Jobs’s passion was applied to issues both large and minuscule. Some CEOs are great at vision; others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says that one of Jobs’s salient traits was his ability and desire to envision overarching strategy while also focusing on the tiniest aspects of design. For example, in 2000 he came up with the grand vision that the personal computer should become a “digital hub” for managing all of a user’s music, videos, photos, and content, and thus got Apple into the personal-device business with the iPod and then the iPad. In 2010 he came up with the successor strategy—the “hub” would move to the cloud—and Apple began building a huge server farm so that all a user’s content could be uploaded and then seamlessly synced to other personal devices. But even as he was laying out these grand visions, he was fretting over the shape and color of the screws inside the iMac.

After the iPod became a huge success, Jobs spent little time relishing it. Instead he began to worry about what might endanger it. One possibility was that mobile phone makers would start adding music players to their handsets. So he cannibalized iPod sales by creating the iPhone. “If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will,” he said.

He got hives, or worse, when contemplating the use of great Apple software on another company’s uninspired hardware, and he was equally allergic to the thought that unapproved apps or content might pollute the perfection of an Apple device. It was an approach that did not always maximize short-term profits, but in a world filled with junky devices, inscrutable error messages, and annoying interfaces, it led to astonishing products marked by delightful user experiences. Being in the Apple ecosystem could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens

He’d redefine the problem or approach, and our little problem would go away.” At one point Jobs made the simplest of all suggestions: Let’s get rid of the on/off button. At first the team members were taken aback, but then they realized the button was unnecessary. The device would gradually power down if it wasn’t being used and would spring to life when reengaged.

Indeed, he and Apple had had a string of hits over the past dozen years that was greater than that of any other innovative company in modern times: iMac, iPod, iPod nano, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, App Store, OS X Lion—not to mention every Pixar film.

In November 2000 Amazon launched ‘Marketplace’ allowing third party sellers to sell their products on the Amazon website in exchange for a small commission. This provided Amazon with a greater selection of products.In January 2002 Amazon reported a net income of $5million, its first ever profitable quarter. The following year became Amazon’s first profitable 12 months.

In summer 1996 Amazon launched its first big innovation: paying other websites commission for a referral. This helped to create an industry we now know as affiliate marketing.

The company is notorious for its confrontational culture. Bezos believes that truth springs forward when ideas and perspectives are banged against each other, sometimes violently. "Bezos says the company attracts a certain kind of person who likes to pioneer and invent, but former employees frequently complain that Amazon has the bureaucracy of a big company with the infrastructure and pace of a startup, with lots of duplicate efforts and poor communication that makes it difficult to get things done. The people who do well at Amazon are often those who thrive in an adversarial atmosphere with almost constant friction. Bezos abhors what he calls “social cohesion,” the natural impulse to seek consensus. He’d rather his minions battled it out in arguments backed by numbers and passion."

Bezos’ closest colleagues are slavish in their devotion, their loyalty, and their effectiveness. Stone calls them Jeff Bots: Jeff Bots draw fuel from their CEO’s ample idea tank and then go out into the world and dutifully execute the best notions. They have completely absorbed Bezos’s business philosophy and molded their own worldviews around it, and they recite rote Jeffisms—how they start from the customer and work backward, et cetera—as if these were their prime directives.

The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called “two-pizza teams.” Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people—small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon’s biggest problems. They would likely compete with one another for resources and sometimes duplicate their efforts, replicating the Darwinian realities of surviving in nature. Freed from the constraints of intracompany communication, Bezos hoped, these loosely coupled teams could move faster and get features to customers quicker. There were some head-scratching aspects to Bezos’s two-pizza-team concept. Each group was required to propose its own “fitness function”—a linear equation that it could use to measure its own impact without ambiguity."

The Kuznets curve, mapping inequality over time, is a bell curve: inequality peaks and then declines. Piketty would replace it with a U curve.

A more immediate problem is that it isn’t going to happen: the nations of the world can’t agree on taxing harmful carbon emissions, let alone taxing the capital of their richest and most powerful citizens. Piketty concedes as much.

not only would not reduce the growth of the US economy but would in fact distribute the fruits of growth more widely while imposing reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior.”

, Piketty aptly has a worldwide solution for it: a global tax on wealth combined with higher rates of tax on the largest incomes.

Another thing that Piketty doesn’t adequately consider is the possibility that inequality, in some of its dimensions, is not rising at all. His book largely focusses on Europe and the United States. At the global level, substantial progress has been made in dragging people out of destitution, and extending their lives

A more upbeat possibility is that the rate of G.D.P. growth will approach, or even exceed, the rate of return on capital. If it does, the coming decades could look more like the middle of the twentieth century than like the nineteenth century

A second possible escape route is for the return on capital to fall, closing the gap with the growth rate.

In the United States, the story was less dramatic but broadly similar. The Great Depression wiped out a lot of dynastic wealth, and it also led to a policy revolution. During the nineteen-thirties and forties, Piketty reminds us, Roosevelt raised the top rate of income tax to more than ninety per cent and the tax on large estates to more than seventy per cent. The federal government set minimum wages in many industries, and it encouraged the growth of trade unions. In the decades after the war, it spent heavily on infrastructure, such as interstate highways, which boosted G.D.P. growth. Fearful of spurring public outrage, firms kept the pay of their senior executives in check. Inequality started to rise again only when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan led a conservative counter-revolution that slashed tax rates on the rich, decimated the unions, and sought to restrain the growth of government expenditures. Politics and income distribution are two sides of the same coin.

If ownership of capital were distributed equally, this wouldn’t matter much. We’d all share in the rise in profits and dividends and rents. But in the United States in 2010, for example, the richest ten per cent of households owned seventy per cent of all the country’s wealth (a good surrogate for “capital”), and the top one per cent of households owned thirty-five per cent of the wealth.

Defenders of big pay packages like to claim that senior managers earn their vast salaries by boosting their firm’s profits and stock prices. But Piketty points out how hard it is to measure the contribution (the “marginal productivity”) of any one individual in a large corporation. The compensation of top managers is typically set by committees comprising other senior executives who earn comparable amounts. “It is only reasonable to assume that people in a position to set their own salaries have a natural incentive to treat themselves generously, or at the very least to be rather optimistic in gauging their marginal productivity,”

It will be possible to say to the irresponsible what can’t be said now: “We won’t let you starve before you get your next deposit, but it’s time for you to get your act together. Don’t try to tell us you’re helpless, because we know you aren’t.” The known presence of an income stream would transform a wide range of social and personal interactions. The unemployed guy living with his girlfriend will be told that he has to start paying part of the rent or move out, changing the dynamics of their relationship for the better

This was a bad trade, in my view. Government agencies are the worst of all mechanisms for dealing with human needs. They are necessarily bound by rules applied uniformly to people who have the same problems on paper but who will respond differently to different forms of help. Whether religious or secular, nongovernmental organization are inherently better able to tailor their services to local conditions and individual cases. Under my UBI plan, the entire bureaucratic apparatus of government social workers would disappear, but Americans would still possess their historic sympathy and social concern.

According to CBO, the top 1% of earners now pay 40% of all federal taxes, compared to less than 20% in the 1970s. Today, according to research by the OECD, income taxes in America are the most progressive among the rich nations of the world

while income inequality is rising, inequality of personal well-being is dropping. "

The CBO study examined the differences between the rich and poor in 1979 and the rich and poor in 2007, but not whether people who were rich or poor in 1979 remained so in 2007. In fact, many people do not remain in the same portion of the income distribution over time: About half of those in the bottom income quintile in 1996, for instance, had moved to a higher income group by 2005, while some 30% of taxpayers in the top income quintile in 1996 had fallen to a lower quintile by 2005.

Plenty also fret that a world of universal incomes would mean even higher hurdles to migration than today’s

Many worry that a general disengagement from work might prove alienating, and money for nothing socially corrosive.

Raising taxes on income and profits has its risks, though. It increases incentives for avoidance and evasion, and reduces the incentives for the most productive workers to work and for companies to invest. An alternative would be to increase income through more efficient taxes, such as value-added tax (VAT). Most European countries raise at least 10% of GDP through taxes on goods and services, primarily VAT. America, in contrast, raises only 4.5% through taxes on goods and services, none of which is collected in VAT form. But although a VAT is efficient, it is also regressive, hitting poorer people relatively harder.

Any universal basic income generous enough to make a dent in poverty would be very expensive.

EITC programme, for example, is just 8% of its spending on public pensions. But it has three problems, too. Though such subsidies reduce the poverty-trap effect, they do not eliminate it; generous wage subsidies that phase out as incomes rise reduce the incentive to find better-paying work, because some of the gain received from a raise is offset by a reduction in benefits. A gently sloping phase-out answers the problem to some extent, but it also increases costs, with more of the workforce qualifying for at least some of the benefit.

The UN's guidelines for REDD projects are also easy to game. Developers are required to define an "imaginary" emissions baseline, or the rate at which logging and other forces would degrade the environment in the event that the proposed project didn't go into effect. "In essence, the purpose of this offset policy is to ensure that greenhouse gas reductions are 'in addition to what would have happened anyway,'" Martin and Walters wrote in the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy article. While this might be easier to prove on a factory retrofit, by, for example, using an emissions device to measure how much carbon dioxide is released before modifications, determining how nature and markets will act on a forest in the future is a guessing game subject to significant corruption. "One can imagine situations where local collusion might occur in relation to future land use and, in establishing a baseline, propose … degradation activities that may never have been undertaken in reality," the authors continue. If developers imagined a scenario where half the forest was logged, for example, the carbon credits would be worth more and the returns on the market would be much higher, even if that amount of logging was unlikely.When Nilsson was initially considering his carbon projects, the proposed baseline was already an area he planned on fudging.

Financial insecurity is a constant companion for the predominantly female workforce at PT Buma, a factory in Indonesia’s West Java province that produced a batch of Ivanka-branded knit dresses that shipping records show arrived in Newark on Jan. 18, two days before Trump’s inauguration. K., a 26-year-old sewing-machine operator, told The Post that she makes the equivalent of $173 a month, the region’s minimum wage. Her full name, like that of other workers, is being withheld by The Post because the workers fear being punished or fired for speaking to the media.

“We are the ultra-poor,” said Kalpona Akter, a Bangladeshi labor organizer and former garment worker who was first hired by a factory at the age of 12. “We are making you beautiful, but we are starving.” Kalpona Akter, a former garment worker, is the executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, one of the country’s most prominent labor rights advocacy organizations. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post) In December, thousands of workers seeking higher pay went on strike outside the capital city of Dhaka. In response, police rounded up and arrested several dozen labor organizers, and factory owners filed criminal complaints against hundreds of workers, according to Human Rights Watch. An estimated 1,500 garment workers were suspended or fired. At a Dhaka apparel summit in February, U.S. Ambassador Marcia S. Bernicat described the mass firings and arrests as “a giant, disappointing step backwards on labor rights” and warned that international buyers “have to ask themselves how they will sell garments made in a country where large numbers of workers and union leaders are suddenly arrested, fired or suspended simply because they or their fellow workers asked for a wage increase.”

But Musk's companies don't look much like the Internet companies Silicon Valley churns out these days. Tesla Motors, like SpaceX, is an ambitious gamble aimed at an established market. Musk spurned early-stage investors and bankrolled the company himself; he has put in $37 million to date. Although Tesla has since accepted more than $68 million from VCs and private equity firms, Musk remains the majority shareholder

The best way to respond to a trade deficit is to ignore it.

Visual and auditory signals have little effect on the gastrulating embryo, but both are essential for the typical development of vision and audition in the newborn.

Genes provide the templates for creating particular proteins that are essential to the developmental process; the environment provides essential input that shapes and influences the direction of the emerging neural networks

Although nothing in neural development appears to be “predetermined”, the process of development is nonetheless orderly and follows very regular patterns over time.

the processes that underlie and guide brain development involve the ongoing interplay of genetic and environmental factors.

The inputs from the active eye invade and subsume territory that would normally have received input from the deprived ey

The bands representing the active eye widen and expand into the territory of the deprived eye; while the bands representing the deprived eye shrink to thin stripes.

monocular visual deprivation

environments

Two simple ways to alter input are enrichment and deprivation

At later ages, the developing—and even the mature—nervous system continues to require input to acquire new knowledge and to develop functional neural systems.

Greenough introduced the term “experience expectant” development to capture the idea that the early experience of the organism plays an essential role in normal brain development, particularly in the early postnatal period

These early events also provide initial patterning within each of the major subdivisions of the brain, but this early patterning, particularly in the neocortex, is both underspecified and malleable.

hese plots reveal the rapid change in FA in young school-aged children and also demonstrate that different tracts vary in the pace with which adult values of FA are approached.

In summary, in vivo brain imaging is opening a window on continuing brain development during infancy and childhood. As the imaging techniques mature, and the biological significance of the signals they record are more firmly established, these techniques promise to reveal much more about the dynamic interactions within human brain tissues that attend the molecular and microstructural events described in this review.

The interpretation (Suzuki et al. 2003) is that unrestricted water in extra-axonal space declines, decreasing tissue diffusivity overall, while diffusion within and/or along the membranes of the axons remains relatively constant or increases.

anisotropy, usually as fractional anisotropy

Diffusion imaging measures the diffusion of water molecules through the tissue. A common use of diffusion imaging involves fitting, for each voxel, a mathematical function called a tensor, that estimates proton diffusion (motion) along each of 3 orthogonal spatial axes.

In summary, MR morphometry studies reveal a complex pattern of development in brain structure during childhood and hint that ongoing maturation of fiber tracts probably plays a key role. Only recently, however, has it been possible to examine the maturation of fiber tracts directly, using diffusion tensor imaging

changes resulting from maturation of fiber tracts

between the ages of 8 and 30 years more modest decreases in cortical surface area accompany robust decreases in cortical thickness.

not only widespread, regionally specific, apparent cortical thinning, but more limited areas of cortical thickening as well.

before adolescence the volume of tissue with the MR signal characteristics of “gray matter” begins to decline concurrently in locations throughout the brain

Data shown in Fig. 11, plotting estimated volumes of brain structures across the lifespan, illustrate that during childhood and adolescence changes in brain structure are at least as dramatic as those at the end of life.

cranial vault

and that some of these alterations might be regressive; that is, they might involve tissue loss.

that gray matter volumes, both in the cerebral cortex and in subcortical nuclei, were considerably larger in school-aged children than in young adults

quantitative morphometry

MRI

Thus at the level of individual neurons the processes associated with exuberant production and retraction of connections provide rapid sampling of the local environment and serve to support axon guidance and target detection.

afferent input

Competition for resources such as neurotrophic factors plays a significant role in selection of pathways.

. Early in development transient connections form throughout the brain, which are not observed in adults.

synapses plateaus

at a microscopic level very rapid formation and retraction of connections can be observed at the level of individual neurons over periods of minutes or hours.

macroscopic level, exuberance and pruning can be observed within major brain areas and pathways on timescales that extend over months or even years.

patterns of connectivity in the developing brain are exuberant in terms of both the numbers of connections formed and their topography.

such that the number of surviving oligodendrocytes matches the local axonal surface area

many excess oligodendrocytes undergo apoptosis a few days after differentiating

neural apoptosis has its peak during prenatal life

In summary, proliferation and migration of glial precursors and differentiation of astrocytes and oligodendrocytes are largely postnatal processes

An intriguing new line of evidence also suggests that a subset of the OPCs dispersed throughout the brain form excitatory and inhibitory connections with neurons, and thus may contribute actively and directly to neural signaling (

Oligodendrocytes synthesize a number of trophic factors that appear to contribute to the maintenance of axonal integrity and neuronal survival

OPC

can differentiate in response to injury

astrocytes

oligodendrocytes

where they migrate from the subgranular layer only as far as the nearby granular laye

dentate gyrus of the hippocampus

olfactory bulb

In vivo brain imaging of children

estimates of the developmental time course in humans of the postnatal processes outlined below are derived by extrapolation from data acquired in other species

Though the production and migration of neurons are largely prenatal events, proliferation and migration of glial progenitors continues for an extended period after birth, and the differentiation and maturation of these cells continue throughout childhood.

. Note that the mechanism for triggering cell death in the MZ, SP or progenitor cell populations must differ from those discussed for neurons. None of these populations contain cells that enter neural networks, thus the specific effects of neurotrophin availability are not likely associated with the apoptotic pathways in these cells groups.Go to:

Although the evidence is somewhat limited, cell death may serve as a mechanism for correcting errors in neuronal production or migration

During development it is thought that neurons compete for neurotrophic resources. According to the neurotrophic hypothesis (Oppenheim 1989), neurons that establish effective connections are able to obtain more neurotrophic factor and are more likely to survive.

neurotrophic substances (Levi-Montalcini

cascade

Across the cortex, rates of apoptosis within all layers is high, reaching 70% in some regions

All neurons and neural progenitor cells (as well as many other types of cells) have this intrinsic “suicide” program.

. Necrotic cell death is a pathological process that follows insult or injury to a population of cells and is a mechanism for eliminating damaged tissue from the biological system.

in glia populations and the events involving exuberant production and pruning of connections are largely postnatal events.

Most naturally occurring cell death in neuronal populations occurs prenatally,

These two processes include naturally occurring cell death, which involves the normal loss of 50% or more of the neurons within a brain region;

the subplate neurons retract their connections and the cells themselves gradually die off.

In the absence of subplate neuron signaling, normal patterns of connectivity between TC axons and layer 4 cortical neurons do not develop.

corticothalamic (CT) pathways.

thalamocortical (TC)

Synapses allow for the transmission of electrochemical information which is the essential means of communication in the brain.

Some guidance cues are attractive and signal movement toward a source, others are repulsive and guide movement away.

guidance molecules

The growth cone

Each cell has many dendrites that form dense “arbors” in the immediate vicinity of the cell, and a single axon that can extend for some distance away from the cell.

fate restriction

The transplanted progenitors produced layer 2–3 neurons suggesting that some kind of signaling from the host induced a change in the type of neurons being produced by the transplanted progenitors.

are capable of producing any neuron type, but that with development they became more and more restricted in the types of neurons they can produce.

corticogenesis

The cortex of animals with defects in Reelin signaling lack laminar structure; the preplate fails to split, and the neurons simply conglomerate under the abnormal preplate

Each new wave of migrating neurons bypasses the previous wave of neurons such that each new wave of migrating cells assumes the most superficial position within the developing cortex.

Cajal-Retzius cells

These first neurons to leave the proliferative zone initially form a primitive structure called the preplate (PP; see Fig. 9b, first panel). Once the preplate is complete, the next wave of migrating neurons splits the preplate into two separate regions, the marginal zone (MZ) and the subplate (SP). These neurons begin to form a new region between the MZ and SP that is the emerging cortical plate (CP; see Fig. 9b, second panel). The first neurons to arrive in the CP are the cells that will form cortical layer 6, the deepest layer of cortex, subsequently migrating cells will form progressively more superficial layers of

“tangential migration”

However, the nucleus of the radial glial cells remains in the VZ

ecause of the greater distances, neurons require what was originally identified as a special population of cells within the VZ called “radial glial guides” to support their migration

pial surface

somal translocation

VZ

The shift to asymmetrical cell division among the progenitor population is gradual and initially includes only a small proportion of progenitors, but those numbers increase dramatically by the end of cortical neurogenesis. In humans cortical neurogenesis is complete by approximately E108

In neural progenitors, asymmetrical cell division produces one neural progenitor and one neuron

symmetrical to asymmetrical

Neurons are post-mitotic cells

Neural progenitors are a mitotic population of cells

neurotrophic factors

Soon after they are produced, neurons migrate away from the proliferative regions of the VZ.

. Different populations of neurons form gray matter structures in many regions of the brain including hindbrain and spinal column, cerebellum, midbrain structures, deep subcortical nuclei and the neocortex.

Sylvian, Cingulate, Parieto-Occipital and Calcarine (GW14-16); Central and Superior Temporal (GW20-24); and Superior Frontal, Precentral, Inferior Frontal, Postcentral, and Intraparietal (GW25-26). Secondary sulci emerge between GW30-35; formation of tertiary sulci begins during GW36 and extends well into the postnatal period.

gyral and sulcal folding.

“lissencephalic” structure

Coup-TF1 and SP8. Both are produced in gradients. Coup-TF1 is expressed in greatest concentration in caudal-lateral regions, while SP8 is expressed in rostral-medial regions.

Thus it is the effect of the particular level of one molecular signal in combination with the particular level of another signal that produces the classical pattern of sensorimotor organization in the developing cortex.

At intermediate levels of both factors somatosensory cortices (S1) emerge.

while the reverse concentrations induce production of neurons for visual cortex

These two signaling molecules are produced in opposite gradients along the anterior-posterior extent of the neocortical proliferative zone

sensorimotor regions

The changes are gradual and follow an ongoing course of continuous specification and refinement

These five subdivisions are aligned along the rostral-caudal axis of the embryo and establish the primary organization of the central nervous system

anterior end of the tube begins to expand forming the three primary brain vesicles, or pouches

The formation of the neural tube occurs between E19 and E29

most rostral region of the neural tube will give rise to the brain, while more caudally positioned cells will give rise to the hindbrain and spinal column.

posterior neuropore

anterior neuropore

Over the course of several days, the ridges rise, fold inward and fuse to form a hollow tub

neural plate.

the neural tube

while later migrating cells signal differentiation of neural progenitors capable of producing cells appropriate for hindbrain or spinal cord structures.

but each successive wave of migrating cells also receives a second signal that specifies a regional identity for the neural progenitors.

The secreted protein binds to receptors on the surface of cells in the upper layer of the embryo and induces the epiblast cells to differentiate into the neural progenitor cells.

complex cascades of molecular signaling.

Cells that remain in the epidermal layer are transformed into one of two types of ectodermal layer stem cells.

Next, a subset of the epiblast cells detach from the upper layer of the embryo and begin to migrate toward the primitive streak

They then change direction again and begin moving toward the rostral end of the embryo

primitive streak and the primitive node

fluid called cerebral spinal fluid

neural stem cell

hypoblast cells

epiblast cells

gastrulation

. The dorsal surface view of the embryo on E13 is shown in the first panel.

embryonic placenta

Most cortical neurons are generated by that time and many have migrated to their positions in the neocortex and have begun to from essential brain networks for information processing.

These structural differences result in functional differences creating brain areas that are specialized for carrying out different kinds of processes.

cerebral spinal fluid

myelin

dendrites and axons

they are gray in appearance

signal relay centers

subcortical nuclei

neocortex

The folding of brain tissue allowed large brains to fit in comparatively small cranial vaults that had to remain small to accommodate the birth process

synapse

60 trillion neuronal connections

with more than 1,000 other neurons

interactive signaling cascades

the production of a protein molecule.

Genes are contained in the nucleotide sequences of DNA that are found in the nucleus of every cell in the body.

evel of connectivity throughout the developing brain far exceeds that of adults

plasticity and capacity for adaptation

reflected in behavior

gray and white matter compartments

90% of adult volume by age 6

thalamocortical pathway

make connections

embryonic day 42

prenatal neural system

gross morphology

rudiments of the major fiber pathways

cortical and subcortical structures

gestation

central and peripheral nervous systems

rudimentary structures

Both gene expression and environmental input are essential for normal brain development, and disruption of either can fundamentally alter neural outcomes.

progenitor cells

protracted process

gestational week