James L Adams—People and Products

The Hand and Product Quality, Part II

As I mentioned in my last post, last week I was to give a talk on the wonders of hands and the rewards of using them at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto.  I did so, and the results were surprising. Full house, rapt attention, and when the audio visual equipment failed (as usual), I was going to go ahead without slides, but the crowd insisted we fix the problem and continue as planned. 

I talked not only about the hands and how wonderfully capable they were in conjunction with the arm and the brain, but also  about my own hobbies (wood work, metal work, rescuing vintage machinery) and  those of a few people I know who are deeply involved in hands-on hobbies (building live-steam model railroad equipment,  gardening, modifying and erecting buildings,cooking, restoring automobiles, tanks, and antiques of all sorts, knitting,  blacksmithing, building airplane propellers , visual arts, and so on),  Afterwards I took questions and some people didn’t seem to want to leave.  I had obviously struck a chord.

 This is actually not that surprising, since most of the people in the crowd were older (probably 50 and above on the average), and living in Palo Alto and surrounding area, probably had not spent their life in manual work.  There is an increasing wave of interest in hands-on hobbies in the U.S. —maybe a reaction against the intangible nature of the "information revolution".  But it seems to be strongest in younger people (the Makers) , and focused in areas where facilities are available (TechShop ) and organized groups with similar interests have formed.  In any case, many people after the talk told me that they have been trying to find the time to do such a thing, but can’t seem to get started.  My advice to them is simple.  Make it your number #1 priority, assume your initial efforts will not be overwhelming, seek out experts for help and advice, but don’t compare your work with theirs.  I used my mother, Jean Adams, as a good example.  When we kids left  home she decided to learn to water color.  She had a background in making clothes, furniture, and other such necessities, but her painting experience was mostly confined to painting the house.

 She took some lessons from a well-known water-colorist in Southern California named Robert Wood, and the two of them got along famously.  At one point he convinced her to enter a painting in a show, which she did, and to her surprise won a prize.  This was not in a region that had a sophisticated art movement going —no galleries, art magazines, professionals, critics, etc., and people liked Mom’s work.  The rest is history.  She ended up with a good local- and-beyond reputation, and eventually won a Califronia state award for her work.  A few of her paintings are scattered around this post.  Had she begun in Boston or New York, rather than in Rialto, California, she probably would have compared herself to world famous painters and given up.

  I think I will spend a bit of time crusading to encourage people to dive into more activities that require the use of both their minds and their hands.  I think they know what they want to do.  They just need to jump into the water.

 

 

 

The Hand and Product Quality

 I am going to give a talk to the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto this coming week extolling the virtues of working with the hands, an activity which has been an important part of my life, even though I have earned my income as an engineer and a professor.  But manual work has brought me the pleasure and quick positive feedback that has enabled me to sail happily through the ups and downs of my mental work. And thinking about my upcoming talk is causing me to become even more impressed with hands.

 The other night my wife and I attended a Beethoven recital by Richard Goode, one of the top pianists of the world. I played the piano quite a bit in my youth, beginning with lessons in a small town and by the time I was in high school playing in the region.  I played quite a bit until I was in my 30’s, but more and more for social groups, and finally at one point quit, because I realized I had good hands, but was neither a musician nor willing to devote the time and effort required to become really good.  Goode is really good.  He is a wonderful musician, and has the kind of hands one can develop by constant practice over many years (he is 70).  Since I have not kept up my piano chops, I was amazed at his manual dexterity, and could not help but wonder what would have happened had I had better teaching and kept at it.

 Today I was leafing through one of my favorite books, The Hand, by Frank R. Wilson,(see recommended book list), a neurologist and long time medical director of the Peter F. Ostwald Health Program for Performing Artists at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco.  It is a well documented book full of thought provoking information and data about the human hand.  But as a life-long specialist in hands, Wilson does not simply mention that we are lucky to have opposable thumbs.  He goes into  detail about the evolution of the thumb, the arm, the shoulder, and the brain as a unit and a very important one.  As he points out, the opposable thumbs are only one part of the system, and would not be that significant if it were not for the grasping, positioning, and subtle feelings and motions we are able to do.  And he dwells on the sophistication and complexity of the hand (the thumb alone is controlled by 9 muscles entering from the forearm and the rest of the hand) and we seem to control it in its many tasks without even thinking about it.  Spend a bit of time watching yours and other people’s hands (and arms), and you should be impressed.  In one of the chapters in Wilson’s book, he compares the tasks the professional piano player’s hand must do with those of a professional rock climber.  Diversity of function indeed.

 I worry that use of the hand and related parts of the body is losing its centrality in the lives of many people.  Wilson makes the point that the brain and the hand developed together—a duo.   It seems to me that many people who seem to be neglecting one of the duo and making their living with their minds, are perhaps losing something by not building the manual skills that would bring them pride and pleasure.   I also worry  that hands are being neglected in education.  I started out in life by growing up on a farm and being taught a large number of manual skills, planning to be either a carpenter or a tool and die maker until I decided to become an engineer (I still worked in shops in the summer while in college). 

 Hopefully I don’t have to argue that hands-on experience in the basic processes necessary to design and build products gives one a better base to judge what is possible, what is not possible, what is good, and what is bad.  Painting custom antique and custom cars by hand gives one  valuable insights to programming a robot to do so, and working on the factory floor equips one to better supervise others that are doing so.  When I graduated from college, I was offered a job at Warner Swasey, then the premier machine-tool builder in the U .S.  I was quite flattered, because they had never offered a job to a Caltech graduate, and the fact that I had graduated #1 in engineering was not the reason.  They wanted me because I had worked summers in a shop.  And even then, I would have begun my career with two more  years working in their shop.  They wanted to make the best machines they could, and were not interested in engineers that had not served their time as machinists.  The U. S. is not doing such things as much any more, and perhaps as a result, the quality of our products has slipped relative to countries who offer more hands-on experience to their new employees.  In many (most?) cases. beginning at the bottom of an organizational chart results in unique proficiency at the top.  Why people working with their hands are often at the bottom of an organizational chart (except for the fortunate few like surgeons and piano players) is a topic for another post.    

 I have spent many hours in my life doing such things as restoring old machines, maintaining cars and houses,  and making and fixing electro mechanical devices and other things.  I think that without this experience, I would be much less competent at either engineering or teaching.  In fact, I have long had the pleasure of being involved in a growing activity at Stanford called the Product Realization Laboratory, led by Professor David Beach, in which students  design, develop, and manufacture products.  I am happy to say that now people are catching onto the value of such a program.  Once engineering schools gave their students hands-on problems.  Then they went through a long period of becoming increasingly theoretical.  Now hands-on work is coming back.  Good for individuals and for the economy—and for product quality.

 

 

 

Thomas Piketty and Economics

 I am in Hawaii to help a friend with a plumbing project.  As usual, when I faced a flight longer than an hour or two, I decided to take a book I wanted to read.  Since I heard so much about it, I chose Thomas Piketty’s book Capital In The Twenty-First Century.  I found it to be a great read.  It is a serious and long book, so I certainly did not finish it on the flight over.  But I became so hooked on it, that I continued to read it rather than help my friend with his plumbing.  But now both are done, and I will explain why I became so interested in it.

 First of all, Piketty is one of those wonders — an academic who can write very readable prose that includes a large amount of data, theory, and information without using jargon and analytical tools specific to his/her discipline.  This is particularly a failing among many academic economists, who seem to want to turn a topic that contains human behavior and emotion into an exact science.  Fortunately this dream is breaking down, and Piketty seems to me to have an excellent grasp of both the theories and human behavior.  In fact he makes the point that economics is a social science, not a physical one, and therefore must account for our foibles.

 The book is amazingly well timed, since it focuses upon the aggregation of capital over time and the resulting inequality.  It is based on a large amount of data on many nations spread over a large span of time.  His charts often begin with the year 1700 and go into the future (based on projections of population growth, and other pertinent trends taken from other fields).  He shows that over long time periods, capital growth tends to be larger than growth in population and wages.  Also that this capital tends to become focused among fewer and people (top 1% owning  over 30% in U.S. at present) until we reach the point that awareness and disapproval result  He does not waste time portraying the difficulties with this situation, but his data and comments do highlight the revolutionary behavior that has occurred when this inequality became too high (French revolution,  rise of communism/socialism, political break-up of wealth, etc.).

 To me, the book also shows the short-term mentality of we Homo Sapiens.  The amount of capital in the world was rising sharply until World War I.  This war followed by the great depression, followed by World War II, dramatically reduced the world’s wealth, and in particular the peaks in Capital.  The period between World War II and the present has been one of re-growth, and is resulting in peaks of capital again.  Piketty says this is normal economic behavior until interrupted.  But he points out that we became used to the unusual growth in wages and productivity in the latter half of the twentieth century, and count on ever increasing rapid growth in wages and opportunity.  Perhaps that may be the case for a while in countries playing “catch-up” (China, India, African countries), but maybe not everywhere. As a good economist, he does point out the necessity of growth.  But as a non-economist and a resident of the San Francisco  peninsula, I have always thought counting on eternal high growth is a bit risky.  Strange things happen as one approaches infinity.

 The comments about the Piketty book in and out of the media are interesting.  He is a young and attractive guy (French, yet), and was featured recently in the Sunday New York Times on the front page of the Style section—perhaps a first for academic economists.   And of course the reactions to his book tend to be biased by  people’s beliefs.  I have always thought that when problems become difficult, people retreat to faith and defend their faith viciously.  Economics is a good example.  In the U.S. it is much more comfortable to believe in capitalism, even though history suggests that pure capitalism does not take care of everyone. But many in the U.S. seem to be becoming less enchanted with it.  Piketty seems to be neither economically far left nor far right.  As he points out in the book, he is young enough to have missed the extreme feelings of the 1950’s and 60’s.   He is therefore getting quite a bit of attack from protectors ofpure capitalism such as Forbes magazine. To his credit, he takes some good swings back, in particular at their handing of individual wealth.  He is probably being attacked from the left as well, although apparently his book is being taken as the textbook for the Occupy Wallstreet crowd. 

 I found the book incredibly thought provoking (perhaps because of my ignorance of economics), even though I did have to occasionally look back in order to try to keep all of the material in my head.  I think it deserves the wide-spread reading and discussion it is apparently receiving.  More details in the recommended reading list at the left.

 

Michael Lewis, Flash Boys, Stocks, and Technology

  I am a fan of Michael Lewis books.  They are fun to read, filled with heroes and villains, and even better give insights into what is to me an exotic and foreign land — that of Wall Street and high (matter of perspective) finance.  I have just finished his latest book, Flash Boys (information in recommended reading column on the left of the blog).  As you can see from the internet, it is already highly controversial, but also presently number one on the New York Times non-fiction best sellers list.

  Michael is a very bright and likable person, who has a knack for causing people to tell him things they probably shouldn’t, which is of course a valuable attribute in the vocation he has chosen.  I met him years ago when his wife, Tabitha Soren, came to Stanford as a holder of a  Knight Journalism Fellowship, awarded to outstanding professional journalists.  He was interested in doing a piece on Silicon Valley venture capitalists, we talked a bit, and he asked me to introduce him to some.  Easily done, with the result that an excellent article appeared, describing the Silicon Valley venture capital industry very well, but also outing a bit of dirty linen that several members of the VC community did not want to become public.  I liked the article, but a couple of the people I told him to look up didn’t return my phone calls for a while.

 One thing that impresses me is that he has an incredible knack to convey the nature of the seemingly strange (to me) behavior of people investing large amounts of money in hopes of making huge profits.  Among other things, Flash Boys is about the impact that computers have had and are having on the stock market.  In brief, computers now handle large movements of money rather than people, and the speed at which they can make decisions and the speed at which buy/sell messages move has become a critical factor in trading, resulting in great emphasis on such things as the length of fiber cables and the speed of digital components. Large buys and sells affect the value of stocks.  When stock transactions were completed in seconds, traders were able to follow them.  But now first milliseconds and then microseconds are important for a number of reasons.  As an example, Computers are fast enough to sense a buy or sale well before it is complete, and use this knowledge to profit by such things as transactions through other exchanges.  The age of high frequency trading was  the result of this.

 Flash Boys is an excellent story about the effects of technology on a traditional business and the interaction between computer specialists and traditional traders and managers.  Books like this open my eyes a lot, because my attitude toward money was probably formed by growing up in a small town after the depression.  I tend to relax into thinking that it represents something fixed.  I certainly do not consider myself an investor, but Michael Lewis books do make me think about the trustworthiness of the money on which I depend on as a retired person.  High frequency trading does not affect my meager stock transactions, but it affects the economy, and the economy affects me.

 I recommend the book for a number of reasons, not the least being that it will give you another look at the influence of technology when it strikes a traditional business.  And if you are not on Wall Street working in finance, it will give you some things to think and worry about.