December 2020 – Page 3 – artdiamondblog.com

Jim Collins Book “Had a Huge Influence” on Reed Hastings’s Creation of Netflix

(p. 6) The Netflix founder and co-chief executive, whose new book is ‘No Rules Rules,’ reads with his mind more than his heart: ‘I generally turn more to television and film for emotional nourishment.’

. . .

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

Probably “Beyond Entrepreneurship,” by Jim Collins and William C. Lazier. It’s not nearly as well known as Collins’s “Good to Great” or “Built to Last” in the pantheon of influential business books. But it came out in the early 1990s, right around the time I was starting my first company, Pure Software. It had a huge influence on how I thought about that business and, later, what I aspired to create at Netflix. Collins and other business authors whose books I benefited from are a big reason I decided to write a book of my own, to try to pay it forward to other entrepreneurs in the same way those other authors have. Years from now, it would be great if someone who found “No Rules Rules” useful today writes their own book improving on it..

. . .

What do you plan to read next?

“Shoe Dog,” the memoir by Phil Knight, who created Nike — and yes, we’re also adapting it for Netflix.

For the full interview, see:

“By the Book; Reed Hastings.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, September 27, 2020): 6.

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Sept. 24, 2020, and has the title “By the Book; Reed Hastings, the Founder of Netflix, Keeps His Library in His Pocket.” The first sentence quoted above, and the questions, are by the New York Times interviewer, who is not identified in either the print or the online versions. The rest is by Reed Hastings. The first sentence quoted above is in the print, but not the online, version.)

Reed Hastings’s book mentioned above is:

Hastings, Reed, and Erin Meyer. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. New York: Penguin Press, 2020.

Jim Collins’s co-authored book mentioned above is:

Collins, James C., and William C. Lazier. Beyond Entrepreneurship: Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company. Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Phil Knight’s memoir mentioned above is:

Knight, Phil. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike. New York: Scribner, 2016.

Bikini Atoll Is “Best Example of the Earth’s Resilience”

(p. A13) . . . “The Age of Nature” is not just a beautifully made series, it’s also a surprisingly joyful one. It’s about rehabilitation—how humans are correcting environmental outrages from Panama to Mozambique to Central China to Yellowstone Park—and how forgiving Mother Nature can be if we just pay her some affectionate attention. . . .

The best example of the Earth’s resilience might be the first location visited, Bikini Atoll—or, rather, the crater left by the 23 nuclear detonations the U.S. set off there from 1946-58. More than 60 years later, humans still can’t live in the immediate area, but under the South Pacific’s surface, anemones, polyps, sharks and wrasses flourish in and around the coral reefs that have somehow clung or sprung back to life. . . .

Elsewhere around the globe, similar acts of restoration and reparation are taking place, or already have: In the ’90s, China’s Loess Plateau, a vast expanse of arable but powdery soil, had been all but ruined by deforestation and grazing, until a massive effort was undertaken to terrace the land and reforest it. Similarly, the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, which once suffered the multiple threats of warfare, poaching, and poaching to finance warfare, had to be restocked with certain animals—200 buffalo, for instance, and 180 wildebeest—but other species, such as lions, have re-emerged on their own.

For the full review, see:

John Anderson. “TELEVISION REVIEW; ‘The Age of Nature’: Back From the Brink.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, October 15, 2020): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 14, 2020, and has the title “TELEVISION REVIEW; ‘The Age of Nature’ Review: Back From the Brink.”)

Even Chimps Seek Cool Comfort

Some humans reject air conditioning. Chimps are unable to create air conditioning. But when they discover a cool cave in a hot summer, they spend time in the cave.

(p. D2) Everyone needs to cool off on a scorching summer day, even chimpanzees. Where do the primates go on sizzling days when woodlands and forests don’t provide respite from the heat?

Caves.

. . .

In southeastern Senegal, temperatures spike to 110 degrees Fahrenheit and fires burn large parts of the landscape over a seven-month dry season. Several natural cave formations pock the terrain, and they can be up to 55 degrees cooler than the surrounding grasslands.

For the full story, see:

Priyanka Runwal. “Why Chimp Moms Flock to Caves on the Savanna.” The New York Times (Tuesday, August 11, 2020): D2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated on August 6, 2020, and has the same title as the print version.)

WHO “Expert” Committee Took Four Months to Endorse Widespread Mask-Wearing

(p. A1) GENEVA—Sylvie Briand landed in China looking for answers. Nearly a month had passed since word of a mysterious pneumonia had emerged. It was now late January and the World Health Organization was struggling to learn more about it.

Frustrated with mounting cases and limited information from China, the WHO’s top brass, including Dr. Briand, flew to Beijing to resolve a burning question: How easily did this new disease spread?

They met with President Xi Jinping. They had a phone call with local WHO staff just back from the Wuhan epicenter, quarantined after one developed a cough. Dr. Briand, the agency’s director of global infectious hazard preparedness, drew up a list of questions for Chinese health officials.

By the time the WHO received answers, the Covid-19 pandemic was stumbling into emergency rooms on three continents. Its spread around the world had already begun on Jan. 30 [2020] when the WHO declared a global public-health emergency, its one and only level of alert.

. . .

(p. A10) “Now is the moment for all countries to be preparing themselves,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared on Feb. 4, when the WHO reported more than 20,600 cases in 25 countries.

But that same day, the WHO also asked nations not to close borders—following its standard protocol, as such restrictions might discourage governments from reporting outbreaks. Within weeks, the virus landed on the agency’s doorstep, turning Geneva into a hot spot.

. . .

To write its recommendations, the WHO solicits outside experts, which can be a slow process. It took those experts more than four months to agree that widespread mask-wearing helps, and that people who are talking, shouting or singing can expel the virus through tiny particles that linger in the air. In that time, about half a million people died.

. . .

A review of the WHO’s initial response to the pandemic, based on interviews with current and former WHO staff, public-health experts advising it and officials who work with it, suggests that the agency’s bureaucratic structure, diplomatic protocol and funding were no match for a pandemic as widespread and fast-moving as Covid-19.

. . .

On Jan. 3 [2020], representatives of China’s National Health Commission arrived at the WHO office in Beijing. The NHC acknowledged a cluster of pneumonia cases, but didn’t confirm that the new pathogen was a coronavirus, a fact Chinese officials already knew. That same day, the NHC issued an internal notice ordering laboratories to hand over or destroy testing samples and forbade anyone from publishing unauthorized research on the virus.

China’s failure to notify the WHO of the cluster of illnesses is a violation of the International Health Regulations, said Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University who has advised the WHO on international health regulation matters. “Once a government knows that there is a novel virus that fits within the criteria, which China did, it’s obliged to report rapidly,” he said.

China also flouted the IHR by not disclosing all key information it had to the WHO, said David Fidler, an expert on global health and international law at the Council on Foreign Relations. The regulations call for member states to provide the WHO with “timely, accurate and sufficiently detailed public health information available to it on the notified event.”

For the full story, see:

Betsy McKay and Drew Hinshaw. “Doctors Split on Best Way To Treat Coronavirus Cases.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, August 29, 2020): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed years, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 28, 2020, and has the title “How Coronavirus Overpowered the World Health Organization.”)

Young Doctor “Taken Aback” by Deaths Under Nationalized Medicine

(p. 26) Westaby’s book will be a balm to the hearts of curmudgeons everywhere. Sidestepping the contemporary hand-wringing about the lack of empathy in medicine, Westaby, a British surgeon, positions empathy as a threat to the surgical career: “Heart surgery,” he writes, “needs to be an impersonal, technical exercise.”

. . .

The deaths that truly madden him are those that could have been prevented by available technologies not then funded by the British National Health Service (N.H.S.), his employer.

. . .

As a young doctor who imagines nationalized medicine as a way toward comprehensive care for all my patients, I was taken aback.

For the full review, see:

Rachel Pearson. “SHORTLIST; Medical Memoirs.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, July 2, 2017): 26.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 27, 2017, and has the title “SHORTLIST; Four Timely Memoirs from the Halls of Medicine.”)

The book under review is:

Westaby, Stephen. Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Trump Administration Pushed FDA to Allow Citizens to Choose Vaccines Sooner

(p. A7) On Sept. 23 [2020], Dr. Stephen M. Hahn left a virtual meeting of the White House’s coronavirus task force to take a call from the president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

Mr. Meadows was angry with Dr. Hahn, the head of the Food and Drug Administration, for pushing new guidelines for vaccine developers, according to two senior administration officials familiar with the call who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. The F.D.A. wanted to require two months of follow-up data to make sure a vaccine was safe and effective, all but ensuring one would not be ready by Election Day as President Trump had promised.

Mr. Meadows told the commissioner the White House would not sign off on the guidance because it was unnecessary and would delay vaccine approval, so he should drop it, the officials said.

. . .

Mr. Meadows, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and the president himself have called Dr. Hahn directly to urge him to speed up emergency authorization of vaccines and treatments, according to the two senior administration officials.

But despite the White House refusal to approve the new vaccine guidance document, the F.D.A. published the guidelines in briefing materials to an advisory committee that will discuss them on Thursday [October 22, 2020], effectively making them official.

For the full story, see:

Sheila Kaplan, Sharon LaFraniere, Noah Weiland and Maggie Haberman. “How the F.D.A. Stood Firm Against White House Pressure.” The New York Times (Wednesday, October 21, 2020): A7.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed dates, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 20, 2020, and has the title “How the F.D.A. Stood Up to the President.”)

Scientists Shocked to Discover a New Structure in Human Body

Some have claimed that we have picked all the low-hanging fruit and that there is little yet to be discovered. But if we remain curious, alert to serendipitous inconsistencies or surprises, we still have a lot to be learned. The default is to not see, or at least to soon forget, when we see the unexpected. To see and remember is hard enough. In the passages quoted below the researchers saw, remembered, and followed up. (Another example would be when Nick Steinsberger saw, remembered, and followed-up on the unexpected positive effects of the accidentally too watery fracking mixture injected into a well.)

(p. D5) A team of researchers in the Netherlands has discovered what may be a set of previously unidentified organs: a pair of large salivary glands, lurking in the nook where the nasal cavity meets the throat. If the findings are confirmed, this hidden wellspring of spit could mark the first identification of its kind in about three centuries.

Any modern anatomy book will show just three major types of salivary glands: one set near the ears, another below the jaw and another under the tongue. “Now, we think there is a fourth,” said Dr. Matthijs Valstar, a surgeon and researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and an author on the study, published last month in the journal Radiotherapy and Oncology.

The study was small, and examined a limited patient population, said Dr. Valerie Fitzhugh, a pathologist at Rutgers University who wasn’t involved in the research. But “it seems like they may be onto something,” she said. “If it’s real, it could change the way we look at disease in this region.”

Even without a direct therapeutic application, Dr. Yvonne Mowery, a radiation oncologist at Duke University, said she “was quite shocked that we are in 2020 and have a new structure identified in the human body.”

Dr. Valstar and his colleagues, who usually study data from people with prostate cancer, didn’t set out on a treasure hunt for unidentified spit glands.

. . .

While perusing a set of scans from a machine that could visualize tissues in high detail, the researchers noticed two unfamiliar structures dead center in the head: a duo of flat, spindly glands, a couple of inches in length, draped discreetly over the tubes that connect the ears to the throat.

Puzzled by the images, they dissected tissue from two cadavers and found that the glands bore similarities to known salivary glands that sit below the tongue. The new glands were also hooked up to large draining ducts — a hint that they were funneling fluid from one place to another.

It’s not completely clear how the glands eluded anatomists. But “the location is not very accessible, and you need very sensitive imaging to detect it,” said Dr. Wouter Vogel, a radiation oncologist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and an author on the study.

. . .

Dr. Fitzhugh added that it should be easier to spot the camera-shy glands with traditional techniques “now that they know to look for it.”

For the full story, see:

Katherine J. Wu. “The Human Anatomy Yields a New Surprise.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 27, 2020): D5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated on Oct. 21, 2020, and has the title “Doctors May Have Found Secretive New Organs in the Center of Your Head.”)

The academic article mentioned above is:

Valstar, Matthijs H., Bernadette S. de Bakker, Roel J. H. M. Steenbakkers, Kees H. de Jong, Laura A. Smit, Thomas J. W. Klein Nulent, Robert J. J. van Es, Ingrid Hofland, Bart de Keizer, Bas Jasperse, Alfons J. M. Balm, Arjen van der Schaaf, Johannes A. Langendijk, Ludi E. Smeele, and Wouter V. Vogel. “The Tubarial Salivary Glands: A Potential New Organ at Risk for Radiotherapy.” Radiotherapy and Oncology (published online in advance of print on Sept. 23, 2020).

Costs and Difficulties of Clinical Trials Delay “Most Promising Experimental Drugs”

(p. A6) As the coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc in the United States and treatments are needed more than ever, clinical trials for some of the most promising experimental drugs are taking longer than expected.

Researchers at a dozen clinical trial sites said that testing delays, staffing shortages, space constraints and reluctant patients were complicating their efforts to test monoclonal antibodies, man-made drugs that mimic the molecular soldiers made by the human immune system.

As a result, once-ambitious deadlines are slipping. The drug maker Regeneron, which previously said it could have emergency doses of its antibody cocktail ready by the end of summer, has shifted to talking about how “initial data” could be available by the end of September [2020].

And Eli Lilly’s chief scientific officer said in June that its antibody treatment might be ready in September, but in an interview this week, he said he now hopes for something before the end of the year.

“Of course, I wish we could go faster — there’s no question about that,” said the Eli Lilly executive, Dr. Daniel Skovronsky. “I guess in my hopes and dreams, we enroll the patients in a week or two, but it’s taking longer than that.”

For the full story, see:

Katie Thomas. “Clinical Trials of Drugs For Virus Are Delayed By a Swamped System.” The New York Times (Saturday, August 15, 2020): A6.

(Note: bracketed year added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 14, 2020, and has the title “Clinical Trials of Coronavirus Drugs Are Taking Longer Than Expected.”)

Invading Mussels Gave Lake Michigan Sparkling Clarity

(p. 12) Having just moved back to Chicago from Mexico, she had seen Lake Michigan with fresh eyes. “Have you noticed how blue the lake is now?” she asked me one day. I had not. “It’s, like, Caribbean blue,” she said. The next time I went down to the lakeside I noticed what she meant. The lake of my childhood had always vacillated somewhere between a slate blue and the gray found in the seams of an old tennis ball. But suddenly it had taken on a kind of hyperclarity; it sparkled. The lake was so clean, I read online, that passing airplanes could see shipwrecks resting on the lake bottom. Thanks to climate change, the lake was approaching Caribbean temperatures, as well; it hit 80 degrees one recent July, when it would normally be in the high 50s. I remember feeling pleased by this change, but also slightly unsettled, the same way we feel on an unseasonably warm winter’s day. It was too good to be good.

And so it came as a revelation to me to read Dan Egan’s deeply researched and sharply written “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes.” Dipping into this book was like opening the secret diary of a mercurial and mysterious parent. I learned that the reason the lake had become so clear was that it had been invaded by a dastardly pair of bivalves — the zebra and quagga mussels — which had hitched a ride on a shipping barge from either the Black or Caspian Seas and then quietly but ceaselessly colonized the lake. They set about cleaning up the water with hyperactive single-mindedness, eventually sucking up 90 percent of the lake’s phytoplankton. The water is now three times clearer than it was in the 1980s.

For the full review, see:

Robert Moor. “Five Alive.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, May 28, 2017): 12.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 23, 2017, and has the title “April’s Book Club Pick: ‘The Death and Life of the Great Lakes,’ by Dan Egan.”)

The book under review is:

Egan, Dan. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.