The Weekend Interview with Rand Paul and Roy Blunt: The Grand New—and Old—Party

By MATTHEW KAMINSKI

A 'Crazy' Reformer

Bowling Green, Ky.

'I don't plan on being bashful," says the next junior senator from Kentucky with an ever-so-mild drawl. "I'm not someone who's sort of still trying to figure out what I believe in. I don't think I'm really open to having Washington change me."

The morning after the election, Rand Paul's suite at the Holiday Inn is littered with Mello Yello and Dr. Pepper cans, a day-old fruit plate and mostly-finished plastic cups of wine. He's been up since before dawn, hitting the national morning news shows, and by 8 a.m. his voice is hoarse and his face looks drawn. In a few hours, Mr. Paul will be off on vacation, "at an undisclosed location," but not before he can send his future colleagues a message. He may be the lone pure tea party stalwart to enter the Senate, but he represents the new zeitgeist on the American right. Don't count on him to sit quietly in the back benches.

His first speech on the floor, he promises, will be on "the out-of-control deficit." But since, "as Mark Twain said about the weather, that everybody is talking about it and nobody is doing anything about it," Mr. Paul plans in his first legislative act to introduce a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget. And, he adds, he'll force a vote on it, too: "People don't like to vote against something that's so incredibly popular." He also wants to look hard at steep cuts in defense and entitlements, the largest chunks of federal outlays, and in one swoop antagonize many Democratic and Republican lawmakers.

Next on his docket are term limits. He jokes that the Soviet Politburo saw more turnover than Capitol Hill. He also wants to "sunset" all regulations until approved by Congress. "Let them write all the regulations they want," he says. "They do anyway, but in two years they're gone unless they get voted on by Congress."

Another tea party favorite is the Read the Bills Act, which he's keen to move on. He wants a "one-day waiting period for every 20 pages" of a proposed bill. I must betray a smile. "People laugh," he says. "But they need smaller bills and they need time to read bills." This is supposed to be an incentive.

He says that the public stands behind this reformist agenda. Tuesday's Republican sweep, he says, reflects "concerns about the debt and . . . an out-of-touch Washington."

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Terry Shoffner

Fresh faces in the Senate: Roy Blunt from Missouri (left), and Rand Paul from Kentucky.

Yet other prominent tea party candidates—Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and Ken Buck—failed in their Senate bids. Mr. Paul doesn't blame the tea party, or anyone else, for their losses, except to note that the election in Nevada was all about Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid's "power of incumbency." Other new faces who'll join Mr. Paul in the Senate include businessman Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, who got his start at a tea party rally but didn't embrace the movement to the same degree. Marco Rubio served in the Florida state house for nearly a decade and considers himself above all a Republican.

Mr. Paul puts "the movement" (in his words) above partisan loyalties. "I'm somebody who believes that the issues are more important than the party," he says. "People in the tea party will tell you that the movement is about equal parts chastisement to both parties. You'll often hear that Republicans doubled the debt and Democrats tripled the debt."

Rand Paul comes with softer edges than his father, Ron Paul, who first won a seat in Congress in 1976. The difference was apparent on election night. At the convention hall next to the Holiday Inn, here in Mr. Paul's hometown, Rep. Paul introduced his son by Skype, hailing him as a politician "who stands for something" and is supported by a movement that is vigorous because "it is outside the party." No note of compromise with the Republican establishment there.

Father and son, age 47, have different styles. Asked what he wanted to do in Washington in a Wednesday morning television interview, the senator-elect said that his kids were hoping to meet the Obama girls. He has made other concessions to the mainstream. He now avoids his dad's talk of shuttering the Federal Reserve and abolishing the income tax. In a bigger shift from his campaign pledge to end earmarks, he tells me that they are a bad "symbol" of easy spending but that he will fight for Kentucky's share of earmarks and federal pork, as long as it's doled out transparently at the committee level and not parachuted in in the dead of night. "I will advocate for Kentucky's interests," he says.

So you're not a crazy libertarian? "Not that crazy," he cracks.

Soon after his surprise primary win this spring, Mr. Paul nearly self-destructed. He mused about the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on MSNBC, looking extreme and, to some, racist. He then cut back on national interviews, regrouped and duked it out in a hard-hitting campaign. In the end he won by 12 points over state Attorney General Jack Conway.

The Republican leadership, which shunned him, now makes nice. One of the first congratulatory calls came from senior Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader. Though Mr. McConnell backed the other candidate in the primary, Mr. Paul says that "people will be surprised that we actually get along and do many things together." As for the GOP leadership, "They're all saying they want new blood up there. They think that I'll be a refreshing face. They might just be being polite, but I take them sincerely."

Mr. Paul says he thinks that Republicans, tea party enthusiasts and even Democrats can make this all work if they form creative "coalitions" behind the changes that the public seems to demand. He brings a message of government reform and could yet find his niche in the chamber. Alternatively, Mr. Paul may end up short of friends, with many a lonely night ahead.

Senator Earmark

Washington

By Thursday morning, fresh off his victory in the Missouri Senate race, Roy Blunt fields calls at his corner suite in the Rayburn House office building. In the reception area is a flag that flew above the Capitol his first week as majority whip in January 2003, with a warm note attached from then-Speaker Denny Hastert. Photos with George Bush and Nancy Reagan hang on the walls. Someone from the maintenance staff stops by to discuss the congressman's move, after 14 years in the House, to the other side of the Hill.

What's different about the next job? "Don't know," Mr. Blunt says.

As much as Rand Paul is a tea party revolutionary, Mr. Blunt is a Republican stalwart on the Hill. He isn't the only incoming senator with long experience in Washington to make the jump over to the Senate in this election. Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey, Ohio's Rob Portman and Indiana's Dan Coats served in Congress before doing something else and then winning their seats this time around.

Mr. Blunt, who is 60, took no detours. His résumé includes his 10-year stint as a powerbroker during the party's previous House majority. He was right-hand man to former Majority Leader Tom DeLay and in his own right a powerful dispenser of patronage and influence. Mr. Blunt engineered tough votes for the 2003 prescription drug benefit and, in the last months of the Bush term, the financial bailout. He was an effective whip. To others, he epitomizes the transactional K Street politician who uses the prerogatives of office to protect incumbents—hence the nickname "Mr. Earmark."

In other words, Mr. Blunt seems like just the kind of career politician that the tea party movement was created to devour. A slate of tea partiers challenged him in the primaries. Even his Democratic opponent campaigned against him as "a Washington insider" and "Mr. Bailout." Mr. Blunt won the open seat by 14 points.

Relaxed, in a open-collar blue shirt, Mr. Blunt starts off by pointing out that he was a hard budget hawk before it became popular. "I led the only fight we had in 10 years to cut the mandatory spending programs," he says, referring to the congressional budget debate in late 2005. As whip, he recalls no one ever called to thank him. Republicans only wanted him to save their pet projects. "I think the country's come a long ways in these five years," he adds.

And how has he changed in the last five years?

He waves the query away with, "Hey, well, I've been a pretty conservative member of congress," and then he changes the subject.

His opponent, Robin Carnahan, didn't let the past slide. Her campaign portrayed Mr. Blunt as a Team DeLay insider overly cozy with lobbyists. His family was dragged in. His son was governor of Missouri; his daughter is a lobbyist, as is his second wife, Abigail. "Roy is the life of the party in D.C.," went an ad from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "His wife? Great! A powerful tobacco lobbyist."

The senator-elect says that the attacks failed to sway Missouri voters because the prominent Carnahan family has been tied to politics for three generations, even longer than his. "I was the first Blunt ever elected to anything," he adds, while Ms. Carnahan's grandfather served in the House.

Among free-marketeers on the right, Mr. Blunt is remembered for his role in the Republican leadership that rebuffed President Bush's push to reform Social Security. He has no regrets. "I'm not sure the country was ready for that at the time," he says.

Ask Mr. Blunt what he learned from the DeLay experience in Congress—which ended up with the Republicans losing the majority in 2006—and he says that the party needs to make sure it "communicates well" with an electorate newly engaged by the tea party. Looking back, he says the loss in 2006 was mostly about an unpopular war in Iraq started by an unpopular president. "I don't think a lot at that point was spending, though I think we spent too much."

In that race, voters "gave the Democrats a chance," he says. "I think they now decided the Democrats were worse than Republicans. But they're just hoping that the Republicans are better than the Republicans were. I do too."

He calls the new conservative grass-roots enthusiasm "a huge benefit for Republicans." For every seat lost by a Christine O'Donnell, "you could find four seats in the House or Senate" the Republicans picked up thanks to the tea partiers.

Mr. Blunt says Republicans are happy to embrace most tea party causes. He'd back a balanced budget amendment and endorses term limits—à la Rand Paul. And earmarks? Mr. Blunt pauses. "Rand doesn't agree with his dad on that. His dad is a leading advocate of earmarks on this side of the building. I'll let the Pauls work that out and then I'll see where they come down." We share a laugh over that.

The elephant, as it were, in the room is how well the Republicans can get along with tea partiers who are energized by their ideas more than the party. Cue Mr. Blunt. "I'll repeat again: communication, so they understand. You got to keep talking to people who have these expectations so they understand what the fight is about at the moment." He adds that Sens. Rubio and Paul are "great" to have in Washington, but "I think everything will not turn out the way they think it will."

With our half-hour up, Mr. Blunt stands in mid-question, claps me on the back without offering a hand in farewell, and says, "See ya."

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

via online.wsj.com

c,mm,n and the Internet of Cars—by Jacco Lammers | Meta Products — a genuine blog by Booreiland about the Internet of Things

Jacco Lammers

Jacco is owner of Sunday Afternoon, a web focused service design company. Within the company he has worked on several new-to-the market services such as Go About, Green Parking Initiative and Dutch Creative. Back in 2006, Jacco graduated on the business concept, brand and vision of c,mm,n.

Find Jacco on LinkedIn

In the c,mm,n project we wonder what a car would look like if it was perceived as a service. I believe that cars, as they are now, cannot fulfill their promise of freedom and individuality anymore. Cars are affordable, offer good (perceived) quality and performance. Although technical developments will continue to improve the product ‘car’, their increasing adoption will continue to decrease the actual value of it. More cars leads to more traffic congestion, pollution, noise, parking problems and the like. The system around the car has reached its limits and will become less and less efficient. The icon car needs to change, but how? By perceiving the car as a meta-product, connected to its context, new freedom of mobility is within reach. This is another kind of freedom than you would expect and it enables you to make your mobility truly your own as never before.

The first c,mm,n car has numerous odd features. In the door, for example, there is a ‘community box’. This separate door gives access to a space inside the door. As a c,mm,n user you can give others access to this box. You could, for example, deliver a package. You could also sell bottled water from your car, or ask people to drop their second hand clothing there. The system around this box is open. You can think of ways to use this box and you have the freedom to give others access to it. This allows the car to provide services.

As services are easier to customize, the product needs to take a step back and become more of a blank slate.

These product characteristics are different from ‘old-skool’ car design. When designing products to deliver a service you need to consider the process in which the actual service is shaped. As services are easier to customize, the product needs to take a step back and become more of a ‘blank slate’. You might need to remove features to give people more possibilities! In the example above we just created a box that can be accessed through RFID (or any other method). That is nothing fancy at all. But you are free to offer or receive any service you want with it.

Maybe this is not the freedom you might expect from a car. In the c,mm,n concept we try to take this all the way. The car itself is open-source. This allows you to create your own service with it. You might offer this car as a prepaid mobility service in which you can also buy vacations (by train or plane). Off course not everyone is going to do this. A ‘customer’ probably just wants to have some options to choose from. On every level c,mm,n wants to empower people to have more control over their mobility. This allows an enormous diversity of solutions. You can just pick the one that suits you best and adapt it to your need. With this cycle of continuous change, freedom is only limited by your imagination. You can take c,mm,n and make it truly your own.

The c,mm,n project was featured at the Amsterdam Motorshow twice. For Jacco, the idea for an open-source car came from a life long affection with cars and working with open-source software. Already in 2005 the Bowser shown at the Detroit Motor Show featured some of these traits as one of the winners of the Michelin Challenge Design. Jacco still drives an old Honda Civic with ‘econo-light’.

Tags: mobility, open-source, service design

posted on Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010 at 15:56 and filed under Booreiland invites
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via metaproducts.nl

The Fed: Dump the Dollar, Save the Economy

By TOM LAURICELLA

The Federal Reserve is launching a renewed effort to shore up the U.S. economy, but in the process, the value of the dollar could be a casualty.

While most individual investors in the U.S. pay little attention to the ups and downs of the world's currencies, moves in this $4-trillion-per-day market both reflect and shape trends in stocks, bonds and commodities.

Ellen Weinstein

Should a weaker dollar be in the cards, that could help key U.S. stock-market sectors, such as technology, lift commodity prices such as gold and oil, and provide a profit tailwind for U.S. investors who put money overseas, especially in emerging markets. But a weaker dollar, taken in the context of the Fed's efforts to stimulate the economy, could ultimately push inflation higher -- a bad outcome for investors now flocking to bonds.

"There are massive ramifications everywhere you look," says James Swanson, chief investment strategist at MFS Investment Management.

Already the dollar has lost 13% against the Japanese yen this year. And even the euro, which was battered by the European debt crisis this spring, has gained 18% against the dollar since June. Weighed against a broader basket of currencies, the dollar is down 8% since late August when the latest move by the Fed began to take shape.

Last week, the Fed announced its plans to pump $600 billion into the financial markets by buying U.S. government bonds. The Fed is concerned that the struggling U.S. economy is vulnerable to deflation -- falling prices -- against the backdrop of high levels of unemployment and depressed home prices.

The Fed's goal is, in part, to prop up the financial markets long enough to allow the economy to heal. In addition, by keeping interest rates low, it hopes banks will increase lending rather than keep their money invested in bonds, which in turn will create more jobs.

To accomplish this, the Fed will embark on a second round of what is known on Wall Street by the cumbersome name of "quantitative easing."

The Fed, which controls the amount of money available in the country, essentially creates new dollars out of thin air and uses that money to buy existing U.S. Treasury bonds from investors. The move doesn't increase the government's debt.

By increasing the amount of dollars in the economy, the Fed effectively dilutes the value of existing dollars -- creating inflation to fight deflation.

Many investors believe that as long as the Fed is in easing mode, the dollar will be under pressure, especially against key emerging-markets countries such as South Korea and Brazil, where economic growth is much stronger and bond yields are more appealing than in the U.S. The U.S. dollar has already fallen by 5% this year against the Korean won and 4% against the Brazilian real.

This may seem a world away from U.S. investors, but it quickly hits home in the form of making imported goods -- such as televisions and clothing -- more expensive. Another almost direct impact is most commodities are priced in dollars no matter where they are produced. So as the value of each dollar is devalued, the number of dollars it takes to buy a barrel of oil rises. That can inflate the cost of everything from a tank of gas to copper pipe for a new kitchen.

But it provides investment opportunities. Commodities, through a low-cost, broadly diversified exchange-traded fund, are one option.

Over the past two years, the stock market has shown a striking tendency to move in the opposite direction of the dollar. While historically that link didn't exist, U.S. companies tend to make more money from overseas than in the past, especially among the biggest stocks that comprise the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.

A weaker dollar would have the most direct impact on companies that are big exporters. U.S. technology companies, for example, often do a meaningful percentage of their business overseas. MFS's Mr. Swanson points to manufacturers as beneficiaries. "Aircraft equipment, turbines, electronic machinery ... we export an awful lot of that."

Traditionally, smaller-company stocks, such as those that populate the Russell 2000 index, have been seen as having their fates more closely tied to the U.S. economy and not the dollar. But Russ Koesterich, chief investment strategist at iShares, the exchange-traded-fund unit of BlackRock, sees a positive for small stocks. "Small caps have actually done well with a declining dollar," he says. The reason is that the declining dollar is part and parcel of the Fed's moves to pump more money into the system. That is aimed at boosting risk, he says, and small-cap stocks tend to do better when investors are willing to take on more risk.

A more direct beneficiary of a weaker dollar are U.S. investors who invest in mutual funds buying foreign stocks and bonds. That's because profits earned in a foreign currency instantly are magnified when the dollar falls in value. A favored destination of many global bond funds these days are emerging-markets bonds priced in local currencies. The thesis is that the bonds will fare well because of the strong fiscal positions and growth prospects in many emerging-markets countries, gains which will be multiplied as those currencies rise in value against the dollar.

A weaker dollar "gives U.S. investors a good opportunity to have nondollar investments," says Eric Stein, a portfolio manager of the Eaton Vance Global Macro Absolute Return Fund. For emerging markets, he says, "it makes the story even more compelling."

One important caveat: While a slow decline in the dollar can provide these opportunities, it's a different story should the dollar go into a free-fall. That could destabilize global financial markets. Another possible negative outcome would be if the dollar's decline comes along with increased protectionism in the U.S. or abroad that cripples the free flow of trade and potentially tips the economy back into recession.

Write to Tom Lauricella at tom.lauricella@wsj.com

via online.wsj.com

Gold, anyone?

The Intelligent Investor: Melchior Palyi, the Man Who Called the Financial Crisis—70 Years Early

Decades before anybody had ever heard of a mortgage derivative, an economist named Melchior Palyi predicted key causes of the 2008-2009 financial crisis with precision that makes a modern reader's hair stand on end.

His warnings help explain why investors insist on trusting market gatekeepers they know to be fallible—such as policy makers, regulators and credit-ratings firms.

The seeds of today's problem were planted long ago, and its forgotten history holds important lessons. In 1936, as part of reforms under the new Banking Act, the U.S. government mandated that federally regulated banks could no longer hold securities that weren't rated investment-grade by at least two ratings firms.

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Christophe Vorlet

To determine how to implement the new policy, the government launched a massive project—with experts from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Works Progress Administration—to study how credit ratings should be used.

Mr. Palyi, then teaching at the University of Chicago, was a vocal skeptic from the outset. Looking back into the 1920s, he found that investment-grade bonds went bust with alarming frequency, often in the same year they were rated. On average, he showed, a bank that followed the new rules would end up with a third of its bond portfolio going into default.

The record was so unreliable that it would be "still more responsible," Mr. Palyi growled, to "stop the publication of ratings altogether." He was especially troubled that the new banking rules switched the responsibility for credit safety from bankers—and even bank regulators—to ratings firms.

"From there," he warned, it "will have to be shifted again—to someone else," presumably taxpayers. Liquidity, Mr. Palyi argued, was being replaced by what he scornfully called "shiftability," a new kind of risk that could someday "be magnified into catastrophic dimensions."

In response to his criticism, government researchers studying how to apply bond ratings changed their method for calculating the performance of investment-grade bonds. By 1943 they had come up with an oddly contorted median that magically improved the track record of the ratings providers.

This switcheroo, recently documented for the first time by economists David Levy of George Mason University and Sandra Peart of the University of Richmond, legitimized the new regulatory model and flushed Mr. Palyi's criticism down the memory-hole of history. Credit ratings, in the words of economist Lawrence White at New York University, acquired "the force of law."

Since the 1930s, more than 150 laws and regulations sprang up requiring banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, pension plans and money-market funds to hold securities regarded as investment-grade by rating agencies. A study released in 2007, on the eve of the financial crisis, found that 76% of fund managers wouldn't invest in bonds below certain credit ratings, even though fewer than a third of them thought that was "a good investment strategy."

In the wake of the crisis, Fitch, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, today's major ratings companies, have all said they have taken steps to improve the transparency and reliability of their ratings and that no one should use credit ratings as the main basis for an investment decision. This year's financial-reform law scales back, but doesn't eliminate, the role of credit ratings in regulation.

Who was Melchior Palyi? Born in Hungary in 1892, he became chief economist at Deutsche Bank. Fluent in at least four languages and endowed with a wicked sense of humor, Mr. Palyi was the chief economic adviser to the German central bank during the financial reconstruction of Germany after the hyperinflation of the early 1920s. In 1933, as Hitler came to power, Mr. Palyi fled to the U.S. He nursed a wariness of centralized power and inflation until he died in 1970.

Mr. Palyi warned in 1938 that a push toward universal home ownership would "make the population fixed to the ground" by "overburdening them with housing costs." That, he foresaw, would limit the mobility of American workers—helping explain why unemployment is so stubbornly high today.

He also derided what is now called "quantitative easing," characterizing it as "a sort of Santa Claus to the economic system" that can lead to "runaway inflation" and a concentration of too much power in too few hands. Investors piling into stocks today based on the Federal Reserve's latest bond-buying binge shouldn't get too cocky.

Mr. Palyi was fond of saying that sooner or later, too much credit always turns into a giant debit as borrowers crumple under the burden of escalating interest payments. That's a warning this entire country would do well to heed.

— intelligentinvestor@wsj.com; twitter.com/jasonzweigwsj

via online.wsj.com

Yo... #adamcurry and #therealdvorak. How about taking on the investment rating firms?

News: The Rise of the 'Edupunk' - Inside Higher Ed

NEW YORK -- The “Edupunks” will inherit the Earth … or at least some attention.

Those in higher education who continue hand-wringing over the relative merits of online learning and other technology-driven platforms will soon find themselves left in the dust of an up-and-coming generation of students who are seeking knowledge outside academe. Such was an emerging consensus view here Monday, as college leaders gathered for the TIAA-CREF Institute's 2010 Higher Education Leadership Conference.

“We're still trying to fit the Web into our educational paradigm.… I just don't think that's going to work,” said Mary Spilde, president of Lane Community College, in Eugene, Ore.

Today's students are “pretty bored with what we do,” she added.

In a notable acknowledgment of the tail wagging the dog, several panelists alluded here to the possibility that if colleges don't change the way they do business, then students will change the way colleges do business.

College leaders don't yet know how to credential the knowledge students are gaining on their own, but they may soon have to, said Mark David Milliron, deputy director for postsecondary improvement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We are not far from the day when a student, finding unsatisfactory reviews of a faculty member on ratemyprofessors.com, will choose to take a class through open courseware online and then ask his home institution to assess him, Milliron said. Colleges need to prepare for that reality, he said.

While the concept of a self-educated citizenry circumventing the traditional system of higher education may have sounded far-fetched a decade ago, the fact that the likes of Spilde gave it more than lip service marks something of a shift. Indeed, there was more than a subtle suggestion across hours of sessions Monday that colleges are in for a new world, like it or not, where they may not be the winners.

Given its uncertainty, that world is at once scary and exciting, panelists said. As Tulane University President Scott S. Cowen put it, the conference offered the potential for a “group therapy session,” where some of higher education's most notable thinkers grappled with a pending paradigm shift. At the same time, however, there was a suggestion that all of the canaries in the coal mine -- the rapid and perhaps permanent decline of state appropriations, for instance -- are not eliciting substantive change.

Among those lamenting the lack of real action was William E. (Brit) Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland and a national advocate for improving efficiencies in higher education. During a session covering the college completion goals set out by President Obama and others, Kirwan passionately questioned the “enormous disconnect” between the rhetoric coming from policy makers and the reality in states that are slashing budgets. Moreover, he asserted that concrete benchmarks have not been set for how the United States will achieve Obama's stated goal of returning to its historic summit as the nation with the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.

“If we were serious about this, we would have it mapped out,” he said. There are indeed maps, but Kirwan's point suggests even policy wonks don't see clear benchmarks.

The seriousness of the budget realities, however, did not go unnoticed by Matthew Goldstein, chancellor of the City University of New York. Speaking like a man under the Sword of Damocles, Goldstein suggested state deficits in New York and elsewhere were the “next bubble.”

“Here's where the problem is really going to come and smack us right in the face,” Goldstein said.

“You don't hear the talking heads and you don't hear the politicians who are running for office saying how real this problem is,” he added.

Goldstein went further, asserting that the inability of states to meet obligations in higher education was a true “national security problem.”

“It's not that we're going to get bombed,” he said. “It's that our competitive position in world markets is going to be seriously compromised.”

So where are the bright spots? A continual refrain from panelists was the idea that “cutting to invest” is the only path forward. College leaders argue that the imperative to grow programs now invariably means the shedding of others.

“You may have to take money out of some other cherished project, but you've got to keep doing new things because that's what universities are about,” said Teresa Sullivan, the newly minted president of the University of Virginia.

In a bow to the “Edupunks,” Sullivan explained that Virginia is incorporating student habits into its pedagogy. For example, the university is experimenting with “flash seminars.” Just as “flash mobs” summon young people to engage in some simultaneous bizarre act in a specified place at a specified time, the “flash seminars” alert students to an edgy topic -- no examples of how edgy -- that will be discussed in a professor's living room. To raise the hype level, only the first 25 students who show up are allowed to participate in this non-credit-bearing activity.

“It's done for the sheer love of learning,” she said. “At least that's what the students think.”

In point of fact, Virginia is quite deliberately documenting what gets students fired up -- hoping to incorporate those subjects into the classroom.

As Sullivan described this melding of youth culture and old school academe, several audience members -- yes, Harvard, too -- were frantically jotting notes.

Edupunks are being heard. Whether that will translate into changes in higher ed remains to be seen.

via insidehighered.com

Scripting News: How Obama could have avoided the shellacking

By Dave Winer on Saturday, November 06, 2010 at 1:35 PM.

President Obama got a shellacking in the mid-term election. I hope health care reform isn't in jeopardy. I hope we find a way out of Afghanistan, and I hope if we hit another terrorist or financial crisis the Republicans and Democrats can find a way to work with each other.  

But I think there's a bigger lesson here, and this is one of those moments when you can talk about lessons in politics. Most of the time people feel it's futile, and nothing can be done, but I think this is one of those moments that there is a message to hear, not from the insiders, but from the voters. This is what I hear. 

First, I hear paradox. How can you make sense of a voter who feels the government should be doing more to create jobs, yet feels the government should stay out of things business does better. Who thinks the deficit is the number one problem but thinks we should spend more to create jobs. Who, like Reagan, thinks government is the problem, yet thinks the military is great. Or says keep your hands off my Medicare, while rallying against "socialized medicine." 

Here's how you make sense of it. 

Times are hard, and people think they're getting worse, and we feel powerless to do anything about it,. Except at one moment, when we pull the lever in the voting booth. That's the only time we have to be listened to. Otherwise, you and I have no way to make things better. So we do the thing that will be heard. Voting for the incumbent is a silent act. Voting for the first African-American president in 2008, was very audible. Voting for a Tea Party candidate in 2010 is the same kind of thing. That's how reconcile the two. Both are heard, both send a message. I want things to get better. 

It was and will be especially bad for Obama because not only did he campaign on Change We Can Believe In (and in that he's far from unusual, most candidates run on change) but if you look at his skin color, and his youth, and his intelligence, and the way he organized using the Internet, you can see why this time around we thought things really might change. Not that the Republicans would all of a sudden stop trying to take money out of our pockets and give it to their friends in the defense industry and on Wall Street, that wasn't the change we were expecting. No, we were told that volunteerism was going to be the new norm. We would all have a way to pitch in to help. To make a difference. He wouldn't have been up against the Republicans if, on coming into office, he set up a Craigslist for volunteering, with meetups at a community level every month to talk about ways of making things work better. And during the rest of the time, no talk, just action. Keep the streets clean. Help out the homeless. Create new flows of information about how things are working, or not.  

I think he had that opportunity, to carry the new way his campaign lifted him up and use the same energy to lift up everything. At least then, if it failed, it wouldn't have been his faillure, it would have been ours. But he didn't even try. Not even a bit. 

I can point you to the exact moment of my disappointment. I was suckered by Obama's pitch. "The fierce urgency of now." I thought that when the new whitehouse.gov went live it would be about us, the people of the United States, but of course it wasn't -- it was about them -- those who took the standard places in the White House to do what they always do. Maybe slightly different. But nothing like the change we were promised, and some of us expected. 

If Obama wants to know why he's being treated like a disappointment, the answer is simple, we are disappointed. Not so much that he's in the pocket of the bankers, and we're still in Afghanistan and Iraq for some reason no one understands, even though we were told that Iraq would already be behind us, and we (incorrectly) assumed that meant Afghanistan too. We need change, we need get our people involved, at least those who want to be involved, working to make things better every day of every year. Not just on the first Tuesday of every other November. 

View the forum thread.

via scripting.com

FORA.tv - Long Conversation with Violet Blue and John Perry Barlow

via fora.tv

Just watched this excellent conversation between John Perry Barlow and Violet Blue. Two quotes stuck me as particularly timely:
The first business of tolerance it to be tolerant toward that which would not tolerate you - @JPBarlow.
and...
Liberty resides in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious - Jon Stewart.

Think about it!

The Stuxnet Worm? More Than 30 People Built It - Technology - The Atlantic

WASHINGTON -- Details about the Stuxnet worm, a highly-engineered piece of malicious software that targeted industrial control systems, have trickled out since it made international news earlier this fall. The sophistication of the malware combined with its ability to target the controllers that run power plants and other infrastructure facilities impressed many security experts.

At a small conference on cybersecurity sponsored by TechAmerica, Symantec's Brian Tillett put a number on the size of the team that built the virus. He said that traces of more than 30 programmers have been found in source code.

Another tidbit that I hadn't seen reported elsewhere is that the peer-to-peer network built into the worm was encrypted. And not only was it encrypted, Tillett noted, but encrypted to FIPS 140-2 standards, which -- judging by the noise of the crowd -- is very impressive to security geeks.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/the-stuxnet-worm-more-t...

via theatlantic.com

Genetic Secret to AIDS Immunity Found - Technology Review

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Genetic Secret to AIDS Immunity Found

Research offers insights into how some HIV-positive people are able to avoid the full-blown disease.

By Karen Weintraub

As long as HIV and AIDS have existed, there has been a small minority who have contracted the virus, but not the disease. Their bodies are somehow able to control HIV, making them less contagious and immune to AIDS symptoms, sometimes forever. A new genomic study of nearly 1,000 of these people, known as "HIV controllers," has found the genetic reason behind this.

The researchers examined the DNA of 974 controllers and, by performing a genome-wide association analysis, compared it with DNA from 2,648 patients whose disease has progressed.

"Of the three billion nucleotides in the human genome, it really comes down to just a handful that relate to a particular function of the immune system that makes the difference," says Bruce Walker, a virologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and one of the two lead researchers on the study, published online today by the journal Science.

These nucleotides, or pieces of genetic material, are located at a genomic region that encodes proteins needed for immunity—an obvious spot that had been considered before by researchers. But because virtually all of the differences found between HIV controllers and those whose disease had progressed were in this area, scientists can now better target their research.

"There have been lots of theories that these controllers might be manifestations of multiple mechanisms," says Warner Greene, director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research. "This tends to focus the field."

The study identified differences in a region of chromosome 6, where there are genes that control a key part of the immune system called the human leukocyte antigen, which is a molecule on the surface of a cell. When that molecule holds a bit of a virus, it's a signal to other cells that the cell is infected and needs to be destroyed. Depending on the amino acids present in the molecule, the part of a virus that is held will be slightly different, and that's what makes the difference for someone who is an HIV controller.

It's much too early, Walker and Greene both say, to use this information to design a drug or vaccine for HIV, but it is a step in that direction.

"I think this gives us really important insights into the type of reactions that occur during the immune response that lead to high-level control of HIV," Greene says. "If we had a vaccine that would make everybody a controller—that would be spectacular."

Roughly one in 300 people who test positive for HIV are controllers, Walker says. The immune systems of these people maintain fewer than 2,000 RNA copies of the virus per milliliter of blood plasma. Most people with HIV carry a viral load of hundreds of thousands to five million copies per milliliter, depending on the stage of infection.

The study's other lead author, Paul de Bakker, an assistant professor at Brigham & Woman's Hospital and an associate member of the Broad Institute, says he next wants to look for rare gene variants that might also help explain why some people's immune systems are better able to control HIV.

Copyright Technology Review 2010.

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Pump-Powered Antennas Could Replace Metal Communications Arrays with Fountains of Saltwater | Popular Science

Pump-Powered Antennas Could Replace Metal Communications Arrays with Fountains of Saltwater

By Clay Dillow Posted 11.02.2010 at 12:59 pm 7 Comments

SSC Pacific's Seawater Antenna SSC Pacific

Aboard oceanfaring vessels, real estate is naturally limited. But communications are vital, presenting something of a conundrum for a ship’s communications crews: where to place all the large antennas necessary for long-range (and often encrypted) communications. So U.S. Navy R&D lab SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific) engineered a clever scheme to turn the ocean’s most abundant resource into communications equipment, making antennas out of geysers of seawater.

SSC Pacific (SPAWAR, by the way, is short for Space and Naval Warfare) was looking for a way to reduce the antenna loads on those huge mast arrays you see on most naval warships (the typical vessel has 80 antennae aboard). Aside from the fact that antennas can interfere with each other, piling all that metal that high can increase the ships odds of being picked up on radar. Moreover, not all antennas are needed all the time, so SSC Pacific sought a way to erect a quick, temporary antenna that could just as easily be dismantled.

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Technology, Clay Dillow, antennas, communications, defense, military, naval sea systems, naval warfare

What they came up with is little more than an electromagnetic ring and a water pump. The ring, called a current probe, creates a magnetic field through which the pump shoots a steam of seawater (the salt is a key ingredient, as the tech relies on the magnetic induction properties of sodium chloride). By controlling the height and width of the, the operator can manipulate the frequency at which the antenna transmits and receives. An 80-foot-high stream can transmit and receive anywhere from 2 to 400 mHz, though much smaller streams can be used for varying other frequencies, ranging from HF through VHF to UHF.

The Navy sees the technology as potentially replacing its 80-antenna arrays with just ten of the seawater antennas operating at various frequencies to cover the entire spectrum currently served. And with a tested range of 30 miles, the antennas can go the distance as well. Outside of military use, the antennas could serve as compact emergency antennas for civilian watercraft, communication systems on offshore oil rigs, or on land using saltwater streams enclosed in tubes.

[SPAWAR via Make]

via popsci.com

This way cool... Beats an ugly 40 meter tower!

Hacker News | Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue52 points by TamDenholm 5 hours ago | 78 commentsI detest recruiters with the fiery incandescent white hot burning heat of a nova, but unfortunately I feel like i have to deal with them because I live in Edinburgh but work in London, i dont take part in the local community because i'm not there.

I applied for a 3 month contract position online. I have this recruiter call me and give me the usual bullshit and it gets to the usual "can i send over your CV to them?", I say sure as i always do after they've wasted 15 minutes of my time asking if i know PHP, if i then know LAMP, then asking my if i know Linux, apache and MySQL, then asking me if i know HTML, then CSS and you get the idea. They ask me all these questions even though 1) my CV they are looking at in front of them says so and 2) they got my CV by me sending it on an online ad asking for these specific skills.

So after i've given them permission to send my CV, the woman asks me for 2 technical references, i say to her that if the company likes the look of my CV then i'd be happy to provide references but i dont just hand out peoples details on a whim because i'd hate people to do that to me. She tells me that she cant send my CV without first getting the references. Normally i'd tell her to piss off politely at this point but the daily rate was going through the market rate ceiling and i'm a whore for money.

So i say sure, i'll give you references, i'll go and get permission from them and get back to you. I do this and email her the next day with contact details. She emails back and asks what companies they work for, i tell them they're freelancers that i've done work for. She says that colleagues arent good enough and will need managers i've worked under. I explain they're clients, not colleagues, and that i'm not an employee, i'm a self employed developer with my own company and clients, i dont and have never had a manager, i'm the guy people come to because they're not technical, i take care of everything for them. The position i'm looking for requires me to be the main technical guy there, surely she'd get where i'm coming from. She asked for technical references, thats what i gave her, people who understood and could articulate my technical ability.

But alas no, i've been penalised for not being a corporate drone, i avoid working for large corporations because its soul destroying and i hate bureaucracy. I like working for other freelancers and small agencies, its far more friendly and less political and i dont have to write screeds of bullshit documents when a quick email is good enough.

Anyway, sorry for the rant but this pissed me off today, i really wish i could totally avoid recruiters as when i have found work without them its been orders of magnitude easier and faster, but they know where the good paying gigs are. Someone please disrupt this industry.

via news.ycombinator.com

Been there... Got the tee shirt ;-(

Scott Adams Blog: Eliminating Political Parties 11/04/2010

Eliminating Political Parties

Nov 4, 2010 General Nonsense | Notify

Imagine a democratic political system in which no one is allowed to be a member of a political party. How would things be different?

My hypothesis is that confirmation bias, or cognitive dissonance, or something of that nature, influences voters to irrationally agree with the platform of their own party no matter what the facts suggest. My hypothesis is easy enough to test. All you'd need to do is come up with a phony issue and present it to your test subjects as something to which their party agrees, or disagrees, and see if party affiliation influences opinions. I think the effect would be large.

Now imagine what would happen to campaign funding if political parties didn't exist. In our current system, a union can give a million dollars to the Democratic Party and it doesn't seem too wrong because the party represents about half of the voters in the country. But if political parties didn't exist, unions or corporate interests would have to donate to individuals. And a large donation to an individual campaign would either be illegal or it would look so much like a bribe that it would be counter-productive.

I think political parties made sense in pre-Internet times. It was a good way to organize and to produce candidates who had a legitimate chance of getting elected. Now it's easy to imagine the Internet being a better platform for electing the right people. The problem is that there's no way to get to a different type of system from here. The major parties are too entrenched to give up power, and belonging to organizations is a fundamental freedom.

I'm fascinated by the fact that the freedom to organize into political parties limits our other freedoms more than most people realize.  Political parties make the government incompetent, and the result of ineffective government is that citizens are less prosperous. Poverty is the ultimate restriction of freedom.

If Thomas Jefferson sprung back to life today, and learned about the Internet, I wonder how he would recommend changing the Constitution of the United States. I think he would favor banning political parties.

via dilbert.com

This is genius! It eliminates the huge hole opened by the SCOTUS ruling on corporate political donations.

Can you imaging the furor it would touch off?

InnoDB Storage Engine Dropped From Oracle MySQL Classic Edition

In a move to make MySQL more profitable, Oracle has dropped support for InnoDB storage engine from the MySQL Classic edition which is available for free. So this free version of MySQL – the classic edition is left with only one storage engine, that is MyISAM. InnoDB Storage engine will be available only from MySQL Standard edition and above which starts at US$2000.

InnoDB storage engine support dropped from Oracle MySQL Classic Edition

• databases
• developer
• structural
• communitys
• article
• alternative

A quick look at the MySQL product page shows that Storage Engine: InnoDB is not available for the MySQL Classic Edition.

However, InnoDB is still available for free on the MySQL Community edition. But the sad part is InnoDB has always been available for free on all binaries of MySQL. Ironically, InnoDB is a property of Oracle after it acquired InnoDB’s parent company Innobase way back in 2005.

This may very well pose to be a problem for developers and businesses who have their entire database structure in MySQL. And since InnoDB is stated to be a faster storage engine, companies generally tend to chose Innodb. Now that InnoDB is no more free, developers as well as businesses have to look out for suitable alternatives.

PostgreSQL has been a competing database to MySQL from some time now and we feel now is the time PostgreSQL may start gaining popularity. There is another option called NoSQL which is primarily meant for applications that have to scale on the cloud.

Recently we told you about the fate of OpenOffice.org – a Sun product which is not doing any good after being acquired by Oracle.

via digitizor.com

Yikes...

Research shows that two people can learn to cooperate intuitively, but larger groups need to communicate — University of Leicester

Issued by University of Leicester Press Office on 28 October 2010

Two people can learn to cooperate with each other intuitively – without communication or any conscious intention to cooperate. But this process breaks down in groups of three or more.

A study by members of the University of Leicester’s School of Psychology and Department of Economics set out to explain how two people learn to cooperate without even knowing that they are interacting with each other. In larger groups, explicit communication is needed to coordinate actions.

Professor Andrew Colman, Dr Briony Pulford, Dr David Omtzigt, and Dr Ali al-Nowaihi carried out the study, due to appear in the journal Cognitive Psychology. The research, funded by the British Academy,  has helped to explain the mechanisms of intuitive cooperation.

The researchers conducted a series of laboratory experiments with groups of various sizes and developed a mathematical model of the intuitive learning process. Experimental participants received financial gains or losses after pressing one of two buttons on a computer, unaware that the outcome depended not on their own choice but on their neighbour’s. It turned out that after many repetitions of the game, gains gradually exceeded losses in groups of two but not in three-person and larger groups.

Professor Colman said: “Here’s a simple example that shows the basic idea. Every morning, Alf chooses whether to give his son raisins or cheese sticks to snack on during the day. Similarly, Beth chooses between popcorn or peanuts for her daughter’s snack. The children are friends and always share their snacks with each other at school, although their parents know nothing about this. Alf’s son is allergic to peanuts and gets ill if he eats any of his friend’s peanuts, and Beth’s daughter is allergic to cheese and gets ill if she eats any of her friend’s cheese sticks. The upshot is that although each parent’s snack choice has no effect whatsoever on his or her own child’s wellbeing, in each case one option leaves the other parent’s child well and its parent happy, whereas the alternative option makes the other child ill and upsets its parent.

“The choices of Alf and Beth govern each other’s fates and, in the game of life, while two people may ‘develop an understanding’ or work intuitively together – this scenario is easily distorted once a third person becomes involved. Without effective planning and ground rules, even the best of working relationships between two people can become undone once a third is involved.

“Married couples or pairs of business partners may be able to rely on this type of intuitive cooperation, to an extent, but larger groups need explicit communication and planning. Mechanisms need to be put in place to facilitate it. Intuitive cooperation is really a case of two’s company, but three’s a crowd.”

Andrew Colman is a Professor of Psychology, Briony Pulford is a Lecturer in Psychology, and Ali al-Nowaihi is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Leicester. David Omtzigt, formerly a Research Associate at the University of Leicester, is now a Postdoctoral Researcher at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The research was funded by the British Academy Larger Research Grants Scheme.

Ends

For more details, contact Professor Andrew M. Colman

E-mail: amc@le.ac.uk

Telephone number 0116 229 7197

via www2.le.ac.uk

and you wondered why Congress is broken?

Media Matters for America

via mediamatters.org

GOP to investigate ‘scientific fraud’ of global warming: report | Raw Story

GOP to investigate ‘scientific fraud’ of global warming: report

Fresh off a dramatic victory in which it retook the House leadership, the Republican Party intends to hold major hearings probing the supposed "scientific fraud" behind global warming.

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder related the news in a little-noticed article Wednesday morning.

The effort is a likely attempt to out-step the White House on energy policy moving forward. Legislation on energy and climate change reform, one of President Barack Obama campaign promises, has yet to materialize, though Obama's EPA recently classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

Holding hearings would please the Republicans' conservative base, which increasingly doubts the scientific basis for global warming -- especially human-induced global warming -- and provide a reflection of the new GOP's tenor.

Ron Brownstein of the National Journal reported last week that in Tuesday's midterm election, "virtually all of the serious 2010 GOP challengers" have denied that there is scientific evidence that global warming is even happening.

"The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones," Brownstein wrote.

Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists -- and just about every accredited international scientific institution in the world -- unequivocally agree that global warming occurring and is fueled by human activity.

Scientists say inaction will lead to an unmitigated spiral of polarized -- and over time rising -- temperatures, melting ice caps, rising sea levels and droughts, among other consequences.

The Republican belief to the contrary incubates the party's fervent opposition not only to cap and trade but to any measures reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Obama administration has long anticipated efforts from the GOP to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency, and plan to strongly enforce environmental regulations.

The deeply differing views of the White House and likely energy chairman, Texas Republican Joe Barton, suggests that conflicts over the issue are inevitable in the new divided government.

via rawstory.com

And so it begins....

Why did California vote down legal pot?

Why did California vote down legal pot?

By Jeffrey A. Miron, Special to CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Jeffrey A. Miron: Prop 19 advocates didn't present right reasons for making pot legal
• Voters were wary of claims of dramatic positive change if it were legalized, he says
• Miron advises advocates to argue pot prohibition interferes with individual liberty
• Another key to legalizing marijuana is to get conservatives involved, he writes

Editor's note:Jeffrey A. Miron is senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Miron is the author of "Libertarianism, from A to Z."

(CNN) -- California voters have just rejected Proposition 19, the ballot initiative that would have legalized marijuana under state law. Where did Prop 19 go wrong?

Prop 19 failed in part because many proponents emphasized the wrong arguments for legalization. Many advocates promised major benefits to California's budget because of reduced expenditure on marijuana prohibition and increased revenue from marijuana taxation. Other supporters claimed that Mexican drug violence would fall substantially.

Both claims were overblown. The budgetary benefits, while not insignificant, would have been small compared with California's fiscal mess. Mexican drug violence is mainly associated with the cocaine and methamphetamine trades, as well as from marijuana traffic to other states.

Many voters sensed that Prop 19 supporters were overreaching, and this made them suspicious of all the arguments in its favor. Common sense should have recognized that since marijuana was close to legal already, Prop 19 would not have had dramatic effects.

Prop 19 failed also because it overreached. One feature attempted to protect the "rights" of employees who get fired or disciplined for using marijuana, including a provision that employers could only discipline marijuana use that "actually impairs job performance." That is a much higher bar than required by current policy.

This provision allowed Prop 19 opponents to claim that workplaces would become infested with impaired pot users. That assertion is not well-founded, but that is not the point. Prop 19 did not need to address employee marijuana-testing in the first place.

A more effective position for Prop 19 supporters would have been that employee marijuana-testing should be unencumbered by state or federal law. That would allow employers to protect themselves and their employees against perceived risks from marijuana, thereby promoting support for legalization.

A final problem with Prop 19 is that it would only have legalized marijuana under state law, since federal law also bans marijuana. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, moreover, announced just weeks before Tuesday's election that the administration would enforce the federal law fully even if Prop 19 passed.

This legal limbo would have kept the marijuana market underground, limiting tax revenue and continuing the ills of black market. This ambiguity also dimmed support by making state-level legalization feel like an empty gesture.

So what is the path to legalizing marijuana in the United States?

First and foremost, advocates must emphasize that in a free society, the burden of proof should be on prohibitionists to justify the interference with liberty that results from outlawing marijuana, a burden the prohibitionists have never met. Any calm assessment of marijuana versus alcohol, for example, shows that alcohol is the substance with the greater potential for harm.

Ancillary benefits of legalization are naturally important: by eliminating the black market, legalization promises reduced crime and corruption, fewer infringements on civil liberties, better quality control for marijuana users, along with budgetary benefits. But these considerations are unlikely to convince the majority until more people agree that government should not interfere in the private decision to consume marijuana.

Marijuana advocates should also focus on federal law, in addition to or even instead of state law. Legalization proponents have long despaired of affecting change at the federal level and assumed that state-by-state change would someday bring down federal prohibition. That position is understandable, and it has achieved some success, such as the decriminalization of medicalization of marijuana in many states.

Yet it's hard to see the federal apparatus yielding ground without direct elimination of its authorization; the stakes for those who hold this power are too high. Legalizers can also argue compellingly that no reasonable interpretation of the Constitution justifies federal imposition of a marijuana ban.

A final key to legalizing marijuana is to get conservatives, not just liberals, more involved. A number of well-known conservatives have advocated legalization, such as Milton Friedman, George Schultz, and William Buckley, but the general perception is that legalizers are "stoners, " acting mainly out of self-interest.

Yet legalization can appeal to conservatives, especially if the arguments emphasize freedom, personal responsibility, and the Constitution, along with up-front clarity about the goal: legal production and use of marijuana for adults, whatever their motivations. Past liberal efforts, such as medical marijuana, invite charges of hypocrisy and weaken support.

Marijuana can and should be legal, Prop 19's failure notwithstanding. But the strategy for achieving that end must change.

The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Jeffrey A. Miron.

via cnn.site.printthis.clickability.com

'Skin Printer' Could Help Heal Battlefield Wounds - Technology Review

'Skin Printer' Could Help Heal Battlefield Wounds

Using an inkjet printer and cartridges full of living tissue, researchers demonstrate rapid healing in animals.

Christopher Mims 10/29/2010

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In a recent presentation at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress, researchers from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine showed off the results of a unique experiment involving a printer that uses living cells as its "ink."

The skin bio-printer can move along an X and Y axis (A) and sports a print head with cartridges of living cells (B)

The system, which lays down cells with the same fluid-based inkjet technology used in many printers, could print large swathes of living tissue directly onto the injuries of soldiers wounded on the battlefield. Covering burns and related wounds is of critical importance because, the scientists note, "any loss of full-thickness skin of more than 4 cm in diameter will not heal by itself."

A dual print head keeps the skin fluid until it hits the treatment area

Tests on mice revealed advanced healing by both the second and third week of recovery, with complete closure and formation of scar tissue by week three in treated (but not untreated) subjects. The printer has two heads, one of which ejects skin cells mixed with fibrinogen (a blood coagulant) and type I collagen (the main component of the connective tissue in scars). The other head ejects thrombin (another coagulant).

Like the components of quick-setting resins which must be kept separate until mixing causes a chemical reaction that hardens the resin, the products of the two print heads mix to immediately form fibrin, yet a third protein involved in the clotting of blood. The whole confection is topped by a layer of keratinocytes (i.e. skin cells), which are also printed.

Future iterations of the research will be conducted on pigs (which have skin that more closely resembles that of humans), and it's not clear when, if ever, such a device might appear in a field hospital in Afghanistan, not to mention your local burn center.

Treated (top) versus untreated (bottom) skin

Full citation: In Situ Bioprinting of the Skin for Burns

Kyle W. Binder1, Weixin Zhao1, Gil Young Park2, Tao Xu1, Dennis Dice1, Anthony Atala1, James J. Yoo1

1 Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States of America 2 Imperial College London, Department of Bioengineering, London, United Kingdom

Follow Mims on Twitter or contact him via email.

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Are 'Patent Trolls' the Secret Heroes of the Tech World? How 3-D Printing Is Transforming the Toy Industry

via technologyreview.com

How 3-D Printing Is Transforming the Toy Industry - Technology Review

How 3-D Printing Is Transforming the Toy Industry

Toymakers once made models by hand, but 3-D printing has changed all that.

Christopher Mims 10/28/2010

• 4 Comments
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a raw print of a Cyberman from the television show Dr. Who realized on an envisionTEC Perfactory, courtesy IPF

Sculptors use whatever medium they find most effective for creating investment vehicles for the world's idle rich, but the reality for many model makers is far different. Take, for example, DesignWorks, a UK-based studio full of people who do nothing but sculpt for a living, on deadline.

DesignWorks creates prototypes and finished pieces in a variety of media (OK, a variety of plastics) for inventors, manufacturers and toy makers. LiDesignWorks used to create all of its models the old-fashioned way -- by hand, in clay. And they still do; what's changed since the invention of 3D scanners and stereolithography -- now known by the more inclusive term 3D printing -- is that they now have the ability to directly translate real world objects into miniature versions of themselves.

This transformation recalls the transition from illustration and painting to the age of photography, when the impression of a thing could be replaced by a representation of it that was in some sense more faithful, not to mention easier to produce and mass distribute. The difference is that 3D scanning and 3D printing have arrived in the age of computers, a time when all media, including photos, are endlessly manipulable.

A five-inch tall prototype Dalek printed on an envisionTEC Perfactory 3D printer, courtesy IPF

Unlike the hobbyists who seem to love 3D printing for its own sake, in the world of industrial model-making, this transition is driven almost entirely by the demands of the marketplace: Ed Barnett-Ward, Designworks director of sculpting, told Develop3D that the transition to 3D rapid prototyping cut development time from a year to just three months.

Working on the computer also allows both faithful reproductions of actor's faces. This is especially important given that actors have likeness rights granting them veto power over any representation of their characters.

"But now scanning takes that out of the equation - if you've digitally scanned something it's a true reflection," says Barnett-Ward.

DesignWorks doesn't own the expensive 3D printers it uses; it relies on Industrial Plastic Fabrications, a rapid prototyping bureau that got its hands on the UK's first Objet Connex 500 3D printers, the first commercial multi-material 3D printer ever released.

Multi-material 3D printing with an Objet Connex 500 allows the combination of transparent and opaque resins, courtesy Objet

Photography also began as an art form with limited application and draconian requirements for resources and expertise -- before the invention of photographic paper, photos were captured on metal plates and glass slides. As 3D printing and 3D scanners follow the same trend, we can expect a future in which our memories are captured and even realized in something other than the two dimensions to which we've become accustomed -- and that this process will be as mundane then as the digital camera is now.

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'Skin Printer' Could Help Heal Battlefield Wounds Museum Lets You Play Just About Every Video Game Ever

Close Comments

mikedu

• 6 Days Ago
• 10/28/2010
• 18 Comments

Is this affordable to the public

I'm really interested if people like artists, modelers or architects can have their cad or sketchup drawings created on demand. Is there a service like that for people in Asia?

Reply

Duann

• 6 Days Ago
• 10/28/2010
• 1 Comment

Re: Is this affordable to the public

Hi Mikedu,

3D printing with www.shapeways.com starts at $1 per cubic cm and has free worldwide shipping on any order over $25.

Reply

flared0ne

• 5 Days Ago
• 10/29/2010
• 328 Comments

Re: Affordable??

So is that $1 per cubic centimeter of resin, or whatever your build-out material is, or is that per cubic centimeter of total volume enclosed, as with some form of aetherial construct??

A bit steep, but better than the price of printer ink -- it's recently going for around $10,000 per gallon, while your price is closer to around $3,785 per gallon. Assuming no "volume" discount (heh).

You might want to research and publicize the characteristics of your various build-out material options. For example, one question that jumps to mind is whether your output pieces vaporize cleanly (no ash, etc) at kiln temperatures -- like might be encountered in a lost-wax casting process. I would also want to find out if the material is amenable to further "sculpting", texturing, thermo-forming, etc...

The potential niche of small molds for elaborate metal jewelry might be worth exploring. Granted, the economics might fail completely. Just a thought.

Reply

fdeschouwer

• 5 Days Ago
• 10/29/2010
• 1 Comment

Re: Is this affordable to the public

It is affordable. Two Industrial Design students from Brazil recently used our 3D printing service - http://i.materialise.com - to realize their graduation project, a 3D printed toy called Oh Dog!

Read the story on our blog:
http://i.materialise.com/blog/entry/3d-printed-moveable-toy-dog-oh-dog

Reply

via technologyreview.com