Silicon Valley Funding Big Dings in the Universe

When Steve Jobs was trying to recruit Pepsi’s John Sculley to become Apple CEO, Jobs asked him something like: ‘do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water, or do you want a chance to make a ding in the universe.’

(p. B1) One persistent criticism of Silicon Valley is that it no longer works on big, world-changing ideas. Every few months, a dumb start-up will make the news — most recently the one selling a $700 juicer — and folks outside the tech industry will begin singing I-told-you-sos.

But don’t be fooled by expensive juice. The idea that Silicon Valley no longer funds big things isn’t just wrong, but also obtuse and fairly dangerous. Look at the cars, the rockets, the internet-beaming balloons and gliders, the voice assistants, drones, augmented and virtual reality devices, and every permutation of artificial intelligence you’ve ever encountered in sci-fi. Technology companies aren’t just funding big things — they are funding the biggest, most world-changing things. They are spending on ideas that, years from now, we may come to see as having altered life for much of the planet.

For the full commentary, see:
Manjoo, Farhad. “STATE OF THE ART; These Days, Moon Shots Are Domain of the Valley.” The New York Times (Thurs., MAY 17, 2017): B1 & B6.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MAY 17, 2017, and has the title “STATE OF THE ART; Google, Not the Government, Is Building the Future.”)

Open Offices Disrupt Analytical Thinking and Creativity

(p. A13) Visual noise, the activity or movement around the edges of an employee’s field of vision, can erode concentration and disrupt analytical thinking or creativity, research shows. While employers have long tried to quiet disruptive sounds in open workspaces, some are now combating visual noise too.
. . .
“I could barely ever focus,” says Ms. Spivak, marketing and communications director for San Francisco-based Segment.
Her company overhauled its layout when it moved to new offices in April. Its former space was like a warehouse, creating “these long lines of sight across the workspace, where you have people you know and recognize moving by and talking to each other. It was incredibly distracting,” CEO Peter Reinhardt says.
. . .
(p. A15) Being surrounded by teammates with similar work patterns can be comforting to employees. Unpredictable movements around the edges of a person’s field of vision compete for cognitive resources, however, says Sabine Kastner, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University who has studied how the brain pays attention for 20 years. People differ in their ability to filter out visual stimuli. For some, a teeming or cluttered office can make it nearly impossible to concentrate, she says.
. . .
In an experiment with Chinese factory workers published in 2012, Ethan Bernstein, an assistant professor of leadership and organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, found teams were 10% to 15% more productive when they worked behind a curtain that shielded them from supervisors’ view. The employees felt freer to experiment with new ways to solve problems and improve efficiency when protected from their bosses’ critical gaze, Dr. Bernstein says.
A loss of visual privacy is the No. 2 complaint from employees in offices with low or no partitions between desks, after noise, according to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of 42,764 workers in 303 U.S. office buildings.

For the full commentary, see:
Sue Shellenbarger. “WORK & FAMILY; Why You Can’t Concentrate at Work.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 10, 2017): A13 & A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 9, 2017 and has the title “WORK & FAMILY; Why You Can’t Concentrate at Work.”)

The Bernstein paper, mentioned above, is:
Bernstein, Ethan S. “The Transparency Paradox.” Administrative Science Quarterly 57, no. 2 (June 2012): 181-216.

Bezos Stayed the Course, Refuted the Skeptics, and Made a Ding in the Universe

(p. B1) Twenty years ago this week, Amazon.com went public.
Skeptics of Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, have spent the better part of the past two decades second-guessing and vilifying him: He has been described as “a monopolist,” “literary enemy No. 1,” “a notorious international tax dodger,” impossible, a ruthless boss and — more than once — “Lex Luthor.” His company used to routinely be described as Amazon.con.
But you know what?
Here we are, 20 years later, and Mr. Bezos has an authentic, legitimate claim on having changed the way we live.
He has changed the way we shop. He has changed the way companies use computers, by moving much of their information and systems to cloud services. He’s even changed the way we interact with computers by voice: “Alexa!”
Along the way, he has bought — and fixed — The Washington Post, one of the nation’s premier journalistic institutions. And through his aerospace company, Blue Origin, he has invested billions of dollars in the race to space, a onetime hobby that, if successful, could change the world much more pro-(p. B3)foundly than free one-day shipping.
. . .
Perhaps the most surprising thing Mr. Bezos was able to accomplish, despite his detractors, was to find investors willing to trust him enough to invest in Amazon even as it racked up losses after losses.
That’s not to say investors were always happy with Mr. Bezos — they would frequently punish his stock, making it seem like a volatile investment. Then, every so often, he would surprise investors with profits, as if to suggest, “Yes, we can make money whenever we want, if we don’t want to invest in the future.”

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “DEALBOOK; 20 Years On, Bezos Alters the Way We Shop and Live.” The New York Times (Tues., MAY 16, 2017): B1 & B3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MAY 15, 2017, and has the title “DEALBOOK; 20 Years On, Amazon and Jeff Bezos Prove Naysayers Wrong.”)

Going Postal

(p. 19) Over all, Leonard emphasizes a darker side of postal history, from the corruption scandals that periodically erupted after Andrew Jackson politicized the service, creating a gargantuan patronage machine, to oppressive government censorship campaigns. He devotes much of a chapter to Anthony Comstock, the longtime postal inspector and self-styled “weeder in God’s garden,” who banned and prosecuted the mailing of birth control pamphlets, “marriage aids” and “indecent” literary works like Walt Whitman’s poems, lest they pollute public morals. Still another chapter charts the spree of mass killings by overworked, underpaid and aggrieved postal workers in the 1980s and early 1990s.

For the full review, see:
LISA McGIRR. “We Had Mail.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., JULY 10, 2016): 19.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JULY 8, 2016, and has the title “Two Books Recount How Our Postal System Created a Communications Revolution.”)

The book under review, is:
Leonard, Devin. Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service. New York: Grove Press, 2016.

Lower Quality Restaurants Most Hurt by Minimum Wage Hike

(p. A17) “There’s only so much you can charge for tamales,” the owner of a small eatery said in 2015 to explain one reason he was closing.
For some empirical backup, consider an April [2017] study from Michael Luca at Harvard Business School and Dara Lee Luca at Mathematica Policy Research. They used Bay Area data from the review website Yelp to estimate that a $1 minimum-wage hike leads to a 14% increase in “the likelihood of exit for a 3.5-star restaurant.”
Put differently, San Francisco’s minimum wage experiment may be dangerous for your favorite white-tablecloth restaurant–the kind of place where the food is exquisite and can command a premium–but it’s downright deadly for your local white-apron diner.

For the full commentary, see:

Michael Saltsman. “The Minimum Wage Eats Restaurants; A San Francisco ex-owner says: ‘There’s only so much you can charge for tamales.’.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 9, 2017): A17.
(Note: bracketed year added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 9, 2017,)

The Luca and Luca paper, mentioned above, is:
Luca, Dara Lee and Luca, Michael. “Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit.” (April 2017). Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 17-088.

“Mind-Bending” Automatic Braking Trickles Down to Cheaper Cars

(p. B4) I first experienced radar-assisted cruise control in a $70,000 Mercedes in 2001. Slowing automatically to keep from hitting the car ahead felt like a magic trick. In 2009, I was told to drive a new $50,000 Volvo into the back of a “parked car” (really, an inflatable mock-up). Every fiber of my body wanted to stomp on the brake pedal. Instead, the car did it for me. Automatic braking is mind-bending the first time.
Both of these technologies are standard equipment on 2017 Toyota Corollas, which start at $19,385. So is lane-keeping assist, which nudges the car back between the road stripes if you wander. Automatic high-beam headlamps, too.
Huzzah for technology trickle down!

For the full story, see:
TOM VOELK. “Tech Trickles Down into a Safer Corolla.” The New York Times (Fri., MARCH 17, 2017): B4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 16, 2017, and has the title “Video Review: Not-So-Standard Equipment on the Otherwise Standard Corolla.”)

Since 1880 North America Is Warmer by One and a Half Degrees Fahrenheit

(p. A23) Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.

For the full commentary, see:
Stephens, Bret. “Climate of Complete Certainty.” The New York Times (Sat., APRIL 29, 2017): A23.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 28, 2017.)

Many Great Inventors Rose, with Little Education, from Poverty

(p. A13) Mr. Baker is good at pointing out the unanticipated consequences that arose from some inventions: Richard Jordon Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, a fearsome instrument of battlefield butchery still in use in some forms today, believed that his contribution would save lives–depending on which side of the gun you were on–because one man operating the weapon would reduce the need for other soldiers. The inventor who created television, Philo Farnsworth, believed that his device could bring about world peace. “If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about our differences, why would there be any misunderstandings?” he wrote. “War would be a thing of the past.” And you wouldn’t need the Gatling gun.
Like Farnsworth, many of the inventors in “America the Ingenious” came from impoverished upbringings and had little formal education. Walter Hunt, creator of the safety pin, was educated in a one-room schoolhouse but went on to invent scores of other items, including a device that allowed circus performers to walk upside-down on ceilings. Elisha Graves Otis, of Otis elevator fame, was a high-school dropout who, according to his son, Charles, “needed no assistance, asked no advice, consulted with no one, and never made much use of pen or pencil.” Of the innovators who undertook world-changing engineering feats, it is remarkable how often they brought them in under budget and ahead of schedule, among them the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam and New York’s Hudson and East River railroad tunnels.

For the full review, see:
PATRICK COOKE. “BOOKSHELF; The Character of Our Country; Copper-riveted jeans, the first oil rig, running shoes, dry cleaning and the 23-story-high clipper ship–as American as apple pie.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Oct. 5, 2016): A13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 4, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Baker, Kevin. America the Ingenious: How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers Changed the World. New York: Artisan, 2016.

Government Ignored Ebeling’s Warning on Challenger O-Rings

(p. 21) Thirty years ago, Bob Ebeling drove to the headquarters of the aerospace contractor Morton Thiokol in Brigham City, Utah, to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. On the way, he leaned over to his daughter Leslie and said: “The Challenger is going to blow up. Everyone’s going to die.”
Mr. Ebeling (pronounced EBB-ling), an engineer at Thiokol, knew what the rest of the world did not: that the rubber O-rings designed to seal the joints between the booster rocket’s segments performed poorly in cold weather. A severe cold snap in Florida was about to subject the O-rings to temperatures more than 30 degrees lower than at any previous launch.
During the afternoon and evening before the launch, Thiokol engineers, relying on data provided by Mr. Ebeling and his colleagues, argued passionately for a postponement of the launch in conference calls with NASA managers at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. They were overruled not only by NASA, but also by their own managers.
On the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, sitting in a conference room with his daughter and Roger Boisjoly, Thiokol’s chief seal expert, Mr. Ebeling watched on a large projection screen as the Challenger cleared the launching pad. “I turned to Bob and said, ‘We’ve just dodged a bullet,'” Mr. Boisjoly told The Guardian in 2001.
A minute later, the O-rings failed and the Challenger exploded in a ball of fire, killing all seven crew members aboard. Among them was Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from New Hampshire who had been chosen to be the first citizen passenger in space.
Mr. Ebeling never recovered from the disaster. “I’ve been under terrible stress since the accident,” he told The Houston Chronicle in 1987. “I have headaches. I cry. I have bad dreams. I go into a hypnotic trance almost daily.”
He soon left Thiokol and the engineering profession. For the rest of his life he faulted himself for not doing enough to prevent the launch.

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “Bob Ebeling Dies at 89; Warned of Challenger Disaster.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun, MARCH 27, 2016): 21.
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date MARCH 25, 2016, and has the title “Robert Ebeling, Challenger Engineer Who Warned of Disaster, Dies at 89.”)

Justified Species Extinction

(p. A1) The death toll from diseases carried by mosquitoes is so huge that scientists are working on a radical idea. Why not eradicate them?
Mosquitoes kill more humans than any other animal and were linked to roughly 500,000 deaths in 2015, mostly from malaria. For more than a century, humans have used bed nets, screens and insecticides as weapons, but mosquitoes keep coming back. They are now carrying viruses like Zika and dengue to new parts of the world.
Powerful new gene-editing technologies could allow scientists to program mosquito populations to gradually shrink and die off. Some efforts have gained enough momentum that the possibility of mosquito-species eradication seems tantalizingly real.
“I think it is our moral duty to eliminate this mosquito,” entomologist Zach Adelman says about Aedes aegypti, a species carried afar over centuries by ships from sub-Saharan Africa.
. . .
(p. A8) Purposely engineering a species into extinction–or just diminishing it–is fraught with quandaries. Scientists must weigh the potential impact of removing a species on the environment and food chain. It will take years of more research, testing and regulatory scrutiny before most genetically altered mosquitoes can be released into the wild. And the strategy might not work.
Wiping a species off the face of the earth is “an unfortunate thing to have to do,” says Gregory Kaebnick, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, N.Y.
He says humans shouldn’t force a species into extinction to meet their own preferences. “We ought to try not to do it,” says Mr. Kaebnick. One justification, he says, would be to avert a serious public-health threat.

For the full story, see:
BETSY MCKAY. “A World with No Mosquitoes.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 3, 2016): A1 & A8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 2, 2016, and has the title “Mosquitoes Are Deadly, So Why Not Kill Them All?”)

Employers Less Likely to Hire Older Workers

(p. A3) Using a method of uncovering discrimination well known in economics, David Neumark, an economist at the University of California at Irvine, led a study that sent out 40,000 fake résumés to employers who had posted openings. Mr. Neumark and his co-authors found that résumés suggesting an applicant was 64 to 66 years old got a response 35 percent less often than résumés suggesting that the applicant was 29 to 31.
Labeling it discrimination is another matter, however. “The one thing that people always point out is that acceptability for age stereotyping is extremely high,” Mr. Neumark said. “The number of people who make age-related jokes are way more frequent than people who make race-related jokes. For whatever reason, the social stigma for age discrimination is really weak.”
Aside from fairness, evidence suggests that finding ways to keep older Americans working has benefits to the broader society: Working keeps older Americans happier, healthier and more mentally engaged. And forestalling retirement could relieve some of the pressure a large aging population places on this country’s social safety net.
“Governments all over the world are trying to figure how to get old people to stay at work longer,” Mr. Neumark said. “If we have discriminatory barriers, then all these reforms will be less effective.”

For the full story, see:
Quoctrung Bui. “As More Older People Look for Work, They Are Put Into ‘Old Person Jobs’.” The New York Times (Thurs., AUG. 18, 2016): A3.
(Note: the online version of the article has the title “More Older People Are Finding Work, but What Kind?”)

The Neumark paper mentioned above, is:
Neumark, David, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button. “Experimental Age Discrimination Evidence and the Heckman Critique.” American Economic Review 106, no. 5 (May 2016): 303-08.