July 2013 – Page 2 – artdiamondblog.com

Creator of C Language Worked Late “in a Chaotic Office”

“Dennis Ritchie received the Japan Prize in May at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., for his role in co-developing the Unix operating system.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. A7) Dennis Ritchie invented C, the computer-programming language that underlies Microsoft Windows, the Unix operating system and much of the other software running on computers around the world.

Mr. Ritchie was a longtime research scientist at Bell Labs, originally AT&T’s research division. Bell Labs announced that he died at age 70 [his body was discovered on October 12, 2011].
. . .
Twitter and other online forums crackled with tributes to Mr. Ritchie after his death was announced.
One came from James Grimmelmann, a former Microsoft programmer who now is an associate professor at New York Law School.
“If [Steve] Jobs was a master architect of skyscrapers, it was Ritchie and his collaborators who invented steel,” Mr. Grimmelmann wrote.
Long-haired and often working late into the night in a chaotic office, Mr. Ritchie fulfilled in some ways the computer-nerd stereotype. He was given to gnomic pronouncements on his creations.
“Unix is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity” was one. Another: “C is quirky, flawed and an enormous success.”

For the full obituary, see:
STEPHEN MILLER. “REMEMBRANCES; DENNIS RITCHIE 1941-2011; Pioneer Programmer Shaped the Evolution of Computers.” The New York Times (Fri., October 14, 2011): A7.
(Note: ellipsis, and words in first brackets, added; name in second brackets, in original.)

The Precautionary Principle Is Biased Against the New, and Ignores the Risks of the Old

(p. 250) In general the Precautionary Principle is biased against anything new. Many established technologies and “natural” processes have unexamined faults as great as those of any new technology. But the Precautionary Principle establishes a drastically elevated threshold for things that are new. In effect it grandfathers in the risks of the old, or the “nat-(p. 251)ural.” A few examples: Crops raised without the shield of pesticides generate more of their own natural pesticides to combat insects, but these indigenous toxins are not subject to the Precautionary Principle because they aren’t “new.” The risks of new plastic water pipes are not compared with the risks of old metal pipes. The risks of DDT are not put in context with the old risks of dying of malaria.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.

Ignoring Einstein’s Mistakes by Deifying Him, Makes Us Forget His Struggles

Source of book image: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41zyL4LVYxL.jpg

(p. A13) Mr. Ohanian finds that four out of five of the seminal papers that Einstein produced in the so-called “miracle year” of 1905, when he was working as a patent inspector in Zurich, were “infested with flaws.”
. . .
. . . he notes Einstein’s errors for a purpose, showing us why his achievement was all the greater for them.
In this Mr. Ohanian provides a useful corrective, for there is a tendency, even today, to deify Einstein and other men of genius, treating them as if they were immortal gods. Einstein himself objected to the practice even as he reveled in his fame. “It is not fair,” he once observed, “to select a few individuals for boundless admiration and to attribute superhuman powers of mind and of character to them.” In doing so, ironically, we make less of the person, not more, forgetting and simplifying their struggle.
. . .
. . . Einstein’s ability to make use of his mistakes as “stepping stones and shortcuts” was central to his success, in Mr. Ohanian’s view. To see Einstein’s wanderings not as the strides of a god-like genius but as the steps and missteps of a man — fallible and imperfect — does not diminish our respect for him but rather enhances it.

For the full review, see:
McMahon, Darrin M. “BOOKSHELF; Great and Imperfect.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., September 5, 2008): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Ohanian, Hans C. Einstein’s Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.

“The Million-Dollar Question” for “Our Long Economic Slump”: Why “the Severe Downturn in Jobs”?

(p. 5) [There are] . . . two underappreciated aspects of our long economic slump. First, it has exacted the harshest toll on the young — even harsher than on people in their 50s and 60s, who have also suffered. And while the American economy has come back more robustly than some of its global rivals in terms of overall production, the recovery has been strangely light on new jobs, even after Friday’s better-than-expected unemployment report. American companies are doing more with less.
“This still is a very big puzzle,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard professor who was chief economist at the Labor Department during the Clinton administration. He called the severe downturn in jobs “the million-dollar question” for the economy.

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID LEONHARDT. “CAPITAL IDEAS; The Idled Young Americans.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., May 5, 2013): 5.
(Note: ellipsis, and words in brackets, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 3, 2013.)

Will Apple Innovate Without Jobs?

“Steve Jobs, introducing the iPhone 4 in January [2011].” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B4) “The good news for Apple is that the product road map in this industry is pretty much in place two and three years out,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “So 80 percent to 90 percent of what would happen in that time would be the same, even without Steve.”

“The real challenge for Apple,” Mr. Yoffie continued, “will be what happens beyond that road map. Apple is going to need a new leader with a new way of recreating and managing the business in the future.”
. . .
His design decisions, Mr. Jobs explained, were shaped by his understanding of both technology and popular culture. His own study and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When a reporter asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
. . .
Great products, Mr. Jobs once explained, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”
Mr. Yoffie said Mr. Jobs “had a unique combination of visionary creativity and decisiveness,” adding: “No one will replace him.”

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR. “Without Its Master of Design, Apple Will Face Challenges.” The New York Times (Thurs., August 25, 2011): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses in text, and bracketed year in caption, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 24, 2011, and the slightly longer title “Without Its Master of Design, Apple Will Face Many Challenges.”)

Chinese Peasants Applied Precautionary Principle to Scythe Technology

(p. 249) In a letter Orville Wright wrote to his inventor friend Henry Ford, Wright recounts a story he heard from a missionary stationed in China. Wright told Ford the story for the same reason I tell it here: as a cautionary tale about speculative risks. The missionary wanted to improve the laborious way the Chinese peasants in his province harvested grain. The local farmers clipped the stalks with some kind of small hand shear. So the missionary had a scythe shipped in from America and demonstrated its superior productivity to an enthralled crowd. “The next morning, however, a delegation came to see the missionary. The scythe must be destroyed at once. What, they said, if it should fall into the hands of thieves; a whole field could be cut and carried away in a single night.” And so the scythe was banished, progress stopped, because nonusers could imagine a possible–but wholly improbable–way it could significantly harm their society.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.

Record Companies Refused to See Efficiency of Napster Distribution System

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) . . . the central character in “Appetite for Self-Destruction” is technological change.
. . .
Record labels scrambled to negotiate with Napster and develop a legal version of the service with multiple revenue streams. The attempts all failed. In Mr. Knopper’s telling, there were unreasonable demands on all sides. But he faults music executives for “cling[ing] to the old, suddenly inefficient model of making CDs and distributing them to record stores. . . . In this world, the labels controlled — and profited from — everything.” In the new world being ushered in by Napster, he writes, control was shifting “to a snot-nosed punk and his crazy uncle.”
The labels’ inability to reach an agreement with Napster destroyed “the last chance for the record industry as we know it to stave off certain ruin,” Mr. Knopper writes in a typically overheated passage. Had a deal been consummated, he suggests, a legal version of Napster might have generated revenues of $16 billion in 2002 and saved the industry. Whether or not the author’s estimate is accurate, his larger point remains: The music industry’s big mistake was trying to protect a business model that no longer worked. Litigation would not keep music consumers offline.

For the full review, see:
JEREMY PHILIPS. “BUSINESS BOOKSHELF; Spinning Out of Control; How the record industry missed out on a chance to compete in a new digital world.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., February 11, 2009): A15.
(Note: first two ellipses added; third ellipsis in original.)

The book under review is:
Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. New York: Free Press, 2009.

Due to Global Warming, Chicago “Winters Have Softened”

(p. 20) Before anyone accuses me of being some latter-day A. J. Liebling, whose 1952 book “Chicago: The Second City” infuriated residents, let me say there are some good things about living here. The beauty of Lake Michigan. A former rail yard has become Millennium Park. Thanks to global warming, the winters have softened.

For the full review, see:
RACHEL SHTEIR. “Chicago Manuals.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., April 21, 2013): 1 & 20-21.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 18, 2013.)

The Decay of River Rouge’s Diseconomies of Scale

“The rolling hall at Ford’s River Rouge plant, one of Andrew Moore’s photographs of Detroit.” Source of caption and of the Andrew Moore photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Ford’s River Rouge plant near Detroit is a standard textbook example of diseconomies of scale (aka diminishing returns to scale). The image above is an apt illustration of the consequences of diseconomies of scale.

(p. 19) A Connecticut native, Mr. Moore moved to New York in 1980, living near South and John Streets in Lower Manhattan. At night he would wander the neighborhood taking pictures of the construction of the South Street Seaport, which kindled an interest in documenting “life in flux,” he said. “I like places in transformation, the process of becoming and changing.”
. . .
Photos like those of the enormous rolling hall at Ford’s River Rouge plant and a sunset over the Bob-Lo Island boat dock were inspired, Mr. Moore said, by 19th-century American landscape painters like Frederic Church and Martin Johnson Heade.

For the full story, see:
MIKE RUBIN. “Capturing the Idling of the Motor City.” The New York Times, Arts&Leisure Section (Sun., August 21, 2011): 19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 18, 2011.”)

Andrew Moore has a book of his photos of Detroit:
Moore, Andrew, and Philip Levine. Andrew Moore: Detroit Disassembled. Bologna, Italy: Damiani/Akron Art Museum, 2010.

Millions Die Due to Precautionary Principle Ban of DDT

(p. 248) . . . , malaria infects 300 million to 500 million people worldwide, causing 2 million deaths per year. It is debilitating to those who don’t die and leads to cyclic poverty. But in the 1950s the level of malaria was reduced by 70 percent by spraying the insecticide DDT around the insides of homes. DDT was so successful as an insecticide that farmers eagerly sprayed it by the tons on cotton fields–and the molecule’s by-products made their way into the water cycle and eventually into fat cells in animals. Biologists blamed it for a drop in reproduction rates for some predatory birds, as well as local die-offs in some fish and aquatic life species. Its use and manufacture were banned in the United States in 1972. Other countries followed suit. Without DDT spraying, however, malaria cases in Asia and Africa began to rise again to deadly pre-1950s levels. Plans to reintroduce programs for household spraying in malarial Africa were blocked by the World Bank and other aid agencies, who refused to fund them. A treaty signed in 1991 by 91 countries and the EU agreed to phase out DDT altogether. They were relying on the precautionary principle: DDT was probably bad; better safe than sorry. In fact DDT had never been shown to hurt humans, and the environmental harm from the miniscule amounts of DDT applied in homes had not been measured. But nobody could prove it did not cause harm, despite its proven ability to do good.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Samuel Adams Is Underrated Founder Because He Burned His Paper Trail

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A17) “Samuel Adams: A Life” makes it abundantly clear why the British so detested Adams. He started talking independence more than a decade before the Declaration and did more than anyone to organize opposition to colonial taxes and to make “no taxation without representation” a rallying cry. . . .
. . .
If Mr. Stoll’s biography lacks the narrative power of books on other Founders, such as David McCullough’s “John Adams,” the reason may be that the paper trail left by Samuel Adams is frustratingly short. He destroyed much of his correspondence during the revolutionary years, fearful that it could fall into the wrong hands. Some of the letters that remain end with the words “burn this.” This Adams wasn’t playing for the history books. He was trying to plot a revolution. Mr. Stoll makes a convincing case that Samuel Adams is not just the most underrated of the Founders but also one of the most admirable, down-to-earth and principled (he worked to abolish slavery).

For the full review, see:
JONATHAN KARL. “Revolution Is No Tea Party; Rabble-rouser, wordsmith, strategist and defender of liberty.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., November 3, 2008): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Stoll, Ira. Samuel Adams: A Life. New York: Free Press, 2008.