— Updated: 7:30 pm -->Scott Brown Was an Outlier After All
By NATE SILVERA new poll from Public Policy Polling in Massachusetts suggests that Republican Senator Scott Brown — who represents one of the Democrats’ few opportunities to play offense in a cycle in which they hold more than two-thirds of the Senate seats that will be contested in 2012 — is in relatively good shape for re-election. Against a series of potential Democratic opponents, he holds leads by margins ranging between 7 and 19 points, according to the survey.
Obviously, it’s a bit early to be looking ahead toward the 2012 elections, and the political environment could change significantly before then. It is perhaps more likely than not that it will shift somewhat back toward the Democrats, as a matter of simple reversion to the mean as well as the fact that, in Presidential years, turnout is higher, which tends to work to Democrats’ benefit. It will be some time, however, before we can develop a good sense for whether the Democrats are liable to hold onto the Presidency and the Congress — and what chance they might have to win back Mr. Brown’s seat in Massachusetts.
But it’s worth pausing to think about Mr. Brown, whose election this January will probably be seen as the bellwether event when narratives are written about the 2010 election cycle. Indeed, Mr. Brown’s win in Massachusetts was the first time that a lot of pundits realized that the Democrats were in trouble — not just a little trouble, but a lot of it. The special election caused a significant shift in public perceptions: Democratic odds of losing the House, which were taken to be about 25 percent at the start of January 2010, according to the collective wisdom of traders at the Iowa Electronic markets, had risen to 40 percent by the end of the month, following Mr. Brown’s victory.
In another way, however — and as badly as the Democrats did on Nov. 2 — last month’s elections make Mr. Brown’s victory seem like more, rather than less, of an outlier.
Barack Obama won 61.8 percent of the vote in Massachusetts in 2008. One might reasonably have predicted, therefore, that if Mr. Brown had nevertheless been able to win his election in Massachusetts, Democrats would also lose a few other seats in which Mr. Obama had won by that margin — particularly in a universe in which Democrats lost nearly 65 seats in the House of Representatives over all.
In fact, however, this did not occur. The bluest seat to flip from Democrats to Republicans on Nov. 2 was the Illinois 17th Congressional district at the western frontier of the state, which gave 56.4 percent of its vote to Mr. Obama in 2008. (Outside of Illinois, where Mr. Obama may have overachieved in 2008 given his that he makes his home there, the next-bluest seat to flip to Republicans was the New Hampshire 2nd congressional district, where Mr. Obama had gotten 56.1 percent of the vote in 2008.)
Prior to November, there were also three seats that were already held by Republicans, but where Mr. Obama had achieved even more of the vote than the 61.8 percent that he got statewide in Massachusetts. These were the at-large congressional district in Delaware (61.9 percent), the 1st congressional district in Hawaii (70.4 percent) and, the 2nd congressional district in New Orleans, Louisiana (74.1 percent).
Democrats, however, won back all three of these seats (they were the only three Congressional seats in the country, indeed, that did flip from red to blue.) Thus, Mr. Brown now occupies the bluest seat in either branch of Congress currently held by a Republican. (The runner-up is the Illinois 10th congressional district — formerly held by Republican Mark Kirk and won by their nominee Bob Dold; Mr. Obama had won 60.9 percent of the vote there.)
The tsunami that hit Democrats last month — as large as it was — was remarkably precise and orderly, all things considered: given that the Democrats lost more than 60 seats, they lost almost exactly the 60 seats that you might have expected them to lose based on the overall partisanship of the districts. That did not include seats similar to Massachusetts, where Democrats in fact held on to all 10 congressional districts, even though several of the seats had been considered vulnerable.
In some ways, then, last month’s results ought to reinforce that the Democratic nominee in the Massachusetts special election, Martha Coakley, really was an incredibly weak candidate — or that Mr. Brown was an especially strong one, or both. Indeed, this was somewhat obvious at the time for those willing to engage in a sufficiently careful investigation of the data.
Perhaps this implies that Mr. Brown is more vulnerable than the Public Policy Polling survey suggests. Certainly if the 2012 elections resemble 2010, in terms of Congressional voting being aligned very strongly with Presidential voting, he could be in some trouble if the Democrats rebound to any extent at all. At the same time, a broader sweep through history would reveal that incumbents — especially ones with the political skills of Mr. Brown — are sometimes able to defy gravity for years at a time.
What would have happened if Democrats had nominated a stronger candidate in Massachusetts and won the special election? My guess is that it would ultimately not have made very much difference (although they would have had more flexibility in passing their health care bill). The basic conditions that led to the Democrats’ defeat — a weak economy, the inability to sell legislation to the public, the “enthusiasm gap”, strong Republican recruitment — were for the most part already manifest by mid-late 2009 — well in advance of Mr. Brown’s election — even though few analysts were able to put all the pieces together quite so quickly.
Friday, December 03, 2010
Scott Brown Was an Outlier After All - NYTimes.com
Obama debt commission: Majority approve final plan - Dec. 3, 2010
Debt plan draws bipartisan support
By Jeanne Sahadi, senior writerDecember 3, 2010: 5:59 PM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Defying expectations, more than 60% of President Obama's debt commission voted Friday in favor of the group's final recommendations for reducing the country's long-term debt.
In a strong bipartisan showing, 11 of 18 members voted yes. Five Democrats, five Republicans and one independent voted in favor of the panel's debt-reduction plan. Those who voted against it included four Democrats and three Republicans.
But the result still fell short of the 14 votes needed in order for the commission to present its recommendations to Congress for a legislative vote.
No matter, said Dave Kendall, senior fellow for health and fiscal policy at Third Way, a moderate progressive think tank. " A majority ... that's huge. The president can say to Congress, 'We got 11 votes. We know we can do this on a bipartisan basis.' "
Indeed, said Sen. Kent Conrad, one of the Democrats who voted for the plan, "this book is going to be read again."
A Democrat who voted against the plan -- former union leader Andy Stern -- nevertheless said because more than 60% of the commission voted in favor, "this plan deserves a vote [in Congress]."
At the very least, the commission's final report will provide lawmakers a comprehensive framework for how to tackle the problem of reining in debt, and some of their ideas may find their way into future budgets.
It's certainly likely some of them will make their way into the president's 2012 budget proposal, which is due out in February.
"If we want an America that can compete for the jobs of tomorrow, we simply cannot allow our nation to be dragged down by our debt," Obama said in a statement.
He promised that he and his economic team "will study closely [the specific recommendations in the commission's report] in the coming weeks as we develop our budget and our priorities for the coming year."
Just which proposals show up in his budget are the question.
The group's final report -- called "The Moment of Truth" -- includes a wide range of suggested spending cuts and tax changes that would slash $4 trillion from projected deficits between now and 2020. The panel's co-chairmen, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, said all along they would not let any part of the federal budget be treated as a sacred cow
Their recommendations include a radical overhaul of the tax code, changes to Social Security and substantial cuts in defense and discretionary spending
Overall the panel's plan would reduce the country's accumulated debt to 40% of the overall economy by 2035, down from the 185% currently projected.
CBS News Poll: Most Oppose GOP Tax Plan - Political Hotsheet - CBS News
(Credit: CBS)
CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto.
Republicans have argued that the midterm elections have given them a mandate on what they are calling one of the most important issues facing America, the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts.
"The American people want us to stop all the looming tax hikes and to cut spending, and that should be the priority of the remaining days that we have in this Congress," incoming House Speaker Rep. John Boehner said Thursday. Boehner added that a House vote Thursday to extend the cuts for all but the highest-earning Americans amounted to "chicken crap."
According to a new CBS News poll, however, Boehner is off-base in his claim that Americans "want us to stop all the looming tax hikes."
The poll finds that 53 percent of Americans want the Bush-era tax cuts extended only for households earning less than $250,000 per year. That roughly matches the proposal put forth by the White House, which wants to extend the cuts only for incomes less than $250,000 for families and $200,000 for individuals.
Just 26 percent of Americans say they support extending the cuts for all Americans, even those earning above the $250,000 level, which is the GOP proposal.
House Minority Leader John Boehner.
(Credit: AP)Another 14 percent of Americans say the cuts should expire for all Americans. The Treasury Department says the cost of making the cuts permanent for everyone is $3.7 trillion over a decade. The White House plan which would not extend the cuts on high earners would cost an estimated $3 trillion over ten years. (By point of contrast, the controversial deficit commission proposal released this week would save about $4 trillion in that time.)
Seventy percent of Democrats want to extend the cuts only on incomes below $250,000, according to the CBS News poll. Forty-seven percent of independents and 41 percent of Republicans agree.
Only ten percent of Democrats and one in four independents back the GOP proposal to extend the tax cuts for all. Even among Republicans, support for extending all the cuts is less than half at 46 percent.
The Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire for all Americans by the end of the year, and lawmakers are working feverishly to reach compromise on the issue during the lame duck session. The Democrat-led House voted Thursday to extend them for those below then $200,000/$250,000 threshold, but the bill is unlikely to get the 60 votes it needs to break a GOP filibuster in the Senate.
Following the House vote, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California released a statement saying Democrats "just don't get it."
"Clearly, Congressional Democrats learned nothing from the lessons of November 2nd," he said. "The American people had a clear choice between those that want to cut taxes for all Americans and those that want to raise them and they chose decisively. Instead of living up to the mandate set by the American people, Congressional Democrats have defied the will of the American people."
President Obama dispatched Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Jack Lew, to oversee negotiations on finding common ground on the issue earlier this week following a meeting with congressional leaders from both parties. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday that "[t]he talks are ongoing and productive, but any reports that we are near a deal in the tax cuts negotiations are inaccurate and premature."
Republicans have suggested they are unwilling to compromise on the issue, and most political observers expect Democrats to agree to extend all the cuts temporarily. In exchange, Republicans could give ground on other Democratic priorities, such as ratification of the START arms treaty with Russia or an extension of unemployment benefits, which expired on Tuesday.
If the House/Obama plan were to be passed, according to the Tax Policy Center, a married couple with no children making $415,000 per year could expect to pay about $7,000 per year more in taxes. Tax rates on Americans making more than $373,650 would see their top marginal tax rate increase from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. (You can calculate how the various plans might affect you individually here.)
CBS Evening News: The Story Behind the Bush Era Tax Cuts
MoneyWatch: Are You Middle Class?
This poll was conducted among a random sample of 808 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone November 29-December 1, 2010. Phone numbers were dialed from RDD samples of both standard land-lines and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus four percentage points. The error for subgroups is higher. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.
Brian Montopoli is senior political reporter for CBSNews.com. You can read more of his posts here. Follow Hotsheet on Facebook and Twitter.
Scripting News: WikiLeaks on the run
By Dave Winer on Friday, December 03, 2010 at 10:56 AM.
We're having a Rebooting The News moment here with WikiLeaks.
Joe Lieberman calls Amazon to say they should cut them off. Amazon cuts them off, then says the Lieberman call had nothing to do with it. We have no reason to doubt Amazon. It's consistent with their philosophy of not taking sides in political battles. Still I wish Amazon, who I'm a big fan of, had stood with them, had maintained its neutrality.
Then their DNS host cuts them off, claiming they were being hit with a massive Denial-of-Service attack. Again, no reason to doubt their word, but we wish they had found a way to work with them. Then WikiLeaks says you can find them through wikileaks.ch, which redirects to a dotted ID. People exchange this information on Twitter. So in a weird sneaker-net sort of way we have implemented a human DNS.
Now France runs a press release saying WikiLeaks can't be hosted there. We assume they had some reason to think that they might have this problem.
All the while there's a huge glaring 800-pound-gorilla elephant-in-the-room size contradiction. The pols say that businesses can't support WikiLeaks, but the Guardian and the NY Times and the newspapers in Pakistan, Indonesia, Israel -- all over the world -- they're businesses too. So if they're really serious about this, we're in First Amendment territory. They ought to be careful, because the politicians depend on these businesses to sell their product. Without them, they have no way to lie to us.
See the problem isn't that WikiLeaks is lying, the problem is that they're telling the truth. This is not business as usual.
While the politicians and reporters are getting a fumbling on-the-job education in the architecture of the Internet (an NPR reporter said, hesitatingly, that it appears as if the server is now in Switzerland), the next question is where does the running stop? When does the situation reach equilibrium? What's the best outcome for the people of the planet?
It seems to me that at the end of this chain is BitTorrent. That when WikiLeaks wants to publish the next archive, they can get their best practice from eztv.it, and have 20 people scattered around the globe at the ends of various big pipes ready to seed it. Once the distribution is underway the only way to shut it down will be to shut down the Internet itself. Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they're governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.
That must be what they're discussing behind the scenes in government. And don't miss that this is equally threatening to media. They won't be able to engage in spin rooms and situation rooms, appearances and perception. When we can see the real communiques, that kind of mush won't do.
Ethan Zuckerman, via email: "Dave, [the torrents are] already there - the cables themselves are being distributed as a torrent. What's so crazy about all this is that the 'illegal content' everyone claims to be worried about hosting is basically just a promotional page - the sensitive stuff is out there in torrentspace and virtually impossible to stop from being distributed."
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Secrets of the "New Music Industry" that the "Old Music Industry" Doesn't Want to Know | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Secrets of the "New Music Industry" that the "Old Music Industry" Doesn't Want to Know
Commentary by Richard Esguerra
This week's news that the feds seized 82 websites based on allegations of copyright infringement demonstrated that government website seizures can silence innocent speech. But let's take a broader view for a moment. The domain seizure debacle, the COICA Internet censorship bill, ACTA, and many other short-sighted efforts to eliminate copyright infringement all depend on (a) the traditional entertainment industry's yowling wail that "piracy" on the the Internet is injuring the livelihoods of artists and (b) the US government's chronically uncritical acceptance of those complaints.
But the new services catering to musicians are struggling to tell their side of the story — a story that turns out to be substantially more optimistic and instructive. Jeff Price, CEO of TuneCore, posted a fantastic six-part series titled "The State of The Music Industry & the Delegitimization of Artists" that surfaces this new perspective that desperately needs to be heard in the debate.
Here are some key ideas from the series:
- U.S. music purchases overall are up year-to-year, while album sales are down. In other words, artists are making more money, while the labels are making less.
- Price presents some insightful back-of-the-napkin math comparing (a) an artist's take from selling and distributing CDs with a label, to (b) an artist's take from selling songs and albums online: "By selling just two songs on iTunes for $1.98, the artist makes the same amount of money as if a $16.98 full length CD was bought. An artist sells one digital album for $9.99 and makes 500% more than a signed band."
- The traditional music industry insists on measuring artist success via album sales, which harms artists that are nonetheless popular, interesting, relevant, and profitable.
- Outdated copyright and trademark laws can actually impede independently successful artists from capitalizing on all available opportunities.
The takeaway? Thanks to technology and Internet-enabled services, more music is being purchased, more music is being heard, and artists are getting paid. But the traditional music industry measures success using a bygone standard, leading to a lopsided perspective of how artists can achieve success in this day and age. And in our view, this leads to an undervaluing of the broad, actual advantages of the Internet — and innovative services using the Internet as a platform — in rewarding artists for their creativity.
We hope that Congress and other decision makers think twice before accepting that dangerous Internet censorship measures like COICA actually represent what's best for artists. And Jeff Price's series ought to be required reading for anyone thinking of legislating or giving over government resources to copyright enforcement on websites.
From the story that Jeff Price is telling, updating the laws to help artists take advantage of new opportunities would provide far more value without also threatening free speech, damaging the technical underpinnings of the Internet, and limiting innovation.
Related Issues: No Downtime for Free Speech Campaign, The COICA Internet Censorship and Copyright Bill
Related Cases: RIAA v. The People
Ezra Klein - Why did the Democrats falter on the tax cuts?
Why did the Democrats falter on the tax cuts?
By Ezra Klein
This post by Greg Sargent contains some wise words on the psychology of the Democrats:
At risk of overgeneralizing, the problem isn't that Dems aren't capable of winning an argument. It's that they don't think they're capable of winning a protracted political standoff, even on an issue where the public is on their side, once Republicans start going on the attack. They seem to set their goal early on at salvaging a compromise, rather than going for the win. As a result, they tend to telegraph weakness at the outset, sending a clear message that they'll essentially give Republicans what they want as long as they can figure out a way to call it a compromise.
It's very important to realize how strong of a hand Democrats had -- and to some degree, have -- on the Bush tax cuts. Right or wrong, the Democrats' original position on this was that the tax cuts for income under $250,000 should be extended, and the tax cuts for income over $250,000 should expire. The public agrees: 49 percent share the Democrats' position, 14 percent want all the tax cuts to go, and 34 percent want to see all the tax cuts extended. Put another way, 63 percent of Americans don't want the tax cuts for the rich extended.
The GOP understood this just fine: Back in July, Rep. Dave Camp, then the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, admitted that his party couldn't hold tax cuts for the middle class hostage in order to secure tax cuts for the rich. "I'll probably vote for it myself," he said of the Democrats' proposal. In September, John Boehner joined him. "If the only option I have is to vote for some of those tax reductions," he told Bob Schieffer, "I'll vote for it."
Democrats, it seemed, had won this one. They had the popular position, the president's veto pen and control of the Congress. But they simply refused to carry the ball over the goal line. Instead, they began negotiating with themselves, talking about millionaires' brackets and short-term extensions. Republicans noticed the Democrats' disarray and lost their fatalism: "Incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said on Bloomberg Television he was ready to instruct GOP members to vote down legislation Democrats plan to bring to the floor that would extend the expiring Bush-era tax cuts only for the middle class."
Now it looks like all the tax cuts will be extended, at least for the moment. But it's a baffling outcome. The structure of the situation favored -- and continues to favor -- the Democrats. No tax cuts pass without their support, and Republicans have previously admitted that their position isn't popular enough to prevail in a standoff. The only thing that's changed is that Republicans have realized Democrats aren't confident enough to enter a standoff. But it didn't have to be this way. Think back to early this week, when the president announced the federal pay freeze. "The hard truth is that getting this deficit under control is going to require broad sacrifice," he said. "And that sacrifice must be shared by the employees of the federal government." Here's what he could've said next:
It also must be shared by those among us who've prospered most in recent years. Even before the financial crisis, middle-class incomes had stagnated. But the incomes of the wealthiest Americans hadn't. Similarly, America's upper class has recovered from the crisis much quicker than the working class. There's nothing wrong with that: The country depends on the ingenuity and resourcefulness of its most successful citizens. But in a time of high deficits and belt tightening, it makes $700 billion in tax cuts that go solely to the top 2% an unreasonable expense. Those tax cuts were passed in a time of surplus, and now we're in a time of deficits. As our situation changes, so must our policy. I will veto any bill that extends those tax breaks.
He not only could've said it, he could've stuck to it. But he didn't. Instead, Jack Lew and Tim Geithner are now supposed to negotiate out a deal, and the White House will be blamed for the inevitable concessions and disappointments it includes. I'm not against deal-making, of course, and I've regularly defended the administration's pragmatic concessions. But there are times when you can get more at the negotiating table, and times when you can get more by declaring that there's simply nothing to negotiate. This was the latter.
Photo credit: Melina Mara/The Washington Post.
“Angry Birds” Christmas Edition: Out Now! - Techland
The Christmas edition of Rovio's flyaway gaming app success, Angry Birds -- officially called Angry Birds Seasons, is now available to download from iTunes and the Android marketplace.
(Top 10 Things you Didn't Know About Christmas on TIME.com.)
Fans of the series will enjoy 25 new daily doses of pig hating avians which will count you down to Christmas Day. There is also more good news as the app is free to download on Android handsets. It will cost $0.99 from iTunes but will include Angry Birds Halloween. If you already have the halloween edition of the game then you will be eligible for your free holiday edition as previously confirmed.
(See TIME.com's guide to Christmas shopping 2010.)
An HD version of Angry Birds Seasons is also available for the iPad, priced at $1.99 from the iTunes store. Keep checking Techland for updates on the rumors of Angry Birds appearing on the Xbox 360, PS3, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS and Windows Phone 7 in 2011.
More on Time.com:
Track Santa's Journey Through Social Media
Kids Games You Never Thought Would Turn Into Movies
18 iPhone Games To Keep You Occupied
Work Without Dread: Assange and Information Restriction
In the November 8 New Yorker, Steve Coll expresses a series of reservations about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. He raises, only to set aside, doubts about Assange's character and recent charges of rape to focus on "his political conceptions and acuity" (27). The core of Coll's criticism is that WikiLeaks "so far . . . lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media" (28). Coll never quite specifies what these ideals are, but at one point opposes "dissent" to "vandalism": WikiLeaks "will have to steer through the foggy borderlands" between the two. Another version of this opposition pits "insurgency" against journalism as a profession, which, "despite its flaws, has constructed its legitimacy by serving as a check on governmental and corporate power within constitutional arrangements that assume the viability of the rule of law," or "normalcy within a national system" (28). "Ethical culture" is thus associated with the subordination of the questioning of the state to the defense, at most the expansion, of legal citizenship within a particular state.Coll does not mention WikiLeaks' association with The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and The New York Times to release the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs. But describing the papers' contact with Assange, The New York Times's Eric Schmitt also underlines the distinction between journalists and "sources" to exclude Assange from the media, stressing that the journalists alone arranged the documents to make them intelligible to the reader ("we were not in any kind of partnership or collaboration with him. This was a source relationship. He’s making it sound like this was some sort of journalistic enterprise between WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and that’s not what it was” [quoted in Clint Hendler, "The Story Behind the Publication of WikiLeaks’s Afghanistan Logs,"Columbia Journalism Review, July 28, 2010). Schmitt implies that if he was not collaborating in a "journalistic enterprise," then he was not collaborating in anything. Coll's and Schmitt's primary reaction is to struggle with WikiLeaks' wielding of information without narratives --except that of its own heroism--and without neutrality. Rather than addressing the reader from a position between the reader and the state, WikiLeaks files make the reader a witness to a contest between the state and itself, while the media mediates between the files and the reader. Schmitt calls WikiLeaks the "source" to assimilate this situation to what the media usually does: frame the source for the reader. But because WikiLeaks is not in fact the original source, and yet also presents its data independently, underneath runs the anxiety that it is a media entity trying to get itself into the position of a state-level actor, at least in its structural relation to other media--and even, in the latest case of the leaked U.S. Embassy cables, other governments. Coll's qualification, "free media," suggests that WikiLeaks' tactics could be consistent with unfree or state media.
Interestingly, Assange's texts "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance" (2006) describe his goal and that of state-associated conspiracy as that of obstructing communication. By "conspiracy" he means the organization to mutual benefit of authoritarian elites, including government agencies and mass media. Communicative restriction, he writes, is the modus operandi of conspiracy: "usually the effect runs the other way; it is the conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction." Although leaks create new chances for communication--"only revealed injustice can be answered"--Assange's texts more often describe the leaks as double negatives restricting the conspiracy's restrictive powers, which are inseparable from its productive communicative powers. Finally the effect runs this way: "we can reduce total conspiratorial power via unstructured attacks on links or through throttling and separating." On the whole, rather than claiming to enhance transparency, Assange points out that one party's transparency is another's opacity. To harass the opposition is to make it hesitate to speak. Insofar as this is WikiLeaks' program, it may be disquieting but not contradictory that it operates secretly--that, as rival leaker John Young remarks, "They're acting like a government."
It isn't finally the hiddenness of the data that's at issue for Assange, but its ability to flow at all--but still, restriction and efficiency are supposed to be linked, since broader knowledge of what governments do is imagined to be in itself a way of slowing their doing it. The idea is that data wouldn't stream as efficiently toward any purpose if people couldn't be sure that they could control it. And control, again, is imagined to consist of distributing non-information and limiting operational information. One outcome to anticipate from Assange's point of view, then, would be a technological arms race in which state agencies shift from security clearances and encryption to more sophisticated digital defenses. But another possible development appears in an NSA text called "Toward a Taxonomy of Secrets" published by Young on his own leak site, Cryptome. The author, a philosophically minded engineer for the NSA, concludes that not all secrets can or need to be digitally managed:
Our efforts might, in some cases, be better applied to understanding the motivations and dynamics that are creating the secrets in the first place, with an eye toward coming up with a system that better maps to the human processes and behavioral tendencies.
We may find that by shifting the structures, rules, and value systems in human space, we have fewer secrets to deal with. We may find that we can alter the human-space systems to clarify the context and valuation of secrets, and put them into a form more amenable to elegant automation. We must get back to the notion that, in dealing with secrets, the human/automation construct works better if the whole system is adapted to the behaviors, values, and motivations of the humans.
A more secure world, for the engineer, is one in which on the one hand, secrets are safest when those who want them kept mobilize human beings' various positive desires for secrecy, while on the other by "shifting . . . value systems" one may create less need to have certain information secret, and hence to have it revealed, as the case may be. Roberto Bola̱o describes such a state of affairs in By Night in Chile (2000). The narrator is sworn to "absolute discretion" about being hired to give General Pinochet's junta an academic introduction to Marxism. Having completed this black-comic commission, he unburdens himself to a friend, only to hear his story repeated all over Santiago, to his horror. He expects recriminations, but the phone never rings. "At first I thought this silence was the result of a concerted decision to ostracize me. Then, to my astonishment, I realized that nobody gave a damn. The country was populated by hieratic figures, heading implacably towards an unfamiliar, grey horizon, where one could barely glimpse a few rays of light, flashes of lightning and clouds of smoke" (By Night in Chile, trans. Chris Andrews, 102). This world already exists, its logic expressed by the Daily Telegraph's deputy editor, Benedict Brogan: "The Saudis would like someone to whack Iran? No kidding . . . . infinite boredom" ("WikiLeaks is embarrassing Рbut not serious," November 28, 2010). WikiLeaks, did not create new possibilities for Brogan's boredom: by his own declaration, he was already well and truly bored. Maybe, then, it's actually the vastness of such uncaring that WikiLeaks brings to light, in so doing giving it the chance to be otherwise.
The Dickishness Of The GOP - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
« When Spoilers Wouldn't Matter, Ctd | Main | The "Get Assange" Chorus »
The Dickishness Of The GOP
01 Dec 2010 05:06 pm
What we've observed these past two years is a political party that knows nothing but scorched earth tactics, cannot begin to see any merits in the other party's arguments, refuses to compromise one inch on anything, and has sought from the very beginning to do nothing but destroy the Obama presidency. I see no other coherent message or strategy since 2008. Just opposition to everything, zero support for a president grappling with a recession their own party did much to precipitate, and facing a fiscal crisis the GOP alone made far worse with their spending in the Bush-Cheney years. There is not a scintilla of responsibility for their past; not a sliver of good will for a duly elected president. Worse, figures like Cantor and McCain actively seek to back foreign governments against the duly elected president of their own country, and seek to repeal the signature policy achievement of Obama's first two years, universal healthcare.
I know it is the opposition's role to oppose. But the sheer scale and absolutism of the opposition, and its continuation in the lame duck session, even over such small but integral reforms such as the new START and DADT repeal, is remarkable.
The two parties are evenly spread in this 50-50 country, but only one can brook no compromise in its accelerating rush to the far right. And that is what it seems we have to contemplate for the next two years - total paralysis in the face of urgent problems as part of a game of cynical partisan brinkmanship. They simply cannot bear that another party might actually have a role to play in government.This is not conservatism, properly understood, a disposition that respects the institutions and traditions of government, that can give as well as take, that seeks the national interest before partisan concerns, and that respects both the other branches of government and seeks to work with them. These people are not conservatives in this core civilized sense; they are partisan vandals.
And if the GOP block the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, despite the careful Pentagon study, a slow roll-out of its provisions, and support from the Joint Chiefs chairman and the defense secretary, then we will find out something else. The contempt the GOP has for gay lives, gay citizens and those who wear the uniform of the United States is as deep and as vile as we ever thought it was. Yes, I'm angry at this general nihilist partisanship, and wounded once more by these people's profound, obsessive homophobia. But I cannot, alas, say I am surprised. The degeneracy has been building for a long time. It is just the stench of it right now that overwhelms the nostrils.
(Photo: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivers an address at the conservative Heritage Foundation November 4, 2010 in Washington, DC. The Republican party made big gains in the Senate but failed to take control of the chamber. 'If the administration wants to cooperation then it's going to have to move in our direction,' McConnell said. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)
Permalink :: Sphere It! :: Share This
Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review
I've been playing tennis for nearly five decades. I love the game and I hit the ball well, but I'm far from the player I wish I were.
I've been thinking about this a lot the past couple of weeks, because I've taken the opportunity, for the first time in many years, to play tennis nearly every day. My game has gotten progressively stronger. I've had a number of rapturous moments during which I've played like the player I long to be.
And almost certainly could be, even though I'm 58 years old. Until recently, I never believed that was possible. For most of my adult life, I've accepted the incredibly durable myth that some people are born with special talents and gifts, and that the potential to truly excel in any given pursuit is largely determined by our genetic inheritance.
During the past year, I've read no fewer than five books — and a raft of scientific research — which powerfully challenge that assumption (see below for a list). I've also written one, The Way We're Working Isn't Working, which lays out a guide, grounded in the science of high performance, to systematically building your capacity physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
We've found, in our work with executives at dozens of organizations, that it's possible to build any given skill or capacity in the same systematic way we do a muscle: push past your comfort zone, and then rest. Aristotle Will Durant*, commenting on Aristotle, pointed out that the philosopher had it exactly right 2000 years ago: "We are what we repeatedly do." By relying on highly specific practices, we've seen our clients dramatically improve skills ranging from empathy, to focus, to creativity, to summoning positive emotions, to deeply relaxing.
Like everyone who studies performance, I'm indebted to the extraordinary Anders Ericsson, arguably the world's leading researcher into high performance. For more than two decades, Ericsson has been making the case that it's not inherited talent which determines how good we become at something, but rather how hard we're willing to work — something he calls "deliberate practice." Numerous researchers now agree that 10,000 hours of such practice as the minimum necessary to achieve expertise in any complex domain.
There is something wonderfully empowering about this. It suggests we have remarkable capacity to influence our own outcomes. But that's also daunting. One of Ericsson's central findings is that practice is not only the most important ingredient in achieving excellence, but also the most difficult and the least intrinsically enjoyable.
If you want to be really good at something, it's going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. That's true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at something you've earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.
Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we've found are most effective for our clients:
- Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
- Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
- Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
- Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
- Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
- Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.
I have practiced tennis deliberately over the years, but never for the several hours a day required to achieve a truly high level of excellence. What's changed is that I don't berate myself any longer for falling short. I know exactly what it would take to get to that level.I've got too many other higher priorities to give tennis that attention right now. But I find it incredibly exciting to know that I'm still capable of getting far better at tennis — or at anything else — and so are you.
Here are the recent books on this subject:
- Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin. My personal favorite.
- The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
- Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Genius in All of Us by David Schenk.
- Bounce by Mathew Syed
* Thanks to commenter Rick Thomas for pointing out the misattribution.
Tony Schwartz is president and CEO of The Energy Project. He is the author of the June, 2010 HBR article, "The Productivity Paradox: How Sony Pictures Gets More Out of People by Demanding Less," and coauthor, with Catherine McCarthy, of the 2007 HBR article, "Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time." Tony is also the author of the new book "The Way We're Working Isn't Working: The Four Forgotten Needs that Energize Great Performance" (Free Press, 2010).
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Why The Wikileaks Document Release Is Key To A Functioning Democracy | Techdirt
Filed Under:
democracy, free speech, information, wikileaks
Companies:
wikileaks
Why The Wikileaks Document Release Is Key To A Functioning Democracy
from the the-difference-between-democracy-and-the-state dept
As various politicians and bureaucrats freak out and get the wrong message from the latest Wikileaks document leak, the Economist has an excellent explanation of why the leak is actually a very good thing in preserving American democracy. Will it make some diplomats jobs harder? Absolutely. But diplomacy isn't supposed to be easy. And what the documents reveal is that the US has a history of doing things it's not supposed to do. The really key insight in the Economist piece is that there's a difference between elected officials and "the state" made up of career bureaucrats, who are not necessarily subject to democratic pressures -- allowing them to make moves where they are not, in fact, answerable to the American public. And that's a problem:
The United States is nominally a democracy, but it's sadly ridiculous to think this means very much. To get at the value of WikiLeaks, I think it's important to distinguish between the government--the temporary, elected authors of national policy--and the state--the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government. The careerists scattered about the world in America's intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America's unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it.A better informed public is not a bad thing... except if your entire job is based on trying to keep people in the dark. Look at who's complaining the most about Wikileaks and you realize that it's the people who benefit from not being held accountable for their actions.As Scott Shane, the New York Times' national security reporter, puts it: "American taxpayers, American citizens pay for all these diplomatic operations overseas and you know, it is not a bad thing when Americans actually have a better understanding of those negotiations".
...
I'd say providing that information certainly would have been a socially worthy activity, even if it came as part of a more-or-less indiscriminate dump of illegally obtained documents. I'm glad to see that the quality of discussion over possible US efforts to stymie Iran's nuclear ambitions has already become more sophisticated and, well, better-informed due to the information provided by WikiLeaks.
60 Comments | Leave a Comment..
Real danger of WikiLeaks dump: curtailed rights
Real danger of WikiLeaks dump: curtailed rights
By Timothy J. McNulty, Special to CNNSTORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Timothy McNulty says journalism, national security survived lies, will survive WikiLeaks truth
- He says he's uneasy that what used to be called spying is now "transparency"
- Still, he says, we should not use WikiLeaks to attack free media, increase government secrecy
- McNulty: Filter of news media for WikiLeaks dump was crucial to responsible presentation
Editor's note: Timothy J. McNulty, a journalist at the Chicago Tribune for more than 30 years, is a teacher at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and co-director of the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative.
(CNN) -- Journalism and national security have survived decades of lies; both can handle a little unexpected truth.
Giving government secrets and classified documents to a nation's enemies or even its allies is certainly against the law. We've always called it spying.
Now the equation is changed and people who approve giving purloined documents to the wide electronic world call it transparency. Others, who oppose WikiLeaks' release of diplomatic cables Sunday, are calling it an act of terrorism to be met with full government sanctions.
The sober side of me knows that putting the entire archive of a quarter-million State Department documents online can be harmful and potentially dangerous for national security. Yet the news reader -- the citizen -- in me also finds it immensely satisfying to learn what government leaders are really saying compared with the official statements, releases and communiqués that often masquerade as government information.
Knowing that Saudi leaders, behind a false front of regional solidarity, are fretting about Iran seems a bit refreshing. I do appreciate knowing that our DEA knows that an Afghan vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year carrying $52 million in cash.
Even if I feel chagrined that our diplomats are getting blackmailed by other nations into taking Guantanamo Bay prisoners off our hands, I'd rather know the truth than the pretend explanations.
The real danger, it seems to me, is not the revelation of assorted classified material but our tendency to overreact, either to actual security threats such as the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber or, in this case, to a massive information dump.
We've become so reactive to security concerns -- and, at the same time, apathetic to threats to our own civil liberties -- that we might, as a result of the WikiLeaks release, allow government agencies to step on the universal reach of the Internet or find ways to create exceptions to First Amendment freedoms.
Official ire may be aimed at WikiLeaks and its founder, but there's a real current of anger at the media for providing a printed and organized outlet for these documents.
Without the printed media, however, the information would be presented in such a helter-skelter fashion, it would be difficult to analyze or even know what is true and which documents are bogus. Since the earlier two massive releases by WikiLeaks of low-level Defense Department documents relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I have yet to find a person who has actually read more than a tiny sampling of the actual leaked documents.
Many say the electronic information age has done away with traditional or mainstream journalism, but here it is evident that the journalists at The New York Times, The Guardian, Germany's Der Spiegel magazine and the Spanish daily El Pais are still doing the legwork -- sifting through information, confirming, editing and presenting it to the public.
Over many weeks, the above publications have also cooperated with their governments and with WikiLeaks in vetting the material and removing information that clearly might be harmful to people in other countries.
We all understand how illegal it is to reveal state secrets, even those that are classified secret for no good reason. We also know that over the years, governments have lied to the American people in the name of national security, whether about preparations for war or dealings with our allies and enemies.
Journalists take comfort in the saying about sunlight being the best disinfectant, and usually that is true. Abraham Lincoln expressed the same sentiment this way: "Let the people know the facts and the country will be safe."
I know there is risk in having these illegally obtained insights into government discussions and calculations, but we should not allow others to use this to attack a free media or to create more government secrecy.
During a conversation with my journalism class on the WikiLeaks controversy yesterday, the graduate students considered both overreactions as potential dangers -- that these leaks will provide an excuse to curtail our constitutional freedoms and that government will become even more duplicitous.
And that would be a real crime.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Timothy McNulty
Thin air: Oxygen atmosphere found on Saturn's moon Rhea
ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2010) — NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected a very tenuous atmosphere known as an exosphere, infused with oxygen and carbon dioxide around Saturn's icy moon Rhea. This is the first time a spacecraft has directly captured molecules of an oxygen atmosphere -- albeit a very thin one -- at a world other than Earth.
The oxygen appears to arise when Saturn's magnetic field rotates over Rhea. Energetic particles trapped in the planet's magnetic field pepper the moon's water-ice surface. They cause chemical reactions that decompose the surface and release oxygen. The source of the carbon dioxide is less certain.
Oxygen at Rhea's surface is estimated to be about 5 trillion times less dense than what we have at Earth. But the new results show that surface decomposition could contribute abundant molecules of oxygen, leading to surface densities roughly 100 times greater than the exospheres of either Earth's moon or Mercury. The formation of oxygen and carbon dioxide could possibly drive complex chemistry on the surfaces of many icy bodies in the universe.
"The new results suggest that active, complex chemistry involving oxygen may be quite common throughout the solar system and even our universe," said lead author Ben Teolis, a Cassini team scientist based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Such chemistry could be a prerequisite for life. All evidence from Cassini indicates that Rhea is too cold and devoid of the liquid water necessary for life as we know it."
Releasing oxygen through surface irradiation could help generate conditions favorable for life at an icy body other than Rhea that has liquid water under the surface, Teolis said. If the oxygen and carbon dioxide from the surface could somehow get transported down to a sub-surface ocean, that would provide a much more hospitable environment for more complex compounds and life to form. Scientists are keen to investigate whether life on icy moons with an ocean is possible, though they have not yet detected it.
The tenuous atmosphere with oxygen and carbon dioxide makes Rhea, Saturn's second largest moon, unique in the Saturnian system. Titan has a thick nitrogen-methane atmosphere, but very little carbon dioxide and oxygen.
"Rhea is turning out to be much more interesting than we had imagined," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The Cassini finding highlights the rich diversity of Saturn's moons and gives us clues on how they formed and evolved."
Scientists had suspected Rhea could have a thin atmosphere with oxygen and carbon dioxide, based on remote observations of Jupiter's icy moons by NASA's Galileo spacecraft and Hubble Space Telescope. Other Cassini observations detected oxygen escaping from icy Saturn ring particles after ultraviolet bombardment. But Cassini was able to detect oxygen and carbon dioxide in the exosphere directly because of how close it flew to Rhea -- 101 kilometers, or 63 miles -- and its special suite of instruments.
In the new study, scientists combined data from Cassini's ion and neutral mass spectrometer and the Cassini plasma spectrometer during flybys on Nov. 26, 2005, Aug. 30, 2007, and March 2, 2010. The ion and neutral mass spectrometer "tasted" peak densities of oxygen of around 50 billion molecules per cubic meter (1 billion molecules per cubic foot). It detected peak densities of carbon dioxide of around 20 billion molecules per cubic meter (about 600 million molecules per cubic foot).
The plasma spectrometer saw clear signatures of flowing streams of positive and negative ions, with masses that corresponded to ions of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
"How exactly the carbon dioxide is released is still a puzzle," said co-author Geraint Jones, a Cassini team scientist based at University College London in the U.K. "But with Cassini's diverse suite of instruments observing Rhea from afar, as well as sniffing the gas surrounding it, we hope to solve the puzzle."
The carbon dioxide may be the result of "dry ice" trapped from the primordial solar nebula, as is the case with comets, or it may be due to similar irradiation processes operating on the organic molecules trapped in the water ice of Rhea. The carbon dioxide could also come from carbon-rich materials deposited by tiny meteors that bombarded Rhea's surface.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The ion and neutral mass spectrometer team and the Cassini plasma spectrometer team are based at Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by NASA.
Journal Reference:
- B. D. Teolis, G. H. Jones, P. F. Miles, R. L. Tokar, B. A. Magee, J. H. Waite, E. Roussos, D. T. Young, F. J. Crary, A. J. Coates, R. E. Johnson, W.- L. Tseng, R. A. Baragiola. Cassini Finds an Oxygen-Carbon Dioxide Atmosphere at Saturn's Icy Moon Rhea. Science, 2010; DOI: 10.1126/science.1198366
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Mind Your Body: A Higher Road to Relaxation
You're under pressure. Deadlines are looming. Everyone is making demands on your time. Your anxiety level is rising. Your stomach is in knots. So you do what you've been well-trained to do. You make sure you get in your gym time.But if neuroscientist Steven W. Porges is right, there's an even better way to counter stress. Exercise has its uses, but as a stress fighter it works primarily at a visceral level—and the operative word is fight. You're basically combating excess levels of cortisol, the hormone that spreads news of danger through your body and readies it to fight or flee.
You're better off working through higher—and more direct—channels, like the brain. The most efficient stress-reducer might just be a smile. Engaging socially with others triggers neural circuits that calm the heart, relax the gut, and switch off fear, Porges says.
The path from sociability to tranquillity is paved by the vagus nerve, the main route of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. The vagus wanders from brain stem to body, carrying signals to organs like the heart, lungs, and intestines, and regulating a number of facial muscles to boot. The vagus influences heart rate and breathing. It is intimately involved in how we perceive, react to, and recover from stress. When the vagus nerve is activated, heart rate slows, blood pressure drops, and the body enters a state of physical calm.
Over time, nature has elaborated a three-tier system of wiring to enable us to respond to immediate risk, says Porges, director of the Brain-Body Center at the University of Illinois.
All three are concerned with sorting out safety from danger, friend from foe. When we feel unsafe, we generally activate the fight-or-flight response, which conducts its business through the other half of the autonomic system, the sympathetic branch. Activation of sympathetic pathways is the physiological equivalent of pushing the panic button.
Older and more rudimentary among response strategies is total shutdown—freezing and immobilization. It's accomplished through an older version of the vagus nerve. So primitive is this vestigial channel, a holdover from our invertebrate past, that it lacks a protective coating of myelin, the fatty substance that sheathes most nerves in mammals, speeding the transmission of impulses.
Then there's the myelinated vagus, which serves as the pinnacle of our evolved capabilities. Linking the cranial nerves serving face, voice, and ears with the heart, lungs, and gut, it gives facial expressions and vocalizations privileged access to the circuitry modulating our visceral reactions. It is normally activated only under conditions of safety, but it provides the body with a much less taxing, and far more rewarding, escape from anxiety than fighting or fleeing.
When we scan our surroundings for risks, sweet smiles with gentle eye contact and soft voices with rhythmic inflections cue the brain structures that regulate the vagus nerve. The viscera lighten up: Heart rate slows, breathing eases. Stress switches off. You feel safe enough to move closer. Intimacy is now possible. Think of the vagus nerve as a social engagement system. And it works two ways. Social engagement creates the sense of safety that calms the viscera. And released from gut-wrenching anxiety, your insides now enable you to advance your social agenda, which further calms you.
Social interactions are very important in our experience as human beings, Porges says, and the social engagement system determines the quality of those interactions. Further, he calls the power of this system "amazing" both in terms of its effects on behavior and mental state and the speed with which it works. Not only do coping strategies like exercise tackle stress primarily at the visceral level, they actually work against deployment of the higher system. You may think exercise is curative, Porges says, but the calm you get from jogging 10 miles is more analgesic than therapeutic.
Exercise actually turns off the social engagement system by stimulating the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, which dampens the function of the vagus. Among its effects: blocking sensitivity to social cues. Distraction by some novelty may seem alluring at times of stress, but it bypasses the vagus nerve entirely and works at cross purposes to it. If your gut's in a knot, new and strange input will only aggravate the jitters. You're better off with old friends or favorite tunes than experimental sounds or the party where you don't know a soul. A skittish nervous system is really requesting familiarity and predictability, which is a metaphor for safety, Porges says.
Porges contends that our reaction to challenge is organized hierarchically, and that the evolutionarily newer neural circuits inhibit the older ones. We use the newer circuit to promote calm states, to soothe ourselves, and to engage with others. When this doesn't work, we mobilize for fight-or-flight behaviors. And if that doesn't do it, we resort to the old vagal system and freeze.
Our reaction to danger and the mobilization of defensive systems, rather than the engagement system, happens automatically, Porges observes. It's not a voluntary choice. It's as if our nervous system has betrayed us. But that doesn't mean we're stuck. "The mantra I use," Porges says, "is when your nervous system fails you, use behavior." To cope with such betrayals, we can learn to compensate—by moving into a quiet room or moving into social relationships rather than away from them.
Band-Aid Sized MP3 Player Powered By Body Heat : Discovery News
The last complaint you will usually hear about MP3 players like the iPod is that they are too big. But get ready for the MP3 player in your hand to get much smaller, the size of a Band-Aid, to be specific.
It's called the Skinny Player, and it's being designed by Chih-Wei Wang and Shou-His Fu. Unlike the current generation of iPod Shuffles and iPod Nanos, the Skinny Player does not need to be clipped onto your clothes or shoved into your pocket. They are designing the Skinny Player to stick to your skin like you would attach a Band-Aid. But unlike Band-Aids, this tiny MP3 player will not lose its stickiness as you peal it off for the hundredth time.
Scars won't be necessary for the Skinny Player to work though. No batteries either. The Skinny Player's designers say it will be powered by body heat.
The design only includes an on/off button and flexible speakers, no word yet on adjusting the volume. But the memory capacity won't be the best, as it is designed to only store one album.
Few of the technical details about the tiny MP3 player have been leaked, so how exactly it will be powered by body heat is unclear. The small size and the ability to stick it onto your skin like a Band-Aid should make the Skinny Player perfect for runners who now depend on their iPods to keep them energized on the running path.
As Dvice points out, the Skinny Player is still just a good idea that is still a long way from becoming a reality. But judging by how many technology blogs have picked up this story, it may just be a matter of time.
But here's a little eye candy, pictures of the Skinny Player's design:
'Uncertainty' isn't the real reason they're not hiring - LA Times
Over the last few economically stagnant months, a new explanation has emerged for why businesses are reluctant to hire more workers and otherwise gear up for recovery.
The reason, you see, is "uncertainty." The idea seems to be that Washington's will-they-or-won't-they dithering over extending the Bush tax cuts, the advent of healthcare reform, financial reform, etc., etc., etc., has unsettled the business landscape so horribly that decision makers are huddled under duvets, gnawing their knuckles in fear and bewilderment.
This argument raises a number of important questions. The first is: When did American business leaders turn into such wusses? This nation spent three decades facing the threat of nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union. That was uncertainty, and it hovered over the most prosperous period in our history. Now CEOs are crabbing about not knowing if their top marginal federal income tax rate will stay at 35% or rise all the way to 39.6.
In an op-ed round robin hosted by The Times' editorial board last month, a USC business professor listed among the uncertainties killing confidence that "businesses don't know what will happen to interest rates."
But businesses never know what will happen to interest rates, any more than I know who'll be in the next Super Bowl. No one who knows what will happen to interest rates has to run a business at all; he can just sit back and play the bond market with perfect knowledge, and become the richest person in the world.
The principal retailer of the "uncertainty" trope is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which trots the term out so frequently you'd think it collects a royalty for every repetition by a commentator on, say, CNBC. But the chamber's "certainty" isn't the one you find in the dictionary, which defines it as "freedom from doubt; confidence; sureness." The chamber's definition of "certainty" is "less regulation; lower taxes."
How do we know this? Consider the form letter the chamber asks members to send to Congress, urging the lawmakers to "end the tax uncertainty plaguing the business community" by extending the Bush tax cuts. According to the dictionary definition, "uncertainty" over taxes could be ended by letting the tax cuts lapse, or by voting to extend them for the middle class but not for the wealthy. The chamber's lexicon doesn't recognize the latter outcome.
One wonders where the chamber gets the idea that uncertainty about taxes and regulation is such a big deal for business. If you listen to what actual business owners are saying, what's mainly holding back hiring and expansion isn't regulatory "uncertainty," but lack of demand.
For more than a year, the monthly small-business economic trends survey of the National Federation of Independent Business has listed "poor sales" as business' single biggest problem. In the most recent survey, that factor was listed by 30% of respondents, swamping "taxes" (20%) and "government requirements and red tape" (17%).
That's important because the policy responses to "regulatory uncertainty" and to poor demand are very different. In the first case, you kill consumer protections, eviscerate oversight of industries such as oil drilling, mortgage and securities trading and healthcare, and shift the tax burden downward toward the middle class — in chamber-speak, that's called "broadening the tax base."
In the latter case, you might want to spur demand by extending unemployment coverage, enacting more stimulus and not needlessly scaring people about their Social Security retirement, which only provokes them to cut back on spending now. You might also want to avoid imposing a government wage freeze at this particular moment, as President Obama has just proposed.
What really gives the lie to the "uncertainty" argument is its long history. The idea that federal regulation, taxation and deficit spending unnerved business to the point of paralysis was aired out in the '30s. It was dismissed then by no less a figure than Joseph Schumpeter, the herald of the entrepreneurial age and the conservative economist least likely to be mistaken for John Maynard Keynes. Schumpeter pointed to the argument as one of those that "fully merit the shrugging of shoulders with which they are usually met."
These days, the "uncertainty" argument relies on the claim that regulation is out of control, and about to get worse. This summer the American Enterprise Institute threw a fit when it discovered that the new financial reform act came to 2,319 pages. The bill that created the Federal Reserve system was only 31 pages, it observed, adding: "The numbers pretty much speak for themselves."
But what do the numbers tell us, other than that the folks at AEI can count into the low four figures? First of all, the Federal Reserve bill they mention was enacted in 1913. Fun as it may be to evoke America's golden past, keep in mind that the nation's gross domestic product in 1913 was $39 billion ($600 billion in current dollars). Today it's nearly $15 trillion. So it's proper to think of today's economy as a teensy bit more complicated than that of a century ago.
Second, that 31-page bill created a Federal Reserve System that was completely unable to cope with the onset of the Great Depression, and even played a key role in turning a plain-vanilla downturn into the Great Depression. Not my conclusion — Milton Friedman's. And he's a conservative saint.
The original Fed was upgraded by the Banking Act of 1935, which clocked in at about 50% longer than its predecessor. (GDP that year was $73 billion — $865 billion, inflation-adjusted.) That Fed proved completely unable to cope with the economic downturn of 2008.
So now we have the financial reform law of 2010, which refashions the Fed and the rest of our financial regulatory structure. Yes, it's long and detailed, but history warns us that it may not be detailed enough. How much do you want to bet that if it were 31 pages, its opponents would be screaming that Congress was leaving too much to the judgments of "unelected bureaucrats"?
The new law has to deal with realities that didn't exist in 1935 or 1913, such as derivatives and mortgage securities and international trading and blind risk-taking by bankers in markets they don't understand. Bankers and financiers and their water-carriers at the Chamber of Commerce have some nerve complaining about the regulation required to keep them from wrecking the economy the rest of us live in.
You want certainty? I'm certain that instead of making loans to businesses that need them, the banking bonus babies of the future will find new ways to lose money, and a future Congress will have to clean up the mess. I'm certain that the Chamber of Commerce of that era will argue that we need less regulation, not more, and I'm certain they'll be lying.
Michael Hiltzik's column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.