IBM Plays SimCity With Portland, Oregon 220
Hugh Pickens writes "Portland, Oregon will be the first city to use IBM's new software called Systems Dynamics for Smarter Cities, containing 3,000 equations which collectively seek to model cities' emergent behavior and help them figure out how policy can affect the lives of their citizens. The program seeks to quantify the cause-and-effect relationships between seemingly uncorrelated urban phenomena. 'What's the connection, for example, between ... obesity rates and carbon emissions?' writes Greg Lindsay. 'To find out, simply round up experts to hash out the linkages, translate them into algorithms, and upload enough historical data to populate the model. Then turn the knobs to see what happens when you nudge the city in one direction.' One of the drivers of the 'Portland Plan' is the city's commitment to a 40 percent decrease in carbon emissions by 2030, which necessitates less driving and more walking and biking. After running the model, planners discovered a positive feedback loop: More walking and biking would lead to lower obesity rates for Portlanders. In turn, a fitter population would find walking and biking a more attractive option. But as the field of urban systems gathers steam, it's important to remember that IBM and its fellow technology companies aren't the first to offer a quantitative toolkit to cities. In the 1970s, RAND built models they thought could predict fire patterns in New York, and then used them to justify closing fire stations in NYC's poorest sections in the name of efficiency, a decision that would ultimately displace 600,000 people as their neighborhoods burned."
Re:Models don't tell you anything you didn't know (Score:4, Insightful)
People put so much stake in computer models anymore that when they don't match up with reality, reality is blamed for the error.
Re:Models don't tell you anything you didn't know (Score:5, Insightful)
Both an accurate model and a shitty model are, in the hands of a suitably skilled consultant's graphic design team, essentially identical in their ability to provide a dense veneer of scientific rationality, 3D-rendered near-future utopias attractively large-format-printed on posters suitable for display at planning meetings, and other charming props to hang on your existing plans and prejudices...
Things can get particularly ugly if there are large fudge factors in your initial dataset: modeling material stresses, or aerodynamics or such is hard because it is easy to be wrong about difficult stuff, and easy for slight mistakes to cascade(at least, though, there are correct answers that you can hopefully find, even if you don't know them just yet); doing societal cost/benefit analysis is hard because there are lots of factors that don't have quantified costs or benefits, so you can shove the model around just by slapping different price tags on unquantified things.
Re:simple consulting? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparenty they found a computer model that infuses people with a desire to walk and bike:
After running the model, planners discovered a positive feedback loop: More walking and biking would lead to lower obesity rates for Portlanders. In turn, a fitter population would find walking and biking a more attractive option.
I find it very hard to believe that this feedback loop exists in real life to any significant degree. If it really was true, the professional sports athletes would prefer walking and biking over driving their cars, and the sport stars seem to be preferring their luxury sports cars today.
IBM's model must be missing one or more important variables to why people choose cars over walking.
You're misinterpreting that. It said that a fitter population would find walking and biking a more attractive option. Meaning more attractive than an unfit population would.
It's not that most fit people would choose walking over cars, especially not in all situations. It's that a higher percentage of fit people would choose walking or biking than unfit people would. Which makes perfect sense. If I'm going 3 blocks and I'm in good shape, that's not much of a walk. Especially if it's in decent weather. So I may walk it so that I don't have to deal with getting into my car, parking, etc. But if I'm 350 lbs., then that's a difficult walk, so I'm going to take my car.
If I'm going 10 miles or the weather is bad, then I'm driving no matter how fit I am.
Re:Roadless (Score:4, Insightful)
Naturally a city with such a good infrastructure would also have plentiful fire hydrants. Slashdot posters can't seem to imagine anything but the suburban wastelands they live in.
Re:Roadless (Score:2, Insightful)
Naturally a city with such a good infrastructure would also have plentiful fire hydrants.
Since that's the only fire rescuing infrastructure one would require in a city of significant size. Not to mention all the other infrastructure requirements for such type of population centers.
Slashdot posters can't seem to imagine anything but the suburban wastelands they live in.
Just because you imagine it does not translates it to the realm of the practical (or even efficient). There are a lot of ways to design civil infrastructure that is more eco-friendly, economical and sustainable. Yours ain't one of them. You haven't even put any thought behind them as you are simply defending the indefensible just as a matter of course. It is crap like this that gives sustainable engineering a bad rep among the common cattle. Despite what you might believe about yourself and your ideas, you are also part of the same mindless cattle (but just so happen to be munching grass on the other side of the corral.)
Also, a tendency to making derogatory assumptions (and that are easily falsifiable) on the readers that disagree is usually an indication that a logically weak point is being defended. But don't let that dissuade your exercising of your freedom of speech when making dumb posts and all that. So feel free to build up your strawmen, so long as you don't complain about the splinters you get from f* with it.