Month: December 2018

Star Wars Details Allow “a Fully Believable, Escapist Experience”

(p. A15) Mr. Jameson clearly lays out the qualities that geeks appreciate in their art: realism bolstered by a deep internal history and the sort of “world-building” exemplified by Tolkien. But in Hollywood “Star Wars” changed the game thanks to its verisimilitude, “which immediately and thoroughly convinces viewers that they are watching humans and aliens skip from planet to planet in a vast, crowded other galaxy with its own detailed history.” Similarly, the biological background of the “Alien” series includes Xenomorphs “whose intricate life cycle can be described from beginning to end in grisly detail.” Books like “The Star Trek Encyclopedia,” in which the show’s designers document “all the alien planets and species that they’d invented” and present starship engineering schematics, are quintessential works of geek culture.
Detail is important to geeks, the author suggests, because they want without “any boundaries, any limits. . . . They don’t want the artwork to ever end.” Whether it’s playing a tabletop game filled with lore about previously unknown characters from the “Star Wars” galaxy or reading a “textbook” to study the fantastic beasts of the “Harry Potter” world, geeks want to believe–at least for a bit. As Mr. Jameson says, “geeks have long thought of artworks as places where one can hang out.” That’s one reason why single films have given way to trilogies and why characters have cross-populated to create Marvel’s seemingly endless “cinematic universe.”

For the full review, see:
Brian P. Kelly. “BOOKSHELF; The Geeks Strike Back.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 8, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 7, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing’ Review: The Geeks Strike Back; The “Star Wars” franchise and Marvel’s superhero films reign supreme in today’s Hollywood. How did that happen?”)

The book under review, is:
Jameson, A. D. I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

False Fears of Killer Robots Distract Us from Real Benefits of Collaborative A.I.

(p. A27) If we spend all of our time looking over our shoulders for killer robots, that means we are not looking ahead to discern the outcomes we might actually want.
. . .
The most successful A.I. systems out there today are dependent on teams of humans, just as the humans depend on those systems to provide insights and perform tasks beyond their own abilities. Image-processing A.I. can outperform human radiologists at spotting tumors in X-rays, if medical personnel get patients in front of the right machine and ask the right questions. But teams of human doctors will be vital to marrying technology and empathy for the effective treatment of complex diseases.

For the full commentary, see:
Ed Finn. “Don’t Fear the Killer Robots.” The New York Times (Saturday, Nov. 17, 2018): A27.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 15, 2018, and has the title “A Smarter Way to Think About Intelligent Machines.”)

Environmentalists Support Logging to Reduce Infernos

(p. A3) FRENCH MEADOWS RESERVOIR, Calif.–Obscured amid the chaos of California’s latest wildfire outbreak is a striking sign of change that may help curtail future devastating infernos. After decades of butting heads, some environmentalists and logging supporters have largely come to agreement that forests need to be logged to be saved.
. . .
The Camp Fire and the 98,400-acre Woolsey Fire in Southern California were fueled by fierce winds in unusually dry weather, which turned much of the state into a tinderbox.
Another dangerous factor, land-management experts say, is that forests have become overgrown with trees and underbrush due to a mix of human influences, including a past federal policy of putting out fires, rather than letting them burn. Washington has also sharply reduced logging under pressure from environmentalists.
Now, the unlikely coalition is pushing new programs to thin out forests and clear underbrush. In 2017, California joined with the U.S. Forest Service and other groups in creating the Tahoe-Central Sierra Initiative, which aims to thin millions of trees from about 2.4 million acres of forest–believed to be the largest such state-federal project in the country.

For the full story, see:
Jim Carlton. “Deadly Fires Shift View of Logging.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Nov. 17, 2018): A3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the same date and has the title “Facing Deadlier Fires, California Tries Something New: More Logging.” The last quoted sentence is the slightly shorter version that appeared in the print version.)

Progress on Cancer Cures Is Slow and Too Few Benefit

(p. 5) The reason is a new generation of cancer treatments that have become available in recent years. Some, called immunotherapy, harness the patient’s own immune system to battle a tumor. Others, known as targeted therapies, block certain molecules that cancers depend on to grow and spread. The medical literature — usually circumspect when it comes to cancer, in light of many overhyped treatments in the past — now fairly gushes with terms like “revolutionary” and “cure.” In this case, the hype feels mostly justified.
. . .
A recent analysis estimated that about 15 percent of patients with advanced cancer might benefit from immunotherapy — and it’s all but impossible to determine which patients will be the lucky ones. Just last week, a study of lung cancer patients demonstrated the overall benefits of combining immunotherapy with traditional chemotherapy. But here, too, the researchers noted that most patients will not respond to the new treatments, and it is not yet possible to predict who will benefit. In some cases, the side effects are terrible — different from those of chemotherapy but often just as dire.

For the full commentary, see:
Robert M. Wachter. “The Problem With Miracle Cancer Cures.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, April 21, 2018): 5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 19, 2018.)

The claim that only 15% benefit, made above, is based on the following:
Howard, Jacqueline. “Hope and Hype around Cancer Immunotherapy.” CNN, Weds., Sept. 27, 2017.
GAY, NATHAN, and VINAY PRASAD. “First Opinion; Few People Actually Benefit from ‘Breakthrough’ Cancer Immunotherapy.” March 8, 2017.

Tyler Cowen Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

What are the benefits of innovative dynamism? Arthur Diamond lays out the clearest positive case to date for innovation in this highly readable and historically comprehensive work.

Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics, George Mason University; Director of Mercatus Center; “Economic Scene” columnist for the New York Times; blogger for Marginal Revolution. Author of In Praise of Commercial Culture, Creative Destruction, The Great Stagnation, The Complacent Class, and many other works

Cowen’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

Little Correlation Between a State’s Tax Breaks and Subsidies to Firms, and the State’s Unemployment and Income Levels

(p. A27) It’s politically difficult for city and state officials to offer incentives to one firm and not another, Timothy Bartik, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, told me. Like Lay’s potato chips, “you can’t hand out just one,” as he put it. He fears that after the hysteria over Amazon’s HQ2 and the recent $4.1 billion deal struck between the state of Wisconsin and the Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn, incentive amounts will only climb.
Unfortunately, incentives and tax breaks don’t work. Research by Mr. Bartik indicates that there is not a large correlation between a state’s giveaways and its unemployment rate or income levels.
. . .
Lavish benefits also don’t have much influence over the choice of a location. The typical package changes a decision only 25 percent of the time or less — about two-thirds of the incentives are handed to companies that would have moved to the state offering them, regardless.
Instead, the deals often end up being a burden on budgets. Texas schools have lost an estimated $4 billion to the state’s economic development program and Cleveland schools lost over $34 million in one year alone. New Jersey’s budget is at risk of bleeding $1 billion a year, while Michigan’s liability for its business tax credits is set to soar to $9.38 billion over the next two decades and incentives have already led to a $325 million budget deficit. None of that accounts for the extra outlays to upgrade infrastructure and services for the people who move in to take advantage of any jobs that are created.
. . .
The solution, . . . , must be an armistice. States and cities need to collectively swear off big-dollar economic deals aimed at particular companies. If no one offers them, corporations will have to figure out where to locate on their own.
There’s nothing to love about these incentives. Republicans should be outraged by the idea of government picking winners and insist instead that companies be left to choose locations based on the conditions they need to operate their businesses, not sweetheart deals. Democrats should oppose them because they are starving state and city coffers of funds needed for important services, such as schools.

For the full commentary, see:

Covert, Bryce. “HQ2 Winners Are Losers.” The New York Times (Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2018): A27.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 13, 2018, and has the title “Cities Should Stop Playing the Amazon HQ2 Bidding Game.” Where there are minor differences in the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The research by Bartik, mentioned above, is:
Bartik, Timothy J. “A New Panel Database on Business Incentives for Economic Development Offered by State and Local Governments in the United States.” W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research: Prepared for the Pew Charitable Trusts, 2017.

Chernobyl Was Due to “Bureaucratic Incompetence,” Not Due to Technology

(p. C6) Dr. Medvedev’s study of Lysenko was not approved for official publication in the Soviet Union, but samizdat, or clandestine, copies circulated among the intelligentsia. In 1969, the book was translated into English and published as “The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko.”
Dr. Medvedev was fired from his job at an agricultural research laboratory, and within a few months was summoned to a meeting with a psychiatrist, on the pretext of discussing the behavior of his teenage son. Instead, Dr. Medvedev was taken to a holding cell, where he managed to pick the lock and walk away.
Soon afterward, on May 29, 1970, as Dr. Medvedev recounted in his book “A Question of Madness,” he was confronted at his home by two psychiatrists accompanied by several police officers.
“‘If you refuse to talk to us,’ one of the psychiatrists told Dr. Medvedev, ‘then we will be obliged to draw the appropriate conclusions . . . And how do you feel yourself, Zhores Aleksandrovich?’
“I answered that I felt marvelous.
“‘But if you feel so marvelous, then why do you think we have turned up here today?’
“‘Obviously, you must answer that question yourself,’ I replied. “A police major arrived. “‘ And who on earth might you be?’ Dr. Medvedev asked. ‘I didn’t invite you here.’ ”
“He protested, to no avail, that the homes of Soviet citizens were considered private and inviolable to the forces of the state.
“‘Get to your feet!” the police major ordered Dr. Medvedev. ‘I order you to get to your feet!’ ”
Two lower-ranking officers, twisted Dr. Medvedev’s arms behind his back, forced him out of his house and into an ambulance. He was driven to a psychiatric hospital.
The preliminary diagnosis was “severe mental illness dangerous to the public,” and Dr. Medvedev was repeatedly warned to stop his “publicist activities.”
Meanwhile, his brother, Sakharov and other activists for greater openness in the Soviet system sent telegrams and published open letters calling for Dr. Medvedev’s release. One of his friends, the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then still living in the Soviet Union, condemned Dr. Medvedev’s detention with a bold and blistering statement.
“The incarceration of freethinking healthy people in madhouses is spiritual murder,” he said. “It is a fiendish and prolonged torture . . . These crimes will never be forgotten, and all those who take part in them will be condemned endlessly, while they live and after they’re dead.
“It is shortsighted to think that you can live constantly relying on force alone, constantly scorning the objections of conscience.”
Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for Literature later that year.
. . .
In 1990, Dr. Medvedev wrote an account of the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, which he considered inevitable, with the Soviet Union’s history of scientific and bureaucratic incompetence.
“In the end, I was surprised at how poorly designed the reactor actually was,” he told the New York Times in 1990. “I wanted to write this book not only to show the real scale of this particular catastrophe, but also to demolish a few more secrets and deliberate misconceptions.”

For the full obituary, see:
SCHUDEL, Matt. “‘Scientist exposed agricultural fraud and Soviet incompetence.” The Washington Post (Sunday, Sept. 6, 2018): C6.
(Note: ellipses between paragraphs, added; ellipses internal to paragraphs, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Sept. 4, 2018, and has the title “‘James Mirrlees, Whose Tax Model Earned a Nobel, Dies at 82.”)

The books by Zhores Medvedev that were mentioned above, are:
Medvedev, Zhores A. The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
Medvedev, Zhores A., and Roy A. Medvedev. A Question of Madness: Repression by Psychiatry in the Soviet Union. London: Mcmillan London Ltd., 1971.
Medvedev, Zhores A. The Legacy of Chernobyl. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.

Jack Ma Worries that Heavier Chinese Government Regulations Risk “Destroying Innovation”

(p. B3) SHANGHAI–Chinese e-commerce tycoon Jack Ma used a government-sponsored forum to suggest regulators take a lighter touch in dealing with technology companies, saying the market should be allowed to decide how new industries such as artificial intelligence develop.
“I personally think that the government has to do what the government should do, and the companies do what companies should do,” Mr. Ma said at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Monday, recalling a conversation he said he had last year with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao about self-driving cars.
“Protecting the backward forces who are crying out loud will be the most important factor in destroying innovation,” Mr. Ma said.

For the full story, see:
Yoko Kubota. “Jack Ma Urges Beijing to Ease Up.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, September 18, 2018): B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 17, 2018, and has the title “Alibaba’s Jack Ma Says Government Should Stick to Governing.”)

“Outsider Status” of Surgeons “Permitted Greater Risks and Leaps of Faith”

(p. A19) . . . as Arnold van de Laar reminds us in “Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations,” a collection of hypervivid anecdotes and oddities, it was only recently that surgeons were considered the equals of what we would now call internists–doctors who diagnose, prescribe medicine and prognosticate.
. . .
. . . , it has been both the bane and the secret glory of surgery as a vocation that it was relegated for so long to the margins of “decent” intellectual or professional life. Its dodgy, outsider status perhaps permitted greater risks and leaps of faith than were available to nonsurgical physicians, who still found themselves making inchworm progress from the dictates of Hippocrates and Galen. Surgeons worked fast to beat pain and gangrene (so fast that in one case, Scottish surgeon Robert Liston cut off a man’s testicles in a rush to amputate his leg). They used whatever materials seemed to make sense–in some cases gold thread, costly but long-lasting; in other cases branding irons.

For the full review, see:
Laura Kolbe. “The Kindest Cuts.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, November 15, 2018): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 14, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Under the Knife’ Review: The Kindest Cuts.”)

The book under review, is:
van de Laar, Arnold. Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.

Musk Jabs the SEC as “the Shortseller Enrichment Commission”

(p. B1) Elon Musk risked reigniting a battle with federal securities regulators on Thursday when he appeared to openly mock the Securities and Exchange Commission only days after the Tesla Inc. chief executive settled fraud charges with the agency.
Seemingly without prompt, Mr. Musk sent a tweet in the early afternoon that suggested the SEC was enriching investors betting against the electric-car maker. “Just want to [say] that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work,” Mr. Musk tweeted. “And the name change is so on point!”

For the full story, see:
Tim Higgins and Gabriel T. Rubin. “Tweet by Elon Musk Takes Jab at the SEC.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, October 5, 2018): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 4, 2018, and has the title “Elon Musk Tweet Mocks the Securities and Exchange Commission.”)