Month: September 2015

“A Collective Thumbing of the Nose at” Burma’s Dictatorship

(p. A9) For a young man born in a premodern dictatorship, Nway appeared to have it all. The son of a physician, he grew up in the town of Twantay, Burma, with the comforts typically reserved for the country’s military elite. He dreamed of becoming a doctor and raising a family of his own.
That all changed one night after the abortive elections of 1990, when Nway’s father, a supporter of the democracy movement, was arrested on unnamed charges and sentenced to 20 years in prison. There, he was kept in solitary confinement and endured routine beatings, interrogations and mock suffocations until he died of “complications of the liver” in October 1996.
Nway’s father was gone but not forgotten: His awza, or influence, lives on. Inspired by his father’s legacy, Nway dropped out of medical school and devoted his life to bringing liberal democracy to Burma.
. . .
At one point in the book, Nway is pursued by the “dogs” of Burma’s security forces and happens upon some old acquaintances at a beer den. The friends swallow their fear and summon passersby to help protect him. They sit down, building “a fort around Nway” in “a collective thumbing of the nose at the Special Branch police” until he is able to slip away on a motorbike.
For Ms. Schrank, this anecdote embodies the philosophy that ultimately makes the dissidents’ appeal to the people of Burma successful. In her final chapter she notes that it has now become “cool” to tie across your forehead a strip of cloth with the sign of the NLD and support the party “that only months before had belonged to the underground students and come most often with a one-way ticket to prison.”

For the full review, see:
NICHOLAS DESATNICK. “BOOKSHELF; Freedom Fighters; To understand how Burma’s military junta began coming apart at the seams, you need to meet this band of ‘oddballs and dreamers.'” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 31, 2015): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added, italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 30, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Schrank, Delphine. The Rebel of Rangoon: A Tale of Defiance and Deliverance in Burma. New York: Nation Books, 2015.

Increasing Recalls of Organic Food Due to Bacterial Contamination

(p. B3) New data collected by Stericycle, a company that handles recalls for businesses, shows a sharp jump in the number of recalls of organic food products.
Organic food products accounted for 7 percent of all food units recalled so far this year, compared with 2 percent of those recalled last year, according to data from the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture that Stericycle uses to compile its quarterly report on recalls.
In 2012 and 2013, only 1 percent of total units of food recalled were organic.
Kevin Pollack, a vice president at Stericycle, said the growing consumer and corporate demand for organic ingredients was at least partly responsible for the increase.
“What’s striking is that since 2012, all organic recalls have been driven by bacterial contamination, like salmonella, listeria and hepatitis A, rather than a problem with a label,” Mr. Pollack said. “This is a fairly serious and really important issue because a lot of consumers just aren’t aware of it.”

For the full story, see:
STEPHANIE STROM. “Private Analysis Shows a Sharp Increase in the Number of Organic Food Recalls.” The New York Times (Fri., Aug. 21, 2015): B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 20, 2015, and has the title “Recalls of Organic Food on the Rise, Report Says.” The last paragraph quoted above differs in the print and online versions; the version quoted is the print version. The online version of the paragraph is: “According to Stericycle, 87 percent of organic recalls since 2012 were for bacterial contamination, like salmonella and listeria, rather than a problem with a label. “This is a fairly serious and really important issue because a lot of consumers just aren’t aware of it,” Mr. Pollack said.”)

Disneyland “Immersed the Viewer in the Story Itself”

(p. A11) On July 17, 1955, about 28,000 people (roughly half of whom had been sold counterfeit tickets) walked, for the first time, through the gates of Disneyland and into history. To say it didn’t go smoothly would be an understatement: The temperature was 101 degrees (hot, even for Southern California) and difficulties with both the plumbing system and the labor unions made it impossible for anyone to get a drink. Only a handful of the rides and attractions were open at all, and most of those were continually breaking down and closing. Even the animals–the horses and mules in the Wild West attractions–refused to cooperate. That walk may have been historic, but it was made even more difficult by all the asphalt–poured only a few hours earlier–that kept sticking to everyone’s shoes.
. . .
With Disneyland, Walt Disney took the concept of narrative to the extreme: Rather than merely showing the viewer a story, even with the heightened naturalism of sound, color and a combination of cartoon characters and real actors, the theme park actually immersed the viewer in the story itself.
. . .
Walt Disney–who famously said, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world”–would be pleased that in the half century since his death, his creation has been constantly tinkered with. Although very little remains of the park that opened in 1955, he would still recognize it, and love it.

For the full commentary, see:
WILL FRIEDWALD. “CULTURAL COMMENTARY; Finding Disneyland; Celebrating 60 Years of Disneyland, a Park that Was ahead of Its Time.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 15, 2015): D5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 14, 2015, and has the title “CULTURAL COMMENTARY; Celebrating 60 Years of Disneyland; In honor of Disneyland’s 60th birthday, a look back at a park that was ahead of its time.”)

Fire Cooked Carbohydrates Fed Bigger Brains

(p. D5) Scientists have long recognized that the diets of our ancestors went through a profound shift with the addition of meat. But in the September issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, researchers argue that another item added to the menu was just as important: carbohydrates, bane of today’s paleo diet enthusiasts. In fact, the scientists propose, by incorporating cooked starches into their diet, our ancestors were able to fuel the evolution of our oversize brains.
. . .
Cooked meat provided increased protein, fat and energy, helping hominins grow and thrive. But Mark G. Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, and his colleagues argue that there was another important food sizzling on the ancient hearth: tubers and other starchy plants.
Our bodies convert starch into glucose, the body’s fuel. The process begins as soon as we start chewing: Saliva contains an enzyme called amylase, which begins to break down starchy foods.
Amylase doesn’t work all that well on raw starches, however; it is much more effective on cooked foods. Cooking makes the average potato about 20 times as digestible, Dr. Thomas said: “It’s really profound.”
. . .
Dr. Thomas and his colleagues propose that the invention of fire, not farming, gave rise to the need for more amylase. Once early humans started cooking starchy foods, they needed more amylase to unlock the precious supply of glucose.
Mutations that gave people extra amylase helped them survive, and those mutations spread because of natural selection. That glucose, Dr. Thomas and his colleagues argue, provided the fuel for bigger brains.

For the full story, see:
Carl Zimmer. “MATTER; For Evolving Brains, a ‘Paleo’ Diet of Carbs.” The New York Times (Tues., AUG. 18, 2015): D5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 13, 2015.)

The academic article summarized in the passages above, is:
Hardy, Karen, Jennie Brand-Miller, Katherine D. Brown, Mark G. Thomas, and Les Copeland. “The Importance of Dietary Carbohydrate in Human Evolution.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 90, no. 3 (Sept. 2015): 251-68.

Should We Have a Right to the Silence that “Contributes to Creativity and Innovation”?

(p. D5) The benefits of silence are off the books. They are not measured in the gross domestic product, yet the availability of silence surely contributes to creativity and innovation. They do not show up explicitly in social statistics such as level of educational achievement, yet one consumes a great deal of silence in the course of becoming educated.
. . .
Or do we? Silence is now offered as a luxury good. In the business-class lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I heard only the occasional tinkling of a spoon against china. I saw no advertisements on the walls. This silence, more than any other feature, is what makes it feel genuinely luxurious. When you step inside and the automatic doors whoosh shut behind you, the difference is nearly tactile, like slipping out of haircloth into satin. Your brow unfurrows, your neck muscles relax; after 20 minutes you no longer feel exhausted.
Outside, in the peon section, is the usual airport cacophony. . . .
. . .
To engage in inventive thinking during those idle hours spent at an airport requires silence.
. . .
I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested.

For the full commentary, see:
MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD. “OPINION; The Cost of Paying Attention.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., MARCH 8, 2015): 5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MARCH 7, 2015.)

The commentary quoted above is related to the author’s book:
Crawford, Matthew B. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

More Danger from Existing Artificial Stupidity than from Fictional Artificial Intelligence

(p. B6) In the kind of artificial intelligence, or A.I., that most people seem to worry about, computers decide people are a bad idea, so they kill them. That is undeniably bad for the human race, but it is a potentially smart move by the computers.
But the real worry, specialists in the field say, is a computer program rapidly overdoing a single task, with no context. A machine that makes paper clips proceeds unfettered, one example goes, and becomes so proficient that overnight we are drowning in paper clips.
In other words, something really dumb happens, at a global scale. As for those “Terminator” robots you tend to see on scary news stories about an A.I. apocalypse, forget it.
“What you should fear is a computer that is competent in one very narrow area, to a bad degree,” said Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute, a group dedicated to limiting the risks from A.I.
In late June, when a worker in Germany was killed by an assembly line robot, Mr. Tegmark said, “it was an example of a machine being stupid, not doing something mean but treating a person like a piece of metal.”
. . .
“These doomsday scenarios confuse the science with remote philosophical problems about the mind and consciousness,” Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a nonprofit that explores artificial intelligence, said. “If more people learned how to write software, they’d see how literal-minded these overgrown pencils we call computers actually are.”
What accounts for the confusion? One big reason is the way computer scientists work. “The term ‘A.I.’ came about in the 1950s, when people thought machines that think were around the corner,” Mr. Etzioni said. “Now we’re stuck with it.”
It is still a hallmark of the business. Google’s advanced A.I. work is at a company it acquired called DeepMind. A pioneering company in the field was called Thinking Machines. Researchers are pursuing something called Deep Learning, another suggestion that we are birthing intelligence.
. . .
DeepMind made a program that mastered simple video games, but it never took the learning from one game into another. The 22 rungs of a neural net it climbs to figure out what is in a picture do not operate much like human image recognition and are still easily defeated.

For the full story, see:
QUENTIN HARDY. “The Real Threat Computers Pose: Artificial Stupidity, Not Intelligence.” The New York Times (Mon., JULY 13, 2015): B6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 11, 2015, and has the title “The Real Threat Posed by Powerful Computers.”)

How Jack Dorsey Achieves Work-Life Balance: “I Don’t Have a Family”

(p. B1) Maybe Jack Dorsey needs to clone himself.
On July 1, the technology entrepreneur took on the challenge of turning around Twitter, the social media site that he co-founded and that he was asked to run as interim chief executive. At the same time, Mr. Dorsey has filed confidential paperwork to sell stock to the public in the other company where he is chief executive, Square, a mobile payments provider, a person briefed on the action said on Friday [July 24, 2015].
The collision of events adds fodder to one of Silicon Valley’s hottest topics: how Mr. Dorsey will juggle the companies, and whether he will forgo responsibilities at one to concentrate on the other.
. . .
(p. B2) On Tuesday [July 28, 2015], Mr. Dorsey will face Twitter investors when he reports the San Francisco-based company’s quarterly earnings. The executive has been preparing for the event, where his performance will be scrutinized.
Mr. Dorsey has also spent time at Square, which has offices about a block away from Twitter’s on Market Street in San Francisco. Last week, he moderated a panel discussion on women in technology at Square’s twice-monthly staff meeting, featuring three women — Sarah Friar, Alyssa Henry and Francoise Brougher — who head finance, engineering and business operations, respectively, at the mobile payments company.
During a part of the session that focused on parenting, according to a person who attended the meeting, Mr. Dorsey was asked how he managed to achieve work-life balance. He told the audience, “Uh, I don’t have a family.”

For the full story, see:
MIKE ISAAC and VINDU GOEL. “Square’s Filing Turns Talk to Dorsey’s Juggling Skills.” The New York Times (Sat., JULY 25, 2015): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed dates, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JULY 24, 2015.)

The Dynamism of Venturesome New Yorkers: “If You Want Country Living, Move to the Country”

(p. A18) One cannot live any closer to the terminals of La Guardia Airport than the residents of East Elmhurst, Queens. Some homes sit only a few hundred yards away from the control tower, on the opposite side of the Grand Central Parkway. The new $4 billion airport hub envisioned for the site, announced this week by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Vice President Joseph R. Biden, would be even closer.
So it might be assumed that the promise of years of heavy-duty construction and the associated noise, traffic and dust would fill residents with dread.
Not quite.
“We live in New York City, honey,” said Michele Mongeluzo, 56, whose house sits on a rise just south of the parkway, offering an unobstructed view of the airport and the proposed construction site. “If you want country living, move to the country.”
In interviews this week along the blocks closest to the airport, residents almost universally said that they not only had no trepidation about the construction but that they also actually welcomed it. Improvements, they said, were long overdue.
Furthermore, they suggested, what was a little construction on top of the aural challenges — the roaring jet engines, the chop of helicopter rotors, the incessant highway traffic — that they had already contended with and apparently overcome?
“If it’s noisy, I’m used to it,” said Freddy Fuhrtz, 75, who retired as an employee in the cargo division of Pan Am and still lives in the two-story house on 92nd Street where he grew up and raised his children. “It’s progress.”

For the full story, see:
KIRK SEMPLE. “Construction Plans Don’t Faze Airport Neighbors.” The New York Times (Fri., JULY 31, 2015): A18 & A21.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 30, 2015, and has the title “Construction Plans for La Guardia Airport Don’t Faze Its Neighbors.”)

Too Much Positive Thinking Creates Relaxed Complacency

(p. D5) In her smart, lucid book, “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation,” Dr. Oettingen critically re-examines positive thinking and give readers a more nuanced — and useful — understanding of motivation based on solid empirical evidence.
Conventional wisdom has it that dreams are supposed to excite us and inspire us to act. Putting this to the test, Dr. Oettingen recruits a group of undergraduate college students and randomly assigns them to two groups. She instructs the first group to fantasize that the coming week will be a knockout: good grades, great parties and the like; students in the second group are asked to record all their thoughts and daydreams about the coming week, good and bad.
Strikingly, the students who were told to think positively felt far less energized and accomplished than those who were instructed to have a neutral fantasy. Blind optimism, it turns out, does not motivate people; instead, as Dr. Oettingen shows in a series of clever experiments, it creates a sense of relaxation complacency. It is as if in dreaming or fantasizing about something we want, our minds are tricked into believing we have attained the desired goal.
There appears to be a physiological basis for this effect: Studies show that just fantasizing about a wish lowers blood pressure, while thinking of that same wish — and considering not getting it — raises blood pressure. It may feel better to daydream, but it leaves you less energized and less prepared for action.
. . .
In one study, she taught a group of third graders a mental-contrast exercise: They were told to imagine a candy prize they would receive if they finished a language assignment, and then to imagine several of their own behaviors that could prevent them from winning. A second group of students was instructed only to fantasize about winning the prize. The students who did the mental contrast outperformed those who just dreamed.

For the full review, see:
RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. “Books; Dare to Dream of Falling Short.” The New York Times (Tues., DEC. 23, 2014): D5.
(Note: italics in original; ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date DEC. 22, 2014.)

The book under review, is:
Oettingen, Gabriele. Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. New York: Current, 2014.

Refugee Walks Nearly 30 Miles Across English Channel, Dodging Hurtling Trains in Dark, Before His Arrest

(p. A1) LONDON — For one African migrant, there was nothing left to lose.
The migrant, Abdul Rahman Haroun, 40, risked his life this week by climbing four fences, evading international search teams and as many as 400 security cameras, and walking about 30 miles in the darkness of the Channel Tunnel in an effort to reach Britain from Calais, France. He dodged trains traveling to London from Paris as they hurtled by at up to 100 miles per hour.
He had made it nearly to the other side, Folkestone, England, before he was caught and arrested on Tuesday [August 4, 2015].
Three days later news of Mr. Haroun’s perilous journey was still reverberating in Britain, a country polarized by a spiraling migration crisis. Though much about him remains unknown — the police said he is Sudanese and has no fixed address — his story of determination had reduced the sprawling migration crisis to a human scale, . . .

For the full story, see:
DAN BILEFSKY. “In a First, a Sudanese Migrant Nearly Crosses the English Channel on Foot.” The New York Times (Sat., AUG. 8, 2015): A1 & A8.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 7, 2015.)