jobs. American workers don't need protectionism, they need new opportunities. We'd be a lot better off if politicians focused on balancing budgets, expanding education and increasing economic development, instead of making defensive promises to suspend NAFTA and put tariffs on Chinese toothpaste.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Iterating literacy...

The practice of reading words on paper appears to be dying. Reading's impending death has been covered (ironically) by all the newspapers. If you run a google search on "death of reading" you'll find hundreds of articles covering reading's demise, in papers ranging from the Washington Post to the Washington Times (I can assure you, that's quite a wide spectrum). You'd have to be a total non-reader to have missed all of the stories about the NEA (the National Endowment for the Arts, not the National Education Association) studies "Reading at Risk" and "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence" which chronicle our growing "ignorance". These studies focus on non-readers, in particular on teenagers, citing alarming statistics on all the reading they're not doing and the societal dissolution their illiteracy will bring.

The Washington Times editorial page strikes a typically grim and shrill tone "Here are some of the troubling highlights...from 1982 to 2002, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds who read literature dropped from 60 percent to 43 percent. Fifty-two percent of the same age demographic said they read a book voluntarily in 2002, which is down from 59 percent a decade earlier...Our increasing failure to read constitutes a kind of creeping national illiteracy which should concern everyone, not simply librarians and booksellers. Literacy is an integral aspect of civil society. Substance, culture and literature should not be the ironic casualties of the Information Age." I love those value-laden words - "substance" and "culture". Of course we accept that the Washington Times editorial board is the arbiter of substance and culture (this is the newspaper published by Sun Myung Moon, the wacko Unification Church leader who maintains that he's the new Messiah).

This is one of the rare issues on which the Washington Times and the Washington Post agree. Here's this from the Washington Post "More than half the adults in this country won't pick up a novel this year, according to the NEA. Not one. And the rate of decline has almost tripled in the past decade...". Reading's mourners share a tone of gloom and doom, and warn us against creeping ignorance. The future they depict is one of drooling idiots pounding their keyboards and wiggling their joysticks, barely able to feed themselves. We must make children read (they seldom mention adults, they know how much luck they'd have trying to make adults read)! Good luck, I say.

I'm not feeling the gloom. I have to wonder. Which way are we facing when we wail and gnash our teeth about the decline of printed word literacy, forward or backward? Is it okay that reading is fading in importance, or is it a sign of the coming apocalypse?

On the apocalypse team are academics like Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, along with all the newspapers and the NEA. Wolf's been making the rounds of high-brow talk shows, expertly reinforcing our fear of reading's demise whilst flogging her book "Proust and the Squid" - a not-so-aptly named treatise on how reading shapes our brain. Wolf argues that reading is an acquired skill that forces us to think deeply and synthesize information. She further argues that if reading fades in our culture, we will lose that ability to think deeply and digest (not just consume) information. She fears that reading will not survive the onslaught of "digitization", and that its potential loss is serious and saddening.

For every printed word literacy pessimist like Maryanne Wolf, there's an optimistic digital literacy champion like Henry Jenkins , the professor of New Media Literacy at MIT. Jenkins and a number of other researchers think we educators should redefine literacy to represent the way that people, especially teenagers, are engaging in the digital world. According to Henry, educators like Maryanne Wolf are building a "Maginot Line" in a hopeless attempt to defend reading and children against the encroaching digital world. He argues that we need to "...identify skills, knowledge, and competencies young people need to become meaningful participants in the 21st century culture around them – skills central to citizenship, community life, and cultural expression...in this new landscape of video games, cell phones, podcasting, blogging, instant messaging and other kinds of media-intensive experiences, children are participants – not spectators, not consumers in the traditional sense of the term. These new media forms and the cultures that emerge around them offer young people new opportunities for emotional growth and intellectual development but also require new kinds of ethical responsibilities. The goal of media literacy education in the 21st century should be to prepare kids to live within a more participatory media culture..."

So, which is it - doom or boom? I love to read. I read two newspapers a day (I think I'm one of the Boston Globe's last 4 readers). I also generally have a book or two going (I'm halfway through "The Looming Tower" and "Spook Country" at the moment, in case you're wondering). But I understand that just because the Washington Times editorial board and the NEA think we're going to hell in an iPod basket, there's no way we can force teens or adults read more ("No dessert until you eat your Proustian spinach!"). I don't think that we're reading less because we have suddenly become dumber, or shallower. I think it's that there are much more engaging media available to us. The printed word has always been a narrow form of communication, engaging only one of our senses (and that one only indirectly), while forcing us to adapt to the form, not vice-versa. Even Maryanne Wolf admits that our brains are not well-suited for reading. She explains that our brains go through a process of rewiring to match the medium of printed texts, and a significant percentage of us, known as dyslexics, never fully adapt. Maybe reading is fading because it is poorly suited to our abilities, and the new digital media are more powerful alternatives. It may be that bemoaning our fading printed word proficiency in 2010 is akin to anguishing over the weakening wrists of teamsters who no longer needed to wield buggy whips to drive cars in 1910.

The new media are not only more engaging, they are much, MUCH more democratic. For most of the past 500+ years the printing press was the only mass media game in town. The media were controlled by those who owned the means of production, first in the form of books and newspapers, and then more recently, television and radio. If you wanted to publish something, or broadcast something, you had to own the printing press or the TV station (ham radio operators being the exception). Then suddenly, over the past 15-20 years, an economic & technological revolution has taken place in media. The internet gives each of us the ability to broadcast our creations to the entire wired world! And not just an email, or a blog post, we can post movies, slide shows, music, etc. Video cameras can be had for a few hundred dollars today, instead of tens of thousands. To edit a video 15 years ago required an investment of $150,000, now anyone who owns a Mac or an XP computer can do it for free. Every teenager can (and does) build their own web site. Podcasts are as easy to make as a newsletter (perhaps easier). Of course the Washington Post and the Washington Times should feel wretched about our declining interest in printed texts, because they have lost their monopoly.

I understand that this revolution has trade-offs. I love that I can post 2000 word opinions on my blog every week, and no longer risk the indignity of having my 150 word letters rejected by the Boston Globe (what do they know?). But I also recognize that I can't afford to have a news bureau in Islamabad or Indonesia. Nor can I be assured of the quality of everything that is posted to Youtube, or MySpace. One of the biggest challenges in the explosion of digital media is keeping up with it all, and finding the nuggets hidden in all the dross. I sincerely hope that someone like Goodreads will come up with a Goodfeeds, where we can all let each other know about the latest podcasts, vodcasts, web sites, etc that we've found (what are your favorites?).

So what do you think? Will the next generation be a bunch of simpletons with tiny brains and over-sized thumbs? Will we soon lose the pleasure of spending a rainy afternoon in a bookstore cafe, sipping a mocha choca latte yaya and thumbing through the latest William Gibson? When they go online, "is our children learning?" (you gotta love it when the Washington Times complains about declining literacy while endorsing George Dumberer Bush for President). Should public schools use whips and chairs to make kids read? What should literacy look like 10 years from now?

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Bring it on!

I was ready to move on from (pass?) the topic of cars, but the New York Times website has a story this morning on new models of small cars that are selling well in Europe and Asia, but which we'll never see here in the United States. Arrggghhh! These cars are incredibly fuel efficient, and so freakin' cute! Check them out here.

I was thinking of writing a blog spot or two on George Bush's legacy (negligance-y?). He's in the Balkans (again), making speeches about bringing Ukraine into NATO (I thought the whole point of NATO was to keep countries like the Ukraine out of NATO), and pissing off Angela Merkel and Putin. He keeps returning to Eastern Europe (looking for that watch he lost, perhaps), apparently because it's one of the few places where he is popular. Bush may be polling in the single digits in Boston, but he's boffo in Bulgaria. Given how well he's handled things here and around the world - Katrina, Wall Street, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, health care, crumbling infrastructure, the economy, China, Social Security, etc. - it's good to have him offstage, where he can do the least damage (we need a Hippocratic Oath for presidents like Dubyah - "First, do no harm").

Or we could talk about the economy, and Wall Street. How do you feel about Bear Stearns, did you send their deposed CEO, James Cayne, a sympathy card?. Will we need to build an Ark to survive the rising tide of mortgage defaults, and should we worry that so many people took out loans that they had no chance of ever paying back? As we head into a recession should we be cheered by the job opportunities for Repo men? Does it matter that, for the first time in my lifetime, the Canadian dollar is now worth a dollar? How about that deficit? Are the Gen-Xers ready to step up (no more slacking) and pay my generation's bills? Or should we declare bankruptcy and hope that China will write off all our debts?

I'm also tempted to talk about education, given that it's what I do. The dollar and our educational proficiency seem to be tracking each other, is that a good thing? Is it a problem that the US is so far behind Finland (they're number yksi!) and 30 other countries in math, science and literacy tests? Are standardized tests accurate predictors of our future societal and economic health? Is education all about the contest, and the prize (what is the prize)?

Or, we could go back to discussing religion. By which I mean the Red Sox (the one true faith). Baseball season has begun, no more of that knuckle-dragger sports-page-filling football folderol. Is Manny the Mozart of hitting (if you've watched Manny in the dugout, and you've seen Amadeus, you'll understand that the comparison is not meant as praise)? Can the Yankees' creaky, ancient pitching staff hold up for a season? Is there anything more satisfying than a night of baseball in which the Red Sox win, and the Yankees lose?

And there's technology. Wonderful, incomprehensible, banal technology. Is the iTouch a boon to mankind, or just another ADHD-inducing distraction? Speaking of religion, which is it - Mac or Wintel? Is Steve Jobs a visionary, or just amazingly arrogant? Do you youtube? Is the democratization of media the best or the worst trend to come down the pike? Should we celebrate the fact that today anyone can create a film of their cat flushing the toilet and share it with the world, or should we fall to our knees and pray that Rod Serling will come back from the dead?

What do you think about these things? What shall we talk about next?