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New submissions

[ total of 32 entries: 1-32 ]

New submissions for Tue, 28 Mar 17

[1]  arXiv:1703.08595 [pdf]
Title: Low Precision Neural Networks using Subband Decomposition
Comments: Presented at CogArch Workshop, Atlanta, GA, April 2016
Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

Large-scale deep neural networks (DNN) have been successfully used in a number of tasks from image recognition to natural language processing. They are trained using large training sets on large models, making them computationally and memory intensive. As such, there is much interest in research development for faster training and test time. In this paper, we present a unique approach using lower precision weights for more efficient and faster training phase. We separate imagery into different frequency bands (e.g. with different information content) such that the neural net can better learn using less bits. We present this approach as a complement existing methods such as pruning network connections and encoding learning weights. We show results where this approach supports more stable learning with 2-4X reduction in precision with 17X reduction in DNN parameters.

[2]  arXiv:1703.08667 [pdf, ps, other]
Title: Exploration--Exploitation in MDPs with Options
Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

While a large body of empirical results show that temporally-extended actions and options may significantly affect the learning performance of an agent, the theoretical understanding of how and when options can be beneficial in online reinforcement learning is relatively limited. In this paper, we derive an upper and lower bound on the regret of a variant of UCRL using options. While we first analyze the algorithm in the general case of semi-Markov decision processes (SMDPs), we show how these results can be translated to the specific case of MDPs with options and we illustrate simple scenarios in which the regret of learning with options can be \textit{provably} much smaller than the regret suffered when learning with primitive actions.

[3]  arXiv:1703.08774 [pdf, other]
Title: Who Said What: Modeling Individual Labelers Improves Classification

Data are often labeled by many different experts with each expert only labeling a small fraction of the data and each data point being labeled by several experts. This reduces the workload on individual experts and also gives a better estimate of the unobserved ground truth. When experts disagree, the standard approaches are to treat the majority opinion as the correct label or to model the correct label as a distribution. These approaches, however, do not make any use of potentially valuable information about which expert produced which label. To make use of this extra information, we propose modeling the experts individually and then learning averaging weights for combining them, possibly in sample-specific ways. This allows us to give more weight to more reliable experts and take advantage of the unique strengths of individual experts at classifying certain types of data. Here we show that our approach leads to improvements in computer-aided diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. We also show that our method performs better than competing algorithms by Welinder and Perona, and by Mnih and Hinton. Our work offers an innovative approach for dealing with the myriad real-world settings that use expert opinions to define labels for training.

[4]  arXiv:1703.08816 [pdf, other]
Title: Uncertainty Quantification in the Classification of High Dimensional Data
Comments: 33 pages, 14 figures
Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

Classification of high dimensional data finds wide-ranging applications. In many of these applications equipping the resulting classification with a measure of uncertainty may be as important as the classification itself. In this paper we introduce, develop algorithms for, and investigate the properties of, a variety of Bayesian models for the task of binary classification; via the posterior distribution on the classification labels, these methods automatically give measures of uncertainty. The methods are all based around the graph formulation of semi-supervised learning.
We provide a unified framework which brings together a variety of methods which have been introduced in different communities within the mathematical sciences. We study probit classification, generalize the level-set method for Bayesian inverse problems to the classification setting, and generalize the Ginzburg-Landau optimization-based classifier to a Bayesian setting; we also show that the probit and level set approaches are natural relaxations of the harmonic function approach.
We introduce efficient numerical methods, suited to large data-sets, for both MCMC-based sampling as well as gradient-based MAP estimation. Through numerical experiments we study classification accuracy and uncertainty quantification for our models; these experiments showcase a suite of datasets commonly used to evaluate graph-based semi-supervised learning algorithms.

[5]  arXiv:1703.08840 [pdf, other]
Title: Inferring The Latent Structure of Human Decision-Making from Raw Visual Inputs
Comments: 10 pages, 6 figures

The goal of imitation learning is to match example expert behavior, without access to a reinforcement signal. Expert demonstrations provided by humans, however, often show significant variability due to latent factors that are not explicitly modeled. We introduce an extension to the Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning method that can infer the latent structure of human decision-making in an unsupervised way. Our method can not only imitate complex behaviors, but also learn interpretable and meaningful representations. We demonstrate that the approach is applicable to high-dimensional environments including raw visual inputs. In the highway driving domain, we show that a model learned from demonstrations is able to both produce different styles of human-like driving behaviors and accurately anticipate human actions. Our method surpasses various baselines in terms of performance and functionality.

[6]  arXiv:1703.08933 [pdf, other]
Title: Multiple Instance Learning with the Optimal Sub-Pattern Assignment Metric
Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

Multiple instance data are sets or multi-sets of unordered elements. Using metrics or distances for sets, we propose an approach to several multiple instance learning tasks, such as clustering (unsupervised learning), classification (supervised learning), and novelty detection (semi-supervised learning). In particular, we introduce the Optimal Sub-Pattern Assignment metric to multiple instance learning so as to provide versatile design choices. Numerical experiments on both simulated and real data are presented to illustrate the versatility of the proposed solution.

[7]  arXiv:1703.08970 [pdf, other]
Title: Multimodal deep learning approach for joint EEG-EMG data compression and classification
Comments: IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), 2017
Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

In this paper, we present a joint compression and classification approach of EEG and EMG signals using a deep learning approach. Specifically, we build our system based on the deep autoencoder architecture which is designed not only to extract discriminant features in the multimodal data representation but also to reconstruct the data from the latent representation using encoder-decoder layers. Since autoencoder can be seen as a compression approach, we extend it to handle multimodal data at the encoder layer, reconstructed and retrieved at the decoder layer. We show through experimental results, that exploiting both multimodal data intercorellation and intracorellation 1) Significantly reduces signal distortion particularly for high compression levels 2) Achieves better accuracy in classifying EEG and EMG signals recorded and labeled according to the sentiments of the volunteer.

[8]  arXiv:1703.09068 [pdf, other]
Title: Automatic Decomposition of Self-Triggering Kernels of Hawkes Processes
Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

Hawkes Processes capture self- and mutual-excitation between events when the arrival of one event makes future ones more likely to happen in time-series data. Identification of the temporal covariance kernel can reveal the underlying structure to better predict future events. In this paper, we present a new framework to represent time-series events with a composition of self-triggering kernels of Hawkes Processes. That is, the input time-series events are decomposed into multiple Hawkes Processes with heterogeneous kernels. Our automatic decomposition procedure is composed of three main steps: (1) discretized kernel estimation through frequency domain inversion equation associated with the covariance density, (2) greedy kernel decomposition through four base kernels and their combinations (addition and multiplication), and (3) automated report generation. We demonstrate that the new automatic decomposition procedure performs better to predict future events than the existing framework in real-world data.

[9]  arXiv:1703.09146 [pdf, other]
Title: GPU Activity Prediction using Representation Learning
Comments: Proceedings of the 33 rd International Conference on Machine Learning, New York, NY, USA, 2016. JMLR: W&CP volume 48. Copyright 2016 by the author(s)
Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

GPU activity prediction is an important and complex problem. This is due to the high level of contention among thousands of parallel threads. This problem was mostly addressed using heuristics. We propose a representation learning approach to address this problem. We model any performance metric as a temporal function of the executed instructions with the intuition that the flow of instructions can be identified as distinct activities of the code. Our experiments show high accuracy and non-trivial predictive power of representation learning on a benchmark.

[10]  arXiv:1703.09197 [pdf, other]
Title: Deep Architectures for Modulation Recognition
Comments: 7 pages, 14 figures, to be published in proceedings of IEEE DySPAN 2017
Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

Cross-lists for Tue, 28 Mar 17

[11]  arXiv:1703.08581 (cross-list from cs.CL) [pdf, other]
Title: Sequence-to-Sequence Models Can Directly Transcribe Foreign Speech
Comments: Submitted to Interspeech 2017

We present a recurrent encoder-decoder deep neural network architecture that directly translates speech in one language into text in another. The model does not explicitly transcribe the speech into text in the source language, nor does it require supervision from the ground truth source language transcription during training. We apply a slightly modified sequence-to-sequence with attention architecture that has previously been used for speech recognition and show that it can be repurposed for this more complex task, illustrating the power of attention-based models. A single model trained end-to-end obtains state-of-the-art performance on the Fisher Callhome Spanish-English speech translation task, outperforming a cascade of independently trained sequence-to-sequence speech recognition and machine translation models by 1.8 BLEU points on the Fisher test set. In addition, we find that making use of the training data in both languages by multi-task training sequence-to-sequence speech translation and recognition models with a shared encoder network can improve performance by a further 1.4 BLEU points.

[12]  arXiv:1703.08612 (cross-list from cs.RO) [pdf, other]
Title: Jointly Optimizing Placement and Inference for Beacon-based Localization
Subjects: Robotics (cs.RO); Learning (cs.LG)

The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable, range- or bearing-only observations relative to a set of fixed beacons provide an effective means of estimating a robot's location as it navigates. The accuracy of such a beacon-based localization system depends both on how beacons are spatially distributed in the environment, and how the robot's location is inferred based on noisy measurements of range or bearing. However, it is computationally challenging to search for a placement and an inference strategy that, together, are optimal. Existing methods decouple these decisions, forgoing optimality for tractability. We propose a new optimization approach to jointly determine the beacon placement and inference algorithm. We model inference as a neural network and incorporate beacon placement as a differentiable neural layer. This formulation allows us to optimize placement and inference by jointly training the inference network and beacon layer. We evaluate our method on different localization problems and demonstrate performance that exceeds hand-crafted baselines.

[13]  arXiv:1703.08710 (cross-list from cs.CV) [pdf, other]
Title: Count-ception: Counting by Fully Convolutional Redundant Counting
Comments: Under Review

Counting objects in digital images is a process that should be replaced by machines. This tedious task is time consuming and prone to errors due to fatigue of human annotators. The goal is to have a system that takes as input an image and returns a count of the objects inside and justification for the prediction in the form of object localization. We repose a problem, originally posed by Lempitsky and Zisserman, to instead predict a count map which contains redundant counts based on the receptive field of a smaller regression network. The regression network predicts a count of the objects that exist inside this frame. By processing the image in a fully convolutional way each pixel is going to be accounted for some number of times, the number of windows which include it, which is the size of each window, (i.e., 32x32 = 1024). To recover the true count take the average over the redundant predictions. Our contribution is redundant counting instead of predicting a density map in order to average over errors. We also propose a novel deep neural network architecture adapted from the Inception family of networks called the Count-ception network. Together our approach results in a 20% gain over the state of the art method by Xie, Noble, and Zisserman in 2016.

[14]  arXiv:1703.08836 (cross-list from cs.CV) [pdf, other]
Title: Learned multi-patch similarity

Estimating a depth map from multiple views of a scene is a fundamental task in computer vision. As soon as more than two viewpoints are available, one faces the very basic question how to measure similarity across >2 image patches. Surprisingly, no direct solution exists, instead it is common to fall back to more or less robust averaging of two-view similarities. Encouraged by the success of machine learning, and in particular convolutional neural networks, we propose to learn a matching function which directly maps multiple image patches to a scalar similarity score. Experiments on several multi-view datasets demonstrate that this approach has advantages over methods based on pairwise patch similarity.

[15]  arXiv:1703.08838 (cross-list from cs.DC) [pdf, other]
Title: Distributed Voting/Ranking with Optimal Number of States per Node

Considering a network with $n$ nodes, where each node initially votes for one (or more) choices out of $K$ possible choices, we present a Distributed Multi-choice Voting/Ranking (DMVR) algorithm to determine either the choice with maximum vote (the voting problem) or to rank all the choices in terms of their acquired votes (the ranking problem). The algorithm consolidates node votes across the network by updating the states of interacting nodes using two key operations, the union and the intersection. The proposed algorithm is simple, independent from network size, and easily scalable in terms of the number of choices $K$, using only $K\times 2^{K-1}$ nodal states for voting, and $K\times K!$ nodal states for ranking. We prove the number of states to be optimal in the ranking case, this optimality is conjectured to also apply to the voting case. The time complexity of the algorithm is analyzed in complete graphs. We show that the time complexity for both ranking and voting is $O(\log(n))$ for given vote percentages, and is inversely proportional to the minimum of the vote percentage differences among various choices.

[16]  arXiv:1703.08961 (cross-list from cs.CV) [pdf, ps, other]
Title: Scaling the Scattering Transform: Deep Hybrid Networks
Authors: Edouard Oyallon (DI-ENS), Eugene Belilovsky (CVN, GALEN), Sergey Zagoruyko (ENPC)

We use the scattering network as a generic and fixed initialization of the first layers of a supervised hybrid deep network. We show that early layers do not necessarily need to be learned, providing the best results to-date with pre-defined representations while being competitive with Deep CNNs. Using a shallow cascade of 1x1 convolutions, which encodes scattering coefficients that correspond to spatial windows of very small sizes, permits to obtain AlexNet accuracy on the imagenet ILSVRC2012. We demonstrate that this local encoding explicitly learns in-variance w.r.t. rotations. Combining scattering networks with a modern ResNet, we achieve a single-crop top 5 error of 11.4% on imagenet ILSVRC2012, comparable to the Resnet-18 architecture, while utilizing only 10 layers. We also find that hybrid architectures can yield excellent performance in the small sample regime, exceeding their end-to-end counterparts, through their ability to incorporate geometrical priors. We demonstrate this on subsets of the CIFAR-10 dataset and by setting a new state-of-the-art on the STL-10 dataset.

[17]  arXiv:1703.09185 (cross-list from cs.DC) [pdf, other]
Title: Private Learning on Networks: Part II
Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Learning (cs.LG); Optimization and Control (math.OC)

Widespread deployment of distributed machine learning algorithms has raised new privacy challenges. The focus of this paper is on improving privacy of each participant's local information (such as dataset or loss function) while collaboratively learning underlying model. We present two iterative algorithms for privacy preserving distributed learning. Our algorithms involves adding structured randomization to the state estimates. We prove deterministic correctness (in every execution) of our algorithm despite the iterates being perturbed by non-zero mean random variables. We motivate privacy using privacy analysis of a special case of our algorithm referred to as Function Sharing strategy (presented in [1]).

[18]  arXiv:1703.09194 (cross-list from stat.ML) [pdf, other]
Title: Sticking the Landing: An Asymptotically Zero-Variance Gradient Estimator for Variational Inference
Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG)

We propose a simple and general variant of the standard reparameterized gradient estimator for the variational evidence lower bound. Specifically, we remove a part of the total derivative with respect to the variational parameters that corresponds to the score function. Removing this term produces an unbiased gradient estimator whose variance approaches zero as the approximate posterior approaches the exact posterior. We analyze the behavior of this gradient estimator theoretically and empirically, and generalize it to more complex variational distributions such as mixtures and importance-weighted posteriors.

[19]  arXiv:1703.09202 (cross-list from stat.ML) [pdf, other]
Title: Biologically inspired protection of deep networks from adversarial attacks
Comments: 11 pages
Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG); Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC)

Inspired by biophysical principles underlying nonlinear dendritic computation in neural circuits, we develop a scheme to train deep neural networks to make them robust to adversarial attacks. Our scheme generates highly nonlinear, saturated neural networks that achieve state of the art performance on gradient based adversarial examples on MNIST, despite never being exposed to adversarially chosen examples during training. Moreover, these networks exhibit unprecedented robustness to targeted, iterative schemes for generating adversarial examples, including second-order methods. We further identify principles governing how these networks achieve their robustness, drawing on methods from information geometry. We find these networks progressively create highly flat and compressed internal representations that are sensitive to very few input dimensions, while still solving the task. Moreover, they employ highly kurtotic weight distributions, also found in the brain, and we demonstrate how such kurtosis can protect even linear classifiers from adversarial attack.

Replacements for Tue, 28 Mar 17

[20]  arXiv:1610.06276 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Modeling Scalability of Distributed Machine Learning
Comments: 6 pages, 4 figures, appears at ICDE 2017
[21]  arXiv:1611.03158 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Using Neural Networks to Compute Approximate and Guaranteed Feasible Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman PDE Solutions
Comments: Submitted to IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2017
Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)
[22]  arXiv:1703.05840 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Conditional Accelerated Lazy Stochastic Gradient Descent
Comments: 33 pages, 9 figures
Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)
[23]  arXiv:1703.06182 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Deep Decentralized Multi-task Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning under Partial Observability
Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
[24]  arXiv:1703.06959 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: CSI: A Hybrid Deep Model for Fake News
[25]  arXiv:1606.00611 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Recursive Autoconvolution for Unsupervised Learning of Convolutional Neural Networks
Comments: 8 pages, accepted to International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2017)
[26]  arXiv:1611.01540 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Topology and Geometry of Half-Rectified Network Optimization
Comments: 19 Pages (10 main + Appendices), 4 Figures, 1 Table, Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2017
Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG)
[27]  arXiv:1611.01708 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Detecting Dependencies in Sparse, Multivariate Databases Using Probabilistic Programming and Non-parametric Bayes
[28]  arXiv:1611.06534 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Linear Thompson Sampling Revisited
Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG)
[29]  arXiv:1612.01086 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Deep Learning of Robotic Tasks without a Simulator using Strong and Weak Human Supervision
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)
[30]  arXiv:1701.08716 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Does Weather Matter? Causal Analysis of TV Logs
Comments: Companion of the 26th International World Wide Web Conference
Subjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Learning (cs.LG)
[31]  arXiv:1702.05043 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Unbiased Online Recurrent Optimization
Comments: 11 pages, 5 figures
[32]  arXiv:1703.01253 (replaced) [pdf, other]
Title: Machine Learning on Sequential Data Using a Recurrent Weighted Average
Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG)
[ total of 32 entries: 1-32 ]

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From rules to skills

Becoming a better software engineer means you need to go beyond just following rules. That means learning principles, like the fact you only have a limited ability to keep details in your head. But you also need to learn new skills. Some of these skills are tied to particular technologies: applying new tools, learning new languages. But there are other, less obvious skills you will need to learn.

One that I've already talked about is knowing when to ask for help, part of the larger skill of learning. And if you read that post closely you'll notice the reliance on other skills, like estimation and planning.

Another critical skill for any programmer is writing: taking a vague notion and turning into a reasoned argument. Writing, as William Zinsser said, is thinking on paper, though these days it's much more likely to be on a computer. There are many books on writing, so to kick off what I hope to be a series of book reviews I'm going to be reviewing a particularly excellent one next week.


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Thermus aquaticus is a species of bacteria found living in the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. Hot springs typically are areas characterized by low oxygen levels, low light levels and high concentrations of sulfur and calcium carbonate.

Based on the way bacteria live in or near hot springs, which of the following would be the most reasonable explanation for how they create food?

Through the process of photorespiration by using oxygen and light energy to produce carbon dioxide.

Through the process of radiosynthesis by using gamma radiation and melanin to create energy for growth.

Through the process of photosynthesis by using energy from the sun, water, and carbon dioxide to make glucose.

Through the process of chemosynthesis by combining hydrogen sulfide with oxygen and carbon dioxide to make carbohydrates.

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Sentence Examples with the word leeward side

Limnaea and Planorbis); the existence of belts of dead poplars, patches of dead and moribund tamarisks, and vast expanses of withered reeds, all these crowning the tops of the jardangs, never found in the wind-scooped furrows; the presence of ripple-marks of aqueous origin on the leeward side of the clay terraces and in other wind-sheltered situations; and, in fact, by the general conformation, contour lines, and shapes of the deserts as a whole.

Over the whole width of the country from coast to coast, or of the Welsh mountain ranges only, this is so; but it is nevertheless true that the leeward side of an individual valley or range of hills generally receives more rain than the windward side.

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From this cause also, therefore, the leeward side of the valley receives more rain than the windward side.

The sugar farms are mostly on the islands of Hawaii, Oahu, Maui and Kauai, at the bases of mountains; those on the leeward side have the better soil, but require much more irrigating.

Or leeward side of the Olympics.


UN meets to discuss new global restrictions on economic activity

United Nations bureaucrats are meeting in Doha, Qatar this week for a new global summit seeking to impose global taxes and caps on carbon dioxide emitted through economic activity.

The Obama administration has kicked off the event by promising aggressive new actions to limit economic activity in the United States.

The Guardian reports Obama representative to the conference Jonathan Pershing tells delegates “the Obama administration has taken a series of steps, including sharply increasing fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, and made good on promises of climate financing for poor countries.”

The Guardian also notes Obama’s Cap and Tax scheme was killed in the U.S. Senate. That was due to the efforts of ATP supporters and our allies in contacting and challenging wavering senators.

The UN has taken past actions to limit carbon dioxide and curb economic activity, but none of these have affected global climate.

Rather than accept the scientific proof human activity is not altering the global climate, UN bureaucrats are using their failure to instead suggest they don’t have enough power and are now pushing even more draconian restrictions on economic activity.


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Why Many From-Scratch Cities Are Failing to Thrive

Why Many From-Scratch Cities Are Failing to Thrive

Rome. Paris. New York City. Beijing. Some of the most powerful and beautiful cities are centuries old, with some having been built up and outwards for thousands of years. Many new, built-from-scratch cities may not be destined for the same success — in fact, hundreds of shiny, modern metropolises lay dormant in spite of high hopes and intelligent design.

With global urban population expected to rise to six billion by 2050 from 3.9 today, new cities will be essential for growing communities to form and thrive. Public and private projects around the world are aiming to design and build these idealistic cities of the future, but have been proven flawed in both approach and outcome.

Flawed planning, hazy results

A Hologram for the King, a Dave Eggers novel recently made into a film starring Tom Hanks, portrays a fictionalized example of how new cities can fail to get off the ground. In it, the protagonist Alan takes a trip to Saudi Arabia to present his company’s IT system, which he hopes will be adopted by the in-the-works King Abdullah Economic City. Throughout the course of the story the city remains in a state of limbo, likely never to live up to the King’s exaggerated claims or marketing promises.

King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC, pronounced “cake”) is real: though perhaps not as bleak as rendered in the book, the desert megacity has been underway since 2005 as one of four new cities proposed to control sprawl and congestion. The city is supposed to become larger than Washington DC, but remains only 15 percent completed, gaining only several thousand inhabitants over a decade post-conception.

Other Middle Eastern countries have traversed this road already to minimal success. The United Arab Emirates’ carbon-neutral smart city Masdar, though completed, remained virtually empty to this day. Built to house 50,000, the population is only 1,000, consisting mostly of students attending the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology there.

China is perhaps the posterchild for from-scratch cities: the nation has used more cement in the last three years than the US in the entire 20th century, and invested more time, money, and space into brand new cities than any other country. Called “overnight cities” by some, a fleet of metropolises have been popped up across rural land in anticipation of rapid population growth.

Roughly 600 new cities have been built since 1949, many in the 80s and early aughts. Hundreds of these remain empty or under-populated, often referred to as “ghost cities” or compared to dystopian fantasy settings. The buildings shine, but the streets echo; they are eco-friendly, but until they are people-friendly their sustainability is a moot point.

China’s top-down approach to urban planning is smart in theory but lacking in practice: you can plan a city all you want, but over half the appeal of cities are their community and culture, which are inherently organic. Even the best marketing plan can’t disguise the deficit.

In spite of China’s struggles with the matter, down in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made smart cities a major goal of his administration. One of such cities is Lavasa, a completely privately-run metropolis. Like the others, it is unfinished. Visitors remark that it is more suitable for vacation than for living, as it lacks adequate hospital and schooling systems. And like many other new cities, it doesn’t solve problems like poverty because it’s too expensive to live there.

Other high-tech, eco-friendly city projects — like Portugal’s fully sensor-embedded PlanIT Valley — have halted construction over economic concerns.

Whether public or private, from-scratch cities face similar issues: attracting people, solving problems, and investing large sums into an uncertain fate.

People bringing promise

Why is it, exactly, that historic cities flourish while new ones flounder? Old cities face troubles of all sorts, especially as older infrastructure crumbles, populations fluctuate and architecture becomes outdated. Systems fail, buildings overcrowd, and yet they remain resilient in their complexity.

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day. This is obviously true: modern Rome was built over the course of two and a half thousand years, and is thusly one of the oldest continuously occupied sites in Europe. Even newer cities like New York have had a couple of centuries to develop character, layers and intricacy.

New cities may never have the chance to make it to that status, and it doesn’t help that they lack the appeal and vibrancy of old cities. As the architect of the still-budding city Loseva said in an interview, “soul is something that the city develops over time.” The older the city, the stronger the soul.

The location of age-old cities also reflects the cream of the crop in real estate: they are natural and ideal spots with the best weather conditions and access to water supply and trade. Their economies and communities have thusly developed both financial and cultural capital over the ages, not out of a goal of perfection but out of necessity.

This said, not all from-scratch cities in recent histories have or will necessarily falter. South Korea’s Songdo is among the most successful so far, whether by design or chance, it’s reached a population of 70,000, which is expected to triple by 2018. Though it’s largely a blank slate still, Koreans already accustomed to the high-tech slickness of cities like Seoul may be ideal adopters to fill it out with the color and energy it needs.

Songdo may be an outlier. Either way, the planet needs more cities. Perhaps people simply don’t want to live in cities of the future — not yet anyway.

What is the solution? Unfortunately, I don’t think there a hard and fast rule — it may be that time and population growth alone does the trick. Even so, the territory is uncharted and the variables are many. Knowing what we know about people, about culture, and urban planning, better practice should at least be in reach.

As Jane Jacob wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Perhaps this is the core issue: city architects should plan and build alongside people rather than simply for them.

There must be room to go off the books, room for the unexpected, room for a little bit of chaos to seep between the buildings. If urban planners have to compromise their ideals to get there, it may just be worth it: without people, a city is simply a glorified diorama. With them — flaws and all — it can develop a spirit along with its skyscrapers.

6 Green Innovations That Could Revolutionize Urban Planning

6 Green Innovations That Could Revolutionize Urban Planning

The world’s cities are in constant flux, being built or built upon to accommodate fast-growing urban populations. The standard approach to urban design has changed, as it has countless times throughout the ages. Today, a new trend has dawned: sustainable design for greener cities, and ultimately a greener planet.

Sustainable design boils down to two main goals: conserving energy and reducing waste. There are many innovations that deliver these goals that are worth paying attention to. After all, they could be staples in the future of urban design, construction, and renovation. As a seasoned real estate entrepreneur, I find it useful to watch these developments carefully.

Here are seven innovations that, though not necessarily new, I believe may explode in popularity as cities are designed and developed with sustainability in mind.

1.Green roofs

Not unlike the habitats of the Hobbit’s Shire, green roofs are structures either partially or fully covered by vegetation. Why? The benefits are extraordinary. Green roofs limit the need for heating and cooling, filter pollutants from the air, insulate buildings, and offer extra square footage for agriculture. They also help mitigate the “heat island” effect in urban spaces — when cities are hotter than the surrounding land — by lowering temperatures.

The modern trend started in Germany in the 1960s and spread to other European cities, many of which are known for their sustainable initiatives. It’s an effective use of space that reduces energy consumption and adds new functionality to formerly barren roofs. North America also has a growing market for green roofs and other types of eco-friendly “living architecture.”

2. High-speed transport

Elon Musk’s future-forward Hyperloop has been in talks for years, and recently the much-hyped high-speed rail had its first public test. It could take many years to be fully realized, but it’s not the first of its kind: also known as bullet trains, high-speed railways can be found in Japan, China, France, Germany, Russia, South Korea, the US, among other countries.

Though expensive to build, high-speed rails are generally eco-friendly and save in greenhouse emissions by providing a speedy alternative to more fuel-intensive transport. Just look to California, where high speed rails run on electricity and reduce the need for cars. In future cities, mitigating the need for vehicular and air travel by implementing high speed rails instead will save dramatically on energy usage and mitigate pollution, too.

3. Floating buildings

With so much land overtaken by human activity, expanding onto the water could preserve greenery for agriculture and other uses. There are various of types of floating architecture designed precisely to be eco-friendly urban solutions.

Self-sustaining floating house units already exist: for example, the WaterNest 100 by EcoFloLife is made of 98 percent recyclable materials, with photovoltaic panels embedded in the rooftop for solar energy. This type of innovation could work for an entire city, in theory. In fact, various eco-friendly floating cities have been designed, including Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut’s Lilypad, proposed as a city for climate refugees, and Silt Lake City, which would float atop the Nile River.

4. Water recycling

Speaking of water, droughts and shortages are predicted to become increasingly common as populations grow, supplies dwindle and the planet warms. Americans in particular use 100 gallons per day, 95 percent of which is wasted. Certainly there is a more efficient way to conserve water, in and out of cities.

Greywater refers to water in sinks, showers, washing machines, etc: essentially all streams but toilets. Greywater, along with stormwater and even wastewater can be better managed and recycled for reuse in urban settings through large-scale systems and smaller-scale innovations like this high-tech shower that recycles water as you wash.

5. Solar solutions

Solar is one of the fastest growing forms of sustainable energy and one of the most promising too. But for all the hype, it faces some key problems: mainly, the fact that sunlight isn’t always a guarantee.

Even so, solar technology is becoming better and more efficient, and more easily stored for not-so-sunny hours. One Swedish company is able to power 24 homes with one dish, and Tesla now offers a solar battery at the most affordable price yet. Individual solutions like these could be scaled up for implementation in urban areas, like this solar road used in the Netherlands that generates enough power for a year’s worth of electricity.

6. Microgrids

Solar energy is great for easing reliance on the electrical grid, but grids will likely be necessary in powering cities for a long time. However, there are less wasteful ways to provide electricity, like the use of microgrids for example.

Microgrids are small, decentralized energy systems that collect, store and distribute electricity in an even and balanced way. Where large-scale power plants are often powered by fossil fuels, localized grids are better suited to sustainable energy sources like solar and wind, and can act as backup in case of blackouts. For cities, a network of microgrids would waste less energy and derive it from a variety renewable sources. The market for microgrids is expected to grow to $40 billion by 2020.

These are just several of the innovations that are likely to inform sustainable design in cities as we move into a more environmentally-conscious future. Whether all at once or a little at a time, the urban greening trend shows no sign of sunsetting anytime soon — which is why it’s smart for those in the real estate industry to take note and adapt.

ULI’s UrbanPlan: Creating Informed Citizens, In and Out of Classrooms

ULI’s UrbanPlan: Creating Informed Citizens, In and Out of Classrooms

As a real estate industry insider, I’ve felt compelled and delighted to follow the Urban Land Institute and its endeavors closely. An independent, global nonprofit, ULI dedicates time and resources to supporting the entire spectrum of real estate development and land use disciplines in order to strengthen communities across America.

The real estate industry as of late has been striving for sustainability and local empowerment; ULI is representative of the space where the real estate business meets private and public community betterment. One ULI initiative I feel has a unique potential is UrbanPlan, which brings hands-on curriculum into high school and college classrooms to help students learn about — and participate in — the forces that shape community development.

UrbanPlan has been servicing youth for over a decade in schools across the country, and recently even further. Since its founding in partnership with the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003, it’s reached over 27,000 high school and university students in about 140 classrooms every academic year. This latest year, UrbanPlan operated in 36 high schools, ten universities, and even a pilot program for 90 pupils in the United Kingdom.

UrbanPlan is run by 13 ULI District Councils, which deliver the ULI mission at a local level to provide industry expertise to community leaders.

In 2010, UrbanPlan was selected by the George Lucas Educational Foundation (yes, that George Lucas) as one of 20 programs running in the US to spread awareness on innovative and effective educational programs, emphasis mine. Since kids are the future of our cities and communities, this is exactly the type of program that influences future leaders to care about intelligent land use.

How it works

What I find most interesting about UrbanPlan is that it’s not your everyday lecture; there are no textbooks, powerpoints or pop quizzes. Instead, the curriculum is immersive, allowing students to fill various roles and negotiate to solve problems — and turn profit — in fictional communities.

I think most of us can agree that the most fun and interesting classes back in the day were the ones that let us learn in the act of doing, rather than simple note-taking. What better way to get students interested in real estate development than to let them experience it for themselves?

Here’s a description of the program, from ULI’s website:

Student development teams respond to a “request for proposals” for the redevelopment of a blighted site in a hypothetical community. Each team member assumes one of five roles: finance director, marketing director, city liaison, neighborhood liaison, or site planner. Through these roles, students develop a visceral understanding of the various market and nonmarket forces and stakeholders in the development process. They must reconcile the often-competing agendas to create a well-designed, market-responsive, and sustainable project.

Once again, the emphasis is mine. With students taking on different roles, conflict, collaboration, and creativity can organically unfold. All the while, team members work together to design a project that fits the needs of the community and the market.

Teams present their final projects to “city council” of ULI members, who question teammates, deliberate, and award a “contract” to the winning proposal as a council would in reality.

The course is typically six weeks and a total of 15 hours long. And while it’s not designed to create a future generation of real estate developers — the skills go far beyond that, into general teamwork, marketing and economics — for those that may choose professions in this area, a robust understanding of the industry will be instilled.

Real results

While this sounds pretty interesting in theory, you may be wondering how it comes together in reality. The press has covered several cases, which report on how the UrbanPlan curriculum operated in real classrooms.

According to Paula Blasier director of San Francisco-based UrbanPlan, the program allows students that may not be top performers under traditional education models to excel. “All of a sudden, a kid discovers a whole new world, maybe even a possible profession, that requires a skill set they thought had no value,” Blasier said. This is because the activities require human skills that aren’t always used in classrooms.

Berkeley High School student Sofia Haas noted that the program helped her understand the complexity of development and the political trade-offs involved. “It was definitely challenging to have to make a profit on our product and try to keep true to our beliefs,” she said. “But those are the problems that face people who do this in the real world.”

Now, Haas is careful to take note of the little things in neighborhoods that were likely implemented carefully behind the scenes.

In Colorado, high school students found UrbanPlan was helpful for team building. It was also a great fit for Littleton High School’s curriculum, because it fit into the economic portion of students’ social studies requirements.

“When we first started, none of us really liked each other, but as time went on, we all stepped up and took on our roles,” student Ashley Winters said of the experience. “Everyone helped everyone else know what they were doing and what they were supposed to be talking about.”

Why it’s important

Since the US population is forecasted to grow by 60 million people in the next two decades, programs like UrbanPlan are critical in educating the next generation to be informed citizens able to handle population and community demands.

Blasier admits that one of the key benefits of UrbanPlan is preparing young people to be called upon for active roles in their communities — and that the forces that come into play in these decisions aren’t often taught in schools. “We wanted to provide the most realistic experience possible, but we also wanted a model that could be embraced by public schools nationwide,” she said. “We knew we had to make it not only engaging for the kids but teacher friendly as well.”

Ultimately, I believe that UrbanPlan is an innovative and highly useful educational approach that helps students understand the reality of the public, private, and political aspects of real estate and land development. The town in question may indeed by hypothetical, but the lessons are not. At the end of the day, immersive projects like this are the ones that stick and teach kids some of the most important responsibilities of adulthood.

Featured image: Sony Abesamis via Flickr

Dying Sustainably: What Greener Burials Mean For Big Cities

Dying Sustainably: What Greener Burials Mean For Big Cities

The world’s cities have a grave problem. With limited space and growing populations, the dead outnumber the living in packed cemeteries that occupy valuable real estate, cost families exorbitant fees, and strain the environment to boot.

While land is abundant in more rural areas to respectfully bury the deceased, in cities like London and New York City space is increasingly scarce. Because cemeteries aren’t inherently profitable — the dead do not pay rent, after all — existing sites must grapple with an influx of demand without much chance at horizontal expansion.

So what is the solution? Pushing bodies further underground? Building mausoleum towns? Creating floating cemeteries and skyscrapers? As radical as these ideas may seem, they have all been explored and implemented in cities attempting to make room for the dead.

With 50 million people passing away every year, afterlife accommodation is as much a real estate issue as it is an environmental one. Just as the real estate industry has moved toward a more ethically and environmentally conscious ethos,  the funeral business is doing the same for deceased tenants. Some say as many as one in four older Americans are likely to opt for sustainable burial options in the future, given the growth of environmental awareness.

Though challenges lie ahead, especially in cities, many sustainable and space-saving burial options exist. It may take an extra dose of creativity — and maybe even some cultural change — but new earth and community-friendly burial solutions could do the world a great good.

A costly problem

Even if they want to, many city residents can no longer bury their loved ones the traditional way. Inground plots in Manhattan are in the single digits with six-figure costs. Even a burial outside of cities can cost upwards of $10,000, considering the price of coffins and other funeral services.

In US cemeteries alone, 30 million feet of hardwood caskets are buried, along with 90,000 tons of steel caskets, 14,000 tons of steel vaults and over 2,500 tons of copper and bronze. That’s a huge wealth of trees and minerals buried beneath the earth, unable to be recycled or put to use. Embalming chemicals can also be incredibly toxic to humans, animals and wildlife. Even cremation takes its toll: it’s an energy-intensive process that emits mercury from burnt teeth fillings.

With baby boomers aging, 76 million Americans are projected to reach life expectancy between 2024 and 2042. To give each a standard burial, an area about the size of Las Vegas would be required. This won’t be an issue for the many people living in rural locations, but with city populations growing there will no doubt be problems among denser populations. In fact, there already are.

City residents and urban planners are in perhaps the perfect positions to pursue sustainable alternatives, for the sake of space, money and the planet.

The Green Burial Movement

The concept of green burials is not a new one — in fact, it was once the norm, with burials often occurring at home in wooden boxes. At the turn of the 19th century, when deaths moved from homes to hospitals and funeral parlors, the post-death rituals we practice today became widely adopted. Embalming began during the Civil War to help preserve the bodies of soldiers during their transport, and though not legally mandated continues to be the standard practice.

The green burial movement, which began in the early 90s, seeks to return to the style of natural burial. Biodegradable caskets made of bamboo, cardboard, or wicker are less expensive and easier on the earth; for those that want to go the cremation route without the detriments, an alternative method called resomation is less toxic and energy exhaustive.

Today, people who want green burials need only consult with the Green Burial Council (in North America) to find a certified green burial provider, the number of which has increased from just one in 2006 to over 300 today. Unlike other services bearing the “organic” label, green burials tend to be even cheaper than traditional ones.

The Green Burial Council estimates that about one-quarter of older Americans want green burials — an opportunity to take the trend from niche to mainstream. Because city residents face the biggest dilemma and tend toward progressive social leaning, it’s no surprise that New York City boasts great green options like Brooklyn’s Greenwood Heights Funeral & Cremation Services.

Saving space and memories

Just making the switch from steel to straw caskets won’t solve space issues, however green they may be. With the last open cemetery in Manhattan selling vaults for $350,000, it’s worth wondering if there’s a better way to die without shipping yourself to faraway fields a day-trip away from family.

Other cities have tackled this problem, some to great success. Countries like Belgium, Singapore and Germany practice grave recycling, through which families get a free public grave for the first 20 years or so, after which they can either pay for renewal or allow the cemetery to move the body to make space for another. Locations without this practice balk at the idea of disturbing the dead.

Some Asian cities have decided upon large, mechanized columbariums, which store thousands of urns that can be retrieved with an electronic card. Hong Kong has plans for a columbarium island called “Floating Eternity,” and other cities are considering vertical cemeteries. A Norwegian student won a design contest with his vision of such a skyscraper, which would house coffins, urns, and a computerized memorial wall.

As our virtual selves gain credence during life, digital memorializing has become more popular. A Japanese company offers virtual cemeteries for descendants to tour, while Hong Kong’s government created a virtual social network for families unable to.

Designing for the future

How do we negotiate respect for the dead with respect for the planet? And how do we negotiate these with cemetery real estate deficits and cost concerns? We don’t want to do away with cemeteries, after all. Like schools and hospitals, graveyards add a layer of emotional and cultural intelligence to neighborhoods. In cities, they are more akin to history museums and monuments — housing century-old skeletons instead of people more recently warm.

Moving forward, city residents will have to make tough choices, and urban planners will have to make smarter ones. As the number of people living in cities grows, the number of those dying there will too. Real estate developers may not be directly responsible for accommodating the dead, but one a larger scale urban planners may be wise to do so.

Grave as the situation may seem, so long as there are both private and public efforts to solve space and environmental issues, cities and their residents will grow to adopt the most efficient and green burial processes possible.

How Urban Planning Shapes Art, Music and Culture

How Urban Planning Shapes Art, Music and Culture

The structure and a design of a city is integral to the way in which communities come to use its space. This is true of the basics — like recreation, work and residential — but it’s also true of art: where it thrives, where it’s created, and how it’s consumed. From music venues to street art and theater districts, there are reasons why certain cities and spaces spawn cultural renaissances.

You see, the size and layout of homes and public places impact what people choose to do there. So if a building is conducive to creative activities, the area will develop to reflect it. Then, as the location begins to adopt creativity into its ethos, the art has it’s own impact, and may affect urban planning moving forward. This cycle of environment and art is something often considered overtly.

For people interested in art, culture, urban design or all of the above, the cause and effect of environment on cultural innovation is a topic worth exploring. With this knowledge, urban planners can design spaces that organically spark creation, and artists can choose spaces that serve their needs based on both historic accomplishments and future goals.

Art & culture

Artistic movements are induced by time, attitude, persons and place. The importance of environment in art-making cannot be overstated — just think about the classic pastoral, impressionism, and expressionism, all inspired by nature.

The natural world has always been impactful for artists, but so have cities in a different way. Urbanisation has birthed its own art movements based on factors like the city layout, population, and the social and political realities of the times. The symmetry and tight design of a cities contrasts greatly with nature, so it makes sense this the art that comes from it characterizes more grit than greenery; more angles than angels.

For example, modernism as an art form was shaped by the rapid growth of cities and industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th century. When people began to move into cities to seek their fortunes, the environment inspired a new outlook that rejected the certainty of enlightenment and the limits of traditionalism. Modern cities, defined by order and the promise of enlightenment, inspired art, literature and philosophy that affirmed human power to create with the aid of science, technology, and practical experimentation.

In this way, modernism was a reflection of urban environments: their stoicism, their nihilism and their promise. It’s a testament to the functionality of city design during the industrial revolution: when machines and manufacturing were introduced via factories and plants, economic growth and innovative thinking flourished. In fact, modernism inspired a new era of urban design that followed the logic of mass production by implementing large-scale solutions citywide.

Around the same time, city design that prioritized industrialization faced artistic pushback in the form of the Arts and Crafts movement. Due to anxieties over the prominence of industrial life, handcraftsmanship surged in the early 20th century to prove the value of human creativity and design.

But in the wake of two world wars, cities and cultural attitudes would change. Times of hardships and the inability of cities to keep urban spaces safe and clean made clear that even modernism had its faults: in city planning, architecture, and in philosophy. Postmodernism emerged as a result of these failures, exemplified by the decline of American cities. It rejected the totality of modernism in favor of a more contextual and skeptical approach less devoted to perfection.

But even in times and places in strife, art has thrived: as it turns out, abandoned warehouses served the needs of artists as well as they did mass production. In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, large abandoned factories proved ideal for artists seeking cheap rent and ample, light-filled spaces. The town was revived as a hub for creative types, and remains one of the hippest neighborhoods in the city.

Music making

Another key example of how our designed environment shapes culture is music, which has developed in garages, living rooms, churches and garages. The distinct personality of different genres has in part to do with the history of the space through which they first emerged.

1960s Detroit, it’s argued, gave birth to MoTown for several reasons: first, the northern migration of African Americans from the South for factory jobs, and second, because single-family houses had ample space for pianos. A musical heyday was relinquished even in the face of the city’s imminent decline because African American residents used this extra space to gather and make music.

“What this suggests is that cities shouldn’t despair too much about their existing built form, even if in many cases they are struggling with it,” wrote Aaron Renn on this phenomenon. “The question might be, what does that form enable that you can’t get elsewhere?”

The Detroit-Motown connection prompted journalist Ian Wylie to explore how urban planning shaped other music scenes in an article for the Guardian. When considering the grunge scene in Seattle, Wylie writes, both architecture and weather contributed to its cultivation. The inclusion of garages in local homes gave musicians a place to practice, and the damp, moderate climate convinced them to spend more time there making music, regardless of season.

Wyle also writes of how tower blocks in London made ideal transmission spots for illegal radio stations promoting grime music: the towers were fortress-like labyrinths that concealed the pirate stations from police, allowing the widespread broadcasting and popularization of grime music.

Then there are Berlin’s abandoned warehouses, which gave rise to electronic music. Not unlike Williamsburg’s abandoned factories, these large spaces provided ample from for experimentation and dance parties.

“DJs enjoyed the liberation of making music in places where previously they might have been jailed or even shot for trespassing,” Wylie writes. “The large warehouses of cold war-era Berlin also became spaces for artists and musicians to convert into studios.”

Lastly, New York City’s community centers played a part in the growth of hip hop: DJs and other hip hop artists held shows at sponsored community talent shows and dances more often than they did on the streets. The existence of these centers allowed a blending of generations and cultures, which contributed to hip-hop’s unique and eclectic sound.

What it all means

Where there are cities there are humans, and where there are humans there is art. Whether the city as a whole inspires a political and artistic movement, or simply certain elements of its design, environment will always play an important role in cultural evolution.

Many of the world’s cities tell the stories of the complex relationships between buildings, communities, and art. When the space informs the artist, the art informs the community, and then the community informs the future of the space. It’s a known phenomenon that when art flourishes, it invigorates neighborhoods, and invites the further development of both art and business.

Both urban planners and artists can take this information into stride in their future endeavors. It’s a common goal of developers to build spaces that are hospitable to young, artistic individuals and communities. Building spacious community centers, rooms, and public spaces where collaboration can happen could prompt the artistic renaissances of the future.

For young creatives, cities continue to offer the inspiration and flexibility to kickstart new projects, movements, genres, and works of art. Whether or not urban planners intend it — and as evidenced by abandoned spaces, perhaps especially when they don’t — creativity finds a way to fill in both cracks and canals.

Featured image: Vincent Anderlucci via Flickr

How The World’s Most Eco-Friendly Cities Pull Off Sustainable Transport

How The World’s Most Eco-Friendly Cities Pull Off Sustainable Transport

With every population, urban or otherwise, carbon footprints collect like dirty clouds in the wake of human movements. Ironically, these footprints are often more like wheel tracks: roughly a third of America’s emissions caused by the transport of people and goods, 80 percent of which can be attributed to cars and other road vehicles.

The world’s cities are far from immune to travel’s impact on the planet, as many densely populated metropolises are crammed with vehicles. These cars, which zip between skyscrapers and line narrow streets, often belong to commuters that travel significant distances each day and emit Co2 all the while. Even idling cars are problematic, as emissions increase the more time is spent on the road accelerating and decelerating.

With urban populations growing, the opportunity to make city transport greener is one worth a deep dive for urban planners. Cities already have a leg up when it comes to sustainability: with robust public transportation systems in place, cities have lower footprints than their suburban counterparts. As downtown revitalization attracts a greater number of residents into cities that can live, work, and shop locally, cars may be rendered an unnecessary luxury in due time.

The rise of eco-friendly transport

The US is home to several cities considered eco-friendly; because of its public transportation and commitment to green initiatives, New York City is one of them. But it wasn’t always this way — in fact, many of America’s cities were influenced by the 1939 New York World’s Fair imagining of an ideal, car-based city. This utopic roadway concept took the States by storm post-war, after which car ownership skyrocketed and roadways sprawled.

Cities in Europe, on the other hand, were never designed based on the assumption that private cars are the pinnacle of urban mobility. Countries far older than the US boast more compact and walkable city streets. We know now that the World Fair was wrong, and author Jane Jacobs was right: “Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Cities that invested in car-based infrastructure have proven to be less environmentally sustainable, among other issues.

As a result of this knowledge, cities across the world, no matter their original design, are striving to decrease their reliance on cars. The financial incentive for this is also clear: city residents without cars save money on automobile-related costs, and have a heightened ability to boost the local economy.

The planet likes bikes

Some cities are ahead of others in this regard, and when it comes to transportation innovations, it’s worth looking to some of the planet’s greenest urban spaces for solutions and ideas.

One prime example is Copenhagen, Denmark, sometimes called the bike capital of the world. 55 percent of citizens here ride a bike every day — it’s estimated that for every kilometer cycled, society enjoys a net profit of 23 cents. Bikers also save the city 90,000 tons of Co2 emissions annually.

Copenhagen’s bicycle culture has been over a century in the making; photographs show Danes in early 20th century biking to and fro enthusiastically. This culture was challenged mid-century by cars, but in the 1960s it became apparent that their prominence was leading to traffic accidents and congestion. To counter this, Copenhagen put energy and investment into extensive cycling infrastructure and branding campaigns.

With over 390 kilometers of bike lanes, Copenhagen’s cycling is not only a healthy, green alternative to driving, but a well-defined symbol of freedom and personal energy. The Danish city continues to expands their bike culture with new policies, marketing initiatives, projects, pathways and more.

Other cities look to Copenhagen as an example, and the idea is certainly catching on — and not only in Europe. Buenos Aires in Argentina has become a latest poster child for urban biking, and Chinese city Hangzhou boasts the largest bike share in the world with a 78,000  fleet.

Have feet, will travel

Cites that are pedestrian friendly also tend to be much greener than car-centric ones. When urban space is made walkable — a task that may take development and beautification — residents rely less on cars and more on their feet. Some cities have even closed down roads to cars to create public walking spaces. You can see examples of this in New York City, where Times Square has been transformed into a shiny, commercial pedestrian paradise.

There are many big cities cutting down on cars, including London, Madrid, and Hamburg, in addition to already mostly car-free cities like Venice, Freiberg, and Groningen. Cities like Istanbul and Mexico City are also embracing the importance of people-oriented mobility to incredibly promising results.

Pedestrianization has been touted as a great necessity in urban design: it preserves the health and safety of city residents, reduces pollution and noise while improving tourism, and heightens retail income and community involvement.

Air, land and sea

Part of reducing reliance on cars means finding alternative ways for people to travel. This goes much further than biking and walking: there are many other complex systems of transport including travel via bus, tram, boats and more.

Perhaps the quintessential example of a carless city is Venice, which was built with canals instead of streets. Though some boats there are indeed pollutants, the city is accessible by foot and gondola.

Medellin, Colombia takes the concept of gondolas to a new level, literally: the city implemented gondola lifts called metro cable that go up and down the city’s steep mountainside. This is part of a greater metro system called Metro de Medellin, which saves 175,000 tons of Co2 every year along with saving $1.5 billion in respiratory health costs. Areas that were once violent and dangerous have been utterly transformed due to the modern ease of mobility.

Share or beware

Lastly, the share economy is a growing trend in transportation and travel that has proven to be a green alternative to cars and hotel rooms. By renting space in an existing cars and homes, travelers don’t contribute to excess energy consumption.

Carsharing in particular is on the rise everywhere from the US to China, India, Brazil and Mexico. If people share rides, theory has it, car ownership decreases and complements a growing array of public transportation options. Car ownership is already declining, and the Ubers and Googles of the world are knee-deep in plans for a future of automated ridesharing.

Gilles Vesco, a politician that switched the city of Lyon to a sustainable model, agrees that sharing is the future: “Sharing is the new paradigm of urban mobility,” he said. “Tomorrow, you will judge a city according to what it is adding to sharing. The more that we have people sharing transportation modes, public space, information and new services, the more attractive the city will be.”

But non-sharing car-owners should perhaps beware, because the other side to encouraging alternative transportation is discouraging car use. Tolls, gas taxes, high occupancy fast lanes, no-car days and other measures that bar cars can make driving unpleasant and expensive. Maybe this isn’t the fairest way to push sustainable transport, but seems to be working in cities like Portland, where congestion charges have been implemented to cut down on traffic.

100 percent green transport may still be impossible, and the organic dissuasion of excess car use certainly won’t happen overnight. But as we all become more aware of our collective carbon footprints, it wouldn’t hurt to gradually relax our wheels. Instead, we can push for a future of mobility that elevates both community and the environment. The trick is prioritizing these elements over the luxury of plush leather interiors.

Smarter Urban Planning in an Age of Extreme Weather

Smarter Urban Planning in an Age of Extreme Weather

Historically, cities around the world have practiced urban planning methods to improve communities for both residents and governing bodies. Those methods differ by region, but are consistent in the initiatives they support — land use, environmental protection, and public welfare.

However, weather patterns have recently become unusually extreme, sometimes disastrous, due to global warming. In order to protect our urban environments, we need to account for these dramatic weather fluctuations through smarter, preemptive urban planning.

The Current Landscape

Altering a city’s physical infrastructure is not fast or easy, which means cities must prepare beforehand to defend against certain weather conditions. Natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy are unfortunate reminders of the potential consequences.

Of course, no two locations feel environmental effects in quite the same way. California has succumbed to extreme droughts while the Northeastern region of the country is visited regularly by severe storm weather. Meanwhile, rising temperatures melt polar ice, warm ocean bodies, and lessen mountain snowpacks. As a result, coastal areas are feeling the consequences of rises in sea level.

Weather patterns may differ by location, but their massive impact on city life and urban planning is undeniable. The cost for a city’s unpreparedness can multiply itself in damage repair.

The Effects of Extreme Weather In Urban Places

One of the more dangerous and consistent results of global warming and inadequate urban planning is flooding. Not only can water disasters lead to loss of life, but their effects on agriculture can also be substantial, often with international ripple effects.

In urban environments, flooding causes damage to residential properties, businesses, subway infrastructure, and roads. In order to prevent those massive repair costs, urban planning must be approached as a preventative measure.

The largest global disaster of 2012 was Hurricane Sandy with an astounding cost of $65 billion. Hurricane Sandy and the year-long Midwest/Plains drought accounted for almost half of the world’s economic losses, according to USA Today.

Even when the damages of extreme weather don’t amount to this astronomical figure, flooding still poses both economic and environmental problems on a smaller scale. Snowfall and drought also can be damaging in extreme cases.

Finding New Methods

Just as weather patterns are changing, so should preparation efforts. Self sufficiency — a common community approach when it comes to anticipating severe weather — is an element that urban planning can easily incorporate. That is, urban planners will help make it easier to retain the resources that become scarce in times of natural disasters.

For example, many buildings are beginning to harvest their own rainwater and residential households are filtering their rainwater for utility usage. With cities allowing designated space for water storage area or tools to help water and energy conservation, the communities are in a much better place if their resources are ever strained.

Architects are also looking to implement responsive living materials into traditional buildings so that they are more adaptive and environmentally suitable. It is not uncommon to find corporate buildings using green energy and filtered air, and architects are now seeking to make residential buildings just as environmentally conscious. Engineers have started to create amazing materials, such as self-repairing concrete, a substance that uses sunlight and bacteria to repair any cracks that appear in the concrete to prevent water infiltration.

To persuade cities to be more proactive outside of their traditional urban planning methods will take some time. But just as urban planning helps us adapt to busy environments, it needs to adapt to the extreme weather conditions as well. Finding new ways to approach the urban planning process can help minimize the damaging effects of severe weather conditions and create a better, more prepared city environment.

Have Smartphones Made Us More or Less Charitable?

Have Smartphones Made Us More or Less Charitable?

In the minds of many, smartphones and narcissism go hand in hand, in pocket. From selfies to social media, mobile technology has become a digital extension of the physical self, or a means through which to carefully curate one’s personality and values. For some, this means mirror shots at the gym, brunch photographs, or vaguely political articles and memes. For others, it’s photos of missionary work, Kickstarter campaigns and philanthropy apps. Almost always, the aim is the same: to promote and enable an identity to be admired. Whether that identity is generous or conceited is up to the choices we make with the power of a million apps at our fingertips.

Where does charity fit into the smartphone experience, and does mobile technology actually encourage people to be more giving? It would be easy to assume that smartphones promote vanity above all else, an argument many have made while sneering at Snapchatting youngsters. Just consider the breadth of tools dedicated to selfies, the weight of likes and upvotes, and the shallow mentality of viral news trends.

At the same time, smartphones make donating easier than ever, to more causes than ever. This ability has been wildly impactful, if not only because the availability and simplicity of the tools that enable it.

The truth is complex — a little of this, a little of that, and a lot of speculation. It may just be that humans are both more charitable and more self-absorbed, and that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. It may just be that the effects of smartphone ubiquity can steer us toward a greater good.

Cell phones and selfishness

We all can picture the stereotype of a grumpy teenager texting at the dinner table, oblivious to both conversation and food. This negative image isn’t completely without warrant: studies have shown that those that spent more time with smartphones were less socially minded. They are also less inclined to volunteer for community service compared to those without their noses in screens. The feeling of connectivity a phone provides, in theory, may in the moment feel like enough to replace physical connection. And so, when we’re digitally connected to our closest friends and family, the impulse to engage with or help outsiders diminishes. We remain glued to Instagram, instead of donating gifts to homeless shelters or building schools for kids.

This effect is called “virtual distance” by some analysts, and it has measurable impacts. The greater the distance, researchers have found, the more separated we become from those around us. We are less inclined to share our ideas, especially in the workplace. Smartphone usage also may prevent us from engaging with and helping others, whether out of distrust or isolation.

Photo: Brandon Warren via Flickr.

The point is, when technology is used as a default for human relations, it can be harmful to their ability to produce real-world benefits. The key is to step back from the digital distance and re-engage with the world, including strangers. For children growing up in the golden age of smartphones, this may be more difficult task than it is for today’s adults, who grew up in a less tech-driven era.

Because mobile apps let users create their own worlds with like-minded individuals and friends, people have a tendency to become more insular in their beliefs and interests. Within a carefully curated social group, there is little room for discovery or new ideas. This can make people less empathetic, and block access to new social causes. While the availability to expand our minds and hearts is greater with smartphones, there’s also just enough information to reinforce complacency.

That’s not to mention the instant gratification of smartphones, which can breed mindsets unwilling to embark on new and potentially difficult journeys without immediate returns. The ease of mobile technology makes delaying gratification harder; the gratification of charity, in comparison to a tangibility of a Seamless delivery, appears more abstract in value.

Whatever the cause, interest in volunteering and charity has seen a precipitous decline in America. Volunteering hit its lowest rate in a decade in 2013.

The case for mobile charity

Every factor that might contribute to a perceived selfishness and detachment among smartphone users can also be used to the benefit of charities worldwide. The trick is in the delivery and expression.

Giving is a social act. Mobile technology can fuel anti-social behavior, as detailed above, but in the digital realm it begets a whole new type of social behavior: social media. Online networks can have enormous reach, and facilitate the constant sharing of thoughts, ideas, and content. When this content is philanthropic in nature, the reach alone can prompt awareness and drive donation.

Photo: m01229 via Flickr.

Researchers say there are three reasons people give: one, because they want to; two, because they think it’s valuable to do so; and three, as a form of showing off. The third reason is a significant one when it comes to mobile donation, which has in many ways become a form of social performance. Think of the ALS Icebox Challenge, which had participants pour icy water on their heads, or the no-makeup selfies for cancer awareness. Neither explicitly required donation, but both raised huge funds along with stroking the egos of the people that jumped on the bandwagon.

Instant gratification works in the favor of charity, too — mobile technology makes donating as easy as one or two taps. When Facebook implemented a “Donate Now” button for nonprofit pages, they positioned themselves to become a hub for online fundraising. Mobile-responsive crowd-funding also lets users get involved in peer-to-peer donation projects. These easy social options have been hugely successful so far on all digital platforms, including mobile.

Text message donations can also be made by smartphone owners — for example, in 2012, the Red Cross launched a donate-by-text initiative, generating $46 million in relief funds after a deadly earthquake in Haiti. Now, there are various SMS processes and campaigns people can use to text pre-set micro-donations to different causes.

Lastly, mobile technology opens completely innovative ways for people to donate to causes that catch their interest. Mobile app Instead let users make small donations in lieu of daily expenses like coffee; One Today showcases a different cause every day; and Tinbox donates money from corporate sponsors in exchange for ad placement on your phone.

What’s the verdict?

By numbers alone, people are more charitable than ever. As the planet’s overall wealth amasses and spending increases, statistically more of this money goes to charitable causes (every year, more of these are made on mobile phones.) Americans give about 3 percent of their income to charity, and this figure has not changed in the decades before or after the smartphone’s rise.

Generally speaking, then, it’s rather dubious to claim that smartphones have changed our charitable virtues for better or worse. More accurately, they have changed not what we do, but how we do it. It just so happens that smartphones have the ability to amplify our actions ad infinitum.

That’s not to say that mobile technology doesn’t have its pitfalls in terms of the behavior it can bring out in users. It sometimes seems as if people have traded in working to help their actual communities in favor of their digital ones, at a loss to psychical spaces in need of extra hands. I think that we should all be careful to engage more with real people and their needs than we do with front-facing camera phones — this said, there is a lot of value behind screens in terms of reach and convenience.

Nonprofits should definitely lean into mobile donations and campaigns that jive with what’s shown to drive progress. It’s simple: Make it a selfie. Make it instant. Make it social. Heck, make it a game. These are the new vehicles of charity — and though may never replace soup kitchen style volunteering, they do work. We can only keep faith that the desire to give back remains part of the human DNA, not to be overwritten by iPhone coding.

Featured image: Jon Fingas via Flickr

The Massive Impact of Effective Altruism Programs

The Massive Impact of Effective Altruism Programs

The nonprofit industry has been growing exponentially over recent years but Effective Altruism programs have found a way to add a element to the historic practice of charitable giving.

The movement focuses on charitable giving guided by data meaning they measure where the most impactful organizations are and what causes need the most attention from a statistical standpoint.

The effect altruism approach has reached a handful of peaks that have amounted in bettered lives and helped established communities globally. Accomplishments like raising over $10 million dollars in funds for direct cash transfers to individuals living in impoverished countries are just an example of this movement’s collective impact Effective Altruist programs work in coherence to deliver amongst the values of this movement through their philanthropy. All programs that support this vision practice core beliefs like open-mindedness, critical thinking and global empathy in route to scale change to a larger level and measure the difference being made. A few organizations under the effective altruism movement include:

Started in 2007, GiveWell specializes is on identifying the most promising causes and charities to donate to. GiveWell is a part of the effective altruism movement and it’s been majorly effective in putting finances and useful attention towards notable causes with productive organizations. In August 2014, GiveWell announced “Open Philanthropy Project” for exploration of more speculative causes. The Open Philanthropy Project is the collaborative bridge between GiveWell and Good Ventures, a philanthropic foundation founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife.

Giving What We Can

Founded in November 2009, Giving What We Can is a community of people interested in maximizing the good they can do implement in emerging markets specifically for global poverty. GWWC largely banks on the research done by organizations like GiveWell that evaluate the actual effectiveness of nonprofits.

80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours is a UK-based organization that conducts research on careers with positive social impact. The name represents the 80,000 hours a healthy person will work in their career lifetime. Direct Giving Bennat Berger

The group emphasizes that the positive impact of choosing a certain occupation should be measured by the amount of additional good that is done as a result of this choice. It considers indirect ways of making a difference, such as donating via your job’s salary, but direct giving is still a focus of theirs as well. 80,000 Hours is run by the charity the Centre for Effective Altruism. There are more effective altruist organizations to fill the roster and each has contributed to the amazing accomplishments that this movement stands by.

It’s hard to believe that such a community of nonprofits only began a few years ago but the positive impact has reached very monumental goals. Over $350 million dollars pledged to evidence based global poverty interventions via GWWC. GWWC, in efforts with SCI, also helped deworm over 4 million school children by way of funding through their platforms. GiveWell and Against Malaria Foundation provided financing for over 1 million bed nets to protect against malaria in needing places.

These causes have been identified by effective altruist supporters as global problems that need positive change and this movement allows such organizations to do said things at a massive level. With such large donations for direct impact, the change being implemented is clearly being scaled to a more macro approach.

These achievements are thanks to the many effective altruism teams across the world. The community includes the founders of Paypal and Skype; over 20 companies and a global network of prestigious educational communities – including students and professors students from institutions such as Harvard, Cambridge, Yale, Oxford and Stanford. Effective altruist organizations have done a spectacular job standing behind a vision of impactful giving to the most needing causes and collaboratively they’ve done that at a bigger scale.

How Charities Use Data to Save Lives

How Charities Use Data to Save Lives

Philanthropic organizations have been put under the microscope lately as people who actively donate want more transparency into where their donations are going. Direct giving is a practice that approaches philanthropy with that exact purpose and, naturally, more and more foundations are starting to participate.

The premise behind GiveWell and other like organizations is that they provide transparency to the donation process. GiveWell vets charities who may receive their grants through a strict application process. Not only has GiveWell created a library of worthy charities, it also helps donors decide where they’ll contribute based around GiveWell’s analysis.

Effective Altruism doesn’t only create a positive trend just for impoverished communities, it also does so for the entire business of philanthropy.

How GiveWell got started and established

GiveWell is arguably the most prominent nonprofit involved in the development of emerging markets and a notable proponent of effective altruism. GiveWell specializes in giving contributors the best opportunities and details so that they can donate where they see the best fit. Their organization has put a priority on conducting deep research into the impact of programs; measured by the lives they’ve saved and communities they’ve changed per dollar spent. But GiveWell only deals with the most notable charities so that donors give to the best of the best.

GiveWell’s intent is to analyze charities by quantifying their effectiveness so that donors have the most insight when giving. Started as a group of donors, this nonprofit began with giving founders who wanted their charitable efforts to be put towards good use.

The organization’s top charities influence some of the most effective initiatives – Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, and Deworm the World Initiative are just a few under GiveWell’s direction. These charities allow GiveWell donors to contribute towards different causes or through different methods of donation. Take GiveDirectly for example, their charity allows cash transfers to households in developing countries through a mobile phone payment service. But GiveDirectly is only one of the many effective programs under the umbrella.

Although GiveWell is one of the founding fathers of this type of nonprofit, it supports a much bigger cause in effective altruism.

Effective Altruism

The quickly growing social movement, effective altruism, is a household name in the nonprofit community. The ideology focuses on charitable giving guided by data. Effective Altruist organizations & projects have the goal of making a massive and efficient impact, something that GiveWell and other nonprofits perpetuate well.

The effect altruism approach has reached a handful of peaks that have amounted in bettered lives and improved communities worldwide. Over $10M in funds raised for direct cash transfers to individuals living in impoverished countries via GiveWell and GiveDirectly’s services. That accomplishment is matched by five others of that caliber that attend to funding for deworming of school kids, global poverty interventions and more honorable causes.

EA organizations fight to make charitable morality more effective and impactful. Bringing a data analysis approach to charities shows donors where their money is actually impacting the causes at hand. The philanthropic landscape is moving more towards this method as it presents a better use of funds in a more streamlined process.