Warming of Northwest Is Due to Waves, Not Human Activity

(p. A19) Scientists have long known that sea surface temperatures are lower when strong winds whip up ocean waves, and higher when the seas are calm. Researchers generally have assumed that the phenomenon was but one factor in that warming, and that increased levels of carbon dioxide from human activity play a major role in driving rising temperatures.
But the new analysis, which relies on wind, barometric pressure and temperature data recorded from 1900 to 2012, concludes that human activity has little impact.
“The concept of winds controlling or affecting ocean temperature in that very way is not controversial, but the strength of that relationship was quite amazing” in the northwestern Pacific, said James Johnstone, a climatologist and the study’s lead author. “It explains practically every wiggle in the ocean temperature variations. It’s a phenomenal correlation.”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL WINES. “Human Role in Warming of Northwest Played Down.” The New York Times (Tues., SEPT. 23, 2014): A19.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 22, 2014.)

The Johnstone paper, summarized above, is:
Johnstone, James A., and Nathan J. Mantua. “Atmospheric Controls on Northeast Pacific Temperature Variability and Change, 1900-2012.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online before print, September 22, 2014, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1318371111.

American Poor Are Richer Now than in the Past

PriceChangesBySectorGraph2014-10-07.jpgSource of graph: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — Is a family with a car in the driveway, a flat-screen television and a computer with an Internet connection poor?

Americans — even many of the poorest — enjoy a level of material abundance unthinkable just a generation or two ago.
. . .
(p. B2) Two broad trends account for much of the change in poor families’ consumption over the past generation: federal programs and falling prices.
Since the 1960s, both Republican and Democratic administrations have expanded programs like food stamps and the earned-income tax credit. In 1967, government programs reduced one major poverty rate by about 1 percentage point. In 2012, they reduced the rate by nearly 13 percentage points.
As a result, the differences in what poor and middle-class families consume on a day-to-day basis are much smaller than the differences in what they earn.
“There’s just a whole lot more assistance per low-income person than there ever has been,” said Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “That is propping up the living standards to a considerable degree,” he said, citing a number of statistics on housing, nutrition and other categories.
. . .
. . . another form of progress has led to what some economists call the “Walmart effect”: falling prices for a huge array of manufactured goods.
Since the 1980s, for instance, the real price of a midrange color television has plummeted about tenfold, and televisions today are crisper, bigger, lighter and often Internet-connected. Similarly, the effective price of clothing, bicycles, small appliances, processed foods — virtually anything produced in a factory — has followed a downward trajectory. The result is that Americans can buy much more stuff at bargain prices.

For the full story, see:
ANNIE LOWREY. “Changed Life of the Poor: Better Off, but Far Behind.” The New York Times (Mon., May 1, 2014): A1 & B2 (sic).
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 30, 2014, and has the title “Changed Life of the Poor: Better Off, but Far Behind.”)

Ideas Should Not Be Rejected Just Because They Disagree with Reigning Theory

(p. 107) . . . Claude Bernard, the nineteenth-century founder of experimental medicine, . . . famously said, “If an idea presents itself to us, we must not reject it simply because it does not agree with the logical deductions of a reigning theory.”

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The Invention of the Vacuum Tube as a Revolutionary Event

(p. A11) Mr. Bryce’s engrossing survey has two purposes. The first is to refute pessimists who claim that technology-driven economic growth will burn through the planet’s resources and lead to catastrophe. “We are living in a world equipped with physical-science capabilities that stagger the imagination,” he writes. “If we want to bring more people out of poverty, we must embrace [technological innovation], not reject it.” The book’s other purpose is to persuade climate-change fundamentalists that they are standing on the wrong side of history. Instead of saving the planet by going backward to Don Quixote’s windmills, they need to take a progressive approach to technology itself, he says, striving to make nuclear power safer, for instance, and using the hydrocarbon revolution sparked by fracking and deep-offshore exploration to bridge the way to the future.
. . .
Mr. Bryce focuses in particular on the vacuum tube, designed in 1906 by Lee de Forest, the man also credited with inventing the radio.
The discovery of the vacuum tube, Mr. Bryce says, was a revolutionary event. By trapping the energy generated from the free flow of electrons and directing it to boost a small AC current into a much larger one, de Forest created electric amplification–which the transistor and integrated circuit would multiply exponentially.

For the full review, see:
ARTHUR HERMAN. “BOOKSHELF; How to Defuse the Power Elite; To compel the switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar power is to consign billions of people to a life of poverty and darkness.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., May 22, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 21, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper’ by Robert Bryce; To compel the switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar power is to consign billions of people to a life of poverty and darkness.”)

The book being reviewed is:
Bryce, Robert. Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014.

Nevada Government Lets Tesla Sell Directly to Consumers

(p. A13) . . . in addition to rubber-stamping the agreement that waived Tesla’s property, sales and business taxes for a decade or more–while throwing in discount power rates–the Nevada legislature also approved a bill last week that would exempt the auto maker from franchising regulations outlawing the company’s retail approach. The state’s auto dealers, who only weeks ago threatened to sue over the matter, shifted gears and endorsed the legislation.
“My car dealers want to assist in any way they can,” John Sande of the Nevada Franchise Auto Dealers Association told the Reno Gazette Journal. “Nevada law does not allow Tesla to come in and sell directly to the consumer, so we are going to have to come in and change it so they can sell directly to the consumer.”
No doubt the dealers balanced the pros and cons of agitating for their own self-interest against overwhelming political support for the deal and the spending potential of thousands of new, well-paid workers who may prefer a Ford or Chevy pickup over a $70,000 Tesla Model S. But the fact that Nevada legislators so quickly jettisoned a key provision of the state’s dealership-franchise provisions speaks volumes about how essential these statutes really are to the well-being of their constituents.
There is no rational reason Tesla–or any other automobile manufacturer–should be restricted from selling new cars directly to those who seek to buy them.

For the full commentary, see:
JOHN KERR. “OPINION; Tesla Breaks the Auto Dealer Cartel; Nevada lets the electric car maker sell directly to consumers. Too bad everyone else still can’t.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Sept. 17, 2014): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 16, 2014.)

Apprenticeships as an Alternative to Education Credentials

(p. R3) College degrees and internships don’t produce the same quality of worker as intensive, on-the-job apprenticeships, says Brad Neese, director of Apprenticeship Carolina, a program of the South Carolina Technical College System. Employers are seeing “a real lack of applicability in terms of skill level” from college graduates, Mr. Neese says. “Interns do grunt work, generally.” In contrast, he says, “an apprenticeship is a real job.”
. . .
“The apprenticeship model helps us show people there’s a career path within this company,” says Robby Hill, owner of HillSouth, a Florence, S.C., technology consulting firm taking advantage of South Carolina’s on-the-job training program. New employees see the opportunities ahead, along with a clearly delineated ladder of skill acquisition and salary increases, says Mr. Hill, whose 22-person firm offers apprenticeships for IT and administrative-support employees. The company also asks employees to sign noncompete agreements as they get accredited for new skills.

For the full story, see:
LAUREN WEBER. “JOURNAL REPORTS: LEADERSHIP IN HR; Here’s One Way to Solve the Skills Gap. Apprenticeships Can Help Give Companies the Employees They Need. So Why Aren’t There More of Them.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., April 28, 2014): R3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 27, 2014, and has the title “JOURNAL REPORTS: LEADERSHIP; Apprenticeships Help Close the Skills Gap. So Why Are They in Decline? Some States Try Extending the Practice to More Professions.”)

Needed Revolutionary Ideas Often Come From Outsiders

(p. 103) . . . where knowledge is no longer growing and the field has been worked out, a revolutionary new approach is required and this is more likely to come from the outsider. The skepticism with which the experts nearly always greet these revolutionary ideas confirms that the available knowledge has been a handicap.”

Source:
W. I. B. Beveridge as quoted in Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Fleck Made Two Versions of His Typhus Vaccine: A Worthless Version for the SS Troops and an Effective Version for His Fellow Buchenwald Inmates

(p. C7) Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961), who earned a doctorate at Lwów University while studying under Weigl, also became interested in typhus during World War I, when he too was drafted by Austria-Hungary. Fleck’s specialty was immunology, and in 1919 he joined Weigl’s institute. Somewhere between 1921 and 1923 he crafted a way to diagnose typhus, but despite this achievement, Polish anti-Semitism denied him the academic recognition that his talent merited. During this period, he would occupy government posts (until 1935, when anti-Semitic policies made it impossible for Jews to hold such positions) and, with his wife’s dowry, opened his own laboratory.
By August 1942, Fleck, though confined to Lwów’s Jewish ghetto, managed to create a vaccine from the urine of typhus patients. (Fleck’s vaccine may have been easier to produce than Weigl’s.) Six months later, he was sent to Auschwitz, where he worked in a bacteriological research unit and where he was treated somewhat better than most camp inmates. In December 1943, Fleck was dispatched to the Buchenwald concentration camp to work on a typhus vaccine.
The Germans wanted the Buchenwald typhus-vaccine prisoner unit–some were physicians and scientists, some weren’t–to follow instructions for making a vaccine that had originated at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. It was a convoluted process that involved rabbit lungs and the organs of other animals. The unit’s inmates, including Fleck, who understood immunology better than anyone else at Buchenwald, conspired to produce two kinds of vaccine: large quantities of worthless serum that were shipped to SS troops at the front; and much smaller doses of effective vaccine that were used to secretly immunize prisoners. Their daring sabotage could have led to their execution, of course, but their Nazi overseers in the camp were too medically ignorant to understand what was transpiring. If senior SS officials elsewhere became suspicious, the prisoners would supply the real vaccine for testing by the skeptical parties.

For the full review, see:
HOWARD SCHNEIDER. “The Fever that Gripped Europe.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 19, 2014): C7.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 18, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl’ by Arthur Allen; Two scientists who worked to beat typhus and sabotage the Nazis.”)

The book being reviewed:
Allen, Arthur. The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

My dissertation adviser, Stephen Toulmin, recommended a philosophy of science book by Ludwig Fleck that I have owned for several decades, but never gotten around to reading. It is said to anticipate some of the issues discussed by Thomas Kuhn in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The Fleck book is:
Fleck, Ludwik. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. pb ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981 [first published in German in 1935].

The Ants Answer to Global Warming

(p. C4) While experts search for ways to cope with excessive atmospheric carbon, the world’s ants may have had a solution all along.
A new paper reports that ants radically accelerate the breakdown of some important minerals into chemicals that suck carbon dioxide–a byproduct of burning fossil fuels–out of the atmosphere to form new rocks.
. . .
Ants are so effective at promoting this process that they might have played an unheralded role in cooling the planet over millions of years, the author writes, adding that if we can figure out how they do it, we could investigate how to emulate them to sequester atmospheric carbon ourselves.

For the full story, see:
DANIEL AKST. “R AND D; Are Ants Cooling the World?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Aug. 16, 2014): C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 15, 2014.)

The paper on the ant solution to global warming is:
Dorn, Ronald I. “Ants as a Powerful Biotic Agent of Olivine and Plagioclase Dissolution.” Geology 42, no. 9 (Sept. 2014): 771-74.

French Socialist Wants to Encourage Entrepreneurs by Reducing Regulations

MacronFrenchSocialist2014-10-07.jpg “Emmanuel Macron, France’s new economy minister, has been a major force behind a recent shift by President François Hollande toward a more centrist economic policy.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B3) . . . , what is important, Mr. Macron said, as a late train from the nearby Gare de Lyon rumbled beneath his window, is that France continue to streamline and modernize the welfare state.

“For me being a Socialist today is about defending the unemployed, but also defending businessmen who want to create a company, and those who need jobs,” he said. “We have to shift the social model from a lot of formal protections toward loosening bottlenecks in the economy.”

For the full story, see:
LIZ ALDERMAN. “France’s 36-Year-Old Economy minister Is Face of the New Socialism.” The New York Times (Tues., OCT. 7, 2014): B3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 6, 2014, and has the title “Emmanuel Macron, Face of France’s New Socialism.”)

Medical Innovator “Maintained a Healthy Skepticism Toward Accepted Wisdom”

(p. 103) Barry Marshall, a lanky twenty-nine-year-old resident in internal medicine at Warren’s hospital, was assigned to was assigned to gastroenterology for six months as part of his training and was looking for a research project. The eldest son of a welder and a nurse, Marshall grew up in a remote area of Western Australia where self-sufficiency and common sense were essential characteristics. His personal qualities of intelligence, tenacity, open-mindedness, and self-confidence would serve him and Warren well in bringing about a conceptual revolution. Relatively new to gastroenterology, he did not hold a set of well-entrenched beliefs. Marshall could maintain a healthy skepticism toward accepted wisdom. Indeed, the concept that bacteria caused stomach inflammation, and even ulcers, was less alien to him than to most gastroenterologists.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.