Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Gary Becker, 1930-2014

Thursday, May 8th, 2014

Gary Becker, the wide-ranging economist who epitomized the iconoclastic nature of the University of Chicago, died this week. I’ve been on deadline writing a piece about one of his star students, Claudia Goldin, for which I almost scored what would have been Becker’s last interview. Alas, he was too ill — his assistant regretfully informed me of this on April 28th. On May 3rd, Becker passed away.

Here are some of my favorite links about Becker, assembled by the economist Tyler Cowen. I particularly liked Steven Levitt’s sweet homage to Becker, even describing how “people feared him because he could see the truth.” I think I like that because I feared my professors at Chicago, and sometimes my fellow students, that same way. And yet I had to engage with them, because that’s what Chicago trains you to do. When you do, you find that most of them are like Levitt describes Becker, deeply engaged with the people around them, even lunk-headed students like me.
I interviewed Becker only twice. In 2006, in an interview at the Boston Copley Hotel, which got our waiter so interested he looked up Becker online while we talked. Becker surprised me by readily conceding that markets aren’t always an effective approach, even offering up pollution controls as an example. He also said he thought science and math were important, but a liberal arts education would serve his grandkids best:

[L]earn liberal arts principles, so that if in 30 years from now the details are very different, you have a foundation that you can use to change.

I also interviewed him for this piece, Chicago Schooled, on whether the Chicago School caused the Great Recession. Becker again surprised me by not saying anything more emphatic than we’ll have to wait and see.

Becker told me in that first interview that he hadn’t studied sociology because it was too hard. Surprise again for me, since I got better grades in sociology courses than economics courses, and I knew I wasn’t smarter than Becker. He probably meant it was too obtuse, as these notes from James Heckman suggest. Becker was always clear-headed, and I wish I could have interviewed him more often.

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Boston’s rising sea levels

Tuesday, April 8th, 2014

One reader of my piece on Boston Under Water, the cover story in Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine, wrote in to say “I’m keeping a copy of this week’s magazine so that in 30 years I can pull it out and have a good laugh at the absurd predictions and loony policy suggestions. Thanks in advance for a good laugh!”

First, I would be happy in 30 years to be one of those reporters whose articles get held up as an example of how little we really know about the future. If I’m still coherent, I’ll breathe a small inward sigh of relief that I didn’t talk up the plans some have to retreat to Worcester.

It is certainly true that science is not linear. We are not marching along the x axis in a perfect set of dots, sea levels rising a tad each year. Within the last five years, sea levels around Boston even dropped slightly in an 18-month period. But they’re on the rise again, and my article was based on what scientific models predict will happen over time. We can mock models for their inability to predict the weather more than a few days out, but sea level models work on long-term averages, not specific points (here are good basic and intermediate explainers of how the models work). The models have worked well for what we know of the past, which gives them some authority when talking about the future.

I fear my scoffing reader will not bother to save their copy of the magazine when the basement starts flooding twice a day.

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A tale of two alleys

Monday, March 3rd, 2014

I was at the Boston Architectural College last week for a talk by Arlen Stawasz, a young architect who is thinking about climate change, and used a fellowship to spend a couple of months late last year in The Netherlands and Bangladesh. His site, Exploration of Sea Level Rise, features photos and videos showing aspects of how these two very different nations approach their mutual dilemma, the impact of rising seas.
On my way in, I looked at Boston’s Public Alley 343 and Public Alley 344 are directly across Boylston St. from each other. A part of PA 344 is a Green Alley, made with permeable asphalt and paving. It collects and filters rain water from the roof, as well. The estimated cost was between $100,000 and $500,000. I have no idea how much it normally costs to pave an alley. But around $500,000 seems to be the going rate for porous alleys; Boston’s Porous Alley Project will cost $300,000 to $500,000, says this source.

I photographed both PA 343 and PA 344. Guess which is which.

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Farewell, sweet passport, part 2

Monday, February 10th, 2014

In November 2007 I headed off to Iceland to report for Fast Company on Iceland’s efforts to create a hydrogen-powered economy. I know what you’re thinking: ‘Iceland in November, whoo!’ Hey, this is Iceland in November:

iceland plant man

If you go to the right greenhouse on the Golden Circle tour. I spent most of one day on that tour, learning about the wildness of Iceland, its hard history and its Thingvellir, the world’s first parliament. I saw Geysir, which didn’t erupt, and Strokkur, which did.

I also hit the annual Eve Online user conference (eventually wrote about that company for Fast Company, though I’ve yet to do the big write-up I think the company deserves, as a prime example of the way Millennials will run businesses).

The tour turned out to be useful for the mood of my piece. I did some actual work in Iceland, as well. For instance, I became the first person in the world to rent a hydrogen-powered car. Happily for me, I was not the first person to crash his hydrogen-powered rental car.

I stayed in the Hotel Holt, whose dining room served horse (but not whale), and featured one of the best collections of modern Icelandic paintings (the story is that starving artists used to pay in paintings for their meals and drinks). I had drinks at an ice bar (cold and kind of pointless), and basked in the Blue Lagoon (warm and really pleasant). On my last day, I went to the tip of Hallgrim’s Church in Reykjavik. Nearby is the Einar Jonsson house, whose sculpture garden features Jonsson’s gripping, often eerie works, like “Thor Wrestling with Age:”

And I straddled the North American and European continents:

More on my passport and where it’s taken me to come.

(All photos are mine, and can be used with attribution)

Posted in Writings, Trips | 6 Comments »

Money, happiness and product design

Sunday, February 9th, 2014

I blogged about Continuum’s bathroom innovation inspiration center earlier this month. That came out of a reporting trip for a piece I wrote that was part of a series of pieces on Can Money Buy Happiness? published today in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.

Continuum’s offices are almost completely open, with some pop-up conference rooms with walls. It feels like a place where people create things. This story couldn’t get at the full picture of the company and how it works; it’s simply too small.

In the draft, I wrote about a near-failure in the design process. This is what got cut:

Less happy is the process of coming up with a tablet case. Young takes this one personally, because he hates his tablet case and its ‘kickstand.’

But it’s a tough category to reinvent. “It’s really difficult for companies to stand out. A lot of things do their job, but don’t go much beyond that,” Young says.

His own design efforts weren’t working. After a few months, Michaud called Young to say Felix was going to have to kill the product.

That was on a Friday in May. Young, however, wasn’t through.

“It was just bugging me,” he says. “I had this moment at night where I just kept designing things in my head.”Then he had a Newton’s apple moment. He realized he could use gravity to create a tablet stand that would easily adjust to exactly where you wanted it. He came in to Continuum that Saturday morning, six-year-old son Davis in tow. He plunked Davis and an iPad at one of the desks by the window of the shop area, overlooking morning traffic.

While son played games, father was one room away in Continuum’s model shop, building a ‘breadboard,’ or prototype. It was a crude cardboard mockup, but on Monday, when Michaud met with the design team to give them the bad news, they pulled out Young’s breadboard.

Michaud smiled broadly. “You nailed it! You absolutely nailed it!” he said.

Thus was born the Felix FlipBook and FlipStand, one with cover and one without, which debuted in December.

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Social physics

Wednesday, February 5th, 2014

Sandy Pentland sent me a galley of his new book, Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread. It gives a cohesive overview of his research and puts it all under an intellectual canopy: we are collective creatures, shaped irrevocably by those around us. There are always outliers, of course, but even they cannot always escape cultural norms.

His thesis aims not at selfish gene-style biological adaptation, but self-interested economics. Pentland says his research, built on analyzing massive sets of data, shows that rational behavior is driven by the group, not the self. I expect he’ll get a good deal of backlash from traditional economists, but those involved in experimental research, the behavioralists, will probably support him.

I’m still digesting the book, but put together this piece for Information Week, drawn from an interview with Pentland focused mostly on part two of the book, on organizational dynamics.

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Innovation has really gone to the toilet

Monday, January 27th, 2014

I just completed a story on Continuum, a Boston design shop perhaps best known for the Swiffer and Reebok’s Pump. My piece looked at the creative process that goes into giving a twist to the mundane. One thing that didn’t make it into the piece: how the lowly toilet can foster innovation.

These photos I took show Continuum’s distribution medium for the company’s research arm, otherwise known as the Men’s Room.Oprah greets you as you walk in. Welcome to the creative zone, superstar!

Here’s a contemplative spot:

and, when you’re washing your hands, more trends to consider:

I shouldn’t mock. The company does a lot of creative work in a wide variety of fields. A few of them can be seen in this shot from Continuum’s Wall of Inspiration, which lines its main conference area.

It’s doing something right. Maybe I should start writing up trends and putting them on my bathroom walls.

Look for the piece in February in The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.

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Omnichannel still a work in progress at Best Buy

Thursday, January 16th, 2014

I wrote late last year about Best Buy’s “omnichannel” strategy, which centers on using its stores as mini-distribution centers for its Web site. The strategy is supposed to help it fight off Amazon, which has an inherent cost advantage (in part because Amazon can lose money at will, as it did in quarters 2 and 3 this past year, without being punished by the stock market). Instead, its sales, including online sales, fell by almost one percent (overall retail sales were up 3.8 percent) during the Christmas season. From this we can say a few things:
A) Opening on Thanksgiving Day is a turkey of an idea;

B) Retail continues to be a feeding frenzy for buyers of commodity consumer electronics;
C) Strategies often work better in theory.
Best Buy is still in the process of rolling out its omnichannel strategy. Perhaps if it were fully implemented it would have helped the company’s sales during the Christmas season. My guess is Best Buy will push forward with omnichannel and try desperately to find a way out of the discount wars. Having 1,000 distribution centers gives it reach Amazon doesn’t have, but also costs Amazon doesn’t have. If Best Buy has to beat Amazon on pure cost, it won’t happen. At least, not until Wall Street starts demanding a better bottom line from Amazon.

A sidenote: For my story I interviewed Scott Durchslag, Best Buy’s president of e-commerce, who turned out to have been a year behind me at the University of Chicago, and had gone to the same high school as one of my roommates. It’s possible I met him; Durchslag and I had similar majors and took the same famous prof for at least one course, though in different years. But neither of us remembered having met.

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Future batteries may still be lithium

Wednesday, November 13th, 2013

It’s difficult to look out 20 years and see what technology will power cell phones, electric vehicles and the smart grid, and then write about it in 900 words or so. The short answer is, lithium ion might still be the technology that matters, but there’s a lot happening in the smart grid that will affect how things play out. See my piece, Where Batteries Are Headed, in the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Energy Report (no registration required for this piece).

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The embrace of the press

Wednesday, November 6th, 2013

I’ve gone on air plenty of times, but I don’t often get quoted in text, which seems somehow more important. Must be my profession that makes me undervalue talking heads. Anyway, I was interviewed for being one of the co-authors of a report on why it’s so hard for companies to get something remotely like transformation out of digital technology. Here’s the link to the FierceCIO piece CEOs lack vision to lead digital transformation. It came out of this report, Embracing Digital Technology, I co-wrote for MIT Sloan Management Review.

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Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Archive for the 'Writings' Category

Gary Becker, 1930-2014

Boston’s rising sea levels

A tale of two alleys

Farewell, sweet passport, part 2

Money, happiness and product design

Social physics

Innovation has really gone to the toilet

Omnichannel still a work in progress at Best Buy

Future batteries may still be lithium

The embrace of the press

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