UP Links 19 February 2013

It has been to the Netherlands, not surprisingly, that some American officials, planners, engineers, architects and others have been looking lately. New York is not Rotterdam (or Venice or New Orleans, for that matter); it’s not mostly below or barely above sea level. But it’s not adapted to what seems likely to be increasingly frequent extreme storm surges, either, and the Netherlands has successfully held back the sea for centuries and thrived. After the North Sea flooded in 1953, devastating the southwest of this country and killing 1,835 people in a single night, Dutch officials devised an ingenious network of dams, sluices and barriers called the Deltaworks.

Water management here depends on hard science and meticulous study. Americans throw around phrases like once-in-a-century storm. The Dutch, with a knowledge of water, tides and floods honed by painful experience, can calculate to the centimeter — and the Dutch government legislates accordingly — exactly how high or low to position hundreds of dikes along rivers and other waterways to anticipate storms they estimate will occur once every 25 years, or every 1,000 years, or every 10,000.

Ahmed explains that when it comes to Kabul’s traffic police, “the rules are unevenly applied, punitive to those who can least afford it, and mostly irrelevant to those with money and power.”

The point here is that it’s the poor, like Sayed Wahid, who are hit hardest by Kabul’s endemic corruption. Either they do the sensible thing, and pay a bribe they can ill afford, or else they’re at real risk of losing their livelihood. Meanwhile, the rich and powerful aren’t even asked to pay bribes: the police know better than to try this stunt on someone who could easily get them fired. It’s safe to solicit a bribe from a guy from Kunduz in a van; you’d have to be much braver to try it with a man in a suit driving a Mercedes.

It’s not that the rich don’t pay bribes at all; of course they do. But in general when the rich pay bribes, they tend to get even richer. That’s the deal: that’s business. When the poor pay bribes, by contrast, it’s a deadweight loss: it’s just money disappearing into the pockets of a corrupt official, never to be seen again.

It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.

“He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,” Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone, the answers to those questions remain palpable at the press of a button. The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.

The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment.

“The research has shown that every time the size of a city doubles, productivity or innovation per resident increases by 15 percent,” Hsieh says. “But when companies get bigger, productivity per employee generally goes down. So we want to figure out how do you actually avoid the fate that most companies have and instead create this interesting hybrid between corporation and community and city so that you actually get productivity increases both for the company as well as the community and city?”

Yet more research, he adds, has shown that most innovation happens as a result of an idea from one industry being applied to another. And so he is equally invested in having his Zappos employees bump into the owner of a jazz bar down the street as he is in having them bump into each other in the hallway

But, as China’s economy and society advance, engagement with global markets and growing awareness of rights have caused expectations to change faster than the law and judicial practices. The Chinese people are no longer satisfied with rule by law and are demanding an end to systemic corruption, inadequate land rights, discrimination against migrant workers, state-owned enterprises’ privileged position, and weak protection of intellectual property.

…Given China’s past experience, we are likely to see a period of institutional innovation, characterized by marginal changes leading to a system of checks and balances on the exercise of state power. This will require orchestration from the top and experimentation at the bottom.

The industry has introduced innovations that have reduced the costs of desalinating water. Companies started to adopt technologies to pump water through membrane filters to capture salt in the 1990s. That brought down the price of desalinated water to less than $1 a cubic meter from $3, says Ashvalom Felber, chief executive officer of IDE Technologies Ltd., one of the world’s three largest manufacturers of desalination plants.

And technology developed by San Leandro, California-based Energy Recovery Inc. and other companies that recirculates water in filtering plants has cut energy expenses by as much as 60 percent, says Energy Recovery CEO Tom Rooney. The technology lessens the cost of a cubic meter of desalinated water to about 50 cents, Felber says.

Fresh ground supplies, by comparison, run less than 20 cents, according to the 2030 Water Resources Group.

“The industry keeps evolving, and prices keep coming down,” Felber says.