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A new report on global health policy calls for the United States to maintain its commitment to fight HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis and to double the funds committed to maternal and child health, to $2 billion a year.

The report, unveiled at a Boston University (BU) conference co-sponsored by BU, Harvard, and the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies on Monday (April 26), also recommends strengthening efforts at disease prevention, setting national global health priorities for the next 15 years, and bolstering collaboration and support of international institutions that can help in the effort, such as the World Health Organization, the World Bank, UNICEF, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Harvard Provost Steven Hyman, who spoke at one of the event’s three panels, said it’s important that, as the academic field of global health emerges, it not be bound in a traditional academic silo. Though the creation of academic disciplines has been an important way to focus efforts in some fields, Hyman said a more problem-centered approach that draws solutions from many fields is more appropriate for global health.

Hyman said New England is well placed to play a key role in global health, with collaborations already established among universities, hospitals, and businesses.

BU President Robert Brown said that student interest in global health is “profoundly” greater now than it was a decade ago and that the international flavor of the region’s universities — both with many students from abroad coming here and students studying abroad — will give the area an advantage as global health increases in importance.

The evidence that more students are interested in global health today is reflected on Harvard’s campuses, Hyman said, in courses that are so packed that students have to be admitted by lottery. When they graduate, though, he cautioned, those students will need careers that can harness their enthusiasm and apply it toward the greater good.

“The real question is are we going to create the kinds of … opportunities that allow this wonderful burst of idealism to be wedded to a career path that allows a student to make a career in global health,” Hyman said.

Novartis senior director Phil Dormitzer, who spoke on the panel featuring Hyman and Brown — and which also featured U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano and Genzyme Senior Vice President James Geraghty —  said that New England’s concentration of research institutions attracted Genzyme’s operations a few years ago from the San Francisco Bay area. Still, he said, one of the biggest challenges in global health is not necessarily marshalling the brain power, clinical expertise, and capital to conceive, test, and bring products to market. To be usable in the developing world, where the need is greatest, vaccines and critical drugs need to be made very inexpensively, something that is best done in other parts of the world.

New England, Capuano said, has long outgrown its textile mill industrial roots and specializes in well-paying, knowledge-based industry. Today the dominant industry is in the biosciences, which Capuano said will likely move elsewhere as it matures, as production practices become refined and as manufacturing costs become more and more important. By then, Capuano said, the region’s powerful combination of knowledge-based resources will likely be on to the next big thing, whatever that may be.

“We do intellectual capital. We build it in the university, we test it in the hospitals, we commercialize it in our businesses,” Capuano said.

Outside of New England, Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) student Amy Bei, participating on a panel of future global health leaders, said it is critical that capacity be built in the developing nations themselves. Bei, who worked in Tanzania on malaria, said she has a passion to help train local scientists.

Filed under: Convertible, Performance, Ford, Specialty

Ford and Hurst have a long and illustrious history of working together to create special edition Mustangs, and the latest fruits of their labor can be seen in our high-res image gallery below. The 2010 Hurst Mustang Pace Car will make its first official appearance during the Ford Racing Mustang Challenge race that will be held at Virginia International Raceway on April 25, 2010.

There will only be one 2010 Hurst Mustang Pace Car, and it will make appearances at the Hot Rod Power Tour, a slew of Larry H. Miller dealerships and finally at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas before being auctioned off next January. Proceeds from the car’s sale will benefit the Austin Hatcher Foundation for Pediatric Cancer. A hot Mustang convertible for a worthy cause… what’s not to like?

Though you won’t be able to march into your local Ford dealership and drive off in a new Hurst ‘Stang, you will be able to get “promotional items” inspired by the car… including ‘skins’ for pinewood derby racers. Sadly, the miniature version won’t be sporting the full-size car’s polished 20-inch wheels, Hurst shifter or 550-horsepower supercharged V8 engine. What they will have in common, though, is the iconic black and gold Hurst color scheme. See below for images and click past the break for the press release.

[Source: Hurst Performance Vehicles]

Continue reading Hurst debuts Ford Racing Mustang Challenge pace car at VIR

Hurst debuts Ford Racing Mustang Challenge pace car at VIR originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has dug itself into quite a  deep hole.  Costs remain very, very high (see Harvard study: “Realistic” first-generation CCS costs a whopping $150 per ton of CO2 — 20 cents per kWh!).  And nobody wants the CO2 stored underground anywhere near them (see CCS shocker: “German carbon capture plan has ended with CO2 being pumped directly into the atmosphere”).

Now comes a new study in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, “Sequestering carbon dioxide in a closed underground volume,” by Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M, and Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at University of Houston.  Here are its blunt findings:

Published reports on the potential for sequestration fail to address the necessity of storing CO2 in a closed system. Our calculations suggest that the volume of liquid or supercritical CO2 to be disposed cannot exceed more than about 1% of pore space. This will require from 5 to 20 times more underground reservoir volume than has been envisioned by many, and it renders geologic sequestration of CO2 a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of CO2 emissions.

The study concludes:

In applying this to a commercial power plant the findings suggest that for a small number of wells the areal extent of the reservoir would be enormous, the size of a small US state.  Conversely, for more moderate size reservoirs, still the size of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay reservoir, and with moderate permeability there would be a need for hundreds of wells. Neither of these bodes well for geological CO2 sequestration and the findings of this work clearly suggest that it is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others.

Realistically, it has always been hard to see how CCS could be more than a small part of the solution to averting catastrophic climate change, as I discussed at length in my September 2008 post, Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?

We need to put in place 12 to 14 “stabilization wedges” by mid-century to avoid a multitude of catastrophic climate impact — see “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution (updated)”   For CCS to be even one of those would require a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to the current flow of oil out of the ground. That would require, by itself, re-creating the equivalent of the planet’s entire oil delivery infrastructure, no mean feat.

But any significant amount of leakage would render CCS pointless.  The UK Guardian’s article on the study quotes the coauthor:

Previous modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2 because it was based on the “totally erroneous” premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University

“It is like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface,” Economides said.

The paper concludes that CCS “is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others.”

The Guardian talked to “The Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA), which lobbies on behalf of the sector”:

Jeff Chapman, chief executive of the CCSA, believes Economides has made inappropriate assumptions about the science and geology. He believes the conclusions in the paper are wrong and says his views are backed up by rebuttals from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Pacific Northwest National laboratory and the American Petroleum Institute.

The British Geological Survey confirmed it was looking at the Economides findings and was hoping to shortly produce a peer-reviewed analysis.

Yet the concern laid out in the study is not a new one.  Indeed, my 2008 post quoted a BusinessWeek piece, “The Dirty Truth About Clean Coal”:

The method is widely viewed as being decades away from commercial viability. Even then, the cost could be prohibitive: by a conservative estimate, several trillion dollars to switch to clean coal in the U.S. alone.Then there are the safety questions. One large, coal-fired plant generates the equivalent of 3 billion barrels of CO2 over a 60-year lifetime. That would require a space the size of a major oil field to contain. The pressure could cause leaks or earthquakes, says Curt M. White, who ran the U.S. Energy Dept.’s carbon sequestration group until 2005 and served as an adviser until earlier this year. “Red flags should be going up everywhere when you talk about this amount of liquid being put underground.”

Precisely.

Since CCS is probably at least two decades away from being practical and affordable for large-scale commercialization (assuming we have a high and rising CO2 price by then), we’ll have plenty of time to test different wells and geologies and find out just how many of those red flags we should be paying attention to.

Fortunately, there are many, many other carbon-reducing and clean energy solutions available to us now:

• An introduction to the core climate solutions

We know a lot of you guys and gals out there are former BlackBerry users and abusers. And so we’ll put the question to you? With the unveiling today of the BlackBerry 6 operating system, how does it stand up to the likes of Android and the various flavors it comes in? (Sense, Motoblur, Touchwiz, etc.) Check out the video after the break if you haven’t already seen it, and check out all the coverage at CrackBerry, and let us know. Anything to be worried about here?

read more

For the tiny flatworm, regeneration of missing body parts is a piece of cake. Someone chopped its head off? No problem! It grows a brand new one in about seven days, complete with a spanking new brain with all the right circuits and connections. (As for the chopped-off head, it just grows a new body.) This amazing ability of the flatworm to regrow a missing head and to produce a brain on demand has now been traced back to a key gene, researchers report in a PloS Genetics study. The identification of the gene is exciting news for scientists who wonder if humans, too, can one day learn to regenerate missing body parts. The Register reports that the discovery of the “smed-prep” gene unlocks the mechanisms by which the hard-to-kill Planarian flatworms grow new muscle, gut, and brain cells:
Even more importantly, it seems that the information contained in smed-prep also makes the new cells appear in the right place and organize themselves into working structures – as opposed to nonfunctional blobs of protoplasm.
Lead researcher Aziz Aboobaker describes the worm’s regenerative superpowers to the BBC:
“One of the reasons they can do this is because they’re chock-full of stem cells. We estimate that at …

Uma das coisas que mais irrita o usuário é um navegador lento. Quem nunca se estressou com a demora de carregamento de alguma página ou praguejou quando o programa simplesmente travou e fechou de repente, fazendo com que você perdesse tudo?

Independente de qual seja o problema, é fundamental que ele funcione perfeitamente, seja para aproveitar ao máximo a velocidade de seu computador e internet ou para evitar complicações futuras. Mas e quando o navegador já está “condenado”?

Em alguns casos, esses problemas já são crônicos. A lentidão já faz parte da rotina, o browser precisa ser reiniciado e hora em hora e nem mesmo reinstalá-lo resolve. Se isso acontece com você, saiba que está na hora de dar um reset no navegador. Clique na imagem ou aqui para ler essa matéria do Baixaki.

Oh…great. A Russian company is now marketing a new cruise missile system that can be hidden in a shipping container, turning any merchant ship into a warship able to take out an aircraft carrier. Cool? More »

While lots of attention was paid to the claims that the confiscation of Gizmodo reporter Jason Chen’s computer’s would “settle” whether bloggers are considered journalists, the details in that case suggest otherwise. However, a much more important case on that particular question was decided late last week. It’s the case of Shellee Hale, which we’ve covered in the past. Basically, Hale posted some information claiming a security breach at another company. She revealed this information as a comment on another site — and when she was sued, the company demanded she reveal where she got that information from. She claimed that her sources were protected, as she was a journalist.

The court ruled against her, saying that because she had “no connection to any legitimate news publication,” her own investigations weren’t journalism. That’s troubling for a variety of reasons, especially given the wide latitude in determining what constitutes a “legitimate news publication.” Hale appealed, and unfortunately, the ruling last week from the appeals court upheld the lower court’s ruling:

“Simply put, new media should not be confused with news media,” wrote Superior Court Appellate Judge Anthony J. Parrillo.

The court also claimed that her activities were not journalism because they “exhibited none of the recognized qualities or characteristics traditionally associated with the news process, nor has she demonstrated an established connection or affiliation with any news entity.”

Again, this is problematic. In an age of participatory journalism, people who do journalism don’t need “an established connection or affiliation with any news entity.” They can easily establish one with various sites, or they can simply set themselves up as a “news organization” on their own. Furthermore, as technology has changed the whole process of journalism, there’s an awful lot about journalism today that “exhibits none of the recognized qualities or characteristics traditionally associated with the news process.” That’s because the news process is constantly changing — such as its expansion into participatory efforts these days. This ruling is troubling in that it looks backwards, not forward. It’s also a reminder that rather than various broken state laws that shield journalists, it really is time for a federal shield law to protect journalists.

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Where some people just see a detour sign and say “argh,” the owner of a California A&W franchise sees an opportunity to grow his customer base.

Taking advantage of some free space on the detour signs placed in the vicinity of his eatery, Peter Knight placed signs pointing hungry drivers in his direction.

“We’re trying to be as aggressive as possible,” he explains. “We had to get some kind of sign out there.”

According to Knight, his signs are working as people who would never have thought to stop by his A&W are now popping in for a bite.

“We’ve actually seen some new customers because we’ve directed traffic in a different direction,” he says.

 

Creative A&W Restaurant Owner Takes Advantage Of Detour Signs [Fox40.com]

If you have a free two minutes and want to get a quick look at OS 6.0, which will be released in the third quarter this year, you can check out this video.

I really wish they had made a more straight forward video, without the bouncing screen shots and dancing people. And the crappy music, though that’s on a more subjective topic.

This post originated at BBGeeks.com – home to all things Blackberry! Also a great source of info about AT&T BlackBerry.

RIM gives us a video look at OS 6.0

This post originated at BBGeeks.com – home to all things Blackberry! Also a great source of info about AT&T BlackBerry.

RIM gives us a video look at OS 6.0

Ford is having a great run of it. Just today they announced a $2.1 billion first quarter 2010 profit, which is up from 2009’s first quarter by $3.5 billion (yep, they lost $1.4 billion in Q1 2009). I don’t think there’s any other greater vote of confidence in their new line of products than that… but the good press on their products keeps on coming.

In a comparison on the San Francisco Chronicle website, out of 7 hybrids analyzed the Ford Fusion Hybrid came out number one in terms of how many years it will take to pay off the added cost of the hybrid system versus a non-hybrid model. According to the paper, at only 5.6 years the Fusion Hybrid beats the next closest competitor by almost 6 years. But is the analysis really meaningful or has the SF Chronicle bunged this one up badly?

(more…)

We know you’re focused on Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Goldman Sachs (GS) right now, but at some point today you should take a few moments to note that the Fed is meeting, and will thus induce a whole new round of nervousness into this market.

Mike O’Rourke at BTIG spells out the key things you need to think about:

The FOMC’s latest policy meeting occurs today and tomorrow.  For nearly a year, FOMC meetings have been either uneventful or unimportant, or both.  The most notable excitement was last November’s meeting when expectations rose that the FOMC might amend or drop the “exceptional and extended” (E&E) language.  It was in that statement that the FOMC essentially locked in the E&E language by  providing an explanation for it.  The FOMC announced the interest rate decision by explaining that, “The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions, including low rates of resource utilization, subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations, are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.”  The bold portion was qualifier language added at that meeting and has remained in subsequent statements to date.  As the recovery now broadens beyond a Financial markets recovery to a real economy recovery, investors need to be prepared  for the FOMC to take monetary policy off the auto pilot mode that it has been on for some time.  As such, FOMC meetings and Fed speeches should garner heightened attention. 

So, what would actually prompt the Fed to change its language and prepare markets for the tightening process?

There are a few key economic indicators heading to the red zone.

Here’s one noticeable “v” which suggests inflation in the offing.

Low capacity utilization has been central to the argument that inflation is basically impossible.

Beyond that, the Fed is watching:

• Unemployment (still very elevated).
• The CPI
• The employment cost index (which is ticking up again)
• Inflation expectations (still calm)
• Commodity index (ticking up again).

Right now, none of the indicators would require the Fed to move towards a more hawkish stance.

But! And here’s the kicker:

Retrospectively, all of the qualifiers the FOMC identified appear tame.  Excess Reserves remain tethered to the Fed despite the exceptionally low interest rates.  M2 is barely growing year over year.  One other aspect we should note is the currently stalled Financial Regulatory Reform Bill, which moderates the Fed’s 13-3 emergency powers.  Essentially, once the Fed begins a permanent unwind of its balance sheet, it may not have the flexibility to bring it back up should the need arise.  The combination of these factors reinforces the current dovish stance the FOMC has taken and the slow unwind as described by Sack.  The conversation does not end there, because the Fed must also look prospectively.

In the March meeting minutes released earlier this month, the FOMC removed the 6 month calendar expectation from E&E that FOMC members previously indicated.  One could argue, that a indicate a shift in language has commenced.  The simple fact is that the data warrants some type of language adjustment.  The two key areas of weakness the FOMC members have highlighted during this recovery have been housing and employment.  The most recent data on both fronts has shown early signs of light.  One month‘s data certainly does not make a trend, but revisions in both cases have been upwards and forward estimates are also in the positive direction.  With economic data ramping up, the Fed can afford the luxury of shifting gear with words, especially since they do not have to follow through with action anytime soon.  Since the Chairman has been so adamantly dovish recently, we cannot say that we know E&E will be altered or gone tomorrow (although it should be), but, at a minimum, we expect a baby step towards tighter language.

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Federal and California law both protect reporters against police searches aimed at uncovering confidential sources or seizing other information developed during newsgathering activities. Yet on Friday, agents with the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) executed a search warrant at Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home, searching for evidence related to Gizmodo’s scoop on what appears to be a pre-release version of Apple’s next iPhone model. The warrant does not reveal whether Chen himself is considered a criminal suspect, or what alleged crime the police are investigating, but Chen was not arrested. All of his computers and hard drives (among other materials) were seized for further search and analysis.

Under California and federal law, this warrant should never have issued. First, California Penal Code Section 1524(g) provides that “[n]o warrant shall issue for any item or items described in Section 1070 of the Evidence Code.” Section 1070 is California’s reporter’s shield provision (which has since been elevated to Article I, § 2(b) of the California Constitution). The items covered by the reporter’s shield protections include unpublished information, such as “all notes, outtakes, photographs, tapes or other data of whatever sort,” if that information was “obtained or prepared in gathering, receiving or processing of information for communication to the public.” The warrant explicitly authorizes the seizure of such protected materials and information, including the photographs and video taken of the iPhone prototype, as well as research regarding the Apple employee who purportedly lost the phone. This fact alone should have stopped this warrant in its tracks.

Second, the warrant likely violates the Privacy Protection Act (or PPA, 42 USC § 2000aa et al.). Congress passed the PPA to ensure special protection for journalists by prohibiting government search and seizure of both “documentary material” (explicitly including photos and video) and “work product material,” material which is or has been used “in anticipation of communicating such materials to the public.” 42 USC § 2000aa-7(a) and (b). The PPA includes an exception for searches targeting criminal suspects (which Chen may or may not be), but that exception does not apply “if the offense to which the materials relate consists of the receipt, possession, communication, or withholding of such materials or the information contained therein.” 42 USC § 2000aa(a)(1). Violations of the PPA could render the law enforcement agencies or the individual officers who searched Chen’s house liable for damages no less than $1,000.

The purpose of the PPA and state shield law is to prevent police from rummaging through sensitive information contained in a reporter’s notes and communications. This search warrant is particularly worrisome on this point because it is so plainly overbroad. An officer seeking a search warrant must demonstrate to the issuing judge both probable cause that a crime was committed and that there is a reasonable basis to conclude that the materials sought and searched are relevant to that crime. The warrant issued in the Chen case was remarkably broad, seeking “all records and data located and/or stored on any computers, hard drives, or memory storage devices, located at the listed location.” That a computer or hard drive may be capable of storing information relevant to the case is not enough. Unless the warrant application provided a factual basis to tie Chen’s computer (and “digital cameras,” “display screens,” “mice,” “cassette tapes,” “CD-ROM disks,” etc.), any information obtained from them could be thrown out. Furthermore, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (the federal appellate court for California and the surrounding states) in its 2009 opinion in United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing Inc., 579 F.3d 989 (9th Cir. 2009), identified a series of guildelines meant to ensure that even otherwise lawful warrants authorizing the search and seizure of computers do not give officers too much access to private data that might be intermingled with evidence of a crime. This warrant does not appear to comply with those guidelines.

The police appear to have gone too far. The REACT team, “a partnership of 17 local, state, and federal agencies” with a “close working partnership with the high tech industry,” seems to have leapt eagerly to Apple’s aid before it looked at the law. Putting the presumed interests of an important local company before the rights guaranteed by law is an obvious occupational hazard for a police force charged with paying particular attention to the interests of high tech businesses. Now that First Amendment lawyers, reporters, and others have highlighted the potential legal improprieties of this search, the task force should freeze their investigation, return Chen’s property, and reconsider whether going after journalists for trying to break news about one of the Valley’s most secretive (and profitable) companies is a good expenditure of taxpayer dollars.

[Colorado Law Professor Paul Ohm has more on this issue at Freedom to Tinker, in particular looking at the effect of Comprehensive Drug Testing on this search.]

EDITOR’S NOTE: The City Council voted 9-5 Tuesday — one vote short of the two-thirds needed to take jurisdiction of the nearly 5 percent DWP power rate after learning it is permanent, not temporary as many of them, the press and the public believed. Parks, who had opposed the increase and could have supplied the 10th vote, was absent. Alarcon, Cardenas, Hahn, Wesson and Garcetti supported the permanent rate hike. (I erred earlier in saying Zine, missing that Garcetti’s name is now at the bottom of the alphabetical list.)

Austin Beutner has made transparency of the DWP a top priority so taking his word at face value I’ve sent him several requests for information about DWP rates, plans and policies.

Of course, words can mean different things to different people but I’ll go with Wikipedia which says transparency “implies openness, communication, and accountability” which in a government sense includes “open meetings, financial disclosure statements, freedom of information legislation, budgetary review, audits, etc.”

Based on the DWP’s long history of obfuscation, half-truths and outright lies, it could take the middle-aged Beutner the rest of his life to shed light into all the darkness of DWP machinations.

We know with certainty that Beutner’s real job is to be just transparent enough to get massive rate hikes through the City Council which means giving then enough cover so that they can overcome their phobic fear of the wrath of voters.

There must be thousands of questions to ask about what has happened to ratepayers’ billions in recent years, why water mains are bursting and the electrical system aging, why there’s so little green energy, why no comprehensive planning, why salaries are so high, how hundreds of millions can be turned over as “surplus” to general fund every year…

Today, Jan Perry’s Energy and Environment Committee is asking questions about why the DWP needs to spend $6 million a year more for “dumping privileges for dumping dirt, asphalt, and concrete” at landfills on top of the $4 million already allocated.

Questions also could be asked about why the DWP is spending $11.125 million to buy warehouse and industrial property for the mayor’s “clean tech corridor” near downtown and is intending — with help from the other bottomless pit of public wealth, the Community Redevelopment Agency — to buy jobs with massive subsidies.

“The Clean Technology Business Incubator will help CRA/LA fulfill its
role of economic development and job creation by encouraging research
and development in green technologies such as renewable energy,
recycling and next-generation transportation,” said Calvin Hollis,
CRA/LA Interim Chief Executive Officer, according to CurbedLA.

Apart from dressing up the DWP to look respectable, Beutner’s real task as “Jobs Czar” is to turn our bankrupt city government into an economic engine the way the Soviet Union and China in their Communist heydays tried to do without success before turning to that old-fashioned notion of free enterprise capitalism.

Perhaps, he knows something Stalin and Mao did not.

Certainly, a key area of flagrant DWP spending is its crash program to meet the mayor’s artificial political goal of achieving 20 percent renewables by 2010 no matter how much it costs, no matter that there is no plan to get rid of coal plants or to methodically go green at a cost the public can afford.

Other People’s Money has always been something the mayor has generously spent and this report Monday from the Tehachapi News shows just how desperate the DWP officials are to please the mayor without regard to cost or common sense:

“At the April 13 Airport Commission board meeting, Tehachapi Municipal
Airport Manager Tom Glasgow offered a clue as to why the Los Angeles
Department of Water and Power needs its huge rate increase.

“In January, the DWP was fueling its Bell Ranger jet turbine helicopter
at the Tehachapi airport as it ferried crews to a new wind farm
construction site 10 miles to the northeast of Tehachapi.

“The roads had not yet been carved out of the mountains, and the DWP was
utilizing sky cranes to carry out work. The department would drive
crews to the airport and airlift them by helicopter to the job site.

“Jet fuel sales jumped from 186 gallons in January 2009 to 1,821 gallons
in January 2010.”

Money is no object when it’s other people’s and that’s what DWP’s green energy plan is all about: Buying wind and solar power and renewable energy credits on the open market at a premium because they failed to carry out their stated goal more than a decade ago to reduce reliance on coal for nearly half the city’s power, why they even dragged their feet on rooftop solar to the point LA couldn’t even power a square block with solar.

This frantic politically-driven policy of buying renewables was so successful the DWP actually achieved the goal of 20 percent in March but the mayor’s failure to get his 20 to 30 percent rate hike could diminish that to 12 percent by the year’s end.

At that level, LA not only would have the state’s dirtiest energy portfolio but also the one with the lowest level of clean energy.

Transparency is the issue and Beutner has to come clean about all the questions about DWP before he has any chance of getting his hands on more of the public’s money.

To do that, he’s going to have to take the politics out of water and power policy, rein in payroll costs that make up nearly 60 percent of DWP spending after buying water and fuel — not the 25 percent of total costs he claims — and put forward clear long-term plans for rebuilding the infrastructure, generating renewable energy, closing coal plants and do all that at rates that don’t kill more jobs than they create and bankrupt more people than they enrich.

In other words, the mission of DWP must be what it’s supposed to be: Providing water and power for the City of Los Angeles, not serving the political games of the mayor. It’s a utility that provides public services, not a jobs or wealth redistribution program.

Article Tags: Philip Stott

Click source to read FULL report from Philip Stott

Source: web.me.com/sinfonia1/Clamour_Of_The_Times

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The Goldman hearing before a Senate subcommittee continued this afternoon with Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) addressing Goldman’s role in market making with regard to synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations — the type of security at the heart of the SEC’s claim. McCaskill actually uses an accurate analogy for Goldman’s role, calling it a bookie. She’s right: as a market maker, Goldman and other investment banks act a lot like a bookie by lining up investors who want to take separate sides of a bet. But she takes the analogy a little too far.

Bookies set the “line” of a bet, the price and return that can result from a bet. McCaskill accuses Goldman of doing a bad job of setting the line, since those who bet on the housing market lost quite badly, while those who bet against it did quite well. The problem with this claim, however, is that unlike bookies, market makers don’t set the line — the market does. All the traders do is align investors based on market demand and supply.

So why did those who shorted the housing market in early 2007 make so much money? Because the market was very, very wrong. Thus, any securities that would have provided a short on the subprime mortgage market would have been very, very lucrative. The same thing happens when an underdog is largely expected to lose a sporting event, but wins. If the odds were 50 to 1 for that game, then anyone who took that bet would be rewarded very handsomely.

But Goldman, and other broker-dealers, didn’t set the housing market odds — investors did. Most got it very wrong, which is why so many lost so much money. Investors were so far off, they triggered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The few that got it right, however, made a killing.

A lot of Sengoku Basara fans missed out when the previous titles weren’t released in the US, but thankfully, that changes with Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, a.k.a. Sengoku Basara 3 in Japan. Looking to see more of

Stumbled across some interesting research on government support of startup businesses. First, this new piece on the Vox site:

We are all for policy support for entrepreneurs. But, we believe it must be channelled correctly. An approach that seeks to pick winners ex ante is likely to fail. We base this assessment in part on the very poor performance of policy interventions of this type (Lerner 2009). Our view is also based on the underlying firm dynamics that are observed in the data and discussed above. We instead believe policymakers should focus more consistently on the many small businesses and entrepreneurs that make large and small improvements to the economy. The best support policymakers can provide is to encourage competition among local banks and financiers. Governments should forget about picking winners and focus on picking the right system.

Me: Right, capital access is important. But then I took a look at that Lerner report (Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed — and What to Do About It) by Josh Lerner at Harvard. Here is an interesting bit of a Q&A he did with the NYTimes Freakonomics blog (anything in bold is mine):

Q. Are government interventions to boost entrepreneurship always successful? Why do these programs fail?

A. Sadly, for every successful effort such as those in Israel and Singapore, there are numerous unsuccessful ones.

First, they can simply get it wrong: allocating funds and support in an inept or, even worse, a counterproductive manner. Decisions that seem plausible within the halls of a legislative body or a government bureaucracy can be wildly at odds with what entrepreneurs and their backers really need. When Australia legalized the venture capital limited partnership structure earlier this decade, for instance, legislators worried that foreign funds or firms might exploit the favorable tax treatment these entities enjoyed. So they required that each company backed by a venture partnership have at least half its assets in Australia. The venture funds found that this restriction handicapped the companies in their portfolio. The entrepreneurs could not expand their software development activities in India or their manufacturing operations in China without putting the venture funds’ tax status in danger, even as they competed against American ventures that made heavy use of “off-shoring.”

Q. You write about “The Neglected Art of Setting the Table” i.e. establishing a favorable environment for entrepreneurs. Tell us about the ideal place setting.

A. Often, in their eagerness to get to the “fun stuff” of handing out money, public leaders neglect the importance of setting the table, or creating a favorable environment. Such efforts to create the right climate for entrepreneurship are likely to have several dimensions. Ensuring that creative ideas can move easily from universities and government laboratories is critically important. However, many entrepreneurs come not from academia, but rather from corporate positions, and studies have documented that, for these individuals, the attractiveness of entrepreneurial activity is very sensitive to tax policy (particularly low capital gains tax rates). Also important is ensuring that the law allows firms to enter into the needed contracts — for instance, with a potential financier or a source of technology — and that these contracts can be enforced.

Our friends at CrackBerry.com are all over the big announcement at WES 2010, having just finished up a Liveblog of the keynote and posting details on the upcoming operating system out of Waterloo: BlackBerry 6. RIM is really upping their game with this release: they’re making their OS more touchscreen-friendly, revamping the entire UI to be a lot prettier and more user friendly, making notifications easy to get to, adding a webkit-based browser, and even changing their app launcher up by adding clearer categories.

Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the latest buyout rumor du jour – RIM.  This time it’s from the Toronto Globe and Mail, who cite analyst speculation but rightly smack it all down. Now that we’ve seen that RIM is aggressively working on improving their own OS instead of looking for a from-scratch jumpstart, we think it’s safe to say that the chances of RIM being interested in Palm are rapidly approaching zero.

Combine that with the rumored BlackBerry vertical slider and Palm definitely is going to have some strong competition on their hands. What do you think – How does webOS fare against this upcoming BlackBerry OS?