Entrepreneurship – Page 48 – artdiamondblog.com

112 Years of Spectacular Progress Started With Wilbur Wright

“New close-up images of a region near Pluto’s equator reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) LAUREL, Md. — The first close-up image of Pluto has revealed mountains as tall as the Rockies, and an absence of craters — discoveries that, to their delight, baffled scientists working on NASA’s New Horizons mission and provided punctuation for a journey nine and a half years in the making.

Only 112 years after the Wright Brothers were barely able to get their airplane off the ground, a machine from Earth has crossed the solar system to a small, icy world three billion miles away. The flyby on Tuesday, when New Horizons buzzed within 7,800 miles of the former ninth planet, came 50 years to the day after NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft made a similar first pass by Mars.

For the full story, see:
KENNETH CHANG. “Pluto’s Portrait From New Horizons: Ice Mountains and No Craters.” The New York Times (Thurs., JULY 16, 2015): A1 & A17.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date JULY 15, 2015.)

Antiquated Education Needs Reform to Encourage Entrepreneurship

(p. 22) . . . “Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era,” by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith — argues that the only way to ensure any kind of future security for our children is to totally upend the education system and rethink what school is for.
“Disrupt” is a buzz word these tech-world gurus use sparingly, but that’s what they mean. Wagner works at Harvard’s Innovation Lab, Dintersmith in venture capital, funding education and tech start-ups. . . . Their argument is this: Public education in America is based on antiquated late-19th-century priorities, on the need “to educate large numbers of immigrants and refugees from farms for basic citizenship and for jobs in a growing industrial economy.” Most of the stuff children are forced to know, and on which our culture’s sense of achievement is based, is unnecessary in the age of Google. But tests and test-makers still run the show, and kids are required to “jump through hoops” and drill and drill to assimilate reams of facts (“content”) instead of learning the skills that will keep them employed and employable for years to come — which is to say, the skills to be entrepreneurs.
. . . .
. . . the assumption that undergirds this whole tract: that every person can — or should — be molded into an entrepreneur.

For the full review, see:
LISA MILLER. “Raise Them Up; A Vision of Education for an Entrepreneurial America.” The New York Time Book Review (Sun., AUG. 23, 2015): 22.
(Note: ellipses in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date AUG. 18, 2015, and has the title “‘Most Likely to Succeed,’ by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith.”)

The book under review, is:
Wagner, Tony, and Ted Dintersmith. Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era. New York: Scribner, 2015.

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.”)

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.

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.

Uber Used Political Entrepreneurship to Fight Government Regulations

(p. A15) Mayor Bill de Blasio’s summertime battle with Uber exposed vulnerabilities in his political operation and has given rise to resentment among many of the allies he will need to advance his agenda at City Hall.
. . .
Aides to the mayor said they weren’t prepared for the force of Uber’s campaign-style attack of television ads, which began to air on July 14, the day after they met with Uber officials to negotiate.
Uber also ran a sophisticated digital strategy, with more than 40,000 people emailing the mayor and almost 20,000 sending him twitter messages.
City Hall repeatedly stumbled when it tried to fight back.
Aides managed to send emails to thousands of Uber users, saying they were only trying to slow the car service’s expansion–while studying the issue–but were flooded by many people incorrectly accusing them of trying to totally ban the service.
. . .
After Uber staged several large rallies, the mayor’s office aggressively tried to find supporters. But a rally on City Hall steps had fewer than 200 people, and many other officials didn’t want to enter the fray.
Many of the city’s influential black leaders were already backing Uber and had appeared at a July 14 news conference. Aides to the mayor were furious. “It was the African-American ministers that turned this fight,” said Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a pro-business group.

For the full story, see:
JOSH DAWSEY. “War With Uber Hurt de Blasio With Allies; Aides to the mayor say they weren’t prepared for the force of Uber’s campaign-style attack of TV ads.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 31, 2015): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 30, 2015.)

In Health Care We Need More than Incremental Steps; We Need Cures

(p. 8A) In 1998, I went to the doctor so fatigued I was unable to get out of bed. He sent me home diagnosed with multiple sclerosis but without so much as a treatment plan, a prescription or what I needed most: hope. Come back when it gets worse, he said, the medical equivalent of a pat on the head.
. . .
We need advocates unwilling to tolerate the old silos who insist on pushing neurologic science into a new era of breakthroughs. We need private funders with the vision to place big bets, often on long odds, with bigger payouts, perhaps a vaccine for MS or Alzheimer’s, on the other side.
At a time when the horizons of science have never spread wider, researchers and their supporters must rethink both the goals and the model of scientific research. It is a time for bold ambitions, not incremental steps.
Millions have experienced moments like the one I did in 1998. We owe these patients more than incremental progress. Ultimately, we owe them cures.

For the full commentary, see:
Ann Romney. “Bold Innovators Needed to Boost Health Research.” USA Today (Mon., October 16, 2014): 4A.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date October 16, 2014, and the title “Ann Romney: Health Research Needs Boost from Bold Innovators.”)

From Self-Funding, and Sony, Khanna Builds PlayStation Supercomputer to Advance Science

“Gaurav Khanna with a supercomputer he built at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics department using 200 Playstation 3 consoles that are housed in a refrigerated shipping container.” Source of caption: print version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) This spring, Gaurav Khanna noticed that the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics department was more crowded than usual. Why, he wondered, were so many students suddenly so interested in science?”

It wasn’t a thirst for knowledge, it turns out. News of Dr. Khanna’s success in building a supercomputer using only PlayStation 3 video game consoles had spread quickly; the students, a lot of them gamers, just wanted to gape at the sight of nearly 200 consoles stacked on one another.
. . .
Making a supercomputer requires a large number of processors — standard desktops, laptops or the like — and a way to network them. Dr. Khanna picked the PlayStation 3 for its viability and cost, currently, $250 to $300 in stores. Unlike other game consoles, the PlayStation 3 allows users to install a preferred operating system, making it attractive to programmers and developers. (The latest model, the PlayStation 4, does not have this feature.)
“Gaming had grown into a huge market,” Dr. Khanna said. “There’s a huge push for performance, meaning you can buy low-cost, high-performance hardware very easily. I could go out and buy 100 PlayStation 3 consoles at my neighborhood Best Buy, if I wanted.”
That is just what Dr. Khanna did, though on a smaller scale. Because the National Science Foundation, which funds much of Dr. Khanna’s research, might not have viewed the bulk buying of video game consoles as a responsible use of grant money, he reached out to Sony Computer Entertainment America, the company behind the PlayStation 3. Sony donated four consoles to the experiment; Dr. Khanna’s university paid for eight more, and Dr. Khanna bought another four. He then installed the Linux operating system on all 16 consoles, plugged them into the Internet and booted up the supercomputer.
Lior Burko, an associate professor of physics at Georgia Gwinnett College and a past collaborator with Dr. Khanna, praised the idea as an “ingenious” way to get the function of a supercomputer without the prohibitive expense.
“Dr. Khanna was able to combine his two fields of expertise, namely general relativity and computer science, to invent something new that allowed for not just a neat new machine, but also scientific progress that otherwise might have taken many more years to achieve,” Dr. Burko said.
. . .
His team linked the consoles, housing them in a refrigerated shipping container designed to carry milk. The resulting supercomputer, Dr. Khanna said, had the computational power of nearly 3,000 laptop or desktop processors, and cost only $75,000 to make — about a tenth the cost of a comparable supercomputer made using traditional parts.

For the full story, see:
LAURA PARKER “An Economical Way to Save Progress.” The New York Times (Tues., DEC. 23, 2014): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 22, 2014, and has the title “That Old PlayStation Can Aid Science.”)