June 2009 Archives
The world press is marking the 35th anniversary of the bar code. So many people have grown up with it that it no longer appears to be the sinister innovation it once seemed; as my friend Jackson Lears remarked to the New York Times:
[W]ith the advent of Google Earth and global tracking devices, "it now seems comparatively innocuous."As the Times piece points out, the bar code was supposed to be a transitional technology, to be replaced by directly read numbers. Then it was thought doomed by the development of tiny embedded microchips that would identify products by broadcasting signals -- radio frequency identification (RFID). But for reasons of economics and human factors (imagine having to aim a scanner precisely at a line of numbers), the robust bar code has held its own.The bar code "has almost acquired a certain antique appeal as an early expression of the sorting and categorizing impulse in computer-driven marketing and sales," he added.
It seems, he said, "in some ways a charmingly archaic icon."
And there's even more to the story. Bar codes have been around even longer than the Times article suggests -- the technology's principles are at least 60 years old. And the mathematical tricks that make it work have been around for at least 40 years; many of the brilliant people behind them are known only to specialists. These are computer programs that generate numbers with digits that have no meaning in themselves, added to double-check the accuracy of the real numbers. The book publishing industry was using a program developed by the Dutch mathematician Jacobus Verhoeff by the late 1960s, even before it adopted bar codes, which nearly all books now carry. Together, the bar code and the check digit became essential to early electronic commerce. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, chose books to start his business partly because one city, Seattle, was rich in both experienced programmers and book distribution warehouses, but also because existing databases of scannable International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) were available on CD-ROM and could be uploaded. The Oracle software used by Bezos was also not so new; it originated in the 1970s was based on a theoretical breakthrough published in 1970 by the IBM research mathematician Edgar Codd. Wal-Mart as well as Amazon.com became a dominant retailer through its outstanding exploitation of the ISBN's later and broader counterpart, the Universal Product Code (UPC).
An unexpected side of this story, then, is how many of information technology's breakthroughs were made by 1975. Of the top ten computer algorithms (problem-solving procedures) of the twentieth century named by editors of the journal Computers in Science and Engineering a few years ago, eight were developed in the two decades between 1947 and 1965, followed by one in 1977 and one a decade later, with none in the 1990s. The PageRank algorithm that helped launch Google is missing, so this isn't an ultimate list. But the bar code story stills suggest a slower pace of recent technological change than we often suppose. What has the more recent two-dimensional bar code added for most people but the ability to create custom pet-based postage stamps?
Three sentiments are in order. One is deep respect for the theorists as well as the business people who moved before hardware was quite ready for their ideas. Another is relief that even Wal-Mart can't always impose its will on suppliers and customers; resistance is not necessarily futile. And the third is a question. Are there equally brilliant ideas germinating now, and if so, what has kept them from the marketplace?
Whatever the causes of the Washington DC Metro crash that took the lives of nine people and injured scores of others, our first thoughts will be with the victims' families, and our reaction will be Never Again.
But there is another way of looking at casualties, statistical and actuarial, a style of thinking prized and highly paid in the Capital and around the Beltway and in academia. To the humanist rhetoric of infinite human worth, the idea that when a person dies a world is destroyed, it opposes the economic logic of limited resources and the bureaucratic watchword of consistency.
At an academic lunch some time ago, after a report of the collapse of a local parking garage -- I don't remember whether there were casualties -- a colleague in the policy culture launched zestfully into the thesis that not enough structures were falling down, that it showed that they were being built too safely, misallocating resources. There seemed to be an optimal number of building collapses. Maybe he was just provoking the rest of us, but I recall him sounding like he meant it.
Stephen Colbert lampooned the Environmental Protection Agency's reduction of the value of a statistical life a year ago as a typical Bush tactic to subvert regulation:
The disturbing truth is that even at the old, higher number, the loss of 9 human lives would not be grounds for replacement of the older model cars offering less survivability. Even if all nine casualties could have been spared, the $888 million estimate cost of replacing 1970s cars newer, safer models would have been almost $100 million per life, more than twelve times the pre-2008 $8.04 million statistical value of life used by the EPA.
The Department of Transportation uses slightly different, and lower figures. From a 2002 memo, apparently still current, on its web site:
But there is another way of looking at casualties, statistical and actuarial, a style of thinking prized and highly paid in the Capital and around the Beltway and in academia. To the humanist rhetoric of infinite human worth, the idea that when a person dies a world is destroyed, it opposes the economic logic of limited resources and the bureaucratic watchword of consistency.
At an academic lunch some time ago, after a report of the collapse of a local parking garage -- I don't remember whether there were casualties -- a colleague in the policy culture launched zestfully into the thesis that not enough structures were falling down, that it showed that they were being built too safely, misallocating resources. There seemed to be an optimal number of building collapses. Maybe he was just provoking the rest of us, but I recall him sounding like he meant it.
Stephen Colbert lampooned the Environmental Protection Agency's reduction of the value of a statistical life a year ago as a typical Bush tactic to subvert regulation:
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Word - Priceless | ||||
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The Department of Transportation uses slightly different, and lower figures. From a 2002 memo, apparently still current, on its web site:
Based on our improved understanding of the academic research literature, we have determined that the best present estimate of the economic value of preventing a human fatality is $5.8 million. This value should be used, effective immediately, for analyses performed by DOT analysts. In addition, we will, for the first time, require supplementary analyses at values for a statistical life higher and lower than $5.8 million. Specifically, analysts will prepare estimates based on assumptions of $3.2 million and $8.4 million for the value associated with each life saved.So when a Washington policy analyst leaves the above-ground air of the District and enters a subway train, his or her statistical worth (leaving aside the age-weighting that the regulatory czar nominee Cass Sunstein favors; see the bioethicist Wesley J. Smith's blog) drops from $7.22 million to $5.8 million, or almost 20 percent, and is restored again at the end of the journey, gaining well over a million dollars just by stepping off the escalator. F. Scott Fitzgerald didn't know how right he was when he observed that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
Today's New York Times has a tribute to the steadfastness of the Ford clan in the crisis of the American auto industry, despite the loss of more than 90 percent of the market price of their stake in the company:
My friend the historian of technology Howard Segal was already exploring the connections between Henry Ford and his descendant in a syndicated essay several years ago. Ford became notorious for violent union-busting and fringe politics, but Segal points to a progressive side often neglected now, but a positive influence for his successors:
The Times article concludes that
General Motors, once acclaimed as the model of the modern multidivisional corporation and the bête noire of corporate critics -- its hamfisted tactics in response to Ralph Nader's criticisms of the Corvair's design confirmed their worst expectations -- is a humbled ward of the state. Chrysler has merged with Fiat. But in Ford's case, family control made decisions possible that averted such outcomes.The Fords have had their tense times, most recently in 2007 when a few family members tried -- unsuccessfully -- to hire a Wall Street firm to advise the family on possible exit strategies.
But as they have done for decades after their meeting last January, the Fords rallied behind the family's appointed leader: William C. Ford Jr., a great-grandson of the founder and chairman since 1999.
My friend the historian of technology Howard Segal was already exploring the connections between Henry Ford and his descendant in a syndicated essay several years ago. Ford became notorious for violent union-busting and fringe politics, but Segal points to a progressive side often neglected now, but a positive influence for his successors:
Segal has shown in his book Recasting the Machine Age that Ford's "village industries" were no mere exercise in nostalgia or ploy against the United Auto Workers, but initiatives to combine the best of old (recycled, water-powered mills) and new (up-to-date machinery), reducing environmental impact. The Fords have also built on this side of Henry's thinking.Along with decentralization, Bill has expanded the company's outsourcing that began with the village industries. As a 1938 Life magazine article about the River Rouge Plant revealed, "Ford still buys parts and materials from 6,000 independent plants throughout the nation." Bill has vastly increased that number.
But outsourcing requires reliable inventory controls, and Bill has greatly improved Ford Motor Company's inventory policies without falling into the trap created by his ousted predecessor, Jacques Nasser, for whom impersonal computerized systems were panaceas. Bill has built on Henry's legacy, as detailed in Ford and Samuel Crowther's "Today and Tomorrow" (1926).
The Times article concludes that
Ford family members said they could not envision any situation that would cause them to sell out. "If this were just a financial investment, the family probably would have been out of it years ago," Bill Ford said. "This is very much an emotional commitment."And that ending, of course has a subtext for the Times itself. The Sulzbergers' situation is not so different from the Fords'. This may be the decisive stand of noblesse oblige.
What's the secret of the lines for the Apple 3G iPhone when people are cutting back on so much else? Sure, it makes them more productive. But there's more to it than that. Bad Times are good news for design. Manufacturers turn to new looks hoping to stir anxious consumers. My friend the historian of technology Jeffrey Meikle has noted that planned obsolescence in the automobile industry began during the now-overshadowed recession of 1927 -- the height of the 1920s boom, but also a year of urgent warnings that too few Americans were sharing in the prosperity, as Gerald Leinwand has documented. The streamlining of the 1930s was in part a desperate marketing ploy, but it also brought some real benefits in
manufacturing and functionality, even if Chrysler flubbed the decades
biggest automotive innovation, the Airflow, an aerodynamic car developed with the help of a wind tunnel and the advice of Orville Wright himself.
Source: Wikipedia
It was during the Depression that three-strip Technicolor was introduced to the public, despite the bulk and cost of equipment ($30,000 for the camera alone), setting what remains a benchmark for cinematic color. Wade Sampson writes:
Hard times may inhibit investment in research, but they can also create a paradoxically opposite effect -- heightening the psychological boost of novelty and opening new markets.
Source: Wikipedia
It was during the Depression that three-strip Technicolor was introduced to the public, despite the bulk and cost of equipment ($30,000 for the camera alone), setting what remains a benchmark for cinematic color. Wade Sampson writes:
The amazing early history of the process and the tenacity of the founders and their investors is here.The Three Little Pigs premiered on May 25,1933. It was so popular that it ran for weeks. Variety stated: "Three Little Pigs is proving the most unique picture property in history. It's particularly unique because it's a cartoon running less than 10 minutes, yet providing box office draft comparable to a feature, as demonstrated by the numerous repeats."
United Artists could not supply enough prints to meet the demand and some exhibitors had to share a print, running it back and forth between two or more theaters.
"Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" replaced "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime" as the working man's anthem during the Depression.
Hard times may inhibit investment in research, but they can also create a paradoxically opposite effect -- heightening the psychological boost of novelty and opening new markets.
Champion of common sense or crowned demagogue, the Prince of Wales is making headlines again -- this time for engineering a veto of the architect Richard Rogers' (Lord Rogers of Riverside) plan for urban redevelopment on the prime site of the former Chelsea Barracks. For the prosecution, Hugh Pearman in the Wall Street Journal:
For the defense, Alice Thomson in The Times:The "Shard" tower, by Mr. Rogers's former partner Renzo Piano -- with whom Mr. Rogers designed Paris's Pompidou Center in the 1970s -- will be the most prominent building in London by far. Its impact on the skyline will be colossal. In contrast, the visual impact of Mr. Rogers's Chelsea plan will be zero on the skyline and negligible in its neighborhood. So why isn't Charles writing letters to the Qataris about the Shard? Easy. The Shard is planned for an office quarter of a poor borough next to a commuter railway station. Chelsea, by contrast, is a rich residential district inhabited by some very conservative people with good contacts. (It also happens to be where the left-leaning Mr. Rogers lives.)
What are the royals for if not to protect our heritage? He's meddling, you say, but the Prince is at his best when he becomes involved. The neighbours never wanted these glass and steel high-tech residential towers stuffed with £50million flats. But they had no influence over the combined might of Lord Rogers, Gulf State money and the Candys (who have two other vast projects in the capital) and who are held in awe by London's planning committees.
Prince Charles could do something. He pulled rank and wrote a letter to his friend, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the ruler of Qatar, who was backing the project. The arrogance of architects has been trumped by the arrogance of princes.
What interests me is the demographic side of this battle. It would not be happening without the last century's gains in longevity. Queen Elizabeth II has already outlived Queen Victoria by two years and may well live longer than the 102 years of her mother. If Charles were king now he would not have been able to intervene so directly. Since he has considerable popular support -- over 70 percent according to a poll last spring by the largely pro-Rogers Guardian, we can expect his campaigns to continue for years to come.
Major twentieth-century architects -- a regal breed in their own right -- also enjoyed striking professional longevity. Frank Lloyd Wright was in his late 80s when he designed the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, now a National Historic Landmark. Philip Johnson was in his late 70s when the audaciously Chippendale-pedimented AT&T (now Sony) building in Manhattan created a furore; he continued working into his 90s.
I. M. Pei, still active, was over 90 when the Museum of Islamic Art he designed opened in Qatar in 2008. Frank Gehry, possibly North America's current reigning starchitect, turned 80 in February. Lord Rogers is 75; the traditionalist architect Quinlan Terry, reportedly the Prince of Wales' candidate for the Chelsea site, is 71.
So while media culture may be in the hands of ever-younger media executives, responsibility for the bult environment may be moving in the other direction.
Sunday's New York Times Week in Review section taught me a new term I'd like to propose for admission to the English language: gosudarstvennik. In fact, I'll follow the Times editors in giving its naturalization a boost by not italicizing it henceforth. It's a mouthful -- reminds me of Florence King's quip that today's American editors would advise Fyodor Dostoevsky to change his name to Ted Dost -- but nonetheless an intriguing concept. In a piece on Avigdor Lieberman, the new foreign minister of Israel, Clifford J. Levy explains:
You don't have to be Russian, or Israeli, to be a gosudarstvennik. The term also helps distinguish those American, Western European, Asian, and other leaders who relish wielding authority from the more reticent. Dick Cheney clearly is one, Joe Biden not. George Washington consciously decided to reject the role. (I love The Onion's take on this.) John F. Kennedy wasn't; Lyndon Johnson may have been the most natural since Andrew Jackson.
Gosudarstvennik isn't an exclusively political concept. One broader definition might be a company man or woman who runs the company. Not every CEO, and especially not all company founders, are gosudarstvenniks. Henry Ford was; his only child and successor, Edsel Ford, was not and proved to be doubly jinxed in death as a namesake of failure.
To conservative critics, Barack Obama is a stealth gosudarstvennik, advancing the power of the state step by step in response to real or perceived crises (as of course George W. Bush and Congress did after Sept. 11). To some liberals he is doing the opposite, compromising where he had promised reforms. (The Onion, again.) Whatever course he takes, I don't think we've heard the last of this expression.
Tatyana A. Karasova, head of the Israel department at the Institute for Oriental Studies in Moscow, said Mr. Putin and Mr. Lieberman had a rapport because they are both "gosudarstvenniks" -- a term that derives from the Russian word for state or government and implies a person who likes wielding official power. "Putin, as a gosudarstvennik, can really understand another gosudarstvennik like Lieberman," she said.(I asked some of my local Slavic gurus about the Karasova/Levy definition, and they have their doubts; they consider the word a more general Soviet-era euphemism for an influential political insider. Levy 's use of it may not be the originally Russian sense but a subtly hostile repurposing by the British journalist and blogger Edward Lucas, author of The New Cold War. Never mind the pedigree; it's an irresistible concept.)
You don't have to be Russian, or Israeli, to be a gosudarstvennik. The term also helps distinguish those American, Western European, Asian, and other leaders who relish wielding authority from the more reticent. Dick Cheney clearly is one, Joe Biden not. George Washington consciously decided to reject the role. (I love The Onion's take on this.) John F. Kennedy wasn't; Lyndon Johnson may have been the most natural since Andrew Jackson.
Gosudarstvennik isn't an exclusively political concept. One broader definition might be a company man or woman who runs the company. Not every CEO, and especially not all company founders, are gosudarstvenniks. Henry Ford was; his only child and successor, Edsel Ford, was not and proved to be doubly jinxed in death as a namesake of failure.
To conservative critics, Barack Obama is a stealth gosudarstvennik, advancing the power of the state step by step in response to real or perceived crises (as of course George W. Bush and Congress did after Sept. 11). To some liberals he is doing the opposite, compromising where he had promised reforms. (The Onion, again.) Whatever course he takes, I don't think we've heard the last of this expression.
Talk about bombs bursting in air! I'm not sure how serious Michael Kinsley really is about replacing the Star-Spangled Banner as our national anthem. It's hardly an original suggestion, and he doesn't seem enthusiastic about most of the usual alternatives (except possibly for "America the Beautiful") he ticks off in his column. He likes "God Bless America," for example, but he praises it as "jolly and un-hymn-like" -- surely a left-handed compliment for a genre that must not only open baseball games but commemorate solemn anniversaries.
It's true that the anthem is hard to sing. But that's in part because democracies are based on messy compromises, while absolutist and totalitarian regimes from Louis XIV to Stalin have mobilized great art and music in the service of the State. Democracy's counterpart to Versailles, the US Capitol, was the work of a brilliant amateur whose poor interior planning took years to correct. On the other hand, the bloody tyrant Joseph Stalin was a gifted singer as a young man, according to the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. The music historian Laurel E. Fay, in her recent lecture "The Great Tunesmith's Greatest Hit: A National Anthem for the Centuries," showed how Stalin took an active part in the contest for a USSR counterpart to the cosmopolitan Internationale, and perhaps the best tribute to his efforts is that it is still (according to Fay) considered excellent for its purpose by music critics and scholars, for all the barbarity that it masked. Recent Russian governments have changed the words but have found no satisfactory replacement, for all their repudiation of most other Soviet-era symbols in favor of pre-Revolutionary ones. You can hear why even many educated Europeans who didn't know about the Gulag, or didn't want to know, were swayed by cult of personality, as (sadly) was the great singer Paul Robeson:
Among democracies "The Star-Spangled Banner" is no more offensive or bellicose than any other. Compare the "Marseillaise," with its promise to spread the enemy's "impure blood" as fertilizer. (No surrender monkeys there!) No wonder "Deutschland über Alles" is melodically superior to our national anthem -- Joseph Haydn himself composed the score in honor of Austrian Emperor Francis II's birthday in 1797 -- but it has survived as the present German national anthem only through the amputation of the first two of three verses of the poet Hoffmann von Fallersleben for their territorial claims and anachronistic Gemütlichkeit; lyrics here. As for the words of "God Save the Queen," one wit described them (can anyone help me with the reference?) as "a series of curt instructions to the Divinity."
If the tune of our national anthem originated in a drinking song, so what? In another post I've already noted the early nation's status as the Alcoholic Republic. John Hancock was a major importer (and sometimes smuggler) of Madeira, and as Marvin Kitman notes in George Washington's Expense Account,
The President and Congress have enough on their plate. For the sake of a more perfect union, let's keep, celebrate, and do our best to sing our imperfect anthem.
It's true that the anthem is hard to sing. But that's in part because democracies are based on messy compromises, while absolutist and totalitarian regimes from Louis XIV to Stalin have mobilized great art and music in the service of the State. Democracy's counterpart to Versailles, the US Capitol, was the work of a brilliant amateur whose poor interior planning took years to correct. On the other hand, the bloody tyrant Joseph Stalin was a gifted singer as a young man, according to the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. The music historian Laurel E. Fay, in her recent lecture "The Great Tunesmith's Greatest Hit: A National Anthem for the Centuries," showed how Stalin took an active part in the contest for a USSR counterpart to the cosmopolitan Internationale, and perhaps the best tribute to his efforts is that it is still (according to Fay) considered excellent for its purpose by music critics and scholars, for all the barbarity that it masked. Recent Russian governments have changed the words but have found no satisfactory replacement, for all their repudiation of most other Soviet-era symbols in favor of pre-Revolutionary ones. You can hear why even many educated Europeans who didn't know about the Gulag, or didn't want to know, were swayed by cult of personality, as (sadly) was the great singer Paul Robeson:
Among democracies "The Star-Spangled Banner" is no more offensive or bellicose than any other. Compare the "Marseillaise," with its promise to spread the enemy's "impure blood" as fertilizer. (No surrender monkeys there!) No wonder "Deutschland über Alles" is melodically superior to our national anthem -- Joseph Haydn himself composed the score in honor of Austrian Emperor Francis II's birthday in 1797 -- but it has survived as the present German national anthem only through the amputation of the first two of three verses of the poet Hoffmann von Fallersleben for their territorial claims and anachronistic Gemütlichkeit; lyrics here. As for the words of "God Save the Queen," one wit described them (can anyone help me with the reference?) as "a series of curt instructions to the Divinity."
If the tune of our national anthem originated in a drinking song, so what? In another post I've already noted the early nation's status as the Alcoholic Republic. John Hancock was a major importer (and sometimes smuggler) of Madeira, and as Marvin Kitman notes in George Washington's Expense Account,
Washington never drank more than a bottle of Madeira a night, as all the historians say, besides rum, punch and beer.And it was in surviving leadership blunders in the War of 1812 that a new American patriotism was born. It's all to our credit as Americans that we have taken our national anthem (officially so for nearly 80 years) from one of our least glorious conflicts, when most major public buildings of the capital city were burned, the militia ran away, and President James Madison and his wife had to flee. The message that a nation's spirit transcends its leadership is the polar opposite of the spirit of authoritarian music.
The President and Congress have enough on their plate. For the sake of a more perfect union, let's keep, celebrate, and do our best to sing our imperfect anthem.
The accused killer of a security guard in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, James W. von Brunn, followed a trajectory sadly common on the racist and terrorist fringe: good family, education at top schools, promising beginnings in the arts, science, or engineering -- and a puzzling slide into infamy. Think American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell (Brown), the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski (Harvard, Michigan), the Sept. 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta (Cairo, Technical U. Hamburg), and the physicist turned neo-Nazi publisher and novelist William Pierce (Rice, Colorado, fast-track tenure at Oregon). (Gary Weiss seems to have scooped the Times on von Brunn's wedding announcement in its own electronic archive.)
Von Brunn's first marriage had a further, bizarre, twist; in 1951, while still a promising young advertising man at a top New York agency, he had illustrated a reprint (edited by his English-born father-in-law, a writer also on Madison Avenue) of a sporting book by "Frank Forester." Title: Upland Shooting. Forester was the pseudonym of Henry William Herbert (1807-1858), an exiled, eccentric early nineteenth-century English aristocrat now considered the founder of American sports writing.
Herbert's suicidal rage in his decline was directed only against himself, but (as von Brunn probably did) he originally hoped to make his own death a spectacle, sending invitations to his chosen spot, a New York hotel. According to an article by Brad Parks in the Newark Star-Ledger, he is buried in a Newark cemetery with an epitaph of his own choosing: "Infelicissimus." ("Most unhappy")
Herbert and von Brunn had something else in common, according to a number of sources about each: violent outbursts linked to drinking. (Jeffrey Goldberg points to this revealing look at von Brunn's past in the New York Daily News.) One clue to von Brunn's fatal choices occurs in Joshua Wolf Schenk's "What Makes Us Happy" in the June Atlantic, about the Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who has been studying the long-term sources of life satisfaction for decades:
Von Brunn's first marriage had a further, bizarre, twist; in 1951, while still a promising young advertising man at a top New York agency, he had illustrated a reprint (edited by his English-born father-in-law, a writer also on Madison Avenue) of a sporting book by "Frank Forester." Title: Upland Shooting. Forester was the pseudonym of Henry William Herbert (1807-1858), an exiled, eccentric early nineteenth-century English aristocrat now considered the founder of American sports writing.
Herbert's suicidal rage in his decline was directed only against himself, but (as von Brunn probably did) he originally hoped to make his own death a spectacle, sending invitations to his chosen spot, a New York hotel. According to an article by Brad Parks in the Newark Star-Ledger, he is buried in a Newark cemetery with an epitaph of his own choosing: "Infelicissimus." ("Most unhappy")
Herbert and von Brunn had something else in common, according to a number of sources about each: violent outbursts linked to drinking. (Jeffrey Goldberg points to this revealing look at von Brunn's past in the New York Daily News.) One clue to von Brunn's fatal choices occurs in Joshua Wolf Schenk's "What Makes Us Happy" in the June Atlantic, about the Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who has been studying the long-term sources of life satisfaction for decades:
Again and again, Vaillant has returned to his major preoccupations. One is alcoholism, which he found is probably the horse, and not the cart, of pathology. "People often say, 'That poor man. His wife left him and he's taken to drink,'" Vaillant says. "But when you look closely, you see that he's begun to drink, and that has helped drive his wife away."
Fast food restaurants have pointed to the new, healthier items on their menus. And a few years ago, skeptics found the some of the salads contained more calories and fat than burgers in the same establishments.
But suppose that they are offering really healthy salads now. What if, in giving people a choice, these dishes really push diners toward the unhealthiest alternatives? That's called "vicarious goal fulfillment," and it's what Gavan Fitzsimons of Duke University and his coauthors found in a recently published laboratory experiment. Subjects were more likely to pick a really unhealthy item from the menu when a side salad was offered as an option. The researchers explain:
The only real solution I can see is to favor establishments that offer only healthy food. But given our supposed zest for better eating, why aren't there more of them? I'll have to think that question over and report later.
But suppose that they are offering really healthy salads now. What if, in giving people a choice, these dishes really push diners toward the unhealthiest alternatives? That's called "vicarious goal fulfillment," and it's what Gavan Fitzsimons of Duke University and his coauthors found in a recently published laboratory experiment. Subjects were more likely to pick a really unhealthy item from the menu when a side salad was offered as an option. The researchers explain:
Just because we consumers want to see healthier items available does not mean that we are going to choose them. We present evidence that for many consumers, the addition of healthy alternatives to food choice sets can, ironically, increase the consumption of very indulgent food items.People with the highest levels of self-control actually are more likely to choose unhealthy foods in the presence of healthy ones than those with low self-control.
The only real solution I can see is to favor establishments that offer only healthy food. But given our supposed zest for better eating, why aren't there more of them? I'll have to think that question over and report later.
The master furniture maker Sam Maloof, who died last month at the age of 93, is remembered in Janet Eastman's tribute in the Los Angeles Times. The son of Lebanese immigrants and a professional calligrapher, Maloof was a World War Two veteran who quit his first postwar job after the birth of his first child in 1949 because the salary was too low, then persisted 20 years before turning profit as an independent cabinetmarker. His work was coveted by celebrities and US Presidents, yet even with assistants he limited his output to about 100 pieces a year and refused lucrative offers to license plans that could never be executed to his superlative, intuitive standards, without written plans or metal hardware. His business card always read simply "woodworker."
Maloof owed the start of his fame to postwar economic difficulties:
The newlyweds didn't have money to furnish their first small house in Ontario, so Maloof designed and built an efficient room divider with an attached table and benches. He used discarded fir plywood and oak shipping crates and borrowed tools. Soon friends asked for copies of his no-frills furniture. . . .Maloof ultimately prospered in the marketplace because he cared so much for his work and so little for the market. As it turned out, the new wealth of the postwar era, especially in Southern California, created appreciative patrons. But I doubt Maloof would have abandoned his calling in their absence. We hear a lot about the thousands of hours of practice it takes to become an expert. But the masters have something more, a willingness to do the unreasonable in the cause of the thing itself.
Within two years of being self-employed, Better Homes and Gardens published photographs and plans of Maloof's furniture to show readers how to decorate economically.
Photo credit: Wikipedia
06/05/09 12:40 PM
This post is not necessarily hazardous to your empathy, compassion, and emotional stability
The Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Kevin O'Brien has stirred strong feelings with his warning that judicial empathy, as invoked by President Obama, is unconstitutional.
But let's not draw premature conclusions about the real world from early experimental data. Young, media-saturated people are volunteering for community service at a rate that should disarm at least some worries. If all the screen traffic and texting really are impairing our humanity, shouldn't the Millennials rather than the universally reviled Baby Boomers be the real Me Generation?
Anxiety over technology's effects on our own constitutions goes back a long way. From an Intel blog post, quoting Tom Standage's Victorian Internet, here's a 1868 speech by a New York businessman:
If he's right, one way to identify a proper Supreme Court candidate might be to find somebody who is a heavy technology user with a special taste for streaming video, according to neuroscience research described in The Times (London):I have scoured my pocket copy of the Constitution. Couldn't find a single reference to "empathy," though. I tried searching an online version, too, but when I typed "empathy" in the search window, the only answer I got back was, "Did you misspell something?"
I looked up the oath of office that Souter's successor will take. I don't see "empathy" there, either . . . .
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, announced recently that they had compiled compelling evidence that even the universal traits of human wisdom -- empathy, compassion, altruism, tolerance and emotional stability -- are hard-wired into our brains.And in particular:
Seriously, though,there are real concerns about the outcomes of childhood saturation with electronic media and communication, and I've expressed my own."Our poor brains are definitely suffering information overload," says Felix Economakis, a London-based chartered psychologist who specialises in stress. "Technology is making quantum leaps, bombarding us with new things to focus on, but we have not been able to catch up and adapt. Our brains' attention levels are finite. When everything is screaming at us, we start withdrawing so that normally nice people become unempathetic.
"The primitive fear centre in the brain, called the amygdala, operates in terms of fight or flight. Information overload makes it feel under threat and it shuts down higher brain regions that deal with empathy."
But let's not draw premature conclusions about the real world from early experimental data. Young, media-saturated people are volunteering for community service at a rate that should disarm at least some worries. If all the screen traffic and texting really are impairing our humanity, shouldn't the Millennials rather than the universally reviled Baby Boomers be the real Me Generation?
Anxiety over technology's effects on our own constitutions goes back a long way. From an Intel blog post, quoting Tom Standage's Victorian Internet, here's a 1868 speech by a New York businessman:
Telegraphy has enabled a rapid pace that keeps the merchant "in continual excitement, without time for quiet and rest". He goes on to describe how the poor chap "goes home after a day of hard work... to a late dinner, trying amid the family circle to forget business, when he is interrupted by a telegram from London... and the poor man must dispatch his dinner as hurriedly as possible in order to send off [a] message to California.As a species, we're usually better than we realize at adapting creatively to the changes our inventions generate.
The Wall Street Journal has an engrossing column by the distinguished writer and translator Susan Bernofsky on the Germanization of Donald Duck. As a graduate student and later as a publishing visitor I had been curious about the Federal Republic's hip cult of The (Original) Donald. Had I been missing some Aesopian subtext? Bernofsky has the answer: the creative magic of censorship. Here's how it happened:
To fend off political attacks, Donald's German publisher hired a Ph.D. art historian, who had never seen a comic book before, for reverse dumbing down, which she accomplished with her nation's celebrated Gründlichkeit (thoroughness):
The biggest positive unintended consequence of comics cleanups was at home. And it illustrates why human resilience is so intriguing. Many horror comic publishers and their artists were ruined by the Comics Code. One of the most notorious, William Gaines, closed his publications as well. (Before developing the horror genre, Gaines had inherited his father's insolvent company, Educational Comics, specializing in Bible stories and history. There's a good account here.) But he and his staff managed to turn one of them into a different kind of youth comic, the satirical magazine, Mad. No wonder its recycled icon, Alfred E. Neuman, had that grin.
Bonus for German readers, and other Donald fans who want to see a detailed map of Duckville and who can tolerate Web translation engines: From Die Zeit, the man who is mapping Entenhausen: "Wer wie Jürgen Wollina dreizehn Jahre lang die Geografie des fiktiven Entenhausen erforscht, muss ein wahrer Donaldist sein." (Whoever has been researching the geography of the fictional Entenhausen for thirteen years must be a true Donald scholar.) Now that's Gründlichkeit!
In the years following World War II, American influence in the newly formed Federal Republic was strong, but German cultural institutions were hesitant to sanction one U.S. import: the comic book. A law banning comics was proposed, and some American comics were eventually burned by school officials worried about their effects on students' morals and ability to express themselves in complete sentences.Some might call this extreme, since only a few years earlier, sufficiently tall German children could feast their eyes on the pornographically anti-Semitic Der Stürmer in street-corner display boxes. Or maybe that was part of the reason. After all, in the United States, the crusade to clean up the comic book industry, aimed not at Disney but at the gory fare that was the guilty pleasure of a teenage generation, was a high-minded German-born psychoanalyst named Dr. Frederic Wertham. Wertham was no McCarthyite or book burner but an early champion of civil rights. He subscribed to the idea, still held by many thoughtful people, that youthful media influence future mental well-being. A balanced review of Wertham's career and influence, by Jeet Heer, is here.
To fend off political attacks, Donald's German publisher hired a Ph.D. art historian, who had never seen a comic book before, for reverse dumbing down, which she accomplished with her nation's celebrated Gründlichkeit (thoroughness):
Her interpretations of the comic books often quote (and misquote) from the great classics of German literature, sometimes even inserting political subtexts into the duck tales. Dr. Fuchs both thickens and deepens Mr. Barks's often sparse dialogues, and the hilariousness of the result may explain why Donald Duck remains the most popular children's comic in Germany to this day.The German strategy wasn't unique. According to a Web article by the comics historian Dwight Decker, Disney reassured Swedish parents that their own edition was prepared by
Lecturer Per-Anders Westrin, Licentiate of Philosophy, distinguished psychologist and pedagogue.I'm not sure about the Swedish version, but the German Donald developed a durable cult following as a result of the initial pressure, amusing as it now appears in the age of youth texting culture, let alone Grand Theft Auto.
The biggest positive unintended consequence of comics cleanups was at home. And it illustrates why human resilience is so intriguing. Many horror comic publishers and their artists were ruined by the Comics Code. One of the most notorious, William Gaines, closed his publications as well. (Before developing the horror genre, Gaines had inherited his father's insolvent company, Educational Comics, specializing in Bible stories and history. There's a good account here.) But he and his staff managed to turn one of them into a different kind of youth comic, the satirical magazine, Mad. No wonder its recycled icon, Alfred E. Neuman, had that grin.
Bonus for German readers, and other Donald fans who want to see a detailed map of Duckville and who can tolerate Web translation engines: From Die Zeit, the man who is mapping Entenhausen: "Wer wie Jürgen Wollina dreizehn Jahre lang die Geografie des fiktiven Entenhausen erforscht, muss ein wahrer Donaldist sein." (Whoever has been researching the geography of the fictional Entenhausen for thirteen years must be a true Donald scholar.) Now that's Gründlichkeit!
Michael Osinski, now a Long Island oyster farmer, revisits his past as the programmer who did more than anybody else to enable the Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMOs) that brought down world markets, ultimately splitting income from sales of his $500,000-per-copy program when he worked with a Boston company that had bought it from a former employer.
Some cynical quotes from bosses are worthy of Wall Street and Liar's Poker, but my favorite is his observation of the effect of his product on the trading floors:
Some cynical quotes from bosses are worthy of Wall Street and Liar's Poker, but my favorite is his observation of the effect of his product on the trading floors:
The aim of software is, in a sense, to create an alternative reality. After all, when you use your cell phone, you simply want to push the fewest buttons possible and call, text, purchase, listen, download, e-mail, or browse. The power we all hold in our hands is shocking, yet it's controlled by a few swipes of a finger. The drive to simplify the user's contact with the machine has an inherent side effect of disguising the complexity of a given task. Over time, the users of any software are inured to the intricate nature of what they are doing. Also, as the software does more of the "thinking," the user does less.But earlier in the story there's another model of the process, and an observation of the glass ceiling for programmers on the old Wall Street:
Traders told us what they wanted, and we wrote the software code to make it possible. We were on the cutting edge. When I finished that project, I approached my former boss to ask if I could move to the trading desk, to where the big money was.The traders' eventually fatal style wasn't a set of bad habits they picked up from using the software; it was the rationale for writing it in the first place, to get an edge by not having to think about decisions. Greed and automation in the mortgage business were like a binary explosive. No wonder even Osinski's friends called him "the Facilitator.""Mike," he told me when denying my request, "can you really look for people dumber than you and then take advantage of them? That's what trading is all about."
Yes, I assured him, yes, yes. But no deal.
Dan Neil's column on the General Motors bankruptcy in the Los Angeles Times includes two paragraphs on an aspect of GM's troubles that deserves more attention:
The challenge for GM is not to attempt an environmentally and commercially futile retro strategy, but to create excitement about buying and driving cars. Significantly it was the year after Earl's retirement in 1958 that another marketing genius, William Bernbach, launched the "Think Small" campaign for Volkswagen, which Advertising Age has deemed the best of the twentieth century. (See my friend Phil Patton's classic Bug for the still hard to believe story of how an upstart Jewish agency turned Hitler's pet project into an American icon.) Bureaucratic inertia needn't be all-powerful. But to overcome it, the company needs a next-generation design guru combining the flair of Earl with the outsider hipness of Bernbach for a time when refinement must replace brute horsepower.
GM also struggled with its vast and unresponsive, self-perpetuating bureaucracy. When Chairman Roger Smith -- the "Roger" in Michael Moore's skewering "Roger & Me" documentary -- attempted to streamline GM's back-of-the-house operations in the 1980s, the result was chaos.Bureaucratic (and union; it was a symbiotic culture) resistance is at the heart of the turnaround-skeptic persuasion. And nostalgia for the tailfin era doesn't help. But new GM management does have a chance to resuscitate the company's legacy. Alfred P. Sloan's management theories are what generations of business school professors once taught, but Harley Earl's designs were what made GM a world-renowned collection of brands.
Divisional managers openly subverted the reorganization, hiring new people and reestablishing the old chains of command until they had created a weird rump parliament inside the company. GM's capital outlays soared, while sales and quality plunged.
The challenge for GM is not to attempt an environmentally and commercially futile retro strategy, but to create excitement about buying and driving cars. Significantly it was the year after Earl's retirement in 1958 that another marketing genius, William Bernbach, launched the "Think Small" campaign for Volkswagen, which Advertising Age has deemed the best of the twentieth century. (See my friend Phil Patton's classic Bug for the still hard to believe story of how an upstart Jewish agency turned Hitler's pet project into an American icon.) Bureaucratic inertia needn't be all-powerful. But to overcome it, the company needs a next-generation design guru combining the flair of Earl with the outsider hipness of Bernbach for a time when refinement must replace brute horsepower.
Edward Tenner
