Month: November 2014

Shetl Golden Age Ended When “Russia Repurposed Shtetl Jews as Scapegoats”

(p. 15) Smuggling looms large not only in the economy of Petrovsky-Shtern’s shtetl but for its symbolism, too. The author is interested in the way aspects of one world slide inside another. His golden-age shtetl was born when Russia swallowed a giant slice of Poland at the end of the 18th century and went from having few Jews to overseeing vast numbers of them, many of whom lived in privately owned Polish towns.
These towns are the essential ingredients of the hybrid world Petrovsky-Shtern is celebrating. Polish nobles had permitted Jews to live there on the condition that they ran the outdoor markets, sold liquor and in general acted as engines of trade. When the towns fell under Russian rule, Jews retained many of their economic privileges while expanding their civil rights, especially after they displayed a willingness to inform on their erstwhile Polish overlords.
Shtetl dwellers became adept at playing the declining Polish nobility off against bribable Russian officials. The czar had not yet laid his heavy hand on the trade by which shtetl Jews powered the economic growth of western Russia. Neither had he made nationalism the supreme ideology and Eastern Orthodoxy synonymous with Russian nationalism.
That would come, and as the Russian treasury bought up more and more of the private towns and trade died, Russia repurposed shtetl Jews as scapegoats for a restive peasant population.

For the full review, see:
JONATHAN ROSEN. “World of Our Great-Grandfathers.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., July 27, 2014): 15.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 25, 2014.)

The book under review is:
Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan. The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Wal-Mart Nimbly Evades Bank Industry Efforts to Restrict Competition

(p. B3) Here comes Wal-Bank.
After years of thwarted efforts to break into banking, Walmart is making its biggest foray yet into everyday financial services.
Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, is teaming up with Green Dot, known for its prepaid payment cards, to supply checking accounts to almost anyone over 18 who passes an ID check.
. . .
. . . the new Walmart initiative will be the first full-blown, off-the-shelf checking account. To help attract customers, Walmart and Green Dot will forgo a screening system many banks use to vet potential customers and rely instead on a proprietary system. The model is expected to allow almost any consumer who passes an identification check to open an account in minutes, according to Green Dot.
In the past, Walmart has tried to secure a federal bank charter to become a deposit-taking bank, but abandoned that effort in 2007 in the face of opposition from the banking industry. Since then, the retailer has assembled an array of services that could be offered without a charter, as well as partnerships with financial service companies like Green Dot.

For the full story, see:
HIROKO TABUCHI and JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG. “Finding a Door Into Banking, Walmart Prepares to Offer Checking Accounts.” The New York Times (Weds., SEPT. 24, 2014): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 23, 2014, and has the title “Walmart Prepares to Offer Low-Cost Checking Accounts.”)

Moss Revived After 1,500 Years

(p. D3) Typically, plants break down into organic matter as they become permafrost. Looking at the ancient moss from Signy Island, however, Dr. Convey and his colleagues wondered if, after centuries of frozen darkness, it could grow again.
It was an unlikely idea. Scientists had not managed to revive moss that had been frozen for more than 20 years. Still, Dr. Convey thought it would be interesting to try. “It was just kite-flying,” he said.
The scientists put a core of Signy permafrost under a lamp in a lab in Britain and misted it from time to time with water. After a few weeks, the moss was sending up new green growth.
The deepest layer in which the resuscitated moss grew was three and a half feet below the surface. Based on radiocarbon tests, as they report in the journal Current Biology, the revived moss turned out to be more than 1,500 years old. It’s been in a state of suspended animation, in other words, since the age of King Arthur.
. . .
In some cases, organisms may naturally revive after thousands of years without scientists’ help. And it’s possible that they play an important role in their ecosystems.
At the end of each ice age, for example, retreating glaciers leave behind bare ground that develops into new ecosystems. Dr. Convey wonders if moss, and perhaps other species, may survive under the ice for thousands of years and revive when the glaciers melt. “That gives you a very different way of understanding the biodiversity of a region,” he said.
While cloning mammoths remains speculative, reviving dormant organisms is now passing out of its proof-of-concept stage. The research could lead to using revival to help bolster endangered species.
“You could use whatever is stored in ice or sediment as a sort of backup for biodiversity,” said Luisa Orsini of the University of Birmingham in England. But, she said, “one has to be really, really careful introducing something from the past.”

For the full story, see:
Carl Zimmer. “MATTER; A Growth Spurt at 1,500 Years Old.” The New York Times (Tues., MARCH 18, 2014): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 17, 2014.)

The academic paper reporting the research summarized above, is:
Roads, Esme, Royce E. Longton, and Peter Convey. “Millennial Timescale Regeneration in a Moss from Antarctica.” Current Biology 24, no. 6 (March 17, 2014): R222-R223.

“Folkman Persisted in His Genuinely Original Thinking”

(p. 141) As detailed by Robert Cooke in his 2001 book Dr. Folkman’s War, the successful answers to these basic questions took Folkman through diligent investigations punctuated by an astonishing series of chance observations and circumstances. Over decades, Folkman persisted in his genuinely original thinking. His concept was far in advance of technological and other scientific advances that would provide the methodology and basic knowledge essential to its proof, forcing him to await verification and to withstand ridicule, scorn, and vicious competition for grants. Looking back three decades later, Folkman would ruefully reflect: “I was too young to realize how much trouble was in store for a theory that could not be tested immediately.”

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: italics in original.)

Less than One Percent of Government Spending Is Cost Effective

(p. A3) . . . , most Americans don’t think of their government as particularly successful. Only 19 percent say they trust the government to do the right thing most of the time, according to Gallup.
. . .
Of the 11 large programs for low- and moderate-income people that have been subject to rigorous, randomized evaluation, only one or two show strong evidence of improving most beneficiaries’ lives.
“Less than 1 percent of government spending is backed by even the most basic evidence of cost-effectiveness,” writes Peter Schuck, a Yale law professor, in his new book, “Why Government Fails So Often,” a sweeping history of policy disappointments.

For the full commentary, see:
David Leonhardt. “A Quiet Movement to Help Government Fail Less Often.” The New York Times (Tues., July 15, 2014): A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the last two paragraphs quoted above, were combined into one paragraph in the online version.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has title “The Quiet Movement to Make Government Fail Less Often.”)

The book mentioned in the passage quoted above is:
Schuck, Peter. Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Evidence Some Flies Can Adapt to Climate Change

(p. D7) In the early 2000s, Ary A. Hoffmann, a biologist then at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, wondered how the many species in tropical rain forests would cope when their humid environment dried out.
. . .
. . . at the end of the experiment, the flies were no more resistant to dry air than their forebears. The flies seemed to lack the genetic potential to evolve. Those results suggested that if the rain forest home of Drosophilia birchii loses its high humidity, the flies will die off.
. . .
Recently, two of Dr. Hoffmann’s collaborators — Belinda van Heerwaarden and Carla M. Sgrò of Monash University — decided to rerun the experiment, but with a crucial twist.
Rather than expose the flies to 10 percent relative humidity, Dr. van Heerwaarden and Dr. Sgrò tried 35 percent. That’s still far drier than the moist air of rain forests, but it’s not the aridity one might encounter on a summer day in Death Valley.
“It’s a humidity that’s more relevant to the predictions for how dry the environment would become in the next 30 to 50 years,” Dr. Sgrò said.
. . .
Unlike the flies in the earlier studies, it didn’t take long for these to start evolving. After just five generations, one species was able to survive 23 percent longer in 35 humidity.

For the full story, see:
Carl Zimmer. “MATTER; Study Gives Hope of Adaptation to Climate Change.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 29, 2014): D7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 24, 2014.)

The recent paper discussed above, is:
van Heerwaarden, Belinda, and Carla M. Sgrò. “Is Adaptation to Climate Change Really Constrained in Niche Specialists?” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281, no. 1790 (2014): 1-1.

Zambrano Was Cement Process Innovator

(p. A22) Beginning in 1992, Mr. Zambrano bought up far-flung producers to create the third-largest cement company in the world. He remade each new acquisition, introducing high technology and logistical efficiencies that made Cemex the subject of business school case studies at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From his own computer Mr. Zambrano could monitor any Cemex operation in more than 50 countries, said Rossana Fuentes-Berain, a Mexican journalist who wrote a 2007 book about Mr. Zambrano, “Grey Gold.”
What distinguished him was “the technology, the management and the hunger to prove that you can be as good as anybody in the market,” Ms. Fuentes-Berain said.

For the full obituary, see:
ELISABETH MALKIN. “Lorenzo Zambrano, 70, Leader of Cemex, Dies.” The New York Times (Thurs., May 15, 2014): A22.
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date MAY 13, 2014, and has the title “Lorenzo H. Zambrano, Head of Cement Giant Cemex, Dies at 70.”)

The biography mentioned above, as of this posting, is only available in Spanish:
Fuentes-Berain, Rossana. Oro Gris: Zambrano, La Gesta de Cemex y la Globalizacion en Mexico. Aguilar, 2007.

Centrally Planned War on Cancer “Fails to Allow for Surprises”

(p. 115) It leaves the impression that all shots can be called from a national headquarters; that all, or nearly all, of the really important ideas are already in hand…. It fails to allow for the surprises which must surely lie ahead if we are really going to gain an understanding of cancer. –A COMMITTEE OF THE INSTITUTE OF MEDICINE, NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, ON THE NATIONAL CANCER ACT AND THE “WAR ON CANCER”

Source:
As quoted in Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)