artdiamondblog.com – Page 458 – Art Diamond's web log

Obstacles to Curing Scurvy: A Deadly Experiment and Putting Theory Before Evidence

(p. 165) What was needed was some kind of distilled essence – an antiscorbutic, as the medical men termed it – that would be effective against scurvy but portable too. In the 1760s, a Scottish doctor named William Stark, evidently encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, conducted a series of patently foolhardy experiments in which he tried (p. 166) to identify the active agent by, somewhat bizarrely, depriving himself of it. For weeks he lived on only the most basic of foods – bread and water chiefly – to see what would happen. What happened was that in just over six months he killed himself, from scurvy, without coming to any helpful conclusions at all.
In roughly the same period, James Lind, a naval surgeon, conducted a more scientifically rigorous (and personally less risky) experiment by finding twelve sailors who had scurvy already, dividing them into pairs, and giving each pair a different putative elixir – vinegar to one, garlic and mustard to another, oranges and lemons to a third, and so on. Five of the groups showed no improvement, but the pair given oranges and lemons made a swift and total recovery. Amazingly, Lind decided to ignore the significance of the result and doggedly stuck with his personal belief that scurvy was caused by incompletely digested food building up toxins within the body.

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

Arrested for Feeding Homeless Without a Permit

“Volunteers from Food Not Bombs were arrested at Lake Eola Park in Orlando, Fla., last month after feeding homeless people without a permit.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A10) MIAMI — The hacker group Anonymous has declared a cyberwar against the City of Orlando, disabling Web sites for the city’s leading redevelopment organization, the local Fraternal Order of Police and the mayor’s re-election campaign.
. . .
The group described its attacks as punishment for the city’s recent practice of arresting members of Orlando Food Not Bombs, an antipoverty group that provides vegan and vegetarian meals twice a week to homeless people in one of the city’s largest parks.
“Anonymous believes that people have the right to organize, that people have the right to give to the less fortunate and that people have the right to commit acts of kindness and compassion,” the group’s members said in a news release and video posted on YouTube on Thursday. “However, it appears the police and your lawmakers of Orlando do not.”
A 2006 city ordinance requires organizations to obtain permits to feed groups of 25 people or more in downtown parks. The law was passed after numerous complaints by residents and businesses owners about the twice-weekly feedings in Lake Eola Park, city officials said. The law limits any group to no more than two permits per year per park.
Since June 1, the city police have arrested 25 Orlando Food Not Bombs volunteers without permits as they provided meals to large groups of homeless people in the park. One of those arrested last week on trespassing charges was Keith McHenry, a co-founder of the first Food Not Bombs chapter in 1980 in Cambridge, Mass. He remained in the Orange County Jail on Thursday awaiting a bond hearing.

For the full story, see:
DON VAN NATTA Jr. “Citing Homeless Law, Hackers Turn Sights on Orlando.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Fri., July 1, 2011): A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated June 30, 2011.)

“Keith McHenry, a co-founder of the first Food Not Bombs group, serving food at the park in May. He was in jail Thursday.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Chinese Emphasis on Rote Learning Produces Passive Researchers

(p. A15) Hardly a week goes by without a headline pronouncing that China is about to overtake the U.S. and other advanced economies in the innovation game. Patent filings are up, China is exporting high-tech goods, the West is doomed. Or so goes the story line. The reality is very different.
. . .
But more than 95% of the Chinese applications were filed domestically with the State Intellectual Property Office–and the vast majority cover “innovations” that make only tiny changes on existing designs. A better measure is to look at innovations that are recognized outside China–at patent filings or grants to China-origin inventions by the world’s leading patent offices, the U.S., the EU and Japan. On this score, China is way behind.
. . .
China’s educational system is another serious challenge because it emphasizes rote learning rather than creative problem solving. When Microsoft opened its second-largest research lab (after Redmond, Wash.) in Beijing, it realized that while the graduates it hired were brilliant, they were too passive when it came to research inquiry.
The research directors attacked this problem by effectively requiring each new hire to come up with a project he or she wanted to work on. Microsoft’s approach is more the exception than the rule among R&D labs in China, which tend to be more top-down.

For the full commentary, see:
ANIL K. GUPTA AND HAIYAN WANG. “Chinese Innovation Is a Paper Tiger; A closer look at China’s patent filings and R&D spending reveals a country that has a long way to go.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., July 28, 2011): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)

From Inventor to Entrepreneur When No Company Would Distribute Weed Eater

“George Ballas showed off in 1975 the original Weed Eater, a popcorn can rigged up with some wires.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) George Ballas got his big idea after a poisonous snake bit a worker who was trimming his lawn with shears. The idea turned an old popcorn can, some wires and an edger into the Weed Eater.

Mr. Ballas, who died Saturday at age 85, was a dance instructor, developer, inventor and marketer who built hotels, patented an adjustable table and marketed an early portable phone.
. . .
Mr. Ballas said the idea for the Weed Eater came to him while he was in a car wash, contemplating the big rotating bristles that cleaned hard-to-reach corners yet somehow didn’t scratch the finish.
Drawing from that inspiration, he rigged up an old popcorn can with some wires and hooked it to a rotating edger, and the first string trimmer was born.
. . .
He hired an engineer to design new models that substituted monofilament fishing line for wire and ran on electricity and gas. He dubbed it “Weed Eater” and held several patents on it.
When Mr. Ballas failed to find a company interested in distributing the device, he decided to sell it himself.
. . .
Mr. Ballas also taught entrepreneurship at Rice University in Houston. He continued to tinker with new inventions, and at one point marketed a football-helmet-sized portable phone that found few takers.
“A Weed Eater,” Mr. Ballas told the Houston Chronicle in 1993, “comes along once in a lifetime.”

For the full obituary, see:
STEPHEN MILLER. “REMEMBRANCES; Dance Studio Owner Invented Weed Eater.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., JUNE 30, 2011): A5.
(Note: ellipses added.)

“Comfort” at Home Was Unfamiliar Before 1770

(p. 135) If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly. Until the eighteenth century the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that there wasn’t even a word for the condition. ‘Comfortable’ meant merely ‘capable of being consoled’. Comfort was something you gave to the wounded or distressed. The first person to use the word in its modern sense was the writer Horace Walpole, who remarked in a letter to a friend in 1770 that a certain Mrs White was looking after him well and making him ‘as comfortable as is possible’. By the early nineteenth century, everyone was talking about having a comfortable home or enjoying a comfortable living, but before Walpole’s day no one did.

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

The Anecdote for Malignant Perfectionism: “I’ll Fix that in My Next Piece”

“Jeanne Moreau and Orson Welles in ‘Chimes at Midnight,’ a 1965 Shakespeare-based film that’s recently been restored.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. D8) Every great artist, . . . , strives for perfection. In fact, that’s part of what makes them great: They’re never entirely satisfied with anything that they do. The classical pianist Artur Schnabel once remarked that he was only interested in performing music that was “better than it can be performed…unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a never-ending problem, it doesn’t interest me too much.” This sums up the plight of all serious artists: They lead lives of endless frustration, struggling to reach the top of the hill, then seeing another, higher hill just beyond it.
. . .
Alas, that kind of suffering goes with the territory. The trick, as every artist knows, is not to let it interfere with getting things done. The wisest artists are the ones who finish a new work, walk away and move on to the next project. Whenever a colleague pointed out a “mistake” in one of Dmitri Shostakovich’s compositions, he invariably responded, “Oh, I’ll fix that in my next piece.”
The road to malignant perfectionism, by contrast, starts with chronic indecision. Jerome Robbins, whose inability to make up his mind was legendary throughout the world of dance, was known for choreographing multiple versions of a variation, then waiting until the last possible minute to decide which one to use. Beyond a certain point, this kind of perfectionism is all but impossible to distinguish from unprofessionalism, and Mr. Welles reached that point early in his career. . . .
. . .
Mr. Welles’s problem was that he wanted it both ways. He was a perfectionist who expected his collaborators to sit around endlessly waiting for him to make up his mind–and to pay for all the overtime that he ran up along the way. Simon Callow, his biographer, has summed up this failing in one devastating sentence: “Any form of limitation, obligation, responsibility or enforced duty was intolerable to him, rendering him claustrophobic and destructive.” That’s the wrong kind of perfectionism, and it led, as it usually does, to disaster.

For the full commentary, see:
TERRY TEACHOUT. “The Snare of Perfectionism: When Artists Aim Too High.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 22, 2011): D8.
(Note: ellipsis in Schnabel quote was in original; other ellipses added.)

Occupational Licensing Reduces Job Creation

(p. A15) Only one in 20 workers needed the government’s permission to pursue their chosen occupation in the 1950s, notes University of Minnesota Prof. Morris Kleiner. Today that figure is nearly one in three.
. . .
The breadth of jobs is remarkable. Travel and tourist guides, funeral attendants, home-entertainment installers, florists, makeup artists, even interpreters for the deaf are all regulated by various states. Want to work as an alarm installer? In 35 states, you will need to earn the government’s permission. Are you skilled in handling animals? You will need more than that skill in the 20 states that require a license for animal training.
There’s usually more to these licenses than filling out some paperwork and paying a small fee. Most come with government-dictated educational requirements, examinations, minimum age and grade levels, and other hurdles.
. . .
Instead of looking to the federal government to create jobs, state legislatures could have a real and immediate effect on unemployment in their states by showing how less truly is more. They can remove the barriers to job creation that their predecessors erected and enjoy the job-generating drive of their states’ aspiring entrepreneurs.

For the full commentary, see:
CHIP MELLOR And DICK CARPENTER. “Want Jobs? Cut Local Regulations.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., July 28, 2011): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Arthur Murray “America’s First Space Pilot,” RIP

“Maj. Arthur Murray in 1954.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A18) “I begin to feel weightless, and I’m flying so fast my instruments can’t keep up — they show what happened two miles ago. I’m climbing so steeply I can’t see the ground, and I feel confused. I have a sense of falling and I want to grab something for support.”

It was May 28, 1954, and Maj. Arthur Murray, test pilot, would wrestle for the next 15 terrifying seconds with a rocket plane racing over 1,400 miles an hour and spinning wildly, supersonically out of control. In the turmoil, he would fly higher than any human being had ever been, 90,440 feet over the earth.
Finally, Major Murray’s plane, a Bell X-1A, sank back into heavier air, and he had time to look at the dark blue sky and dazzling sunlight. He became the first human to see the curvature of the earth. At the time, he was called America’s first space pilot.
Arthur Murray, known as Kit, died on July 25, in a nursing home in the town of West in Texas, his family said. He was 92. He requested that his ashes be scattered over the Mojave Desert, where some of his fellow test pilots crashed and died.
Tom Wolfe marveled at the test pilots of Edwards Air Force Base in his 1979 book “The Right Stuff” exclaiming, “My God — to be part of Edwards in the late forties and early fifties!”

For the full obituary, see:
DOUGLAS MARTIN. “Arthur Murray, Test Pilot, Is Dead at 92.” The New York Times (Fri., August 5, 2011): A18.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated August 4, 2011.)

The wonderful Tom Wolfe book mentioned is:
Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1979.

At First, Some Feared Electricity

(p. 133) Something of the prevailing ambivalence was demonstrated by Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt, who went to a costume ball dressed as an electric light to celebrate the installation of electricity in her Fifth Avenue home in New York, but then had the whole system taken out when it was suspected of being the source of a small fire. Others detected more insidious threats. One authority named S. F. Murphy identified a whole host of electrically induced maladies – eyestrain, headaches, general unhealthiness and possibly even ‘the premature exhaustion of life’. One architect was certain electric light caused freckles.

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

The Movie Auteur as a Model for Technology Entrepreneurship

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

(p. 3) Two years ago, the technology blogger John Gruber presented a talk, “The Auteur Theory of Design,” at the Macworld Expo. Mr. Gruber suggested how filmmaking could be a helpful model in guiding creative collaboration in other realms, like software.

The auteur, a film director who both has a distinctive vision for a work and exercises creative control, works with many other creative people. “What the director is doing, nonstop, from the beginning of signing on until the movie is done, is making decisions,” Mr. Gruber said. “And just simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art.”
“The quality of any collaborative creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge,” Mr. Gruber pointed out.
Two years after he outlined his theory, it is still a touchstone in design circles for discussing Apple and its rivals.
Garry Tan, designer in residence and a venture partner at Y Combinator, an investor in start-ups, says: “Steve Jobs is not always right–MobileMe would be an example. But we do know that all major design decisions have to pass his muster. That is what an auteur does.”
Mr. Jobs has acquired a reputation as a great designer, Mr. Tan says, not because he personally makes the designs but because “he’s got the eye.” He has also hired classically trained designers like Jonathan Ive. “Design excellence also attracts design talent,” Mr. Tan explains.

For the full story, see:
RANDALL STROSS. “DIGITAL DOMAIN; The Auteur vs. the Committee.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., July 24, 2011): 3.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated July 23, 2011.)

“Credentialing Gone Amok—In 20 Years, You’ll Need a Ph.D. to Be a Janitor”

(p. 17) Call it credential inflation. Once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D. or just a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, the master’s is now the fastest-growing degree.
. . .
“There is definitely some devaluing of the college degree going on,” says Eric A. Hanushek, an education economist at the Hoover Institution, and that gives the master’s extra signaling power. “We are going deeper into the pool of high school graduates for college attendance,” making a bachelor’s no longer an adequate screening measure of achievement for employers.
Colleges are turning out more graduates than the market can bear, and a master’s is essential for job seekers to stand out — that, or a diploma from an elite undergraduate college, says Richard K. Vedder, professor of economics at Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
Not only are we developing “the overeducated American,” he says, but the cost is borne by the students getting those degrees. “The beneficiaries are the colleges and the employers,” he says. Employers get employees with more training (that they don’t pay for), and universities fill seats. In his own department, he says, a master’s in financial economics can be a “cash cow” because it draws on existing faculty (“we give them a little extra money to do an overload”) and they charge higher tuition than for undergraduate work. “We have incentives to want to do this,” he says. He calls the proliferation of master’s degrees evidence of “credentialing gone amok.” He says, “In 20 years, you’ll need a Ph.D. to be a janitor.”

For the full story, see:
LAURA PAPPANO. “The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s.” The New York Times, EducationLife Section (Sun., July 24, 2011): 16-17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated July 22, 2011.)