The Humanities in City Planning: Culture, Uncertainty, and Visuality
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Strategy exhibits a pervasive commitment to the belief that the best approach to adopt in dealing with affairs of the world is to confront, overcome and subjugate things to conform to our will, control and eventual mastery. Performance is about sustaining distinctiveness. This direct and deliberate approach draws inspiration from ancient Greek roots and has become orthodoxy. Yet there are downsides. This book shows why. Using examples from the world of business, economics, military strategy, politics and philosophy, it argues that success may inadvertently emerge from the everyday coping actions of a multitude of individuals, none of whom intended to contribute to any preconceived design. A consequence of this claim is that a paradox exists in strategic interventions, one that no strategist can afford to ignore. The more single-mindedly a strategic goal is sought, the more likely such calculated instrumental action eventually works to undermine its own initial success. © Robert C. H. Chia and Robin Holt 2009 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Standard techniques of cost effectiveness analysis measure a technology’s benefits in terms of expected life years (or quality-adjusted life years) gained at today’s life expectancies. However, this approach ignores the gains which derive from the possibility that a health technology allows an individual to survive long enough to benefit from other technological innovations which raise life expectancy (and quality of life) in the future. Borrowing a term from the finance literature, we refer to this source of value as the “option value” of innovation. We explain where this value comes from and how to calculate it in a variety of standard cost effectiveness analysis contexts. We provide a proof-of-concept using the example of the drug tamoxifen, which delayed the onset of breast cancer for some patients until more effective adjuvant treatment was available. We
find that incorporating option value can increase the conventionally estimated value of tamoxifen with better adjuvant treatment by nearly a quarter (from 248,000 for those who initiated tamoxifen in 1999). We expect similar results for other drugs in therapeutic areas of rapid technological advancement.
Geopolitical dynamics associated with nuclear proliferation, the Arab Spring, the rapid rise of Chinese power, an oil-fueled Russian resurgence, and the post-Afghan and Iraq eras will demand significant changes in intelligence focus, processes, and resources. Nearly a decade after intelligence failures required a restructuring of the Intelligence Community with mandates for a scientific approach to intelligence analysis, current efforts continue to focus on overly deterministic individual analyst methods. We argue for a process-oriented approach to analysis resembling the collaborative scientific process successful in other professions that is built on shared theory and models. After demonstrating that events in the real world are path dependent and contingent on deterministic and random elements, we highlight the role of uncertainty in intelligence analysis with specific emphasis on intelligence failures. We then describe how human agency in an interconnected and interdependent system leads to a landscape of dancing strategies as agents dynamically modify their responses to events. Unfortunately, the consequences of the present deterministic intelligence mindset are significant time delays in adjusting to emerging adversaries leading to an increased susceptibility to intelligence failures. In contrast with the existing analyst-centric methods, we propose a risk management approach enhanced by outside collaboration on theory and models that embrace lessons from the twentieth-century science of uncertainty, human agency, and complexity.
A city is an identity in manifold presentations or profiles, some of which are reviewed here. Why and how do cities and planning allow for so many differing and apparently incompatible analogies (and theories)? To ask, What is really going on? is perhaps to miss that manifold. For cities allow for regionalized analogies, overlapping and incompatible, and many may be valid, at least regionally, at the same time. More generally, we describe thinking in analogy.
In evaluating projects using cost-benefit analysis, the option value of such projects and the insurance they provide is likely to alter both the costs and the benefits substantially.
Economists think of medical innovation as a valuable but risky good, producing health benefits but increasing financial risk for consumers and healthcare payers. This perspective overlooks how innovation can lower physical risks borne by healthy patients facing the prospect of future disease. We present an alternative framework that accounts for all these sources of value and links them to the value of healthcare insurance. We show that any innovation worth buying reduces overall risk and generates positive insurance value on its own. We conduct a stylized numerical exercise to assess the potential empirical significance of our insights. Our calculations suggest that conventional methods meaningfully understate the value of historical health gains and disproportionately undervalue treatments for the most severe illnesses, where physical risk to consumers is the costliest. These calculations also suggest that the value of physical insurance from new technologies may exceed the financial spending risk that they pose.
In 1948, Dr. Edwin Land and the Polaroid Corporation introduced its first instant camera and film. The technology involved a photograph which required that the consumer manually remove a protective peel-away layer. Consumers were also involved in the somewhat messy process of “stopping” the development and applying a protective gel. By the 1960s Polaroid had introduced an enormously successful color version of its black and white technology. In 1972, Polaroid introduced a revolutionary technology with its SX-70 instant camera and film. The technology which is similar to that sold in stores today, automatically ejected a photograph which develops before one’s eyes. There was no longer any need to peel off the protective layer or to intervene in the timing of the picture development. Hailed as a major technological achievement, the SX-70 sold well despite its relatively high price as compared to conventional photography.
Most of the chapters in this volume address the question: What is the appropriate planning education for students from developing areas? In this chapter I turn this question on its head, asking instead: What is the best way to teach the material with which I have been charged and what does the presence of developing areas students in my course teach me about my teaching?
Originally published in 1967, the modest and plainly descriptive title of Development Projects Observed is deceptive. Today, it is recognized as the ultimate volume of Hirschman’s groundbreaking trilogy on development, and as the bridge to the broader social science themes of his subsequent writings. Though among his lesser-known works, this unassuming tome is one of his most influential. It is in this book that Hirschman first shared his now famous “Principle of the Hiding Hand.” In an April 2013 New Yorker issue, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an appreciation of the principle, described by Cass Sunstein in the book’s new foreword as “a bit of a trick up history’s sleeve.” It can be summed up as a phenomenon in which people’s inability to foresee obstacles leads to actions that succeed because people have far more problem-solving ability that they anticipate or appreciate. And it is in Development Projects Observed that Hirschman laid the foundation for the core of his most important work, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and later led to the concept of an “exit strategy.”
Polaroid's goal from early in its history has been to make the camera easy to operate-to simplify the mechanical aspects of picture taking and allow the photographer to concentrate on the content and composition of the photo. This goal was basically realized with the SX-70 System after 30 yr of continual advances, but improvements continue to be made. In pursuing the goal of simplifying photography, Polaroid has pioneered a number of 'firsts' that now are part of common camera technology, both instant and conventional. These contributions continue to be used by the camera industry and others worldwide.
Most current discussions of business ethics confuse truly ethical issues with ones of policy, liability, or deterrence. The fundamental ethical question about capitalism is whether its capacity to create wealth and reduce poverty is offset by a reduction in the moral quality of its participants. Though the Wealth of Nations is often read as a book wholly devoted to exchange, in it Adam Smith identifies (and in some cases proposes remedies for) five moral problems created by capitalism: impoverishing the spirit of the workers, creating cities in which anonymity will facilitate price-fixing, expanding the ranks of the rich who lack virtue, inducing government to create monopolies and privileges, and separating ownership and management in ways that lead to what we now call agency problems.
The assessment of the impact of a new brand entry is an important issue for both practitioners and scholars of competitive strategy. A new entrant into a market may create additional demand for the product and/or share the existing market by drawing buyers away from incumbent brands. This paper suggests a diffusion modeling approach for assessing the impact of a new durable brand entry on market size and the sales of incumbent brands. The model is illustrated by applying it to the case involving Polaroid and Kodak in instant photography during the period 1976 to 1985. Limitations and possible extensions of the model are discussed.
The equilibrium prices in asset markets, as stated by Keynes (1930), "...will be fixed at the point at which the sales of the bears and the purchases of the bulls are balanced." We propose a descriptive theory of finance explicating Keynes' claim that the prices of assets today equilibrate the optimism and pessimism of bulls and bears, regarding the payoffs of assets tomorrow.This equilibration of optimistic and pessimistic beliefs of investors is a consequence of investors maximizing Keynesian utilities, subject to budget constraints defined by market prices and investor's income. The set of Keynesian utilities is a new class of non-expected utility functions representing the preferences of investors for optimism or pessimism, defined as the composition of the investor's preferences for risk and her preferences for ambiguity. Bulls and bears are defined respectively as optimistic and pessimistic investors. (Ir)rational exuberance is an intrinsic property of asset markets where bulls and bears are endowed with Keynesian utilities.
Scitation is the online home of leading journals and conference proceedings from AIP Publishing and AIP Member Societies
The primary theme of this address is cautionary: Statistical independence is far too often assumed casually, without serious concern for how common is dependence and how difficult it can be to achieve independence (or related structures). After initial discussion of statistics and religion, the address turns to miracles, especially Hume's critique and Babbage's reply. Stress is given the often tacit or unexamined assumption of independence among witnesses of a putative miracle. Other contexts of multiple testimony are treated, and the address ends with contemporary casual assumptions of independence: nuclear reactor safety, repeated measurements, and so forth. Other topics include prayer, circularity of argument, and the tension between skepticism about testimony and the pragmatic need to accept most of it provisionally.
Statisticians acting as expert witnesses encounter special problems. These include (a) exposition of underlying methods and concepts, (b) the avoidance of data mining when attorneys wish to leave no stone unturned, and (c) the explanation of hypothesis testing versus prediction. Data management practices are particularly important. Appropriate and inappropriate forms of criticism are discussed, as is the problem of maintaining objectivity. Examples drawn from actual experience are given.
This article addresses the challenge of managing uncertainty when producing estimative intelligence. Much of the theory and practice of estimative intelligence aims to eliminate or reduce uncertainty, but this is often impossible or infeasible. This article instead argues that the goal of estimative intelligence should be to assess uncertainty. By drawing on a body of nearly 400 declassified National Intelligence Estimates as well as prominent texts on analytic tradecraft, this article argues that current tradecraft methods attempt to eliminate uncertainty in ways that can impede the accuracy, clarity, and utility of estimative intelligence. By contrast, a focus on assessing uncertainty suggests solutions to these problems and provides a promising analytic framework for thinking about estimative intelligence in general.