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Tthe market is tanking, with the financial sector taking huge losses.

The Dow is down more than 100.

The culprit? Weak top-line and consumer numbers at JPMorgan.

Let’s see how the big boys are holding up:

• JP Morgan (JPM): -2.42%

• Goldman Sachs (GS): -2.05%

• Morgan Stanley (MS): -3.27%

• Wells Fargo (WFC): -2.41%

• MBIA (MBI): -3.07%

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See Also:

• Wait, Are You Really Surprised That Banks Never Modeled A Housing Downturn?
• Here’s Why The Financial System Isn’t Out Of The Woods, And Still Has A Ton Of Deleveraging To Do
• JPMorgan Earnings Blow Past Expectations, Revenue Looks Light, Consumer Lending Still Very Ugly

Well – what’s old is new again. Dave Jilk – my first business partner and CTO of Standing Cloud – sent me this magnificent video on 1963 Timesharing: A Solution to Computer Bottlenecks where MIT Professor Fernando Corbato explains how timesharing works to MIT Science Reporter John Fitch (who has one of those magnificent deep reporter voices).

Since history can be so incredibly instructive to reflect on when you think about the future of science.  If you draw a curve of “computer technology progress” from 1963 to 2010 after you watch this and then ponder the progress from 2010 to 2057 you will have a very interesting few moments of reflection.

The following quotes are approximate but they will give you enough sound bites to motivate you to watch it!

“Computers used to be unreliable – they managed to lick all of those problems” (2:00)

“The man machine interaction is very poor” (3:00)

“The computers are very expensive – they cost between 300 and 600 / hour” (3:30) – (BAF: Kind of like a lawyer today)

“It’s a little noisy out here (in the data center) – let’s go in my office so I can show you how it works from a remote terminal” (4:30)

“It looks like a typewriter” (5:00)

The moments of drawing on a blackboard to explain how a computer works (starting around 6:00) is priceless.

“Eventually we’d like to see graphical display but there are technical problems right now” (9:30)

“Wooo the chalk is a little soft” (12:30)

“The disk memories have been available for a year or so but most people haven’t figured out how to use them yet because they haven’t figured out how to keep things from getting mixed up” (16:30)

“I’m moderately familiar with the keyboard – we have to study how humans interact with the machines” (19:00)

Watching the interactive demo at about 20:00 is just wild.

“In the long run we will have increasing needs for computer time by a large amount” (25:00)

Singularity anyone?  Or not so much?

The Center For American Progress has a fascinating map that shows exactly how much oil the U.S. imports from “unsafe” countries, ten of which are on the State Department’s Travel Warning List.

Currently, we spend about $1 billion per day overseas on oil.

In 2008, the U.S. imported 4 million barrels of oil a day (1.5 billion barrels total) from “dangerous or unstable” countries, at a cost of roughly $150 billion.

Continue reading here.

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See Also:

• The Entire World Is Freezing! Oil At 15-Month High!
• IEA Says Developed-World Oil Demand Already Looking Weaker Than Expected

This is the first in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.

Guilt. Shame. These aren’t emotions commonly associated with fish. According to Jennifer Jacquet, however, they may actually be effective tools to prevent destructive overfishing. Jennifer knows a thing or two about guilt—she writes the Guilty Planet blog for scienceblogs.com. Her lecture today covered creative ways to convince corporations to buy and sell fish caught in a sustainable manner. A supermarket that sells orange roughy, for instance, might change its practices if made to feel shame for peddling this exploited fish. Greenpeace, which graded the major seafood markets for sustainability, has made headway by calling out less ocean-friendly chains like Trader Joe’s. Can we go further, though, and attach a real public stigma to the trade of unsustainably caught fish?

Jennifer talked about the importance of corporate transparency to bring about policy changes, using examples from other industries. She mentioned the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), which forces polluters to publicize their emission levels. On the day after the first TRI figures were released in 1989, the polluting firms saw their stocks fall a combined $4.1 million. These corporations—feeling guilty and seeking to deflect public scorn—soon announced plans to reduce emissions. Jennifer also referenced restaurant hygiene report cards, which grade the cleanliness of restaurants: you get an A if diners can eat your risotto off the floor, a C if the vermin outnumber your patrons. No restaurant wants the scarlet letter “C” tacked to its window—it would be hard to recover from the public shame of such a poor grade.

Our class discussion, as it has a tendency to do here at Scripps, delved into a number of tangents, all of them thought-provoking. One student, who moved to San Diego from China in June for graduate school, cautioned that with shame can come unfair humiliation. He spoke of China’s Cultural Revolution, when citizens who were suspected of supporting capitalism were forced to walk through the streets wearing hats bearing the sign “Capitalist Dog.” Now, he asserts, China feels regret for putting its people through such a public disgrace because it realizes its original convictions were misguided. I brought up the success of anti-smoking campaigns and the shame placed on cigarette companies for being deceitful about the health effects of smoking and its youth-targeted advertising. Prof. Jeremy Jackson countered by pointing out that a backlash against anti-smoking campaigns actually makes smoking appealing to some young people.

But back to fish—after all, this is a marine policy course. Can seafood retailers like Walmart and Red Lobster be guilted into changing their practices? I think we have a long way to go: it’s still a social norm to buy and eat trawl-caught shrimp, which includes 12 pounds of unintended, wasted bycatch for every pound of shrimp caught. The public looks down upon corporate misdeeds like embezzlement and pollution. It’s time to add trade in unsustainable fisheries to that list of offense.

This week I was able to chat with Louis Ventre, Jr. who is the Executive VP and General Counsel for HCE, LLC. HCE has just filed a U. S. patent application for hydrogen nano bubble storage methods based upon the work of the late inventor Udo von Wimmersperg.

The theory behind the patent is that hydrogen bubbles at a nano scale can be dispersed and stored in water. This water in turn can be stored in a container at atmospheric pressure and ambient temperatures. These hydrogen nano bubbles then can be released for use in hydrogen internal combustion engines and fuel cells. So essentially these nano scale water bubbles are filled with hydrogen at very high pressures, up to 43,500 pounds per square inch before being released. This “juiced” water, however, does not have to be stored any differently than a combustible liquid such as gasoline.

According to the HCE, “The method used to release gas from the aqueous dispersion depends on the application. In the case of an internal combustion engine one might choose to inject the dispersion into the inlet manifold and carry the water through the combustion and expansion process. Alternatively, the gas can be separated by weakening the surface tension of the water through raising the temperature of the dispersion. This can be done, for example, by utilizing waste heat. Another method to release hydrogen would be to introduce an additive that lowers surface tension. The rate at which gas separation from liquid can be effected is related to prevention of foaming. In the case of fuel cells, it may be advantageous to introduce the gas in dispersion.”

Once again, according to the company, “The invention of a new liquid fuel consisting of a dispersion of hydrogen nanobubbles in water solves this problem. The hydrogen nanobubble dispersion (HND) can be carried in a normal fuel tank and can be used as a direct replacement of gasoline in conventional engines. The vehicle range per gallon of HND is the same as that for gasoline. In addition there is a saving in weight by a factor two because of the lower density of HND; this aspect is of particular benefit in the case of aircraft fuel.”

Many people will turn up their noses when one mentions running a car on water. There is no evidence that a car has run on water alone to date. But, this juiced water along with leading edge hydrogen nano bubble storage technology may just allow us to rethink the possibilities of how future hydrogen cars will be fueled and what it will take to get us to this point. Many thanks to Louis Ventre, Jr. for his insights and information about this new “outside-the-box” technology.

The Massachusetts special election to replace Ted Kennedy’s seat next Tuesday was supposed to be cinch for Democrats. But a new poll shows Republican challenger Scott Brown leading Democrat Martha Coakley 50-46 percent. The coming Democratic freakout might not have to wait until November. It could be here. This upset would have significant repercussions — not only for health care reform, but for the Democrats’ economic agenda.

Brown’s victory would give Republicans 41 seats in the Senate, enough
to break the Democrats’ filibuster-proof margin by a single vote. In
other words, Tuesday’s impact would extend beyond health care. It would
hurt the Democrats chances to pass a jobs bill, which is already suffering in the Senate; a financial regulation
bill which already receive zero Republican support; a cap and trade with dwindling prospects even though there are some Republicans like
Lindsay Graham who have expressed interest in working with Democrats on
climate change legislation; and immigration reform. Republicans have demonstrated remarkable party discipline (or shameful partisan cynicism) in opposing every step of Obama’s legislation. A 41-seat minority puts a guillotine over the head of Obama’s 2010 agenda.

That said, health care reform might be safe — for a while. The interim senator Paul Kirk is a Democrat who has promised to vote for health care if he isn’t displaced first. Massachusetts
Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin has signaled that a final
winner from Tuesday’s vote could take more than a week to determine,
because a federal vote allows for 10 extra days for military and
absentee ballots to come in. Another source told the Boston Herald that
the vote might not be certified until February 20. If that’s true, it
gives the Democrats a lot of time to hammer out the final details.

But here’s the X-factor. If Coakley loses, recriminations follow.
Pundits would break down the defeat along various lines: 1) She was a
horrible candidate. 2) Democrats didn’t show up at the polls because
they assumed victory. 3) Health care reform’s growing unpopularity and
the Democrats’ perceived dithering and weakness contributed to
Coakley’s erosion. 4) “The Tea Parties Win! In the very state where
colonists first rose up against the tyranny of the Old World, the
American People took a stand against the Leftist Agenda and dumped the
tea of tyrannical over-reach into the Bay of Oblivion…” The first two
will be liberal explanations. The third will be the centrist read. And
that last one is made ready-to-order for Glenn Beck and his ilk.

Brown’s victory would represent both a tactical blow to the
filibuster-proof majority and a mojo killer, which could make liberal
Democrats start to wonder whether they could be Coakleyed in November.
That would tie huge anchors to the Democrats already plodding economic
agenda. Stay tuned. Tuesday is huge.

Update: Passing along this RealClearPolitics list of polls. Coakley led by 30 points in September. The two latest polls have her up by 8 points and down by 4.

American shoppers, stressed to save face during the holiday season, are still having problems paying their debts.

But the picture is mixed..

Reuters: Bank of America, the biggest U.S. bank, had the highest default and delinquency rates of the three companies that reported early on Friday. The bank said its rate of charge-offs — debts the company believes it will never collect — rose last month to 13.53 percent from 13.00 percent in November, reversing a three-month decline.

Bank of America’s credit card delinquencies — an indicator of future loan losses — fell to 7.44 percent last month from 7.69 percent in November. Capital One said its annualized charge-off rate for U.S. credit cards rose to 10.14 percent in December from 9.60 percent in November.

However, credit card accounts that were at least 30 days delinquent fell to 5.78 percent from 5.87 percent at Capital One, the third-largest U.S. issuer of Visa-branded credit card and the fifth-largest issuer of MasterCard-branded credit cards.

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See Also:

• Consumer Credit Plunges Record 8.5% In November
• Credit Card Charge-Offs Rise In November, Breaking Two-Month Streak
• Gartman: Here’s Why Credit Card Delinquencies Fell To 1.1%

While I’ve done my own share of mobile device battery testing, Steve Paine has easily done more. From smartphones to MIDs and UMPCs to netbooks, Steve has tested down to the milliwatt over the past few years. Today he observed that on the CPU side of the house, the power difference between ARM and x86 is drastically reduced over what it was. If you’ve been following the progress of Intel’s Atom platform, that’s no surprise. And it doesn’t take an engineering degree to know that larger backlit displays can consume more power that most other device components. So what’s the “sweet spot” for a device display to effectively cancel out the power efficiency of ARM over x86?  Here’s what Steve says:

“When you get to screen sizes of 4” and above, something happens that levels the playing field for Intel somewhat. Their CPU platforms (*1) don’t idle down very well but in a typical ‘internet-connected’ scenario on one of these ‘smart’ devices, that becomes almost insignificant as the screen backlight adds such a huge load to the platform that when combined with Wifi, 3G, BT, GPS and audio, the CPU is just 10% of the total load. Swapping Intel out for ARM would save you just 5-10% battery life in an ‘active’ scenario.”

Steve’s point is rather timely, considering all of the ARM-powered devices we peeped at the Consumer Electronics Show. Many of them offered displays well over 4″, with some in the netbook-like 10″ range. It makes you wonder if pairing a low-power Atom chip with Moblin or other form of Linux might make for a better experience than an ARM device running Android or a custom Linux distro. Put another way: if you could get potentially more processing power but not pay a power premium, would you?

Of course, display technologies are bound to mature. In fact, our video demo of the Pixel Qi display on a Notion Ink prototype tells me that this whole situation of power hungry displays is due for a refresh in the near future. But until then, Steve may have a pretty good point. Thoughts?

Volkswagen Group-dedicated tuner Abt Sportsline has released a tuning package for the facelift version of the Audi Q7 3.0 TDI Clean Diesel.

The company promises that the engine’s praised fuel economy and emissions efficiency have remained untouched, while the unit’s power was upgraded from the standard 240HP to 278HP. The torque has also gone up from the factory stock 550 Nm to 580 Nm.

The clean and now mean(ish) Q7 sits on ABT springs, which bring it 30mm closer to the ground and it can… (read more)

The University of Chicago has recorded a substantial increase in applications to the College this year, forming the largest and most diverse undergraduate applicant pool in the school’s history while maintaining the highest academic standards.

The University received 19,306 applications for the class entering in the fall of 2010, a 42 percent increase from last year’s total of 13,564.

There were increases in applications from minority students, as well as increases from all income levels, from every geographic region of the U.S. and from outside the country.

Leaders at the University said the increases reflect a larger number of talented students becoming familiar with the distinctive opportunities available at UChicago.

“Our students and faculty place great value on intellectual curiosity, diversity of thought and openness to the world,” said John W. Boyer, Dean of the College and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in History.

“Attracting more students who share our values enriches our academic culture of constantly testing ideas and arguments. At Chicago we are fortunate to have students at all levels who share our devotion to the core academic enterprise of the University.”

This year’s increase continues a trend that has built for two decades and accelerated in recent years, including a doubling of College applicants since 2006. University leaders said the growth stems, in part, from a broadening of academic programs and enhanced student life opportunities.

For example, the Chicago Studies program has created new avenues for intellectual engagement with the city, the College has significantly expanded support for student research projects supervised by faculty and it also has created many new study-abroad options, including the five-year-old Center in Paris and a new initiative in China.

Additional student life initiatives have included the recent construction of new residence halls and athletics facilities, the growth of cultural options in the Hyde Park neighborhood and a renewed emphasis on the arts as an integral part of campus life.

The Odyssey Scholarships program also has helped more students benefit from a UChicago education by reducing loans and supplying grants for students who qualify.

Enthusiasm among prospective students continues to grow, as shown by this year’s rise in early-action applications, which increased by 32 percent over the previous record in 2007.

Because early applicants tend to view the University as a first choice, the increase suggests a growing group of students who are passionate about the institution, said James G. Nondorf, Vice President and Dean of College Admissions and Financial Aid.

“By every measure, this is a highly accomplished and diverse group of young scholars,” Nondorf said.

Nondorf said the school’s adoption of the Common Application in 2008 likely contributed to the increase in applications.

“What’s most encouraging is that so many talented students and their families are learning about this University’s distinctive strengths,” Nondorf said.

Linda De Croock, a Belgian woman who had her throat crushed in a car accident a quarter-century ago, received one of the odder-sounding organ transplants we’ve ever heard: For two years, De Croock had a dead man’s windpipe growing inside her arm. Reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine, her doctors say they successfully implanted the donated trachea in her forearm and then moved it from there to where it belongs.

While the arm might seem a questionable place to put a windpipe, the point was to acclimate her body to the new organ and get her off anti-rejection drugs. Doctors at Belgium’s University Hospital Leuven implanted the donor windpipe in De Croock’s arm as a first step in getting her body to accept the organ and to restart its blood supply. About 10 months later, when enough tissue had grown around it to let her stop taking the drugs, the windpipe was transferred to its proper place [Canadian Press]. Since De Croock’s own tissue has grown around the windpipe, her body no longer considers it foreign and dangerous. A year has passed since the surgery to move the windpipe from her arm to her throat, and the doctors report she is doing well.

After the accident, De Croock originally had metal pieces installed to prop open her windpipe. But having metal do the job became worse and worse. “Life before my transplant was becoming less livable all the time, with continual pain and jabbing and pricking in my throat and windpipe,” the 54-year-old Belgian told The Associated Press in a telephone interview [Canadian Press].

This is the first time scientists have transplanted an organ as large as a trachea in this way—allowing it to acclimate inside the patient’s body before they set it in its proper location. Dr Pierre Delaere, the surgeon who led the team, said: ”This is a major step forward for trachea transplantation. Her voice is excellent, and her breathing is normal. I don’t think she could run a marathon, but she is doing well” [Sydney Morning Herald].

Related Content:
80beats: Injured Vet Receives Transplanted Pancreas Grown From a Few Cells
80beats: First American Face Transplant is Successful (So Far)
80beats: Doctors Use a Patient’s Own Stem Cells to Build Her a New Windpipe
Discoblog: Organ Transplants Gone Horribly Awry
DISCOVER: How Do Transplant Patients End Up With Killer Organs?

Image: iStockphoto

That’s right, Marvel’s first next IMAX movie is, appropriately, gonna be Iron Man 2—perfect, since we’ll need a mega-sized screen to hold that many mecha flying around, going pewpewpew. Unfortunately, it wasn’t shot in IMAX (like parts of The Dark Knight), it’s just gonna be remastered. [Comic Book Resources via io9]