Learning to write is much like learning any other skill – by taking instruction, and practicing.  I had learned to write poetry as a teenage by writing hundreds of poems – some good, some not.  As a professional, I have provided a technical review of many hundreds of reports, and written many.  Now I am beginning to try to write scientific papers, and I am learning all over again.  In this journey, I have discovered a few things that matter.

As a poet, my words flow free and complete from emotion to paper.  As I find the right word for the moment, I cast it in the stone of ink, and it testifies there, to the end of time.

Reports are factual, and will provide the method the engineer used to come to the conclusions reached.  Opinions of others will be referenced, and protocols will typically be referenced when they may be uncommon.  All other work is to be the engineer’s, and it will be clear what is observation and what is opinion.  Opinions that are counter to the conclusions of the report will not be mentioned, unless that is specifically what the report is intended for.  Reports are as impersonal as possible, with all hyperbole eliminated and adjectives kept to a minimum.  Reports are intended to present information and explain conclusions, without significant regard for whom the audience is beyond the specific recipient of the report.  Editing tends to require as much time as writing.

Academic papers are intended to teach¹.  They will identify the need for the research, and they will clearly present the outcome².  They will specifically identify the work that has been done by others as it relates to the work being presented³.  While not stated in the literature reviewed, it would be expected that the most appropriate reference would be used as the source material.  And all of it will be very careful and deliberate.

Papers will be written, edited, rewritten, and improved many times before they are ready for publication⁴.  They will be written in the specific style of the journal, but the general format is well defined⁵.  Editing is expected to take 4 times the time required to write it originally⁶.

 

1                     https://explorable.com/research-paper-question  extracted July 16, 2016

2                     http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/scientific-papers-13815490  extracted July 16, 2016

3                     http://abacus.bates.edu/~ganderso/biology/resources/writing/HTWgeneral.html  extracted July 16, 2016

4                     http://umech.mit.edu/freeman/6.021J/2000/writing.pdf  extracted July 16, 2016

5                     http://www.columbia.edu/cu/biology/ug/research/paper.html  extracted July 16, 2016

6                     Jack Harich, personal communication July 10, 2016

I’ve been working on a difficult step in the process, and I’m venturing a long way from traditional engineering.  If this sounds too far away from ‘common sense’, please let me know.

The poorest decile of the Canadian population meet’s it’s needs in about 66% of a day (not including the fraction of paid employment that meets the needs of this decile).  I am not convinced that 100% of their needs are met, and if they have plenty of time to meet their needs, what is preventing them from using that time to meet needs?  I would guess and say that they have an Effectiveness of something near 66%, so that it would take nearly 24 hours per day per capita for all of their needs to be met.

But what is that ‘Effectiveness’ representing in society?  Some of it will be ‘-isms’, like racism, sexism, classism, etc. (community obstructions that prevent individuals, families, and communities from being able to meet their needs, regardless of the time used), and also like alcoholism (individual obstructions that prevent individuals, families, and communities from being able to meet their needs).  But some of it will be related to how an individual, family, or community thinks about how their needs will be met in the future – their confidence, if you will.  And how people interact with that confidence will change how people will assess their needs and may interfere with how they would meet specific needs.

People in poverty are concerned with day-to-day relationships, and live with hope.  They know that no matter what they do, their needs tomorrow may not be able to be met, regardless of their choices and actions today.  People in the middle are concerned with setting and achieving goals.  They know that meeting their goals will allow them to have their needs met, and at all times they know that meeting any specific want will not prevent them from achieving their goal.  People in affluence are concerned with legacy and traditions.  They know that their needs will always be met, and they know that they deserve to have their wants met.

Each of these perspectives makes individuals’ behaviour obstructionist in some ways.  There are many ‘middle class’ people who are living pay-check to pay-check.  There are many people in poverty who will buy goods that they perceive as luxuries, because it allows them to maintain their hope that they are better off than others.  And there are people in affluence that are capable of frittering away vast sums of wealth to create an image, ending in bankruptcy.  Each of these behaviours comes about from the confidence the individuals have in how their needs will be met in the future, and that belief prevents the individuals from acting in their long-term best interests.

Essentially, the effective strategies for meeting needs at one level of consumption may not be effective at another.  Just making more resources or time available does not necessarily cause people’s Actualized Quality of Life to increase – there has to be a way to change the strategies, too.

So, there will be a variety of obstructions that prevent people from meeting their needs effectively, and these obstructions will interact with different alternatives designs in different ways.  Sustainability Engineering can find the best alternatives that are available for any given problem in any given community, based on the resources available to the community in perpetuity, the skills and technology available within a community, and the obstructions within society that interfere with specific alternatives.

This may be able to be tied directly to Human Development, although that concept is distinctly separated from Sustainability Engineering, in that S.Eng. does not seek to change people’s behaviours directly, but instead must react to their behaviours.  Ideally, S.Eng. would be able to produce solutions that are adaptable as Human Development removes obstructions.  This will take more work to explore.

 

The graph above shows the time use and resource use of each decile of household income (although the highest two deciles are combined as the highest pentile). The lowest consuming decile, at around 960 minutes per day per capita, comes from the poorest people in Canada.  It is not realistic to expect that all of their needs are met, and yet they have approximately 1/3 of their time available for meeting needs, and they don’t use it for that for some reason.  I believe that this reason is that there are obstructions within society that prevent individuals, families, or community from being able to meet their needs effectively, and people will generally rather have unmet needs than to work ineffectively against these obstructions.  Examples may be sexism, racism, classism, alcoholism, and so on.

Addressing these obstructions is beyond the capacity and role of engineers. Understanding how these obstruction prevent the Actualized Quality of Life reaching the Potential Quality of Life is entirely within the capacity and role of engineers, so it behooves us to do so.

I believe that people who encounter obstructions will find them stressful. I believe that people who find the obstructions unsurmountable will develop Chronic Stress.  This is something that can be measured, and it has a relatively simple recipe to create.  By deconstructing the recipe, I believe it is possible to identify which needs are not being met effectively, and which ones are, within any individuals within the community.

So, with a time-use study, a resource-use study, and some form of cause-of-stress study, we can find the time used by those that have each specific need met, and the time used by those who do not, to come up with a measure of both the Potential Quality of Life (the time available for activities other than those required to meet your needs) and the Actualized Quality of Life (the time available for activities other than those required to meet your needs, as if all of your needs were met). Ultimately, the intent of Sustainability Engineering is to ensure that the change in Actualized Quality of Life / cost to community is maximized.

The steps required to do this are:

Find the time spent within the community for each need:

For those individuals who have the need met = A

For those individuals who have the need unmet =B

Effectiveness E = ∑A/[∑A+∑B], all values summed across each need, for the whole population.

Potential Quality of Life PQoL = 1440 min/ca/d –[∑A+∑B]

Actualized Quality of Life AQoL = 1440 min/ca/d –[∑A+∑B]/E

= 1440 min/ca/d-(∑A+∑B)²/∑A

= 1440 min/ca/d-(∑A+2∑B+∑B²/∑A)

 

We see from this that a slight change in the time required to meet needs for those individuals who do not have those needs met currently will make the most significant improvement in the overall AQoL. In fact, taking the derivative produces

dAQoL = -{d∑A +2d∑B+2∑Bd∑B/∑A-∑B²/∑A² d∑A}

= {1+∑B/∑A} {d∑A [1 -∑B/∑A] + 2d∑B}

To have a largest change in the AQoL, dAQoL should be at 0.

This requires that {d∑A [1 -∑B/∑A] + 2d∑B} = 0,

which means that [1 + 2d∑B/ d∑A] = ∑B/∑A

Note, this doesn’t include cost, so this won’t be the final answer, but it should be a good first estimate.

All this talk is great – just like all of the other talk on Sustainability that has occurred over the last 30 years. Since the Club of Rome first showed people that bad things were going to happen if we didn’t change to something else, we’ve been talking. Some of the talk focused on how little we could change and still avoid the worst effects (even if just for a small subset of the whole). Some of the talk focused on how much we would have to change. And some has been on just how bad things will be even if we do change. Talk, talk, talk.

So. What do we do about it? What is the Walk? For me, it is living on a farm (that others are farming) and heating with wood that we grow here (generally, cutting standing dead around the perimeter of the fields is plenty). But that doesn’t make any real difference for anyone else. Even when the real value of food rises significantly at the end of the current oil surplus, and I convert my land into a more intensive form of agriculture, I will still be doing nearly nothing to follow the Walk.  This blog itself is just Talk, but it provides a demonstration that Walking is possible in a meaningful way.  To make it real, I will have to include these concepts in my practice of engineering, which ultimately means educating clients.  More Talk…

What have you done, or will you do, to Walk the Talk? What is the Walk for you? Comments are open. I’d love to hear from you.