Author: Art Diamond

Auerbach Talked to Hikers, Skiers, and Divers to Advance Wilderness Medicine: “He Never Stopped”

(p. B10) Dr. Paul Auerbach, an emergency care physician who pioneered the field of wilderness medicine in the 1980s and then taught ways to heal people injured by the unpredictable, died on June 23 [2021] at his home in Los Altos, Calif.

. . .

Out in the wild, knowing how to treat a venomous snake bite or a gangrenous infection can mean the difference between life and death. In the 1970s, however, the specialized field of health care known as wilderness medicine was still in its infancy. Then Dr. Auerbach showed up.

A medical student at Duke University at the time, he went to work in 1975 with the Indian Health Service on a Native American reservation in Montana, and the experience was revelatory.

“We saw all kinds of cases that I would have never seen at Duke or frankly anywhere else except on the reservation,” Dr. Auerbach said in a recent interview given to Stanford University, where he worked for many years. “Snakebites. Drowning. Lightning strike.”

. . .

“I kept going back to literature to read, but there was no literature,” he said. “If I wanted to read about snake bites, I was all over the place. If I wanted to read about heat illness, I was all over the place. So I thought, ‘Huh, maybe I’ll do a book on wilderness medicine.’”

Dr. Auerbach started researching material for the book in 1978, when he began his medical residency at U.C.L.A., finding the time to do so despite grueling 12-hour hospital shifts. He collected information about how to treat burn wounds, hypothermia, frostbite and lightning injuries. He interviewed hikers, skiers and divers. And he assigned chapters to doctors who were passionate about the outdoors.

The resulting book, “Management of Wilderness and Environmental Emergencies,” which he edited with a colleague, Edward Geehr, was published in 1983 and is widely considered the definitive textbook in the field, with sections like “Protection From Blood-Feeding Arthropods” and “Aerospace Medicine: The Vertical Frontier.” Updated by Dr. Auerbach over 30 years, it is in its seventh edition and now titled “Auerbach’s Wilderness Medicine.”

. . .

Last year, shortly before he received his cancer diagnosis, the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold, and Dr. Auerbach decided to act.

“The minute it all first happened, he started working on disaster response,” his wife said. “Hospitals were running out of PPE. He was calling this person and that person to learn as much as he could. He wanted to find out how to design better masks and better ventilators. He never stopped.”

For the full obituary, see:

Alex Vadukul. “Dr. Paul Auerbach, 70, Who Pioneered Treatment of Wilderness Emergencies.” The New York Times, First Section (Tuesday, July 20, 2021): B10.

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

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date July 19, 2021, and has the title “Dr. Paul Auerbach, Father of Wilderness Medicine, Dies at 70.”)

The latest edition of Auerbach’s book is:

Auerbach, Paul S., Tracy A. Cushing, and N. Stuart Harris, eds. Auerbach’s Wilderness Medicine. 7th ed. 2 vols. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier, 2017.

Global Freedom Has Declined for 15 Straight Years

(p. A4) Freedom House, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting freedom and democracy, reports that freedom across the globe has declined for 15 straight years, a trend that accelerated last year. “The long democratic recession is deepening,” Freedom House says.

. . .

Democracy is messy, but in an authoritarian system the problem is the lack of messiness. Cults of personality develop, opposing voices with potentially good ideas are squelched, healthy debates and innovative thoughts are blocked. In a new piece in Foreign Affairs magazine, China expert Jude Blanchette notes this risk for Mr. Xi in China: “Paeans to the greatness of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ may strike outsiders as merely curious or even comical, but they have a genuinely deleterious effect on the quality of decision-making and information flows within the (Communist) party.”

At least China has done a good job of managing its economy. Elsewhere, authoritarian systems have produced a plundering of national resources, corruption and a general mismanagement of the economy.

For the full commentary, see:

Gerald F. Seib. “Autocrats Show Staying Power, for Now.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, July 13, 2021): A4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 12, 2021, and has the title “Cuba’s Unrest Frames World’s Big Struggle: Dictators vs. Democracies.”)

34,300 Hong Kongers Apply for British Visa to Leave “A City That Is Lacking Freedom”

(p. B1) LONDON — Lin Kwong had a good life in Hong Kong. She taught sports management part time at a college and chaired an amateur drama club. Her young son, Chee Yin, was doted on by his grandparents. She had friends and favorite restaurants. But in February, she made the difficult decision to leave it all behind.

“Nothing is as difficult as staying in a city that is lacking freedom,” she said.

In the year since China imposed a sweeping national security law on its territory of Hong Kong, a former British colony, tens of thousands of people have made plans to leave the city. And like Ms. Kwong, many are headed for Britain, where holders of British National Overseas (B.N.O.) pass-(p. B3)ports have been given a pathway to work and citizenship. In the first quarter of the year, 34,300 people applied for the special visa, according to Britain’s immigration department.

. . .

Ms. Kwong often posts on social media, wanting to show the benefits of life in Britain. At a memorial in London last month on the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, she posted a photo of a lit candle. In Hong Kong, the long-running annual vigil had been banned.

At a protest in London on June 12, hundreds of Hong Kongers marched through the city center chanting “Fight for freedom!” and “Stand with Hong Kong!” Organizers wore masks with a Union Jack pattern, and sang “God Save the Queen.”

For the full story, see:

Isabella Kwai and Alexandra Stevenson. “Departing Hong Kong For New Life.” The New York Times, First Section (Monday, July 12, 2021): B1 & B3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated July 31, 2021, and has the title “Hong Kong Migrants Seek Fresh Start in U.K. After Crackdown.”)

Anderson Led NCR to Disrupt Its Own Cash Register Technology

I believe that Clayton Christensen (with Raynor) in The Innovator’s Solution, used the NCR transition from mechanical cash registers to electronic cash registers as an example of creative destruction that was NOT an example of his disruptive innovation. Alternatively, should this be considered a rare case where a firm succeeds in disrupting itself, especially rare because it was not implemented by the firm founders? (The usual case of rare self-disruption is HP disrupting its laser printer by developing the ink jet printer.)

(p. A9) The same self-belief that kept Mr. Anderson alive as a POW gave him confidence he could save NCR.

“The most important message I try to get across to our managers all over the world is that we are in trouble but we will overcome it,” he told Business Week, which reported that he had the “stance and mien of a middleweight boxer.”

Founded in 1884, NCR was comfortably entrenched as a dominant supplier of mechanical cash registers and machines used in accounting and banking. It underestimated the speed at which microelectronics and computers would wipe out its legacy product line. By the early 1970s, NCR was losing sales to more nimble rivals.

A factory complex covering 55 acres in Dayton made hundreds of exceedingly complicated machines rapidly becoming obsolete. Mr. Anderson found that NCR was using about 130,000 different parts, including more than 9,000 types and sizes of screws. For 1972, his first year as president, NCR took a $70 million charge, largely to write down the value of parts and inventory and replace outdated production equipment.

Mr. Anderson slashed the payroll and invested in new products, including automated teller machines and computers. Profitability recovered, and NCR reported record revenue of $4.07 billion for 1984, the year he retired as chairman.

For the full obituary, see:

James R. Hagerty. “Former POW Revived National Cash Register.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 10, 20211): A9.

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date July 6, 2021, and has the title “Former Prisoner of War Saved NCR From Obsolescence.”)

The Christensen co-authored book mentioned above is:

Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

AI Algorithms Use Massive Data to Do “Narrow Tasks”

(p. B2) A funny thing happens among engineers and researchers who build artificial intelligence once they attain a deep level of expertise in their field. Some of them—especially those who understand what actual, biological intelligences are capable of—conclude that there’s nothing “intelligent” about AI at all.

. . .

. . . the muddle that the term AI creates fuels a tech-industry drive to claim that every system involving the least bit of machine learning qualifies as AI, and is therefore potentially revolutionary. Calling these piles of complicated math with narrow and limited utility “intelligent” also contributes to wild claims that our “AI” will soon reach human-level intelligence. These claims can spur big rounds of investment and mislead the public and policy makers who must decide how to prepare national economies for new innovations.

. . .

The tendency for CEOs and researchers alike to say that their system “understands” a given input—whether it’s gigabytes of text, images or audio—or that it can “think” about those inputs, or that it has any intention at all, are examples of what Drew McDermott, a computer scientist at Yale, once called “wishful mnemonics.” That he coined this phrase in 1976 makes it no less applicable to the present day.

“I think AI is somewhat of a misnomer,” says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research on AI’s economic impacts requires a precise definition of the term. What we now call AI doesn’t fulfill the early dreams of the field’s founders—either to create a system that can reason as a person does, or to create tools that can augment our abilities. “Instead, it uses massive amounts of data to turn very, very narrow tasks into prediction problems,” he says.

When AI researchers say that their algorithms are good at “narrow” tasks, what they mean is that, with enough data, it’s possible to “train” their algorithms to, say, identify a cat. But unlike a human toddler, these algorithms tend not to be very adaptable. For example, if they haven’t seen cats in unusual circumstances—say, swimming—they might not be able to identify them in that context. And training an algorithm to identify cats generally doesn’t also increase its ability to identify any other kind of animal or object. Identifying dogs means more or less starting from scratch.

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Mims. “AI’s Big Chill.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 31, 2021): B2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 30, 2021, and has the title “Artificial Intelligence’s Big Chill.” When you click on the title in the search list internal to the WSJ, you get a different title on the page of the article itself: “Why Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Intelligent.”)

120 Million Added People Face Food Scarcity Due to Covid-19

(p. A1) An estimated 270 million people are expected to face potentially life-threatening food shortages this year — compared to 150 million before the pandemic — according to analysis from the World Food Program, the anti-hunger agency of the United Nations. The number of people on the brink of famine, the most severe phase of a hunger crisis, jumped to 41 million people currently from 34 million last year, the analysis showed.

The World Food Program sounded the alarm further last week in a joint report with the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, warning that “conflict, the economic repercussions of Covid-19 and the climate crisis are expected to drive higher levels of acute food insecurity in 23 hunger hot spots over the next four months,” mostly in Africa but also Central America, Afghanistan and North Korea.

The situation is particularly bleak in Africa, where new infections have surged. In recent months, aid organizations have raised alarms about Ethiopia — where the number of people affected by famine is higher than anywhere in the world — and (p. A5) southern Madagascar, where hundreds of thousands are nearing famine after an extraordinarily severe drought.

. . .

In South Africa, typically one of the most food-secure nations on the continent, hunger has rippled across the country.

. . .

An estimated three million South Africans lost their jobs and pushed the unemployment rate to 32.6 percent — a record high since the government began collecting quarterly data in 2008.

. . .

In Duncan Village, the sprawling township in Eastern Cape Province, the economic lifelines for tens of thousands of families have been destroyed.

Before the pandemic, the orange-and-teal sea of corrugated metal shacks and concrete houses buzzed every morning as workers boarded minibuses bound for the heart of nearby East London. An industrial hub for car assembly plants, textiles and processed food, the city offered stable jobs and steady incomes.

“We always had enough — we had plenty,” said Anelisa Langeni, 32, sitting at the kitchen table of the two-bedroom home she shared with her father and twin sister in Duncan Village.

For nearly 40 years, her father worked as a machine operator at the Mercedes-Benz plant. By the time he retired, he had saved enough to build two more single family homes on their plot — rental units he hoped would provide some financial stability for his children.

The pandemic upended those plans. Within weeks of the first lockdown, the tenants lost their jobs and could no longer pay rent. When Ms. Langeni was laid off from her waitressing job at a seafood restaurant and her sister lost her job at a popular pizza joint, they leaned on their father’s $120 monthly pension.

Then in July, he collapsed with a cough and fever and died of suspected Covid-19 en route to the hospital.

“I couldn’t breathe when they told me,” Ms. Langeni said. “My father and everything we had, everything, gone.”

For the full story, see:

Christina Goldbaum and Joao Silva. “No Job, No Food: Virus Deepens Global Hunger.” The New York Times (Friday, August 6, 2021): A1 & A5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Aug. 6, 2021, and has the title “No Work, No Food: Pandemic Deepens Global Hunger.”)

The Walt Disney Company Cheats Scarlett Johansson

Walt Disney is one of my heroes. The current Walt Disney Company is not.

(p. B1) The fight between actress Scarlett Johansson and Walt Disney Co. over her contract for the movie “Black Widow” has a new participant: the powerful Creative Artists Agency, which represents Ms. Johansson and many of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

On Thursday, Ms. Johansson filed a lawsuit against Disney alleging her contract was breached when the company decided to put “Black Widow” on its Disney+ streaming service at the same time it was released in movie theaters.

. . .

“They have shamelessly and falsely accused Ms. Johansson of being insensitive to the global Covid pandemic,” CAA Co-Chairman Bryan Lourd said in a statement.

Mr. Lourd blasted Disney for releasing details of Ms. Johansson’s salary and for attempting to tie (p. B2) her lawsuit to the pandemic. Disney “included her salary in their press statement in an attempt to weaponize her success as an artist and businesswoman, as if that were something she should be ashamed of,” he added.

Mr. Lourd said Disney’s response to Ms. Johansson is an attack on her character that is “beneath the company that many of us in the creative community have worked with successfully for decades.”

. . .

“They have very deliberately moved the revenue stream and profits to the Disney+ side of the company, leaving artistic and financial partners out of their new equation. That’s it, pure and simple,” Mr. Lourd said.

For the full story, see:

Joe Flint. “Johansson’s Agent Rips Disney Over Film Flap.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 31, 2021): B1-B2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 30, 2021, and has the title “Scarlett Johansson’s Agent Rips Disney Over ‘Black Widow’ Dispute.”)

Musk Pushed Hard to Achieve Sustainable Scale at Tesla

(p. B1) This was Mr. Hunter’s big moment: His team had scheduled 1,700 people to pick up their Model 3s in the coming days—a record—and he was proud to announce the achievement. The compact Model 3 was Mr. Musk’s bet-the-company shot at transforming Tesla into a mainstream auto maker and ushering in a new era of electric vehicles—and at that moment, Tesla needed to move thousands of them to stay afloat.

Mr. Hunter had set a record, but Mr. Musk wasn’t happy. The Tesla chief executive ordered Mr. Hunter to more than double the number the next day or else he’d personally take over.

There was more. Mr. Musk said he’d heard that Mr. Hunter’s team had been relying on phone calls to schedule car pickups. That stopped now. Nobody likes talking on (p. B6) the phone, Mr. Musk said; it takes up too much time. Text customers instead. That would be faster. If he heard about any calls being made the next day, Mr. Hunter was fired.

Mr. Hunter’s wife and children had only recently joined him in Las Vegas; they had just finished unpacking their boxes. Now Mr. Musk was threatening to fire him if he didn’t do the impossible in 24 hours.

Tesla was 15 years old, and it was running out of time and money.

. . .

The sales organization didn’t have hundreds of company cellphones that Mr. Hunter’s sales team could use to send text messages, as Mr. Musk demanded, and they didn’t want their employees using their own personal phones.

Overnight, Mr. Hunter and other managers pieced together a solution, employing software that allowed his team to text from their computers. They stopped the practice of walking customers through the reams of sales paperwork that would eventually need to be completed and signed. If Mr. Musk’s goal was to have people in a queue to pick up their cars, then that’s what they would do. They’d just start assigning pickup times for customers: Can you come in at 4 p.m. on Friday to get your new Model 3?

Often, Mr. Hunter didn’t even wait for any response before putting a customer on the list for pickup. If the customer couldn’t make it, she might be told she would lose her spot in line for a car that quarter. Customers became more motivated to complete the tedious paperwork needed to complete a sale when there was a Model 3 dangled in front of them. Mr. Hunter’s team began telling customers to have it all completed 48 hours before delivery.

The team raced through their list of customers, assigning times at pickup centers around the U.S. By 6 p.m. the next day, they had reached 5,000 appointments. Mr. Hunter gathered the team to thank them for their work. He fought back tears. He hadn’t told them that his job was on the line; all they knew was that it was super-important to schedule a bunch of deliveries. That night on the call, Mr. Hunter reported the results to Mr. Musk.

“Wow,” Mr. Musk said.

. . .

As the clock ticked down to the end of September [2020] and Tesla’s outrageous sales goal seemed out of reach, Mr. Musk turned to Twitter to make an unusual request to his loyal customers: Help us deliver vehicles.

Longtime owners showed up at stores around the country. They focused on showing customers how to operate their new cars, and explained life with an electric vehicle, freeing up paid staff to handle the overflow of paperwork. Mr. Musk and his new girlfriend, pop musician Grimes, worked at the Fremont delivery center, joined by board member Antonio Gracias. Mr. Musk’s brother, Kimbal, also a member of the board, showed up at a store in Colorado. It was truly an all-hands-on-deck moment. Surrounded by friends and kin, Musk seemed at his happiest, one manager recalled: “It was like a big family event…. He likes that—he likes loyalty.”

The company was ready to tabulate the quarter’s final delivery results. It was close. Deliveries reached 83,500—a record that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations but that was more than 15% shy of the internal goal of 100,000. (It was also uncannily close to the estimate by the head of customer experience, who had seemingly been ousted for suggesting it.) Almost 12,000 vehicles were still en route to customers, missing the deadline for the third quarter.

For the full essay, see:

Tim Higgins. “The Race to Rescue Tesla.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 31, 2021): B1 & B6.

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

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date July 30, 2021, and has the title “Elon Musk’s ‘Delivery Hell’.”)

The essay quoted above is based on Higgins’s book:

Higgins, Tim. Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century. New York: Doubleday, 2021.

30% of U.S. Manufacturing Job Growth Is in Southwest

(p. A1) Companies producing everything from steel to electric cars are planning and building new plants in Southwest states, far from historical hubs of American industry in the Midwest and Southeast.  . . .

The Southwest, comprising Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma, increased its manufacturing output more than any other region in the U.S. in the four years through 2020, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Those states plus Nevada added more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs from January 2017 to January 2020, representing 30% of U.S. job growth in that sector and at roughly triple the national growth rate, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

. . .

(p. A8) Manufacturers in the Southwest have been relatively insulated from pandemic shutdowns and layoffs, and job growth there is expected to continue.

. . .

Some growth in the Southwest has come at the expense of California, classified in U.S. statistics as part of the Far West. In 2019, nearly 2,000 manufacturing workers in Texas and more than 1,300 in Arizona arrived from California, the most in a decade, the most recent Census Bureau data show. More than 2,700 manufacturing workers have come to Nevada from California in 2017 through 2019.

For the full story, see:

Ben Foldy and Austen Hufford. “Southwest Emerges As America’s New Factory Hub.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., June 02, 2021): A1 & A8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 1, 2021, and has the same title in search list, but on the article page has the title “The Southwest Is America’s New Factory Hub. ‘Cranes Everywhere.’”)