Author: Art Diamond

“I’m Alive and That’s an Extremely Good Thing”

(p. A4) HONG KONG — When Bill Jaynes realized water was rushing into the plane, he started to panic.
Mr. Jaynes, a Micronesian journalist, was aboard a plane set to land on Weno, the tiny Pacific island that is part of the Federated States of Micronesia.
“I thought we landed hard until I looked over and saw a hole in the side of the plane and water was coming in,” he said in a Facebook video, describing the landing of a Boeing 737-800 flown by Air Niugini at Chuuk International Airport on Friday morning [September 28, 2018]. “And I thought, well, this is not, like, the way it’s supposed to happen.”
But then help suddenly arrived — from a flotilla of local boats that rushed to the plane, which landed short of the runway in the Chuuk lagoon, and all 47 passengers aboard the aircraft were evacuated, according to early statement from the airline.
“It’s just surreal,” said Mr. Jaynes, managing editor of The Kaselehlie Press, a newspaper on Pohnpei, another Micronesian island.
Matthew Colson, a Baptist missionary who lives on Weno, recorded the rescue effort and posted his interview with Mr. Jaynes on Facebook. He said the locals who rushed their boats to the scene were fisherman and construction workers, all locals.
. . .
Mr. Jaynes, reflecting on the experience, said, “I’m alive and that’s an extremely good thing.”

For the full story, see:
Austin Ramzy. “When a Plane Crashed in the Pacific, Fishing Boats Came to the Rescue.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 28, 2018): A4.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 27, 2018, and has the title “‘Their Plane Was Set to Land. The Water Rushed In. Then, the Boats Came.”)

The passages quoted above, provide one more example of one of the main messages of:
Ripley, Amanda. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.

Higher Minimum Wages Increase Automation of Routine Tasks

(p. A11) Over the past few years, San Francisco in particular, and California in general, has increased the cost to hire and train employees at risk of being automated. The minimum wage will rise to $15 an hour in San Francisco in 2018. The rest of California will get there four years later. On top of San Francisco’s hourly wage mandate are requirements for health care, paid leave and employee scheduling.
These added costs give employers with already slim profit margins a strong incentive to automate or embrace self-service. In an interview with Forbes, the founder of a delivery robot company linked his product’s value proposition to a rising minimum wage: “At something like $10 per delivery, the majority of citizens will not use [human delivery]. It’s too expensive.”
The empirical evidence supports the anecdotes: An August [2017] study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research linked a rising minimum wage to an increase in unemployment for workers in jobs that require a large number of routine tasks. The authors reported that it wasn’t just service-industry jobs at risk. A rising minimum wage also had a negative effect on job opportunities for older, less-skilled employees in manufacturing.

For the full commentary, see:
Michael Saltsman. “CROSS COUNTRY; San Francisco’s Problem Isn’t Robots; It’s the $15 Wage Floor; The city fears automation will replace workers–but its own policies make low-value jobs illegal.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Nov. 25, 2017): A11.
(Note: bracketed year added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 24, 2017.)

The later published version of the National Bureau of Economic Research study mentioned above, is:
Lordan, Grace, and David Neumark. “People Versus Machines: The Impact of Minimum Wages on Automatable Jobs.” Labour Economics 52 (June 2018): 40-53.

Closed Malls Repurposed as Distribution Centers

(p. B6) The pressure for speedy online package delivery is prompting companies to look for distribution facilities closer to residential areas or highways.
Some of the best locations, it turns out, are dead malls.
Warehouse landlords say they like former malls because the shopping centers occupy swaths of space relatively close to where consumers live or near main highways.
But it isn’t easy to convert a mall into logistics space quickly. Developers say it takes a community ready to accept that the mall has failed as well as understanding that there are viable job opportunities in logistics real estate.

For the full story, see:
Esther Fung. “The Best Location for New Warehouse Is Often an Old Mall.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2017): B6.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Aug. 8, 2017, and the title “The Best Place for a New Warehouse? An Old Mall.”)

Communism Is “the Greatest Catastrophe in Human History”

(p. A17) Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd–now St. Petersburg–100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.
. . .
The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.
To this list should be added nearly a million Gulag prisoners released during World War II into Red Army penal battalions, where they faced almost certain death; the partisans and civilians killed in the postwar revolts against Soviet rule in Ukraine and the Baltics; and dying Gulag inmates freed so that their deaths would not count in official statistics.
If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported–including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia–the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.

For the full commentary, see:
David Satter. “100 Years of Communism–and 100 Million Dead; The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2017): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 6, 2017.)

“Wishing Only for More Time”

(p. A20) Walter Mischel, whose studies of delayed gratification in young children clarified the importance of self-control in human development, and whose work led to a broad reconsideration of how personality is understood, died on Wednesday [September 12, 2018] at his home in Manhattan.
. . .
In a series of experiments at Stanford University beginning in the 1960s, he led a research team that presented preschool-age children with treats — pretzels, cookies, a marshmallow — and instructed them to wait before indulging themselves. Some of the children received strategies from the researchers, like covering their eyes or reimagining the treat as something else; others were left to their own devices.
The studies found that in all conditions, some youngsters were far better than others at deploying the strategies — or devising their own — and that this ability seemed to persist at later ages. And context mattered: Children given reason to distrust the researchers tended to grab the treats earlier.
. . .
For the wider public, it would be the marshmallow test. In the late 1980s, decades after the first experiments were done, Dr. Mischel and two co-authors followed up with about 100 parents whose children had participated in the original studies. They found a striking, if preliminary, correlation: The preschoolers who could put off eating the treat tended to have higher SAT scores, and were better adjusted emotionally on some measures, than those who had given in quickly to temptation.
The paper was cautious in its conclusions, and acknowledged numerous flaws, including a small sample size. No matter. It was widely reported, and a staple of popular psychology writing was born: If Junior can hold off eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes in preschool, then he or she is headed for the dean’s list.
. . .
In 2014, Dr. Mischel published his own account of the experiment and its reception, “The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.”
In at least one serious replication attempt, scientists failed to find the same results. Still, there is general agreement that self-discipline, persistence, grit — call it what you like — is a good predictor of success in many areas of life.
. . .
“I am glad that at the choice point at 18 I resisted going into my uncle’s umbrella business,” he wrote in the autobiographical essay. “The route I did choose, or stumbled into, still leaves me eager early each morning to get to work in directions I could not have imagined at the start, wishing only for more time, and not wanting to spend too much of it looking back.”

For the full obituary, see:

Benedict Carey. “Walter Mischel, 88, Marshmallow Test Creator, Dies.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018): A20.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Sept. 14, 2018, and has the title “Walter Mischel, 88, Psychologist Famed for Marshmallow Test, Dies’.”)

Mischel’s book on delayed gratification, is:
Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.

“No Clear Path” for A.I. to Match Humans in “Broad, Integrated, Flexible and Robust Understanding of the World”

The author of the comments quoted below is a Duke University Professor of Computer Science.

(p. A15) For those not working in AI, it can be difficult to interpret achievements in the field.
. . .
. . . the AI system solves problems in a very different way than humans.
. . .
Tasks that require responding to the same kind of standardized input over and over, with a clear measure of success, are a natural fit. Such tasks range from the diagnosis of medical images to flipping burgers. On the other hand, jobs that are messy and unpredictable and require an understanding of people and the broader world–I like to think of kindergarten teachers–will likely remain safe for a long time.
Much progress has been made in AI in a short time, so future breakthroughs are not unthinkable. For now, humans remain unsurpassed in their broad, integrated, flexible and robust understanding of the world.
. . .
. . . currently there is no clear path toward building such systems.

For the full commentary, see:
Vincent Conitzer. “Natural Intelligence Still Has Its Advantages; AI is disruptive, but it hasn’t rendered humanity obsolete.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 28, 2018.)

Automation Predicted to Destroy 19 Million Old Jobs and Create 21 Million New Jobs

(p. B5) At least 21 new job categories may soon emerge from technological and other societal changes, says a new report from IT-services and consulting firm Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp.
With titles such as “genetic diversity officer,” “virtual store sherpa” and “personal memory curator,” these roles aren’t science fiction, the study’s authors argue. Rather, they are identified as jobs many employers will have to fill within the next decade.
“It’s easier to understand what types of jobs are going to go away,” says Ben Pring, director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, . . .   The idea behind the report, he says, was “to craft a credible narrative of what we’re going to gain.”
. . .
Mr. Pring and his colleagues say the dawning age of intelligent machines won’t be without painful upheaval: They estimate about 19 million positions in the U.S. will be automated out of existence in the next 15 years, while employers create some 21 million new roles. At the same time, the majority of existing ones will likely be enhanced. “Work will change, but it won’t go away,” Mr. Pring says.

For the full story, see:
Vanessa Fuhrmans. “A Future Without Jobs? Think Again.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, November 16, 2017): B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 15, 2017, and has the title “How the Robot Revolution Could Create 21 Million Jobs.”)

The Cognizant report, mentioned above, is:
Pring, Ben, Robert H. Brown, Euan Davis, Manish Bahl, and Michael Cook. “21 Jobs of the Future: A Guide to Getting – and Staying – Employed for the Next 10 Years.” Teaneck, NJ: Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, Nov. 15, 2017.

“Much Less” Poverty in U.S. Now Than 30 Years Ago

(p. A15) Instead of focusing on reported incomes, our work measures poverty based on consumption: what food, housing, transportation and other goods and services people are able to purchase. This approach, which captures the effect of noncash programs and accounts for the known bias in the CPI-U, demonstrates clearly that there is much less material deprivation than there was decades ago.
Other indicators support this finding. According to the American Housing Survey, the poorest 20% of Americans live as the middle class did a generation ago as measured by the square footage of their homes, the number of rooms per person, and the presence of air conditioning, dishwashers and other amenities. In terms of housing problems like peeling paint, leaks and plumbing issues, today’s poor haven’t quite matched the living standards of the 1980s middle class, but they are getting close.

For the full commentary, see:
Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan. “Hardly Anyone Wants to Admit America Is Beating Poverty; The White House tells the truth, but partisans on both sides are wedded to the idea of failure.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2018): A15.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 6, 2018.)

Hershey Gave the World Chocolate Candy and a Single, Very Rich, Residential School

(p. A19) In the early 20th century, Milton Hershey transformed chocolate from a luxury good to a working-class staple. It made him a fortune, which he used to establish Hershey, Pa.–a model company town 100 miles west of Philadelphia and the self-proclaimed “sweetest place on earth.” He also established an orphanage, the Milton Hershey School, to provide housing and education primarily for children from the area.
. . .
Other early-20th-century philanthropists, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, left behind massive general-purpose foundations that underwrote experiments in medicine, science and higher education, Mr. Kurie observes, while Hershey “gave us chocolate candy and a single residential school in south-central Pennsylvania that remains little known outside the region.”
. . .
. . . , [Mr. Kurie] suggests that the trust can be viewed as a model of philanthropic responsibility, even by institutions without a devoutly local focus. Mr. Kurie’s most significant contribution here is to draw attention to philanthropy’s “external stakeholders,” those people and organizations “who are neither agents nor subjects of philanthropy but who are, for better or worse, caught up in its activities.” He demonstrates how a philanthropic institution can continue to reflect a founder’s vision while shaping and being shaped by the community that grows up around it, one whose bonds can often be bittersweet.

For the full review, see:
Benjamin Soskis. BOOKSHELF; A Man, a Brand, a School, a Town.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, March 26, 2018): A19.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 25, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘In Chocolate We Trust’ Review: A Man, a Brand, a School, a Town.”)

The book under review, is:
Kurie, Peter. In Chocolate We Trust: The Hershey Company Town Unwrapped. Philadelphai, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Kilby Invented Transistor While Flouting Mandated Summer Vacation

(p. A15) Sixty years. But how much longer? In 1958 Jack St. Clair Kilby–from Great Bend, Kan.–created one of the greatest inventions, a great bend, in the history of mankind. Kilby recently had started at Texas Instruments as an electrical engineer. Most everyone left on a mandated summer break, but he stayed in the lab and worked on combining a transistor, capacitor and three resistors on a single piece of germanium. On Sept. 12, he showed his boss his integrated circuit. At a half-inch long and not very wide, it had ugly wires sticking out, resembling an upside-down cockroach glued to a glass slide.
. . .
Brace yourself. When Moore’s Law finally gives up the ghost, productivity and economic growth will roll over too–unless. The world needs another Great Bend, another Kilbyesque warp in the cosmos, to drive the economy.
. . .
Let’s hope the next Jack Kilby skipped this summer’s vacation.

For the full commentary, see:
Kessler, Andy. “INSIDE VIEW; The Chip That Changed the World; Jack Kilby built the first integrated circuit 60 years ago. We need a new Moore’s Law.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Aug. 27, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 26, 2018.)

To Bacharach, Retiring from Music “Is Like Dying”

(p. 6B) NEW YORK (AP) — At age 90, Burt Bacharach hasn’t lost faith in the power of music.
“Music softens the heart, makes you feel something if it’s good, brings in emotion that you might not have felt before,” he said. “It’s a very powerful thing if you’re able to do to it, if you have it in your heart to do something like that.”
. . .
Bacharach says he has no plans to stop writing or performing. He contributes music to a new album by Elvis Costello, a longtime admirer with whom Bacharach has worked with before, and he continues to tour.
“You can throw up your hands and say, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ but it’s what I do. I’m not just going to stop and retire, that is like dying, you know.”

For the full story, see:
AP. “School shootings inspire song by Bacharach, 90.” Omaha World-Herald (Tuesday, September 28, 2018): 6B.
(Note: ellipsis added.)