Category: News

Puget Sound’s toxic runoff

Sen. Kevin Ranker and David Dicks are right that the millions of gallons of toxic runoff slipping into Puget Sound is a silent crisis. [“Puget Sound’s slow oil spill,” Opinion, May 20.]

Better controls on municipal drainage systems and increased funding for local governments are desperately needed, but that is only part of the solution. We also need to prevent chemicals from getting into the runoff in the first place.

Chemicals contaminating Puget Sound come from petroleum products and more than 80,000 chemicals currently on the market. Many of the chemicals are found in consumer products. Toxic flame retardants that have helped make orca whales one of the most contaminated marine mammals on the planet are not spewed from a factory pipe. They are coming from everyday products such as couches, chairs and electronic products. They are in our bodies too.

The same could be said for numerous other chemicals such as phthalates and “Teflon chemicals” now found in products, our bodies and Puget Sound.

The Washington congressional delegation has the opportunity to support The Safe Chemicals Act, a bill recently introduced in Congress aimed at changing this toxic status quo. They should support and strengthen the bill so that it ends the use of chemicals like toxic flame retardants. It is good for Puget Sound and good for our own health too.

— Ivy Sager-Rosenthal, campaign director of the Washington Toxics Coalition, Seattle

An uphill battle

It is clear that the Puget Sound Partnership has an uphill battle to restore and protect Puget Sound. Unfortunately politics —not science —seem to be influencing some of the Partnership’s decisions.

David Dicks, the Partnership’s executive director, attempts to capitalize on the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, claiming that “roughly 140,000 pounds of toxic chemicals” enter Puget Sound every day.

A closer look at the claim, however, reveals that while Dicks has relied on the same claim for the past two years, the Department of Ecology —the source of the claim —updated the pollution level after finding a significant error in its report. The new number is a drastic reduction, cutting the estimated range by two-thirds.

Despite the recalculation, no efforts have been made by the Partnership to revise the policies or priorities for which it advocates.

If the justification for the policies change, shouldn’t the policies themselves be reexamined? With a limited amount of resources, it makes sense to reevaluate priorities. Most important, the Partnership should leave hyperbole behind and set priorities based on the best science and most recent information available.

— Brandon Houskeeper, policy analyst at the Center for the Environment, Seattle

Kicking the coal habit, moving employees to more sustainable careers a common-sense proposal

Thank you for publishing Ted Nace’s “State should kick the coal habit” [Opinion, May 22]. It is outrageous that Washington taxpayers are subsidizing an industry that has such a negative impact on our region’s environment and earth’s climate. It is especially outrageous in light of the current budget problems.

Closing the plant in 2015 and redirecting the subsidy to help transition the TransAlta coal plant employees to more sustainable careers, as Nace suggests, is a common-sense proposal.

— James Williams, Seattle

Adding fuel to the fire

I am responding to “Local business owners planning for fallout from gulf disaster” [Business, May 21], which described a Seattle restaurant owner procuring his shrimp from Mexico rather than from the Gulf Coast.

While the oil leak disaster would produce serious shortages of Gulf Coast shrimp, why add fuel to an already raging ecological fire by substituting imported, farm-raised shrimp for U.S. shrimp? The level of U.S. demand is itself unsustainable and contributing to massive mangrove forest losses, fisheries declines and human-rights abuses just to feed our thoughtless appetite in the United States for cheap shrimp.

We need to see a reduction of our consumption rather than try to fill the “gap” left by the BP-created disaster.

— Alfredo Quarto, executive director of the Mangrove Action Project, Seattle

Shut down polluting coal-power plants

I was disappointed with what went unsaid in “As wind power booms, so do the challenges” [page one, May 23]. We have wind power in the first place because Washington state voters had the foresight to recognized that which other states are still denying.

The nation’s 2,000 most respected scientists — at The National Academy of Science — have just released the results of a study requested by the previous president, which finds that the nation is at the very edge of the cliff of being too late to save the planet from climate change, and that immediate and severe reductions in carbon dioxide pollution are necessary to start now in order to save the planet.

We need to reduce carbon dioxide pollution at a rate of almost 2 percent a year for about the next 50 years — until total carbon dioxide pollution emitted nationwide has been reduced by about 85 percent. Wind power is part of this solution. So is getting rid of TransAlta, one of the Pacific Northwest’s dirtiest emitters of pollution.

If we shut down old, inflexible and dirty coal-power plants, then we could replace them with new, clean, flexible and inexpensive natural-gas-power plants, located where the energy is needed to reduce loads on our aging power lines. Unlike coal, these new natural gas-power plants have the rapid response flexibility necessary to play well with wind power.

— James Adcock, Bellevue

Respect a legitimate lifestyle

In World War II, Boeing engineers knew how to use wind power correctly. The wind turbine people still do not understand these basics or they would not be building these monuments to ignorance.

Recently, Israel has amassed a $3 billion backlog for its ocean-motion power plant. This stands to reason as the world realizes it could now purchase a device that is at lease twice as efficient as wind turbines, more efficient than natural gas and it comes from people who have been seriously into alternate energy for more than 40 years.

We are no better than the people of India who buy a Boeing 737-800, then destroy it by saving a few dollars building their airports and training their people. Ignorance has its costs and doing these sort of things right is the only alternative for those that respect a legitimate lifestyle.

— Hugh Coleman, Kelso

A gaming retailer’s promotion brochure may have just outed the Playstation Move release date — or at least narrowed it down. Its release was previously pegged at September 1st, but this just-after-E3 date might make more sense. Strike while the iron is hot — assuming a near-exact copy of the Wiimote heats the iron to begin with.

What I’m hoping is that they really think that the E3 presentation will blow everyone away. If this report is true (LazyGamer notes that BT has been correct in this roundabout way before), I think it speaks well for the product. Even if it is a Wiimote clone, Sony has different ideas and different developers &mdsah; it could be a whole other world. We’ll be at E3, so you’ll know as soon as we do.

[via LazyGamer and T3]

Pays to ride, not as you leave

I had to write after reading “Scofflaws costing Metro $3.2 million” [NWThursday, May 20].

I commute on the No. 21 bus. I was not surprised to see this information reported. With the current system of paying “as you leave,” I have seen people not pay when the articulated buses are full.

Some bus drivers just open the back door, asking people to exit and come to the front to pay their fare. This works if you are honest. This is where scofflaws come in.

Lack of payment is not something new, but it has been compounded with the new ORCA system. Inattentive drivers might be distracted from noticing a rider has not fully paid his or her fare, especially with the ORCA cards. The beeps sound somewhat similar and with so many riders getting off, a rider could be long gone before anything could be said.

In any case, this could be rectified with having everyone pay as they get on. ORCA is a great idea, but there is some tweaking required and it could involve eliminating the ride-free area.

— Lynda Bui, Seattle

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 314.7 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 17 per cent increase from the same period in 2009, according to Gartner, Inc. Smarpthone sales to end users reached 54.3 million units, an increase of 48.7 per cent from the first quarter of 2009. Among the most successful vendors were those that controlled an integrated set of operating system (OS), hardware and services.

“In the first quarter of 2010, smartphone sales to end users saw their strongest year-on-year increase since 2006,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. “This quarter saw RIM, a pure smartphone player, make its debut in the top five mobile devices manufacturers, and saw Apple increase its market share by 1.2 percentage points. Android’s momentum continued into the first quarter of 2010, particularly in North America, where sales of Android-based phones increased 707 per cent year-on-year.

[JURIST] US President Barack Obama sent legislation [text, PDF] to Congress on Monday that would give the president the ability to force Congress to vote on a repeal of spending provisions once they have been signed into law. Under the Reduce Unnecessary Spending Act of 2010, the president would have 45 days after signing spending legislation into law to issue a rescission proposal specifying the amount to be rescinded, the agency or program that will be affected, and the president’s reasons for the rescission request. After issuing the proposal, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) [official website] would be authorized to withhold disbursement of the funds “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” After the rescission is proposed, it must be considered by the appropriate committee of the House of Representatives [official website] within four days, and must be voted on, without amendment, by the committee. Otherwise, the proposal will be automatically removed from committee, allowing any member of the House to move to consider the proposal. OMB Director Peter Orszag [official profile] promoted the bill [statement], stating:

The Reduce Unnecessary Spending Act will empower the President and the Congress to eliminate unnecessary spending while discouraging waste in the first place. This is critically important both because we should never tolerate taxpayer dollars going to programs that are duplicative or ineffective and because, especially in the current fiscal environment, we cannot afford this waste.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) [official website] reacted favorably [press release] to the proposed legislation, but urged Obama to “call on Democrats in Congress to pass a real budget that reins in overall federal spending.” Representative John Spratt (D-SC) [official website] will formally introduce [AP report] the bill later this week.

The proposed legislation is similar to that introduced to Congress by former president George W. Bush [official profile] in 2006, which was defeated in the Senate [official website] by a Democratic filibuster. In 1998, the Supreme Court [official website] ruled [opinion] in City of New York v. Clinton [Cornell LII backgrounder] that the Line Item Veto Act (LIVA) [legislative materials] violated the Presentment Clause of the US Constitution [text], which only provides for the president to sign or veto a bill in its entirety. LIVA gave the president the unilateral ability to veto certain spending provisions after they had been signed into law, unless two-thirds of both houses of Congress voted to override the line item veto.

2011 BMW X3 Teasers

We’ve been hearing about the next-generation BMW X3 for more than a year now and we finally have our first official teasers of the model.

A prototype of the next-generation X3 recently caused a bomb scare in New York City after a BMW brand manage left the car running with tarp over it.

Sources say that BMW is considering adding a 4-cylinder version of the next X3 along with a ActiveHybrid version.

2011 BMW X3 Teasers:

– By: Omar Rana

Source: BMWBlog

by Ashley Braun

streetgiantIf you want to do something about the Gulf oil spill and you’re one of those people who likes to wear their heart on their sleeve, try this on for size: a commemorative T-shirt of BP’s legacy in the Gulf of Mexico.

You’ll be giving the shirt off your back with every purchase, because all of your $25 will be donated to “charities involved in cleaning, preserving, and rescuing the gulf and its animals.” We’re assuming they don’t mean BP.

Via League of Conservation Voters’ “Really? Seriously?” blog.

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Related Links:

In wake of Gulf spill, should this be the summer of energy reform?

Matthews tells Obama to kill BP’s disaster capitalism

Palin critique latest twist in BP slop

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Early this year, mobile network operator T-Mobile USA announced it would complete its HSPA+ network upgrade by mid-2010, bringing a theoretical maximum downlink speed of 21 Megabits per second to its entire 3G footprint.

After testing the upgraded network technology in Philadelphia for the last year, T-Mobile today announced that the enhancement has gone live in the “Northeastern U.S,” which includes the New York City metropolitan area, New Jersey and Long Island, upstate New York (Albany, Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse,) Connecticut (Hartford, New Haven, Milford and Stamford,) and Providence, R.I. Additionally, the HSPA+ network has gone live in Memphis, Tennessee and Las Vegas Nevada.

T-Mobile says its HSPA+ network will expand into Boston and Washington, D.C. in the coming weeks.

Only two days ago, one of T-Mobile’s premier Android devices, the HTC Nexus One, was the first consumer smartphone to receive the Android 2.2 “FroYo” update. The update reportedly boosts the device’s performance as much as 2 to 5 times.

Though only rolled out to a small group initially, the Android team at Google this afternoon said they “expect a final build [of Android 2.2] to be available for OTA updates shortly.”

So with the fastest version of Android yet, and much faster network at its disposal in a large section of the United States, T-Mobile’s Nexus One has significantly increased in value in just the last week.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

It’s absurd. Uncle Sam is likely to run up an additional $11 trillion in debt over the next decade. But Washington only replies with minor budgetary tweaks. First, the Obama administration says it wants to freeze some domestic spending for three years. Then it creates a new healthcare entitlement program “paid for” through tax increases and unlikely spending cuts. Next up, the Obama administration creates a deficit reduction panel that not even its members think will work. And now the Obama administration wants new “rescission” authority to cut billions from congressional spending bills — excepts it’s “trillions” that are the problem. None of these measures favorably alters the budget’s perilous trajectory.

Little wonder that many observers think Washington will do nothing substantial about the exploding debt problem without some sort of financial market crisis. It is the bond market vigilantes that will come to the rescue and enforce fiscal discipline. Here is one scenario devised by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

Under this scenario, at some point financial markets or foreign lenders decide we are no longer a good credit risk, possibly due to debt affordability concerns. They conclude the United States cannot escape basic economic and financial “laws of gravity” forever. They stop buying our debt securities or demand dramatically higher interest rates due to increased perceived risk. With the sudden shift and large rise in interest rates, the economy goes into a severe recession. … Unlike the past two years, we cannot, however, borrow to stimulate the economy because the crisis was caused by excessive debt and lost confidence. … Creditors concerned with hyperinflation or even default will not buy U.S. debt.

Presumably, that would be the moment when Democrats unveil their “emergency fiscal plan” to calm markets through a massive value-added tax. It would be TARP all over again. But the costs would be many magnitudes higher. But I think the conventional political wisdom is deeply flawed. First, Americans intuitively understand that there is something deeply wrong about running trillion-dollar budget deficits as far as the eye can see. Maybe deficits didn’t politically matter in the 1980s, but debt as a share of GDP was only 50 percent. Now it is 60 percent only its way to 100 percent in a decade.

This is why we didn’t see a second trillion-dollar stimulus. Although plenty of liberal economists though it was needed, even congressional Democrats understood that Stimulus 2.0 would not fly with voters freaked  by all the red ink.

Second, America doesn’t need a domestic debt crisis. Voters can easily track the one happening with Greece and the EU. Runaway spending. Overpaid civil servants. A loss of confidence. Trillion-dollar bailouts. Falling standards of living. National decline.

That all adds up to a pretty compelling case for action in America. And Republicans (along with fiscally responsible Democrats) who want to see true spending reform — of the sort outlined in Rep. Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America — would do well to frequently mention Greece on the campaign trail. Kind of a “don’t let this happen to us” sort of thing. They should also note that lower spending plus smart tax cuts to boost growth are the best recipe for restoring fiscal order — not massive tax increases which politicians will only divert to more spending.

The Senate just voted to recommend that its conferees working to reconcile the House and Senate financial regulatory reform bills include Sen. Sam Brownback’s (R-Kans.) language exempting auto dealers that make loans from Consumer Financial Protection Agency oversight. The nonbinding motion was agreed to by a surprisingly high margin, 60 to 30. Still, due to strong White House and Defense Department opposition — not to mention the sheer size of the auto lending market and the incidence of abusive lending practices at some dealerships — it is not expected to make it into the final bill.

Not what I expected to be my first iPad post after owning an iPad since it was available, but oh well:

The awesomeness of the iPad plus the amazingness of velcro.  A match made in heaven.

I decided to post this one after viewing the video about 1 minute and 20 seconds in.  Too funny!

iPad Version Here

Note:  This post and video is not necessarily meant to be taken seriously.  I had to say this for the fanboys on both sides of the “issue.”

via http://jesserosten.com/2010/ipad-velcro

From Google’s official AdSense blog, earlier this morning: More »

Da_G has written a layman’s version of the challenges facing those intent on porting the leaked HTC Mondrian Windows Phone 7 to another (like HTC HD2) handset.

He writes:

The Mondrian NBH posted in this thread is a format that HTC uses, that you can consider a "container" like a cup or a box. We know this format fully and can dump and create it at will (NBHImageTool)

The qualcomm snapdragon can be thought of a miniature dual-core computer. It is different from a normal computer that has dual cores in an important way: Each core is assigned it’s own block of memory, and runs its own operating system. There is a shared block of memory allowing the 2 operating systems to communicate with each other.

Inside that .nbh container, are some more containers. One is "radio.nb" – inside here is the various software that drives the "second processor". Another is "spl.nb" – this contains the tri-color bootloader that most of you are familiar with as HardSPL. This bootloader has changed considerably for WP7 and it’s layout will need to be determined. Another is "unknown-0×0804.nb", as you might guess we don’t know what that is yet Finally, there’s "os.nb" – the last container. This one has the OS we want to work with (WP7), and really it’s not os.nb as that is the format used on WM6, so far all the WP7 ROMs ive seen use the "flash.store.bin" container format. My NBHImageTool currently names the output file incorrectly as os.nb. I will update a future version to check the actual content of the file and name it properly (flash.store.bin)

In order for us to port the OS from one device to another, one basic thing we need to be able to do is "dump" the "flash.store.bin" container format to its components (I did this manually with a hex editor, and posted on post 2 of this thread), and re-build the flash.store.bin from those components (after we’ve edited them to do the actual "porting")

We don’t yet know the flash.store.bin container format, which is the current hurdle i’m working on. Once we are able to easily dump/rebuild that, there are a number of other challenges to meet, such as how we relocate modules to function on another device. Modules are built with a pre-determined memory layout, and each device has a different memory layout. On WM6.x ROMs we have the tool "g’reloc" or "wmreloc" or "platformrebuilder" to handle this for us. With WP7 ROMs the memory layout is entirely different, so a new tool needs to be developed.

We currently don’t yet know how the memory layout looks, i’ve just been going by CE6 documentation on MSDN. If we’re lucky not much has changed in that regard, and we’ll be able to create a relocation tool based on that documentation.

Anything that has changed since then will need to be reverse engineered. If that is necessary it probably won’t be likely until we can get hands on a device running WP7, inject some native code, and figure out the memory layout and other such goodies.
So, assuming we have those things hammered out (we don’t yet), we need to make our current device bootloaders able to load the WP7 OS. This would be accomplished using some ARM assembly trickery. This is where JTAG comes in because there’s a high probability of bricking and we will be able to obtain debug output from the process to determine where any failures are occuring (and there will be failures!) – another hurdle with this is that it’s looking like there is only one JTAG unit capable of supporting the snapdragon at this moment, and it costs upwards of 4x the original donation drive guesstimate, which is far too expensive for this project. I’m currently researching alternatives. It’s looking like I will end up having to go with one of the less expensive "home brew" JTAG models and writing my own Snapdragon support into OpenOCD (the open source debugger platform that the "home brew" JTAGgers use) – that is far from a trivial task and i’m not looking forward to it at all

Once that’s hammered out, we’ll be at a place where the OS itself is loading up. However it is quite likely at that point, some of the drivers will fail to work (hopefully not basic ones such as the kernel, display, etc.) – here we’ll have to perform some more trickery to get the drivers functioning properly. One potential problem is that since we will be using our original device’s radio.nb, more than likely the protocol the drivers use to communicate with it will be different. This will need to be changed.

Now, all of the above stuff needs to be packaged into a deployment system that’s user friendly, and relatively fail-safe (we don’t want bricks!)

At that point, it’s "done" – not complicated at all, right?

The above certainly sounds like a momentous job, doesn’t it. Follow Da_G on twitter here for the latest on the effort.

The paper reviewed here is ‘Safety and Tolerability of Donepezil, Rivastigmine and Galantamine for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease: Systematic Review of the ‘Real-World’ Evidence’ by Lockhart and colleagues and freely available here.

Aim: The aim of the study is clearly outlined and reflected in the title.

Method: The authors identify trials from the following sources

• Medline database

• EMBASE

• Cochrane library

The researchers used the following search terms in MESH and the text of the abstract: Dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Donepezil, Rivastigmine, Galantamine, cohort, retrospective, naturalistic. The researchers also hand-searched a number of conference proceedings. Primary outcome measures were

• Incidence of individual AE’s reported

• Withdrawal due to AE’s

• Incidence of individual AE’s

The researchers opted for a qualitative analysis rather than a meta-analysis ‘due to potential heterogeneity in included studies’.

Study designs were assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale which is

‘designed to appraise the methodological quality of comparative cohort and case control studies‘

The researchers include a detailed list of inclusion and exclusion criteria in table 1. The impression I got from reading the criteria is that the diagnostic criteria, trial type (essentially randomised trials) and of course treatment were the most significant factors influencing inclusion. Thereafter the inclusion criteria were fairly broad meaning that there was an opportunity to include a relatively large number of papers.

Results: There were a number of steps involved in reaching the final number of 12 papers and the interested reader is referred to the original paper linked to above. The characteristics of the 12 studies are summarised in Table 2. In the identified studies, the numbers for the different acetylcholinesterase inhibitors were

Donepezil: Retrospective analysis – n=6294; Prospective analysis n=4034

Rivastigmine: Retrospective analysis n=1842; Prospective analysis n=2143

Galantamine: Retrospective analysis n=809; Prospective analysis n=418

Table 3 shows withdrawal from the medication to GI effects. There is a wide spread within the prospective study – withdrawal due to any GI AE category although the difference in sample sizes cause difficulties in interpretation. In a number of cases p values are given. I might have missed this, but I couldn’t identify what tests were being used to produce the p-values.

Table 4 shows withdrawal due to all non-GI adverse events. My impression from inspecting this table was that there was a broad range across the studies – both retrospective and prospective and this wasn’t summarised with mean and confidence intervals for aggregated data. Looking through the data further, the figures for withdrawal due to cardiovascular events ranged from 0 to 1.2%.

Table 5 shows an aggregation of GI and non-GI adverse events and here there are a number of consistent findings across various studies particularly in the GI studies although there are outliers in the dataset. Again the data is not pooled although this is explained in the methodology section.

Table 6 shows CNS adverse events. There were a lot of categories here but there were a relatively small number of data points for each category.

Table 7 shows ‘non-CNS-related AE’s’ which covers a number of cardiac and miscellaneous AE’s (excluding GI (with the exception of weight loss)). The De La Gastine study shows a higher incidence of cardiac arrythmias for the different ACHEI’s but has smaller sample sizes than the other studies. Here again I thought the use of confidence intervals and statistical comparison between groups would be helpful.

Conflict of Interest: I couldn’t identify a COI declaration and the authors identify their institutions as Pfizer and Abacus International, a health consultancy firm.

Conclusions: I thought the researchers had gathered a large amount of useful data. It would have been interesting to see the information displayed with the use of confidence intervals and for these to be used in a between-group comparison. Even a lack of difference between groups in itself would have been interesting and I thought would have been helpful in drawing firm conclusions. The researchers discuss why they have opted for a qualitative analysis.

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