Technology – Page 55 – artdiamondblog.com

High Tech

Pontcysyllte aqueduct. Source of image: online version of WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. P12) Of all the stupendous engineering structures produced by the Industrial Revolution, the Pontcysyllte is one of the most extraordinary: a ribbon of water in the sky. A narrow cast-iron water-filled trough, over 1,000 feet long, strides out across a steep-sided Welsh valley on a series of slender stone piers. Canal boats drift across, reaching a height of 126 feet above the valley floor. I first made this trip as a child and it was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. It still is. Because while there is a towpath and handrail on one side of you, on the other there is nothing but the thin lip of the trough, rising to only a few inches above the waterline. It does not look strong enough. You feel you are going to plunge over the edge.
This is one of those marvels of engineering and architecture that really should not exist. Economically, it never made any sense. A product of Britain’s canal-building mania of the 1790s, it opened in 1805 and found itself on a route that went nowhere much, and then stopped. Having been built, it should not logically have survived. It is sited on a truncated stretch of waterway, a puzzling fragment of a much larger, never-completed scheme. This was known as the Ellesmere Canal, intended to link the mighty rivers of Mersey and Severn via the coal and iron ore mines of North Wales. But no sooner had engineers Thomas Telford and William Jessop completed this hugely ambitious structure — along with other expensive aqueducts and tunnels, piercing the hills and leaping the valleys to get to this point — than financial reality took hold and the project was halted. Commercial boat traffic on the inconclusive sections that were built was always light, and had ceased by 1939. The waterway was officially abandoned to navigation in 1944. But salvation was at hand.
It, and its matchless aqueduct, survived for two reasons. Almost by accident, it provided a fresh water supply from the Welsh hills to the towns and cities of northwest England. And it became an early campaign victory, a symbol, for Britain’s nascent waterways preservation movement in the 1940s. The canal network was being rediscovered by a generation of postwar nostalgists, alert both to industrial heritage and to the fast-vanishing gypsy-like lifestyle of the traditional boating families in their “narrow boats” (never called barges).

For the full commentary, see:
Hugh Pearman. “MASTERPIECE; A Marvel That Shouldn’t Exist; In Wales, a fusion of architecture, engineering and nature.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., February 4, 2006): P12.

Source of image: online version of WSJ article cited above.

Occupational Licensing Does More Harm Than Good

Source of book cover image: http://www.upjohninst.org/publications/titles/lo.html

(p. C3) It is well known that doctors, dentists, and lawyers must be licensed to practice their professions. But what about occupational therapists, manicurists and barbers? How about fortune tellers, massage therapists, shampoo assistants, librarians, beekeepers, electrologists and movie projector operators? These are just a sampling of the hundreds of occupations that require a license in at least some states or counties.

In a new book, “Licensing Occupations: Ensuring Quality or Restricting Competition?” (Upjohn Institute, 2006), Morris M. Kleiner, an economist at the University of Minnesota, questions whether occupational licensing has gone too far. He provides much evidence that the balance of occupational licensing has shifted away from protecting consumers and toward limiting the supply of workers in various professions. A result is that services provided by licensed workers are more expensive than necessary and that quality is not noticeably affected.
. . .
Several studies have examined the effect of license requirements on performance in occupations like dentists and teachers. In one study, Professor Kleiner and a colleague, Robert T. Kudrle, found that stricter state licensing requirements for dentists did not noticeably affect the dental health of 464 Air Force recruits. Other studies have found at best weak evidence that students in classes taught by licensed teachers performed better than those taught by unlicensed teachers.
Summarizing the literature, Professor Kleiner concludes, “there is little to show that occupational regulation has a major effect on the quality of service received by consumers.”
At the same time, the hurdles imposed by occupational licensing reduce the supply of workers in many regulated professions, which drives up wages in those jobs and the price of services. Dentists, for example, were found to earn and charge 11 percent more in states with the most restrictive licensing requirements. While tough licensing standards may help higher-income consumers avoid low-quality providers, it also appears to prevent lower-income consumers from gaining access to some services.

For the full commentary, see:
Krueger, Alan B. “Economic Scene; Do You Need a License to Earn a Living? You Might Be Surprised at the Answer.” The New York Times (Thurs., March 2, 2006): C3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

You want more evidence? OK, here’s more evidence:

(p. A20) BISMARCK, N.D., Oct. 10 (AP) – The State of North Dakota is exploring whether people who sell items on eBay for others must get standrd auctioneers’ licenses, a process that includes taking instruction in talking real fast.

To get a license in the stare, aplicants must pay a $35 fee, obtain a $5,000 bond and undergo training at one of eight approved auction schools, where the curriculum includes rapid-fie speaking, breathing control and reading hand gestures.
“I don’t think it offers any additional protection for the consumer,” said Mark Nichols, who runs a small consignment store in Crosby. “It just creates a lot of red tape for the business, as well as having to put out a lot of money.”

For the full story, see:
“North Dakota Weighs Auction License for Some eBay Sellers.” The New York Times (Tues., Oct. 11, 2005): A20.

For Kleiner’s book, see:
Morris M. Kleiner. Licensing Occupations: Ensuring Quality or Restricting Competition? Upjohn Institute, 2006.

Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat, is Worth the Wait

Source of the graphic is page 1 of: MICHAEL O’CONNOR. “Library may help turn borrowers into buyers.” Omaha World-Herald (Saturday, March 4, 2006): 1 & 2.
If you live in Omaha, and want to check out a copy of Thomas Friedman’s pro-trade and globalization best-seller The World is Flat, it looks as though you’re going to have to wait awhile. While you’re waiting, you may want to read his earlier, and in some ways better, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. It is better in its discussion of the importance of Schumpeterian creative destruction, and better in terms of the coherence and flow of the argument.
See:
Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. [ISBN # 0-385-49934-5]
Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

“Unlike Pilots, Doctors Don’t Go Down with Their Planes”

(p. C1) With all the tools available to modern medicine — the blood tests and M.R.I.’s and endoscopes — you might think that misdiagnosis has become a rare thing. But you would be wrong. Studies of autopsies have shown that doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 percent of the time. So millions of patients are being treated for the wrong disease.
As shocking as that is, the more astonishing fact may be that the rate has not really changed since the 1930’s. “No improvement!” was how an article in the normally exclamation-free Journal of the American Medical Association summarized the situation.
. . .
But we still could be doing a lot better. Under the current medical system, doctors, nurses, lab technicians and hospital executives are not actually paid to come up with the right diagnosis. They are paid to perform tests and to do surgery and to dispense drugs.
There is no bonus for curing someone and no penalty for failing, except when the mistakes rise to the level of malpractice. So even though doctors can have the best intentions, they have little economic incentive to spend time double-checking their instincts, and hospitals have little incentive to give them the tools to do so.
. . .
(p. C4) Joseph Britto, a former intensive-care doctor, likes to compare medicine’s attitude toward mistakes with the airline industry’s. At the insistence of pilots, who have the ultimate incentive not to mess up, airlines have studied their errors and nearly eliminated crashes.
“Unlike pilots,” Dr. Britto said, “doctors don’t go down with their planes.”

For the full story, see:
DAVID LEONHARDT. “Why Doctors So Often Get It Wrong.” The New York Times (Weds., February 22, 2006): C1 & C4.

Enron’s Kenneth Rice in Omaha on 9/11/01

Kenneth Rice exiting a Houston federal courthouse on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2006. Source of image: the online version of the Omaha World-Herald article cited below.
A lot of people remember what they were doing when the first jet crashed into the twin towers on 9/11/01. I was listening to a presentation on the potential of broadband given by Kenneth Rice, at a forum sponsored by Creighton University. A day or two earlier, Creighton had presented Rice with a distinguished alumnus award. I don’t remember much detail about Rice’s presentation, but remember thinking that he gave a clear and informative analysis of the potential and risks of the broadband business.

(p. 1D) HOUSTON (AP) – Kenneth Rice, former chief of Enron Corp.’s struggling broadband unit, testified Thursday that his boss, Jeffrey Skilling, directed him to paint a rosy, misleading picture for the Enron board of directors that was in line with false statements Rice said he already made to financial analysts in 2001.
But Rice, the former CEO of Enron Broadband Services, said in his third day on the stand at the fraud and conspiracy trial of Skilling and founder Kenneth Lay that he had no documents and “only my recollection” to back up a conversation he had with Skilling, Enron’s chief executive, as he prepared for a May 2001 meeting of the company’s board.
“What I took from meeting with Mr. Skilling was he wanted me to put a presentation together that was more consistent with the analyst conference and less direct on some of the challenges we were facing at EBS,” Rice said.
In January 2001, Rice told Wall Street analysts who influenced the company’s stock price that the business was well positioned for strong long-term financial performance. In reality, however, Enron’s broadband unit was spending $100 million per quarter and generating little revenue and business, he said.

For the full story, see:
“Skilling said paint rosy picture, Rice says.” Omaha World-Herald (Friday, February 17, 2006): 1D.

Notice of End of Telegram Service, Posted to Western Union Web Site

A telegram. Source of image: online version of article cited below.

BLOOMBERG NEWS
After 155 years in the telegraph business, Western Union has cabled its final dispatch.
The service that in the mid-1800s displaced pony-borne messengers has itself been supplanted over the last half-century by cheap long-distance telephone service, faxes and e-mail.
In a final bit of irony, Western Union informed customers last week in a message on its Web site.

For the full story, see the online version of:
“First Data Unit Scraps Telegrams.” Omaha World-Herald (Thurs., February 2, 2006): 9D.
(In the online version, the headline reads: “Western Union Telegrams Are No More.”)

Solow’s Wit (But Not Wisdom): Treat Schumpeter “Like a Patron Saint”

(p. 195) As Robert Solow wrote acidly in 1994, commenting on a series of papes on growth and imperfect competition, “Schumpeter is a sort of patron saint in this field. I may be alone in thinking that he should be treated like a patron saint: paraded around one day each year and more or less ignored the rest of the time.”
Schumpeter was a most unwelcome guest at the neoclassical table. Yet it was hard for the mainstream to reject him out of hand, since Schumpeter was such a celebrant of capitalism and entrepreneurship. He thought it a superb, energetic, turbulent system, one that led to material betterment over time. He hoped it would triumph over socialism. He just didn’t believe it functioned in anything close to the way the Marshallians did, and he was appalled that economists could apply an essentially static model to something as profoundly dynamic as capitalism. Schumpeter wrote presciently, “Whereas a stationary feudal economy would still be a feudal economy, and a stationary socialist economy would still be a socialist economy, stationary capitalism is a contradiction in terms.” Its very essence, as the economic historian Nathan Rosenberg wrote, (p. 196) echoing Schumpeter, “lies not in equilibrating forces, but in the inevitable tendency to depart from equilibrium” every time an innovation occurs.

Source:
Kuttner, Robert. Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

E-mail Gathers Friends “into the immediacy of our lives”

Amid all that is wasteful, distracting, irrelevant and downright evil about e-mail, there is also this. We carry dozens of people, sometimes hundreds, around with us in our heads. They pass in and out of our thoughts as quickly as thought itself. E-mail is a way to gather these people — so many of them scattered across the globe — into the immediacy of our lives in a way that makes even a phone call feel highly formalized. It is the nearness of e-mail, the conversations it creates, that is addicting as much as the minute-by-minute stimuli. I try to remember that when I am getting twitchy, when I start wondering whether the mail server is down again. I tell myself that I’m just listening for a chorus of voices, a chorus of friends.

For the full commentary, see:
VERLYN KLINKENBORG. “EDITORIAL OBSERVER; ‘ No Messages on This Server,’ and Other Lessons of Our Time.” The New York Times, Section 4 (Sunday, January 29, 2006): 15.

A Censored Google is Better than No Google at All

Surfing the web at a Shanghai internet cafe. Source of image: the NYT article cited below.
At lunch a couple of weeks ago some of us in the department discussed Google’s agreeing to China’s desire to censor some searches. Some view this as Google violating its corporate motto: “don’t be evil.”
But I suspect that Chinese citizens with a hobbled Google, have more freedom than Chinese citizens with no Google at all.
There are many alternative ways to search for “freedom.” No government is clever enough to block them all.

SHANGHAI, Feb. 7 — For months now, the news about the news in China has been awful. Carrying out its vow to tighten controls over what it calls “propaganda,” the government of President Hu Jintao has busied itself closing publications, firing editorial staffs and jailing reporters.
More noticeably, the government has clamped down on the Internet, closing blogger sites, filtering Web sites and e-mail messages for banned words and tightening controls on text messages. Last year, Yahoo was criticized for revealing the identity of an Internet journalist, Shi Tao, who was subsequently jailed. [On Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists said court documents posted on a Chinese Web site showed that Yahoo had done the same in 2003, resulting in the jailing of another writer, Li Zhi.]
Against this grim backdrop, the news that Google had agreed to apply censors’ blacklists to its new Chinese search engine might have seemed like the ultimate nail in the coffin for freedom of information in this country. Chinese Internet mavens were outraged at Google for collaborating in the government’s censorship effort. “For most people, access to more diversified resources has been broken,” said Isaac Mao, a popular Chinese blogger, in a typical sentiment. “The majority of users, the new users, will only see a compressed version of Google, and can’t know what they don’t know. This is like taking a 30-year-old’s brain and setting him back to the mind of a 15-year-old.”
Some threatened that Internet companies that toed the government line would regret it someday. “Doing the bidding of the Chinese government like this is like doing the bidding of Stalin or Hitler,” said Yu Jie, a well-known dissident writer. “The actions of companies that did the bidding of Stalin and Hitler have been remembered by history, and the Chinese people won’t forget these kinds of actions, either.”
Whether Chinese will hold a long-term grudge is arguable. But Web specialists are far more confident that the government will fail in its efforts to reverse a trend toward increasingly free expression that has been reshaping this society with ever more powerful effects for more than two decades.
Last year, China ranked 159th out of 167 countries in a survey of press freedom, Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based international rights group, said. But rankings like this do not reflect the rapid change afoot here, more and more of which is escaping the government’s control.
A case in point is the Chinese government’s recent effort to rein in bloggers who tread too often into delicate territory, criticizing state policy or detailing official corruption. In December, the government ordered Microsoft and its MSN service to close the site of Michael Anti, one of China’s most popular bloggers.
Although Mr. Anti — who is also an employee of the Beijing bureau of The New York Times — had his site closed, any Chinese Web surfer can choose from scores of other online commentators who are equally provocative, and more are coming online all the time.
Microsoft alone carries an estimated 3.3 million blogs in China. Add to that the estimated 10 million blogs on other Internet services, and it becomes clear what a censor’s nightmare China has become. What is more, not a single blog existed in China a little more than three years ago, and thousands upon thousands are being born every day — some run by people whose previous blogs had been banned and merely change their name or switch Internet providers. New technologies, like podcasts, are making things even harder to control.
“The Internet is open technology, based on packet switching and open systems, and it is totally different from traditional media, like radio or TV or newspapers,” said Guo Liang, an Internet specialist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “At first, people might have thought it would be as easy to control as traditional media, but now they realize that’s not the case.”
. . .
“Symbolically, the government may have scored a victory with Google, but Web users are becoming a lot more savvy and sophisticated, and the censors’ life is not getting easier,” said Xiao Qiang, leader of the Internet project at the University of California, Berkeley. “The flow of information is getting steadily freer, in fact. If I was in the State Councils information office, I certainly wouldn’t think we had any reason to celebrate.”

For the full story, see:
HOWARD W. FRENCH. “Letter From China; Despite Web Crackdown, Prevailing Winds Are Free.” The New York Times (Thurs., February 9, 2006): A4.

The Open Road

A strong argument could be made that the automobile is one of the two most liberating inventions of the past century, ranking only behind the microchip. The car allowed even the common working man total freedom of mobility — the means to go anywhere, anytime, for any reason. In many ways, the automobile is the most egalitarian invention in history, dramatically bridging the quality-of-life gap between rich and poor. The car stands for individualism; mass transit for collectivism. Philosopher Waldemar Hanasz, who grew up in communist Poland, noted in his 1999 essay “Engines of Liberty” that Soviet leaders in the 1940s showed the movie “The Grapes of Wrath” all over the country as propaganda against the evils of U.S. capitalism and the oppression of farmers. The scheme backfired because “far from being appalled, the Soviet viewers were envious; in America, it seemed, even the poorest had cars and trucks.”
. . .
The simplistic notion taught to our second-graders, that the car is an environmental doomsday machine, reveals an ignorance of history. When Henry Ford first started rolling his Black Model Ts off the assembly line at the start of the 20th century, the auto was hailed as one of the greatest environmental inventions of all time. That’s because the horse, which it replaced, was a prodigious polluter, dropping 40 pounds of waste a day. Imagine what a city like St. Louis smelled like on a steamy summer afternoon when the streets were congested with horses and piled with manure.
. . .
There’s a perfectly good reason that the roads are crammed with tens of millions of cars and that Americans drive eight billion miles a year while spurning buses, trains, bicycles and subways. Americans are rugged individualists who don’t want to cram aboard buses and subways. We want more open roads and highways, and we want energy policies that will make gas cheaper, not more expensive. We want to travel down the road from serfdom and the car is what will take us there.

For the full commentary, see:
Moore, Stephen. “Supply Side; The War Against the Car.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., November 11, 2005): A10.

The Good Old Days, When Coffee Smelled Like Wet Dogs

We tend to romanticize the country store, and to deride chain stores and name brands. But maybe coffee lovers should think twice.

(p. 116, footnote 1) "The air was thick with an all-embracing odor," wrote Gerald Carson in The Old Country Store, "an aroma composed of dry herbs and wet dogs, [of] strong tobacco, green hides and raw humanity." Bulk roasted coffee absorbed all such smells.

Source:

Pendergrast, Mark. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

(Note: the “of” in brackets in the Carson quote is the word Carson used in his book; Pendergrast mistakenly substitutes the word “or”; I have corrected Pendergrast’s mistake.)