January 2010 – Page 3 – artdiamondblog.com

Bose Leapfrogs the Competition in Defense of Your Peace and Quiet

“The Bose QuietComfort 15 has refined circuitry and redesigned earcaps.” Source of caption: print version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B8) . . . , if your sales are getting eaten alive by cheaper rivals, and you don’t want to play the price game, you have only one option: play leapfrog. Make your gadget so much better than the me-toos that people will be willing to pay your premium once again.

That’s the idea behind Bose’s new QuietComfort 15 model ($300), which replaces the QuietComfort 2.
. . .
First, the QC15 model really, truly does advance the art of noise cancellation — big time. The QC 2 headphones and my Panasonics cut the airplane roar by half. But the 15 reduced it by, say, 85 percent, leaving only a distant, whispery whoosh to remind you that you’re in an aluminum tube 39,000 feet up in the air. Taking them off after a while, as you’ll want to do because your ears get sweaty, is like walking into a rock concert when you’ve been outside the building.

For the full story, see:
DAVID POGUE. “State of the Art; Ho Ho Ho? You Won’t Hear a Thing.” The New York Times (Thurs., December 3, 2009): B1 & B8.
(Note: the online version of the article is “State of the Art; Bose’s Latest Headphones Can Quell the Clangor” and is dated December 2, 2009.)
(Note: ellipses added.)

Obama’s Bigger Government Brings More Lobbyists to Washington

(p. A21) One insight distinguished Barack Obama from the other presidential candidates last year. While he lacked experience or a special grasp of issues, Mr. Obama said he uniquely understood what ails Washington, and what was causing the endless squabbling and bitter stalemate on important issues. If elected, he said he would change the way business is done in Washington, end the partisan deadlock and the ideological polarization.

“Change must come to Washington,” Mr. Obama said in a June 2008 speech. “I have consistently said when it comes to solving problems,” he told Jake Tapper of ABC News that same month, “I don’t approach this from a partisan or ideological perspective.”
Mr. Obama also decried the prominent role played by lobbyists. “Lobbyists aren’t just a part of the system in Washington, they’re part of the problem,” Mr. Obama said in a May 2008 campaign speech.
I was reminded of this last statement by a recent headline on the front page of USA Today. It read: “Health care fight swells lobbying. Number of organizations hiring firms doubles in ’09.” The article suggested that what Mr. Obama had promised to fix had only gotten worse.
. . .
In Washington it’s business as usual, except for one thing. The bigger the role of government, the more lobbyists flock to town. By pushing for his policies, the president effectively put up a welcome sign to lobbyists. Despite promising to keep them out of his administration, he has even hired a few. So nothing has changed, except maybe that Washington is now more acrimonious than it has been.

For the full commentary, see:
FRED BARNES. “OPINION; Why Obama Isn’t Changing Washington; There is no way he can grow the government without attracting more lobbyists and more political acrimony.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., NOVEMBER 27, 2009): A21.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the date of the online version is given as NOVEMBER 26, 2009.)

“Today You Can Be What You Want to Be”

“In this Nov. 25, 1989, file photo a Czech demonstrator overcome by emotion after hearing about the resignation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Prague.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A16) . . . Mirek Kodym, 56, a ponytailed former security guard who published illegal political and literary tracts before 1989 and marched on Tuesday as he had 20 years ago, said the Velvet Revolution had been a seminal moment in which a beleaguered nation had finally tasted freedom.

“Today you can be what you want to be and do what you want to do, and no one will interfere,” he said. “The nostalgia for the past is a stupid thing.”

For the full story, see:
DAN BILEFSKY. “Celebrating Revolution With Roots in a Rumor.” The New York Times (Weds., November 18, 2009): A16.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated November 17, 2009.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“The former Czech Republic’s president Vaclav Havel, background center, with a red scarf, placed a candle at a commemoration of the so-called Velvet Revolution, in Prague on Tuesday.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Replication Easier than “Sweat and Anguish” of First Discovery

(p. 137) No one will deny that Japan’s triumph in semiconductors depended on American inventions. But many analysts rush on to a further theory that the Japanese remained far behind the United States until the mid- 1970s and caught up only through a massive government program of industrial targeting of American inventions by MITI.
Perhaps the leading expert on the subject is Makoto Kikuchi, a twenty-six-year veteran of MITI laboratories, now director of the Sony Research Center. The creator of the first transistor made in Japan, he readily acknowledges the key role of American successes in fueling the advances in his own country: “Replicating someone else’s experiment, no matter how much painful effort it might take, is nothing compared with the sweat and anguish of the men who first made the discovery.”

Kikuchi explains: “No matter how many failures I had, I knew that somewhere in the world people had already succeeded in making a transistor. The first discoverers . . . had to continue their work, their long succession of failures, face-to-face with the despairing possibility that in the end they might never succeed. . . . As I fought my own battle with the transistor, I felt this lesson in my very bones.” Working at MITI’s labs, Kikuchi was deeply grateful for the technological targets offered by American inventors.

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

Heart Disease Is Not Just a Malady of Modern Societies, But “Is Part of the Human Condition”

“Scientists scanned 20 mummies, and examined scans of two more, for the study.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) ORLANDO, Fla. — Researchers said they found evidence of hardening of the arteries in Egyptian mummies dating as far back as 3,500 years, challenging longstanding assumptions that cardiovascular disease is mainly a malady of modern societies.

A team of heart-imaging experts and Egyptologists examined 22 mummies from the Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo in a CT scanning machine, looking for evidence of calcium buildup that could indicate vascular disease.
They were able to identify the hearts, arteries or both in 16 of the mummies, nine of whom had deposits of calcification. An analysis determined the deposits were either definite or probable evidence of atherosclerosis, the condition that leads to heart attacks and strokes.
“Not only do we have atherosclerosis now, it was prevalent as long as 3,500 years ago,” said Gregory Thomas, a cardiologist and imaging specialist at University of California, Irvine, who was principal investigator of the study. “It is part of the human condition.”
The research was presented Tuesday at the American Heart Association scientific meeting here. A report is also scheduled to appear in Wednesday’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

For the full story, see:
RON WINSLOW. “Heart Disease Found in Egyptian Mummies.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., NOVEMBER 18, 2009): A5.
(Note: the online version of the article has a date of NOVEMBER 19, 2009 and is titled “Heart Disease Found in Egyptian Mummies.”)

“Claims that Climate Change Is Accelerating Are Bizarre”

The author quoted below on global warming is a Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

(p. A19) Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally–such as for the last dozen years or so–it does little that can be discerned.

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.
The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode.

For the full commentary, see:
RICHARD S. LINDZEN. “The Climate Science Isn’t Settled; Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., December 1, 2009): A19.
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated NOVEMBER 30, 2009.)

Castro Agents Beat Up Cuban Blogger

“Blogger Yoani Sánchez speaks at home in Havana on Monday, days after she says she was beaten by Cuban agents.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A14) Yoani Sánchez, Cuba’s most prominent dissident blogger, was walking along a Havana street last Friday along with two other bloggers and a friend when two men she says were Cuban agents in civilian clothes forced her inside an unmarked black car and beat her, telling her to stop criticizing the government.

The assault, believed to be the first against the growing blogger movement on the island, has cast a spotlight on the country’s record of repression, highlighting how little change there has been in political freedoms during the nearly three years since Raúl Castro took over as president from retired dictator Fidel Castro.
A decline in tourism revenues from the global recession and damage from several hurricanes last year have prompted the island’s government to clamp down even harder on dissent and freedom of speech, according to a recent report by the Inter American Press Association, a watchdog group.
The group said Cuba currently has 26 journalists in jail, and it cited 102 incidents against Cuban journalists in the past year, including beatings, arbitrary arrests and death threats.

For the full story, see:
DAVID LUHNOW. “Beating Rattles Cuban Bloggers.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., NOVEMBER 11, 2009): A14.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated NOVEMBER 12, 2009.)

Entrepreneurial Innovation Comes from Diverse Outsiders Rather than Establishments

(p. 113) Firms that win by the curve of mind often abandon it when they establish themselves in the world of matter. They fight to preserve the value of their material investments in plant and equipment that embody the ideas and experience of their early years of success. They begin to exalt expertise and old knowledge, rights and reputation, over the constant learning and experience of innovative capitalism. They get fat.

A fat cat drifting off the curve, however, is a sitting duck for new nations and companies getting on it. The curve of mind thus tends to favor outsiders over establishments of all kinds. At the capitalist ball, the blood is seldom blue or the money rarely seasoned. Microcosmic technologies are no exception. Capitalism’s most lavish display, the microcosm, is no respecter of persons.
The United States did not enter the microcosm through the portals of the Ivy League, with Brooks Brothers suits, gentleman Cs, and warbling society wives. Few people who think they are in already can summon the energies to break in. From immigrants and outcasts, street toughs and science wonks, nerds and boffins, the bearded and the beer-bellied, the tacky and uptight, and sometimes weird, the born again and born yesterday, with Adam’s apples bobbing, psyches (p. 114) throbbing, and acne galore, the fraternity of the pizza breakfast, the Ferrari dream, the silicon truth, the midnight modem, and the seventy-hour week, from dirt farms and redneck shanties, trailer parks and Levittowns, in a rainbow parade of all colors and wavelengths, of the hyperneat and the sty high, the crewcut and khaki, the pony-tailed and punk, accented from Britain and Madras, from Israel and Malaya, from Paris and Parris Island, from Iowa and Havana, from Brooklyn and Boise and Belgrade and Vienna and Vietnam, from the coarse fanaticism and desperation, ambition and hunger, genius and sweat of the outsider, the downtrodden, the banished, and the bullied come most of the progress in the world and in Silicon Valley.

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

Castro’s “Absolute Personal Dictatorship” Denounced By Former Member of Cuban Inner Circle

Source of book image:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2575/4095461227_09463c5680.jpg

(p. C1) The plethora of dictators, despots and revolutionaries-turned-authoritarians south of the border has spawned a genre of literature that might be called the Latin American Strongman Novel — a genre that includes harrowing novels based on real historical figures, like Mario Vargas Llosa’s dazzling “Feast of the Goat” (which depicted Rafael Trujillo’s devastating rule over the Dominican Republic) and more mythic creations, like Gabriel García Márquez’s “Autumn of the Patriarch,” that have employed the sorcery of magical realism to conjure larger-than-life fictional tyrants in a panoply of ruthlessness, audacity and corruption.

The latest in this tradition of books is Norberto Fuentes’s fascinating new novel, “The Autobiography of Fidel Castro,” which purports to tell the longtime Cuban leader’s story in his own words. The “self-portrait” that emerges from these pages is that of a Machiavellian survivor: an egomaniac who identifies himself with the revolution but who is loyal not to a cause, not to an ideology, not to his compatriots, but only to his own ambition.
This Fidel is narcissistically longwinded, like his real-life counterpart. He is also a self-mythologizing change agent who succeeds in making himself “the neurological center of an entire nation” — a wily Nietzschean operator who believes in the force of his own will, while sensing that “the chameleon is going to last longer under his rock than the lion, despite its roaring and lean muscles.” He is a cynical master of manipulation and strategic maneuvering, a skilled practitioner of the black arts of propaganda and gamesmanship who always wants “to keep people guessing.”
A journalist and Hemingway (p. C7) scholar, Mr. Fuentes was once a cheerleader of the revolution and part of Mr. Castro’s inner circle himself. He grew disillusioned with the Cuban leader, however, after two army officers were executed in 1989 on what many believe were trumped-up charges. Mr. Fuentes fell out of favor, came under government surveillance and was detained after a failed attempt to flee Cuba by boat. After a hunger strike and the intervention of Mr. García Márquez, he was allowed to leave the country in 1994, and has since denounced Mr. Castro for his “absolute personal dictatorship” and willingness “to do anything necessary to stay in power.”

For the full story, see:
MICHIKO KAKUTANI. “Books of The Times; Fiction Trying for Truth in Novel’s View of Dictator.” The New York Times (Tues., December 15, 2009): C1 & C7.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated Mon., December 14, 2009.)