Isegoria

Supersizing the Levees describes the costs of bigger and better hurricane defenses:

Besides costing billions of dollars, bolstering the line of defense against future hurricanes would likely send swarms of bulldozers into swank neighborhoods, threaten environmentally vulnerable marshes and trigger lawsuits from homeowners whose property would have to be seized to make room for the supersize levees. Raising the height of the levees to 25 feet or higher could also block views of the lake and require engineers to widen the base of the dirt structures by 100 feet or more.

Boing Boing notes that “Slate editor Jack Shafer has a nice essay about the glory days of early 20th century newspapers,” especially Pulitzer’s World.

Fast Company interviews Ray Kurzweil in In Search of the Sixth Sense:

FC: You’re also working on a product to predict changes in the stock market.

Kurzweil: The company is called Fat Kat. Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adapted Technologies. I founded it about five years ago. We have a blue-ribbon group of investors. Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. He and John Doerr run Kleiner Perkins. He is our lead investor. Mike Brown is another lead investor — he’s on our board. He was chief financial officer of Microsoft for many years, and chairman of Nasdaq. And we have a number of other prominent high-tech people backing us. And the concept is applying my field, pattern recognition, to the stock market, particularly to short-term movements of stocks. And if you look at a particular stock it looks like an electric cardiogram. It constantly goes up and down. These little movements look random, and there’s certainly a very large random component to the movement, but its not entirely unpredictable because companies have relationships with one another. They own each other. They’re in supply chains with each other. They’re in industries with each other. There’s all kinds of influences. If you see certain movements in certain stocks, that’s putting out all kinds of ripple patterns and it ultimately will reflect itself in other movements in other securities. In fact the speed with which those reverberations or implications occur is speeding up with the more rapid dissemination of information. We look at data from 10-15 years ago, and we can see similar patterns today. But the patterns 15 years ago were moving much more slowly. Right now, there’s an announcement, and 30 minutes later it’s old news because it’s been all over the Internet. Whereas, 15 years ago, it would take days for the information to move around. So we actually see very similar patterns. They just move more quickly.

From Convoy to Tennessee Brings Immigrants To Shelter After Storm:

Like tens of thousands of New Orleans residents, Fredi Escobar fled the city on Aug. 28 with little more than the shirt on his back.

By the second week in September, after a 800-mile journey that first took him to Texas, Mr. Escobar had rented an apartment here and secured a job as an auto mechanic. ‘This is all we wanted — to work and get on with our lives,’ says Mr. Escobar, 32, heading home recently to have dinner with his wife.

This rapid rebound sets Mr. Escobar apart from thousands of evacuees who are still in shelters and surviving on aid from government agencies, churches and other organizations. Something else distinguishes him too: Mr. Escobar is an illegal immigrant.

Apparently the Latino community has taken better care of its own than the federal government has. Not too surprising…

Dropping Everything tells the story of how Bruce French, “an itinerant private chef living in a teepee…in Telluride, Colorado,” picked up and left for Peraliya, Sri Lanka, after the tsunami hit:

Mr. French confronted and rejected the kinds of notions many people harbor in times of crisis: The international aid community would never let down a person in need. The poor are always noble. Big companies, including Big Oil, don’t have a heart.

Over time, some locals came to resent the foreigners, who they thought were meddling in village affairs. Mr. French was forced to deliver aid in secret to forestall jealousies. One of Mr. French’s friends began to drink heavily after long days of collecting bodies. Another came to view the Sri Lankans as ungrateful.

Do the Right Thing opens with a moral dilemma:

Consider the following dilemma: Mike is supposed to be the best man at a friend’s wedding in Maine this afternoon. He is carrying the wedding rings with him in New Hampshire, where he has been staying on business. One bus a day goes directly to the coast. Mike is on his way to the bus station with 15 minutes to spare when he realizes that his wallet has been stolen, and with it his bus tickets, his credit cards, and all his forms of ID.

At the bus station Mike tries to persuade the officials, and then a couple of fellow travelers, to lend him the money to buy a new ticket, but no one will do it. He’s a stranger, and it’s a significant sum. With five minutes to go before the bus’s departure, he is sitting on a bench trying desperately to think of a plan. Just then, a well-dressed man gets up for a walk, leaving his jacket, with a bus ticket to Maine in the pocket, lying unattended on the bench. In a flash, Mike realizes that the only way he will make it to the wedding on time is if he takes that ticket. The man is clearly well off and could easily buy himself another one.

Should Mike take the ticket?

Unsurprisingly, different cultures answer the question differently:

My own judgment comes down narrowly, but firmly, against stealing the ticket. And in studies of moral reasoning, the majority of American adults and children answer as I do: Mike should not take the ticket, even if it means missing the wedding. But this proportion varies dramatically across cultures. In Mysore, a city in the south of India, 85 percent of adults and 98 percent of children say Mike should steal the ticket and go to the wedding. Americans, and I, justify our choice in terms of justice and fairness: it is not right for me to harm this stranger — even in a minor way. We could not live in a world in which everyone stole whatever he or she needed. The Indian subjects focus instead on the importance of personal relationships and contractual obligations, and on the relatively small harm that will be done to the stranger in contrast to the much broader harm that will be done to the wedding.

An elder in a Maisin village in Papua New Guinea sees the situation from a third perspective, focused on collective responsibility. He rejects the dilemma: “If nobody [in the community] helped him and so he [stole], I would say we had caused that problem.”

The article then goes on to examine the burgeoning field of moral psychology.

The Taming of the Screw recounts how Kenneth LeVey developed a new technology for creating highly specialized screws that wouldn’t, for instance, compress and crack concrete:

Screws are made, oddly enough, by squeezing metal rather than cutting it. A steel or alloy blank, a cylinder with no threads, is rolled between two heavy dies that are grooved with diagonal lines. The blank is put under so much pressure that metal is squished into the diagonal grooves, forming a threaded spiral. Manipulating the shape of the threads using this method, called thread-rolling, was thought to be impossible because it would be too hard to control the structure of the screw if metal oozed into odd shapes.

LeVey considered stamping screws instead, but engineers couldn’t figure out how to get the threads all the way around the screw, and they couldn’t make the screws unscrew. He dreamed up a new way of shaping the screws, using two spinning discs instead of dies, but it would have required expensive new equipment and the writeoff of millions of dollars in old equipment. So he returned to thread-rolling to try to revamp a century-old process.

He was flabbergasted by how archaic screw design was. On rare occasions when a new screw length or width was needed, an engineer would consult a 300-page manual dating from 1936 that explains the relationships between certain heights and pitches of threads and the lengths and widths of the resulting screws. ‘They would go do math for a couple of days and come back with an answer,’LeVey says–to how the grooved dies should look, how much pressure should be applied to the blank, and what the diameter of the blank should be.

LeVey had a handful of interns spend three months putting the mummified math of the old screw guide into software. Meanwhile, he grabbed an old thread-rolling machine out of a nearby factory and wired it to operate very slowly to let him observe exactly what was happening. Using three-dimensional solid-modeling software, LeVey gleaned a finer understanding of how the metal moved when it was squished. Possibilities opened up. LeVey could design intricate dies that, on a computer at least, could wrap screws with a helix of shaped threads.

To make dies capable of pressing tiny, intricate patterns onto the threads, LeVey had to borrow a technology often used to create injection molds for detailed plastic parts. The pattern of the die is milled into a soft, graphitelike carbon. The carbon is placed next to the steel die form, and very high voltage is sent between the carbon and the steel, creating a powerful arc of heat, which vaporizes the steel in the desired pattern. ‘No one had bothered to take advantage of all of this new technology available to us and apply it to this very old product,’ LeVey says.

By 2003 LeVey and ITW finally had a product. The company, under its Tapcon brand, began marketing large-diameter concrete screws with tiny, arrowhead-shape chisels wrapped around the screw, to cut into concrete like sharks’ teeth. Builders previously had to insert adhesive into predrilled holes to get screws to hold when they attached wood framing to concrete foundations; now they can just use LeVey’s breakthrough.

(Hat tip to GeekPress.)

Chris Anderson, of “Long Tail” fame, sings the praises of The Media Center PC:

I’ll no doubt be savaged for praising a Microsoft product, but my favorite technology of the week is our Windows Media Center PC.

It looks like a product with a future:

It appears that, after a slow start, Media Center PCs are finally taking off and now account for 43% of desktop PCs sold in retail (although less than a third of them have TV tuners). Microsoft is promoting it by eliminating the price premium over the regular Windows XP home edition. As a result, you can now find Media Center PCs for less than $900. It’s also going to be built into the default home version of Windows Vista, the next major Microsoft OS. And it’s at the core of Intel’s new Digital Home strategy.   Analysts expect Media Center PCs to reach US sales of more than 20m a year by 2007, and some are rather hyperbolically predicting that it will be "next year’s iPod".