Category: Technology

Tom Watson, Jr. Managed IBM’s Rare and Successful Self-Disruption by “Transitioning the Firm to Electronic Computing”

(p. 9) Thomas J. Watson Jr. seemed, from a young age, to be destined for failure.

. . .

“He played with fire, shot animals in the nearby swamps and pilfered things from neighbors’ houses,” Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman write in “The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived,” a compelling new biography of Watson Jr.

. . .

This is far from the first book about IBM.

. . .

But this is probably the most theatrical book about IBM ever published. McElvenny, who happens to be Watson Jr.’s eldest grandson, is privy to “personal and corporate papers” and, as the endnotes mysteriously specify, many “family sources.”

. . .

“The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived” is about the challenges of corporate and family succession, an essential topic given that IBM itself was the father figure to most of the computing and tech industry. Watson Sr., “the old man,” was a type familiar to our times: the tech titan who runs a large company as an extension of himself. (The IBM machine that beat the “Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings bears his name.) For four decades, IBM was Watson Sr.’s fief. The company “was run entirely out of one man’s breast pocket,” McElvenny and Wortman write. Watson Sr. “made all strategic decisions and most minor ones” and “delegated almost no authority.”

To his lasting credit, he did truly take care of his employees and their families in a manner that bred a strong loyalty. That said, Watson Sr. demanded conformity and could be erratic and cruel.

. . .

IBM faced a classic version of what the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has termed the “innovator’s dilemma” and what the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow described as a monopoly’s disinclination to innovate. IBM was making plenty of profit on punched cards and accounting machines, its customers were happy, so why rock the boat?

Watson Jr.’s intense antipathy toward his father ended up saving IBM. Just before the United States entered World War II, Junior gained self-confidence the old-fashioned way: by joining the Army Air Corps and flying a B-24. When he eventually returned to IBM (pushed to do so by his commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Follett Bradley, who thought Watson would be wasted as an airline pilot), he became the internal champion of transitioning the firm to electronic computing. He was perhaps the only person who could oppose his father in a company built on yes men.

While the book’s title calls him “the greatest capitalist,” it might more accurately, if less ringingly, call him “the greatest manager,” for Watson Jr. was much better at delegating and using his employees’ talents.

For the full review, see:

Tim Wu. “Next-Gen.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, December 17, 2023): 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Dec. 15, 2023, and has the title “The Father-Son Struggle That Helped Ensure IBM’s Success.”)

The book under review is:

McElvenny, Ralph Watson, and Marc Wortman. The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. and the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age. New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.

To Succeed as an Engineer, “All You Have to Be Is a Capitalist Who Wants to Make Better Things and Sell More of Them”

(p. B9) Dr. Wulf made a career in computer science when the field barely existed. As the importance of computers grew, his career became a road map of the developing field: first in academic research, next as an entrepreneur and then as a policymaker.

. . .

He and his wife, Anita K. Jones, also a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, left the university in 1981 to found Tartan Laboratories, which specialized in compilers. (It was named for the university’s athletic teams.)

. . .

Dr. Wulf and Dr. Jones moved to faculty positions at the University of Virginia, but Dr. Wulf took a leave of absence to join the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation. There, he worked with Al Gore, then a senator, to craft legislation to make the military’s computer network, Arpanet, available to civilian researchers through the foundation’s NSFnet. That model gave way eventually to widely accessible, commercially operated networks.

. . .

Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, said of Dr. Wulf in an interview, “I don’t mean to diminish his technical contributions” — both he and Dr. Jones “are giants in the field,” he said — but Dr. Wulf, he believes, will be most remembered for his inspiring leadership in engineering.

In particular, he said, Dr. Wulf was “a huge champion of broadening participation in the field” by not only women and members of other underrepresented groups, but also by people who did not necessarily come from “big research universities, mostly on the coasts.”

Dr. Wulf called engineering “problem-solving under constraints” — time, money or other practical issues. Bringing diverse experiences and points of view to problems, he said, raises the odds of success. Without diverse views, he told an academy meeting in 1998, “we pay an opportunity cost — a cost in products not built, in designs not considered, in constraints not understood, in processes not invented.”

Or, as Dr. Lazowska put it: “You don’t have to have a social conscience. All you have to be is a capitalist who wants to make better things and sell more of them.”

For the full obituary, see:

Cornelia Dean. “William A. Wulf, 83, Who Helped Pave the Way to the Internet, Dies.” The New York Times (Saturday, March 25, 2023): B9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated March 23, 2023, and has the title “William A. Wulf, Pioneering Computer Scientist, Dies at 83.” Where there is a difference in wording in versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

Global Warming Can Allow a “Sudden Efflorescence” of Adaptation from Dormant “Sleeping Beauties”

Above the title of the book review quoted below, the Wall Street Journal printed a few lines from a poem by Baudelaire:

Many a jewel of untold worth
Lies slumbering at the core of Earth
In darkness and oblivion drowned . . .
–Charles Baudelaire, “Le Guignon”

(p. C12) In his new book, Mr. [Andreas] Wagner, a professor at the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, showcases biological “sleeping beauties”: animals, plants, even bacteria that for generations plugged along with modest evolutionary success, only to later flourish spectacularly. “Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture” explains how evolutionary adaptations sometimes go from dormancy to full flowering, while also suggesting that an analogous process applies to human innovations, including science, technology and the arts.

. . .

First we need to recall that not every biological trait an organism possesses is optimal for its current environment. The swim bladder, for example, evolved in fish as an aid to adjusting buoyancy, only later becoming the basis for lungs when their descendants became terrestrial. And the human appendix currently appears to be more an evolutionary liability than an asset, although it may well have conveyed immunologic benefits in the past—and could even prove adaptive in the future. Certain traits may develop that are not immediately adaptive, in the sense of contributing directly to the reproductive success of the genes responsible for the trait and of the individuals carrying them.

If an organism develops a characteristic maladapted to its environment, it and the genes responsible for the trait are selected away into oblivion. But if the novelty is not particularly harmful, or even somewhat helpful, the trait may simply hang around through the generations—until a descendant organism finds a welcoming environmental niche.

The natural world is filled with solutions awaiting a problem.  . . .  But when environments change (and they always do), a wonderful and lively explosion can ensue.

Mr. Wagner refers to this sudden efflorescence as “adaptive radiation”—“only with a key innovation,” he writes, “can a species exploit existing opportunities, such as a warmer climate, a new source of food, or a superior form of shelter. In this view, any one adaptive radiation has to wait, possibly for a long time, until the right innovation arises. And the need to wait holds evolution back.”

In regard to evolutionary developments that at first seem to bear no fruit, Mr. Wagner could have quoted from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

In the world of human creativity, “full many” a terrific creation has been neglected or ignored in its time.

For the full review, see:

David P. Barash. “In Praise of Late Bloomers.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 29, 2023): C12.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added, except for first one at the end of quoted passage from Baudelaire.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 28, 2023, and has the title “‘Sleeping Beauties’ Review: Nature’s Late Bloomers.”)

The book under review is:

Wagner, Andreas. Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture. London: Oneworld Publications, 2023.

“Adding Manpower to a Late Software Project Makes It Later”

(p. 24) Dr. Brooks had a wide-ranging career that included creating the computer science department at the University of North Carolina and leading influential research in computer graphics and virtual reality.

But he is best known for being one of the technical leaders of IBM’s 360 computer project in the 1960s.

. . .

Until the 360, each model of computer had its own bespoke hardware design. That required engineers to overhaul their software programs to run on every new machine that was introduced.

But IBM promised to eliminate that costly, repetitive labor with an approach championed by Dr. Brooks, a young engineering star at the company, and a few colleagues. In April 1964, IBM announced the 360 as a family of six compatible computers. Programs written for one 360 model could run on the others, without the need to rewrite software, as customers moved from smaller to larger computers.

. . .

The hard-earned lessons he learned from grappling with the OS/360 software became grist for his book “The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering.” First published in 1975, it became recognized as a quirky classic, selling briskly year after year and routinely cited as gospel by computer scientists.

The tone is witty and self-deprecating, with pithy quotes from Shakespeare and Sophocles and chapter titles like “Ten Pounds in a Five-Pound Sack” and “Hatching a Catastrophe.” There are practical tips along the way. For example: Organize engineers on big software projects into small groups, which Dr. Brooks called “surgical teams.”

The most well known of his principles was what he called Brooks’s law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

Dr. Brooks himself acknowledged that with the “law” he was “oversimplifying outrageously.” But he was exaggerating to make a point: It is often smarter to rethink things, he suggested, than to add more people. And in software engineering, a profession with elements of artistry and creativity, workers are not interchangeable units of labor.

In the internet era, some software developers have suggested that Brooks’s law no longer applies. Large open-source software projects — so named because the underlying “source” code is open for all to see — have armies of internet-connected engineers to spot flaws in code and recommend fixes. Still, even open-source projects are typically governed by a small group of individuals, more surgical team than the wisdom of the crowd.

For the full obituary, see:

Steve Lohr. “Frederick P. Brooks Jr., an Innovator of Computer Design, Dies at 91.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, November 27, 2022): 24.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Nov. 25, 2022, and has the title “Frederick P. Brooks Jr., Computer Design Innovator, Dies at 91.”)

The Brooks’s book mentioned above is:

Brooks, Frederick P., Jr. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. 2nd ed. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

Iberian Hunter-Gatherers Were More Sophisticated 9,500 Years Ago Than Previously Known

(p. 6) Hunter-gatherer societies on the Iberian Peninsula were making sophisticated baskets with decorative geometric patterns 9,500 years ago, more than 2,000 years earlier than previously thought, researchers in Spain have reported.

. . .

Francisco Martínez-Sevilla, a researcher of prehistory at the University of Alcalá and the lead author of a paper outlining the findings that was published this week in Science Advances, explained that carbon-14 dating tests had been carried out on 76 objects that were found by 19th-century miners in the Cueva de los Murciélagos, a cave in southern Spain.

The objects, including Europe’s oldest pair of sandals, a wooden stick and mace and exquisitely crafted baskets woven from reed and esparto, were previously believed to have been made by Neolithic farmers.

But the carbon-14 testing carried out by Dr. Martínez-Sevilla’s research group, which has recently excavated human remains in the cave, showed that the best-preserved baskets were, in fact, crafted by hunter-gatherer communities in the Mesolithic era, 9,500 years ago.  . . .

“My first reaction was, ‘Oh my God, that is not possible,’” Dr. Martínez-Sevilla said in a telephone interview, explaining how the discovery suggested that Mesolithic societies may have been more complex than previously imagined. “When we realized the magnitude of the findings, we published the paper with all the analysis in less than a year.”

For the full story, see:

Rachel Chaundler. “Artifacts Show Hunter-Gatherers Found Time to Weave, Too.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, October 1, 2023): 6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 3, 2023, and has the title “Hunter-Gatherers Were Making Baskets 9,500 Years Ago, Researchers Say.”)

The research discussed in the passages quoted above is published in the following academic article:

Martínez-Sevilla, Francisco, Maria Herrero-Otal, María Martín-Seijo, Jonathan Santana, José A. Lozano Rodríguez, Ruth Maicas Ramos, Miriam Cubas, Anna Homs, Rafael M. Martínez Sánchez, Ingrid Bertin, Rosa Barroso Bermejo, Primitiva Bueno Ramírez, Rodrigo de Balbín Behrmann, Antoni Palomo Pérez, Antonio M. Álvarez-Valero, Leonor Peña-Chocarro, Mercedes Murillo-Barroso, Eva Fernández-Domínguez, Manuel Altamirano García, Rubén Pardo Martínez, Mercedes Iriarte Cela, Javier L. Carrasco Rus, Carmen Alfaro Giner, and Raquel Piqué Huerta. “The Earliest Basketry in Southern Europe: Hunter-Gatherer and Farmer Plant-Based Technology in Cueva De Los Murciélagos (Albuñol).” Science Advances 9, no. 39 (2023): eadi3055.

Early Wealthy Cell Phone Adopters Funded Innovations That “Made Cellphones Affordable to the Masses”

In Openness to Creative Destruction, I argue that early new technologies are often primitive, expensive, and buggy. They are initially bought by the rich who allow the technology to survive while it is being made better and cheaper. See below that cellphones are another example.

(p. A14) On April 3, 1973, four months after the last manned moon mission, a 44-year-old Motorola engineer took a small step onto Sixth Avenue outside the New York Hilton. There Martin Cooper did something commonplace now but at the time revolutionary: He made a call on a cellular telephone.

“Joel,” Mr. Cooper said to the man who picked up, “I’m calling you from a real cellular telephone—a handheld unit.” Joel Engel worked at Bell Labs, the research division of AT&T. Mr. Cooper was calling to gloat about surpassing the phone monopoly.

. . .

“The function of a cellphone—I can’t express it any better—it is to set people free,” Mr. Cooper, 94, says.  . . .  “A cellphone gives a person the freedom to be connected to the rest of the world, wherever they are and whenever they want to.”

. . .

“We expected the first phones to go to wealthy people,” Mr. Cooper says. “To a large extent that was true. But it turns out that one of the biggest users were real-estate people.” They needed to take calls from clients and go out to show properties. “The cellphone allowed them to do both at the same time. They could be showing a home and still answer the call. So to them the phone, even at that huge price, doubled their effectiveness.”

These early adopters, for whom the technology was worth the cost, helped fund further innovation, which ultimately made cellphones affordable to the masses. Advancements in data-transmission, display and input technology made possible the inexpensive, versatile smartphones we take for granted today.

They also brought ill effects, especially for young people, such as compulsive cellphone use and social media that promote both groupthink and bitter division. “Those are all big problems,” Mr. Cooper says.

. . .

But he accentuates the positive. “We are just starting to figure out what the value of the cellphone is,” he says. “Humanity will solve these other problems if the advantages are big enough. And the advantages—the services you get out of the cellphone, the value to you to make you more efficient—are so great that there’s no question in my mind that humanity is going to solve these problems.”

He is confident that the benefits already outweigh the costs. “Today, people are healthier. There are fewer people in poverty. They live longer than ever before. Something has made that happen, and I think the cellphone is one of the contributors.” By improving efficiency, “it has taken away a lot of the time issues, given people more time to do other things.”

For the full interview, see:

Faith Bottum. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; From the ‘Shoe Phone’ to the Smartphone.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 15, 2022): A13.

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date April 14, 2023, and has the title “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Opinion: From the ‘Shoe Phone’ to the Smartphone.”)

My book that I mention above is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

The Most Powerful A.I. Systems Still Do Not Understand, Have No Common Sense, and Cannot Explain Their Decisions

(p. B1) David Ferrucci, who led the team that built IBM’s famed Watson computer, was elated when it beat the best-ever human “Jeopardy!” players in 2011, in a televised triumph for artificial intelligence.

But Dr. Ferrucci understood Watson’s limitations. The system could mine oceans of text, identify word patterns and predict likely answers at lightning speed. Yet the technology had no semblance of understanding, no human-style common sense, no path of reasoning to explain why it reached a decision.

Eleven years later, despite enormous advances, the most powerful A.I. systems still have those limitations.

. . .

(p. B7) The big, so-called deep learning programs have conquered tasks like image and speech recognition, and new versions can even pen speeches, write computer programs and have conversations.

They are also deeply flawed. They can generate biased or toxic screeds against women, minorities and others. Or occasionally stumble on questions that any child could answer. (“Which is heavier, a toaster or a pencil? A pencil is heavier.”)

“The depth of the pattern matching is exceptional, but that’s what it is,” said Kristian Hammond, an A.I. researcher at Northwestern University. “It’s not reasoning.”

Elemental Cognition is trying to address that gap.

. . .

Eventually, Dr. Ferrucci and his team made progress with the technology. In the past few years, they have presented some of their hybrid techniques at conferences and they now have demonstration projects and a couple of initial customers.

. . .

The Elemental Cognition technology is largely an automated system. But that system must be trained. For example, the rules and options for a global airline ticket are spelled out in many pages of documents, which are scanned.

Dr. Ferrucci and his team use machine learning algorithms to convert them into suggested statements in a form a computer can interpret. Those statements can be facts, concepts, rules or relationships: Qantas is an airline, for example. When a person says “go to” a city, that means add a flight to that city. If a traveler adds four more destinations, that adds a certain amount to the cost of the ticket.

In training the round-the-world ticket assistant, an airline expert reviews the computer-generated statements, as a final check. The process eliminates most of the need for hand coding knowledge into a computer, a crippling handicap of the old expert systems.

Dr. Ferrucci concedes that advanced machine learning — the dominant path pursued by the big tech companies and well-funded research centers — may one day overcome its shortcomings. But he is skeptical from an engineering perspective. Those systems, he said, are not made with the goals of transparency and generating rational decisions that can be explained.

“The big question is how do we design the A.I. that we want,” Dr. Ferrucci said. “To do that, I think we need to step out of the machine-learning box.”

For the full story, see:

Steve Lohr. “You Can Lead A.I. to Answers, but Can You Make It Think?” The New York Times (Monday, August 29, 2022): B1 & B7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Sept. 8, 2022, and has the title “One Man’s Dream of Fusing A.I. With Common Sense.”)

Productivity Increases from AI May Create New Valuable Tasks and Occupations

(p. A2) For centuries, new waves of automation have been greeted by predictions of widespread job loss and convulsive disruption. For centuries, the predictions have been wrong.

. . .

Predictions of technology’s labor-market impacts are notoriously flawed. Experiments like those involving AI often fail to replicate in the real world. Nearly two decades ago, the advent of international fiber-optic connections led some scholars to estimate a fifth of U.S. jobs, such as radiologist, could be offshored. Nothing even close to that happened. A decade ago, economists began warning that self-driving trucks would deprive millions of high-school graduates of good-paying jobs. Today, there are more truck drivers than ever and employers are begging for more.

Often, the technology isn’t good enough or human tasks are too complicated to be replaced. Regulation and inertia get in the way, so the impact unfolds over many years and can’t be detected amid countless other forces at work.

Joshua Gans, an economist specializing in AI at the University of Toronto, said: “Technological changes turn something that was scarce into something that is abundant,” and in the process, “reveal to us what the real value of that stuff is.” Journalists’ greatest value, he said, will be in asking good questions and judging the quality of the answers, not writing up the results.

Spreadsheets made math-intensive analysis easy and cheap, and as a result, led to the creation of countless new tasks and occupations. Large language models could similarly lead to an explosion in applications requiring the synthesis of large amounts of information into serviceable prose.

For the full commentary, see:

Greg Ip. “CAPITAL ACCOUNT; The Robots Have Finally Come for My Job.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, April 6, 2023): A2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 5, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Exponential Growth Is Not Inevitable and Has Seldom Occurred Outside of Computer Chips

(p. C5) Nothing has affected, and warped, modern thinking about the pace of technological invention more than the rapid exponential advances of solid-state electronics. The conviction that we have left the age of gradual growth behind began with our ability to crowd ever more components onto a silicon wafer, a process captured by Gordon Moore’s now-famous law that initially ordained a doubling every 18 months, later adjusted to about two years.

. . .

Bestselling tech prophets like Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Noah Harari argue that exponential growth will allow us to disrupt our way into a future devoid of disease and misery and abounding in material riches.

. . .

The problem is that the post-1970 ascent of electronic architecture and performance has no counterpart in other aspects of our lives. Exponential growth has not taken place in the fundamental economic activities on which modern civilization depends for its survival—agriculture, energy production, transportation and large engineering projects. Nor do we see rapid improvements in areas that directly affect health and quality of life, such as new drug discoveries and gains in longevity.

. . .

The conclusion that progress is not accelerating in the most fundamental human activities is supported by a paper published in 2020 by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The authors, four American economists led by Bryan Kelly of the Yale School of Management, studied innovation across American industries from 1840 to 2010, using textual analysis of patent documents to construct indexes of long-term change. They found that the wave of breakthrough patents in furniture, textiles, apparel, transportation, metal, wood, paper, printing and construction all peaked before 1900. Mining, coal, petroleum, electrical equipment, rubber and plastics had their innovative peaks before 1950. The only industrial sectors with post-1970 peaks have been agriculture (dominated by genetically modified organisms), medical equipment and, of course, computers and electronics.

For the full essay, see:

Vaclav Smil. “Tech Progress Is Slowing Down.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date February 16, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

The essay quoted above is adapted from Smil’s book:

Smil, Vaclav. Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2023.

Cars Give Commuters Flexible Choices Absent from Public Transit

(p. A14) Across the United States, transit systems that have relied for decades on office workers are scrambling to avoid financial collapse as commuters stay home. Many systems are asking their local governments for bailouts as federal pandemic relief runs dry, . . .

. . .

“If anyone says that they know the way out of this difficult situation, they’re fooling themselves,” said Brian D. Taylor, the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “This is a really challenging time.”

. . .

“You can put the New York City subway in the middle of Oklahoma and you wouldn’t have any ridership — that’s kind of the harsh reality for American transit,” Mr. Elkind said. “There’s only so much they can do with service and fares to lure riders back.”

In many cities, riders may need to go to the office only on Wednesdays. Or they want to pick up their children from school in the middle of the day or make a run to the grocery store.

For the full story, see:

Soumya Karlamangla. “With Commuters Scarce, Transit Agencies Try New Enticements.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 20, 2023): A14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 19, 2023, and has the title “With Commuters Staying Home, Transit Agencies Try to Reinvent Themselves.”)

Much of Pandemic Funding to Improve Ventilation in Schools “Is Sitting Untouched in Most States”

(p. 1) As the next presidential election gathers steam, extended school closures and remote learning have become a centerpiece of the Republican argument that the pandemic was mishandled, the subject of repeated hearings in the House of Representatives and a barrage of academic papers on learning loss and mental health disorders among children.

But scientists who study viral transmission see another lesson in the pandemic school closures: Had the indoor air been cleaner (p. 16) and safer, they may have been avoidable. The coronavirus is an airborne threat, and the incidence of Covid was about 40 percent lower in schools that improved air quality, one study found.

The average American school building is about 50 years old. According to a 2020 analysis by the Government Accountability Office, about 41 percent of school districts needed to update or replace the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems in at least half of their schools, about 36,000 buildings in all.

There have never been more resources available for the task: nearly $200 billion, from an array of pandemic-related measures, including the American Rescue Plan Act. Another $350 billion was allotted to state and local governments, some of which could be used to improve ventilation in schools.

“It’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix decades of neglect of our school building infrastructure,” said Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Schoolchildren are heading back to classrooms by the tens of millions now, yet much of the funding for such improvements is sitting untouched in most states.

Among the reasons: a lack of clear federal guidance on cleaning indoor air, no senior administration official designated to oversee such a campaign, few experts to help the schools spend the funds wisely, supply chain delays for new equipment, and insufficient staff to maintain improvements that are made.

Some school officials simply may not know that the funds are available. “I cannot believe the amount of money that is still unspent,” Dr. Allen said. “It’s really frustrating.”

For the full story, see:

Apoorva Mandavilli. “Bad Ventilation Remains Threat To U.S. Students.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, Aug. 27, 2023): 1 & 16.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Aug. 28, 2023, and has the title “Covid Closed the Nation’s Schools. Cleaner Air Can Keep Them Open.”)