artdiamondblog.com – Page 450 – Art Diamond's web log

Entrepreneur Julius Blank’s Greatest Pleasure Came from “Building Something from Nothing”

“Fairchild Semiconductor’s founders in 1988. Victor Grinich (left), Jay Last, Jean Hoerni, Julius Blank, Eugene Kleiner, Sheldon Roberts, Robert N. Noyce (seated, left,) and Gordon E. Moore.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. B14) Julius Blank, a mechanical engineer who helped start a computer chip company in the 1950s that became a prototype for high-tech start-ups and a training ground for a generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, died on Saturday in Palo Alto, Calif.. He was 86.
. . .
Mr. Blank and his partners — who included Robert N. Noyce and Gordon E. Moore, the future founders of the Intel Corporation — began their venture as scientist-entrepreneurs in the wake of a mutiny of sorts against their common previous employer, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist William B. Shockley.
Dr. Shockley, . . . , had recruited the eight scientists from around the country in 1956 to work in his own semiconductor lab in nearby Mountain View, Calif.
The group left en masse the next year because of what its members described as Dr. Shockley’s authoritarian management style and their differences with him over his scientific approach. Dr. Shockley called it a betrayal.
Fairchild’s founders came to be branded in the lore of Silicon Valley as the “Traitorous Eight.” How that happened remains something of a mystery.
. . .
When he left Fairchild in 1969 — he was the last of the eight founding partners to depart — Mr. Blank became an investor and consultant to start-up companies and helped found the technology firm Xicor, which was sold in 2004 for $529 million to Intersil.
His former partners, in addition to founding Intel, had started Advanced Micro Devices and National Semiconductor. Mr. Kleiner had founded a venture capital firm that became an early investor in hundreds of technology companies, including Amazon.com, Google and AOL. Still, the greatest pleasure of his working life, Mr. Blank said in a 2008 interview for the archives of the Computer History Museum, a project in Silicon Valley, came with the uncertainty and camaraderie of “the early years, building something from nothing.”
Mr. Blank described a moment in the first days of Fairchild, just before production began in its factory built from nothing, when the ducts and plumbing and air-conditioning were set, and the new crystal growers and one-of-a-kind chip making machines were ready to be installed.
“I remember the day we finally got the floor tile laid,” he said. “And that night, Noyce and the rest of the guys came out and got barefoot and rolled their pants up and were swabbing the floors. I wish I had a picture of that.”

For the full obituary, see:
PAUL VITELLO. “Julius Blank, 86, Dies; Built First Chip Maker.” The New York Times (Fri., September 23, 2011): B14.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated September 22, 2011 and had the title “Julius Blank, Who Built First Chip Maker, Dies at 86.”)

May 2011 photo of Julius Blank. Source of photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited above.

Steve Jobs on Public School System Monopoly

(p. A15) These days everyone is for education reform. The question is which approach is best. I favor the Steve Jobs model.
In 1984 Steve introduced the Mac with a Super Bowl ad. It ran only once. It ran for only one minute. And it shows a female athlete being chased by the helmeted police of some totalitarian regime.
At the climax, the woman rushes up to a large screen where Big Brother is giving a speech. Just as he announces, “We shall prevail,” she hurls her hammer through the screen.
If you ask me what we need to do in education, I would point you to that ad.
. . .
Steve Jobs knew all about competitive markets. He once likened our school system to the old phone monopoly. “I remember,” he said in a 1995 interview, “seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell Logo on it and it said ‘We don’t care. We don’t have to.’ And that’s what a monopoly is. That’s what IBM was in their day. And that’s certainly what the public school system is. They don’t have to care.”
We have to care. In this new century, good is not good enough. Put simply, we must approach education the way Steve Jobs approached every industry he touched. To be willing to blow up what doesn’t work or gets in the way. And to make our bet that if we can engage a child’s imagination, there’s no limit to what he or she can learn.

For the full commentary, see:
RUPERT MURDOCH. “OPINION; The Steve Jobs Model for Education Reform; If we can engage a child’s imagination, there’s no limit to what he or she can learn..” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., OCTOBER 15, 2011): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Creativity Continues at Disney

“‘We’re kind of like an old married couple,’ said Imagineer Chris Crump, center, of his longtime colleague Larry Nikolai, right. Lisa Girolami, the ride’s producer, is left. It took nearly four years to conceive and build ‘Ariel’s Undersea Adventure,’ which opened at Disney California Adventure Park last week. The trio spearheaded a group of over 100 designers, architects, lighting experts and other specialists.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C11) It took nearly four years to conceive and build a theme-park ride that put visitors inside the world of “The Little Mermaid,” including several musical numbers, a few key narrative moments and 184 figures from Disney’s animated hit.

And that followed the 18 years it took to settle on an approach to the ride, which was on the entertainment giant’s to-do list almost from the day the film was released in 1989. The ride finally opened last week at Disney California Adventure, Disneyland’s younger neighbor, and takes visitors through a condensed version of the movie’s narrative, cramming nine scenes and four songs into 5½ minutes.
. . .
They start by thinking big: Ms. Girolami described their brainstorming sessions as “an iterative process”–first deciding what parts of the movie to retell, then returning to the drawing table as the decision-making focuses to smaller and smaller details.
Then, helped by “rapid prototyping,” a technology that allows them to generate physical models directly from computer-design files, the group tests and retests their models.
. . .
The Imagineers pride themselves on their never-say-die spirit. “We commit to things creatively that haven’t been done,” Ms. Girolami said. “Someone will say, ‘That’s never been done before,’ and it’s our job to say, ‘Great–let’s do it.’ “

For the full story, see:
Ethan Smith. “CREATING; Taking the Little Mermaid for a Spin.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., JUNE 4, 2011): C11.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Jobs, Hope and Cash

(p. A15) ‘Ten years ago, Steve Jobs was alive, Bob Hope was alive, Johnny Cash was alive. Now we’re outta jobs, outta hope and outta cash.” I heard that from a TSA agent in New York the other day, as he eyed me for explosives. We laughed, but there was a poignant edge.
Part of the outpouring over Steve Jobs last week was that he was a huge symbol of what seems a lost world of American dynamism. The inventor in his garage changes the world. We’ll not only make the new machine powerful and fast, we’ll make it so beautiful it will make you cry. Like you’re looking at the future, like you’re looking at a baby in its crib.

For the full commentary, see:
PEGGY NOONAN. “DECLARATIONS; This Is No Time for Moderation; America can’t trim and tweak its way back to economic dynamism.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., OCTOBER 15, 2011): A15.

Collins’ “How the Mighty Fall” Is Useful Business Book

Source of book image: http://www.harpercollins.com/harperimages/isbn/large/9/9780977326419.jpg

Jim Collins’ business books are usually sensible, and are full of arresting examples and memorable hypotheses. His latest full-scale research effort (Great by Choice) is just out, but I have not yet read it. In the next few weeks, I will quote a few of the more thought-provoking or useful passages in his 2009 small book How the Mighty Fall.

Book discussed:
Collins, Jim. How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2009.

Science Not Accurate at Predicting Storm Intensity

(p. D1) For scientists who specialize in hurricanes, Irene, which roared up the Eastern Seaboard over the weekend, has shone an uncomfortable light on their profession. They acknowledge that while they have become adept at gauging the track a hurricane will take, their predictions of a storm’s intensity leave much to be desired.

Officials with NOAA’s National Hurricane Center had accurately forecast that Irene would hit North Carolina, and then churn up the mid-Atlantic coast into New York. But they thought the storm would be more powerful, its winds increasing in intensity after it passed through the Bahamas on Thursday.
Instead, the storm lost strength. By the time it made landfall in North Carolina two days later, its winds were about 10 percent lighter than predicted.
It’s not a new problem. “With intensity, we just haven’t moved off square zero,” Dr. Marks said. Forecasting a storm’s strength requires knowing the fine details of its structure — the internal organization and movement that can affect whether it gains energy or loses it — and then plugging those details into an accurate computer model.
Scientists have struggled to do that. They often overestimate strength, which can lead to griping about overpreparedness, as it has with Irene. But they have sometimes underestimated a storm’s power, too, as with (p. D3) Hurricane Charley in 2004. And it is far worse to be underprepared for a major storm.

For the full story, see:
HENRY FOUNTAIN. “Intensity of Hurricanes Still Bedevils Scientists.” The New York Times (Tues., August 30, 2011): D1 & D3.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 29, 2011.)

Berkeley Environmentalist Sticks to Her Knitting

“Avid knitter Shelby Stofle, gathering wool from sheep in Vacaville Calif., hopes to set up a business making scarves and selling them at craft fairs.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) Shelby Stofle graduated in December from the University of California at Berkeley with $10,250 in student-loan debt–and no job offers from a dozen applications.

The 24-year-old had hoped to work in environmental conservation or sustainable agriculture but struck out even at a grocery store near her rural hometown of Suisun City, Calif.
. . .
With many employment options exhausted, she said she feels her best shot is to set up her own business, selling her hand-made scarves at craft fairs and farmers’ markets.

For the full story, see:
VAUHINI VARA. “As Jobs Vanish, Sticking to Knitting.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., OCTOBER 31, 2011): A5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Some Traits (Including Some Diseases) Depend on Many Genes Rather than a Single Gene

(p. D3) A new exploration of how evolution works at the genomic level may have a significant impact on drug development and other areas of medicine.
The report, published in Nature last week, offers new evidence in a longstanding debate about how organisms evolve. One well-known path to change is a heavily favorable mutation in a single gene. But it may be well known only because it is easy to study. Another path is exploitation of mildly favorable differences that already exist in many genes.
. . .
Three biologists at the University of California, Irvine, Molly K. Burke, Michael R. Rose and Anthony D. Long, followed populations of fruit flies through 600 generations and studied the whole genome of some 250 flies in order to see what kinds of genetic change they had undergone.
. . .
The conventional view is that evolutionary change is generally mediated by a favorable mutation in a gene that then washes through the whole population, a process called a hard sweep because all other versions of the gene are brushed away. The alternative, called a soft sweep, is that many genes influence a trait, in this case the rate of maturation, and that the growth-accelerating versions of each of these genes become just a little more common. Each fly has a greater chance of inheriting these growth-promoting versions and so will mature faster.
In sequencing their subjects’ genomes, the researchers found that a soft sweep was indeed responsible for the earlier hatching. No single gene had swept through the population to effect the change; rather, the alternative versions of a large number of genes had become slightly more common.
. . .
Haldane favored the single mutation mechanism, but Fisher and Wright backed multiple gene change.
. . .
The demise of the Haldane view “is very bad news for the pharmaceutical industry in general,” Dr. Rose said. If disease and other traits are controlled by many genes, it will be hard to find effective drugs; a single target would have been much simpler.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Natural Selection Cuts Broad Swath Through Fruit Fly Genome.” The New York Times (Tues., September 21, 2010): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 20, 2010.)

Power to the People

Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

In the Thursday, November 10, 2011 “Home” section of The New York Times, the lead article was about a surge in demand for personal electricity generators among the middle-class of the northeastern United States (places like Connecticut).
Perhaps the lesson is that “green” is a passing fad, but electric power is a necessity in preserving bedrock values such as light, warmth and communication?

(p. D1) WHEN the snowstorm hit a week ago Saturday, Evan Sidel was driving home from the supermarket, having stocked up on soup ingredients, thinking she and her two daughters would have a cozy evening in. But while she was unpacking the groceries, the power went out with an audible bang, said Ms. Sidel, who lives in a 100-year-old farmhouse in Wilton, Conn.
“You could literally hear the transformer exploding,” she said.
Then things went south fast, escalating perilously like the plot of an action movie, or “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” in previews. As Ms. Sidel pulled an old land-line telephone out of the closet, one birch tree crashed into the side of her house and another into her front door.
“I called a friend who said, ‘My generator has just kicked in, come on over.’ I got out through the garage, drove over the lawn to the street, and I stayed at my friend’s house until Wednesday,” she recounted.
. . .
(p. D7) The back story to the recent biblical weather was the Great Generator Divide. With hundreds of thousands of households without power last week — nearly 800,000 in Connecticut alone — who had a generator (and how big it was) was the second most urgent topic in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. Generator envy ran wide and deep as the staccato growl and smoky breath of portable generators defined the haves and the have-nots in many neighborhoods.
. . .
A few months ago, Mr. Petersheim offered to retrofit the houses he had built in Barryville, N.Y., with standby generators.
“We were seeing more and more power outages in that area,” he said. “And it’s not a super-high-priority area, so the power can stay out for days. Pipes can freeze, food spoils, you can’t get water. It’s become a stress point for our customers. I sent out an e-mail to 20 of them saying, ‘If you’re getting too annoyed with this, it’s pretty affordable, under $7,000 for a 14-kilowatt Generac fueled by propane.’ Seven took us up on it.”
Courtney and Bronson Bigelow (she’s in public relations, he’s a lawyer) were among them. “The first time we had a power outage, it was kind of romantic,” Ms. Bigelow said. “But then it kept happening. When you’re trying to squeeze every second of your weekend, it’s a huge bummer. You can’t wash dishes, you can’t wash yourself, and it’s 20 degrees. This summer we had this freakish weather, torrential rains over Fourth of July, then these weird microburst thunderstorms, and then Irene.”
. . .
Over in Lakeville, Conn., Allen Cockerline, who raises grass-fed cattle with his wife, Robin, at their Whippoorwill Farm, has two large portable generators, 10 and 15 kilowatts each. One runs off his tractor; the other is powered by gasoline. (The tractor-powered one he bought with the farm; the other one cost about $1,500, he said.)
They are a necessary insurance policy for a perishable product, he said: “There’s $30,000 worth of beef in my freezer. I’m not going to let that go.”
But armed as he is against calamity, Mr. Cockerline will admit to some generator envy.
“Everyone that surrounds me is on a much more turnkey situation,” he said. “Theirs just go on automatically. They don’t have to go out and move tractors and generators around.”
“My system is down-and-dirty,” he added, and “in that respect I have a certain amount of envy. But I’m sure my generators are bigger than theirs. Much bigger.”

For the full story, see:
PENELOPE GREEN. “Dark with Envy.” The New York Times (Thurs., November 10, 2011): D1 & D7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated November 9, 2011 and had the title “Power Envy.”)

“Courtney and Bronson Bigelow and their Generac generator in Sullivan County, N.Y.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

“Allen and Robin Cockerline with one of their two portable generators, in Lakeville, Conn.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

“Private Life Was Completely Transformed in the Nineteenth Century”

(p. 448) Private life was completely transformed in the nineteenth century – socially, intellectually, technologically, hygienically, sartorially, sexually and in almost any other respect that could be made into an adverb. Mr Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval – a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old – and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anaesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawnmowers.
It is almost impossible to conceive just how much radical day-to-day change people were exposed to in the nineteenth century, particularly in the second half. Even something as elemental as the weekend was brand new.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

In Greece’s Bloated Bureaucracy “It’s All about Who You Know”

“Police officers, firefighters and coast guard officers protested austerity measures in Athens on Monday.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) ATHENS — Stories of eye-popping waste and abuse of power among Greece’s bureaucrats are legion, including officials who hire their wives, and managers who submit $38,000 bills for office curtains.

The work force in Greece’s Parliament is so bloated, according to a local press investigation, that some employees do not even bother to come to work because there are not enough places for all of them to sit.
. . .
Some experts believe that Greece could reap significant savings by reducing its bureaucracy, which employs one out of five workers in the country and by some estimates could be trimmed by as much as a third without materially affecting services. But though salaries have been cut, the government has yet to lay off anyone.
The main reason is also one of the very reasons that Greece got into trouble in the first place: The government is in many ways an army of patronage appointments built up over decades. When election time rolls around, state workers become campaign workers, and their reach is enormous. There are so many of them that almost every family has one.
. . .
Whether the right workers will be laid off remains an open question. “A lot of people in the government are terrified,” Mr. Hlepas said. “They don’t think any of those people over in Parliament are going to go. They think the ones that do the work will get cut.”
Thomas Tsamatsoulis, 41, who works for the Greek equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration, said he found himself on an early list headed for the reserve pool, though he had been sent to the United States for electronics training and now has a skill that is rare in his agency. At the same time, Mr. Tsamatsoulis said, the agency, which has just two airplanes, has more than 15 pilots.
“You want to believe the government will do this right,” he said. “But it is very difficult. It’s not how it has worked in the past. It’s all about who you know.”
Greece’s bureaucracy has been growing steadily since democracy was reinstated in 1974, with each new administration adding its supporters to the payroll — and wages rising steeply in the past decade, experts say.
“There was really a party going on,” said Yannis Stournaras, an economist and the director of the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research in Athens. “The government kept adding bonuses and benefits and pensions. At election time there was a boom cycle as they handed out jobs.”
“Now they need to cut,” he added. “But they have already lost precious time.”
Stories of excesses abound. Mr. Papandreou told Parliament that one of his ministers found a predecessor’s $38,000 bill for curtains when the Socialists returned to power in 2009. Mr. Mossialos said he found that his own ministry, for media and communication, was spending $750,000 a year for office space for just 11 people.
But some experts question whether the culture of bloat and favoritism will ever be conquered.

For the full story, see:
SUZANNE DALEY. “Bureaucracy in Greece Defies Efforts to Cut It.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., October 18, 2011): A2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 17, 2011.)