Month: March 2016

Ugly, Invasive, Depressing Federal LEDs Disrupt Sleep and Increase Risk of Breast Cancer

(p. B1) In my repellently contented middle age, I don’t seek blue light. Like most sane people, I spurn restaurants whose lighting glares. I recoil from mirrors under fluorescent tubes. I switch on an overhead only to track down a water bug while wielding a flip-flop. Yet each evening from March onward, in the Brooklyn neighborhood where I live part of the year, it seems as if the overhead is always on.
Along with other parts of South Brooklyn, Windsor Terrace is an early recipient of the Department of Transportation’s new light-emitting diode streetlights. New Yorkers who have not yet been introduced to these lights: We are living in your future.
Our new street “lamps” — too cozy a word for the icy arrays now screaming through our windows — are meant to be installed across all five boroughs by 2017. Indeed, any resident of an American municipality that has money problems (and what city doesn’t?) should take heed.
In interviews with the media, my fellow experimental subjects have compared the nighttime environment under the new streetlights to a film set, a prison yard, “a strip mall in outer space” and “the mother ship coming in for a landing” in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Although going half-blind at 58, I can read by the beam that the new lamp blasts into our front room without tapping our own Con Ed service. Once the LEDs went in, our next-door neighbor began walking her dog at night in sunglasses.
Medical research has firmly established that blue-spectrum LED light can disrupt sleep patterns. This is the same illumination that radiates in far smaller doses from smartphone and computer screens, to which we’re advised to avoid exposure for at least an hour before bed, because it can suppress the production of melatonin. . . .
While the same light has also been associated with increased risk of breast cancer and mood disorders, in all honesty my biggest beef with LEDs has nothing to do with health issues. These lights are ugly. They’re invasive. They’re depressing. New York deserves better.
. . .
Even fiscally and environmentally conscientious California has compromised on this point. Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco have all opted for yellow-rich LEDs. These cities have willingly made the modest 10-15 percent sacrifice in efficiency for an ambience that more closely embodies what Germans call Gemütlichkeit and Danes call hygge: an atmosphere of hospitality, homeyness, intimacy and well-being.
. . .
As currently conceived, the D.O.T.’s streetlight plan amounts to mass civic vandalism. If my focus on aesthetics makes this issue sound trivial, the sensory experience of daily life is not a frivolous matter. Even in junior high school, I understood that lighting isn’t only about what you see, but how you feel.

For the full commentary, see:
LIONEL SHRIVER. “Ruining That Moody Urban Glow.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., OCT. 18, 2015): 5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 17, 2015.)

Working for Uber Allows Flexibility for Aspiring Actors

(p. 8) Not long ago, being a waiter at the Ivy or a salesman at Fred Segal was considered the reliable way to earn a living until one got a big break in a Wes Anderson film and got picked up by a major Hollywood agency like CAA or WME.
But Krystal Harris, 27, an actress who appeared in the recent Kevin Hart film “About Last Night,” quickly realized those sorts of jobs were overrated. So now she works primarily for Lyft.
“I was a lead hostess at three different restaurants,” Ms. Harris said. “It really didn’t allow for much flexibility at all. I ended up getting fired for going to an audition. Even when I got my shifts covered, they gave me a hard time.”
In 2013, she turned her Ford Escape into a roving cash register. She had total control over her hours, never needing to clear her schedule with anyone for a last-minute audition. There weren’t even rules against working for both Uber and Lyft.
When acting gigs were hard to come by, she drove as many as 40 hours a week, earning what she estimated was about $20 an hour after Uber and Lyft took their commissions (generally around 20 percent). If the casting gods shined on her, she simply shut off the apps.
“When I’m really on a roll, I don’t have to work,” she said. “As long as my insurance and registration are up to date, I can go back.”
Mr. Totten had a similar experience. Before driving for Uber, he worked at a half-dozen restaurants. All those jobs ended when he had to take off for auditions, or was caught trying to learn lines on the job. Once, he refused to shave because a casting director was looking for someone with stubble.
“My look is my scruff,” said Mr. Totten, who is blond and blue-eyed, with a James Dean meets 90210 appeal. “As soon as I started driving for Uber, things got better.”
. . .
(p. 9) Recently, Mr. Totten considered getting a new side job. “I’m probably going to do Postmates,” he said, referring to the app-based service that delivers artisanal food in under 60 minutes and guarantees its drivers a minimum of $25 an hour. “You can’t live on this anymore.”

For the full story, see:
JACOB BERNSTEIN. “Drivers With Head Shots.” The New York Times, SundayStyles Section (Sun., JAN. 24, 2016): 1 & 8-9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 23, 2016, and has the title “The New Side Job for Actors and Artists in Los Angeles: Driving.”)

Regulatory Costs Slow Development of Lifesaving Antibiotics

(p. A13) In the 1980s, 29 new antibiotics were approved; another 23 were approved during the 1990s. But only nine new drugs made it to market from 2000-10, and a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts shows few drugs in development for the most serious microbial threats such as multidrug resistant Acinetobacter and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
. . .
To revitalize the search for lifesaving antibiotics, the Food and Drug Administration needs a new way to approve them. Legislation proposed in both the House and the Senate would create a new regulatory pathway that would enable the FDA to approve drugs specifically for patients whose serious infections can’t be treated with existing drugs, and for whom there are few or no other treatment options.
For these patients, the FDA would be empowered to approve new drugs based on fewer or smaller clinical studies than for antibiotics intended for broader use. The goal is to reduce the cost of development and accelerate the availability of new drugs for a targeted public health need.

For the full commentary, see:
JONATHAN LEFF And ALLAN COUKELL. “How to End the Regulatory Slowdown for New Antibiotics; With the threat from lethal drug-resistant bacteria growing, the FDA needs to speed up its approval process.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 3, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 2, 2015.)

“Ordinary People Should Have a Go”

(p. A11) The classical archaeologist and now big-picture historian Ian Morris, whose last book argued that war is good for you, now explains why coal is too. In “Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels,” Mr. Morris puts “energy capture” at the center of human values since the Ice Age, through three eras: the Foragers to begin with; the Farmers after about 8,000 B.C.; and, in the past few centuries, the Fossil Fuelers.
. . .
A culture favorable to liberty and dignity for commoners came out of the Reformation and 16th-century Holland, spread to Britain and Britain’s colonies in the 18th century, and resulted after 1800 in an explosion of ingenuity.
This Great Enrichment, which Mr. Morris acknowledges but does not explain, increased income per head not by the 100% or 200% of earlier efflorescences but by anything from 2,000% to 10,000%. Routine materialism of Mr. Morris’s sort can’t explain the most important secular event in human history. He wants to pin it all on energy capture. The correct story is one of ideas of human equality changing, starting with a conviction novel in the 17th century in northwestern Europe that ordinary people should have a go. This led to massive innovation, among which was energy capture. We do not have a fossil-fuel civilization. We have a free and ingenious one.

For the full review, see:
DEIRDRE MCCLOSKEY. “BOOKSHELF; Oil on Troubled Waters; In this telling, progress is explained by the rising use of fossil fuels. Yet the Industrial Revolution was powered by water, not coal..”The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 6, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 5, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, The University Center for Human Values Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Americans Should Not Be Required to Join a Private Organization Against Their Will

(p. A15) I am one of 10 California teachers suing to end compulsory union dues in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which will be heard by the Supreme Court Jan. 11. Our request is simple: Strike down laws in 23 states that require workers who decline to join a union to pay fees anyway. In our view, paying fees to a union should not be a prerequisite for teaching in a public school. No one in the U.S. should be forced to give money to a private organization he or she disagrees with fundamentally. Teachers deserve a choice.
. . .
I was a member of the union for years and even served as a union representative. But the union never played an important role in my school. When most teachers sought guidance, they wanted help in the classroom and on how to excel at teaching. The union never offered this pedagogic aid.
Instead, the union focused on politics. I remember a phone call I received before a major election from someone in the union. It was a “survey,” asking teachers whether they would vote for so-and-so if the election were held tomorrow. I disagreed with every issue and candidate the union was promoting. After that conversation, I thought about what the union represents. Eventually, I realized that my dues–about $1,000 a year–went toward ideas and issues that ran counter to my beliefs.
. . .
A Gallup poll last year found that 82% of the public agrees that “no American should be required to join any private organization, like a labor union, against his will.” That’s all we’re asking.

For the full commentary, see:
HARLAN ELRICH. “Why I’m Fighting My Teachers Union; I don’t want to be forced to pay for a political agenda I don’t support. Now the Supreme Court will rule.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Jan. 4, 2016): A15.
(Note: ellipses added, italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 3, 2016.)

Old Photographic Technology Makes a Limited Comeback

(p. C1) The Phoenix artist Annie Lopez wanted to stand out among her contemporary peers. Instead of trying to invent something utterly new, she has been turning to a 174-year-old photographic printing process — cyanotypes, once used for copying architectural drawings — and giving it her own distinctive twist.
Ms. Lopez created a dress pattern cut from tamale wrapping paper and printed all over with cyanotypes, which have a distinctly cyan-blue color. She printed the cyanotypes herself, in a process that took about 25 minutes per sheet of images. No darkroom was needed.
That ease has brought cyanotypes roaring back to relevance, attracting a surprising number of true-blue adherents showing their work in galleries.
, , ,
(p. C2) Anna Atkins, considered by many to be the first female photographer and the first person to create a book of photo-based images, blended science and art in botanical cyanotypes, starting in the 1840s. Atkins’s “Honey Locust Leaf and Pod” (circa 1854) is featured in the Worcester show.
The fine-art application was scarce for more than a century after Atkins’s day — rare enough that Steichen once called his use of cyanotypes a “secret” in a letter to his friend and mentor Alfred Stieglitz. For fine artists, it was often considered an “ugly stepchild” of the larger medium, Ms. Burns said, “because it was too easy.”
Amateurs embraced cyanotypes more easily. “In terms of popular usage they were big until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and women’s periodicals were giving people instructions on how to make them,” Ms. Burns said. “But then they fell off the map of photography.”
Well into the 20th century, the long-dormant medium was awakened by artists looking for something different.
“As of the 1960s, people started to be interested in reviving old photo processes,” said Dusan Stulik, a former senior scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute who has studied cyanotypes for decades. “Cyanotypes handle subtle light well, and they are fairly sturdy.”
On a gut level, cyanotypes produce a result that is universal. “The color blue strikes some chord in us that goes beyond words,” said the San Francisco photography dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel. “It’s that simple.”

For the full story, see:
TED LOOS. “Photography’s Stepchild Snaps Back.” The New York Times (Sat., Feb. 6, 2016): C1-C2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Feb. 5, 2016, and has the title “Cyanotype, Photography’s Blue Period, Is Making a Comeback.”)

Global Poor Fell from 29% in 2001 to 15% in 2015

(p. A6) UNITED NATIONS — Poverty may be down worldwide, yet that does not mean that yesterday’s poor are today’s middle class. Data analyzed by the Pew Research Center concluded that more than half the world’s population remains “low-income,” while another 15 percent are still what a report issued by the center on Wednesday called “poor.”
The share of the global poor, defined as those who lived on $2 a day or less, fell from 29 percent in 2001. Most of the people in that category, though, took “only a moderate step up the income ladder,” the report concluded: 56 percent were “low-income,” in 2011, living on $2 to $10 a day.

For the full story, see:
SOMINI SENGUPTAJ. “Study Finds Low Incomes Constrain Half of World.” The New York Times (Thurs., JULY 9, 2015): A6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 8, 2015.)

“Science Is Not a Body of Infallible Work, of Immutable Laws”

(p. 1) . . . , “Failure: Why Science Is So Successful” is a breath of contemplative fresh air. Stuart ­Fire­stein, a professor in the department of biological sciences at Columbia University, is best known for his work on ignorance, including inviting scientists to speak to his students about what they don’t know. In a tone reminiscent of Lewis Thomas’s “The Lives of a Cell,” the book is a collection of loosely interwoven meditations on failure and scientific method.
. . .
If we succeed by failing, then we should be freed from the monolithic road to academic tenure; science should be taught as an adventure in failure. With a delightful combination of feigned naïveté and keen eye for the messy ways that great discoveries occur, he goes so far as to suggest writing a grant proposal in which you promise to fail better. He knows this isn’t how the world works, but nevertheless argues that change will take place “when we cease, or at least reduce, our devotion to facts and collections of them, when we decide that science education is not a memorization marathon, when we — scientists and nonscientists — recognize that science is not a body of infallible work, of immutable laws of facts. . . . And that most of what there is to know is still unknown.”

For the full review, see:
ROBERT A. BURTON. “Error Messages.”The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., Jan. 3, 2016): 8.
(Note: first two ellipses added; third ellipsis in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date DEC. 29, 2015, and has the title “‘Black Box Thinking’ and ‘Failure: Why Science Is So Successful’.”)

The book under review, is:
Firestein, Stuart. Failure: Why Science Is So Successful. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

More Evidence for Stigler’s Capture Theory

(p. A15) WASHINGTON — Marilyn B. Tavenner, the former Obama administration official in charge of the rollout of HealthCare.gov, was chosen on Wednesday to be the top lobbyist for the nation’s health insurance industry.
Ms. Tavenner, who stepped down from her federal job in February, will become president and chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the trade group whose members include Aetna, Anthem, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and many Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies.
As the new voice for insurers, Ms. Tavenner will lead the industry in a time of tumultuous changes and challenges, including delicate negotiations with Congress over the future of the Affordable Care Act.
. . .
The board of America’s Health Insurance Plans unanimously elected Ms. Tavenner at a meeting here on Wednesday, according to Mark B. Ganz, the board chairman, who is also the chief executive of Cambia Health Solutions, based in Portland, Ore.
. . .
Mr. Ganz said that Ms. Tavenner had “the trust and respect of members of Congress from both sides of the aisle.”
Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, described the selection in more negative terms. “While millions of Americans are still being hurt by Obamacare’s soaring costs and fewer choices,” he said, “Ms. Tavenner’s appointment shows how the law has created a cozy and profitable relationship for some.”

For the full story, see:
ROBERT PEAR. “Head of Obama’s Health Care Rollout to Lobby for Insurers.” The New York Times (Thurs., JULY 16, 2015): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 15, 2015.)

Yamir Jackson-Adens on How You Learn

(p. B4) PHILANTHROPISTS have poured millions of dollars into improving education in the United States — paying for new buildings, buying new computers and even creating new charter schools.
Susan Crown, a member of the billionaire Crown family of Chicago, is trying something different. Two years ago, she began working with organizations that seek to foster character traits like grit, empathy and perseverance, which studies show can be determinants of future success.
But financing organizations that focus on social and emotional learning programs for disadvantaged children was just part of the effort. Ms. Crown said she also wanted to go deeper into understanding why some organizations succeeded so well.
, , ,
Yamir Jackson-Adens, 18, began going to the Philadelphia Wooden Boat Factory in eighth grade. Living in a poor section in the northeast part of the city, he said he had been bullied in elementary school, and he was still shy. The boat program intrigued him, even though he knew no one who owned a boat.
“In boat building, you learn stuff,” Mr. Jackson-Adens said. “You’re free to move. You don’t have a whole lot of restrictions. It’s more of a trial-and-error kind of thing. You learn from those mistakes. In school, if you fail, you’ve failed.”
. . .
Next fall, Mr. Jackson-Adens will be attending Colorado State University to begin studies that he hopes will lead to becoming a veterinarian.
“Boat got me into thinking outside the box,” he said. “It helped me adjust to different situations.”
That is a life skill anyone could use.

For the full story, see:
PAUL SULLIVAN. “A Philanthropist Drills Down to Discover Why Programs Work.” The New York Times (Sat., Feb. 6, 2016): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Feb. 5, 2016.)