My friend Luis called yesterday (11/24/09) to tell me that his father, Vicente Locay had passed away.
Vicente was not a tall man, but he stood tall at key moments in his life.
Over the years, Luis told many stories about what Vicente said and did in Cuba. One of my favorites was that Vicente, not being particularly religious, had no plans to have Luis christened. But when Castro outlawed public displays of Catholicism, Vicente changed his mind, and made sure that Luis had the benefits of a public christening.
When it became increasingly clear what was in store for Cuba under Castro’s dictatorship, Vicente managed to get his family on a rickety plane, and escape.
In Cuba, Vicente had owned several small businesses. In the U.S., he started over, without ever mastering English. He worked hard remodeling houses to support his family.
For many years, I had hoped that Vicente would outlast Fidel, and would return in triumph to a post-Fidel Havana.
It’s too late for that to happen. The best we can do is to acknowledge and salute a man of courage and strength, who chose freedom.
Disney Learned Quickly (Despite Lack of Formal Education), and Impatiently Expected Others to Learn Quickly Too
The story below is very reminiscent of a story that Michael Lewis tells in The New, New Thing about how entrepreneur Jim Clark learned to fly.
Possible lesson: impatience and quick learning may not be traits of all high level entrepreneurs, but they appear to have been traits of at least two.
(p. 213) Seventeen years later, Broggie told Richard Hubler that teaching Disney how to run a lathe and drill press and other machinery was difficult “because he was impatient. So I’d make what we call a set-up in a lathe and turn out a piece and say, ‘Well, that’s how you do it.’ He would see part of it and he was impatient, so he would want to turn the wheels–and then something would happen. A piece might fly out of the chuck and he’d say, ‘God-damn it. why didn’t you tell me it was going to do this?’ Well, you don’t tell him, you know? It was a thing of–well–you learn it. He said one day, . . . ‘You know, it does me some good sometimes to come down here to find out I don’t know all about everything.’ . . . How would you sharpen the drill if it was going to drill brass or steel? There’s a difference. And he learned it. You only had to show him once and he got the picture.”
This was a characteristic that other people in the studio noticed. “He had a terrific memory,” Marc Davis said. “He learned very quickly. . . . You only had to explain a thing once to him and he knew how to do it. Other people are not the same. I think this is a problem he had in respect to everybody . . . his tremendous memory and his tremendous capacity for learning. He wasn’t book learned but he was the most fantastically well educated man in his own way. . . . He understood the mechanics of everything. . . . Everything was a new toy. And this also made him a very impatient man. He was as impatient as could be with whoever he worked with.”
Disney’s lack of formal education manifested itself sometimes in jibes at his college-educated employees, but more often in the odd lapses–the mispronounced words, the grammatical slips–that can mark an autodidact. “For a guy who only went to the eighth grade,” Ollie Johnston said, “Walt educated himself beautifully. His vocabulary was good. I only heard him get sore (p. 214) about a big word once in a story meeting. Everyone was sitting around talking and Ted Sears said, ‘Well, I think that’s a little too strident.’ Walt said, ‘What the hell are you trying to say, Ted?’ He hadn’t heard that word before.
Source:
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.
(Note: ellipses in original.)
For a similar story about Jim Clark, see:
Lewis, Michael. The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
Support Grows for School Vouchers in D.C.
“Students from Bridges Academy in Washington, D.C., at a Capitol Hill rally last month in support of the city’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which gives students from low-income families scholarships for private schools.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.
(p. A2) The District of Columbia’s embattled school-voucher program, which lawmakers appeared to have killed earlier this year, looks like it could still survive.
Congress voted in March not to fund the program, which provides certificates to pay for recipients’ private-school tuition, after the current school year. But after months of pro-voucher rallies, a television-advertising campaign and statements of support by local political leaders, backers say they are more confident about its prospects. Even some Democrats, many of whom have opposed voucher efforts, have been supportive.
. . .
Many parents whose children receive vouchers say they are satisfied with the private schools they attend. During the 2008-2009 school year, about 61,700 students nationwide received vouchers, up 9% from the previous school year, according to the Alliance for School Choice, a pro-voucher advocacy group.
. . .
Created as a five-year pilot project by a Republican-controlled Congress in early 2004, the Opportunity Scholarship Program is the nation’s only federally funded voucher program. It is open to students who live in the long-struggling Washington school district and whose families have incomes at or below 185% of the federal poverty level — about $40,000 for a family of four. Recipients are chosen by lottery, although preference is given to those attending traditional schools deemed to be in need of improvement under federal law.
Joe Kelley entered his oldest son, Rashawn, in the first Opportunity Scholarship Program lottery in 2004, fearful about violence at the public middle school. Rashawn, now 17, received a voucher, and so have his three sisters. All attend a small, private Christian academy where they have been earning A’s and B’s. “It’s a lot of worry off of me,” said Mr. Kelley, a retired cook and youth counselor.
In an evaluation released in March, researchers found that in reading skills, voucher recipients overall were approximately 3.1 months ahead of eligible students who didn’t receive scholarships. But there was no difference in math skills, and voucher recipients from the worst-performing public schools got no boost in either subject.
For the full story, see:
ROBERT TOMSHO. “D.C. School Vouchers Have a Brighter Outlook in Congress.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., October 19, 2009): A2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
Global Warming Did Not Cause Southeast Drought
(p. A13) The drought that gripped the Southeast from 2005 to 2007 was not unprecedented and resulted from random weather events, not global warming, Columbia University researchers have concluded. They say its severe water shortages resulted from population growth more than rainfall patterns.
The researchers, who report their findings in an article in Thursday’s issue of The Journal of Climate, cite census figures showing that in Georgia alone the population rose to 9.54 million in 2007 from 6.48 million in 1990.
“At the root of the water supply problem in the Southeast is a growing population,” they wrote.
Richard Seager, a climate expert at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who led the study, said in an interview that when the drought struck, “people were wondering” whether climate change linked to a global increase in heat-trapping gases could be a cause.
But after studying data from weather instruments, computer models and measurements of tree rings, which reflect yearly rainfall, “our conclusion was this drought was pretty normal and pretty typical by standards of what has happened in the region over the century,” Mr. Seager said.
Similar droughts unfolded over the last thousand years, the researchers wrote. Regardless of climate change, they added, similar weather patterns can be expected regularly in the future, with similar results.
For the full story, see:
CORNELIA DEAN. “Study Links Water Shortages in Southeast to Population, Not Global Warming.” The New York Times (Fri., October 2, 2009): A13.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated Oct. 1st and has the title “Southeast Drought Study Ties Water Shortage to Population, Not Global Warming.”)
The research summarized in the passages above can be read in its full and original form, at:
Seager, Richard, Alexandrina Tzanova, and Jennifer Nakamura. “Drought in the Southeastern United States: Causes, Variability over the Last Millennium, and the Potential for Future Hydroclimate Change.” Journal of Climate 22, no. 19 (Oct. 1, 2009): 5021-45.
World Trade Barriers Are Increasing
The small dark blue squares indicate the “number of nations that have imposed protectionist measures on each country” and the light blue squares indicate the “number of measures imposed on each category of goods.” Source of quotations in caption and of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.
(p. A5) BRUSSELS — This weekend’s U.S.-China trade skirmish is just the tip of a coming protectionist iceberg, according to a report released Monday by Global Trade Alert, a team of trade analysts backed by independent think tanks, the World Bank and the U.K. government.
A report by the World Trade Organization, backed by its 153 members and also released Monday, found “slippage” in promises to abstain from protectionism, but drew less dramatic conclusions.
Governments have planned 130 protectionist measures that have yet to be implemented, according to the GTA’s research. These include state aid funds, higher tariffs, immigration restrictions and export subsidies.
. . .
According to the GTA report, the number of discriminatory trade laws outnumbers liberalizing trade laws by six to one. Governments are applying protectionist measures at the rate of 60 per quarter. More than 90% of goods traded in the world have been affected by some sort of protectionist measure.
For the full story, see:
JOHN W. MILLER. “Protectionist Measures Expected to Rise, Report Warns.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., SEPTEMBER 15, 2009): A5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
The Long Gestation of the Disneyland Entrepreneurial Idea
(p. 212) Before returning to Los Angeles, Disney and Kimball also went to Dearborn, Michigan, outside Detroit, and visited a village of another kind–Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, a collection of old and reconstructed buildings that included the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop and a replica of Thomas Edison’s laboratory. Greenfield Village, which Ford established in 1929, had a strong autobiographical element: many of its buildings were there because they had been significant in Ford’s life, as with the school he attended and the scaled- down replica of his first auto plant. Greenfield was, besides, a make-believe village, a mixture of buildings spanning centuries. There was no pretense, as at Colonial Williamsburg, of re-creating the past.
Disney had visited Greenfield Village at least once before, in April 1940, but this time he returned to Burbank with his imagination stimulated. He was thinking now beyond a miniature train for his own home. He drafted a memorandum on August 31, 1948, in which he set out in detail what might go into a “Mickey Mouse park” on the sixteen acres the studio owned across Riverside Drive. Ford’s influence can be felt in Disney’s description of an idyllic small town, anchored by a city hall and a railroad station. There would have been a specifically Disney presence in the park only through a toy store that sold Disney toys and books and a shop where Disney artists could sell their own work.
Disney had been talking about a park of’ some kind, on the studio lot or adjacent to it, for years, perhaps since the late 1930s, the idea being to have something to entertain visitors to a studio that was otherwise very much a workaday place. For the studio to embark on such a project in 1948 was irnpractical, though, given its financial condition, and Disney’s memo had no immediate consequences.
Source:
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.
Breakthrough Innovations Require Judgment, Not Surveys
Source of book image: http://press.harvardbusiness.org/on/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/verganti_300dpi.jpg.
(p. W8) In “Design-Driven Innovation” (Harvard Business Press, 272 pages, $35), Roberto Verganti holds that product development should be grounded not in the data of survey-takers or the observations of anthropologists but in the judgment of executives. “We have experienced years of hype about user-centered design,” he says. But breakthrough innovations, in Mr. Verganti’s view, do not represent what customers knew they wanted. Rather, the most profitable innovations are those that create a radically new meaning for a product.
Nintendo’s Wii video-game console and its motion-sensing controllers “transformed what a console meant: from an immersion in a virtual world approachable only by niche experts into an active workout, in the real world, for everyone.” The Swatch in 1983 introduced a new meaning to the watch: neither an article of fine jewelry nor a utilitarian timekeeping tool but a fashion accessory. Starbucks, he says, changed the meaning of a coffee shop from a place to buy coffee to a home away from home.
For the full review, see:
DAVID A. PRICE. “The Shape of Things to Come; Design is more than aesthetics and ease of use. It’s a way of doing business.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., OCTOBER 9, 2009): W8.
Reference for book under review:
Brown, Tim. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: HarperBusiness Publishers, 2009.
Legitimacy of Capitalism Rests on Rich Earning their Wealth
Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago. Source of photo and information in caption: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/luigi.zingales/research/date.html.
(p. A21) Luigi Zingales points out that the legitimacy of American capitalism has rested on the fact that many people, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, got rich on the basis of what they did, not on the basis of government connections. But over the years, business and government have become more intertwined. The results have been bad for both capitalism and government. The banks’ growing political clout led to the rule changes that helped create the financial crisis.
For the full commentary, see:
DAVID BROOKS. “The Bloody Crossroads.” The New York Times (Tues., September 8, 2009): A21.
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated Sept. 7.)
The reference for the Zingales article is:
Zingales, Luigi. “Capitalism after the Crisis.” National Affairs, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 22-35.
Government to Decide Who Lives and Who Dies
“The Reaper Curve: Ezekiel Emanuel used the above chart in a Lancet article to illustrate the ages on which health spending should be focused.” Source of caption and graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.
(p. A15) Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient’s needs. Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree.
The health bills being pushed through Congress put important decisions in the hands of presidential appointees like Dr. Emanuel. They will decide what insurance plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have, and what seniors get under Medicare. Dr. Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. He clearly will play a role guiding the White House’s health initiative.
. . .
In the Lancet, Jan. 31, 2009, Dr. Emanuel and co-authors presented a “complete lives system” for the allocation of very scarce resources, such as kidneys, vaccines, dialysis machines, intensive care beds, and others. “One maximizing strategy involves saving the most individual lives, and it has motivated policies on allocation of influenza vaccines and responses to bioterrorism. . . . Other things being equal, we should always save five lives rather than one.
“However, other things are rarely equal–whether to save one 20-year-old, who might live another 60 years, if saved, or three 70-year-olds, who could only live for another 10 years each–is unclear.” In fact, Dr. Emanuel makes a clear choice: “When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get changes that are attenuated (see Dr. Emanuel’s chart nearby).
Dr. Emanuel concedes that his plan appears to discriminate against older people, but he explains: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination. . . . Treating 65 year olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.”
For the full commentary, see:
BETSY MCCAUGHEY. “Obama’s Health Rationer-in-Chief; White House health-care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the ‘overuse’ of medical care.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 27, 2009): A15.
(Note: first ellipsis added; second and third ellipses in original.)
The article that was the original source for the graph above, is:
Persad, Govind, Alan Wertheimer, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel. “Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions.” The Lancet 373, no. 9661 (Jan. 31, 2009): 423-31.
Project Entrepreneurs Want to Keep Control
(p. 152) As late as January 1940, Disney still resisted selling stock–“I wanted to build this in a different way,” he told sonic of his artists–but by then his need for money was such that going public had become the lesser of evils. Preferred stock in Walt Disney Productions was offered to the public on April 2, 1940. The money raised helped pay for the Burbank studio ($1.6 million) and retired other debts (more than $2 million). The common stock remained in the Disneys’ hands. The company took out a $1.5 million insurance policy on Walt’s life.
Disney remembered having lunch with Ford Motor Company executives a few days after the stock issue, when he passed through Detroit on his way back from New York. Henry Ford himself joined the group after lunch, and when Disney told the old autocrat about selling preferred stock, Ford said. “If you sell any of it, you should sell it all.” That remark, Disney said, “kind of left me thinking and wondering for a while.” Ford “wanted that control,” Disney said. “That’s what he meant by that.” Disney shared the sentiment, even in relatively small matters. On July 1, 1940, he told the studio’s publicity department: “From now on all publicity going out of this studio must have my O.K. before it is released. There shall be no exceptions to this rule.”
Source:
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.
Third Generation Nuclear Reactors Are Simpler and Even Safer
Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.
(p. R1) Researchers are working on reactors that they claim are simpler, cheaper in certain respects, and more efficient than the last generation of plants.
Some designs try to reduce the chance of accidents by automating safety features and minimizing the amount of hardware needed to shut down the reactor in an emergency. Others cut costs by using standardized parts that can be built in big chunks and then shipped to the site. Some squeeze more power out of uranium, reducing the amount of waste produced, while others wring even more energy out of spent fuel.
“Times are exciting for nuclear,” says Ronaldo Szilard, director of nuclear science and engineering at the Idaho National Lab, a part of the U.S. Energy Department. “There are lots of options being explored.”
. . .
(p. R3) As a whole, . . . , the U.S. nuclear industry has a solid safety record, and the productivity of plants has grown dramatically in the past decade. The next generation of reactors so-called Generation III units is intended to take everything that’s been learned about safe operations and do it even better. Generation III units are the reactors of choice for most of the 34 nations that already have nuclear plants in operation. (China still is building a few Gen II units.)
“A common theme of future reactors is to make them simpler so there are fewer systems to monitor and fewer systems that could fail,” says Revis James, director of the Energy Technology Assessment Center at the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent power-industry research organization.
The current generation of nuclear plants requires a complex maze of redundant motors, pumps, valves and control systems to deal with emergency conditions. Generation III plants cut down on some of that infrastructure and rely more heavily on passive systems that don’t need human intervention to keep the reactor in a safe condition reducing the chance of an accident caused by operator error or equipment failure.
For example, the Westinghouse AP1000 boasts half as many safety-related valves, one-third fewer pumps and only one-fifth as much safety-related piping as earlier plants from Westinghouse, majority owned by Toshiba Corp. In an emergency, the reactor, which has been selected for use at Southern Co.’s Vogtle site in Georgia and at six other U.S. locations, is designed to shut down automatically and stay within a safe temperature range.
For the full story, see:
REBECCA SMITH. “The New Nukes; The next generation of nuclear reactors is on its way, and supporters say they will be safer, cheaper and more efficient than current plants. Here’s a look at what’s coming — and when.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., SEPTEMBER 8, 2009): R1 & R3.
(Note: ellipses added.)