Hundreds of Thousands of Californians Moving to Texas, Arizona and Nevada

(p. A18) For more than three decades, California has seen a net outflow of residents to other states, as less expensive southern cities like Phoenix, Houston and Raleigh supplant those of the Golden State as beacons of opportunity.
. . .
. . . , for many Californians, the question is always sitting there: Is this worth it? Natural disasters are a moment to take stock and rethink the dream. But in the end, the calculation almost always comes down to cost.
. . .
California was once a migration magnet, but since 2010 the state has lost more than two million residents 25 and older, including 220,000 who moved to Texas, according to census data. Arizona and Nevada have each welcomed about 180,000 California expatriates since the start of the decade.

For the full story, see:
CONOR DOUGHERTY. “Californians Brave Fires, but Flee Cost of Living.” The New York Times (Weds., DEC. 13, 2017): A1 & A18.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 12, 2017, and has the title “Quakes and Fires? It’s the Cost of Living That Californians Can’t Stomach.”)

“Sea-Level Projections Too High” from Global Warming

(p. A10) In the summer of 2015, two New York Times journalists joined a team of researchers in Greenland that was conducting a unique experiment: directly measuring a river of meltwater runoff on the top of the ice.
Now, the scientists have published the results of that work. A key finding — that not as much meltwater flows immediately through the ice sheet and drains to the ocean as previously estimated — may have implications for sea-level rise, one of the major effects of climate change.
The scientists say it appears that some of the meltwater is retained in porous ice instead of flowing to the bottom of the ice sheet and out to sea.
“It’s always treated as a parking lot, water runs straight off,” said Laurence C. Smith, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles who led the field work in 2015. “What we found is that it appears there is water retention.”
“It’s plausible that this is quite an important process, which could render sea-level projections too high,” he added.
There’s still much that remains unknown about the ice sheet, which at roughly 650,000 square miles is more than twice the size of Texas.
. . .
When he first sent the results to modelers, Dr. Smith said, “they couldn’t believe it.” After months of back-and-forth, Dr. Smith and his colleagues concluded that the model estimates were accurate, but there was something else going on with some of the meltwater. “What is missing,” he said, “is a physical process that is not currently considered by the models — water retention in ice.”
. . .
“If there’s a mismatch between observation and model,” Dr. Tedesco said, “that means the model is moving the mass in one way or another and not respecting the way things happen in the real world.”

For the full story, see:
HENRY FOUNTAIN AND DEREK WATKINS . “As Greenland Melts, Where’s the Water Going?” The New York Times (Mon., DEC. 13, 2017): A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 5 [sic], 2017.)

The published article presenting the results briefly mentioned above, is:
Smith, Laurence C., Kang Yang, Lincoln H. Pitcher, Brandon T. Overstreet, Vena W. Chu, Åsa K. Rennermalm, Jonathan C. Ryan, Matthew G. Cooper, Colin J. Gleason, Marco Tedesco, Jeyavinoth Jeyaratnam, Dirk van As, Michiel R. van den Broeke, Willem Jan van de Berg, Brice Noel, Peter L. Langen, Richard I. Cullather, Bin Zhao, Michael J. Willis, Alun Hubbard, Jason E. Box, Brittany A. Jenner, and Alberto E. Behar. “Direct Measurements of Meltwater Runoff on the Greenland Ice Sheet Surface.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 50 (2017): E10622-E31.

Enforcing New Blood Pressure Guidelines May Lead to Serious Falls

(p. A23) “Under New Guidelines, Millions More Americans Will Need to Lower Blood Pressure.” This is the type of headline that raises my blood pressure to dangerously high levels.
. . .
The new recommendation is principally in response to the results of a large, federally funded study called Sprint that was published in 2015 in The New England Journal of Medicine.
. . .
A blood pressure of 130 in the Sprint study may be equivalent to a blood pressure of 140, even 150, in a busy clinic. A national goal of 130 as measured in actual practice may lead many to be overmedicated — making their blood pressures too low.
. . .
Serious falls are common among older adults. In the real world, will a nationwide target of 130, and the side effects of medication lowering blood pressure, lead to more hip fractures? Ask your doctors. See what they think.
. . .
I suspect many primary-care practitioners will want to ignore this new target. They understand the downsides of the relentless expansion of medical care into the lives of more people. At the same time, I fear many will be coerced into compliance as the health care industry’s middle management translates the 130 target into a measure of physician performance. That will push doctors to meet the target using whatever means necessary — and that usually means more medications.
So focusing on the number 130 not only will involve millions of people but also will involve millions of new prescriptions and millions of dollars. And it will further distract doctors and their patients from activities that aren’t easily measured by numbers, yet are more important to health — real food, regular movement and finding meaning in life. These matter whatever your blood pressure is.

For the full commentary, see:
H. GILBERT WELCH. “Rethinking Blood Pressure Advice.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 16, 2017): A23.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 15, 2017, and has the title “Don’t Let New Blood Pressure Guidelines Raise Yours.”)

Welch has a book that makes a similar point, though more broadly, to that made in the passages quoted above:
Welch, H. Gilbert. Less Medicine, More Health: 7 Assumptions That Drive Too Much Medical Care. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015.

France’s “Mille-Feuille” Regulations

(p. A1) France has long been known for its open hostility to corporations and its suspicion of personal wealth. Taxes were high, regulations were baffling and “It’s not possible” was the default answer to any question — if a company could even find the right person to ask.
Now, the country is in the midst of a sweeping attempt at national rebranding. Labor laws are being changed to make hiring and firing easier. New legislation has slashed a “wealth tax” that was said to drive millionaires out of the country.
. . .
(p. A5) “When you grow up in France, none of the heroes you learn about are entrepreneurs,” said Brigitte Granville, a professor of economics at Queen Mary University of London, who was raised in France. “When someone gets rich in France, people immediately ask, ‘What did he do to make this money? He must be a nasty person.'”
. . .
Now, a new crop of French leaders, most notably the free market-supporting president, Emmanuel Macron, are vigorously trying to shed this anticapitalist reputation. During his campaign, he visited London, home to as many as 400,000 French expatriates, urging them to return to France and “innovate.”
. . .
France’s economic makeover has inspired some derision outside of the country, too. It has the faint smell of desperation to people like Nicolas Mackel, the chief executive of Luxembourg for Finance, a public-private partnership that promotes the country as a business hub.
. . .
“You’ll accuse me of bashing the French,” he said over tea recently, “but earlier this year, they announced that they would have regulators who speak English. We didn’t need to do that because our regulators already speak English and always have.”
For France, English-speaking government officials would be little more than a promising start. The country has so many bewildering layers of regulations that its system is known, unaffectionately, as mille-feuille, a reference to a densely layered pastry.

For the full story, see:
DAVID SEGAL. “Paris Tries On A Fresh Look: Less Red Tape.” The New York Times (Mon., DEC. 11, 2017): A1 & A5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 10, 2017, and has the title “As Brexit Looms, Paris Tries a Business Makeover.”)

The Dutch Laughed in Their Golden Age

(p. 16) HAARLEM, the Netherlands — If you were asked to quickly close your eyes and conjure a picture of the Dutch Golden Age, you might come up with an image of dour, pale figures clad all in black with stiff white ruffs bracing their necks. But it may be time to update that image.
Jokes, and particularly coarse or bawdy humor, were apparently central to the life and art of the Dutch 17th century, according to a new exhibition at the Frans Hals Museum here, “The Art of Laughter: Humor in the Golden Age” which runs from Nov. 11 through March 18, 2018. The exhibition features about 60 masterpieces from leading artists such as Hals, Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Judith Leyster and Gerard van Honthorst, inspired by comic characters, explicit humor and visual punning — with lots of images of people laughing.
“If we learned anything from the research, it was how incredibly important and how widespread humor was in the Golden Age in Dutch culture, but also in painting,” said Anna Tummers, one of the show’s curators at the museum, in an interview a few weeks before the opening. “The more we worked on it, the more we realized quite how many paintings have a joke as their very core.”
. . .
The type of humor in the pictures breaks down into three categories. More than half make scatological references (in which “human excreta feature prominently,” according to the exhibition catalog) while sexually suggestive images make up much of the rest. In the second category, the jokes often focus on “unbridled lust or unequal love.” The third category is trompe-l’œil images — which are designed to fool the eye — or painted practical jokes, which had been in existence since antiquity but surged during the Dutch Golden Age.
“There are lots of sources about how art lovers and others couldn’t stop laughing when they realized that they were taken in by pictures of for example, a boy sleeping or a maid that someone tried to kiss, but who turned out to be a painting,” Ms. Tummers said.

For the full review, see:
NINA SIEGAL. “Need a Laugh? The Dutch Golden Age Can Help.” The New York Times FINE ARTS & EXHIBITS Section (Sun., OCT. 29, 2017): 16.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date OCT. 21 [sic], 2017, and has the title “Need a Good Laugh? Check Out Some 17th-Century Dutch Art.” The wording of the online version differs substantially from that in the print version. The passages quoted above, are from the online version.)

Robots May Be a Threat After They Learn How to Open a Door

(p. A1) Robots may enslave us all someday. In the meantime, if one of them goes berserk, here’s a useful tactic: Shut the door behind you.
One after another, robots in a government-sponsored contest were stumped by an unlocked door that blocked their path at an outdoor obstacle course. One bipedal machine managed to wrap a claw around the door handle and open it but was flummoxed by a breeze that kept blowing the door shut before it could pass through.
Robots excel at many tasks, as long as they don’t involve too much hand-eye coordination or common sense. Like some gifted children, they can perform impressive feats of mental arithmetic but are profoundly klutzy on the playground.
The machines stumble over tasks requiring even toddler-level balance, like kicking a ball, getting out of a car or (p. A9) climbing stairs. Grasping objects of varying size and weight is also perplexing.

For the full story, see:
Daniela Hernandez. “If the Robot Apocalypse Comes, Try Closing the Door.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Nov. 11, 2017): A1 & A9.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 10, 2017, and has the title “How to Survive a Robot Apocalypse: Just Close the Door.”)

For Jane Jacobs, “Self-Certainty” Was Better than a Doctorate

(p. 17) Like the critic Pauline Kael and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, Jane Jacobs arrived to churn the fertile soil of American cultural ideology in the 1960s, brandishing a disciplined populist intellect and a comfort with courting enmity. All three were middle-aged mothers by the time they would shake things up. That Jacobs, nee Butzner in 1916, would force a reconsideration of the nature and purpose of cities was an outcome her young adulthood would have hardly suggested. An unexceptional student at Central High in Scranton, Pa., she later studied at Columbia before failing to gain formal admission to Barnard and abandoning the pursuit of a degree entirely. These experiences, Robert Kanigel maintains in his biography “Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs,” left her with a distaste for the academy that she carried throughout her career.
Where others had doctorates, Jacobs had a self-certainty that was manifest early on. In a chronicling of her childhood so thorough it includes the number of times she was late for homeroom during her first semester of high school (seven), Kanigel recounts an incident in which Jane was expelled from third grade for urging her classmates to dismiss the entreaties of a hygiene instructor, who asked them to pledge to brush their teeth twice a day for the rest of their lives. In Jane’s view, the promise would be impossible to keep, making the request absurd.

For the full review, see:
GINIA BELLAFANTE. “Fighting the Power Broker.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, OCT. 9, 2016): 17.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date OCT. 7, 2016, and has the title “Two New Books About Jane Jacobs, Urban Visionary.”)

The book under review, is:
Kanigel, Robert. Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Yale President Defends Free Speech

(p. A23) In 1963, the Yale Political Union, one of the oldest collegiate debate societies in the United States, invited the defiant segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, to Yale. Just a few weeks before his scheduled visit, Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four African-American schoolgirls and wounding 22 others.
Wallace — the personification of Southern hostility to integration — had famously stood on the portico of the Alabama State Capitol and declared in his inaugural speech, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Many blamed Wallace for inciting the violence.
The provost and acting president of Yale, Kingman Brewster Jr., advised the students to withdraw their invitation. Mayor Richard C. Lee said Wallace was “officially unwelcome” in New Haven.
Not everyone agreed. Pauli Murray, a lawyer and civil rights activist pursuing her doctorate of jurisprudence at the law school, wrote to Brewster, urging him to send a clear message that Wallace should be allowed to express his views at Yale.
. . .
In linking the fate of the civil rights movement to Wallace’s speech, she reminds us that the Constitution makes for strange bedfellows. It applies to segregationists and integrationists, civil rights activists and self-proclaimed racists. All Americans can lay claim to its protections, but those, like Murray, who seek to change society and extend freedoms to the most marginalized may need it most.

For the full commentary, see:
Peter Salovey. “Free Speech, Personified.” The New York Times (Mon., NOV. 27, 2017): A23.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 26, 2017. The wording of the online version differs substantially from that in the print version. The passages quoted above, are from the online version.)

Union Blocks Firing of Teachers Who Do Not Teach

(p. A1) Francis Blake has not held a permanent position in a New York City public school in at least five years. At his last job, in a Bronx elementary school, records show he was disciplined for incompetence, insubordination and neglect of duties — he had been caught sleeping in a classroom when he was supposed to be helping with dismissal.
Felicia Alterescu, a special-education teacher, has been without a permanent post since 2010, despite high demand for special education teachers. According to records, in addition to getting a string of unsatisfactory ratings, she was disciplined for calling in sick when she actually went to a family reunion. She also did not tell the Education Department that she had been arrested on harassment charges.
This month, Mr. Blake, Ms. Alterescu and hundreds of other teachers who are part of a pool known as the Absent Teacher Reserve could be permanently back in classrooms, as the city’s Education Department places them in jobs at city schools.
The reserve is essentially a parking lot for staff members who have lost their positions, some because of school closings and budget cuts, others because of disciplinary problems, but cannot be fired. It grew significantly as a result of a 2005 deal between the Bloomberg administration, which wanted to give principals control over hiring, and the teachers’ un-(p. A17)ion. Since then, the union has fiercely protected the jobs of teachers in the reserve, resisting attempts to put a time limit on how long a teacher can remain there.

For the full story, see:
KATE TAYLOR. “Caught Sleeping or Worse, Idled Teachers Head Back to Class.” The New York Times (Sat., OCT. 23, 2017): A1 & A17.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 22, 2017, and has the title “Caught Sleeping or Worse, Troubled Teachers Will Return to New York Classrooms.”)

High Demand for STEM Workers Is Mainly High for Workers in Info Tech

(p. 10) A working grasp of the principles of science and math should be essential knowledge for all Americans, said Michael S. Teitelbaum, an expert on science education and policy. But he believes that STEM advocates, often executives and lobbyists for technology companies, do a disservice when they raise the alarm that America is facing a worrying shortfall of STEM workers, based on shortages in a relative handful of fast-growing fields like data analytics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and computer security.
“When it gets generalized to all of STEM, it’s misleading,” said Mr. Teitelbaum, a senior research associate in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “We’re misleading a lot of young people.”
Unemployment rates for STEM majors may be low, but not all of those with undergraduate degrees end up in their field of study — only 13 percent in life sciences and 17 percent in physical sciences, according to a 2013 National Science Foundation survey. Computer science is the only STEM field where more than half of graduates are employed in their field.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR. “Where the STEM Jobs Are/Aren’t.” The New York Times, Education Life Section (Sun., NOV. 5, 2017): 10.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 1, 2017, and has the title “Where the STEM Jobs Are (and Where They Aren’t).”)

Sapolsky Wrong to Dismiss Hunter-Gatherer Violence

(p. 15) Sapolsky proposes 10 strategies for reducing violence, all reasonable but none that justify the notion that science is the basis for societal advances toward less violence and higher morality.
. . .
In this section Sapolsky becomes a partisan critic, including presenting a skeptical view about the supposed long-term decline of human violence claimed by Steven Pinker in “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” Sapolsky asserts that Pinker’s calculations include elementary errors, and that low rates of violence among contemporary hunter-gatherers mean that warfare did not predate agriculture. His arguments here are unbalanced. He fails to note that data on hunter-gatherer violence is relevant only where they are neighbored by other hunter-gatherers, rather than by militarily superior farmers.

For the full review, see:
RICHARD WRANGHAM. “Brain Teasers.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, JULY 9, 2017): 15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JULY 5, 2017, and has the title “Insights Into the Brain, in a Book You’ll Wish You Had in College.”)

The book under review, is:
Sapolsky, Robert M. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York: Penguin Press 2017.