Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010Will the Tea Party Punish Republicans for the Tax-Cut Compromise?
By ALEX ALTMAN / WASHINGTON
After Republicans recaptured the House on Nov. 2, party leaders tried their best to tamp down the sense of triumph. "This is not a time for celebration," minority leader John Boehner admonished a GOP crowd during election-night festivities. "This is a second chance for us," Boehner's deputy, Eric Cantor, told CNN the next day. "If we blow it again, we will be in the wilderness for a very long time."
Though delivered to rank-and-file members, the remarks were clearly aimed at the Tea Party activists instrumental in the GOP's sweeping gains. Since their emergence as a powerful political force, Tea Party leaders have repeatedly warned that the GOP cannot take its support for granted. Lawmakers who simply used the movement as a springboard to office only to swerve from its guiding principles, they said, would be thrown from their perch at the next opportunity. With the elections behind them, Tea Party activists would promptly pivot from allies to watchdogs. (See the top 10 political gaffes of 2010.)
It's hard to imagine they like what they're seeing so far in the nation's capital.
In the House, key committee chairmanships were doled out to veteran Republicans whose records clash with the Tea Party policy pillars of smaller government, fiscal responsibility and free markets. The GOP Steering Committee awarded the Energy and Commerce gavel to Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan moderate whose candidacy sparked condemnations from Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, as well as a "Down with Upton" Internet petition that cited offenses ranging from his support of the Wall Street and auto-industry bailouts to his opposition to incandescent lightbulbs. To chair the powerful Appropriations Committee, GOP leaders tapped Kentucky lawmaker Hal Rogers, whose earmarking prowess led to his christening as the "Prince of Pork." Meanwhile, the ink was barely dry on the GOP's much touted earmark moratorium before members reportedly began probing for loopholes.
Ned Ryun, the president of American Majority, a Virginia-based group that trains Tea Party activists, called the committee-chairmanship choices "a slap in the face" for the movement. If that's true, one might expect that the tax plan hammered out by the White House and GOP leaders feels like a haymaker to the jaw. After chanting Tea Party mantras for months, congressional Republicans appear poised to back a bill characterized by many as a second stimulus — one that piles hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, including a slate of deal sweeteners tucked into the package to appease special interests, onto an already bulging federal budget gap.
"The GOP is going to pay dearly," says Colleen Conley, president of the Rhode Island Tea Party, "for so quickly forgetting that the people want deficit reduction and limited government."
The Tea Party Patriots, the movement's largest umbrella organization, recently circulated a petition urging members to oppose the pact, calling the framework a violation of first principles. Other conservative organizations, from the Heritage Foundation to the antitax Club for Growth, came out against the plan. Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the firebrand of the GOP's conservative wing, told TIME last week that the plan's inclusion of deficit spending is "going to give a lot of Republicans who just ran for office heartburn." Apart from DeMint, however, few Republicans — retiring Ohio Senator George Voinovich is one, along with Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Jeff Flake of Arizona in the House — have announced they will vote against the deal. (Watch TIME's video "The Tea Party After-Party: Looking Ahead.")
And not all conservative activists have been quick to condemn the deal. Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a Washington advocacy group with close ties to the Tea Party, wrote a letter backing the compromise. "It is not our ideal proposal, but it is worth supporting while concurrently pushing for a major overhaul of the entire tax code and major spending reductions," Kibbe wrote on Dec. 9. Kibbe noted that though he believed the bill's extension of unemployment insurance benefits through 2011 is "horrible public policy," it is counterbalanced by provisions that preserve the Bush-era tax rates for all Americans for two years and set the estate-tax rate at 35% above a $5 million threshold — a level that's higher than the current rate (which temporarily fell to zero in 2010) but lower than the rate and threshold (55% at $1 million) that would otherwise take effect on Jan. 1.
Like Kibbe, and many Democrats as well, other Tea Party leaders were critical of the deal's components but willing to grudgingly accept the compromise. "I'm holding my nose, gritting my teeth, turning red and not real happy with the deal," David Crow, a member of the Faulkner County Tea Party in Arkansas, wrote in an e-mail to TIME. "But we need the 10-year-old tax rates to remain in place."
Tea Party leaders are frustrated at the restoration of the estate tax, the unemployment-benefits extension and the GOP's inability to garner more than a temporary tax-rate extension, which they claim won't provide enough business certainty to spark a round of fresh hiring. Just as some Democrats have criticized President Obama for folding too soon, their Tea Party counterparts questioned the timing of the agreement. "The question I'm hearing from the grass roots is, 'What's the big rush?'" says Ken Emanuelson, a member of the Dallas Tea Party, who suggested Republicans may have committed a tactical blunder by cutting a deal during the lame-duck session, weeks before their bargaining position would be strengthened by the arrival of new lawmakers. (Read "Despite Frustration, Dems Seem Resigned to Tax-Cut Bill's Passage.")
For nearly two years, the Tea Party has been the loudest among the choir of voices touting the importance of fiscal austerity. In a poll published Dec. 9 by the Pew Research Center, 84% of Tea Party backers said the deficit was a major problem that must be addressed right away, up from 70% of Americans overall. Fifty-one percent of Tea Party respondents also said the solution involved a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes. The muted criticism of a bill that expands the deficit without identifying offsets in spending cuts would seem to hand ammunition to critics who contend that concern for the deficit was merely a campaign battering ram, or a proxy for the party's tax-cutting zeal.
But Republican leaders, who surely can read the polls showing most Americans actually consider jobs and the economy a much higher priority than deficit reduction, are not the only group demonstrating a willingness to compromise. A separate Pew poll published Dec. 13 found that 60% of Americans backed the tax-cut deal, including nearly two-thirds of both liberals and conservatives. "I think part of the problem is that people were so exhausted. They put so much effort into the elections, and quite frankly they wanted to check out a little bit," says Ryun. "For the movement, the timing is terrible." (Comment on this story.)
The timing isn't much better for conservative Republicans, who were forced to weigh in on a polarizing pact just weeks before reinforcements arrived and at a juncture when the conference is trying its best to paper over the cracks in its facade. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has said he expects the vast majority of his troops to line up in favor of the bill; on Monday just five Republicans — South Carolina's DeMint, Nevada's John Ensign, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Ohio's Voinovich — voted against ending debate and bringing the bill to the floor. After months of Tea Party vows to hold the GOP's feet to the fire, there may be enough blame to go around that no one actually gets burned.
See the top 10 campaign ads of 2010.
Read more about the rise of the Tea Party.
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Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The Tax-Cut Plan: Will the Tea Party Punish Republicans? -- Printout -- TIME
Taibbi’s Takedown of ‘Vampire Squid’ Goldman Sachs | Rolling Stone Politics
Illustration by Victor JuhaszBy Matt TaibbiApr 05, 2010 3:58 PM EDTThis article originally appeared in RS 1082-1083 from July 9-23, 2009. This issue and the rest of the Rolling Stone archives are available via All Access, Rolling Stone's premium subscription plan. If you are already a subscriber, you can click here to see the full story. Not a member? Click here to learn more about All Access.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.
BUBBLE #1 The Great Depression
Goldman wasn't always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids —just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to smalltime vendors in downtown Manhattan.
You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman's first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there's really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman’s disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s.
This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an "investment trust." Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game.
Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investmenttrust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hogwild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund — which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah — which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.
The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn't hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.
In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled "In Goldman Sachs We Trust," the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leveragebased investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market's historic crash; in today's dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. "It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity," Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. "If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."
Monday, December 13, 2010
Fed aid in financial crisis went beyond U.S. banks to industry, foreign firms
Fed aid in financial crisis went beyond U.S. banks to industry, foreign firms
By Jia Lynn Yang, Neil Irwin and David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 2, 2010; 12:15 AM
The financial crisis stretched even farther across the economy than many had realized, as new disclosures show the Federal Reserve rushed trillions of dollars in emergency aid not just to Wall Street but also to motorcycle makers, telecom firms and foreign-owned banks in 2008 and 2009.
The Fed's efforts to prop up the financial sector reached across a broad spectrum of the economy, benefiting stalwarts of American industry including General Electric and Caterpillar and household-name companies such as Verizon, Harley-Davidson and Toyota. The central bank's aid programs also supported U.S. subsidiaries of banks based in East Asia, Europe and Canada while rescuing money-market mutual funds held by millions of Americans.
The biggest users of the Fed lending programs were some of the world's largest banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Swiss-based UBS and Britain's Barclays, according to more than 21,000 loan records released Wednesday under new financial regulatory legislation.
The data reveal banks turning to the Fed for help almost daily in the fall of 2008 as the central bank lowered lending standards and extended relief to all kinds of institutions it had never assisted before.
Fed officials emphasize that their actions were meant to stabilize a financial system that was on the verge of collapse in late 2008. They note that the actions worked to prevent a complete financial meltdown and that none of the special lending programs has lost money. (Some have recorded healthy profits for taxpayers.)
But the extent of the lending to major banks - and the generous terms of some of those deals - heighten the political peril for a central bank that is already under the gun for a wide range of actions, including a recent decision to try to stimulate the economy by buying $600 billion in U.S. bonds.
"The American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw-dropping details of the Fed's multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America," said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a longtime Fed critic whose provision in the Wall Street regulatory overhaul required the new disclosures. "Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations. As a result of this disclosure, other members of Congress and I will be taking a very extensive look at all aspects of how the Federal Reserve functions."
The Fed launched emergency programs totaling $3.3 trillion in aid, a figure reached by adding up the peak amount of lending in each program.
Companies that few people would associate with Wall Street benefited through the Fed's program to ease the market for commercial paper, a form of short-term debt used by major corporations to fund their daily activities.
By the fall of 2008, credit had frozen across the financial system, including the commercial paper market. The Fed then purchased commercial paper issued by GE 12 times for a total of $16 billion. It bought paper from Harley-Davidson 33 times, for a total of $2.3 billion. It picked up debt issued by Verizon twice, totaling $1.5 billion.
"It is hard to say what would have happened without the facility, and how its absence might have affected GE, but overall the program was extremely effective in helping stabilize the market," GE spokesman Russell Wilkerson said by e-mail.
Verizon spokesman Robert A. Varettoni said that it was "an extraordinary time," adding that there was no credit available otherwise at the time.
The data revealed that the Fed continued making purchases into the summer of 2009 - after the official end of the recession - showing that it was still concerned about a fundamental part of the financial system even as economic growth was returning.
The disclosure shows "how really profound the financial crisis was in the fall of 2008 and the firepower the Fed mustered in response," said analyst Karen Shaw Petrou of Federal Financial Analytics.
Foreign-owned banks also benefited from the Fed's commercial-paper facility. The Korean Development Bank, owned by the South Korean government, used the program to the tune of billions of dollars, including a $407 million short-term loan on a single day. Many foreign banks, including the French BNP Paribas, the Swiss UBS and the German Deutsche Bank, took extensive advantage of various programs. Even a major bank in Bavaria benefited, as well as another one headquartered in Bahrain, a tiny island country in the Middle East.
Another Fed program allowed investment banks for the first time to borrow directly from the Fed as officials sought to stem the panic that had taken down Wall Street titan Bear Stearns. The central bank assisted 18 companies through this program. Among the biggest beneficiaries was Citigroup, which in a single day in November 2008 borrowed $18.6 billion from the Fed.
The data also demonstrate how the Fed, in its scramble to keep the financial system afloat, eventually lowered its standards for the kind of collateral it allowed participating banks to post. From Citigroup, for instance, it accepted $156 million in triple-C collateral or lower - grades that indicate that the assets carried the greatest risk of default.
Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher defended the Fed's actions during the financial crisis, saying the central bank "stepped into the breach" in its role as a lender of last resort.
"That's what we are paid to do," he said. "We took an enormous amount of risk with the people's money," he acknowledged. But the crisis lending programs are now all closed, he said, "and we didn't lose a dime, and in fact we made money on every one of them."
The banks universally hailed the Fed on Wednesday.
"In late 2008, many of the US funding markets were clearly broken," Goldman Sachs said in a statement, echoing similar comments made by Bank of America and Citigroup. "The Federal Reserve took essential steps to fix these markets and its actions were very successful."
By 2009, Goldman and other Wall Street firms were reporting their best profits ever. That allowed these banks to pay out huge salaries again, but it also drew the ire of lawmakers and ordinary Americans.
Sanders, for one, said these banks got off easy while receiving extraordinary aid. In rescuing these firms, the Fed never required them to lend to small businesses, modify the mortgages of homeowners or invest in a way that would create jobs.
"We bailed these guys out, but the requirements placed upon them had very little positive impact on the needs of ordinary Americans," Sanders said.
yangjl@washpost.com irwinn@washpost.com hilzenrath@washpost.com
Wik-Bee Leaks: EPA Document Shows It Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees
The world honey bee population has plunged in recent years, worrying beekeepers and farmers who know how critical bee pollination is for many crops. A number of theories have popped up as to why the North American honey bee population has declined--electromagnetic radiation, malnutrition, and climate change have all been pinpointed. Now a leaked EPA document reveals that the agency allowed the widespread use of a bee-toxic pesticide, despite warnings from EPA scientists.
The document, which was leaked to a Colorado beekeeper, shows that the EPA has ignored warnings about the use of clothianidin, a pesticide produced by Bayer that mainly is used to pre-treat corn seeds. The pesticide scooped up $262 million in sales in 2009 by farmers, who also use the substance on canola, soy, sugar beets, sunflowers, and wheat, according to Grist [1].
The leaked document (PDF [2]) was put out in response to Bayer's request to approve use of the pesticide on cotton and mustard. The document invalidates a prior Bayer study that justified the registration of clothianidin on the basis of its safety to honeybees:
Clothianidin’s major risk concern is to nontarget insects (that is, honey bees). Clothianidin is a neonicotinoid insecticide that is both persistent and systemic. Acute toxicity studies to honey bees show that clothianidin is highly toxic on both a contact and an oral basis. Although EFED does not conduct RQ based risk assessments on non-target insects, information from standard tests and field studies, as well as incident reports involving other neonicotinoids insecticides (e.g., imidacloprid) suggest the potential for long-term toxic risk to honey bees and other beneficial insects.The entire 101-page memo is damning (and worth a read). But the opinion of EPA scientists apparently isn't enough for the agency, which is allowing clothianidin to keep its registration.
Suspicions about clothianidin aren't new; the EPA's Environmental Fate and Effects Division (EFAD) first expressed concern when the pesticide was introduced, in 2003, about the "possibility of toxic exposure to nontarget pollinators [e.g., honeybees] through the translocation of clothianidin residues that result from seed treatment." Clothianidin was still allowed on the market while Bayer worked on a botched toxicity study [PDF [3]], in which test and control fields were planted as close as 968 feet apart.
Clothianidin has already been banned by Germany, France, Italy, and Slovenia for its toxic effects. So why won't the EPA follow? The answer probably has something to do with the American affinity for corn products. But without honey bees, our entire food supply is in trouble.
Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter [4] or by email [5].
Physics Buzz: Naked Singularities Have Permanent Clothes
The center of a black hole is a mysterious place - a singularity where matter is concentrated into an infinitesimally small point and the laws of physics break down making anything possible. A year ago, a couple physicists said that we might be able to see into a black hole, to see a "naked singularity." Today, three physicists say that's not possible.
In October 2009, Ted Jacobson and Thomas Sotiriou published a paper theorizing that under the right circumstances it could be possible to see the center of a black hole. Now, in a new paper due to appear in Physical Review Letters, three physicists argue the Jacobson/Sotiriou theory, saying that no real-life circumstances would ever allow a singularity to be revealed.To understand what we're talking about, we first have to understand a black hole's anatomy. A black hole's outer edge - called the event horizon - is defined as the "point of no return" where gravity is strong enough to trap objects traveling at the speed of light, not to mention any passersby going slower.
At the center of the black hole is a singularity, the area where matter is densely packed. We can't see beyond the event horizon, though, because everything inside is gravity-bound. No light can escape. That makes the singularity invisible to us.
But what if there was a way to destroy the event horizon, Jacobson and Sotiriou asked? Then we could see a naked singularity.
The duo said that if a spinning object collided with a black hole spinning in the same direction their combined momentum would allow the spinning force to counteract gravity enough to overcome the event horizon. No more trapping of light. We could see inside a black hole.
What would happen then is anybody's guess. It could mean the destruction of the universe. Because of that, scientists like Stephen Hawking believe in a cosmic censorship conjecture that requires singularities to be shielded by indestructible event horizons.
To come to their conclusion that an event horizon could be destroyed, Jacobson and Sotiriou used a mathematical simulation of a black hole. To do the difficult calculations, though, they had to discard some of the variables.
To understand what Jacobson and Sotiriou did, imagine that instead of simulating a black hole, they were simulating the Earth. To make the math easier, they effectively said the Earth was round, even though we know it is not. In reality, it is covered with small bumps like mountains and trees that, though small relative to the size of the Earth, do affect its gravity. Jacobson and Sotiriou ignored those bumps and their results told them that an object colliding with a black hole could disrupt the event horizon.
Enrico Barausse, Vitor Cardoso and Gaurav Khanna - the physicists with the latest paper - spent the last year adding some of those bumps back into the equation. Their results showed that as the object approached the black hole, the object's gravity would be enough to cause it to be deflected away from the black hole, keeping the event horizon intact.
Their research confirms the cosmic censorship conjecture, keeping any would-be naked singularities under wraps.
Will having a baby cost you a raise? Why Mothers and Fathers Make Less - The Curious Capitalist
I'll cost you big bucks (Photo: Getty Images)
Children, it appears, are more expensive than we thought.
We all know about diapers and formula (or a breast pump) and eventually college. But a pair of recent studies suggest that having babies might cost more than we thought. It's not just that your expenses go up when you have a kid. It's likely that your income goes down as well. Both studies are focused on the wage effect of having children, and both find that women and to a lesser extent even men who have kids end up making less than their childless peers. And the difference can be large, as much as 40% less. The studies show that the wage effect can have a significant impact on when women chose to have children, as well as what professions they pick. That's bad news. Here's why:
It is easy to observe that women who take off time to have a child often see a drop in their wages. First of all, they lose out in the income that they would get while they are at home. Second it may take years for them to reenter the workforce. And when they do, many have to enter at a lower level or in a different profession than when they exit. It has been long assumed that much of that wage gap comes from women without college degrees or who have little job experience trying to restart their careers. Women with advance degrees and a high-skills, it was always assumed, would quickly make up the gap. That appears not to be the case. Worse, even women who don't take off time might see a drop in their earnings after having a child.
Both of the studies, one headed by a professor of public health at Columbia and the other by two economics professors at Harvard, looked how having a child affects women of varying skill levels and professions. "The Mommy Track Divides," which was head by Columbia prof. Elizabeth Wilde and published by National Bureau of Economic Research this week, finds surprisingly that it is the women with high-skills that tend to have the hardest time maintaining their wages after child-birth. High-skilled women who have children tend to earn as much as one-third less over the lifetime of their careers than their childless peers. Lower skilled women tend to see their incomes drop by less than 15%. Perhaps even more surprising: Wilde's study also found that children tended to have a wage effect on men, though it was less pronounced than women.
Harvard professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz also found a large wage gap for mothers with advance degrees in their study "The Career Cost of Family," which was released last week. Goldin and Katz looked at the wage penalty for highly educated women who take off time from work. The study found the "Mommy Penalty" differed by professional, but was nonetheless present in all areas of work.
The study found that female M.B.A.'s who have taken off 18 months from their career to raise children suffered a severe income penalty, leaving them earning 41 percent less on average than male M.B.A.'s. Regarding other female professionals who took 18 months off, the study found, female Ph.D.'s earn 33 percent less than male Ph.D.'s, female lawyers earn 29 percent less than male lawyers, and female M.D.'s earn 16 percent less than male doctors.
What causes the Mommy or even the Daddy Penalty? The assumption is that it is due to the time off of work, which can result in a change of employers and a loses of seniority. But that might not be the case. Wilde's study found that even women who continued to work full-time in the first and second year after having a child for the same employer still saw a lifetime drop in wages of 14%. What matters most, according to Wilde, is when you have children.
The problem it appears has to do with flexibility. Either in perception or reality, there is judgment in the workforce that people with children lack the ability to work that "extra hour" when needed. That's why Goldin and Katz say they saw less of a difference in careers where women have a greater ability to set their own office times or hours, or where more women work for themselves. Wilde saw less of an impact on women and men who had children later in their careers, where also they presumably would have more of an ability to name their own schedules or work situations.
But both of these baby effects can have a significant impact on the economy. First of all, if the Mommy penalty pushes women who would go into business into medicine or academia then that can be a major misallocation of human capital. And in an information economy more and more built on intelligence that can be a real problem. What's more, the fact that the impact on wages drops with age, as Wilde finds, is good explanation for why women are waiting until later in life to have children. If so, the Mommy Penalty could be a significant contributor to the rising cost of healthcare and the infertility problem in America. Neither are good outcomes.
Law lab - The Boston Globe
This past week, wrangling over the Bush-era tax cuts has riveted Washington. The spectacle is only the latest round in an endless debate, one that has launched innumerable op-eds, cacophonous talk-show segments, and dinner-table quarrels. As conservatives see it, higher tax rates hurt job creation as well as undercut the incentive for entrepreneurship and hard work. Many liberals cast these downsides as modest, while stressing the value of tax revenue. Will tax cuts bring a bloom of free enterprise — or exploding deficits? Economists have studied the issue ad nauseam, but firm conclusions are elusive. It is difficult to tease out cause and effect, because at any given time, economic conditions other than taxation also shape behavior.
If only there were a scientific way to determine the real impact of taxation on industriousness, labor supply, and innovation.
According to some scholars, there is. Randomly assign a representative sample of the population — say, 10,000 taxpayers — a lower tax rate, and see what happens. Did these Americans, on average, behave any differently than their counterparts? Did they work longer hours or more jobs, start more businesses, hire more employees?
In other words, test government policies using the same technique — randomized controlled trials — used to test new drugs. A growing chorus of legal
scholars, economists, and political scientists believes that such trials should be conducted to evaluate a wide range of laws: gun control, safety and environmental regulations, election reforms, securities rules, and many others. And some believe that we are ethically obligated to do this, because laws affect our lives so pervasively. Understanding the true costs and benefits of legislation, they say, is essential to making good policy — and we may know much less about our own laws than we think.
“The randomized experiment is kind of the gold standard in medicine and social science,” says Ian Ayres, a Yale law professor and economist who advances the idea of the tax experiment in a forthcoming paper. “We should use that same tool to inform us whether laws work.”
Already, randomized trials have migrated beyond medicine. In recent years, experiments to test development programs in poor countries have grown common. Even in the United States, such trials have been used for several decades, in a scattered way, to evaluate social services such as job training and welfare reform, as well as criminal justice and education policies. In one controversial experiment described last week in The New York Times, New York City is testing a homelessness-prevention program by randomly denying services to some households. But now, proponents argue that this instrument should be used in other areas of law — that a culture of experimentation should take hold, and randomized trials should become the norm in lawmaking rather than the exception.
There are certainly potential problems with this vision. First is the question of effectiveness: In some cases, it may prove too difficult to run an accurate test. The full repercussions of laws often take years to manifest themselves, and small-scale experiments do not always translate well to larger settings. Also at issue is fairness. Americans expect to be treated equally under the law, and this approach, by definition, entails disparate treatment.
“The problem is, we’re dealing with laws that have a huge impact on people’s lives,” says Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University. “These aren’t casual tests. It’s not, you try Tide or you try laundry detergent X....Here we’re talking about basic benefits and fundamental rights.” Though Friedman is sympathetic to the goal of gaining better empirical knowledge, he says, “My guess is some of it’s doable in some contexts, and a lot of it’s not doable in other contexts.”
But others are more sanguine, and they make the opposite argument: That precisely because the stakes are so high, the laws that we enact on a large-scale, long-term basis must be more rigorously tested. This wave of thinking is part of a broader trend in fields from health care to education: Our practices should be “evidence-based,” rather than deriving from theories and unproven assumptions. The question is whether this kind of scientific approach can successfully take on a project as unruly as our society — and our politics.
The concept of randomized trials is usually traced back to the 1920s, when Ronald Fisher, a British geneticist and statistician, used the technique in agricultural trials. Fisher randomly assigned plots of land different fertilizers or crop varieties, and compared the results.
Before long, scientists began to apply the method to people. The virtue of randomization is that, provided the numbers are large enough, you can create two groups that are close to statistically identical — the same distribution of gender, age, height, educational background, and other characteristics. Any change in the treatment group can then be confidently attributed to the intervention, rather than to other factors. (In a variant of the concept, trials can randomly assign different interventions to multiple groups.) In observational studies, by contrast, it can be difficult to distinguish correlation from causation.
“The typical experiment involves very, very elementary statistical analysis,” says Donald Green, a Yale political scientist. “When things are done properly, you take the treatment group average and subtract the control group average. It could not be more simple.”
Randomized trials of drugs were first conducted in the late 1940s, and by the 1970s, they were widely used in the United States to evaluate new drugs. Now, of course, it’s unthinkable that the FDA would approve a new drug without clinical trials to show that it’s safe and effective.
The use of randomized trials outside medicine actually dates back even further, to a local experiment. In 1930s, the Cambridge/Somerville Youth Study, designed to reduce delinquency, randomly assigned over 500 boys to either a treatment group, which received visits from a counselor and other services, or a control group, which received neither. A 30-year follow-up found that the intervention had not diminished criminality and, strangely, seemed to have slightly exacerbated it. Since then, a number of comparable experiments have ensued. In the 1980s, police departments in Minneapolis and Milwaukee randomly assigned mandatory arrest for domestic violence offenders to assess its effect on recidivism. They initially found that arrest deterred future offenses, but over time a more complex picture emerged; particularly in areas with high unemployment, arrests appeared to provoke further battery. Similar state-run experiments have shown the effectiveness of unemployment programs that offer job-search assistance.
Though government has proved receptive to the idea in some areas, we are still far from the ideal envisioned by the most ardent proponents. They hope for a time when such experiments are the default. In the world they foresee, any politician who opposed a trial would be suspect, as resistance would appear to indicate lack of confidence in one’s position.
One promising area for expanding the use of trials is regulation. Michael Greenstone, an MIT economist, laid out this case in a chapter in the 2009 anthology “New Perspectives on Regulation.” While regulations profoundly affect everyday life, he argues, our system for assessing them is dreadfully inadequate. Regulations determine, he notes, the loans we can get, the kinds of materials we can use to build homes, the velocities of our vehicles, and the quality of our air and water. But they are typically evaluated, if at all, prospectively — when analysis amounts to educated guesswork.
We study regulations only at “the very moment when we know least about the consequences,” Greenstone says. “There is no culture of trying to understand ex post what the consequences are.”
As an alternative, he recommends introducing regulations on a small scale prior to rolling them out. Safety regulations, such as new rules for cars or cigarette lighters, could be randomly tried in some areas and evaluated after a designated period. If the benefits exceed the costs, they should be expanded; if not, they should be scrapped. Greenstone suggests that industrial plants could be randomly subjected to different environmental regulations. After a given amount of time, the air and water quality in the vicinity would be measured, along with health outcomes for people in the area and the effects on plants and animals. Various versions of regulations could be tried in different states or municipalities.
In a paper to be published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review this spring, Yale professors Ayres and Yair Listokin and George Washington University law professor Michael Abramowicz advocate the systematic introduction of randomized trials throughout government — in legislatures and administrative agencies, at the state and federal level. They suggest that trials be “self-executing,” in that policies would be automatically enacted based on their results (though lawmakers would be able to overrule this default).
As proponents of this idea frequently note, Justice Louis Brandeis famously called the states the “laboratories of democracy,” but state-level innovations do not meet the standards of real, controlled experiments. Ayres and his coauthors propose that the federal government coordinate trials, randomly assigning states (provided they consent) to adopt certain laws; as Ayres puts it, “In the laboratory, you don’t let the rats design the experiments.” Another proposal, perhaps more realistic, is for states themselves to randomize across municipalities or counties.
There are concerns, of course, about how practical widespread tests would be. Some domains are more susceptible than others. Education policy, election laws, and criminology seem particularly ripe for randomized trials (and many have already been conducted, both by academics and government). In these realms, interventions are not likely to be obviously experiments. A kid in a class doesn’t know or care if his class size or teacher’s technique is part of an experiment. The same is probably true of a criminal who receives a particular sentence, or a voter who receives certain literature in the mail. Moreover, the outcomes are relatively conducive to measurement (test scores, recidivism rates, voter turnout). But in other cases, participating knowingly in an experiment could distort the result (this phenomenon even has a name, the Hawthorne effect). This problem could be especially acute for businesses that desire a particular outcome — such as lenient securities laws or safety regulations — and alter their behavior for the duration of the trial. And some experiments — such as giving individuals different tax rates — would surely be controversial. Finally, as even landmark trials like the domestic violence study underscore, the results do not always furnish clear-cut policy prescriptions.
The essential goal here is to take the politics out of policymaking, to replace dogma with data. It’s a noble ideal. But society will always have to contend with clashing values and priorities. Gun control law, for example, may be quite conducive to experimentation. Virginia, say, could randomly assign counties to different restrictions, and measure crime rates over the next few years. But even if the trial demonstrated that gun control reduced crime, many people believe in the liberty to bear arms as a nonnegotiable right. If data showed that air and water pollution had no effect on human health, some would oppose the regulations on industry, while environmentalists would still support them. Good data can only get us so far.
The other obstacle involves the current state of our political discourse. Opponents of a law could still claim that the trial proved nothing. While academics consider it the gold standard, the public may not place more stock in it than in other kinds of research that are more easily manipulated. Already, suspicion of government is rampant, and opponents accuse the Obama administration of technocratic overreach. People don’t like to feel like guinea pigs, and states may chafe at playing the role of lab rats. It is easy to imagine that a substantial segment of the population would view randomized trials as nothing more than another elitist scheme.
That said, proponents of this idea don’t claim it’s a panacea. They do believe randomized controlled trials are, if imperfect, the best way we have of generating empirical data. In his recent essay, Greenstone argued for a “new era in regulatory reform.” The first era, he writes, was that of the New Deal and the Great Society, when the focus was on well-meaning efforts to remedy social problems. In Greenstone’s view, the effort seemed to count more than the results, with little emphasis on follow-up and evaluation. Then, in a backlash, came the second era, under the Reagan administration, when government was recast as the problem. Now, Greenstone believes, we must instigate a third era, in which government is neither demonized nor valorized, when results are measured meticulously and count for more than good intentions.
As Donald Green of Yale says, “We test pharmaceuticals because there are billions of dollars at stake, and lives.” The same, he argues, is true of our laws, yet we don’t subject them to the same scrutiny. “In some ways the question is, how badly do we want to know?”
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is an Ideas contributing writer.
US Airforce builds supercomputer out of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3s - Only cost $2 million | TechEye
The US Airforce saved a fair bit of cash by building a supercomputer made out of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3, some high-end technology and a piece of number eight fencing wire (we made the bit about the fencing wire up).
Dubbed the Condor, the supercomputer was created at the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in New York State. The big idea was to build a cost effective and green alternative to a conventional supercomputer.
The computer is 50,000 times faster than the average consumer
US Airforce backroom boffins will use the gear to handle tasks including artificial intelligence research, pattern recognition detection and the analysis of heavy quantities of images from surveillance systems.
Mark Barnell, director of AFRL's High Power Computing said that the gear was cheap as chips to make and consumes less than a tenth of the power of comparable supercomputers,
It only cost the Airforce $2 million. A normal supercomputer with that level of power would be 10 to 20 times more.
He said his DIY supercomputer exceeds any other interactive supercomputer currently used by the Department of Defence.
There have been Playstation 3 hacks of this type before. The game consoles have the Cell BE chip to accelerate multimedia software. However, set up in a distributed network with some natty, normally Linux based software, the whole lot can turn into a super computer.
NYT: Rep. Ron Paul, G.O.P. Loner, Comes In From Cold
WASHINGTON — As virtually all of Washington was declaring WikiLeaks’s disclosures of secret diplomatic cables an act of treason, Representative Ron Paul was applauding the organization for exposing the United States’ “delusional foreign policy.”
For this, the conservative blog RedState dubbed him “Al Qaeda’s favorite member of Congress.”
It was hardly the first time that Mr. Paul had marched to his own beat. During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, he was best remembered for declaring in a debate that the 9/11 attacks were the Muslim world’s response to American military intervention around the globe. A fellow candidate, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, interrupted and demanded that he take back the words — a request that Mr. Paul refused.
During his 20 years in Congress, Mr. Paul has staked out the lonely end of 434-to-1 votes against legislation that he considers unconstitutional, even on issues as ceremonial as granting Mother Teresa a Congressional Gold Medal. His colleagues have dubbed him “Dr. No,” but his wife will insist that they have the spelling wrong: he is really Dr. Know.
Now it appears others are beginning to credit him with some wisdom — or at least acknowledging his passionate following.
After years of blocking him from a leadership position, Mr. Paul’s fellow Republicans have named him chairman of the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, which oversees the Federal Reserve as well as the currency and the valuation of the dollar.
Mr. Paul has strong views on those issues. He has written a book called “End the Fed”; he embraces Austrian economic thought, which holds that the government has no role in regulating the economy; and he advocates a return to the gold standard.
Many of the new Republicans in the next Congress campaigned on precisely the issues that Mr. Paul has been talking about for 40 years: forbidding Congress from any action not explicitly authorized in the Constitution, eliminating entire federal departments as unconstitutional and checking the power of the Fed.
He has been called the “intellectual godfather of the Tea Party,” but he also is the real father of the Tea Party movement’s most high-profile winner, Senator-elect Rand Paul of Kentucky. (The two will be roommates in Ron Paul’s Virginia condominium. “I told him as long as he didn’t expect me to cook,” the elder Mr. Paul said. “I’m not going to take care of him the way his mother did.”)
Republicans had blocked Mr. Paul from leading the monetary policy panel once before, and banking executives reportedly urged them to do so again. But Republicans on Capitol Hill increasingly recognize that Mr. Paul has a following — among his supporters from 2008 and within the Tea Party, which helped the Republicans recapture the House majority by picking up Mr. Paul’s longstanding and highly vocal opposition to the federal debt.
Aides, supporters and television interviewers now use words like “vindicated” to describe him — a term Mr. Paul, a 75-year-old obstetrician with the manner of a country doctor, brushes off.
“I don’t think it’s very personal,” he said in an interview in his office on the Hill, where he has represented the 14th District of Texas on and off since 1976. “People are really worried about what’s happening, so they’re searching, and I think they see that we’ve been offering answers.”
If there is vindication here, Mr. Paul says, it is for Austrian economic theory — an anti-Keynesian model that many mainstream economists consider radical and dismiss as magical thinking.
The theory argues that markets operate properly only when they are unfettered by government regulation and intervention. It holds that the government should not have a central bank or dictate economic or monetary policy. Once the government begins any economic planning, such thinking goes, it ends up making all the economic decisions for its citizens, essentially enslaving them.
The walls of Mr. Paul’s Congressional office are devoid of the usual pictures with presidents and other dignitaries. Instead, there are portraits of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, titans of the Austrian school. For years, Mr. Paul would talk about their ideas and eyes would glaze over. But during his presidential campaign, he said he began to notice a glimmer of recognition among those who attended his events, particularly on college campuses.
Mr. Paul now views his exchange with Mr. Giuliani in 2008 as a crucial moment in his drive for more supporters. “A lot of them said, ‘I’d never heard of you, and I liked what you said and I went and checked your voting record and you’d actually voted that way,’ ” he said. “They’d see that the thing that everybody on the House floor considered a liability for 20 years, my single ‘no’ votes, they’d say, ‘He did that himself; he really must believe this.’ ”
His campaign that year attracted a coalition that even he recognizes does not always stand together: young people who liked his advocacy of greater civil liberties and the decriminalization of marijuana; conservatives who nodded at his antidebt message; and others who agreed with his opposition to the Iraq war.
During George W. Bush’s presidency, he was out of favor with the reigning neoconservatives who were alarmed at his anti-interventionism. He still gives many conservatives fits with comments like his praise for WikiLeaks.
And many of those who follow the Fed closely say his ideas are “very strange indeed,” in the words of Lyle E. Gramley, a former governor of the Fed who is now a senior economic adviser at the Potomac Research Group. “I don’t think he understands what central banking is all about,” Mr. Gramley said.
Putting such a critic of the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, in such a prominent role, he added, could damage economic confidence.
“The public doesn’t understand how serious the problem was and why the Fed had to take the action it did,” Mr. Gramley said. "Having someone in Congress taking shots at the Fed makes the situation uneasy.”
Still, Mr. Paul says, his colleagues respect his following outside Washington. “I was on the House floor today,” he said, “and somebody I don’t know real well, another Republican, he was talking to two other members, and he knew I was listening. He pointed at me and said, ‘That guy has more bumper stickers in my district than I do!’ ”
Interview requests are so common that Mr. Paul has set up a camera and studio backdrop in his district office to save him the hour’s drive to television stations in Houston.
His bill demanding a full audit of the Fed, which he had unsuccessfully pushed for years, attracted 320 co-sponsors in the House this year.
And the lunches that he has held in his office every Thursday, where lawmakers can meet intellectuals and policymakers who embrace Austrian economics, have become more crowded, drawing Tea Party celebrities like Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.
“For a long time, a lot of people in Congress on both sides of the aisle agreed with Ron a lot of the time but felt it wasn’t safe to go there,” said Jesse Benton, a longtime Ron Paul aide who ran Rand Paul’s Senate campaign.
The father is about to gain even greater visibility. He says he will use his new chairmanship to renew his push for a full audit of the Fed and to hold a series of hearings on monetary policy.
On Web sites for Ron Paul fans, there are urgent pleas for a father-son (or son-father) “Paul/Paul 2012” ticket. But in an interview, the senior Mr. Paul seemed taken by surprise by the suggestion of teaming up. While he is bursting-proud of his son, he is not necessarily ready to yield the spotlight: He is pondering another presidential run on his own.
“I’d say it’s at least 50-50 that I’ll run again,” he said, adding that he would look at where the economy is. (Aides add that it would depend a lot on what his wife, Carol, says.)
But for all the ways the Tea Party echoes Mr. Paul on fiscal issues, it is not clear such support would carry over into a presidential campaign. The last time he ran, he won less than 2 percent of the vote, though that was before the Tea Party became a force in politics.
Even many Tea Party conservatives are not on board with Mr. Paul’s beliefs about scaling back the United States military worldwide. And Paul supporters look on the Tea Party with some disdain.
Mr. Paul acknowledged the sometimes competing interests among Tea Party supporters and his fans. “What brings them together is this acceptance that there’s something really wrong, that we’ve spent too much money and government’s too big,” he said.
That, he added, was why he had to work at keeping up his influence, particularly in spreading the word about the cost of foreign interventions.
Still, he noted: “We’re further along than I would have expected in getting our message out in front. I thought I’d be long gone from Congress before anybody would pay much attention.”
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Hive-minds and Kleptocrats - NYTimes.com
— Updated: 3:21 pm -->Hive-minds and Kleptocrats
It’s not often that I get a chance to accuse Charlie Stross of being stuck in the past, so I should take it — especially because it’s a way to avoid (a) commenting more on the tax debacle and (b) finishing the redraft of the monetary policy chapter in Krugman/Wells 3rd edition (how the heck do we get quantitative easing in without totally muddying everything else?)
So: for those who don’t know, Stross is a spectacularly good contemporary science-fiction author, brimming with ideas, who also has a stimulating blog, where his latest entry asks why things are so messed up. His proposed answer is that we’ve been invaded by alien organisms — namely, corporations:
Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)
Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.
I like it; it’s fun (although William Gibson said much the same thing, I think); but it’s so 1960s, if you know what I mean.
No, really. There was a time, back when John Kenneth Galbraith was writing The New Industrial State and all that, when the notion of the soulless corporation transcending individual will was big stuff. But much of what JKG wrote then if anything evokes nostalgia now. There’s a fairly extensive section of The New Industrial State explaining why abuse of corporate position for personal gain was no longer an issue, with “the rise of the technocracy with its new professional attitudes and its widely diffused power acting as a safeguard against individual avarice or larceny.” That was then.
These days, we’re living in the world of the imperial, very self-interested individual; the man in the gray flannel suit has been replaced by the man in the very expensive Armani suit. Look at the protagonists in the global financial meltdown, and you won’t see faceless corporations subverting individual will; you’ll see avaricious individuals exploiting corporate forms to enrich themselves, often bringing the corporations down in the process. Lehman, AIG, Anglo-Irish, etc. were not cases of immortal hive-minds at work; they were cases of kleptocrats run wild.
And when it comes to the subversion of the political process — yes, there are faceless corporations in the mix, but the really dastardly players have names and large individual fortunes; Koch brothers, anyone?
If you ask how it’s possible that a handful of bad actors can get their way so often, the answer has to be, wasn’t it ever thus? What we call civilization has usually been a form of kleptocracy, varying mainly in its efficiency (the Romans were no nicer than the barbarians, just more orderly). Yes, we’ve had a few generations of government somewhat of, by, for the people in some places — but that’s an outlier in the broader sweep of things.
So never mind the hive-minds; good old greed still rules.
Mum's blood test reveals genome of foetus | COSMOS magazine
Credit: iStockphoto
WASHINGTON: The entire genome of a foetus can be pieced together from bits of DNA that float through the pregnant mother's blood, which could lead to non-invasive foetal testing.
Until now, the most accurate methods of screening a foetus for potential abnormalities have involved risks to the unborn child because they require doctors to take a sample of foetal tissue by piercing the womb.
Those techniques, such as amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling, presented a dilemma to expectant moms, particularly among older women who want to screen for chromosomal abnormalities that can increase in likelihood along with maternal age, such as Down syndrome.
Foetal DNA floats in mother's plasma
But according to researchers in Hong Kong, whose work was published in the U.S. journal Science Translational Medicine, the entire foetal genome can be glimpsed floating in the mother's blood.
Foetal DNA makes up about 10% of a pregnant woman's blood plasma. But because DNA molecules in the plasma exist in fragments, piecing together which ones belonged to the foetus proved technically difficult.
Lead author Dennis Lo and his team discovered in 1997 'floating' DNA from the foetus in the mother's blood, and laboratories have widely used this technique to test for gender as well as foetal genetic and chromosomal disorders.
Genome constructed using mum, dad's genes
However the span of such tests has been limited to one disease or genetic characteristic at a time.
The latest research isolated foetal genetic signatures in the floating DNA, then compared its characteristics against the genetic maps of the mother and father.
That way, scientists were able to construct a genome-wide genetic map of the foetus, which they could then scan for variations and mutations.
Future use in cancer diagnostics and transplants
"Before the present work, it was not clear whether the entire foetal genome is represented in maternal plasma," wrote Lo.
"This information is important because it demonstrates that a non-invasive genome-wide scan of the foetal genome from maternal plasma is possible."
Lo said the method of identifying nucleic acids in the plasma could also help in the fields of cancer diagnosis and tissue transplants.
"It would be interesting to investigate whether key features of the high-resolution size profile for circulating foetal DNA can also be seen in circulating tumour DNA and donor graft-derived DNA," the study said.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
PARC Readies Printed Electronics for Market - Technology Review
Inexpensive printed sensors, transistors, and memory devices that aren't as speedy or as high-capacity as silicon devices could enable the widespread use of sensors in places that aren't cost-effective today. Disposable devices could monitor and store information about the temperature of drugs, the safety of food during shipping, or air quality.
Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which is owned by Xerox, have been developing a suite of materials for making printed electronics, including sensors and transistors. This week at the Printed Electronics USA conference in Santa Clara, California, PARC announced details about two partnerships to develop products based on its research prototypes. PARC will work with Norwegian company Thin Film Electronics to make higher-capacity printed memory devices that incorporate the research center's printed transistors. And PARC is working with Soligie of Savage, Minnesota, to develop products based on its printed temperature sensors.
Much of the excitement around printed electronics has centered on the potential to replace silicon electronics in complex devices such as display screens so that they can roll up. For these types of applications, researchers are working to match silicon's performance in materials that are just as fast and efficient, but flexible and inexpensive.
These more sophisticated printed electronics may be a few years from commercialization. "We want to go to market in simpler applications to prove that printed electronics can work today," says Davor Sutija, CEO of Thin Film. The company's 20-bit printed memory devices will be in toys early next year.
Products integrating these postage-stamp-sized memory devices will include playing cards paired with online games. Kids will use the cards to transfer their playing history between a PC and a handheld device. For a toy or a game that requires only a small amount of memory, using silicon-based memory like flash is impossibly expensive. "When you're only storing a small amount of data in lots of places, the cost threshold is right for printed electronics that cost a few cents," Sutija says.
Thin Film's memory devices are made on long reels of plastic using roll-to-roll printing, the same basic process used to churn out newspapers. They sandwich a layer of electrically sensitive polymer between top and bottom layers of wire-like electrodes that are perpendicular to one another. Where the electrodes cross, it creates a charge-storage device called a capacitor. When a small voltage is applied to the capacitor, the orientation of the polymer in the capacitor changes; this change in orientation makes the "1" and the "0."
The current devices have a large footprint relative to their storage capacity. By increasing the storage density in collaboration with PARC, Thin Film hopes to make a printed memory product that can be integrated with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags for use in disposable packaging to store information about an individual item's history. Today, this requires silicon chips, which are too expensive to implement widely. However, cheaper devices could hold information about the history of, for example, individual bags of spinach, rather than about pallets that hold many boxes of bagged spinach. And more cell phones are expected to begin integrating near-field communications devices that will enable them to act as a contactless credit card and read ubiquitous RFID tags on things like bags of spinach.
To improve the storage density of the printed memory devices, Thin Film will integrate PARC's printed transistors. This will reduce the total number of electrical contact pads needed to read and write to the device. Sutija says the collaboration with PARC will lead to a 128-bit memory product that costs less than 10 cents.
Printed-electronics company Soligie is working with PARC to commercialize printed temperature sensors, or "thermistors," devices commonly found in air conditioners, ovens, and containers used to ship drugs. They're based on materials whose electrical resistance varies with temperature. To manufacture them usually requires baking ceramic materials at high temperatures to make a rigid wire-like structure. PARC has developed printable materials to make flexible thermistors that should be less expensive to make, says PARC's senior director of business development, John Knight.
The thermistors PARC will commercialize with Soligie will still need to be connected to a silicon chip to read out the temperature; down the line, the researchers expect to integrate them with all-printed circuits. The company will begin sending prototypes to customers early next year.
Navy’s Mach 8 Railgun Obliterates Record | Danger Room
DAHLGREN, Virginia — There wasn’t much left of the 23-pound bullet, just a scalded piece of squat metal. That’s what happens when an enormous electromagnetic gun sends its ammo rocketing 5,500 feet in a single second.The gun that fired the bullet is the Navy’s experimental railgun. The gun has no moving parts or propellants — just a king-sized burst of energy that sends a projectile flying. And today its parents at the Office of Naval Research sent 33 megajoules through it, setting a new world record and making it the most powerful railgun ever developed.
Reporters were invited to watch the test at the Dalghren Naval Surface Warfare Center. A tangle of two-inch thick coaxial cables hooked up to stacks of refrigerator-sized capacitors took five minutes to power juice into a gun the size of a schoolbus built in a warehouse. With a 1.5-million-ampere spark of light and a boom audible in a room 50 feet away, the bullet left the gun at a speed of Mach 8.
All that energy was “dump[ed] in 10 milliseconds,” says Charles Garrett, project manager at Dahlgren for the railgun.
But since there no explosion powering the projectile, why should the railgun have made any noise at all? Answer: the bullet went so fast it released a sonic boom.
Since 2005, the Navy has spent $211 million testing whether it can harness electromagnetic energy into a gun. The ultimate goal is to fire the gun at 64 megajoules, making it capable of sending a bullet 200 miles in six minutes. That’s 10 times farther than the Navy’s already-powerful guns can fire, keeping its ships far out of range of enemy anti-ship systems.
The Navy wants to put the railgun on a ship and power it through the ship’s batteries, something that’ll take years to develop. And since the gun’s power can be adjusted — it depends only on the batteries and the capacitors on board a ship, railgun scientists explained — it could theoretically be used to stop cruise missiles or even ballistic missiles.
That’s still a long way off. The Office of Science and Technology will keep running tests until 2017, largely for “thermal management,” says program manager Roger Ellis, basically to ensure that the materials used for the gun don’t get as fried as the bullet under the intense power generated. The Navy guesstimates that it’ll be ready for shipboard defense between 2020 and 2025.
Oh, and the last record holder for most powerful railgun? The same gun when it fired off a shot using 10.64 megajoules two years ago.
See Also:
Climate
Climate
The Risk of Ocean Death from CO2
Cancun, Dec 10, 2010 – The new trump card in climate change will be ocean acidity, or what might be better called ocean death. This newly recognized threat makes drastically cutting CO2 astronomically more urgent, even as negotiators are just now barely beginning to agree to the emissions reductions required to avert dangerous climate change.
Destabilizing the chemistry of the oceans threatens to irreversibly wipe out the fisheries that humanity depends on for food, while jeopardizing the Earth’s entire ecosystem. It is not an overstatement to describe this as the risk of the death of the oceans as we know them.
There is already enough extra CO2 in the atmosphere to crash the oceans 50 years from now. This is due to the 50-year delay between the CO2 level in the atmosphere, and the effect of that level on ocean acidity. We are already at, or above, an atmospheric level now that could cause a future tipping point in the oceans. This means that within 50 years, or less, we must bring the CO2 level back down to where it is now, and then continue to reduce it further. This is vastly more ambitious than the reductions currently imagined in climate negotiations.
As the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the oceans absorb more CO2. This has previously been regarded as a good thing, as it has held down the atmospheric CO2 level and thereby slowed global warming. However, when CO2 dissolves in water it forms carbonic acid. This reacts with calcium carbonate in the water, decreasing the amount of calcium available to organisms that need it to build their shells. At even higher concentrations the increased acidity would begin to weaken existing shells by pulling calcium out of them.
Ocean Death now poses a far more severe, certain, and immanent threat than climate change – at much lower CO2 levels. These CO2 levels have long been discounted for climate change, but the new threat to oceans has yet to be understood and considered by negotiators.
The IUCN side event at the UNFCCC COP16 disclosed that a strong consensus of ocean research shows that even 350ppm CO2 might be too high. Researchers say the current level, rapidly approaching 400ppm, is already close to, or beyond, the maximum that oceans could survive. All agreed that 450ppm would cause collapse of the oceans. If we crash the food web in the oceans we would throw the whole world into ecological collapse and famine, and we could do it within less than 50 years if we continued on our current trajectory.
This is in sharp contrast to the CO2 numbers currently under discussion for climate, where politicians and negotiators routinely accept projected temperature increases associated with CO2 levels of 550ppm and beyond. The science around ocean acidity is simpler, more direct, and far more certain than for climate change, yet it is difficult to predict whether the scientific recognition of this new threat will cause the US wake up from well funded denial any faster. We will likely be closer to 400ppm before we begin to act seriously, and a large amount of additional CO2 overshoot is built in to the system. From where we stand now it looks like it would take a miracle to achieve peak CO2 at as low as 450ppm. However, the science now tells us that we face an even more urgent race to take fossil emissions to zero and then begin to rapidly remove net carbon from the atmosphere, before the effects of the carbon we have already emitted catch up with us in the oceans.
Background on avoiding Ocean Death
The first point to understand is that the risk from ocean acidity is purely a function of CO2, not CO2 equivalents, such as methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gasses. These other gases remain important for temperature, where they could still potentially trigger dangerous runaway feedback loops, but assuming that we do cut CO2 quickly and deeply enough to avoid ocean death, we will also solve climate change.Secondly, it will not be enough to simply stop emitting fossil carbon; we need to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere to reduce the total atmospheric CO2 level to below where it is now.
Third, we have far less time to do this than has previously been assumed; less than 50 years. After we finish wasting time in well funded denial, we will need to undertake a crash global program to decarbonize the world – on a par with WWII and the space program.
What can we do about it?
The first step will be to simply face the truth, and work to make society understand both the seriousness of the danger and the actions that we must take to address the threat and protect our children. This will be like round two of the climate change debate, but with new science that now shows a simple direct linear relationship between the CO2 level and a new catastrophic global threat. We need to steel ourselves, rise to the challenge, and put PR people rather than scientists in charge of the language and the message.Taking CO2 emissions to zero – far more rapidly than we have imagined
The first part of the challenge is well understood from climate change. What is frightening is just how rapidly we must do it to avoid the new threat. What is lacking are the will and resources to do it so quickly. While daunting, it is technically achievable to de-carbonize the world’s energy infrastructure in a matter of decades. In addition to efficiency, and the standard renewables, wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, wave and tidal, the other huge wildcard is nuclear, especially the new fast breeder reactor design from Argon National Labs.Removing net CO2 from the atmosphere
The other new factor that separates the risk of ocean death from previously understood risks of climate change is the need to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere – very quickly. We will need to actively remove a huge amount of CO2 from the atmosphere over the next 50 years.While many policy makers assume that CCS (carbon capture and storage) will be the solution to both CO2 emissions and removing net CO2, CCS actually remains an unproven technology, and may potentially still be fatally flawed do to problems with produced water (dirty liquids and gas forced to the surface), CO2 leakage, and the sheer volume of suitable formations required. At best CCS may help reduce point-source fossil emissions, such as from coal-fired power plants. Using CCS to sequester carbon released from biomass energy to achieve net carbon removal remains one of the big speculative solutions for removing net carbon from the atmosphere.
In response to concerns about ocean acidity a few scientists in the geoengineering community have suggested adding calcium carbonate to oceans, but this would require massive additional energy inputs and would also raise new unanswered questions for ocean ecosystems. At the far end of sci-fi geoengineering ideas are proposals for synthetic trees to actively scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere. These would also require vast amounts of extra energy and presuppose that CCS will work to actually store the CO2 removed from the atmosphere.
Increased net forest cover and low carbon agriculture and rangeland management techniques are the lowest cost way of achieving one-time increases in total terrestrial carbon storage. Preserving and ultimately re-expanding, tropical forests are at the core of the REDD+ initiative and are certainly the first place to start. Soil carbon is also beginning to be discussed and is expected to become important at COP17 in South Africa, but all land use changes combined will not be able to provide more than a fraction of the total carbon removal needed. There is simply not enough capacity to remove the bulk of the net surplus fossil carbon from the atmosphere.
So far, perhaps the best-proven method of removing and storing large amounts of excess carbon from the atmosphere may be biochar. Biochar can also initially be cost-effective based on value-added benefits from soil fertility, pollution mitigation and increased total biomass. Sustainable biochar made from only a small fraction of available agricultural residues could remove almost a gigaton per year of carbon, while other calculations suggest that biochar could remove as much as 5 gigatons per year using 10% of all available waste biomass. The biggest benefit of biochar over CCS alone is that it can increase total productive lands by reclaiming depleted tropical land and thereby taking pressure off intact tropical forests. If seawater were used to irrigate salt tolerant plants on coastal deserts the total might exceed those numbers.
Increased carbon cycling in the oceans is the other major potential source of photosynthetic activity. The ocean scientists at the IUCN event at COP16 did not like the idea of seeding the ocean with iron, and claimed that all of the major ocean NGO’s agree with their position on this. However, photosynthesis in the oceans is the most likely place to look beyond terrestrial biomass to achieve gigaton-scale carbon removal over time.
The direct photosynthetic capture of CO2 by algae for biofuels production shows promise as an alternative to fossil carbon feedstocks, but it is not clear whether this will ultimately be helpful for net carbon removal from the atmosphere.
How much carbon?
CO2 absorbed by the ocean has accounted for about 1/3 of all fossil emissions, while terrestrial sinks are estimated to have absorbed about another 1/3 of fossil emissions. The oceans will give up CO2 on the way back down to lower atmospheric levels, but terrestrial sinks will not.One ppm of atmospheric CO2 is equivalent to about two metric tonnes of solid carbon, so once we get to zero fossil emissions, we will need to remove about two gigatons of carbon per 1ppm reduction in the atmospheric CO2 level. Once we reduce the atmospheric CO2 level enough that the oceans begin to emit CO2 rather than absorb it, then we will need to remove more like three gigatons of carbon per 1ppm reduction in the atmospheric CO2 level.
The apparently insurmountable challenge over the next 50 years will be to keep the oceans from seeing atmospheric CO2 levels above 400ppm for any significant period. To avoid this, we will need to undertake crash programs to both slash fossil emissions and to actively remove net carbon from the atmosphere – as rapidly as possible. If we can do so, the same programs can continue to remove net carbon once we curtail fossil emissions and take us back down to 350ppm, or below. To hold the CO2 level at 400ppm will require slashing total emissions much faster than we currently imagine possible, while also removing several gigatons per year of net carbon from the atmosphere. To eventually go from 400ppm back down to 350ppm will require removing more like 150 gigatons of carbon, as once the oceans start to release CO2 that extra carbon will need to be removed and retired as well.
Risk of Ocean Death PDF download
Background on Avoiding Ocean Death PDF download
