“Science Is Not a Body of Infallible Work, of Immutable Laws”

(p. 1) . . . , “Failure: Why Science Is So Successful” is a breath of contemplative fresh air. Stuart ­Fire­stein, a professor in the department of biological sciences at Columbia University, is best known for his work on ignorance, including inviting scientists to speak to his students about what they don’t know. In a tone reminiscent of Lewis Thomas’s “The Lives of a Cell,” the book is a collection of loosely interwoven meditations on failure and scientific method.
. . .
If we succeed by failing, then we should be freed from the monolithic road to academic tenure; science should be taught as an adventure in failure. With a delightful combination of feigned naïveté and keen eye for the messy ways that great discoveries occur, he goes so far as to suggest writing a grant proposal in which you promise to fail better. He knows this isn’t how the world works, but nevertheless argues that change will take place “when we cease, or at least reduce, our devotion to facts and collections of them, when we decide that science education is not a memorization marathon, when we — scientists and nonscientists — recognize that science is not a body of infallible work, of immutable laws of facts. . . . And that most of what there is to know is still unknown.”

For the full review, see:
ROBERT A. BURTON. “Error Messages.”The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., Jan. 3, 2016): 8.
(Note: first two ellipses added; third ellipsis in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date DEC. 29, 2015, and has the title “‘Black Box Thinking’ and ‘Failure: Why Science Is So Successful’.”)

The book under review, is:
Firestein, Stuart. Failure: Why Science Is So Successful. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

More Evidence for Stigler’s Capture Theory

(p. A15) WASHINGTON — Marilyn B. Tavenner, the former Obama administration official in charge of the rollout of HealthCare.gov, was chosen on Wednesday to be the top lobbyist for the nation’s health insurance industry.
Ms. Tavenner, who stepped down from her federal job in February, will become president and chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the trade group whose members include Aetna, Anthem, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and many Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies.
As the new voice for insurers, Ms. Tavenner will lead the industry in a time of tumultuous changes and challenges, including delicate negotiations with Congress over the future of the Affordable Care Act.
. . .
The board of America’s Health Insurance Plans unanimously elected Ms. Tavenner at a meeting here on Wednesday, according to Mark B. Ganz, the board chairman, who is also the chief executive of Cambia Health Solutions, based in Portland, Ore.
. . .
Mr. Ganz said that Ms. Tavenner had “the trust and respect of members of Congress from both sides of the aisle.”
Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, described the selection in more negative terms. “While millions of Americans are still being hurt by Obamacare’s soaring costs and fewer choices,” he said, “Ms. Tavenner’s appointment shows how the law has created a cozy and profitable relationship for some.”

For the full story, see:
ROBERT PEAR. “Head of Obama’s Health Care Rollout to Lobby for Insurers.” The New York Times (Thurs., JULY 16, 2015): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 15, 2015.)

Yamir Jackson-Adens on How You Learn

(p. B4) PHILANTHROPISTS have poured millions of dollars into improving education in the United States — paying for new buildings, buying new computers and even creating new charter schools.
Susan Crown, a member of the billionaire Crown family of Chicago, is trying something different. Two years ago, she began working with organizations that seek to foster character traits like grit, empathy and perseverance, which studies show can be determinants of future success.
But financing organizations that focus on social and emotional learning programs for disadvantaged children was just part of the effort. Ms. Crown said she also wanted to go deeper into understanding why some organizations succeeded so well.
, , ,
Yamir Jackson-Adens, 18, began going to the Philadelphia Wooden Boat Factory in eighth grade. Living in a poor section in the northeast part of the city, he said he had been bullied in elementary school, and he was still shy. The boat program intrigued him, even though he knew no one who owned a boat.
“In boat building, you learn stuff,” Mr. Jackson-Adens said. “You’re free to move. You don’t have a whole lot of restrictions. It’s more of a trial-and-error kind of thing. You learn from those mistakes. In school, if you fail, you’ve failed.”
. . .
Next fall, Mr. Jackson-Adens will be attending Colorado State University to begin studies that he hopes will lead to becoming a veterinarian.
“Boat got me into thinking outside the box,” he said. “It helped me adjust to different situations.”
That is a life skill anyone could use.

For the full story, see:
PAUL SULLIVAN. “A Philanthropist Drills Down to Discover Why Programs Work.” The New York Times (Sat., Feb. 6, 2016): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Feb. 5, 2016.)

Feds’ Dietary Policy Is “an Obstacle to Sensible Change”

(p. A25) BOSTON — SINCE the publication of the federal government’s 1980 Dietary Guidelines, dietary policy has focused on reducing total fat in the American diet — specifically, to no more than 30 percent of a person’s daily calories. This fear of fat has had far-reaching impacts, from consumer preferences to the billions of dollars spent by the military, government-run hospitals and school districts on food. As we argue in a recently published article in The Journal of the American Medical Association, 35 years after that policy shift, it’s long past time for us to exonerate dietary fat.
. . .
Recent research has established the futility of focusing on low-fat foods. Confirming many other observations, large randomized trials in 2006 and 2013 showed that a low-fat diet had no significant benefits for heart disease, stroke, diabetes or cancer risks, while a high-fat, Mediterranean-style diet rich in nuts or extra-virgin olive oil — exceeding 40 percent of calories in total fat — significantly reduced cardiovascular disease, diabetes and long-term weight gain. Other studies have shown that high-fat diets are similar to, or better than, low-fat diets for short-term weight loss, and that types of foods, rather than fat content, relate to long-term weight gain.
. . .
The limit on total fat is an outdated concept, an obstacle to sensible change that promotes harmful low-fat foods, undermines efforts to limit refined grains and added sugars, and discourages the food industry from developing products higher in healthy fats.

For the full commentary, see:
DARIUSH MOZAFFARIAN and DAVID S. LUDWIG. “Stop Fearing Fat.” The New York Times (Thurs., JULY 9, 2015): A25.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the title “Why Is the Federal Government Afraid of Fat?”)

Serendipity May Be Source of 50% of Patents

(p. 1) A surprising number of the conveniences of modern life were invented when someone stumbled upon a discovery or capitalized on an accident: the microwave oven, safety glass, smoke detectors, artificial sweeteners, (p. 4) X-ray imaging. Many blockbuster drugs of the 20th century emerged because a lab worker picked up on the “wrong” information.
. . .
(p. 5) So how many big ideas emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs? One survey of patent holders (the PatVal study of European inventors, published in 2005) found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project — and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything. This is why we need to know far more about the habits that transform a mistake into a breakthrough.
. . .
A number of pioneering scholars have already begun this work, but they seem to be doing so in their own silos and without much cross-talk. In a 2005 paper (“Serendipitous Insights Involving Nonhuman Primates”), two experts from the Washington National Primate Research Center in Seattle cataloged the chance encounters that yielded new insights from creatures like the pigtail macaque. Meanwhile, the authors of a paper titled “On the Exploitation of Serendipity in Drug Discovery” puzzled over the reasons the 1950s and ’60s saw a bonanza of breakthroughs in psychiatric medication, and why that run of serendipity ended.

For the full commentary, see:
PAGAN KENNEDY. “How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JAN. 3, 2016): 1 & 4-5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 2, 2016, and has the title “Cultivating the Art of Serendipity.”)

Pagan’s commentary is based on her book:
Kennedy, Pagan. Inventology: How We Dream up Things That Change the World. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2016.

The Wealth of Project Entrepreneurs Is Fragile

The stories of Alfred E. Mann (below) as well as that of Malcom McLean, the entrepreneur behind standardized shipping containers, support George Gilder’s point that innovative project entrepreneurs have most of their wealth tied up in their projects. Their wealth only stays large as long as the projects continue to go well.

(p. A20) Alfred E. Mann, who started medical device companies that pioneered in the development of pacemakers for erratic hearts, insulin pumps for diabetics, cochlear implants for the deaf and retinal implants for the blind, died on Thursday [February 25, 2016] in Las Vegas. He was 90.
. . .
Mr. Mann, who spent most of his career in the Los Angeles area, became a billionaire from his entrepreneurial activities. His biggest success was MiniMed, which became the leader in insulin pumps, wearable devices that deliver insulin throughout the day, allowing people with diabetes to more precisely control their blood sugar levels.
. . .
In all, Mr. Mann started and largely financed 14 companies, nine of which were acquired for a total of almost $8 billion, according to MannKind.
. . .
In 1979, while running Pacesetter, Mr. Mann was visiting a cardiac ward and was challenged by a doctor there to work on diabetes, which caused many of the heart problems in patients. That led to the creation of MiniMed and later to MannKind, which developed a form of insulin that is inhaled instead of injected.
MannKind, Mr. Mann’s last big venture, may also have been his Waterloo, eating up much of his fortune.
The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer suffered a costly marketing flop with an inhaled form of insulin in 2007. After that, other big insulin manufacturers dropped their own plans for similar products.
But Mr. Mann, who was chief executive of MannKind for many years, would not give up. He insisted MannKind’s inhaler was better than Pfizer’s and that its insulin had desirable medical characteristics beyond being inhalable. He put about $1 billion of his own money into the company he had named for himself, keeping it afloat through years of setbacks.
“I believe this is one of the most valuable products in history in the drug industry, and I’m willing to back it up with my estate,” Mr. Mann told The New York Times in 2007.
The inhaled insulin, called Afrezza, was finally approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2014, but sales have been dismal. In January, Sanofi, the big French drug company, pulled out of an agreement to market the product. MannKind is now in danger of going out of business, though it is vowing to survive.
“Our resolve is now stronger than ever to continue Al’s legacy of medical innovation, as a tribute to this remarkable man, who did so much to help mankind,” Matthew Pfeffer, chief executive of MannKind, said in a statement Friday.
Mr. Mann, who worked seven days a week even when he was in his 80s, was divorced three times.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW POLLACK. “Alfred E. Mann, 90, Pioneer in Medical Devices, Is Dead.” The New York Times (Sat., FEB. 27, 2016): A20.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 26, 2016, and has the title “Alfred E. Mann, Pioneer in Medical Devices, Dies at 90.”)

Gilder defends entrepreneurial wealth in:
Gilder, George. “The Enigma of Entrepreneurial Wealth.” Inc. 14, no. 10 (Oct. 1992): 161-64, 66 & 68.

Proletariat Loses Money Investing in Ponzi Scheme Supported by Chinese Communists

(p. B1) HONG KONG — At every turn in his improbably rapid rise, Ding Ning, 34, went to great efforts to convey the image of strong government backing for his Internet financing business.
There was his company’s lavish annual meeting and banquet last year in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, where China’s legislature meets and where top government leaders host official functions. Adding a splash of celebrity to the event were Zhou Tao, a nationally famous actress and host on the government’s main television broadcaster, and several mid-ranking officials, bureaucrats and lawmakers.
There were the positive profiles in state-controlled media, as well as the company’s advertising on official TV. There was the section of his company’s website devoted to building Communist Party spirit.
But it all came crashing down in dramatic fashion for Mr. Ding this week, when the police alleged that his financing business, Ezubao, was a $7.6 billion Ponzi scheme and announced 21 arrests, including of Mr. Ding. The company was shut down.
, , ,
(p. B7) In interviews, former staff and investors described the signals of strong state support as one of the keys to Ezubao’s rapid rise.
“Many people joined Ezubao because they saw the support from the government and from some government officials,” said Feng Zhe, 36, a Beijing resident who worked as a salesman at the company from June of last year until December.
Mr. Feng said a number of his friends and family members invested in Ezubao’s products and suffered losses. “Many people bought their products because the government has lent the company credibility,” he added.

For the full story, see:
NEIL GOUGH. “Feeling Twice Victimized.” The New York Times (Sat., Feb. 6, 2016): B1 & B7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Feb. 5, 2016, and has the title “Ponzi Scheme in China Gained Credibility From State Media.”)

“Recyclers Around the Country Face Losses”

(p. B1) . . . recycling is a commodities business. The paper, metal, plastic and glass that recyclers collect, sort and sell competes against so-called virgin materials. And right now, many commodities are cheap.
Abundant oil is the latest headache for recyclers. New plastics are made from the byproducts of oil and gas production. So as plentiful fossil fuels saturate global markets, it has become cheaper for the makers of water bottles, yogurt containers and takeout boxes to simply buy new plastics. This, in turn, is dragging down the price of recycled materials, straining every part of the recycling industry.
In Montgomery, Ala., Infinitus Energy opened a $35 million recycling center in 2014. By last October, it was hemorrhaging (p. B5) money and shut down. Montgomery’s recyclables are now going to a landfill, and a once booming local business, United Plastic Recycling, filed for bankruptcy last year.
. . .
. . . as recyclers around the country face losses, they are passing their costs along to cities and counties. Increasingly, local governments are receiving nothing at all for their recyclables, or even having to pay companies to accept them.
Last year, the city government in Washington, D.C., paid Waste Management $1.37 million to accept the recyclables it collected from residents.

For the full story, see:
DAVID GELLES. “Losing a Profit Motive: A Skid in Oil Prices Pulls the Recycling Industry Down With It.” The New York Times (Sat., FEB. 13, 2016): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 12, 2016, and has the title “Skid in Oil Prices Pulls the Recycling Industry Down With It.”)

In India’s Public Education System, Teachers Are Often Truant

Matt Ridley has a chapter in his recent The Evolution of Everything, where he cites evidence the low quality of public education in much of the less-developed world. The quality is so low that many poor parents scrimp to pull together modest funds to send their children to modest private schools where the teachers actually show up.

(p. A1) DEORIA, India — The young man, having skipped school, was there to plead his case, but Manoj Mishra was having none of it. When the truant offered a letter from a relative of a government minister pleading for leniency, Mr. Mishra grabbed it and, with a frown, tore it in half and dropped it to the floor.

Similar scenes played out repeatedly in Mr. Mishra’s fluorescent-lit office recently, as one truant after another appeared before him, trying to explain an absence from school.
But these were not students who had been pulled in for truancy. They were teachers.
Mr. Mishra, a district education officer in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, is fighting one of the biggest obstacles to improving the largest primary school system in the world: absent teachers. His tough punishments and refusal to back down, chronicled in the local newspapers, have turned him into a folk hero. As he walks along the dusty streets of the wheat-farming villages a couple of hours’ drive from Nepal, older people touch his feet in a sign of respect. Young women pull out their phones and take selfies by his side.
When Mr. Mishra arrived in Deoria in 2014, 40 percent of the district’s teachers were absent on any given day from its 2,700 schools, he said in a recent interview. Nationwide, nearly 24 percent of rural Indian teachers were absent during random visits for a recent study led by Kar-(p. A6)thik Muralidharan at the University of California, San Diego. Teacher absences run as high as 46 percent in some states.
. . .
With the largest population in the world under the age of 35, India is trying to grow by leveraging what is often called the “demographic dividend.” To prepare more than 200 million primary school children for jobs in a modern work force, India passed legislation a decade ago that more than doubled education spending, increased teacher salaries and reduced class sizes.
But children’s already low performance has fallen. Pratham Education Foundation, a nonprofit that conducts an annual household survey, reported that in 2005 about 60 percent of fifth graders in rural India — where most people live — could read at a minimum second-grade level, but that in 2014 less than 50 percent could.
Teacher truancy is among the more prominent causes of that failure, experts say. Teaching jobs pay well and are sometimes obtained through political connections. But those who get them often do not want to travel to the remote areas where many schools are. In areas with weak local governance, not showing up has become the norm, and people feel powerless to complain.

For the full story, see:
GEETA ANAND. “Saturday Profile; Truant India Teachers, Meet Your Nightmare.” The New York Times (Sat., FEB. 20, 2016): A1 & A6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 19, 2016, and has the title “The Saturday Profile; Fighting Truancy Among India’s Teachers, With a Pistol and a Stick.”)

The Ridley book mentioned above, is:
Ridley, Matt. The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge. New York: Harper, 2015.

New Middle-Skill Jobs Combine Technical and Social Skills

DemingGraphOnMathSocialSkillJobs2015-10-18.jpgSource of graph: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below, based on Deming paper cited further below.

(p. 4) For all the jobs that machines can now do — whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food — they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills.

Yet skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility have become increasingly vital in modern-day work. Occupations that require strong social skills have grown much more than others since 1980, according to new research. And the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills.
The findings help explain a mystery that has been puzzling economists: the slowdown in the growth even of high-skill jobs. The jobs hit hardest seem to be those that don’t require social skills, throughout the wage spectrum.
“As I’m speaking with you, I need to think about what’s going on in your head — ‘Is she bored? Am I giving her too much information?’ — and I have to adjust my behavior all the time,” said David Deming, associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University and author of a new study. “That’s a really hard thing to program, so it’s growing as a share of jobs.”
. . .
“If it’s just technical skill, there’s a reasonable chance it can be automated, and if it’s just being empathetic or flexible, there’s an infinite supply of people, so a job won’t be well paid,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s the interaction of both that is virtuous.”
Mr. Deming’s conclusions are supported by previous research, including that of Mr. Autor. Mr. Autor has written that traditional middle-skill jobs, like clerical or factory work, have been hollowed out by technology. The new middle-skill jobs combine technical and interpersonal expertise, like physical therapy or general contracting.
James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, did groundbreaking work concluding that noncognitive skills like character, dependability and perseverance are as important as cognitive achievement. They can be taught, he said, yet American schools don’t necessarily do so.

For the full commentary, see:
Claire Cain Miller. “The Upshot; The Best Jobs Require Social Skills.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., OCT. 18, 2015): 4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 16, 2015, and has the title “The Upshot; Why What You Learned in Preschool Is Crucial at Work.”)

The Deming paper referred to above, is:
Deming, David J. “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., NBER Working Paper # 21473, Aug. 2015.

The Autor paper referred to above, is:
Autor, David. “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., NBER Working Paper # 20485, Sept. 2014.

The Heckman paper referred to above, is:
Heckman, James J., Jora Stixrud, and Sergio Urzua. “The Effects of Cognitive and Noncognitive Abilities on Labor Market Outcomes and Social Behavior.” Journal of Labor Economics 24, no. 3 (July 2006): 411-82.

Technology Extends Capabilities of Older Japanese

(p. A1) TOKYO–At an office-building construction site in the center of Japan’s capital, 67-year-old Kenichi Saito effortlessly stacks 44-pound boards with the ease of a man half his age.
His secret: a bendable exoskeleton hugging his waist and thighs, with sensors attached to his skin. The sensors detect when Mr. Saito’s muscles start to move and direct the machine to support his motion, cutting his load’s effective weight by 18 pounds.
“I can carry as much as I did 10 years ago,” says the hard-hatted Mr. Saito.
Mr. Saito is part of an experiment by Obayashi Corp. , the construction giant handling the building project, to confront one of the biggest problems facing the company and the country: a chronic labor shortage resulting from a rapidly aging population. The exoskeleton has allowed Mr. Saito to extend his working life–and Obayashi to keep building.
. . .
(p. A14) The Fujisawa Aikoen nursing home about an hour outside Tokyo started leasing the “hybrid assistive limb,” or HAL, exoskeletons from maker Cyberdyne Inc. in June.
In Hokkaido, 60-year-old potato-pickers use rubber “smart suits” making it easier to bend over. Baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Haneda airport employ similar assistance.
In cases where older people simply can’t do the job or aren’t available, Japanese manufacturers are turning to robots, which help them keep costs down and continue growing.
Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, Japan’s largest bank, employs a small robot speaking 19 languages to greet customers, while a Nagasaki hotel staffed mainly by robots opened in July. Komatsu Ltd. is developing self-driving vehicles for construction sites, while industrial robot maker Fanuc Corp. is designing machines that repair each other.
Toyota Motor Corp. is testing in homes its “human support robot,” a videophone/remote-controlled android that allows family and friends to perform tasks for distant elderly people as if they were in the same home. In one demonstration, a young man uses a tablet to look around a bed-bound older man’s room, then directs the robot to open the curtains and bring the older man a drink.
SoftBank Group Corp. earlier this year drew global attention when it put on sale in Japan an automaton called Pepper, which it called the world’s first robot capable of understanding emotions. One of the earliest uses for the 4-foot-tall white humanoid is as a nursing helper.
In a Kanagawa Prefecture test, Pepper entertained a room of 30 80- to 90-year-olds for 40 minutes. He led them in light exercises and tested their ability to recognize colors and letters. Women patted his head like a grandchild.
Showing a video of Pepper with a dementia patient on another occasion, Shunji Iyama, one of the developers, says the robot may sometimes work better than people. “That man keeps repeating himself over and over again,” Mr. Iyama said. “If Pepper were human, he’d get fed up, but he just repeats the same reaction and doesn’t get tired.”

For the full story, see:
Jacob M. Schlesinger and Alexander Martin. “Graying Japan Tries to Embrace the Golden Years.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Nov. 30, 2015): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 29, 2015, and has the title “Graying Japan Tries to Embrace the Golden Years.”)