Stross discusses Edison’s inventing at age 21:
(p. 8) Edison soon sought investors who would provide funds in exchange for half-interest in resulting patents.
Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.
Source of book image: http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/BF860CC7-371A-46BB-8ACCECD4289565A8.jpg
Are the poor poor partly because they concentrate less, or do they concentrate less partly because they are poor? Samantha Power discusses one of her favorite books of 2013:
(p. C11) In “Scarcity,” Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir offer groundbreaking insights into, among other themes, the effects of poverty on (p. C12) cognition and our ability to make choices about our lives. The authors persuasively show that the mental space–or “bandwidth”–of the poor is so consumed with making ends meet that they may be more likely to lose concentration while on a job or less likely to take medication on time.
For the full article, see:
“12 Months of Reading; We asked 50 of our friends–from April Bloomfield to Mike Tyson–to name their favorite books of 2013.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 14, 2013): C6 & C9-C12.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Dec. 13, 2013.)
The book that Power praises is:
Mullainathan, Sendhil, and Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. New York: Times Books, 2013.
(p. A21) . . . Mr. Ryan said two years ago: “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”
For the full commentary, see:
Krugman, Paul. “The Hammock Fallacy.” The New York Times (Fri., MARCH 7, 2014): A21.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MARCH 6, 2014.)
The original source of the Paul Ryan quote appears to be:
“Paul Ryan Wants ‘Welfare Reform Round 2’.” The Huffington Post (posted 03/20/2012).
Ryan made similar comments in his January 25th official Republican response to the State of the Union speech:
We are at a moment, where if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged, America’s best century will be considered our past century. This is a future in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency.
Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness, and wise consumer choices has never worked — and it won’t work now.
Source:
NPR transcript of Paul Ryan response, January 25, 2011.
Source of book image: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/07408i?pg=all
Several biographies of Thomas Edison have appeared in recent decades. One of the strengths of Randall Stross’ The Wizard of Menlo Park is that it emphasizes how Edison’s story is relevant to current issues in the economics of invention, entrepreneurship and technology.
In the next several weeks, I will quote some of the more thought-provoking stories and observations in the Stross book.
The Stross book is:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.
(p. E8) . . . a . . . recent finding published in Science magazine suggests that sleep cleans the brain of toxic proteins “like a dishwasher,” as one of the study’s authors put it.
For the full commentary, see:
MOLLY YOUNG. “Tapping Into a Goodnight.” The New York Times (Thurs., MARCH 6, 2014): E8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MARCH 5, 2014.)
The Science article mentioned above is:
Xie, Lulu, Kang Hongyi, Xu Qiwu, Michael J. Chen, Liao Yonghong, Meenakshisundaram Thiyagarajan, John O’Donnell, Daniel J. Christensen, Charles Nicholson, Jeffrey J. Iliff, Takano Takahiro, Rashid Deane, and Maiken Nedergaard. “Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain.” Science 342, no. 6156 (Oct. 18, 2013): 373-77.
Source of book image: http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_296w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2013/12/19/Outlook/Images/booksonbooks0031387485124.jpg
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker discusses a favorite book of 2013:
(p. C11) . . . , babies are smarter than you think, and their cognitive and moral lives, revealed by ingenious experimental techniques, show that fairness, empathy and punitive sentiments have deep roots in human development. Paul Bloom’s “Just Babies” illuminates this research with intellectual rigor and a graceful, easygoing style.
For the full article, see:
“12 Months of Reading; We asked 50 of our friends–from April Bloomfield to Mike Tyson–to name their favorite books of 2013.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 14, 2013): C6 & C9-C12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Dec. 13, 2013.)
The book that Pinker praises is:
Bloom, Paul. Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. New York: Crown Publishers, 2013.
(p. A13) Surely, some kind of ending is upon us. Last week climate protesters demanded the silencing of Charles Krauthammer for a Washington Post column that notices uncertainties in the global warming hypothesis. In coming weeks a libel trial gets under way brought by Penn State’s Michael Mann, author of the famed hockey stick, against National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writer Rand Simberg and roving commentator Mark Steyn for making wisecracks about his climate work. The New York Times runs a cartoon of a climate “denier” being stabbed with an icicle.
These are indications of a political movement turned to defending its self-image as its cause goes down the drain.
For the full commentary, see:
HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. “BUSINESS WORLD; Personal Score-Settling Is the New Climate Agenda; The cause of global carbon regulation may be lost, but enemies still can be punished.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 1, 2014): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb. 28, 2014, and has the title “BUSINESS WORLD; Jenkins: Personal Score-Settling Is the New Climate Agenda; The cause of global carbon regulation may be lost, but enemies still can be punished.”)
The Krauthammer column that the environmentalists do not want you to read:
Krauthammer, Charles. “The Myth of ‘Settled Science’.” The Washington Post (Fri., Feb. 21, 2014): A19.
“Kevin Hartford, right, and a colleague at his factory. He started his business after employers failed to hire him.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
HR departments have incentives to avoid hiring risky employees. But a determined high-risk employee can hire themselves by becoming a free agent entrepreneur. If we want to truly help the disabled, we should remove obstacles to entrepreneurship, such as burdensome regulations and high taxation.
(p. B4) Mr. Hartford, the father of two sons, thrived as a business consultant in his 20s and 30s. He was used to flying first class, staying at swank hotels and advising CEOs. Then the consulting firm unraveled in the mid-1990s. When he began looking for a new job, a stuttering problem–something he had always considered manageable–put off potential employers.
“I applied for job after job after job,” says Mr. Hartford, now 58. “I was one of two finalists; I was one of three finalists. But I never got the job.”
In the end, Mr. Hartford concluded that his only shot at a satisfying job was to create a company. He is now president and co-owner of Alle-Kiski Industries, which makes parts, such as exhaust pipes for train locomotives and prototype truck wheels, for larger manufacturers, including Alcoa Inc. and General Electric Co.
Like many before him, Mr. Hartford discovered that one option for people who don’t fit into large organizations is to start a small one. That is particularly true for people with disabilities. About 11% of disabled workers are self-employed, compared with 6.5% of those with no disabilities, according to Labor Department data.
. . .
The business has grown to 38 employees from a dozen when Messrs. Hartford and Newell started in 2005. They own more than $2 million of equipment used to drill, groove and otherwise shape metal, arrayed in a 27,000-square-foot factory with an American flag hanging from one of the beams. Last year’s sales of $6 million were the highest yet, Mr. Hartford says, and the company is building a 4,000-square-foot addition to house more equipment.
For the full story, see:
JAMES R. HAGERTY. “Entrepreneur Let No Impediment Stop Him; Out-of-Work Consultant Started His Own Company After Discovering His Stutter Put Off Employers.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Jan. 16, 2014): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 15, 2014.)
So was Carnegie suggesting that we should be open to the exceptional appearing in unexpected locations?
(p. 614) In his deed of trust, Carnegie declared that his research institution in Washington should “discover the exceptional man in every department of study whenever and where found… and enable him to make the work for which he seems specially designed his life work.” That notion would remain the driving philosophy behind the institution over the next century. Some of those “exceptional” scientists, supported by Carnegie money were the astronomer Edwin Hubble, who “revolutionized astronomy with his discovery that the universe is expanding,” and Barbara McClintock, whose work on patterns of genetic inheritance in corn won her a Nobel Prize.
Source:
Nasaw, David. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)
(Note: the pagination of the hardback and paperback editions of Nasaw’s book are the same.)
Source of book image: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6zEBTa23QDo/UtsQ6rZTkoI/AAAAAAAACdI/lAdUEZDMyaQ/s1600/Moral+Tribes.png
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker discusses a favorite book of 2013:
(p. C11) “Moral Tribes,” by Joshua Greene, explains the fascinating new field of moral neuroscience: what happens in our brains when we make moral judgments and how ancient impulses can warp our ethical intuitions. With the help of the parts of the brain that can engage in careful reasoning, the world’s peoples can find common ethical ground in a morality that maximizes human flourishing and minimizes suffering.
For the full article, see:
“12 Months of Reading; We asked 50 of our friends–from April Bloomfield to Mike Tyson–to name their favorite books of 2013.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 14, 2013): C6 & C9-C12.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Dec. 13, 2013.)
The book that Pinker praises is:
Greene, Joshua. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them. New York: The Penguin Press, 2013.
(p. D3) In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases.
Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared.
“What shocked me, to be honest, is that for the first half of the time we were doing this project, I totally bought into the idea of age-related cognitive decline in healthy adults,” the lead author, Michael Ramscar, said by email. But the simulations, he added, “fit so well to human data that it slowly forced me to entertain this idea that I didn’t need to invoke decline at all.”
. . .
Scientists who study thinking and memory often make a broad distinction between “fluid” and “crystallized” intelligence. The former includes short-term memory, like holding a phone number in mind, analytical reasoning, and the ability to tune out distractions, like ambient conversation. The latter is accumulated knowledge, vocabulary and expertise.
“In essence, what Ramscar’s group is arguing is that an increase in crystallized intelligence can account for a decrease in fluid intelligence,” said Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University. In a variety of experiments, Dr. Hambrick and Timothy A. Salthouse of the University of Virginia have shown that crystallized knowledge (as measured by New York Times crosswords, for example) climbs sharply between ages 20 and 50 and then plateaus, even as the fluid kind (like analytical reasoning) is dropping steadily — by more than 50 percent between ages 20 and 70 in some studies. “To know for sure whether the one affects the other, ideally we’d need to see it in human studies over time,” Dr. Hambrick said.
For the full commentary, see:
BENEDICT CAREY. “MIND; Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind.” The New York Times (Tues., JANUARY 28, 2014): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JANUARY 27, 2014, and has the title “MIND; The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind.”)
The Ramscar article mentioned above is:
Ramscar, Michael, Peter Hendrix, Cyrus Shaoul, Petar Milin, and Harald Baayen. “The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non-Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning.” Topics in Cognitive Science 6, no. 1 (Jan. 2014): 5-42.
One of the papers by Hambrick and Salthouse that discusses crystallized knowledge is:
Hambrick, David Z., and Timothy A. Salthouse. “Predictors of Crossword Puzzle Proficiency and Moderators of Age-Cognition Relations.” Journal of Experimental Psychology, General 128, no. 2 (June 1999): 131-64.
