Month: April 2018

Government Obstacles Slow 5G Innovation

(p. A13) . . . , governmental obstacles threaten to block a new wave of wireless innovation, known as fifth generation or “5G.” It will multiply download speeds by at least 10 times, allowing wireless carriers to compete with cable companies for high-speed internet access. With superfast speeds and low lag times, 5G will enable advances in everything from driverless cars to the “tactile internet,” in which surgeons can perform operations and builders operate construction equipment remotely, and entertainment can include sensations beyond the audiovisual.
. . .
In some places, outdated local requirements prohibit carriers from placing small cells in local rights-of-way and on government-owned utility poles. Zoning ordinances designed for much larger towers often require local zoning boards to approve small cells. Some localities refuse altogether to negotiate right-of-way access, while others impose prohibitive fees and other unreasonable conditions.

For the full story, see:
Robert McDowell. “Local Laws Imperil 5G Innovation; Misapplied zoning rules and huge fees block antennas the size of pizza boxes.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 3, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 2, 2018.)

“Overblown” Worries that A.I. Will Make Humans Obsolete

(p. B3) SAN FRANCISCO — Apple has hired Google’s chief of search and artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, a major coup in its bid to catch up to the artificial intelligence technology of its rivals.
. . .
Mr. Giannandrea, a 53-year-old native of Scotland known to colleagues as J.G., helped lead the push to integrate A.I. throughout Google’s products, including internet search, Gmail and its own digital assistant, Google Assistant.
He joined Google in 2010 when it purchased Metaweb, a start-up where he served as chief technology officer. Metaweb was building what it described as a “database of the world’s knowledge,” which Google eventually rolled into its search engine to deliver direct answers to users’ queries. (Try googling “How old is Steph Curry?”) During Mr. Giannandrea’s tenure, A.I. research became increasingly important inside Google, with its primary A.I. lab, Google Brain, moving into a space beside the chief executive, Sundar Pichai.
. . .
On the debate over whether humanity should be worried about the rapidly accelerating improvements in A.I., Mr. Giannandrea told MIT Technology Review in an interview last year that the concerns were overblown.
“What I object to is this assumption that we will leap to some kind of superintelligent system that will then make humans obsolete,” he said. “I understand why people are concerned about it but I think it’s gotten way too much airtime. I just see no technological basis as to why this is imminent at all.”

For the full story, see:
JACK NICAS and CADE METZ. “Lagging Rivals in A.I., Apple Adds A Top Google Executive to Its Team.” The New York Times (Wednesday, April 4, 2018): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 3, 2018, and has the title “Apple Hires Google’s A.I. Chief.”)

University of Chicago Defends Free Speech and Tough Intellectual Inquiry

(p. A15) Chicago
Snow carpets the ground at the University of Chicago, and footfalls everywhere are soft, giving the place a hushed serenity. Serene, too, is Robert Zimmer, the university’s 70-year-old president, as he talks about a speaking invitation that could turn his campus turbulent.
Steve Bannon is scheduled to talk at the school early next month–there’s no confirmed date–and Mr. Zimmer is taking criticism for the imminent appearance of Donald Trump’s former right-hand man, a paladin of alt-robust conservatives. Mr. Bannon is precisely the sort of figure who is anathema on American campuses, yet Mr. Zimmer is unfazed by the prospect of his visit, confident that it will pass with no great fuss.
. . .
Mr. Bannon was invited to the university by Luigi Zingales, a finance professor. Would Mr. Zimmer ever contemplate having a quiet word with the prof and asking him to withdraw his invitation to Mr. Bannon? “I wouldn’t even think of it,” Mr. Zimmer answers, in a mildly but unmistakably indignant tone. And no, he won’t be attending the Bannon event. “We have many, many talks,” he says. “I’m really pretty busy.”
Mr. Zingales’s attitude is consistent with the norm Mr. Zimmer seeks to uphold. When I asked the professor by email why he extended the invitation, he replied that Mr. Bannon “was able to interpret a broad dissatisfaction in the electorate that most academics had missed. Remember the shock on November 9, 2016? Regardless of what you think about his political positions, there is something faculty and students can learn from a discussion with him.”
. . .
The University of Chicago has long enjoyed a reputation for tough, even remorseless, intellectual inquiry. Its world-famous economics faculty, for instance, is not a place where faint-hearted academics go to road-test their research. In recent years, as colleges across America have censored unfashionable views, Chicago has also come to be known for setting the gold standard for free expression on campus. Mr. Zimmer, who became president in 2006, deserves much credit. He has been outspoken in defense of free speech and in 2014 even set up a committee–under the constitutional law scholar Geoffrey Stone –that produced the Chicago Principles, the clearest statement by any American university in defense of uninhibited debate.

For the full interview, see:

Tunku Varadarajan, interviewer. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; The Free-Speech University; Steve Bannon is giving a talk at Chicago. Its president is confident he won’t be shouted down.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 17, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Feb. 16, 2018.)

Early Industrial Workers’ Living Standards Improved Over Their Lifetimes

(p. C6) Historians have long debated whether the Industrial Revolution was a net benefit to those who labored in the mills. The first generation of workers generally enjoyed higher wages and liberation from the confines of rural life. Yes, there was child labor, but one girl who entered a New England mill at age 11 recalled: “It was paradise here because you got your money, and you did whatever you wanted to with it.” In her book “Liberty’s Dawn” (2013), Emma Griffin studied those early industrial workers longitudinally and found that their living standards improved markedly over a lifetime.
. . .
William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” are now brightly lit in China, but are they still infernal? Today, Mr. Freeman reports, Foxconn offers “a library, bookstores, a variety of cafeterias and restaurants, supermarkets, . . . swimming pools, basketball courts, soccer fields, and a stadium, a movie theater, electronic game rooms, cybercafés, a wedding-dress shop, banks, ATMs, two hospitals, a fire station, a post office, and huge LED screens that show announcements and cartoons.” But Chinese worker dormitories impose a positively Victorian regime of moral supervision: no drinking, gambling or visiting the opposite sex. Work rules are draconian. And surveillance cameras are everywhere (though, come to think of it, we have plenty of those in the West).
Ultimately, Mr. Freeman can’t decide whether industrialism represents progress or dystopia, and that ambivalence reflects his clear eyes and fair-mindedness. He often lets workers speak for themselves, and they don’t always agree. Xu Lizhi, one of those Foxconn employees who killed himself, was also a poet: “They’ve trained me to become docile / Don’t know how to shout or rebel / How to complain or denounce / Only how to silently suffer exhaustion.” But another worker from a small Hunan village was amazed by his company dormitory: “I had never lived in a multi-story building, so it felt exciting to climb stairs and be upstairs.” Mr. Freeman reminds us that, benevolent or tyrannical, the factory was an exponential leap in the human experience.

For the full review, see:
Rose, Jonathan. “The Very Symbol of Modern Times; Workers’ paradise or soul-deadening dystopia? Why society remains of two minds about the factory.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018): C6.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs, added; ellipsis within paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 23, 2018, and has the title “Review: The Very Symbol of Modern Times; Workers’ paradise or soul-deadening dystopia? Why society remains of two minds about the factory.”)

The book under review, is:
Freeman, Joshua B. Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

The book by Emma Griffin, mentioned above, is:
Griffin, Emma. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.

Pursuit of Slow Hunch Pays Off with Flu Drug

(p. B3) As Americans suffer through the worst influenza outbreak in almost a decade, a Japanese drugmaker says it has developed a pill that can kill the virus within a day.
. . .
“The data that we’ve seen looks very promising,” said Martin Howell Friede, who leads the World Health Organization’s advisory on vaccines, including for influenza. “This could be a breakthrough in the way that we treat influenza.”
. . .
Shionogi scientists began researching a novel flu drug more than a decade ago, shelving almost 2,500 compounds in the process. Then, the 140-year-old Osaka company, which has created blockbuster drugs used to treat HIV and high cholesterol, had a breakthrough.
Shionogi scientists knew from their research that an anti-HIV drug the company had developed with a joint venture of Pfizer Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline Co. worked by blocking a metallic enzyme that HIV uses as a weapon to hijack human cells. They found the flu virus was also exploiting a metallic enzyme.
“So we said, ‘why don’t we build on our HIV knowledge to find a way to treat the flu?’ And we did,” said Takeki Uehara, who led the compound’s development.

For the full story, see:
Preetika Rana. “Drugmaker: Pill Kills Flu in a Day.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Feb. 12, 2018): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Feb. 10, 2018, and has the title “Experimental Drug Promises to Kill the Flu Virus in a Day.”)

Human Ancestors May Have Had Capacity for Symbolic Thought 600,000 Years Ago

(p. D1) On Thursday [February 22, 2018], a team of researchers offered compelling evidence that Neanderthals bore one of the chief hallmarks of mental sophistication: they could paint cave art. That talent suggests that Neanderthals could think in symbols and may have achieved other milestones not preserved in the fossil record.
“When you have symbols, then you have language,” said João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona and co-author of the new study.
. . .
(p. D6) But a second study, which Dr. Zilhão and his colleagues published Thursday [February 22, 2018], in the journal Science Advances, hints that Neanderthals might well have been painting long before 64,000 years ago.
The scientists traveled to a cave on the coast of Spain where Dr. Zilhão had earlier discovered shells that had been drilled with holes and painted with ocher.
. . .
He and his colleagues discovered a layer of flowstone sitting atop the rock where they had found the shell jewelry. That flowstone turned out to be about 115,000 years old.
. . .
The colored, pierced shells themselves are probably not much older than that. Up until about 118,000 years ago, the cave was flooded, thanks to higher sea levels.
That finding provides strong evidence that the shells were made by Neanderthals. They were definitely living in Spain 115,000 years ago, while modern humans would not arrive in Europe for another 70,000 years.
The two new studies don’t just indicate that Neanderthals could make cave art and jewelry. They also establish that Neanderthals were making these things long before modern humans — a blow to the idea that they simply copied their cousins.
The earliest known cave paintings made by modern humans are only about 40,000 years old, while Neanderthal cave art is at least 24,000 years older. The oldest known shell jewelry made by modern humans is about 70,000 years old, but Neanderthals were making it 45,000 years before then.
“These results imply that Neanderthals were not apart from these developments,” said Dr. Zilhão. “For all practical purposes, they were modern humans, too.”
The new studies raise another intriguing possibility, said Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum: that the capacity for symbolic thought was already present 600,000 years ago in the ancestors of both Neanderthals and modern humans.
He agreed with Dr. Zilhão that the new study supports the idea that Neanderthals used language. In addition to the evidence of symbolic thought, researchers have also found that the inner ears of Neanderthals were tuned to the frequencies of speech, much like our own.
“We don’t know how they spoke or what they said,” said Dr. Finlayson. “But they had the ability of speech.”
The cave paintings that Dr. Pike and his colleagues have dated are generally abstract. There’s no evidence so far that Neanderthals painted images of lions and other animals, as modern humans did thousands of years later.
But Dr. Pike doesn’t think a lack of animal imagery marks a mental deficiency in Neanderthals. It could simply reflect a cultural preference.’

For the full story, see:
Zimmer, Carl. “MATTER; The Neanderthal, the Artist.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 27, 2018): D1 & D6.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 22, 2018, and has the title “MATTER; Neanderthals, the World’s First Misunderstood Artists.”)

The first article mentioned above and co-authored by Zilhão, is:

Hoffmann, D. L., C. D. Standish, M. García-Diez, P. B. Pettitt, J. A. Milton, J. Zilhão, J. J. Alcolea-González, P. Cantalejo-Duarte, H. Collado, R. de Balbín, M. Lorblanchet, J. Ramos-Muñoz, G. Ch Weniger, and A. W. G. Pike. “U-Th Dating of Carbonate Crusts Reveals Neandertal Origin of Iberian Cave Art.” Science 359, no. 6378 (Feb. 23, 2018): 912-915.

The second article mentioned above and co-authored by Zilhão, is:
Hoffmann, Dirk L., Diego E. Angelucci, Valentín Villaverde, Josefina Zapata, and João Zilhão. “Symbolic Use of Marine Shells and Mineral Pigments by Iberian Neandertals 115,000 Years Ago.” Science Advances 4, no. 2 (Feb. 22, 2018): 1-6.

Xerox Will Cease to Exist as Independent Firm

(p. A1) When Xerox introduced its popular copying machines in 1959, their wizardry was considered as high tech as the iPhone when Steve Jobs presented it to the world almost 50 years later.
But just as Xerox made carbon paper obsolete, the iPhone, Google Docs and the cloud made Xerox a company of the past.
On Wednesday [January 31, 2018], Xerox said that, after 115 years as an independent business, it would combine operations with Fujifilm Holdings of Japan. The deal signaled the end of a company that was once an American corporate powerhouse.
“Xerox is the poster child for monopoly technology businesses that cannot make the transition to a new generation of technology,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School.
The move offers a stark reminder that no matter how high a company may fly, it is still vulnerable to the next big breakthrough. Xerox joins once formidable tech companies like Kodak and BlackBerry that lost the innovation footrace.
Under the deal, Fujifilm will own just over 50 percent of the Xerox business. There are plans to cut $1.7 billion in costs in coming (p. A11) years. Fujifilm said its joint venture with Xerox would cut its payroll by 10,000 workers worldwide.
How Xerox fell so far is a case study in what management experts call the “competency trap” — an organization becomes so good at one thing, it can’t learn to do anything new.
Xerox traces its origins to the founding in 1903 of the M. H. Kuhn Company. But it was an invention dreamed up in a makeshift Queens lab in the 1930s — a forerunner of the Silicon Valley garages used by the likes of Mr. Jobs — that changed Xerox’s trajectory.
That invention, by Chester Carlson, a patent lawyer, led to the creation of the modern copy machine. He even came up with a term for the process: “xerography.” In 1959, Xerox, which had won the right to explore the technology, offered the office copier that went mainstream.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR and CARLOS TEJADA, “Xerox, Tech Icon That Became a Verb, Is Suddenly Past Tense.” The New York Times (Thursday, Feb. 1, 2018): A1 & A11.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date JAN. 31, 2018, and has the title “After Era That Made It a Verb, Xerox, in a Sale, Is Past Tense.” The online version says that the New York edition also had title “After Era That Made It a Verb, Xerox, in a Sale, Is Past Tense.” My copy was the “National Edition.”)

Upward Mobility from Moving to the Robust Redundant Labor Markets of Open Boomtowns

(p. B3) Chicago in 1850 was a muddy frontier town of barely 30,000 people. Within two decades, it was 10 times that size. Within another two decades, that number had tripled. By 1910, Chicago — hog butcher for the world, headquarters of Montgomery Ward, the nerve center of the nation’s rail network — had more than two million residents.
“You see these numbers, and they just look fake,” said David Schleicher, a law professor at Yale who writes on urban development and land use. Chicago heading into the 20th century was the fastest-growing city America has ever seen. It was a classic metropolitan magnet, attracting anyone in need of a job or a raise.
But while other cities have played this role through history — enabling people who were geographically mobile to become economically mobile, too — migration patterns like the one that fed Chicago have broken down in today’s America. Interstate mobility nationwide has slowed over the last 30 years. But, more specifically and of greater concern, migration has stalled in the very places with the most opportunity.
As Mr. Schleicher puts it, local economic booms no longer create boomtowns in America.
. . .
Some people aren’t moving into wealthy regions because they’re stuck in struggling ones. They have houses they can’t sell or government benefits they don’t want to lose. But the larger problem is that they’re blocked from moving to prosperous places by the shortage and cost of housing there. And that’s a deliberate decision these wealthy regions have made in opposing more housing construction, a prerequisite to make room for more people.
Compare that with most of American history. The country’s economic growth has long “gone hand in hand with enormous reallocation of population,” write the economists Kyle Herkenhoff, Lee Ohanian and Edward Prescott in a recent study of what’s hobbling similar population flows now.
. . .
Were it not for all the restrictions on housing in the most productive places — if workers were able to more freely migrate to them — Mr. Herkenhoff and his co-authors and the economists Enrico Moretti and Chang-Tai Hsieh have estimated that the nation’s G.D.P. would be substantially higher. By their calculations, there are millions of workers missing from the Bay Area and metropolitan New York today.
The population growth that is occurring in these metro areas is fueled almost entirely by immigration, as Ryan Avent points out in “The Gated City,” where he makes a similar argument to Mr. Schleicher. If we consider only domestic moves, about 900,000 more people have moved away from New York than to it since 2010. On net, about 47,000 have left both San Jose and Washington, D.C., while Boston has lost a net 36,000.

For the full commentary, see:
Emily Badger. “Why New York and the Bay Area Are Missing Millions of Workers.” The New York Times (Friday, Dec. 8, 2017): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 6, 2017, and has the title “What Happened to the American Boomtown?”)

The Herkenhoff et al. paper mentioned above, is:
Herkenhoff, Kyle F., Lee E. Ohanian, and Edward C. Prescott. “Tarnishing the Golden and Empire States: Land-Use Restrictions and the U.S. Economic Slowdown.” Journal of Monetary Economics 93 (Jan. 2018): 89-109.

The Moretti and Hsieh paper mentioned above, is:
Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Enrico Moretti. “Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation.” Working paper, May 18, 2017.

The book by Ryan Avent, mentioned above, is:
Avent, Ryan. The Gated City. Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2011.

Millions of Dollars and 30 Years Later, A.I. Still Has Lacks Crucial Common Sense

(p. B6) SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen said Wednesday [February 28, 2018] that he was pumping an additional $125 million into his nonprofit computer research lab for an ambitious new effort to teach machines “common sense.”
. . .
“To make real progress in A.I., we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense,” said Mr. Allen, who founded the software giant Microsoft in the 1970s with Bill Gates.
. . .
In the mid-1980s, Doug Lenat, a former Stanford University professor, with backing from the government and several of the country’s largest tech companies, started a project called Cyc. He and his team of researchers worked to codify all the simple truths that we learn as children, from “you can’t be in two places at the same time” to “when drinking from a cup, hold the open end up.”
Thirty years later, Mr. Lenat and his team are still at work on this “common sense engine” — with no end in sight.
Mr. Allen helped fund Cyc, and he believes it is time to take a fresh approach, he said, because modern technologies make it easier to build this kind of system.
Mr. Lenat welcomed the new project. But he also warned of challenges: Cyc has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, running into countless problems that were not evident when the project began. He called them “buzz saws.”

For the full story, see:
CADE METZ, “A.I.’s Greatest Challenge: Digitizing Common Sense.” The New York Times (Thursday, March 1, 2018): B6.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Feb. 28, 2018, and has the title “Paul Allen Wants to Teach Machines Common Sense.”)

Value of Property Rights Now Seen by One Who Seized Land

(p. 4) MAZOWE, Zimbabwe — The police first came early one morning five years ago, catching villagers by surprise as they worked in their fields. As hundreds of anti-riot police officers jumped down from their vehicles, their commander issued the villagers an order.
“He said that mother and daughter Grace Mugabe wanted this place,” recalled a village leader, Denboy Chaparadza. “So you better move away.”
The villagers understood right away: Grace Mugabe, the wife of Robert Mugabe, who was ousted from power in November after 37 years as Zimbabwe’s leader, and their daughter, Bona, coveted the villagers’ land. The Mugabes already owned property and businesses in Mazowe, about 25 miles north of Harare, the capital, and they were eager to expand.
Before the villagers could object, the police, armed with sticks and iron bars, demolished their modest houses. “Every house,” Mr. Chaparadza said. “They left us out in the open. We felt betrayed.”
. . .
One reason the 146 families who lived in Mazowe felt betrayed by their leader was that they themselves had seized the land from a white farmer in 2000, under Mr. Mugabe’s fast-track land reform program. Now, they risked losing everything to his wife and daughter: 3,100 acres of prime land for farming and cattle ranching that abuts a lake and gold mines.
. . .
Determining who owns the land is a necessary step to development and democratization in Zimbabwe. Nearly all Zimbabweans who benefited from Mr. Mugabe’s land reform policy lack titles, or legal ownership of their property — leaving them at the mercy of the politically powerful.
. . .
Land also remains a tool of political control, one that Mr. Mnangagwa and other leaders of the governing ZANU-PF party have never shown a willingness to relinquish.
. . .
In recent years, as fighting over succession intensified inside ZANU-PF, land was used to punish and to keep people in line.
High-ranking officials expelled from the party had their land seized, or suffered repeated incursions into their properties by party youths. The threat of losing their farms led some officials to stay in ZANU-PF, instead of decamping to new opposition parties.
. . .
Mr. Chaparadza, the village leader, said that as part of any resolution of the land issue, the new government should compensate white farmers.
“Even if they come back, that’s fine as long as they give us another place,” he said. “We won’t deny them. What we need is only some land where we can survive — and title to the land.”

For the full story, see:
NORIMITSU ONISHI. “Land Issue Stands in Zimbabwe’s Path.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, January 21, 2018): 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 20, 2018, and has the title “Resolving Who Owns What Land Lies at Heart of Zimbabwe’s Future.”)