Pi Day Memories

Real Men Cook Quiche

We celebrated PI Day at our house with a scrumptious mushroom quiche -- Pam is good at crust; I'm good at filling. I also celebrated by challenging my K-16 students and colleagues to some earth and globe calculations via our EarthView blog.

It is too late for this year's Pi Day, but it is not too early to start sharpening pencils and gathering "pi" recipes for next year!

Teaching Mentors of the Future

My recent McSchool post centers on a video that seems like a parody of education "reform" but is actually a serious piece of bragging from the Education-Industrial Complex. Apparently, we are living in an age of  convergence between parody and reality (remember the difficulty of discerning Sarah Palin from Tina Fey a couple years ago), so I will be clear: the following is a parody. It does represent, however, where we seem to be headed, as politicians across our country's narrow political spectrum continue to be taken in by the chimera of "accountability."

Mapping America

Thanks to the New York Times for putting data from the U.S. Census Bureau's most recent American Community Survey online in a very engaging format. Maps relating to race, income, education, and families are available at scales ranging from very local to the entire country. The data are aggregated at the level of the census tract, which are calibrated to include roughly equal numbers of people (so that tracts in Manhattan, for example, are tiny in comparison to rural tracts or tracts in most other cities). Individual dots are scattered randomly within those tracts or larger spatial units -- each dot representing different numbers of people depending on the scale being viewed. The maps are produced in partnership with Social Explorer, which provides access to a wealth of census data.

NASA of Coffee

While we are wasting our time in the United States debating whether or not the climate is changing, coffee farmers throughout the world are trying to figure out how to cope with it. The New York Times reports on the research being undertaken at the "NASA of Coffee" in Colombia, a research center dedicated to researching its potentially devastating effects on coffee.

This video accompanies a print article whose title points out why even the most disinterested coffee drinker should care: Heat Damages Colombia Coffee, Raising Prices (though climate change is not the only cause of the price spike that has been developing over the past few months). Learn more about coffee and climate change from my previous blog posts on the topic.

Hydrogeography of Giving

I do not usually forward or post anonymous, schmaltzy tidbits from the Internet, but I could not resist the geography metaphor in this plea for living generously. (I received it from a fellow geographer who is also not in the habit.)

Image: AtlasTours

Sitting in the geography class in school, I remember how fascinated I was when we were being taught all about the Dead Sea.  

If you recall, the Dead Sea is really a lake, not a sea. Its so high in salt content that the human body can float easily. One can almost lie down and read a book!

The salt in the Dead Sea is as high as 35% - almost 10 times the normal ocean water. And all that saltiness has meant that there is no life at all in the Dead Sea. No fish. No vegetation. No sea animals. Nothing lives in the Dead sea.

Hence the name: Dead Sea.

While the Dead Sea has remained etched in my memory, I don't seem to recall learning about the Sea of Galilee in my school geography lesson. So, when I heard about the Sea of Galilee & the Dead Sea and, the tale of the two seas - I was intrigued.
Turns out that the Sea of Galilee is just north of the Dead Sea. Both, the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, receive their water from river Jordan. Yet, they are very, very different.

Unlike the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee is pretty, resplendent with rich, colorful marine life. There are lots of plants and lot of fish, too. In fact, the sea of Galilee is home to over twenty different types of fishes.
Same region, same source of water, and yet, one sea is full of life, the other is dead. How come?

Here is why: The River Jordan flows into the Sea of Galilee and then flows out. The water simply passes through the Sea of Galilee in and out - and that keeps the Sea healthy and vibrant, teeming with marine life.

But: the Dead Sea is so far below the sea level, that it has no outlet. The water flows in from the river Jordan, but does not flow out. There are no outlet streams at all. It is estimated that over a million tons of water evaporates from the Dead Sea every day, leaving it salty. Too full of minerals and unfit for any marine life.

The Dead Sea takes water from the River Jordan, and holds it. It does not give/flow out. Result? No life at all. Think about it. Life is not just about getting. Its about giving, sharing. We all need to be a bit like the Sea of Galilee. 


We are fortunate to get wealth, knowledge, love and respect. But, if we don't learn to give, we could all end up like the Dead Sea. The love, the respect, the wealth and the knowledge; could all evaporate. Like the water in the Dead Sea.

If we get the Dead Sea mentality of merely taking in more water, more money, more of everything, the results can be disastrous. A good idea to make sure that in the sea of your own life, you must have outlets. Many outlets for love, wealth and everything else that you get in your life. Make sure you don't just get, you give out, too. Open the taps. And you'll be opening the floodgates to happiness.

Make that a habit. To share. To give. Experience life. Experience the magic of giving.


James here again: The geography metaphor is much ore useful with a map. Click below to pan, zoom, and activate labels.


View Larger Map

Plum Island

On days that I am teaching, I often check historic anniversaries to see if a relevant anniversary can be brought into the discussion. For anniversary lessons close to home, I subscribe to the Mass Moments e-mail list. Every day I receive a brief description of an event that took place in Massachusetts, with a link to a more detailed version of the story, along with a bibliography and links to related resources.

Yesterday's post began with a 1704 wolf hunt, building on that event to describe the fascinating history of land management on Plum Island, a 9-square-mile barrier island north of Boston. I have been to the island once, more than a decade ago. I remember it as a beautiful place to which I would like to return, and I am more determined to do so after reading this article. We were at a graduation party at a private home, but when we return it will be to wildlife refuge that covers much of the island. The Mass Moments post describes how that refuge came to be established to protect the great diversity of birds that migrate to the island.

Free Fuel Illusion

The New Agriculturalist blog recently reviewed a new title from Zed Books that I look forward to seeing. According to the review, James  Smith's Biofuels and the Globalization of Risk analyses the diversion of agricultural land to the production of fuel, and concludes that current approaches do not contribute to sustainability. The subtitle hints at the reason: The Biggest Change In North-South Relations Since Colonization?

Simply put, the production of fuel from corn and other crops transfers dependence on oil to dependence on cropland that is still needed for, well, crops. Smith estimates that 350 million people could be fed from the land that has already been diverted to biofuels. He concludes that biofuels offer a promise that cannot be realized: sustainability without lifestyle change.

Zed Books offers an additional title on this topic: Food versus Fuel.

NarcoDonors

Last November, just after El Dia de Los Muertos, I posted an article about the violent unraveling of the US-Mexico border zone, a region in which I lived for seven years. The article focused on the growing violence that still remains largely confined to the Mexico side, though its roots are deep on both sides. I included a discussion of  Santa Sangre, a new, nihilistic religious movement created by and for the narcotraficantes themselves.

Damien Cave reports in today's NY Times that the movement has grown to about 6,000 independently-built chapels throughout the country. He also reports that the influence of traffickers is being felt in the mainstream church as well. His focus is on a new church building in Pachuca (north of Mexico City) that was funded by a well-known member of the Zeta gang. Although at least one blogger sees this as bias against the church, I find that journalist Cave offers a sympathetic description of the dilemma that church officials and parishioners face as they decide whether or not to accept such tainted money, and the difficulty of resistance. He also alludes to the moral taint that is often associated with more formally legitimate funding sources. The major implication of this piece, however, is that the U.S. drug war as it is currently pursued threatens to undermine the Mexican state.

Salaries are Spatial

Because the United States does not provide universal health care -- as the governments of most other wealthy countries do -- most people who are insured purchase their health insurance, sometimes as individuals but usually as part of an employee group. Connecting health care to insurance and insurance, in turn, to employment, creates a tremendous amount of waste, confusion in the best cases, while leading to misery, pain, illness, and even death in the worst cases.

I bring all this up because it relates to a special case of a general phenomenon I have been observing for years. One reason we do not have universal health care is that its opponents (read: the American Medical Association and insurance companies) have managed, with decades of effort, to convince enough people that the words "public," "government," and "Communist" all mean the same thing. At the same time, they have convinced us that the alternative is "choice" and that this is best provided by a "free market" in health care. The shameless commodification of health care should come as no surprise in a society that seems bent on subjecting every aspect of human endeavor to whims of markets.

What is surprising is the extent to which people have been convinced that such a convoluted, artificial, and indeed rigged system is in fact a "free market" when nothing can be further from the truth. I am increasingly convinced that no free market as defined in neoclassical economics exists for any good or service, and never has. Health care as it exists in the United States should be just the most obvious of many examples.

The involvement of Blue Cross/Blue Shield adds to the cognitive dissonance in the discussion, as it bills itself (pun intended) as a network of non-profit organizations, even though it serves to generate exorbitant monetary rewards for its leaders. In Massachusetts, the stratospheric severance pay given to its recently departed CEO has raised eyebrows and has gotten the attention of our attorney general, if not our governor. Exorbitant rewards for poor performance are becoming all-too familiar, as are the excuses for out-sized pay at the top of most organizations.

In the case of severance packages -- and I have seen this up-close in a former church -- it is routinely pointed out that the executive's contract required a particular level of severance pay. Current directors have no choice but to comply with what is, after all, a binding obligation. This begs what should be an obvious question: why are such terms negotiated? I would certainly include a generous, no-fault payout in my contract if I could, but everyone knows that is impossible. Why? Because such arrangements do not come from negotiations that take place in free markets or from collective-bargaining processes. They come from a third universe of compensation decisions: executive pay.

Learn more at
Executive PayWatch

In executive pay -- and in the pay of those who work closely with executives -- free markets do not operate, at least not fully. In this arena, pay (and benefits, including severance) may be influenced by several factors, including such "market" considerations as years of experience, breadth of knowledge, level of responsibility, special skills, and so on -- in short, the scarcity of one's credentials and the level of one's commitment. These are minor in comparison, however, with one much more important factor: proximity to those who set salaries.

This became crystal clear to me more than a decade ago, when I heard an executive -- justifying large administrative pay increases while staff pay stagnated -- remarked that "these people work their butts off." In that moment, I realized that the work of those close to the top is better compensated simply because they are close to the top. The difference in pay, for example, between "executive" secretaries and other secretaries has something to do with ability, since executives will reward themselves with more talented secretaries. But the gap is enhanced by proximity to the top, even in the most honestly-run organizations. (One interesting corollary: executives who assign themselves the most talented and best-compensated support staff -- often in unlimited numbers -- enhance their own performance relative to ordinary workers who have far less control over hiring of the people on whom they rely.

Which brings us back to Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Not only is my proximity thesis borne out by Killingsworth's extraordinary; these directors took it to an extraordinary level by approving pay for themselves as members of a non-profit board. The advantages of this arrangement compared to a "government takeover of health care" are difficult to discern.

Biggest Ships Ever

During my last semester as an undergraduate, I took a course in the geography of transport development -- in other words, how the current configuration of transportation networks had developed. To be honest, although I was a geography major, I only took the course because it fit my schedule -- I was just racking up credit hours at that point. (Little was I to know how much that one choice would steer the rest of my life, as getting to know Dr. Starr a bit better was to open the door to everything else I have done in geography.)

During the course, I remembered that as a first-year student on a different campus, I knew a student whose major was transportation, and I could not fathom how that could be an area of study. After a semester with Dr. John Starr, however, I realized that transportation is both a product and a producer of many intersecting geographies.

Of all the developments and technologies we studied -- from canals to the Eisenhower interstates -- one word stands out as most crucial for understanding the ongoing integration of the world space-economy (a.k.a. globalization), and that word is: conTAINerization. I remember my classmate Mike and I competing to see who could best capture Dr. Starr's glee in sounding out the word. RO-RO shipping (roll on - roll off) had revolutionized the transportation by greatly reducing the costs incurred at break-in-bulk points. Once put on a truck, products could move by road, rail, sea, and then rail and road again. Uniformity in containers and investment in the necessary cranes eliminated thousands of jobs for stevedores and others, while greatly decreasing the time required for shipping products.

Combined with strategic decisions being made from Bentonville to Beijing, containerization allowed for the rapid increase in the length of supply chains. As a graduate student teaching economic geography, I drew on an excellent article* about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to illustrate the equally important role of communication and information technologies in enabling extremely long supply chains to reduce costs, even for complex products being created and engineered within short time frames.

Which brings us back to the Danish company Maersk, which is the focus of a very brief article I noticed in the current issue of The Economist. Like many people, I've been seeing the company name for many years, but did not give it much thought until a high-profile piracy incident in 2009. Standard containers now figure very prominently in the coffee trade, as importers and exporters usually try to transact trade by the container, rather than by the bag (a huge difference), and I recall seeing a number of Maersk containers as we made our way from the coffeelands of Matagalpa toward the sea in January of this year.

The amazing thing about this story is that despite the ongoing recession in some countries -- such as the U.S. -- Maersk has been expanding its activities and profits and is expecting enough growth in the near future to sustain TEN new ships, each about 25 percent bigger than the largest ships currently on the water (which are Maersk ships). The new colossi will each hold 18,000 containers. If each container were to be put directly onto a semi-tractor, a single new ship could empty a string of trucks 200 miles long, bumper-to-bumper. The ships will operate between Europe and Asia, in part because a lot of trade is between these regions (empty ships to China; full ships from China) and presumably because they are post-Panamax, which is to say too big to fit through the Panama Canal.

It is perhaps incongruous that such large ships have an environmental benefit. Once loaded and in motion, the marginal costs per mile of transporting containers is relatively low by rail and extremely low by water. Similarly, once loaded, the marginal cost per container of transporting extra containers diminishes with each added one. A ship that combines the latest energy-conserving technologies with enormous size can therefore be seen as a boon to the environment.

The article ends with an interesting observation. Although container ships are currently being built, enough ships have been built in recent years for bulk products such as wheat or coal. What is most interesting is how these bulk ships currently travel: in contrast to container ships laden with consumer goods going out from China to all parts of the globe, bulk ships are steaming toward China laden with the raw materials of the rest of the world, which will go back out to much of that world in a different form ... and in containers!

*Patton, Phil and Mark S. Wexler. 1992. How a ridiculous idea mutated into a marketing star. Smithsonian 23(9).