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Seeing How Life Has Improved Since the Days of the Cowboys

A cowboy on "Texas Ranch House." Source of image: the WSJ article cited below.

"Texas Ranch House" — circa 1867 — is the latest PBS experiment in transporting a group of people back to another era so we can watch them live and struggle the way our ancestors did. (Part one of eight begins Monday, 8-9 p.m. ET, but check local listings.) As with past series such as "Colonial House," everything — clothing, tools, food, housing and all-around deprivation — is authentic. Once again, though, stuffing 21st-century mentalities into period costumes and situations is a tough fit. And once again, it’s the folks wearing the bodices that chafe the most.

The Western setting is fascinating for two reasons: What seems familiar from movies and TV takes on fresh significance when there are real people — not pampered actors — trying to scratch out an existence on the frontier 24/7, with no plot to guide them. There is also the fact, as one of the participants points out early on, that many of us exist today only because a forebear actually did make the real journey West and manage to survive there long enough to bear children. What luck, we are reminded more than once during this series, that those ancestors were so different from contemporary Americans.

. . .

The trouble that threatens to sabotage the entire experiment develops in the widening gap between the cowboys and the Cooke family. The first time one of the employees disses boss man Mr. Cooke, yelling "Don’t let your wife run your life," we react with disgust at the insult. As one of the women in the household explains to the camera, all the cowboys "are sexist bastards." Besides, instead of rising early to ride the range in search of mavericks for 10 hours, the cowboys — mostly young Americans plus one frisky British boarding-school boy playing the part of 19th-century remittance man — indulge in long naps during the 100-degree days and often wake up in the morning with hangovers after nights of hard drinking.

At some point, though, certain facts begin to sink in: Mr. Cooke does have management shortcomings and Mrs. Cooke is far more involved in running the business side of the ranch than a frontier wife would have been. The ladies, in general, don’t enjoy the roles or status that historical reality would dictate, and some act out in defiant, liberated ways. A fatal flaw, if not the only one, for the success of the ranch enterprise. In 1867, spending days making cornhusk dolls while the house filled with flies and vegetables rotted in the garden wasn’t an option for folks who wanted to stay alive. And, like it or not, keeping the ranch hands happy, as obnoxious as they might be, was more important than maintaining marital bliss.

This being a made-for-television environment, no one perishes, but there are no happy endings here, either. When one of the Cooke daughters says to the camera, "I feel lost and dazed and hurt," you feel genuinely sorry for her. At the same time, it’s clearer than ever that emotional pampering, navel-gazing and gender warfare are modern luxuries. Like it or not, if these had been features of daily life in the West 100 years ago, many of the people reading this would never have been born.

For the full review, see:

Nancy deWolf Smith. "TV REVIEW; The West That Never Was." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., April 28, 2006): W10.

Chernobyl Accident Cannot Occur In U.S. Type Reactors

Twenty years ago (April 25, 1986), the Chernobyl nuclear accident sent a plume of radiation into the air above Ukraine. The word "Chernobyl" remains the most emotionally charged argument used by the opponents of nuclear energy. But if examined carefully, the main lesson from Chernobyl may be that what happened there cannot occur in the better designed light water reactors used in the United States, and most of the rest of the world. William Sweet, the author of the commentary below, has also authored Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy.

(p. A23) . . . , though it went unnoticed at the time and has been inadequately appreciated since, Chernobyl also cast into relief the positive features of the reactors used in the United States and most other advanced industrial countries.

The reactor at Chernobyl belonged to a class that was especially vulnerable to runaway reactions. When operating at low power, if such reactors lost water, their reactivity could suddenly take off and very rapidly reach a threshold beyond which they could only explode. Making matters worse, surprisingly little more pressure than normal in the machine’s water channels would lift its lid, snapping the vital control rods and fuel channels that entered the reactor’s core.

On the night of April 25, 1986, poorly trained and supervised plant operators conducted an ill-conceived experiment, putting the machine into the very state in which reactivity was most likely to spike. Within a fraction of a second, the reactor went from being barely on to power levels many times higher than the maximum intended.

This kind of accident cannot happen in the so-called light water reactors used in the United States and most of Western Europe and Asia. In these reactors, the water functions not only as a coolant but as a "moderator": self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions cannot take place in its absence. This is a very useful passive safety feature. If coolant runs low, there is still a danger of a core meltdown, because the fuel retains heat; but the reactor will have automatically and immediately turned itself off.

For the full commentary, see:

WILLIAM SWEET. "The Nuclear Option." The New York Times (Weds., April 26, 2006): A23.

The reference to Sweet’s related book is:

Sweet, William. Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy. Columbia University Press, 2006.

Source of book image: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231137109/sr=8-1/qid=1146071688/ref=sr_1_1/104-5668094-9083929?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Founder of Greenpeace Endorses New Nuclear Reactors

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. Source of image: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/us/25nuke.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

(p. A24) WASHINGTON, April 24 — The nuclear industry has hired Christie Whitman, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the environmental organization, to lead a public relations campaign for new reactors.

Nuclear power is "environmentally friendly, affordable, clean, dependable and safe," Mrs. Whitman said at a news conference on Monday. She said that as the E.P.A. leader for two and a half years, ending in June 2003, and as governor of New Jersey for seven years, she had promoted various means to reduce the emission of gases that cause global warming and pollution.

But Mrs. Whitman said that "none of them will have as great a positive impact on our environment as will increasing our ability to generate electricity from nuclear power."

. . .

Mr. Moore said he favored efficiency and renewable energy, but added that solar cells, which produce electricity from sunlight, were "being given too much emphasis and taking too much money." A dollar spent on geothermal energy, he said, was "10 to 12 times more effective in reducing greenhouse emissions."

Mr. Moore is the director of a company that distributes geothermal systems in Canada. He is also a supporter of what he called "sustainable forestry" because, he said, building with wood avoided the use of materials whose manufacture releases greenhouse gases, like steel and concrete.

Mr. Moore, who left Greenpeace in 1986, favors many technologies that some environmentalists oppose, including the genetic engineering of crops, and has referred to his former colleagues as "environmental extremists" and "anti-human."

. . .

Representatives of the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Teamsters also spoke in favor of new reactors.

For the full story, see:

MATTHEW L. WALD. "Ex-Environmental Leaders Tout Nuclear Energy." The New York Times (Tues., April 25, 2006): A24.

Hurricanes Not Caused by Human-Induced Climate Change: More on Why Crichton is Right

The Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT analyzes the case for human-induced global warming:

(p. A14) There have been repeated claims that this past year’s hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?
The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism.
. . .
To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let’s start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man’s responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn’t just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn’t happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.
If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less — hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.
. . .
In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.
And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an “Iris Effect,” wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as “discredited.” Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming — not whether it would actually happen.
Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.

For the full commentary, see:
RICHARD LINDZEN. “Climate of Fear.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., April 12, 2006): A14.

Teachers’ Unions Fight Innovation, Customization, and Variety

(p. A27) Washington – A Wisconsin court rejected a high-profile lawsuit by the state’s largest teachers’ union last month seeking to close a public charter school that offers all its courses online on the ground that it violated state law by depending on parents rather than on certified teachers to educate children. The case is part of a national trend that goes well beyond virtual schooling: teachers’ unions are turning to the courts to fight virtually any deviation from uniformity in public schools.

. . .

There is a universal American desire for customization and variety in goods and services, and education must respond to that demand, whether the unions like it or not.
. . .

This debate, like the ones over many other education issues, is fundamentally about who gets to have power. Yet the power the teachers’ unions now wield will be fleeting if public schools do not become more responsive to parents.
An industry cannot survive by rushing to court every time a new idea threatens even a small slice of its market share. Instead, maintaining, and even broadening, support for public schools means embracing more diversity in how we provide public education and who provides it.

For the full commentary, see:
Andrew J. Rotherham. “Virtual Schools, Real Innovation.” The New York Times (Friday, April 7, 2006): A27.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Private Enterprise “computer-chip makers have better hand-cleaning standards than most hospitals”

With rising alarm over hospital infections, which cause 90,000 deaths annually, a growing number of hospitals are adopting aggressive hand-hygiene surveillance and monitoring programs, and in some cases imposing penalties for doctors, nurses, and other health-care workers who don’t follow the rules.
. . .
Despite strict guidelines issued by the CDC to stop the spread of bacteria on contaminated hands, and wide adoption of alcohol-based hand-rub dispensers in patient rooms and hospital corridors to make it easier for harried health-care workers to disinfect between patients, compliance rates remain mired at 40% to 50% nationwide, studies show.
The IHI program recommends a far more activist approach that holds hospital administrators and staffers accountable for failure.
“It no longer is tolerable to accept noncompliance rates of more than 50% when we are dealing with critically ill patients,” says Don Goldmann, a senior vice president of IHI and a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, who notes that computer-chip makers have better hand-cleaning standards than most hospitals. While the IHI program emphasizes education and positive feedback, “repeated violations in health-care, or any industry, need to have consequences,” Dr. Goldmann says.

For the full story, see:
LAURA LANDRO. “THE INFORMED PATIENT; Hospitals Get Aggressive About Hand Washing; Staff Surveillance Programs, New Penalties Aim to Boost Sagging Compliance Rates.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., April 5, 2006): D3.

Wildcatters Find 80% of Oil in U.S.

Source of image: WSJ article cited below.

(p. A1) David F. Morehouse, senior geologist with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, contends there is more new oil to be found in the continental U.S. Finding it, he says, will “depend on people doing the data analysis and, quite frankly, people going in and drilling enough in the right places.”
Mr. Findley, who is 54 years old, did just that. Now production in this part of eastern Montana is growing, and new investors are arriving to explore the potential. At least one midsized firm, Marathon Oil Co., has begun buying leases. Halliburton Co., the big Houston-based oil-services company, has invested with Mr. Findley. The state says the proven oil find in the area will likely be in the range of 150 million barrels, hardly what oil-patch hands call an “elephant,” but nevertheless boosting the nation’s proven oil reserves by about 1%.
. . .
(p. A14) While many people associate big oil finds with big companies, over the years about 80% of the oil found in the U.S. has been brought in by wildcatters such as Mr. Findley, says Larry Nation, spokesman for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Wildcatters search for oil, nail down drilling rights, then seek money from banks or bigger companies to extract it.
Mr. Findley grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, the son of an accountant for a chain of grocery stores. A brother-in-law, a geologist, hired him as a field assistant to hunt for oil in west Texas. “I just fell in love with geology,” he recalls. He graduated from Texas A&M University in 1975 and got a job as a geologist with Tenneco Oil Co. In 1983 he left to found his own Montana-based consulting and exploration company, a one-man operation.
Three years later, world oil prices crashed, and fluctuating prices dogged Mr. Findley as he tried to stay in the business. In the 1990s, the majors left the area in the belief that it was played out. Mr. Findley felt there was more oil to be found and began putting together small exploration deals.
His income had dropped by more than half to $45,000 a year, and he wasn’t sure how much longer that would last. “Many times, my wife and I sat down at the kitchen table and said, ‘What are we going to do next?’ We always came to the same conclusion. [Geology] is what I know. This is what I love. So we just kept going.”

For the full story, see:
JOHN J. FIALKA. “Second Look; Wildcat Producer Sparks Oil Boom On Montana Plains After Majors Pulled Out, Mr. Findley Drilled Anew; Size of Find Still Unclear; A Rival Counts Tanker Trucks.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., April 5, 2006): A1 & A14.
Source of map: WSJ article cited above.

United States Still Has Vitality in Research and Innovation

Has the United States lost its vitality? No. Americans remain the hardest working people on the face of the earth and the most productive. As William W. Lewis, the founding director of the McKinsey Global Institute, wrote, ”The United States is the productivity leader in virtually every industry.” And productivity rates are surging faster now than they did even in the 1990’s.
Has the United States stopped investing in the future? No. The U.S. accounts for roughly 40 percent of the world’s R. & D. spending. More money was invested in research and development in this country than in the other G-7 nations combined.
Is the United States becoming a less important player in the world economy? Not yet. In 1971, the U.S. economy accounted for 30.52 percent of the world’s G.D.P. Since then, we’ve seen the rise of Japan, China, India and the Asian tigers. The U.S. now accounts for 30.74 percent of world G.D.P., a slightly higher figure.
What about the shortage of scientists and engineers? Vastly overblown. According to Duke School of Engineering researchers, the U.S. produces more engineers per capita than China or India. According to The Wall Street Journal, firms with engineering openings find themselves flooded with résumés. Unemployment rates for scientists and engineers are no lower than for other professions, and in some specialties, such as electrical engineering, they are notably higher.
Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation told The Wall Street Journal last November, ”No one I know who has looked at the data with an open mind has been able to find any sign of a current shortage.” The G.A.O., the RAND Corporation and many other researchers have picked apart the quickie studies that warn of a science and engineering gap. ”We did not find evidence that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon,” the RAND report concluded.
. . .
. . . , the American workplace is so competitive, companies are compelled to promote lifelong learning. A U.N. report this year ranked the U.S. third in the world in ease of doing business, after New Zealand and Singapore. The U.S. has the second most competitive economy on earth, after Finland, according the latest Global Competitiveness Report. As Michael Porter of Harvard told The National Journal, ”The U.S. is second to none in terms of innovation and an innovative environment.”

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID BROOKS. “The Nation of the Future.” The New York Times (Thursday, February 2, 2006): A23.

The Market Solution to Email Spam

A COMPANY called Goodmail Systems thinks it has come up with a potential (and partial) solution to the problem of spam and fraud on the Internet. According to Goodmail, market forces are the answer, rather than the kinds of ineffective regulations that have so far failed to solve the problems.
. . .
What shocks me most about the opposition to Goodmail is that people who claim to believe in the free and open Internet, with its welcome attitude to innovation, want to shut down an idea. That’s wrong.
If people like those little stamps that mark their mail as safe and wanted or as commercial transactions, then let the customers have them. And let other companies compete with Goodmail to offer better and less expensive service.
Goodmail isn’t good because it’s new, but neither is it bad because it’s new. If it’s a good model, it will succeed and improve over time. If it’s a bad model, it will fail. Why not let the customers decide?

For the full commentary, see:
ESTHER DYSON. “You’ve Got Goodmail. The New York Times (Fri., March 17, 2006): A23.

Nuclear Power Looking “Increasingly Attractive”

(p. A2) Nuclear power has looked increasingly attractive in many nations amid advancing energy prices and concerns about rising emissions believed to cause global warming. Costs for energy sources such as coal have risen amid global expansion and China’s increasing need for raw materials. China and India, especially, are looking to nuclear power as their consumption expands.
Meanwhile, emissions of the gases believed to cause global warming have risen despite efforts in many nations to adhere to the targets set by the Kyoto Protocol.
At the same time, improved reactor design has led to increased interest in the long-dormant U.S. market, which dried up in the early 1980s amid public outcry about safety and investors’ dismay over high costs. Since then, manufacturers have continued to build reactors overseas in Asia and Europe, while the U.S. remains the most coveted market because of its economic might and hunger for new energy sources.

For the full article, see:
DENNIS K. BERMAN. “Toshiba to Buy Nuclear-Power Firm.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., January 24, 2006): A2.
(Note: A somewhat different version of the article appeared in the online version of the WSJ, under the title: “Japan’s Toshiba Wins Nuclear-Power Assets; Purchase of Westinghouse May Open Door to Markets Like U.S., China and India.”)

“The world we have lost was ripe for rejection”

The source for the image of the book cover is: http://img.textbookx.com/images/large/91/0521633591.jpg

Roche delineates minimal light and exiguous fires, chilblains and miasmas, the distinction of white linen, the rare treat of sweetness, the still rarer taste of coffee that made its drinkers sparkle, and the hankerings they inspired. Limited access to water affected drinking habits, cooking, hygiene, and sartorial practices. Housewives and laundresses coped with mountains of dirty linen by river or by pond; the great sent their laundry to the American islands for a whiter wash; the poor rioted for soap as well as bread. Society moved from an economy of scarcity and salvation to one of plenty and prodigality. But the move was slow and spotty. The world we have lost was ripe for rejection.

For the full review, see:

Weber, Eugen. "Recommended Reading." The Key Reporter 67, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 12.

The reviewed book is:

Roche, Daniel. A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600-1800. Cambridge University Press, 2000.