3D Printing is a Hot Political Topic

3D printing or additive fabrication is a hot topic, and not just to the engineers, fabricators and hobbyists anymore. It seems to be becoming part of the political symbology wrapped up in economic recovery or development. As I commented on the Made in Dayton blog, the National Academies Press recently released a report about Building the Ohio Innovation Economy that includes significant emphasis on additive fabrication, and the President mentioned the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, located in Youngstown, in his State of the Union address. There is also the Midwest Pilot for connecting High Performance Computing (HPC) resources to small and medium manufacturing concerns. As we saw in this topology optimization post, there is considerable need for scale-able computational approaches to fully realize the promise of additive manufacturing. Closer to home, your Dayton hackerspace is playing with a printrbot.

Dayton Masonic Temple Photogrammetry

Bundler-PMVS2 Dense Point Cloud Visualization in Meshlab

I wanted to experiment with some free photogrammetry software, and the Masonic Temple in Dayton is a nice target of opportunity. There are some free (as in beer) options, but I wanted something that was free (as in freedom) that I could run on my own machines rather than in a software-as-a-service cloud. The basic work-flow is demonstrated in this post by Andrew Hazelden for some aerial photographs. He gets fairly impressive results using only free software.

Airframer for Dayton Aerospace Cluster

In my previous post on the Dayton Aerospace Cluster, I mentioned that one of the big missing pieces is an air-framer. The DDN recently reported that a Fortune100 defense contractor that currently makes UAV components, but does not make full airframes yet is interested in locating a manufacturing / test facility in the Dayton region.

Here's some of the defense contractors on the Fortune 100:

• 36. Boeing (already makes UAVs: Insitu)
  
• 44. United Technologies (claims it doesn't want to enter the UAV market, but UT subsidiary Sikorsky has made significant investments in a small UAV company)
  
• 52. Lockheed Martin (already makes UAVs: Sentinel)
  
• 72. Northrup Grumman (already makes UAVs: Global Hawk)
  
• 86. General Dynamics (sort of makes UAVs: joint venture with Elbit, joint venture with Aurora, joint venture with Aeronautics Defense Systems)
  

See the full Fortune 500 list. The most interesting one on the list is GD, since two of the three joint ventures listed are with Israeli companies, and Dayton region representatives signed a trade deal in 2009 with representatives from Haifa.

Storms of Our Grandfathers

Are we "rolling 13s" and getting thousand year storms every year?

NOAA April 2011 Precipitation Anomaly

The contour plots below are taken from Theory of the hydraulic jump and backwater curves. These studies of historical storm records were used to inform design decisions for the Miami Valley Conservancy District's retarding basins and channel improvements following the 1913 floods. My previous post has pictures of the hydraulic jump below Huffman Dam in operation.

My question to Dr Curry about what value high-fidelity (read: relatively expensive to run and analyze) climate simulations have for decision makers was motivated by reading up on infrastructure projects like the retarding basins and channel improvements in the Miami Valley. I think it would be interesting to take a look at a historical project like this that included rudimentary analysis of climate (weather event frequency and magnitude) in its design, and say, "here's how it would be informed differently using modern tools."

The design philosophy taken by the engineers working for the Miami Valley Conservancy District was to design for the worst possible case (historical records from Europe were also considered since they went back further and more reliably) plus roughly twenty percent margin due to the inherent uncertainty in estimating the worst possible case.

If it were necessary to depend wholly on the records of storms which have occurred in the United States, it might be thought possible for moderately great storms to occur over a period of a few hundred years, and then to find, as an exception, a storm three or four times as great. Theoretically that is very improbable, simply because water vapor in sufficient quantities cannot be transported from the ocean or gulf fast and long enough to cause such exceptional storms. As stated in chapter XI, however, records were collected of the stages of rivers in Europe for long periods of time, and these furnish fairly conclusive proof that such great exceptional storms actually do not occur. On the Danube at Vienna, for instance, we have records since about the year 1000 A.D.; fairly accurate records are available for stages of floods in the Tiber at Rome for more than 2,000 years; and records have been made of floods on the Seine at Paris for a long period of years.
Relation of Great Storms to Maximum Possible

After making the extensive investigation of storms in the eastern United States, it is believed that the March, 1913, flood is one of the great floods of centuries in the Miami Valley. In the course of three or four hundred years, however, a flood 15 or 20 per cent greater may occur. We do not believe a flood will ever occur which is more than 20 or 25 per cent in excess of that of March 1913. There is a factor of ignorance, however, against which we must provide, and the only way to do this is arbitrarily to increase the size of the maximum flood to be provided for. If longer records were available a closer estimate could be made, but in planning works on which the protection of the Miami Valley depends, it is necessary to go beyond human judgment. This has been done on all the other phases of the design, and we believe it would not be good engineering practice to stop at our judgment on this phase. We must be able to say that the engineering works are absolutely safe in every respect. For this reason provision is made for a flood nearly 40 per cent greater than that of March 1913. This is 15 or 20 per cent in excess of what is believed to be the greatest possible flood that will ever occur.
Reasons for Choosing as a Basis for Design a Flood 40% Greater than that of March 1913

Would modern tools cut the design margin due to reduced uncertainty or would they indicate that the project is now under-designed due to projected climate change? The latter seems unlikely considering that the magnitude of the purported effects has been repeatably shown to be smaller than we can reliably detect given the length of our data record. Would there be any practically significant changes to the decisions and designs? If your system already has sufficient margin for projected changes in weather-event magnitude do projected changes in frequency matter?

Dayton Flood Control Infrastructure at Work

Photos of the flood control contrivances in and around Dayton. All of these were taken on 3 May 2011. But first, a little history and engineering detail so you'll have a better appreciation of the pictures.

Arthur P. Morgan came to Dayton after the 1913 flood to design a flood control system to protect the entire Miami Valley. One element of this system was a dry dam—a dam that held water only during a flood and released the water at a rate that the downstream riverbed could carry. The problem was that the speed of the water through the dam made it powerful and destructive. To solve that problem, Morgan went with Col. Edward Deeds to his farm in Moraine where they built models in his swimming pool. They developed the hydraulic jump, which sends water through a series of baffles and steps, and then finally into a low wall that forces the water back onto itself, dissipating its own energy. This process of turning water onto itself is the hydraulic jump. From there, the water flows downstream calmly. This technology is still used in hydrological engineering throughout the world.

From Dayton Inventors River Walk

Here's a graphical depiction of a hydraulic jump.

A basic 1-D analysis follows the figure (clicking the image should take you to the free Google e-book).

Something that's kind of neat is that this system of flood control was designed in the days when "computers" were people (often women) not machines:

These engineers were certainly sure of themselves:
The bottom line is the important part. The hydraulic jump works by increasing the rate of turbulent kinetic energy production, this leads rather quickly (immediately if you assume equilibrium turbulence) to an increased rate of turbulent kinetic energy dissipation at the bottom of the energy cascade. The destructive capability (momentum) of the water is greatly reduced in exchange for raising its temperature ever so slightly.

The following figure shows the cuts that had to be made for the outlet channels and hydraulic jump pools (note Huffman Dam in the center).

And this one shows an aerial shot of the Huffman Dam just after completion.

These views from the top of the Huffman Dam show the turbulence at the end of the outlet channels due to the hydraulic jump.

Huffman Dam Outlet Channels

Huffman Dam Hydraulic Jump Pool Turbulence

View From the Top of Huffman Dam

These types of momentum dissipation mechanisms are also used throughout the city. The submerged dams take momentum out of the four streams that come together in the Dayton city limits: Miami, Mad and Stillwater Rivers and Wolf Creek.

Low Dam North-West of Downtown Dayton

Low Dam downstream of Dayton Canoe Club

There's talk of replacing these with something more water-sport (canoe / kayak) friendly.

Red Hawks Host Black Knights

I went to watch some collegiate and amateur bouts down in Oxford on Saturday. Miami University was hosting the cadets from West Point (last year's collegiate champs, nice write-up in NY Times). If you're used to the glammed-up barroom brawling of UFC or even the raw knock-out power of professional boxing, then the style and speed of amateur boxing might come as quite a surprise. I really like the amateur fights because they tend to pivot on conditioning, thinking and skillful execution rather than landing lucky or brutal head-shots.

The 14-bout evening started out with a couple of tough young ladies, one from Cincinati, one from Oxford, going three rounds. It's hard to do match-ups for women because there are just fewer boxers in an already small pool of athletes (since boxing is no longer an NCAA sport). The winner of this bout threw very disciplined, quick, straight punches which her clearly less experienced opponent was ill-equipped to catch or counter. This fight was followed by a few match-ups with local fighters out of Cincinnati, OSU and Miami University. The early fights consisted of lots of off-balanced brawling. The result of "first fight" jitters and inexperience for many of these young athletes.

The cadets from West Point fought out of the blue corner for the remainder of the evening against a line-up consisting of mainly Miami University fighters, with the occasional fighter from OSU or Xavier thrown in to the mix. From the first cadet to fight, on up to the "main event" it was clear why these gentlemen have won three championships in a row. A string of cadets won judges decisions handily over their opponents. In the process demonstrating solid fundamentals, and coolness under the frequent early, but generally dissipative, aggressiveness of their foes.

Then, in the first bout at 132lbs (the second being the "main event" of the night), Lang Clarke of Army landed a solid combination to the head followed-up with a deliberate two-two that sent the man from Xavier to the mat (the referee was in the midst of "stop" as the second right landed). The first and only knock-out of the evening. The Xavier athlete was back on his feet (to the relieved cheers of the crowd) after a quick nap and a check from the ring-side doc.

The only heavy-weight bout of the night was stopped by the referee near the end of the first round. The fighter from West Point landed repeated hooks-to-the-head which the young man from Oxford was not defending.

The fight at 195lbs was relatively surprising, not in outcome (the cadet won), but in tactics. Previously the cadets had employed a shorter and simpler version of the rope-a-dope tactic when their less disciplined and less well-conditioned opponents came out swinging. Rather than stand and brawl toe-to-toe, they defended and let the other fighter tire, then exploited that self-inflicted weakness with steady "work" for the rest of the round. This cadet stood up inside his opponent's early windmill, and landed straight punches and upper cuts to the head. One or two furious windmillings punctuated by deliberately thrown and well-landed opposing hits was all that it took for the windmill's blades to drop and the hub to wobble on it's axis. Referee stops contest.

The crowd was ready for their main event. A nice cheer went up for the wiry 132-pounder from Oxford as he stepped in the ring. Yours truly was the only one to cheer when the young man from West Point entered the ring (much to my wife's embarrassment). After she heard the raucous cheer when they actually introduced the Oxford fighter, she said, "OK, you can go ahead and yell for that West Point guy," so I did.

Both fighters were about equally conditioned, which made for a much more exciting fight. They were both able to work (with varying levels of effectiveness) for the majority of each round. The fighter from Oxford threw a great volume of widely-arcing punches, most of which seemed ineffective to me due to the cadet's competent defense. After the repeated, straight head-shots landed by the cadet in the third round, I thought the decision would go his way (if the fight was not stopped sooner, which had been the outcome of this sort of pounding previously). The judges had a different perspective on the bout, so the decision went to the man from Oxford, who, much to his credit, was able to recover repeatedly from the wobbliness induced by these direct blows and swing away until the bell relieved him.

The coaches, medical and officiating crew at Miami University should be congratulated for putting on such a professional event that took good care of these young athletes, and allowed them to further develop their skills.

Thought this was funny; why you don't want guys from the same gym on the card:

Sparring partners are endowed with habitual consideration and forbearance, and they find it hard to change character. A kind of guild fellowship holds them together, and they pepper each other's elbows with merry abandon, grunting with pleasure like hippopotamuses in a beer vat.
The Sweet Science

Dayton Diode

Looks like Dayton has a hackerspace now: Dayton Diode Space. Tell your favorite south-western Ohio hacker!

Grafton Hill Pumpkin Display

Thanks to Judy Chaffin for making a great pumpkin display happen.

My favorite was Casper the Friendly Ghost. It was great to see all the folks out and about in Grafton Hill enjoying the brisk evening air and beautiful display.

A little bit of Dayton in Paris

Found this in the Musée de l'Orangerie (whose main attraction is the Water Lilies).

Henri-Julien Félix Rousseau - Les Pêcheurs à la ligne
[1908 - 1909]

Looks like an early version of the Wright's glider with the fixed double rudder. The French Aero club at the time was trying to replicate their early gliding results. The brothers made a trip to France in 1908 to show off the Flyer (powered, single steerable rudder), which really cemented their fame (previously the Europeans had been broadly and aggressively dismissive of their claims).
This is another case where the hardware preceded full understanding of the physics. The Wrights found in their bicycle, and subsequent wind tunnel, tests that the published empirical constants in the theoretical lift equations were pretty far off.


Just because the tower is cool (and GIMP is cool as well):

Goodbye Blue Sky

Look mummy, there's an airplane up in the sky

over Rotary Park in Beavercreek.

Click this one to watch the prop go 'round:

Fountains from Riverscape

Ohio Aerospace Hub Road Project

Here's a map of the recently announced pork road development project to support our innovation hub:
View Ohio Aerospace Hub Roadwork Development Grant in a larger map

I'm sure this will be welcome by the retailers on Brown St (now that they've successfully shuffled off their vagrant problem).

Free Concert at Masonic Center

The Miami Valley Symphony Orchestra is putting on a free show at the Masonic Center in Grafton Hill on Sunday, May 16th at 3 p.m.

Updatyon Summit: Struggles of an Organization Town

I recently attended the updayton summit.  I'm a newcomer to Dayton and was curious about this unique-sounding gathering.  My first impression on hearing the words Young Creatives (YCs) Summit was "what a pretentious sounding group".  I went with a list of preconceived questions (culled from this set of notes) that I wanted to try and answer through observation of how the summit was conducted and how the participants evolved their involvement.  My initial idea was to look for evidence supporting either a synergistic group process or emergent individual creativity at the summit.  I note my impressions and preconceptions upfront so that you'll understand my observations are not disinterested, though I tried to be 'minimally involved' and objective (with only limited success, the participants and facilitators were really nice and their optimism was infectious).  If you think I missed something significant please point it out in the comments. 

See Me? I'm behind the bald guy.

The updayton summit's main goal is to come up with annual projects that serve to excite YCs and will in-turn help Dayton retain recent college graduates.  The means used to achieve this goal were facilitated consensus generation and voting.  Attendees were split up by self-selected interest categories, and then further into several sub-groups.  My interest category was entrepreneur.  These sub-groups met independently at the beginning of the summit in breakout sessions to generate ideas and vote on their 'top two' options for projects.  After that, the results of all the sub-groups were collected by summit staff.  The attendees then went to panel discussions in their interest category, and then all met together in a Town Hall to vote on the final projects for the coming year. 

There were seven resulting top ideas in the entrepreneur interest category.  Six of these consisted primarily of websites.  Five of those websites were about mentoring for young entrepreneurs by established ones, entrepreneur support groups, information clearinghouses or some combination thereof.  Consensus building is certainly brutal in seeking out the lowest common denominator.  How to argue against something as innocuous and pervasive as a website in our networked age?  And what were the big success stories out of last year's summit?  Weeding and painting and, you guessed it, a web resource.  Remember, these groups met independently at the beginning of the summit.  No significant prior communication between sub-group members other than mingling at vendor booths while surfing swag. 

How does what I observed in the summit breakout sessions look in light of established thoughts on creativity (or lack thereof) in groups?  There are two superficially competing views of the group creative process.  There is the whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-parts school popularized by Stephen Covey.  In opposition, is the creative-acts-are-individual-acts school.  William Whyte's  The Organization Man provides an extensive denial of useful creative genius in groups, and a call for renewed focus on the dignity and efficacy of the individual contribution.  The former I'll call the Synergy School, the latter the Solitary School.

Here's part of Whyte's criticism of the consensus building group,

Think for a moment of the way you behave in a committee meeting.  In your capacity as group member you feel a strong impulse to seek common ground with the others.  Not just out of timidity but out of respect for the sense of the meeting you tend to soft-pedal that which would go against the grain.  And that, unfortunately, can include unorthodox ideas.  A really new idea affronts current agreement -- it wouldn't be a new idea if it didn't -- and the group, impelled as it is to agreement, is instinctively hostile to that which is divisive.  With wise leadership it can offset this bias, but the essential urge will still be to unity, to consensus.  After an idea matures -- after people learn to live with it -- the group may approve it, but that is after the fact and it is an act of acquiescence rather than creation.

I have been citing the decision-making group, and it can be argued that these defects of order do not apply to information-exchanging groups.  It is true that meeting with those of common interests can be tremendously stimulating and suggest to the individuals fresh ways of going about their own work.  But stimulus is not discovery; it is not the act of creation.  Those who recognize this limitation do not confuse the functions and, not expecting too much, profit from the meeting of minds.

Others, however, are not so wise, and fast becoming a fixture of organization life is the meeting self-consciously dedicated to creating ideas.  It is a fraud.  Much of such high-pressure creation -- cooking with gas, creating out loud, spitballing, and so forth -- is all very provocative, but if it is stimulating, it is stimulating much like alcohol.  After the glow of such a session has worn off, the residue of ideas usually turns out to be a refreshed common denominator that everybody is relieved to agree upon -- and if there is a new idea, you usually find that it came from a capital of ideas already thought out -- by individuals -- and perhaps held in escrow until someone sensed an opportune moment for its introduction.
Togetherness

The scientific conference exemplifies Whyte's informational exchange meeting.  No one attends to make decisions (or vote with dots), the attendees are looking to share their work, and learn about their colleagues' work.  These meetings are an important part of modern scientific progress.  This years' updayton meeting did have information exchange components, which I'll get to later.

The Synergy School might argue that the updayton breakout sessions can provide an opportunity for synergistic collaboration, where alternative solutions emerge that are better than any of the individual solutions brought by group members.  The Synergy School's three levels of communication are

1. The lowest level of communication coming out of low trust situations is characterized by defensiveness, protectiveness, and legalistic language which covers all the bases and spells out qualifiers and escape clauses in the event things go sour.
2. The middle level of communication is respectful communication -- where fairly mature people communicate.
3. The highest level of communication is synergistic (win/win) communication.

However, the acknowledged goal of the updayton summit is 'stimulating like alcohol' and 'engagement' rather than synergy.  So, while I went looking for evidence of high-level cooperative action I should have paid closer attention to the marketing materials and lowered my expectations accordingly.  There was no effort at establishing group trust (we didn't even introduce ourselves at the start of the breakout).  We jumped right in to the scripted consensus process.  Low-trust communication among mature professionals leading to compromise (consensus) is the best we can hope for from events like these, and, unsurprisingly, that's exactly what we got.  This naturally raises the question: why bother?  If all we can reasonably hope for is second tier communication then why invest the effort?  The gist I get from a closer look at the promotional material is 'to get buy-in for the projects which will excite YCs to stay'.  Which, in a moment of cynicism, might strike one as rather manipulative.  Instead of manufacturing radiators, now we're manufacturing community-spiritedness.  We might not be able to offer you gainful employment, but you can volunteer to weed our sidewalks!

In support of the Solitary School's idea about the capital of individual ideas, the winning project from the entrepreneur interest category was the one option that wasn't a website.  The young man whose idea formed the core of this project said, "this is something I've been writing about for years".  Something he was clearly passionate about, something that he expended his individual creative effort to flesh out beforehand on his own, and subsequently pitch to the group.  The other options presented by the members of the group were relentlessly mashed into web-sameness by the gentle actions of the facilitators and the listless shrugs of individual acquiescence from well-meaning group members searching for common ground.  When a thoughtful member of the breakout session asked the only really important question, "how do you create an innovator?"  His question was met with more shrugs around the room followed quickly by redirection from the facilitators.  Clearly that question cannot be packaged into a public relations project.

What about the skills sessions?  Surely these have redeeming aspects, the Solitary School would appreciate these as information exchange, and the Synergy School might appreciate them as 'sharpening the saw'.  The  most interesting aspect of the panel discussions was the incipient frustration I observed in some of David Gasper's comments.  Roughly, "there are so many great resources for entrepreneurs in the Dayton region.  Why don't we have more entrepreneurs!?  Dayton needs more entrepreneurs."  Some of the resources mentioned by the panelists were Dayton SCORE, EntrepenuerOhio and Dayton Business Resource Center.  As Theresa Gasper observed, "People seem to want the information PUSHED to them, but then feel overwhelmed with all the information coming at them. No one seems to want to PULL the information – meaning, many don't want to search for the info."  This is consistent with the majority of "needs" identified in the entrepreneur breakout sessions.  These folks are looking for checklists, guarantees of stability and someone to tell them what to do.  In fact, one participant in my session thought that the biggest barrier to entry for entrepreneurs was the lack of the safety net offered by nationalized health-care!  If you were to ask me what is the opposite of the entrepreneurial spirit, I could not have come up with a better answer.  Probably the opposite of the definitions the panel members gave of entrepreneur too:

• some one who has put something of value to them at risk
• some one with significant "skin in the game"

Dayton already has a tough time with entrepreneurial thinking because of its recent history as a factory town (far removed from the celebrated, early-industrial "great men").  In his article on a New Era of Joblessness, Don Peck identifies psychological work that points to an additional generational component contributing to this dearth of entrepreneurs,

Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the 2000s dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’”Twenge told me. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special.’”

In her 2006 book, Generation Me, Twenge notes that self-esteem in children began rising sharply around 1980, and hasn’t stopped since. By 1999, according to one survey, 91 percent of teens described themselves as responsible, 74 percent as physically attractive, and 79 percent as very intelligent. (More than 40 percent of teens also expected that they would be earning $75,000 a year or more by age 30; the median salary made by a 30-year-old was $27,000 that year.)Twenge attributes the shift to broad changes in parenting styles and teaching methods, in response to the growing belief that children should always feel good about themselves, no matter what. As the years have passed, efforts to boost self-esteem—and to decouple it from performance—have become widespread.

These efforts have succeeded in making today’s youth more confident and individualistic. But that may not benefit them in adulthood, particularly in this economic environment.Twenge writes that “self-esteem without basis encourages laziness rather than hard work,” and that “the ability to persevere and keep going” is “a much better predictor of life outcomes than self-esteem.” She worries that many young people might be inclined to simply give up in this job market. “You’d think if people are more individualistic, they’d be more independent,” she told me. “But it’s not really true. There’s an element of entitlement—they expect people to figure things out for them.”

Seeking 'solutions' which enable this emerging neurosis, rather than healing it, is probably not the answer to a more dynamic Dayton. 


Please don't misunderstand my criticisms of this updayton process (or cooperation in general).  I am in agreement with both Covey and Whyte that our biggest challenges require innovative cooperation to solve. 

Our most important work, the problems we hope to solve or the opportunities we hope to realize require working and collaborating with other people in a high-trust, synergistic way...
Interdependence

Let me admit that I have been talking principally about the adverse aspects of the group.  I would not wish to argue for a destructive recalcitrance, nor do I wish to undervalue the real progress we have made in co-operative effort.  But to emphasize, in these times, the virtues of the group is to be supererogatory.  Universal organization training, as I will take up in the following chapters, is now available for everybody, and it so effectively emphasizes the group spirit that there is little danger that inductees will be subverted into rebelliousness.

Over and above the overt praise for the pressures of the group, the very ease, the democratic atmosphere in which organization life is now conducted makes it all the harder for the individual to justify to himself a departure from its norm.  It would be a mistake to confuse individualism with antagonism, but the burdens of free thought are steep enough that we should not saddle ourselves with a guilty conscience as well.

Togetherness

However, what Dayton lacks towards its success is not more resources from government, more focus on community, more committee meetings or trendy bohemian culture to attract jobless hipsters.  In fact, if the attendance of the updayton summit is any indication, Dayton has no lack of optimistic joiners.  However, coddling these agreeable, cooperative, and risk-averse Organization Volk is not the answer if what you are seeking is a flowering of 1000 new entrepreneurs in Dayton.  As Whyte argues, we lack a recognition that  "[t]he central ideal -- that the individual, rather than society, must be the paramount end [...] is as vital and as applicable today as ever".  Lower the barriers to entry (taxes / zoning / regulation / government subsidized competitors), and the passionate individuals uninterested in paternalism will exploit the opportunities that emerge to deliver for Dayton's future.

[
The winner of the 'best swag contest' was MetroParks with their D-ring key fob:

Yes. My keys are now a' swingan'...
]

2010 Young Creatives Summit: Get the Shirt

The 2010 Young Creatives Summit is imminent here in the shining Gem City!

You may forget all the folks you meet during the networking and breakout sessions since they'll be plenty of beverages at the after-party, but you'll always have the shirt!

Get yours while there's still time.

Ohio Personal Income

The Dayton Business Journal has a recent article about incomes in Ohio falling less than the national averages. Here's some interactive graphs from Google public data on the topic:

Interesting how DC is such an outlier in these graphs; it's good to be king.

Here's one that's just interesting, not necessarily Dayton, Ohio-centric (you can drag the labels around if it starts out too cluttered):
Rumors of the death of US manufacturing seem greatly exaggerated.

Devil Take the Hindmost

More Google Data fun:

The local Chemineer boys are striking, funny comments from DDN:

The city of Atlanta and the State of Georgia would happily welcome all of the manufacturing facilities and corporate offices of Chemineer into our productive, low tax and right to work state.
Why worry with the burdens of constrictive Union contracts and astronomical wages? Property taxes and operating expenses are much lower down here and we'd welcome you with open arms.
NCR has already made the switch - you can too! Say good-bye to unions and hello to sunny Atlanta!
ComeOnDown 9:45 AM, 3/9/2010

Capital always wins out, it's nearly as fluid and mobile as ideas. The Boeing machinists thought they could hold the company management over the barrel because of the big new 787 development, and management opened a second line in South Carolina (rather than bring outsourced sub-assemblies 'back home' to Seattle). What makes Chemineer's Dayton operation any better than an equivalent facility and folks down south of the Mason-Dixon?

Open Thread for Externalities and Establishing Causation Discussion

This post is just a place to collect spill-over from a discussion on another site about another topic.

Jesse February 23, 2010 at 12:41 pm

JStults,

I will pick up the debate on your blog then.  I have read the linked article and the information is still not overwhelming to the free-market system.  Have you read much of Walter Block’s work in this area? This is a very brief paper that describes the basics of the free market approach and the ways that government intervention have distorted the market.  http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/misallocations_externalities.pdf
 

jstults said...

Regulatory Models and the Environment: Practice, Pitfalls, and Prospects
Modeling is a difficult enterprise even outside
of the potentially adversarial regulatory environment. The demands grow when the regulatory requirements for accountability, transparency, public accessibility, and technical rigor are added to the challenges. Moreover, models cannot be validated (declared true) but instead should be evaluated with regard to their suitability as tools to address a specific question. The committee concluded that these characteristics make evaluation of a regulatory model more complex than
simply comparing measurement data with model results. Evaluation also must balance the need for a model to be accurate with the need for a model to be reproducible, transparent, and useful for the regulatory decision at hand. Meeting these needs requires model evaluation to be applied over the “life cycle” of a regulatory model with an approach that includes different forms of peer review, uncertainty analysis, and extrapolation methods than for non-regulatory models.

Their choice of terminology is unfortunate, validated generally doesn't mean true, it means understanding the degree to which a model is a suitable representation of the real world.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

The Dayton Aerospace Cluster

This post is about the competitive advantage Dayton may or may not enjoy as an Aerospace Innovation Hub. This month’s Aerospace America has an interesting article titled “Changing aerospace cluster dynamics”, by Philip Butterworth-Hayes. A cluster is a group of similar or competitive businesses that locate in the same region, also known (in Ohio) as an innovation hub. The reasons given in the article for the increase of attractiveness of aerospace clusters are

• development of research institutions
• local and national government subsidies
• specialized work-force availability
• just-in-time production techniques

For these reasons, locating in a cluster gives a business a competitive advantage (see the Cluster Meta-study for more details). Like everything else in the world economy, the dynamics of clusters is changing and businesses in clusters are developing links with clusters around the world. Butterworth-Hayes claims that aerospace clusters in “North America and Europe will do less manufacturing and concentrate more on developing high-end integration and high-technology skills, outsourcing the labor-intensive manufacturing work to clusters in low-wage economies.” A familiar refrain to the folks of Dayton who have been struggling with the effects of the off-shoring (or down-southing) of manufacturing for decades. He continues, “This is exactly what seems to be happening. The key to transforming manufacturing clusters in North America and Europe to centers of aerospace excellence is access to innovation skills – corporate and academic. There is a new imperative for traditional manufacturing clusters to attract companies skilled in design and engineering, rapid prototyping, software development, part manufacturing, testing and research capabilities.”

Ohio’s governor has been in the news lately after designating Dayton an Aerospace Innovation Hub. The main focus of the Governor’s plan seems to follow the “transformation formula” described by Butterworth-Hayes. Grants to local research institutions and trade deals with foreign countries where the manufacturing will take place. So how good an idea is the Governor’s strategy? First it’s a good idea to find out what we’re starting with. Figures 1 through 5 come from the Cluster Mapping Project. They illustrate the relative size / employment / wages in traded clusters in the state of Ohio.

Figure 1 shows that Ohio has a significant and growing share of the turbine engine manufacturing employment in the US. The other good news from Figure 1 is the “Production Technology” cluster, relatively large and growing. The bad news shouldn’t be any surprise, “Automotive” and “Metal Manufacturing” are both large and shrinking.

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Figure 1: State of Ohio: Specialization by Traded Cluster, 1998 – 2007

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Figure 2 shows the part of the reason Ohio (and Dayton) is feeling some pain. The 2^nd and 3^rd largest employers are the shrinking ones. Production Technology is 9^th on the list and Aerospace Engines is 24^th.

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Figure 2: State of Ohio: Employment by Traded Cluster, 2007

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Figure 3: State of Ohio: National Employment Rank by Traded Cluster, 2007

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Figure 4 shows that our Ohio workers in Aerospace Engines are well-paid compared to the national average. Our Aerospace Vehicles and Defense folks (2^nd on the list) are a paid a little less than the national average.

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Figure 4: State of Ohio: Wages by Traded Cluster, 2007

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The key political graph is Figure 5. Which sectors are creating the most jobs? The surprising (at least to me) big winner is “Transportation and Logistics”. Aerospace Engines added a tiny number of jobs over the time-period. Production Technology lost jobs over this period (Figure 1 showed the relative nationwide change).

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Figure 5: State of Ohio: Job Creation by Traded Cluster, 1998 – 2007

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For the Dayton region, the contribution to the Aerospace Engines cluster is basically GE in Cincinnati, that’s close enough to Dayton to be part of a virtual cluster (though their immediate outlook probably depends significantly on the fate of the F-136). The Aerospace Vehicles and Defense is basically WPAFB. So the cluster map seems to indicate that designating Dayton an ’aerospace innovation hub’ is at least somewhat reasonable. There’s a significant number of people in the region already doing the job. What about the rest of the “cluster checklist”?

• development of research institutions: DAGSI, AFRL
• local and national government subsidies: well $250k is a start…
• specialized work-force availability: GE’s big facility in Cinci, various small local shops in Dayton
• just-in-time production techniques: this isn’t really a characteristic of the region, just what efficient manufacturers are doing these days

This actually looks pretty good for Dayton. According to the formula, the well-educated, white-color professionals at the “top” of the value chain will be “innovating” and inking international trade deals while coordinating production at low-wage manufacturing clusters in Mexico and Asia. So what’s the problem? The problem for Dayton is Figure 5. Tiny growth in aero-manufacturing and defense / research jobs is a poor dressing for the sucking chest wound of automotive and metal manufacturing job losses. If we want Dayton to succeed, if we want all of Dayton to succeed, then Dayton needs a different approach than the commonly accepted “transformation formula” for aerospace clusters.

Why not coordinate manufacturing in a (relatively) low-wage cluster in Dayton’s hollow core? Wages couldn’t be as low as developing nations, but there is significant value in locating the engineers and the assembly lines in close proximity (see Gulfstream in Savanah or Cessna in Wichita), and coordinating the far-flung manufacturing is not without it’s significant costs/risks (see Boeing’s 787 experience). Don’t get me wrong, this won’t be a return to the glory days of gold-plated labor contracts. Labor in Dayton has to understand their competitive position and the value proposition that they bring. The availability of inexpensive foreign alternatives must temper their demands, but it doesn’t have to be a race to the bottom. The value of having design and manufacturing collocated means that wages can be higher than in the foreign low-wage alternatives, while still offering a competitive return on capital.

Dayton is different, generic transformation recipes don’t fit. Real innovation is finding a way to go after the top of the value chain (research / innovation / design) and provide opportunities for people in the middle and the bottom of the value chain at the same time. Not everyone can be a Chief, we need ways for Indians to contribute constructively too, or as Esrati put it: What do elevator attendants do in the information age?