March 2013 – Page 3 – artdiamondblog.com

Open Systems Limit the Integrated Vision that Creates Great Products

The following passage is Steve Jobs speaking, as quoted by Walter Isaacson.

(p. 568) People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don’t have the time to think about this stuff 24/7. If you have an extreme passion for producing great products, it pushes you to be integrated, to connect your hardware and your software and content management. You want to break new ground, so you have to do it yourself. If you want to allow your products to be open to other hardware or software, you have to give up some of your vision.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Ibrahim’s Celtel Provided Private Infrastructure to Aid African Growth

Source of book image: http://media.wiley.com/product_data/coverImage300/04/04707432/0470743204.jpg

I was searching for a biography of the entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim who founded the innovative African cell phone company Celtel. The closest I have been able to find so far is Less Walk, More Talk which looks promising, but which I have not yet read.
Arguably, cell phones in Africa have provided important infrastructure that has made it somewhat easier to be productive there, and hence made a contribution to economic growth.

The book is:
Southwood, Russell. Less Walk More Talk: How Celtel and the Mobile Phone Changed Africa. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009.

Chicago Gun Ban Laws Do Not Stop Chicago Gun Deaths

(p. A1) CHICAGO — Not a single gun shop can be found in this city because they are outlawed. Handguns were banned in Chicago for decades, too, until 2010, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that was going too far, leading city leaders to settle for restrictions some describe as the closest they could get legally to a ban without a ban. Despite a continuing legal fight, Illinois remains the only state in the nation with no provision to let private citizens carry guns in public.
And yet Chicago, a city with no civilian gun ranges and bans on both assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, finds itself laboring to stem a flood of gun violence that contributed to more than 500 homicides last year and at least 40 killings already in 2013, including a fatal shooting of a 15-year-old girl on Tuesday.
To gun rights advocates, the city provides stark evidence that even some of the toughest restrictions fail to make places safer. “The gun laws in Chicago only restrict the law-abiding citizens and they’ve essentially made the citizens prey,” said Richard A. Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association.

For the full story, see:
MONICA DAVEY. “Strict Gun Laws in Chicago Can’t Stem Fatal Shots.” The New York Times (Weds., January 30, 2013): A1 & A18.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 29, 2013, and has the slightly different title “Strict Gun Laws in Chicago Can’t Stem Fatal Shots.”)

Most in NYC Oppose Bloomberg’s Nanny State Soda Ban

“Theodore Ogunbiyi-Roche, 10, who is visiting from London, drank a large soda in Times Square . . . ” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A18) . . . , New Yorkers are cool to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to prohibit sales of large sugary drinks in city restaurants, stadiums and movie theaters, according to a . . . poll by The New York Times.

Six in 10 residents said the mayor’s soda plan was a bad idea, compared with 36 percent who called it a good idea. A majority in every borough was opposed; Bronx and Queens residents were more likely than Manhattanites to say the plan was a bad idea.
. . .
. . . those opposed overwhelmingly cited a sense that Mr. Bloomberg was overreaching with the plan and that consumers should have the freedom to make a personal choice . . .
“The ban is at the point where it is an infringement of civil liberties,” Liz Hare, 43, a scientific researcher in Queens, said in a follow-up interview. “There are many other things that people do that aren’t healthy, so I think it’s a big overreach.”
Bob Barocas, 64, of Queens, put it more bluntly: “This is like the nanny state going off the wall.”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and MARJORIE CONNELLY. “60% in City Oppose Soda Ban, Calling It an Overreach by Bloomberg, Poll Finds.” The New York Times (Thurs., August 23, 2012): A18.
(Note: ellipses in caption and article added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 22, 2012, and the title “60% in City Oppose Bloomberg’s Soda Ban, Poll Finds.”)

Steve Jobs: “Never Rely on Market Research”

The following passage is Steve Jobs speaking, as quoted by Walter Isaacson.

(p. 567) Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!'” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Entrepreneur Ping Fu Learned the Resilience of Bamboo

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) The history of American business is full of immigrant success stories–of men and women who flee poverty and oppression in their home countries, arrive on our shores with only pennies in their pockets, and go on to build companies that generate wealth, create jobs, and provide innovative products and services.

Count among them Ping Fu, the Chinese-born chief executive of the high-tech company Geomagic, which provides 3D-imaging for such modern-day miracles as customized prosthetic limbs. If your child wears orthodontic braces, chances are that they were designed for his teeth with the help of Geomagic technology. Ms. Fu founded the company in 1997, 13 years after arriving in San Francisco with $80 in her purse and three English phrases in her vocabulary: “hello,” “thank you” and “help.”
. . .
In the U.S., Ms. Fu worked as a maid, a waitress and a baby sitter while learning English and studying computer science. She eventually landed at Bell Labs in Illinois before striking out on her own. “I was a reluctant and unlikely entrepreneur,” she writes. In China, “I had been hardwired to think that money was evil, and traumatized as a child because of my family’s success.” Encouraged by her Shanghai Papa to follow in the family’s entrepreneurial tradition, she and her then-husband launched Geomagic. In her book, she traces the challenges she faced in building a company–obtaining funding, winning customers, managing a growing staff of professionals.
Ms. Fu’s life story raises a core question about the development of the human psyche: Why is it that, confronted with the kind of horrors that Ms. Fu experienced as a child, some survivors succeed in later life while others fail, overcome by the trials they endured?
Ms. Fu credits the tranquil, happy childhood she experienced for the first eight years of her life. She also points to the Taoist teachings of her Shanghai Papa, who taught her to admire the flexible nature of the bamboo trees that grew in the family garden. Bamboo, he told her, “suggests resilience, meaning that we have the ability to bounce back from even the most difficult times.”

For the full review, see:
MELANIE KIRKPATRICK. “BOOKSHELF; The Art Of Resilience; Ping Fu endured gang-rape and political prison in China before arriving on our shores and founding her own high-tech firm.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., January 9, 2013): D7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 8, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Fu, Ping. Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds. New York: Portfolio, 2012.

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Emissions Have Little Effect on Global Warming

My colleague Mark Wohar, and his co-author David McMillan, have used sophisticated econometrics to analyze a very long time-series dataset on carbon dioxide (CO2) and temperature. They find that CO2 has little, if any, effect on temperature. Here is the abstract of their paper:

(p. 3683) The debate regarding rising temperatures and CO2 emissions has attracted the attention of economists employing recent econometric techniques. This article extends the previous literature using a dataset that covers 800,000 years, as well as a shorter dataset, and examines the interaction between temperature and CO2 emissions. Unit root tests reveal a difference between the two datasets. For the long dataset, all tests support the view that both temperature and CO2 are stationary around a constant. For the short dataset, temperature exhibits trend-stationary behaviour, while CO2 contains a unit root. This result is robust to nonlinear trends or trend breaks. Modelling the long dataset reveals that while contemporaneous CO2 appears positive and significant in the temperature equation, including lags results in a joint effect that is near zero. This result is confirmed using a different lag structure and Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model. A Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach to account for endogeneity suggests an insignificant relationship. In sum, the key result from our analysis is that CO2 has, at best, a weak relationship with temperature, while there is no evidence of trending when using a sufficiently long dataset. Thus, as a secondary result we highlight the danger of using a small sample in this context.

Source:
McMillan, David G., and Mark E. Wohar. “The Relationship between Temperature and CO2 Emissions: Evidence from a Short and Very Long Dataset.” Applied Economics 45, no. 26 (2013): 3683-90.
(Note: bold added.)

Stanford Meta-Study Finds Organic Food Is No More Nutritious than Much Cheaper Non-organic Food

“Conventional strawberries in Watsonville, California. Researchers say organic foods are no more nutritious and no less likely to be contaminated.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A20) Does an organic strawberry contain more vitamin C than a conventional one?

Maybe — or maybe not.
Stanford University scientists have weighed in on the “maybe not” side of the debate after an extensive examination of four decades of research comparing organic and conventional foods.
They concluded that fruits and vegetables labeled organic were, on average, no more nutritious than their conventional counterparts, which tend to be far less expensive. Nor were they any less likely to be contaminated by dangerous bacteria like E. coli.
The researchers also found no obvious health advantages to organic meats.
. . .
The conclusions will almost certainly fuel the debate over whether organic foods are a smart choice for healthier living or a marketing tool that gulls people into overpaying. The production of organic food is governed by a raft of regulations that generally prohibit the use of synthetic pesticides, hormones and additives.
The organic produce market in the United States has grown quickly, up 12 percent last year, to $12.4 billion, compared with 2010, according to the Organic Trade Association. Organic meat has a smaller share of the American market, at $538 million last year, the trade group said.
. . .
In the study — known as a meta-analysis, in which previous findings are aggregated but no new laboratory work is conducted — researchers combined data from 237 studies, examining a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and meats. For four years, they performed statistical analyses looking for signs of health benefits from adding organic foods to the diet.
The researchers did not use any outside financing for their research. “I really wanted us to have no perception of bias,” Dr. Bravata said.

For the full story, see:
KENNETH CHANG. “Stanford Scientists Cast Doubt on Advantages of Organic Meat and Produce.” The New York Times (Tues., September 4, 2012): A20.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date September 3, 2012.)

Profits Allow You to Make Great Products, But the Products, Not the Profits, Are the Motivation

The following passage is Steve Jobs speaking, as quoted by Walter Isaacson.

(p. 567) My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Organic Food May Be Less Healthy than Non-Organic Food

Source of book image: http://www.leckeragency.com/sites/default/files/books/Schwarcz,%20Joe%20-%20The%20Right%20Chemistry%20Cover.jpeg

(p. D7) . . . , when did “chemical” become a dirty word? That’s a question raised by one of Canada’s brightest scientific minds: Joe Schwarcz, director of the Office for Science and Society at McGill University in Montreal. Dr. Schwarcz, who has received high honors from Canadian and American scientific societies, is the author of several best-selling books that attempt to set the record straight on a host of issues that commonly concern health-conscious people.

I’ve read two of his books, “Science, Sense and Nonsense” (published in 2009) and “The Right Chemistry” (2012), and recently attended a symposium on the science of food that Dr. Schwarcz organized at McGill.
What follows are tips from his books and the symposium that can help you make wiser choices about what does, and does not, pass your lips in 2013.
. . .
ORGANIC OR NOT? Wherever I shop for food these days, I find an ever-widening array of food products labeled “organic” and “natural.” But are consumers getting the health benefits they pay a premium for?
Until the 20th century, Dr. Schwarcz wrote, all farming was “organic,” with manure and compost used as fertilizer and “natural” compounds of arsenic, mercury and lead used as pesticides.
Might manure used today on organic farms contain disease-causing micro-organisms? Might organic produce unprotected by insecticides harbor cancer-causing molds? It’s a possibility, Dr. Schwarcz said. But consumers aren’t looking beyond the organic sales pitch.
Also questionable is whether organic foods, which are certainly kinder to the environment, are more nutritious. Though some may contain slightly higher levels of essential micronutrients, like vitamin C, the difference between them and conventionally grown crops may depend more on where they are produced than how.
A further concern: Organic producers disavow genetic modification, which can be used to improve a crop’s nutritional content, enhance resistance to pests and diminish its need for water. A genetically modified tomato developed at the University of Exeter, for example, contains nearly 80 times the antioxidants of conventional tomatoes. Healthier, yes — but it can’t be called organic.

For the full story, see:
JANE E. BRODY. “PERSONAL HEALTH; What You Think You Know (but Don’t) About Wise Eating.” The New York Times (Tues., January 1, 2013): D7.
(Note: ellipses added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date DECEMBER 31, 2012.)

The Schwarcz books mentioned above, are:
Schwarcz, Joe. The Right Chemistry: 108 Enlightening, Nutritious, Health-Conscious and Occasionally Bizarre Inquiries into the Science of Daily Life. Toronto, Ontario: Doubleday Canada, 2012.
Schwarcz, Joe. Science, Sense & Nonsense. Toronto, Ontario: Doubleday Canada, 2009.