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The Management Myth - Matthew Stewart
So why is Mayo’s message constantly recycled and presented as something radically new and liberating? Why does every new management theorist seem to want to outdo Chairman Mao in calling for perpetual havoc on the old order? Very simply, because all economic organizations involve at least some degree of power, and power always pisses people off. That is the human condition. At the end of the day, it isn’t a new world order that the management theorists are after; it’s the sensation of the revolutionary moment. They long for that exhilarating instant when they’re fighting the good fight and imagining a future utopia. What happens after the revolution—civil war and Stalinism being good bets—could not be of less concern.
Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling, you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey, these are people we’re talking about! And the debate goes on. Ultimately, it’s just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group.
The tragedy, for those who value their reading time, is that Rousseau and Shakespeare said it all much, much better.
Ryan steals march on Obama as fiscal crisis looms - Michael Barone
It was Ryan's way of saying that the financial meltdown arrived largely without warning, while the impending fiscal crunch is like a runaway freight train.
"This is the most predictable crisis in the history of our country," he went on. "We are on our path to a debt crisis" like those we've seen recently in Europe, with the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product rising, under President Obama's budget, past the 90 percent danger point on its way to 800 percent.
At some point in between, as Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff explains in the Financial Times, interest rates spike and the government is forced to make draconian cuts.
Those Social Security checks? They can be cut anytime, as the Supreme Court held in Flemming v. Nestor in 1960. Congress can do that just as quickly as it voted $700 billion to bail out the banks in the fall of 2008.
Ryan's budget attempts to prevent that by restructuring taxes and spending programs so the national debt as a percentage of GDP will start sliding down.
Tax rates would be lowered and the tax base broadened, much as Congress did in 1986. Federal spending would revert to 2008 levels and be frozen for five years.
Corporate welfare programs, including green energy, would be ended. Defense spending would be at levels recommended by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Medicaid would be converted into block grants to the states, which would give them new incentives to hold down costs.
Medicare would be converted, for those now under age 55, to a program like federal employees' health benefit plans and the Medicare prescription drug program. Seniors would have a choice of plans and would receive "premium support" -- federal supplements varying in size depending on income and health.
First Thoughts on the Ryan Plan - Megan McArdle
The broad outlines of the plan would work, from a budgetary perspective. It reduces the deficit to a smaller percentage of GDP than either the current-law baseline or the more likely "alternative fiscal scenario". On the other hand, politically, it seems very unlikely to pass in anything like its current form--the Ryan plan actually cuts spending, as a percentage of GDP, from its historical levels. Given the burden of Baby Boomer retirements that we have promised to cover--and the GOP's craven cowardice and shameless pandering in the face of the senior lobby--I don't see how spending is going to fall in the near-to-medium term.
That is a reasonable objection, but not a fatal one. Most bold plans get negotiated. The question is whether the GOP is actually willing to negotiate, or somehow believes that it can get its way through sheer bloody-mindedness. With GOP freshmen idiotically cheering a potential government shutdown, as though this had anything at all to do with getting government spending or deficits under control, "bloody-mindedness" seems like the more credible current explanation.
On the other hand, they've hardly got a monopoly on that. The wildly disproportionate fury and outrage which greeted both Bowles-Simpson and the Ryan plan from the left indicate that progressives have so far failed to come to grips with the fact that they are going to have to compromise: that while some of the gap is going to be closed by tax increases, some of it is going to be closed by spending cuts. And not just defense cuts, or seemingly trivial changes to physician reimbursement rates that we hope will snowball over time, but actual cuts in services that people currently want and expect to get from government--but do not want or expect to pay for.
Homeownership and Mortgage Debt - Mark A. Calabria
From 1990 until today, the percentage of mortgage debt to value increased by over 50%, all to gain a 2 percentage point increase in homeownership. So it seems the story of the last 20 years has been a massive increase in home debt with very little increase in actual homeownership rates.
Using Heat to Cool Buildings - Kevin Bullis
All refrigerators and air conditioners cool by evaporating a refrigerant, a process that absorbs heat. They differ in how that refrigerant is condensed so that it can be reused for cooling. Unlike the technology inside most air conditioners, which employs electrically driven compressors to mechanically compress the vaporized refrigerant, adsorption chillers use heat to condense the refrigerant. Adsorption chillers are typically far less efficient than chillers that use electrical compressors, and are bulky and expensive. But they have the advantage of being cheap to operate, since they require very little electricity. "If you have waste heat, you can run it for free," McGrail says.
So far these chillers have been limited to applications where there is a lot of waste heat—such as industrial facilities and power plants—or where electricity isn't always available. Cutting their size and cost could make them attractive in more applications, including in homes, where they could be run using hot water from solar heaters, McGrail says.
Understanding Radiation - Charlie Martin
In fact, the radiation was normally in one of four forms, which we now describe as:
- “Alpha” rays, fast moving particles that are the nuclei of helium atoms stripped of their electrons
- “Beta” rays, electrons with no nucleus attached,
- “Gamma” rays, a form of very high energy X-ray,
- and free, fast-moving neutrons, one of the particles that make up the nucleus.
There are other forms, like free fast-moving protons, and more exotic particles, but they aren’t really important for this; the main four are enough to explain what’s happening at Fukushima.
Radiation Dose Chart
(Liberal) Academic Self-Selection - Scott Jaschik
Few aspects of faculty demographics generate more attention than their politics. Why is it, many want to know, that professors are far more likely than the general public to be liberal? Many theories have been put forward, including the view (much discussed in conservative circles) that academe is hostile to conservatives and tries to either weed them out or convert them.
Two studies being released today provide more evidence that bias is not the cause -- and the studies provide some additional evidence to back the theory (put forward last year by one of the authors of the new work) that "self-selection" is the primary reason so many academics are liberal. In brief, the self-selection idea holds that some professions have become "typed" in American society in various ways that may relate to gender or class but could also relate to politics. Academe is seen as more liberal, so liberals are more likely to identify being an academic as something to which they aspire. The argument is significant because it does not contest the lopsided political nature of many faculties, but also suggests that higher education is open to those conservative scholars who want careers there.
Social Scientist Sees Bias Within - John Tierney
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”
Real Clear SciencePutting Chernobyl in Perspective - Josh Gilder
In 2006, 20 years after the accident, a group of eight UN agencies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization, assessed the damage in a study incorporating the work of hundreds of scientists and health experts from around the world.
It turns out that two decades after the fact, the death toll had not reached the tens of thousands that were predicted. In fact, fewer than 50 deaths could be directly attributable to radiation from the disaster, almost all of them among rescue workers who had been exposed to massive amounts of radiation on the disaster site at the time of the fire and its immediate aftermath. In addition, nine children in the area died of thyroid cancer that is thought to have been caused by radioactive contamination, but even among the nearby population, there was neither evidence of decreased fertility nor of congenital malformations that could be attributed to radiation exposure.
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None of this takes away from the heroism of the emergency workers at the Fukushima plants who are taking real risks to bring the reactors there under control, nor the need to take reasonable precautions for the surrounding population, especially children. But it is worth keeping in mind the other startling conclusion of the UN study, which was that alongside the radiological effects, the crippling “mental health impact” caused by widespread misinformation was “the largest public health problem created by the accident.” In other words, the most dangerous fallout form the accident is fear. The way to prevent it is for the media to present more balance in the reporting and “expert” commentary the public is currently receiving in massive doses.
Introduction To Radiation - Siju Mammen
There is a lot of confusion regarding radiation and radiation poisoning and this article will try and break it down.
New engine radically improves fuel economy, cuts emissions - Tuan C. Nguyen
But what gives the new motor an aura of potentially being truly revolutionary is that it utilizes shock wave technology, which takes fuel efficiency to a whole other level. While cars engine use about 15 percent of available fuel for propulsion, the Wave Disk Generator harnesses an impressive 60 percent. Such a vast improvement can translate to a 90 percent reduction in carbon emissions and a driving range of over 500 miles.
Developed by scientists at Michigan State University, the prototype may someday replace the internal combustion engine if it ever makes it to market. Compared to the familiar, but clunky 1,000-pound workhorse under the hood, the generator is about the the size of a cooking pot. And since the engine enables cars to operate sans transmission systems, cooling systems, emissions regulation or fluids, manufacturers can produce electric cars that are up to 30 percent lighter and require far less maintenance
