Sustainability is Sustainable and Good for Business, Our Health, Our World

I returned a short while ago from NYC where yesterday I took part in an extraordinary conference -- The New York Times 2013 Energy for Tomorrow Conference.

The full agenda of the conference can be accessed directly here.

It was an intellectual feast that brought together mayors, an Academy Award winner, thought leaders, scientists, environmentalists, investors, policy makers, and decision-makers, corporate employees from IBM to Google, as well as a farmer/former NBA player/MacArthur Fellow -- and these were just some of the speakers. In the audience, I met a colleague from Cornell (now retired), a diplomat from the Chinese embassy in DC, a Georgia Tech professor, numerous journalists from as far as Singapore, affordable housing advocates, urban planners, students, a researcher at MIT, head of the electric vehicle taxi program for NYC, and a financier in private equity, to single out just a few.

The conference began with a stimulating breakfast session (the food was good, too) on smart vehicles, but time was too short for me to be able to ask the question that I had -- what about cybersecurity issues in this product domain? I was thrilled that even operations research was mentioned -- indeed, where would transport studies be without OR?!

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of NYC, who needs no introduction, was introduced by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, and both were absolutely brilliant.

With the paralysis in Washington (Congress) regarding environmental action, mayors and cities are leading the way.  This is the first truly urban century and cities have to (and many are) taking action. We must unlock human creativity and take actions to mitigate risk. Mayor Bloomberg chairs the C40 group, which actually consists of 60 cities.

Mayor Bloomberg had 4 major points with the first one being that one must develop a plan with goals and metrics -- you have to be able to measure. He has done much to improve air quality and water quality and, along with the Sierra Club, has been instrumental in retiring many coal-fired power plants.

750,000 trees have been planted in NYC with a goal of planting 1 million and he gave credit also to Bette Midler.

He noted how sustainability provides good economic value -- being environmentally friendly improves your brand and helps in recruiting -- vibrant, smart employees want to work in places where they can breathe clean air!

He mentioned how he, with Al Gore (former VP and of the An Inconvenient Truth fame), climbed up on a rooftop and painted it white -- with white rooftops reducing energy costs by 20% -- a quick payback.

He also emphasized private-public partnerships -- closing roads to traffic -- something I have written about, spoken about, and even been interviewed on, and how we should be stealing the best ideas in terms of transport and sustainability from around the world.

What really intrigued me is when he said that China will become a leading environmentalist in the next 10 years  He, as several others yesterday, emphasized resiliency and that we must prepare for extreme events. Hurricane Sandy was noted several times during the conference.

The next panel was the Mayors panel and the panelists were engaging, and very  entertaining with one of my favorite quotes being "cars are the next cigarettes."  The theme that people will vote with their feet (want to live and work in a sustainable location) continued.

We were then treated to a conversation between Andrew Revkin and Jeremy Irons, who has garnered not only an Academy Award, but numerous other awards for his acting. His passion for the environment resonated as did his eloquence. The night before the conference, the movie Trashed, which he was the Executive Producer of, was screened, and more info on what is being done to our globe because of garbage can be found here.  He noted that he is using the actor's power to address important problems and even emphasized electronic recycling and packaging -- his knowledge impressed me. He noted that a film can inject a feeling of purpose. He also emphasized that it is about education and that industry should prove that what it is making is 100% safe. Since my research group does a lot of work on sustainable supply chains his message was near and very dear to me. Coincidentally, Revkin is a fellow Brown University grad and I heard him deliver the Daffodil Lecture at UMass a while back.

Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times then led a panel on renewable energy with experts from the US and abroad, including the CEO of ConEd, Kevin Burke. Joe Nocera, also of The New York Times, followed with a panel on the role of technology and innovation and I was especially moved by Stephen Kennedy Smith, who spoke on agribusiness and urban food supply. I managed to talk with him later and mentioned that when I got my PhD from Brown his nephew, John F. Kennedy Jr., received his undergraduate degree. There are also other school ties which I noted.

During lunch, we ate (a very healthy spread) and discussed the urban food supply and since one of my most recent papers was on competitive food supply chains (with Min Yu), which was published in the European Journal of Operational Research, this topic was mesmerizing. Will Allen, the Renaissance man -- farmer and MacArthur Fellow, regaled us with his work in inner cities and urban farms.

I had to then take off since it was time to get ready for the Transport and Traffic panel that I was speaking at, which was moderated by Joe Nocera, and I had terrific company!

Below are several of my fellow panelists as we get ready in the "Green" room which actually had a red door.

The day concluded with breakout sessions in which we brainstormed and a closing session Dealbook: Investing in the city of tomorrow -- provocative and timely.

Prior to that we also got to hear Bill Keller of The Times in conversation with Carol Browner -- the former energy czar. She also spoke about resilience and noted the importance of physical infrastructure, nature, and communities -- simply fabulous

The conference was videostreamed and you can access the videos of the various panels on the conference website.  The Transport and Traffic panel that I was part of can be accessed directly here.
I had to bring in the Braess paradox into the conversation as well as congestion charging and transport congestion policies dating back to Roman times -- when chariots were the problem!

And I could not resist posting photos below taken of me with Professor Richard Schuler, professor emeritus of Cornell, and of  Dr. Yajun Fang of MIT taken at the reception at the end of a very exciting day. Professor Schuler is the academic father of Professor Ben Hobbs of Hopkins, an INFORMS Fellow.


New York City was as vibrant, exciting, and stunning as always and I share with you the additional photos that I took while walking as a very happy pedestrian in NYC!



And, on the way back to Massachusetts, via Amtrak on the Vermonter, as I strolled back to the dining car for a cup of tea I heard a greeting --"Hello, Anna!" and it was one of my favorite Isenberg School of Management colleagues, Professor Glenn Wong, of sports law and sports management fame.

Green buildings, LEED, and energy efficiency

Did you know that buildings consume 70% of the electricity used in the US? Although there has been clear progress in terms of making appliances more efficient, an enormous amount of energy is still wasted in buildings. Equipment may be left operating when it is not needed, air conditioners may be running full blast where there are no occupants, and mechanical and electrical infrastructure may become less efficient over time.

When one considers how much time humans spend in buildings it is imperative that research into sustainable buildings receives full consideration and support.

Alec Appelbaum has an excellent Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, "Don't LEED Us Astray." LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a program which awards points for incorporating eco-friendly material and practices into buildings' design and construction. It has brought great attention to environmental awareness from the buildings and construction sector, as well as from consumers.

The United States Green Building Council gives out the LEED certification, with the highest level being "platinum," and such certification has now become the most-widely used green building measure in the US.

Appelbaum, in his article, notes that much more should and could be done regarding the LEED certifications, since they provide a snapshot of a building at a point in time. According to Appelbaum, and I concur: some certified buildings end up using much more energy than the evaluators predicted, because the buildings are more popular than expected or busy at different times than developers forecast, or because tenants ignore or misuse green features. The government should institute regular audits or "check-ups" to ensure that the certified buildings are performing energy-wise, as certified. Those who perform well may get tax credits or even subsidies for outstanding performance.

I would argue that one needs to capture the entire life cycle of the building (clearly a challenging research and practical problem, but manageable). In order to do this, we need to develop green building supply chain design models. We have, recently, taken a step in this direction with our study, "Sustainable Supply Chain Network Design: A Multicriteria Perspective," which is forthcoming in the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering.

Given how much time people spend in buildings and, hence, how important buildings are to our health and well-being, and that of the environment, we, as a nation, need to push the frontiers of energy research in this direction.

Death by PowerPoint and Hypnotizing Chickens

The New York Times has an article by Elisabeth Bumiller, with a terrific spaghetti-like graphic on the military's overuse and overreliance on PowerPoint (PPT) presentations, at the expense of careful, thoughtful analysis. In the article, the leader of the American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General McChrystal, is quoted as saying: “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” with his audience erupting in laughter.

From the Pentagon to Iraq and Afghanistan, from the boardrooms to the classrooms, PowerPoint presentations have become the props that are used for presentations. In the article, General Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, states: “PowerPoint makes us stupid.”

Military commanders note that a typical PPT relays less information than a five-page paper can hold, and the presenter does not need to carefully write to deliver an analytic point. PPTs are sometimes referred to as "hypnotizing chickens" since they dull the audience into a stupor.

Frankly, the time wasted by military and corporate analysts in preparing such talks could be put into much better use and the same goes for their seated audiences. The time would be better spent by crafting more thorough analyses and writing up the results. Presentations could then be given, with the articles disseminated, in a discussion-like setting with a white or blackboard or paperboard to highlight dynamically the relevant points. We have become, to our detriment, a visual society that craves animation and images, at the expense of thorough analysis and evidential support.

When giving the majority of my presentations (and I have a pile coming up to give internationally) I use latex beamer rather than PowerPoint. In this way, I can include mathematical expressions, and more thorough analyses. Every presentation that I give at a conference, workshop, or seminar is based on 1 or more refereed journal articles so the results are verified.

As for teaching, despite carefully prepared slides, nothing beats the give and take of doing numerous examples on the board and interacting with the students, through Q&A, to make sure that they understand the material.

Life, whether in the classroom or at war, is not two-dimensional as PowerPoint slides are, which can dull and deaden our minds and, frankly, waste precious time.

AAUW Report on Underrepresentation of Women in Math and Sciences - "Why So Few?"

Tamar Lewin writes in The New York Times on the AAUW report, supported by the National Science Foundation, to be released today, "Why So Few?" which documents that although women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields have made gains, stereotypes and cultural biases still impede their success. The Times article, Bias Called Persistent Hurdle for Women in Sciences, is definitely worth reading, as is the AAUW report.

According to Lewin: The report found ample evidence of continuing cultural bias. One study of postdoctoral applicants, for example, found that women had to publish 3 more papers in prestigious journals, or 20 more in less-known publications, to be judged as productive as male applicants.

In addition, in a survey, commissioned by the Bayer Corp., and conducted by Campos Inc., two-thirds cited the persistent stereotype that STEM fields are not for girls or minorities as a leading contributor to their underrepresentation. Many in the Bayer survey, also being released today, said they had been discouraged from going into their field in college, most often by a professor. This I find extremely painful, as a professor and a female, to read.

Well, there is some hope (I am being sarcastic here), Harvard, after 375 years, tenured a female in its Mathematics Department. Her name is Dr. Sophie Morel; she is from France, and I found out about her from the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study website.

In 2005-2006 I was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute and represented mathematics, along with my friend, Dr. Pierrette Cassou-Nogues, who is from France. I have 3 degrees in Applied Mathematics from Brown University (with a specialty in operations research) but my primary appointment is in the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst.

Interestingly, the New York Times journalist, Tamar Lewin, who wrote the article on persistent bias against women in science, is married to Robert Krulwich, an NPR and ABC reporter, who was my interviewer on the World Science Festival panel on Traffic in New York City last June. He was simply fabulous and during a chat before the panel spoke about his wife. Also joining me on the Traffic panel were Dr. Iain Couzin of Princeton University and Dr. Mitchell Joachim of Columbia University.

Sustainable Supply Chain Networks and Design

The New York Times should be commended for publishing not one but two articles on sustainable supply chains and transportation in the same issue! Yesterday, in its Business Day section, The Times had an article, Clearing the Air at American Ports, written by Steven Greenhouse (appropriate name for this topic) and Wal-Mart Plans to Make its Supply Chain Greener by Stephanie Rosenbloom.

The former article discusses how the ports of LA and Long Beach are the single largest contributors to air pollution in the Los Angeles area, due to diesel pollution, and how a unique partnership, a labor-green alliance, is looking to prevent old trucks, which generate greater levels of emissions, from hauling cargo from the ports. The burden of replacing the older trucks with new trucks, which emit fewer emissions, is to be placed on the trucking companies, rather than on the individual truckers, many of whom, because of the large costs, are just barely eking out a living.

The article on Wal-Mart, in turn, emphasizes how Wal-Mart is working with suppliers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in its supply chain to a tune of 20 million metric tons by 2015 (which would be equivalent to removing more than 3.8 million cars from roads for one year)! Suppliers are to examine the complete carbon lifecycle of their product -- from the manufacturing and use of raw materials through the recycling stage. Given Wal-Mart's clout and heft, as well as its growing emphasis on sustainability, such initiatives are proactive and timely (and also help to reduce energy costs).

We have been conducting research on sustainable supply chains and transportation for many years and have published articles (and even books) on such topics.

In 2007, I wrote the article, "Sustainable Supply Chain and Transportation Networks," with Dr. Zugang "Leo" Liu and Dr. Trisha Woolley, two of my former doctoral students, who are now, respectively, professors at Pennsylvania State University at Hazelton, and at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. This article, which appeared in the inaugural issue of the journal, International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, is available for downloading for free from the journal's website.

Our article demonstrates how competition among decision-makers in supply chains, who are multicriteria decision-makers, and interested in reducing emissions, can be combined with collaboration across successive tiers of the supply chain. Hence, this framework allows for the determination of the ultimate supply chain network design for sustainability in the case of alliances and partnerships, as we have been reading more and more about in the press.

This article of ours is one in a series on sustainability, supply chain networks and transportation, which can be accessed on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks (please use Internet Explorer or update your Mozilla browser for downloading of pdf files from this site).

A Humanitarian Logistics Service Corps -- Let's Dream and Do It!

In two OpEd companion pieces in The New York Times, Matt Klapper and James J. Riley argue for a search and rescue corps for disaster relief, and Dr. Vanessa Bradford Kerry, the daughter of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, argues for a new international service corps of medical professionals to assist in humanitarian operations relief, also post disasters.

These two service corps ideas are outstanding but another crucial element of this complex disaster relief network is missing. Hence, I would add that we need to dream bigger dreams and to include a missing piece. We need to envision and to build a humanitarian logistics service corps. Without timely and effective humanitarian logistics operations man and material do not get delivered to points of demand, as what was dramatically demonstrated in the post-earthquake disaster of Haiti and numerous others disasters. Indeed, doctors had to do amputations with hacksaws and to disinfect wounds with vodka and operate without anesthesia. Many medical professionals continue to be traumatized after conducting their medical procedures and more lives could have been saved. They did not have the supplies at the appropriate time that effective logistics would have given them.

I have been writing about this issue extensively in this blog and believe that building on the ideas generated, a humanitarian logistics service corps would enable the following:

1. it would educate interested parties about humanitarian logistics and would provide new, exciting partnerships with colleges, universities, even high schools, and various relevant organizations;

2. it would provide educated and trained professionals both within specific countries, where the disaster has struck and outside with domain-specific knowledge and expertise;

3. it would enable closer collaboration and coordination during dynamically evolving disasters and post-disaster relief, and

4. it would provide opportunities for partnerships with stakeholders, including corporations, to develop technologically-enhanced tools for logistics operations.

This service corps could then lend its expertise during periods of relative serenity to assist needy communities in food distribution, n humanitarian support, and other appropriate service activities.

Education would be a critical component of the humanitarian logistics service corps. Read here how desperately Haiti's education infrastructure was affected by the calamitous earthquake.

I can envision which professional societies and organizations could help to spearhead such a service corps and would single out both IFORS (the International Federation of Operational Research Societies) and INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). The funding for such an effort might be provided by relevant foundations, corporations, private and public institutions, humanitarian organizations, and, perhaps, some governments.

The expertise gained by members of such a humanitarian logistics service corps could then be applied outside this sector, since effective production and supply, combined with the effective movement of goods and services to points of needed demand for delivery in a timely manner, are what makes economies work!

Bloomberg's Experiment and Braess on Broadway

According to The New York Times, the New York Traffic Experiment Gets Permanent Run!

The road closure(s), which banned vehicles on Broadway from 47th to 42nd Streets and from 35th to 33rd Streets, was pitched last February as an innovative way to fight congestion. It quickly became a fascination for tourists and New Yorkers alike, drawn to the curious sight of a pedestrian mall, complete with picnic tables and folding chairs, under the neon lights.

The article states that Mayor Bloomberg was more trusting of separate data collected from GPS devices in yellow cabs. Those numbers encompassed 1.1 million Midtown taxi trips taken between Fifth and Ninth Avenues in Midtown. Of those trips, northbound travel times improved by 17 percent, and southbound trips slowed by 2 percent, but a street-by-street breakdown could not be calculated.

This network redesign, if I may call it, was discussed on the Traffic panel that I was part of last June in New York City as part of the World Science Festival, which was tremendous fun. The above graphics were prepared for that panel.

The closure of that segment of Broadway would be representative, as I depict above, of the reverse of the Braess paradox (in which the addition of a road makes all travellers worse off in terms of travel time due to selfish or user-optimizing, as opposed to system-optimizing behavior). You can read up on the paradox and Professor Braess on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks site.

Of course, one has to realize that midtown Manhattan and its streets are subnetworks of a much larger transportation network with multiple origin/destination pairs of associated demands which vary dynamically over the day and the night.

Nevertheless, this initiative by Mayor Bloomberg demonstrates how the science of traffic flow and associated congestion management tools can be implemented in the real-world and what could be more dramatic than doing this right in the heart of NYC!