Trump Argues Regulations Impede Infrastructure Investment

(p. A18) Mr. Trump is pursuing a similar shift in regulation, seeking to reverse or rewrite a host of rules intended to protect workers and consumers, under the theory that freeing companies from “red tape” will allow businesses to prosper, with wide-ranging benefits.
In remarks at the White House last week, Mr. Trump argued that regulation was impeding private investment in infrastructure. He held up a long, multicolored chart that he said reflected the permitting process for the construction of “a highway or a roadway.”
“By the time you finished, you probably gave up,” Mr. Trump said.

For the full story, see:
BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and ANA SWANSON. “Trump Bets on Business to Lift Workers.” The New York Times (Thurs., December 21, 2017): A18.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 20, 2017, and has the title “Republican Economic Policies Put Business First.” The online version says that the page number for the print New York edition was A19. My print paper was probably the midwest edition.)

Cognitive Abilities Highest After Waking in Morning

(p. A15) A raft of studies in disciplines ranging from medicine to economics have yielded all sorts of data on the science of timing. Daniel Pink, an author who regularly applies behavioral science to the realm of work, has handily distilled the findings in “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.”
. . .
For a slim book, “When” brims with a surprising amount of insight and practical advice. In amiable, TED-talk-ready prose, Mr. Pink offers scheduling tips for everything from workouts to weddings. Exercise, for example, is best done in the morning for those who hope to lose weight, build strength and boost their mood through the day.
. . .
Moods are not the only things that shift every 24 hours. Our cognitive abilities also morph in foreseeable ways. We are often sharpest in the hours after waking up, which makes morning the best time to take exams or answer logic problems. Researchers analyzing four years of test results for two million Danish schoolchildren found that students consistently scored higher in mornings than afternoons.

For the full review, see:
Emily Bobrow. “BOOKSHELF; Hacking The Clock; Exercise in the morning if you want to lose weight. But if you want to perform at your physical peak, plan a workout for the afternoon.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 9, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Review: Hacking The Clock; Exercise in the morning if you want to lose weight. But if you want to perform at your physical peak, plan a workout for the afternoon.”

The book under review, is:
Pink, Daniel H. When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.

Weather Channel Entrepreneur Was a Global Warming Skeptic

(p. B1) John S. Coleman, a co-founder of the Weather Channel, the original meteorologist on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and, later in his career, a vocal climate change skeptic, died on Saturday [January 20, 2018] at Summerlin Hospital Medical Center in Las Vegas. He was 83.
. . .
His career took him through broadcast positions in Omaha, Milwaukee and Peoria, Ill. He joined the fledgling “Good Morning America” in 1975 and stayed for seven years.
“He was sort of a weather rock star at the time,” said Joseph D’Aleo, whom Mr. Coleman recruited out of academia to lend a hand at “Good Morning America” and to help him develop his idea for a 24-7 weather channel.
“He was dedicated to everything he did; he’d sometimes take off after the morning shows, get on an airplane, go halfway across the country and meet with venture capitalists to present his idea,” Mr. D’Aleo said in an interview.
But after a year of false starts, Mr. D’Aleo said, Mr. Coleman “felt a little bit like Sancho Panza behind Don Quixote and his impossible dream.”
. . .
The American Meteorological Society named Mr. Coleman broadcast meteorologist of the year in 1983, citing his “many years of service in presenting weather reports of high informational, educational and professional quality.”
. . .
By the time he retired in 2014, he had become a lightning rod for controversy over his views on climate change.
At the top of his personal blog, he wrote: “There is no significant man-made global warming at this time, there has not been any in the past and there is no reason to fear any in the future.”

For the full obituary, see:
TIFFANY Hsu. “John Coleman, 83, TV Weather Pioneer.” The New York Times (Weds., January 24, 2018): B14.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JAN. 21, 2018, and has the title “John S. Coleman, Weather Channel Co-Founder, Dies at 83.”)

Tinkerers Create Cheap Prosthetic Hands with 3-D Printers

(p. D1) The proliferation of 3-D printers has had an unexpected benefit: The devices, it turns out, are perfect for creating cheap prosthetics. Surprising numbers of children need them: One in 1,000 infants is born with missing fingers, and others lose fingers and hands to injury. Each year, about 450 children receive amputations as a result of lawn mower accidents, according to a study in Pedatrics..
State-of-the-art prosthetic replacements are complicated medical devices, powered by batteries and electronic motors, and they can cost thousands of dollars. Even if children are able to manage the equipment, they grow too quickly to make the investment practical. So most do without, fighting to do with one hand what most of us do with two.
E-nable, an online volunteer organization, aims to change that. Founded in 2013 by Jon Schull, the group matches children like Dawson in need of prosthetic hands and fingers with volunteers able to make them on 3-D printers. Designs may be downloaded into the machines at no charge, and members who create new models share their software plans freely with others.
The materials for a 3-D-printed prosthetic hand can cost as little as $20 to $50, and some experts say they work just as well, if not better, than much costlier devices. Best of all, boys and girls usually love their D.I.Y. prosthetics.

For the full story, see:
Mroz, Jacqueline. “Hand of a Superhero.” The New York Times (Tues., Feb. 17, 2015): D1 & D6..
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 16, 2015. I do not have the print version, so I cannot confirm if there are differences between the online and print versions, and am not sure if the whole passage quoted above appears on p. D1, or if some or all of it is from p. D6.)

Firms Invest in France as Rules “Make It Easier to Hire and Fire”

(p. B1) PARIS — The announcements came in a steady drumbeat. Around 1,300 job cuts at France’s biggest automaker. At least 2,500 at France’s largest supermarket chain. Over 200 sought at a major clothing retailer. And thousands more are on the way.
Just weeks after France’s labor overhaul went into effect, companies are readily taking advantage of new rules that make it easier to hire and fire.
. . .
Perceptions of France, long derided as a difficult place to do business for its onerous labor rules, are changing.
Growth has recently picked up after being stagnant for nearly five years. And there are signs that the changes, a major piece of the president’s economic program, are drawing the interest of investors.
Amazon will open a new distribution center south of Paris this year, creating over 1,000 jobs. Facebook and Google announced Monday they would invest in artificial intelligence development in France. Also Monday, Toyota announced it would invest 300 million euros, or $367 million, to increase capacity at a plant in northern (p. B3) France, creating up to 700 jobs through 2020.
“The complex labor laws have historically been the No. 1 obstacle to the competitiveness and attractiveness of France,” said Olivier Marchal, the chairman of Bain & Company France, a business consulting firm. The changes, together with other business-friendly measures such as a gradual reduction in the corporate tax, have “drastically changed investor perceptions,” he said.

For the full story, see:
LIZ ALDERMAN. “Newfound Freedom … to Fire.” The New York Times (Weds., January 24, 2018): B1 & B3.
(Note: ellipsis in article title, in original; ellipsis between quoted paragraphs, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 23, 2018, and has the title “French Companies Have Newfound Freedom … to Fire.”)

“The Establishment Drew Its Knives” Against Lister’s Handwashing

(p. C5) Lindsey Fitzharris’s slim, atmospheric “The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine” has its share of resplendent gore. . . . The book is an imperfect first effort, stronger at the beginning than at the end, and a bit workaday when it isn’t freaky — it floats less on narrative momentum than on an armada of curious details. But the story it tells is one of abiding fascination, in part because it involves a paradigm shift so basic, so seemingly obvious, that one can scarcely believe the paradigm needed shifting in the first place.
. . .
The real drama in Lister’s story comes from the resistance he faced to his theories. After he published the last article in a five-part series in the medical journal The Lancet, carefully outlining his system for killing “septic germs,” the establishment drew its knives. The inventor of chloroform wrote under a pseudonym to complain that Lister was taking credit for having discovered the miracles of carbolic acid. (He wasn’t.) Others accused him of fearmongering, dismissing Pasteur’s germ theory as pure hooey. The editor of The Lancet himself refused to use the word “germ.”
“It was difficult for many surgeons at the height of their careers,” Fitzharris writes, “to face the fact that for the past 15 or 20 years they might have been inadvertently killing patients by allowing wounds to become infected with tiny, invisible creatures.”
. . .
There were, after all, others — most famously the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis. In 1847, he hypothesized that puerperal fever was spread by doctors carrying “cadaverous particles” from the deadhouse to the obstetrics ward at Vienna’s General Hospital. When he set up a basin filled with chlorinated water and enjoined his colleagues to do something radical after autopsies — wash their hands — mortality rates plummeted.
The establishment still rejected Semmelweis’s hypothesis when he published it. Over the years, Fitzharris writes, his behavior grew increasingly erratic. He was eventually committed to an asylum.
Lister, meanwhile, lived to a ripe old age and got a mouthwash named after him. Timing, personality and geopolitics always help determine who earns the garlands for innovation. But it’s sad to think that Semmelweis never lived to see the vindication of his theory. He died in that asylum, possibly from an infection, believing that his contribution had been bleached from the record.

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR . “Books of The Times; Wash Up, Doc: How Hospitals Became Clean.” The New York Times (Thursday, November 30, 2017): C5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 29, 2017, and has the title “Books of The Times; The Story of How Surgeons Cleaned Up Their Act.”)

The book under review, is:
Fitzharris, Lindsey. The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Kodak Using Blockchain to Manage Digital Photo Property Rights

(p. B1) Shares of Eastman Kodak more than doubled after the company waded into the digital-currency world with plans to launch an initial coin offering.
Kodak on Tuesday [January 9, 2018] said the coin, KodakCoin, would be the backbone of a new platform that will help photographers license their work and track the unlicensed use of their images. The coin uses the technology behind bitcoin, called blockchain, to keep a digital ledger of the photographs.
. . .
“For many in the tech industry, ‘blockchain’ and ‘cryptocurrency’ are hot buzzwords, but for photographers who’ve long struggled to assert control over their work and how it’s used, these buzzwords are the keys to solving what felt like an unsolvable problem,” said Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke in a statement.
For the past several years, people have been experimenting with ways to use blockchain. At its essence, blockchain is an open record of transactions, maintained in an online ledger that is distributed across a network of computers, that cannot be tampered with. That makes it like an indelible time stamp, which could be useful in a case of copyright and digital-rights management.

For the full story, see:

Erik Holm and Paul Vigna. “Kodak Snaps Is Crypto-Moment.”The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Jan 10, 2018): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan 9, 2018, and has the title “Kodak Catches Crypto Fever.” The online version has two additional paragraphs between the last two paragraphs quoted above.)

“Without Amazon, We Wouldn’t Be Here”

(p. B1) KANATA, Ontario — Truth be told, the headquarters of Instant Pot don’t look much like a church.
But inside this sterile, gray office building on the outskirts of Ottawa, behind a door marked only by a small metal sign, a new religion has been born.
Its deity is the Instant Pot, a line of electric multicookers that has become an internet phenomenon and inspired a legion of passionate foodies and home cooks. These devotees — they call themselves “Potheads” — use their Instant Pots for virtually every kitchen task imaginable: sautéing, pressure-cooking, steaming, even making yogurt and cheesecakes. Then, they evangelize on the internet, using social media to sing the gadget’s praises to the unconverted.
. . .
(p. B5) I went to Kanata to get a peek behind the scenes of the Instant Pot phenomenon and meet its creator: Robert Wang, who invented the device and serves as chief executive of Double Insight, its parent company. What I found was a remarkable example of a new breed of 21st-century start-up — a homegrown hardware business with only around 50 employees that raised no venture capital funding, spent almost nothing on advertising, and achieved enormous size primarily through online word-of-mouth. It is also a testament to the enormous power of Amazon, and its ability to turn small businesses into major empires nearly overnight.
. . .
In 2010, after several months of sluggish sales in and around Ontario, Mr. Wang listed the Instant Pot on Amazon, where a community of food writers eventually took notice. Vegetarians and paleo dieters, in particular, were drawn to the device’s pressure-cooking function, which shaved hours off the time needed to cook pots of beans or large cuts of meat.
Sensing viral potential, Instant Pot sent test units to about 200 influential chefs, cooking instructors and food bloggers. Reviews and recipes appeared online, and sales began to climb.
. . .
Mr. Wang credits the device’s technological advances — most notably, a group of sensors that keep the cooker from overheating or exploding under pressure.
Instant Pot’s internet fandom also gives it a leg up. The food bloggers behind popular recipe sites like Nom Nom Paleo were early converts to electric pressure-cooking, and cookbook authors took note of the device’s cult appeal. Mr. Wang says that more than 1,500 Instant Pot cookbooks have been written, including several of Amazon’s current best-sellers.
Amazon has played a particularly large role in Instant Pot’s rise. Early on, Instant Pot joined the “Fulfillment by Amazon” program, in which Amazon handles the packing and shipping of a seller’s products in exchange for a cut of each item sold. Eventually, Instant Pot sent Amazon wholesale shipments directly from factories in China, and Amazon began promoting the machines in its major annual sales. At one point, more than 90 percent of Instant Pot’s sales came through Amazon.
“Without Amazon, we wouldn’t be here,” Mr. Wang said.

For the full story, see:
KEVIN ROOSE. “The Shift; Instant Pot’s Inner Sanctum.” The New York Times (Mon., December 18, 2017): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 17, 2017, and has the title “The Shift; Inside the Home of Instant Pot, the Kitchen Gadget That Spawned a Religion.”)

Trying to Explain Low AI Productivity Gains as Due to Slow Adapting and Old Habits

(p. A2) In a recent paper Erik Brynjolfsson and Daniel Rock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Chad Syverson of the University of Chicago note electric motors based on alternating current were introduced in the late 1800s but even by 1919 half of U.S. factories still weren’t electrified. The integrated circuit was commercialized in the 1960s yet 25 years later computers still represented just 5% of the value of all business equipment. Indeed, since the introduction of computers labor productivity has behaved much as it did after the introduction of electric motors and the internal combustion engine.
The authors blame these lags on the cost and time it takes for businesses to adapt to new technologies, obstacles they see at work today. Online shopping came along in the 1990s but retailers struggled to adapt business processes to the internet. They needed to build complementary infrastructure such as fulfillment centers, and, the authors note, customers had to adapt their habits, as well.
. . .
. . . perhaps the U.S. is at a point when technology and an economy growing solidly with low unemployment become mutually reinforcing. “Entrepreneurs are more willing to take risks, including investments in new technologies and new business models when the economy is running hotter,” says Mr. Brynjolfsson. “This will speed up the adoption of the kinds of conventions needed to take full advantage of artificial intelligence and other new technologies,” he said.

For the full commentary, see:
Greg Ip. ”CAPITAL ACCOUNT; Technology-Driven Boom Is Finally Coming.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., December 28, 2017): A2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 27, 2017, and has the title ”CAPITAL ACCOUNT; A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient.”)

The Brynjolfsson, Rock and Syverson paper, mentioned above, is:
Brynjolfsson, Erik, Daniel Rock, and Chad Syverson. “Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox: A Clash of Expectations and Statistics.” NBER Working Papers # 24001. National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., Nov. 2017.

World War I Spread the Deadly Flu of 1918

(p. A17) The Spanish flu began in the spring of 1918, infected 500 million people, and killed between 50 million and 100 million of them–more than both world wars and the Holocaust combined. Not since the bubonic plague of the mid-14th century–the Black Death–had such a fearsome pestilence devastated mankind.
Spanish-flu patients “would soon be having trouble breathing,” writes Laura Spinney in “Pale Rider,” her gripping account of the pandemic.
. . .
Ms. Spinney is at her best in trying to tease out the real origin of the pandemic. The first suspect was China, where pneumonic plague had erupted on the Manchurian border in 1910. The government, trying to curry favor with the Allies in World War I, had then sent tens of thousands of laborers, many infected, to dig trenches on the Western Front. Another theory put the initial outbreak at the British army’s mobilization base in Étaples in northern France. A third candidate was in the American heartland, at a U.S. Army staging base, Camp Funston in Kansas. The question is unsettled, but plainly the movement of troops in the Great War accelerated the flu’s spread.
. . .
The frantic search for the cause of the pandemic was nightmarish, too. A respected researcher persuaded himself and others that he had found the bacillus, and he persisted even though autopsies rarely turned up his pet suspect in the tissues of the dead. The microbe hunters couldn’t find their quarry because it slipped through the ultrafine strainers they tried to catch it with, and it was invisible to their microscopes. It was what the French bacteriologist Émile Roux called an “être de raison,” an organism whose existence could be deduced only from its effects. Eventually a virus–1/20th the size of a bacillus–was identified as the culprit. It was not actually seen until decades later with the invention of the electron microscope.

For the full review, see:
Edward Kosner. “BOOKSHELF; A World Of Sickness; The Spanish flu of 1918-19 infected 500 million people, killing between 50 and 100 million. Its cause was discovered only decades later.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 11, 2017): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 10, 2017, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Review: A World of Sickness; The Spanish flu of 1918-19 infected 500 million people, killing between 50 and 100 million. Its cause was discovered only decades later.”)

The book under review, is:
Spinney, Laura. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. New York: PublicAffairs, 2017.

Apple Orchard Must Focus on “Placating a Government Regulator”

(p. A1) ALTAMONT, N.Y. — For eight weeks every fall, Indian Ladder Farms, a fifth-generation family operation near Albany, kicks into peak season.
The farm sells homemade apple pies, fresh cider and warm doughnuts. Schoolchildren arrive by the busload to learn about growing apples. And as customers pick fruit from trees, workers fill bins with apples, destined for the farm’s shop and grocery stores.
This fall, amid the rush of commerce — the apple harvest season accounts for about half of Indian Ladder’s annual revenue — federal investigators showed up. They wanted to check the farm’s compliance with migrant labor rules and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets pay and other requirements for workers.
Suddenly, the small office staff turned its focus away from making money to placating a government regulator.
The investigators arrived on a Friday in late September and interviewed the farm’s management and a group of laborers from Jamaica, who have special work visas. The investigators hand delivered a notice and said they would be back the following week, when they asked to have 22 types of records available. The request included vehicle registrations, insurance documents and time sheets — reams of paper in all.
Over the next several days, the Ten Eyck family, which owns the farm, along with the staff devoted about 40 hours to serving the investigators, who visited three times before closing the books.
“It is terribly disruptive,” said Peter G. Ten Eyck II, 79, who runs the farm along with a daughter (p. A14) and son. “And the dimension that doesn’t get mentioned is the psychological hit: They are there to find something wrong with you. And then they are going to fine you.”
This is life on the farm — and at businesses of all sorts. With thick rule books laying out food safety procedures, compliance costs in the tens of thousands of dollars and ever-changing standards from the government and industry groups, local produce growers are a textbook example of what many business owners describe as regulatory fatigue.
Over the past five decades, Mr. Ten Eyck said, there has been an unending layering of new rules and regulations on his farm of over 300 acres, as more government agencies have taken an interest in nearly every aspect of growing food, and those agencies already involved have become even more so.
Now, a new rule is going into effect that will significantly expand the oversight of one regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, at the farm.
. . .
Researchers at the Mercatus Center, a conservative-leaning economic think tank at George Mason University, say apple orchards are facing a growing federal regulatory burden. Quantifying that burden is difficult, but using a computer algorithm that analyzes regulations through keyword searches, researchers from the center’s RegData Project estimated the federal regulatory code contains 12,000 restrictions and rules on orchards, up from about 9,500, or an increase of 26 percent, from a decade ago.
Many of those rules apply to other businesses as well, and some restrict the actions of government regulators, not the orchard owners. Using the Mercatus Center data, and screening for such exceptions, The New York Times identified at least 17 federal regulations with about 5,000 restrictions and rules that were relevant to orchards.
. . .
. . . regulation streamlining is a winning message across the political spectrum when it comes to making life easier for small businesses, according to more than 20 interviews with business owners and others in the produce industry.
Industry by industry, small businesses have been lobbying governments — from town health departments to federal cabinet agencies — to simplify rules and eradicate redundancy.
. . .
The grievances relate largely to the sheer amount of time and money that it takes to comply, and what farmers see as a disconnect between them — the rule followers — and the rule makers, who Mr. Ten Eyck describes as “people looking at a computer screen dreaming up stuff.”
“The intentions are not bad,” he said. “It is just that one layer after another gets to be — trying to top the people before them.”

For the full story, see:
STEVE EDER. “One Apple Orchard and 5,000 Government Rules.” The New York Times (Thurs., December 28, 2017): A1 & A14-A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 27, 2017, and has the title “When Picking Apples on a Farm With 5,000 Rules, Watch Out for the Ladders.”)