Category: News

Michael Giberson

In the course of making a point about current political actions pursued by some in the electric power industry, Rob Bradley points to the views of industry pioneer Samuel Insull:

Where did the drive for automatic pass-through of  “reasonable” costs begin? For the electric industry, it began in Chicago in June 1898 in a then-controversial speech by Samuel Insull, the head of Chicago Edison Company and the president of the major trade association of the industry, the National Electric Light Association.

Insull did not want regulation for its own sake. He believed that franchise protection was worth giving authorities control over rates. Insull believed that this quid-pro-quo — exclusive franchises for cost-based rate maximums — would lower interest costs (a huge cost item for public utilities) and thus lower rates. Insull also saw statewide public utility regulation as a better alternative to local politics and to municipalization.

Insull’s political program was ahead of its time. Most of his fellow electric utility heads were opposed when Insull first gave his speech. But he would win them over in the next years, and state-after-state would implement formal cost-of-service regulation for electricity.

Bradley then publishes in full Insull’s 1898 speech to the National Electric Light Association (the organization which became today’s Edison Electric Institute).

Check out Bradley’s post to see the speech, most of which is given to contrasting private and public management of resources and well worth reading.  For example, Insull asks, “Is the administration of municipal affairs in the various cities throughout this country so economical, as compared with the management of private industries, and the class of service rendered so efficient, as to justify the increasing of the burdens already imposed upon municipal government?”

It is a perhaps understandable failure of Insull’s analysis that he asserts the superior capabilities of private management in a competitive market setting to advocate private management in a state-regulated monopoly setting. Insull was, after all, able to expand his business and reduce cost and reduce prices pretty consistently throughout his career as a utility industry tycoon – both as a competitor and as a monopolist.

Doesn’t Juicy Couture make the cutest and most unique speakers? So instead of a dog or diamond gems this time around, they have taken on a new shape…”Sid” Teddy Bear Speaker. A Plush velour teddy that hides a speaker compatible with any MP3 player. This cute pink teddy pumps out the hits and gives you a pocket in the rear to hold your player. His arms and legs move making it easy to position him in any room to hear your music. “Sid” retails for $58.

Just when you thought the Florida Senate race drama had stabilized for a few hours, meet Jeff Greene. Greene, a real estate billionaire, is reportedly preparing to announce his candidacy today, just hours before the candidate filing deadline in Florida.

Sure, the guy has plenty of cash to fuel a last-minute campaign, but check out how he got all that money:

Greene earned more than $800 million by betting against the sub-prime mortgage market during the recent real estate boom. He’s been called “The Meltdown Mogul” and “The Reluctant Billionaire.”

I can almost hear the campaign commercials now…

If online media is supposed to be journalism’s white knight, it is taking its sweet time getting here.

AOL is hiring hundreds of journalists and so, on a somewhat smaller scale, is Yahoo. But despite the hype at a few big online outlets, the slowly thawing journalism job market is still dominated by legacy organizations like newspapers and magazines. Journalism schools and students know that newer companies will play a role in redefining journalism, and they’re trying to prepare for it with additional technical training, but the old guard still reigns.

“We still are doing a lot of business with all the people we were doing business with 30 years ago,” said Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. The new companies matter, he added, but “they don’t come across to
me as sort of the key variable in our life right now.”

The old guard has shrunk dramatically in recent years, as a once-lucrative business model has fallen prey to Internet economics. Daily papers shed 5,200 jobs last year, according to The American
Society of Newspaper Editors, which has conducted an
annual survey since 1978. The last three years were the worst in
the survey’s history, with 5,900 and 2,400 jobs lost in 2008 and 2007,
respectively. In 2009, the size of the workforce reached an all-time
low.

I don’t think it’s a big coincidence that we’re seeing all of these fossil fuel accidents after 8 years of lax oversight by Bush-Cheney (see The deadly toll of the ’safe’ and ‘clean’ coal and oil industries).  The fox was guarding the henhouse.  And in this case, the henhouse itself was not actually run by the hens.

An investment group with ties to labor pension funds called for the resignation of Massey Energy directors who are “ultimately responsible for Massey’s alarming safety compliance record.”  Brad Johnson has the story in this Wonk Room repost.

The Change to Win Investment Group “presented today an in-depth analysis to shareholders of Massey Energy Company, making the case to vote against the three directors up for election at the mining company’s May 18 annual meeting, the first meeting of shareholders since the tragic April 5 explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, in which 29 miners lost their lives.” In a letter to investors, CtW called for the removal of directors responsible for the “preventable mine explosion” that “killed 29 miners and destroyed $1.1 billion in shareholder value“:

We urge you to vote “Withhold” on directors Richard M. Gabrys, Dan R. Moore and Baxter F. Phillips, Jr. at the Massey Energy Company annual meeting on May 18. As members of the Safety, Environmental and Public Policy Committee (SEPPC), these directors are ultimately responsible for serious and systematic non-compliance with mine safety laws over an extended period, a risk oversight failure that likely led to the catastrophic and preventable mine explosion on April 5 that killed 29 miners and destroyed $1.1 billion in shareholder value.

The investment group “believes Massey Chair and CEO Donald Blankenship’s ‘production first’ emphasis fostered a management culture that tolerated unacceptable safety and compliance failures.” By supporting Blankenship’s drive for profits over rules, the members of the Safety, Environmental and Public Policy Committee hold ultimate responsibility for the deaths of Massey’s miners.

Don Blankenship’s ‘Safety’ Overseers:

Richard Gabrys
On Massey’s board since 2007, Gabrys is “the retired vice chairman of Deloitte.” He also serves on the board of the Michigan-based companies La-Z-Boy Inc., coal-dependent utility CMS Energy, and engineering firm TriMas Corporation. Gabrys has given $6000 to Republicans, including $1000 to George W. Bush, and $500 to Rep. John Dingell (D-MI).

Dan R. Moore
On Massey’s board since 2002, Moore is “the Chairman of Moore Group, Inc., which owns multiple automobile dealerships in West Virginia and Kentucky.” He previously ran West Virginia’s Matewan Bank. Moore also serves on the board of the West Virginia University Foundation, the Branch Bank and Trust Company, and the West Virginia Housing Fund. Moore has contributed $8100 to Republicans since 2000.

Baxter F. Phillips
Massey’s president since 2008 and a top executive since 2000, Phillips joined Massey in 1981. Phillips has contributed $8900 to Republicans and $5950 to the Massey PAC.

On April 19, Massey director Lady Barbara Thomas Judge resigned amid shareholder unrest.

“During times like these, a change in senior management is not appropriate or in the best interest of our members and shareholders,” said Admiral Bobby R. Inman, Massey Energy’s lead independent director on April 22. “Therefore, we want to emphasize that Don Blankenship has the full support and confidence of the Massey Energy Board of Directors.”

KNOXVILLE — The four finalists for the job of director of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will be visiting campus in May to complete their interviews and participate in public forums.

The schedule for the candidates’ public forums, all to be held in the Toyota Auditorium at the Baker Center, 1640 Cumberland Ave., is:

• May 5, 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. — Kenneth Richards, associate professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and affiliated associate professor at Maurer School of Law at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind.
• May 6, 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. — Christopher Hill, professor and director of the doctoral program in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University in Arlington, Va.
• May 10, 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. — Deborah Taylor Tate, former FCC commissioner and now a distinguished scholar at the Free State Foundation in Washington, D.C.
• May 19, 2 to 3 p.m. — Carl Pierce, W. Allen Separk Distinguished Professor of Law at UT Knoxville and interim director of the Baker Center.

“Having the Baker Center on our campus is a huge asset to UT Knoxville, our community, our state and our nation,” said Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek. “Through the Baker Center, UT Knoxville has the opportunity to engage decision-makers about some of the most important issues facing our country, including health policy, global security, energy and environment, and governance studies. And, thanks to the influence of Sen. Howard Baker — who has been called the ‘Great Conciliator’ — we strive to do all of this through civil discourse.”

The Baker Center director will report to the UT chancellor and work closely with Sen. Baker, UT deans and faculty, and with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The director will be expected to develop national visibility and an international reputation for the center, a strong research base in public policy and an interdisciplinary academic program in public policy drawing upon the resources of the university, ORNL, the Knoxville community and the state of Tennessee.

The director will oversee the development of public programs on important public policy topics with nationally known speakers and experts; advance public policy and civics education, and create programs and materials to help teachers; establish nationwide partnerships and provide leadership among congressional centers; develop and maintain first-rate political archives, including an oral history program, and make them accessible to scholars and the public; coordinate fundraising for the center; be a spokesperson for the center with community groups, the media, and at conferences and other events; and promote the museum as an educational resource for the public.

Requirements for the job include a doctorate in an academic discipline related to public policy development or an appropriate terminal degree and equivalent experience with a strong record of achievement; an understanding of the mission of higher education and scholarship; experience in fiscal management; the ability to interact with a diverse and multicultural community; strong written and public speaking skills; and the capacity to develop a five- to 10-year vision for the center.

College of Business Administrator Dean Jan Williams is chairing the committee searching for the Baker Center director.

The Baker Center, which opened at UT in 2003, is a public policy institute integrating research, education, public programming and archives. It develops programs and promotes research to further the public’s knowledge of our system of governance, and to highlight the critical importance of public service, a hallmark of Sen. Baker’s career.

The center opened its new $17 million facility in October 2008. The 53,000-square-foot facility was funded entirely by private dollars and includes the Modern Political Archives, which hold more than 100 collections of political papers from prominent Tennessee leaders. The museum tells the story of how government works using Sen. Baker’s life as a backdrop, explores modern Tennessee politics and engages students and adults in interactive exhibits. A 200-seat auditorium provides a setting for programs, classrooms and break-out rooms for instruction and conferences

For more about the Baker Center, see http://bakercenter.utk.edu/main/. For more about the director candidates, see http://bakercenter.utk.edu/main/search-finalists.php.

C O N T A C T :

Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, [email protected])

Foi revelado pela Hyundai durante o Salão do Automóvel de Busan, na Coréia do Sul o novo Elantra versão 2011 (vendido na Asia como Avante). O novo modelo terá um motor 1.6 de quatro cilindros a gasolina e 138 cv, e transmissão automática de seis marchas.

O novo sedan chegará no mercado norte-americano no final desse ano e no mercado coreano no início do segundo semestre. Entre as mudanças do carro estão os assentos traseiros com sistema de aquecimento, faróis de neblina e uma tela de LCD com várias informações.

Vejam o vídeo da apresentação do novo Elantra logo abaixo, mostrando alguns detalhes da sua aerodinâmica. Fica a dica para um carro moderno e estiloso para o futuro.

Imagens do novo sedan

Via | Inside Line

Last week, NASA presented the first images and videos from its latest and greatest eye on the Sun: the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

SDO has been in the works for a long, long time, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting data from it for years… so of course I was away from my computer when the images were released. Still, it was worth a few extra days to see something as back-of-the-neck-hair-raising as this:

Holy Haleakala! Click to emprominate.

As if on cue, just days after SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) was switched on, the Sun threw an epic fit, blasting out an arcing prominence perfectly positioned for us to see. A prominence is a loop of gas that erupts from the surface of the Sun. This gas follows the Sun’s magnetic field lines; complicated interplay between the energy stored in the field lines versus their tension causes them to leap up from the Sun, anchored in two spots that represent where the north and south poles of the lines punch through the Sun’s surface. A prominence might have as much as a hundred billion tons of matter in it, and can be hundreds of thousands of kilometers across.

To give you an idea of this, here’s a video made from images from AIA:

Kaboom! Interestingly, the gas isn’t as hot as you might think, and can be cooler than the surface of the Sun. When we see a prominence edge-on, silhouetted against the surface of the Sun, it actually appears dark! When that happens, we call it a filament.

I’ve been a big fan of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) for a long time, and SDO is like the Son of SOHO. It has technology that is more current, and has very high resolution cameras. SDO can take spectra of the Sun to look in detail at its composition, temperature, motion, and magnetic strength. It can also measure the seismology of the surface of the Sun, the way waves travel across it and make it pulse; this tells us about the interior of the Sun that is otherwise totally invisible. Combining all this data together yields a vast amount of knowledge waiting to be learned about our nearest star.

It also produces stunning full-Sun imagery:

This image is amazing; it shows very hot helium and iron ranging in temperature from 60,000 Kelvin (100,000+° F) to well over a million Kelvins (1.8 million degrees F)! You can see the big prominence to the left, as well as several others around the disk. All the twisting and writhing on the surface is due to the bubbling convection of hot material from the Sun’s interior rising to the surface coupled with the fiercely complex solar magnetic field. The physics involved is incredibly complex, but with SDO’s help scientists will soon have a much firmer grasp on what’s going on.

Of course, they’ll also have a pile of new mysteries to ponder as well. The Sun is the closest star to the Earth, and closer than most planets. We know a lot about it, but there’s so much left to understand: what’s the root cause of the 5.5 year long solar magnetic cycle? How is that tied to Earth’s climate? What effect do sunspots have on the Sun and Earth? How exactly does the Sun influence space weather; the flood of subatomic particles streaming from the solar surface and interacting with our own magnetic field, affecting satellites and even our power grid?

Science is like a tapestry with no edge, and with holes located here and there in the fabric. We can fill those holes ever more, and explore the edges, pushing them back with each new discovery. Along with many other observatories like it, SDO is our loom that helps us create and follow that weave.

Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA, NASA/GSFC/SDO/AIA

Filed under: Motorsports

Here’s a story you might expect more from Formula 1 than NASCAR: team owners say that you simply can’t be competitive in the sport if you don’t have a plane to shuttle your crew around. Rick Hendrick, for instance, has three 50-seat regional jets, Joe Gibbs has another three, and Jack Roush has two Boeing 727s. Meanwhile, Formula 1’s Jensen Button and Ross Brawn left the Malaysia after the grand prix on commercial flights.

The key is the schedule: NASCAR has races just about every weekend, making every available moment to work on the car an awfully precious one. Having a transportation fleet that can fly crews out the morning of the race, land and get them straight to the garage a few hours before the race, doing so without all those commercial glitches, can make the difference between podium and also-ran. Team owners say they actually save money using the planes, not having to book hotel rooms and pay for food. That means NASCAR has opened the door for us to use “it’s thrifty” and “we’ll need a private jet” in requests to our bosses from now on…

[Source: Jacksonville.com]

The key to NASCAR competitiveness is… an airplane? originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 08:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I used to own a HTC Mogul from Sprint… and I loved that phone! It’s one of the reasons why I am a loyal HTC fan and owner. When I had that Windows-based phone there was an application called Skyfire. This was one of the greatest apps I have ever used, and this was before applications were what they are today.

Skyfire took my meager Windows-based browser and made it King, allowing it to access Flashed-based sites in all its glory. Now Skyfire, which I am excited to say, is releasing an Android-based application. Not only will Skyfire allow full Flash video playback, it packs the punch of pinch to zoom, copy and paste and many other mobile browsing essentials. I for one will be first in line and a return user of this lovely application. Check out the link below to see Skyfire live in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t00fEV2_kE

The first batches of these handsets that were tested were missing nearly all of Google’s apps. Like the Bacflip, this handset was also going to have a few core Android apps replaced by bloatware. The most notable omission was Yahoo Search integration instead of Google’s search. Dell has recently confirmed that all of Google’s app will be installed on this device.

The Aero will include Market, Maps, Gmail, and search. Although, there’s no word on the search provider so there’s still a chance it will be swapped out for Yahoo Search. Dell most likely pressured AT&T not to hinder their devices like they did with their first Android handset. The Backflip has essentially been a flop and this is partly due to the restricted Android experience.

[via engadget]

The video game tie-in for the first Iron Man movie didn’t exactly light up the sales charts, so Sega promised to do better (qjnet/news/this-is-how-iron-man-2-will-be-better-than-the-first.html) for the second. Unfortunately, the prologue trailer (qjnet/news/iron-man-2-game-trailer-is-kinda-lame.html) for the Iron

The NEW 6-Core AMD Phenom II X6 Delivers Exceptional Value! Integrated Dual-Channel Memory Controller. HyperTransport 3.0 Technology. AMD Balanced Smart Cache. AMD Virtualization (AMD-V).

VISION is a platform solution to correctly match critical components; CPU, GPU, motherboard & memory. BLUEPRINT your system performance with AMD VISION! A Choice You Can Feel Good About!

—A real nonsensical headline about a product in today’s Fry’s Electronics newspaper ad

Late yesterday saw Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch take to the official blog to reiterate the company’s recent stance on mobile platforms.  No longer interested in working with Apple, Adobe has decided to move forward with other mobile operating systems, specifically Android. 

It’s no longer a secret that Flash will be integrated into the next release of Android (Froyo).  Google’s own Andy Rubin verified this in a recent NYTimes interview.  We expect to see Android demonstrated  at Google I/O but when might we actually see the rollout?  Lynch sets the table for a June arrival.

We look forward to delivering Flash Player 10.1 for Android smartphones as a public preview at Google I/O in May, and then a general release in June. From that point on, an ever increasing number and variety of powerful, Flash-enabled devices will be arriving which we hope will provide a great landscape of choice.

Might We Suggest…

• FarmVille on Nexus One Signals Death of Productivity [VIDEO]
  Taimur Asad of Redmond Pie has been playing with the HTC Desire ROM on his Nexus One these last few days.  As many of you might know, it features Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 as part of the build.  So wh…

Another day another iPad case – this latest one is from Built. You know that company famous for those flexible and fun shaped neoprene cases. There is Neoprene Envelope and Neoprene Sleeve and both will provide protection for the iPad. The soft inner lining helps prevent scratches, and the thick neoprene keeps it safe from any bumps while you travel.  The Neoprene Envelope specifically comes in a Nolita Stripe or Black color scheme and the Neoprene Sleeve comes in Fiery Orange, Black, and Spring Fuchsia but has no pockets whereas the Neoprene Envelope has an interior pocket for storing your power adapter. The Neoprene Envelope retails for $40 and the Neoprene Sleeve retails for $30.

Back in 2008, after milking the poor cash cow to death, Motorola decided to can their once crazy-popular RAZR series of phones. A good thing, too, as their Android line of phones are really quite good, and have helped them climb out of the dreaded red end.

But today over on Slash Gear, a prototype RAZR3 has risen from the grave to show us a twisted world where Motorola feature phones were the hotness, and smart phones were only for the geeks and their pocket protectors (like me…). It’s quite chilling.

The specs are actually quite good, especially considering it was meant to be released back in those hazy days of 2009. A 5MP camera with LED flash, GPS, Voice Control, FM radio, chrome exterior, you know the drill. But no apps. Eck. I shiver to think of phones without app stores.

*shiver*

But, for those with a taste for nostalgia, or a perverse liking for glimpses into alternate realities, you should take a look at the video, below.