Fishermen load their catch of sardines into crates on the Adriatic Sea, May 1970. James P. Blair, National Geographic.
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Unhappy Truckers and Other Algorithmic Problems

[ed. See also: The Trucker and the Professor.]

When Bob Santilli, a senior project manager at UPS, was invited in 2009 to his daughter’s fifth grade class on Career Day, he struggled with how to describe exactly what he did for a living. Eventually, he decided he would show the class a travel optimization problem of the kind he worked on, and impress them with how fun and complex it was. The challenge was to choose the most efficient route among six different stops, in a typical suburban-errands itinerary. The class devised their respective routes, then began picking them over. But one girl thought past the question of efficiency. “She says, my mom would never go to the store and buy perishable things—she didn’t use the word perishable, I did—and leave it in the car the whole day at work,” Santilli tells me.

Her comment reflects a basic truth about the math that runs underneath the surface of nearly every modern transportation system, from bike-share rebalancing to airline crew scheduling to grocery delivery services. Modeling a simplified version of a transportation problem presents one set of challenges (and they can be significant). But modeling the real world, with constraints like melting ice cream and idiosyncratic human behavior, is often where the real challenge lies. As mathematicians, operations research specialists, and corporate executives set out to mathematize and optimize the transportation networks that interconnect our modern world, they are re-discovering some of our most human quirks and capabilities. They are finding that their job is as much to discover the world, as it is to change it. (...)

A mathematician claimed the prize, and a regal $10,000. But the contest organizers could only verify that his solution was the shortest of those submitted, and not that it was the shortestpossible route. That’s because solving a 33-city problem by calculating every route individually would require 28 trillion years—on the Department of Energy’s 129,000-core supercomputer Roadrunner (which is among the world’s fastest clusters). It’s for this reason that William J. Cook, in his book In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman, calls the traveling salesman problem “the focal point of a larger debate on the nature of complexity and possible limits to human knowledge.” Its defining characteristic is how quickly the complexity scales. A six-city tour has only 720 possible paths, while a 20-city tour has—by Cook’s quick calculations on his Mac—more than 100 quadrillion possible paths. (...)

By now it should be clear that we are not talking just about the routing needs of salesmen, for even the most trenchant of regional reps does not think about hitting 90,000 far-flung burghs on a call. But the Traveling Salesman Problem, and its intellectual cousins, are far from theoretical; indeed, they are at the invisible heart of our transportation networks. Every time you want to go somewhere, or you want something to get to you, the chances are someone is thinking at that very moment how to make that process more efficient. We are all of us traveling salesmen.

by Tom Vanderbilt, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Peter and Maria Hoey

Francis Bacon: Triptych (1976)
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The ‘Shift the Goalpost’ Home Sale

It’s a deal. Or is it?

After apartment-hunting in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for months this spring, Dr. Ronald Nath finally lucked out with a two-bedroom duplex at the top of a condominium, listed at $800,000.

A day after a crowded open house, Dr. Nath, a Massachusetts surgeon, offered $803,000 for the unit, which was to be a home for his son David, a television news producer. But because of its location and the outdoor spaces on both floors, the unit attracted more than a dozen offers, which prompted the seller to request higher bids.

For his “best and final” offer, which usually signals the end of the haggling process, Dr. Nath promised $912,000, which seemed to do the trick. The seller congratulated Dr. Nath and told him the unit was his; a contract was drawn up.

Not so fast. A few days later, like a kite in a gust of wind, the price soared again, to $995,000. Insulted by what he described as being “played,” Dr. Nath refused to raise his offer and ultimately lost the unit to a buyer who plunked down $1.1 million. “I was absolutely outraged,” he said. “When you give your word that a deal is done, you’re supposed to fulfill your agreement.”

A real estate deal, like any other business transaction, isn’t ironclad until signatures wind up on a contract, said Tom Le of the Corcoran Group, the seller’s broker, who defended his clients’ right to get the highest possible price for their unit, even if it left some raw feelings.

“Of course Dr. Nath is going to be upset, because his heart was set on the apartment,” Mr. Le said. “But the truth is, Dr. Nath was given every single opportunity to match the price.” He added that after watching home values plummet over the last few years, sellers finally have relief. “They’ve been scraping by for years just to get to this point.” Both the seller and the buyer declined to comment, said Mr. Le, who added that even he had been taken aback by the intensity of interest in the home.

Whether caused by economics, or the unseemly equivalent of moving the goalposts to prevent touchdowns, experiences like Dr. Nath’s are becoming more common in a market with a huge pool of buyers chasing a limited number of homes.

Not too long ago, an accepted offer marked the home stretch of the deal: the expectation was that the two sides would sign a contract and a deposit check would be cashed a few days later. Now, as sellers go back on their word and repeatedly increase their asking prices, “best and final” often seems to mean “O.K. and almost there,” according to real estate industry sources.

by C.J. Hughes, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Nancy Doniger

Guy Mendes, Okoboji
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Paul Wackers
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Catherine Ryan
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Ryan Adams

Streets Can Be Public Spaces Too

As I wrote last fall, to move more deliberately toward anything resembling a sustainable future, we need to use land more efficiently, building more compactly, with higher densities of homes and businesses per acre than we built, on average, in the late 20th century. We particularly must do this in two circumstances: by retrofitting or "repairing" what are now low-density suburbs with aging commercial buildings going out of service, and by reinvesting and rebuilding in disinvested parts of central cities and older towns and suburbs. While I am on record as saying that we don’t necessarily need high densities to achieve these improvements, we certainly need to do much, much better than sprawl.

A growing segment of the market is ready for more urban environments, but for young urbanites to remain committed to city living and more walkable suburban environments as their life circumstances evolve, they will need higher quality urban places than we have offered in the recent past; and they will need relief from the sometimes harshness that unmitigated density can bring. It is the urban commons – the parks, plazas, streets, greenery and public facilities we share or in which we have a collective interest – that have the greatest potential to provide these things. As I argued earlier this year, sustained success – and successful sustainability, for that matter – require that there must be a "there" to the neighborhoods, cities, suburbs and towns we inhabit. (...)

There is no better place to start than with our streets, our most plentiful and visible parts of the urban commons. And I would offer as a first principle that a street is not just a "street"; a road is not just a "road." We have come to think of streets and roads as conduits, particularly for motorized vehicles: viaducts for getting us from point A to point B as efficiently as possible. Anything that slows us along the way is viewed as a detriment.

There are probably some roadways (inter-city freeways, perhaps; but not city streets, I would argue) for which vehicle travel efficiency is still a supreme goal. But that objective should not be allowed to define all streets, particularly in urban and suburban areas. My friend and street-design mentor Victor Dover, in an excellent essay on the subject for the just-published second edition of the Charter of the New Urbanism, reminds us that streets have historically been regarded differently:

Our society once created many different types of streets. A street was not just a conduit for moving cars and trolleys through, but also a place in its own right for socializing, entertainment, commerce, and for civic expression. Pedestrians (and their natural allies, the cyclists) ruled. (...)

But, when I say that a street is not just a "street,” I mean that it is not just a surface for motorized travel. It is also the sidewalk, the curb, the trees and “street furniture” that line it; the facings of the shops, homes, and other buildings and uses along the way. It is not just about transportation, but also about civic definition and social and commercial interaction. It is a system, at a minimum, and should at least aspire to becoming a place, as Victor asserts.

by Kaid Benfield, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: Courtesy of ITE and CNU

Special Deal

On the last week of April earlier this year, a small committee of doctors met quietly in a midsized ballroom at the Renaissance Hotel in Chicago. There was an anesthesiologist, an ophthalmologist, a radiologist, and so on—thirty-one in all, each representing their own medical specialty society, each a heavy hitter in his or her own field.

The meeting was convened, as always, by the American Medical Association. Since 1992, the AMA has summoned this same committee three times a year. It’s called the Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee (or RUC, pronounced “ruck”), and it’s probably one of the most powerful committees in America that you’ve never heard of.

The purpose of each of these triannual RUC meetings is always the same: it’s the committee members’ job to decide what Medicare should pay them and their colleagues for the medical procedures they perform. How much should radiologists get for administering an MRI? How much should cardiologists be paid for inserting a heart stent?

While these doctors always discuss the “value” of each procedure in terms of the amount of time, work, and overhead required of them to perform it, the implication of that “value” is not lost on anyone in the room: they are, essentially, haggling over what their own salaries should be. “No one ever says the word ‘price,’ ” a doctor on the committee told me after the April meeting. “But yeah, everyone knows we’re talking about money.”

That doctor spoke to me on condition of anonymity in part because all the committee members, as well as more than a hundred or so of their advisers and consultants, are required before each meeting to sign what was described to me as a “draconian” nondisclosure agreement. They are not allowed to talk about the specifics of what is discussed, and they are not allowed to remove any of the literature handed out behind those double doors. Neither the minutes nor the surveys they use to arrive at their decisions are ever published, and the meetings, which last about five days each time, are always closed to both the public and the press. After that meeting in April, there was not so much as a single headline, not in any major newspaper, not even on the wonkiest of the TV shows, announcing that it had taken place at all.

In a free market society, there’s a name for this kind of thing—for when a roomful of professionals from the same trade meet behind closed doors to agree on how much their services should be worth. It’s called price-fixing. And in any other industry, it’s illegal—grounds for a federal investigation into antitrust abuse, at the least.

But this, dear readers, is not any other industry. This is the health care industry, and here, this kind of “price-fixing” is not only perfectly legal, it’s sanctioned by the U.S. government. At the end of each of these meetings, RUC members vote anonymously on a list of “recommended values,” which are then sent to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that runs those programs. For the last twenty-two years, the CMS has accepted about 90 percent of the RUC’s recommended values—essentially transferring the committee’s decisions directly into law.

The RUC, in other words, enjoys basically de facto control over how roughly $85 billion in U.S. taxpayer money is divvied up every year. And that’s just the start of it. Because of the way the system is set up, the values the RUC comes up with wind up shaping the very structure of the U.S. health care sector, creating the perverse financial incentives that dictate how our doctors behave, and affecting the annual expenditure of nearly one-fifth of our GDP.

by Haley Sweetland Edwards, Washington Monthly | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Kintsugi (to patch with gold) or Kintsukuroi (to repair with gold) is the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery and ceramics using a lacquer resin sprinkled with powdered gold (or silver). Rather than being concealed, the damage is celebrated and becomes a defining feature of the object. As a general rule, the repaired artifact acquires far higher value and enjoys greater appreciation than it had in its previously undamaged state.
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Daniel Gordon ‘The Green Line’
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Joseph Lorusso (1966)
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The Decline and Fall of the Book Cover

Getting to design your own book cover is the sort of ultimately maddening power that probably shouldn’t be entrusted to vain mortals. It’s a little like getting to choose your own face. What kind of face would best express your inner self? Maybe more important, what kind of face will make other people like or respect or want to sleep with you? Do these two hypothetical faces bear any resemblance to each other? Can you imagine a face that would combine their best features?

There’s often an embarrassing disconnect between how people try to present themselves and how they’re actually perceived, which is why they ask their friends to tell them honestly how they look in something—and why publishing houses hire professional designers for books’ covers and allow their authors very little say over them. Most writers are given what’s called “consultation” on their covers, which means that when they’re shown their cover designs they try not to cry right in front of their editors. But, because I’m a cartoonist as well as an essayist, and also have a savvy and implacable agent whose will is not to be opposed, I had “approval” over the cover of my book, which meant that I got to make a tiresome and nit-picky pest of myself.

I had what we’ll call a constructive dialogue with my publisher’s editorial, design, and marketing teams, finding a balance between my personal vision and something people might possibly want to buy. For months we went back and forth: I’d send them several illustration options and they’d pick whichever one I liked least; they’d send me some design options, I’d pick the one that made me least unhappy, and they’d veto it. Book covers are an important sales tool, and the marketing department felt, quite reasonably, that the cover was very much their business. I also had a paranoid sense of shadowy, Olympian forces weighing in from farther above; I’ve been told that the most powerful figures in the current literary world, the buyers for the major national bookstore chains, have been known to offer to increase their orders for a book if its cover is changed.

Perhaps to get rid of me for a while, my editor dispatched me on a research mission: to go to a bookstore, survey the covers of other literary nonfiction books, and report back to her about which ones I liked, and why.

The main principles of design—in books, appliances, cars, clothing, everything—are:

1. Your product must be bold and eye-catching and conspicuously different from everyone else’s, but

2. Not too much!

Which is why the covers of most contemporary books all look disturbingly the same, as if inbred. It seems as if sixty-five per cent of all novels’ jackets feature an item of female apparel and/or part of the female anatomy and the name of some foodstuff in the title—the book-cover equivalent of the generic tough-guy-with-gun movie poster with title like “2 HARD & 2 FAST.” There’s clearly some brutally efficient Darwinian process at work here, because certain images—half-faces, napes, piers stretching into the water—spread like successful evolutionary adaptations and quickly become ubiquitous.

by Tim Kreider, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Laurent Cilluffo

Cuauhtémoc Suárez
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Ashore I, Nanna Hänninen

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Unity with the Universe

Manhattan, Mont. -- Something strange is happening at the house glowing in the distance. Or rather, a web of strange things, magic almost, if you'll permit what might seem on the front end to be hyperbole. A man named Tom Morgan lives here, making some of the most expensive and sought-after fly fishing rods in the world, which he does despite having been paralyzed from the neck down for the past 17 years. He's revered for what he calls "thought rods," where the instrument functions as an extension of the mind, delivering the fly where you imagine it will go, not where a series of clumsy physical muscle movements try to direct it.

In all of his rods -- both in the way he builds them and in the way people seek them out -- there lives a sense of the mystic. One old model is nicknamed "The Unity with the Universe." Tom once offended a conservative fisherman by joking that their accuracy was the result of prayers and incantations. He has that kind of faith in his rods. He believes in how they can connect an angler, if only briefly, to the soul of nature, and how they can connect him to the person he used to be. The rods are what matter, to Tom and to his customers, which seems like such an inadequate word to describe the relationship.

Most of the people who buy them are spiritual pilgrims, and some are literal pilgrims, flying to Montana to visit or pick up their rods in person. They come from as far away as Japan. They drive out of Bozeman, headed west, finally seeing the glow on a ridge to the right. A white bus named Moby -- yes, the people inside love Melville -- lets them know they've found the place. The house is surrounded by snowy peaks and a herd of buffalo, which move like ghosts across the high plains. The strangers arrive at the front door, the wind coming down from the Tobacco Root Mountains, blowing hard and cold. Tom's staff often joke when they hear tires on the long gravel road: "Get out the prayer rug." Some visitors don't even know he's paralyzed. A young rod maker once arrived for an apprenticeship and stuck out his hand when he met Tom. Nobody had told him. The rods are more important than the obstacles overcome to create them, and the anglers who travel such great distances don't want to unlock the secret of his life; they are grasping for understanding of their own. "It's like they're walking in to see the Dalai Lama," says that apprentice.

It's a lot to expect from a fishing pole.

A small epiphany waits at the end of their time with Tom, if they pay attention to the signs. There is no his life and their life, just life. The rods don't provide answers, only questions, about how you lived it before you arrived, and how you might live it after. The questions apply to Tom, too. There are secrets to be unlocked at the house glowing on the hill, about dreams and perfection and, yes, even love, but first you have to go inside.

by Wright Thompson, ESPN |  Read more:

Image: Ross Detman

“Superbowl” by Laurie Bartley, 2007
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