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There’s been much talk this week about the Obama administration’s desire to obtain $120 billion from the banks with a new tax, especially for them. The President is expected to explain that tax tomorrow, but the Wall Street Journal managed to get a leak ahead of time. From what it’s learned, the tax appears to be on big banks’ net liabilities. In other words, the more a bank’s liabilities outweigh its assets, the more it will owe. Put one more way, the more highly leveraged a bank, the more it will have to pay. It’s effectively an excise tax on leverage.

Here’s the WSJ’s description of the calculation:

The government would likely calculate liabilities by subtracting the total of a bank’s equity and insured deposits from its assets

So, in a sense, the less capital that a bank has to back up its bets, the more it will owe Uncle Sam. It taxes unprotected risk. From a historical perspective, a tax like this isn’t shocking. Taxing behaviors that the government deems unsavory is one of its favorite pastimes. Just ask smokers how much they pay for their cigarettes.

If the administration wishes to create this tax as a sort of regulatory check on risk, then that would sort of makes sense (see the next paragraph). But that doesn’t appear to be what it’s doing here. According to what I’ve read, the tax would only exist for a few years, until the $120 billion mark has been reached. Then it will disappear. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not sure how a temporary tax on big banks’ risks to pay for costs resulting from mortgage modifications and the bailouts to the auto companies and AIG makes sense on really any level.

But what about as a permanent regulatory measure? There’s certainly an argument for a framework like this. The tax revenues could sit in a sort of “just in case” fund, to be used in times of financial emergencies. Then, if another financial crisis hits, any costs borne by the government in cleaning up the mess could be covered by the fund.

I still think it’s a silly idea, however. If you’re want banks to have less leverage, then just create leverage limits. Isn’t that a simpler, cleaner approach than trying to determine a tax rate to pay for the cost of impending doom if highly leveraged banks fail? Why should we want a financial system where banks can take unlimited risks, as long as they’re okay with paying the associated tax for doing so? I’d prefer stability, and a more direct approach.

Lasers have performed wonders over the years but can they push display technology into an era of super-efficient screens? One San Jose, Calif.-based startup is betting on it.

Founded in 2005, Prysm exited stealth mode this week with the introduction of its Laser Phosphor Display (LPD) technology. At first, shooting lasers doesn’t sound like the greenest […]

A 30 percent loss of public funding contributed to a $300 million budget shortfall for the Chicago Transit Authority in 2010.

Staff reductions, mandatory furlough days and strict controls on spending, along with transferring capital funds to operating, are necessary to help fill the gap.

The sessions will provide information and resources for obtaining job interviews, training, health benefits and unemployment compensation.

Representatives from the Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development, Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, ICMA Retirement Corporation, as well as CTA representatives will be available to answer questions on topics such as benefits, unemployment compensation and accessing 401K and 457 accounts.

Every CTA employee who received a layoff notice was also provided information on the workshops. Employees also received contact information for various support organizations. The CTA has worked with its labor unions to provide the information for distribution as well.

Workshop dates are:

The Chicago Transit Authority is hosting a series of workshops designed to assist the more than 1,000 employees scheduled for layoffs next month.

In order to balance its 2010 budget, CTA will be reducing service effective February 7, consequently, there will be a corresponding reduction in the CTA workforce.

• Wednesday, January 13
• Thursday, January 14
• Friday, January 15
• Thursday, January 21
• Friday, January 22
• Monday, January 25
• Thursday, February 11

The workshops will be conducted at CTA Headquarters, 567 W. Lake Street.

A catastrophic earthquake in Haiti Tuesday (Jan. 12) sent tremors all the way to Boston, prompting rapid, broad-based medical and humanitarian assistance from Harvard University and its affiliates.

Two faculty members from Harvard Medical School (HMS) are traveling today (Jan. 13) to Haiti, where they will join others already engaged in rescue operations, medical care, and relief efforts.

En route is Joia Mukherjee, medical director of Harvard-affiliated Partners In Health (PIH), a not-for-profit aid group with community-based clinics in Haiti and eight other countries.

Also on the way is David Walton, an internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who is associated with PIH and is an instructor in medicine at HMS. In 2008, he helped to set up a 54-bed hospital in La Colline in Haiti’s rugged Central Plateau.

Mukherjee and Walton will help medical and aid efforts in the shattered Caribbean island nation. Once they report back, PIH will send the appropriate supplies and personnel to provide relief.

Already laboring in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital near the quake’s epicenter, is physician Louise Ivers, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, who used e-mail earlier today to broadcast an urgent plea for help. “Port-au-Prince is devastated,” her e-mail said, “lots of deaths. SOS, SOS. … Temporary field hospital … needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”

Ivers is clinical director in Haiti for PIH, which opened its first clinic in rural Haiti in 1985 and has since opened eight others. PIH also has community-based medical operations in Peru, Russia, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States. The clinics are staffed by local medical personnel as well as by Harvard faculty and students.

All faculty and students involved with PIH in Haiti are reported safe, said Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of the Faculty of Medicine at HMS.

Meanwhile, the situation on the ground in Haiti is an “overwhelming tragedy,” he said. “We all share in the shock and grief over [Tuesday’s] devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince. Our hearts go out to the millions who have been affected, both in Haiti and closer to home.”

Flier also expressed concern that some members of the Harvard community “may be experiencing personal losses, and we want to offer them our compassion and to provide them with the support they may need.” Members of the Harvard community who would like counseling services or referrals are asked to call Harvard’s Employee Assistance Program at 877.327.4278 or to contact their Human Resources representatives.

Other Havard-related relief efforts are also rolling out. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), a University group of disaster-relief specialists, is working with nongovernmental organizations to assess immediate medical needs and other required assistance, according to spokesman Vincenzo Bollettino. HHI will offer regular updates on its Web site and on Twitter concerning Harvard’s relief partners and affiliated programs and hospitals, he said.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital has dispatched an emergency response team, including HHI’s director of education, Hilarie Cranmer, who is a physician and clinical instructor. The team will work with United Nations and Dominican officials to address the immediate needs of displaced people.

HHI fellow and physician Miriam Aschkenasy, a public health specialist at Oxfam America, is also working on Haitian relief. HHI is in touch with Alejandro Baez, a physician and former faculty member at Brigham and Women’s who now runs disaster services in the nearby Dominican Republic. They will assess the needs for further disaster response.

PIH’s main hospital, L’Hôpital Bon Sauveur, is in Cange, about 20 rugged miles outside Port-au-Prince. It experienced a strong shock from Tuesday’s powerful quake, but no major damage or injuries.

The hospital and its satellite clinics — already serving a flood of medical evacuees from the capital — are run by Zanmi Lasante, PIH’s sister organization, which means “Partners in Health” in Haitian Creole.

The earthquake, measured at 7.0 on the Richter scale, was centered 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince and has affected one in every three Haitians, about 3 million people. Many thousands of Haitians are believed dead.

“The earthquake has destroyed much of the already fragile and overburdened infrastructure in the most densely populated part of the country,” according to the PIH Web site. “A massive and immediate international response is needed to provide food, water, shelter, and medical supplies for tens of thousands of people.”

Communications throughout Haiti were disrupted. In theory, Zanmi Lasante has Internet access and cell phone communication via satellite.

HMS student Thierry Pauyo is working at Zanmi Lasante. But the Harvard School of Public Health does not have any students in Haiti on regular winter session travel courses, nor are there students registered who come from there. Harvard University does have a student from Haiti, said Sharon Ladd, director of the Harvard International Office. The student’s immediate family is reported safe.

Zanmi Lasante means “Partners In Health” in Haitian Kreyol (Creole). Its main site — now a vital center of stability in a devastated land — is one of the largest nongovernmental health care providers in Haiti and the only provider of comprehensive primary care.

It has a 104-bed hospital with two operating rooms, adult and pediatric inpatient wards, an infectious-disease center, an outpatient clinic, a women’s health clinic, ophthalmology and general medicine clinics, a laboratory, a pharmaceutical warehouse, a Red Cross blood bank, radiographic services, and a dozen schools.

Zanmi Lasante employs about 90 community Haitian health workers and serves an estimated 500,000 people in the Central Plateau.

EMI, the smallest of the four major record labels, has sent a cease & desist letter to DJ Lobsterdust and Bootie SF regarding “NirGaga,” a mashup combining Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” The song had appeared in Bootie SF’s “best of 2009” compilation (and got a thumbs up from the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog), but now has been removed. For now, you can still find it online, so you can listen and reach your own fair use conclusions. The song is obviously transformative, and it’s hard to imagine it as a substitute for the originals.

As far as we’ve been able to tell, mashups rarely draw the attention of record label lawyers. Of course, EMI was involved in efforts to block the viral distribution of Dangermouse’s now legendary Grey Album. And EMI used the DMCA in 2008 to censor video mashups commenting on the lawsuit between Joe Satriani and Coldplay. But bringing the lawyers to bear against garden-variety mashups is something else again. Is this the beginning of a general crackdown on mashups by EMI, or, we hope, just a misguided one-off?

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (blog)Danforth Center wins $44 million stimulus awardSt. Louis Post-Dispatch (blog)… forms of next-generation biofuels production, and algae has the benefits of being energy efficient and posing little or no harm to the enviro…

Deploying multitouch on handsets in the US is.. well.. touchy. Patents and licensing issues scare a number of hardware manufacturers away from deploying it, even when the hardware itself supports it. Take the Motorola Droid for example; the European variant, the Milestone, packed multitouch support out of the box, whilst the US Droid was limited to one finger’s worth of input at a time.

Some hardware makers — Palm and HTC, to name a few — have the chutzpah to look at these patents and scoff them off as the nonsense they are, either rolling out their own multi-touch technology or just daring someone to pull them into court for it. It looks like Motorola might be about to do the same.

In an interview with Laptop Magazine, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha had this to say:

I think you will see us deliver multitouch in the majority of our devices going forward. There’s a complex set of factors, not all of them technical. But I think you’ll see us being proactive on multitouch because the user feedback on multitouch is very good.

So there you have it – Motorola will support multitouch on the “majority” of their devices from here on out. Sure, this could very well mean “the majority of our devices [outside of the US]“, but considering that Sanjay specifically mentions the non-technical factors — that is, the aforementioned licensing holdups, which really only apply in the US — we’ve got hope.

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There are three ways to tether your Android handset and get sweet internet love even where there’s no Wi-Fi in sight: the risky-but-free rooting method, the still-geeky-but-not-as-bad free route, and the $30 easy way. Here are the pros and cons of each.

Method 1: Tether Android with Apps that Need Root (Free, heavy configuration)

The Android Wi-Fi Tether application turns your phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot—essentially a MiFi—in one tap. The catch? You have to gain root access to your phone, a multi-step process that uses an unofficial Android add-on which can brick your phone if applied incorrectly. Rooting Android is doable for geeks and hackers with experience soft-modding hardware, but it’s not something most users could (or should!) do.

If you’re up for getting root access in Android, the Android and Me blog runs down how to do it. It’s a multi-step process that involves unlocking your phone’s bootloader, flashing a recovery image, and flashing an add-on to the default Nexus One firmware. Not for the faint of heart, but definitely doable if you’ve ever upgraded your router’s firmware or hacked your Xbox. Here’s a video of the process from Android and Me:

The pros of this method: it’s free and it makes your phone act as a Wi-Fi hotspot that any computer can connect to without extra software or messing with your computer’s setting. The cons: you can seriously screw up your phone if something goes wrong, and you may be sacrificing over-the-air automatic Android updates in the future. (If OTA updates cease, you can always flash your recovery image—but this just means your rooted phone requires maintenance a non-rooted phone does not.)

Method 2: Tether Android with Proxoid (Free, no root required, some configuration)

If you don’t want to gain root but know enough to get around the command line and use proxy servers, the Proxoid Android app can tether your phone for free. Proxoid turns your Android device into a proxy server that your computer uses to make internet requests. Proxoid is free in the Android market, but to get it working you have to install the Android SDK or device drivers onto your computer, tweak some of the settings, and then configure your browser to use a proxy server whenever you want to tether. Here are the installation instructions.

To connect to the internet via Proxoid, on the phone you tap a button to start the proxy server. On your Mac you enter a command in the Terminal and on Windows you run a batch file to start the tunnel, then you set your web browser to use that proxy.

The pros of this method are that it’s free and you don’t need to gain root, so it’s less risky. The cons are that you’ve got to install the Android SDK (something really only developers should have to do), and set your browser to use the proxy server each time you want to tether.

Note: Proxoid is the only method I haven’t tested myself on the Nexus One. Proxoid’s documentation is a bit rough—the Mac installation instructions are second-hand, as the author doesn’t own a Mac—and there isn’t a Nexus One-specific listing. Let me know if you’re successfully using Proxoid on your N1 and what OS you’re using.

Method 3: Tether Android with PDAnet ($30, no root required, minimal configuration)

Finally, the PDAnet Android application lets you tether Android using an app on the phone plus simple software you install on your computer.

PDAnet costs $30 if you want to access https ports (which the free version blocks). To connect to the internet via the phone, you tap a button to start PDAnet on the phone, and click “Connect” in the PDAnet on your computer.

The pros of PDAnet are that it’s risk-free, easy to use, and requires minimal setup. (You do have to enable USB debugging on your phone, which is the geekiest step it involves, but that’s just a checkbox in your phone’s settings.) The cons of PDAnet is that it requires the PDAnet software on your computer and that it costs $30.

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What I’m Doing

Either I’m getting old and worn-out, or Jarvis is getting to me, because right now I’m with Chris: rooting Android isn’t a process I want to go through again or have to maintain. In that spirit of laziness, I also don’t want to have to mess with proxy servers or the command line when I tether; I want to click “Connect” and get online. So, I went with PDAnet, which was the simplest but not free option of the bunch.

How are you tethering your Android device?

Smarterware is Lifehacker editor emeritus Gina Trapani’s new home away from ‘hacker. To get all of the latest from Smarterware, be sure to subscribe to the Smarterware RSS feed. For more, check out Gina’s weekly Smarterware feature here on Lifehacker.

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While working on a new project, we came across some compatibility problems in a plugin that we want to use in that project. We have a known solution that works and doesn’t require the plugin, but if we can make the plugin work without too much additional work it’s worth using it. We have a limited amount of time to finish this project due to our new iteration system, so we’re feeling some time pressure, but we don’t really have enough information to make a good decision yet.

Rather than making an immediate decision, Jeff decided to spend another 30 minutes with the plugin to see if he could make it work. If we can solve the compatibility problems in those 30 minutes, it will be a nice win and we can make use of the plugin that we want to. On the flip side, we already have a known solution to the problem. Even if we’re not able to solve the problems we’ll only lose a half an hour, so it’s worth the time to do a very short spike to see if we can fix it.

One of the most popular and long-standing children’s shows in the country is set to get its own line of video games, courtesy of Warner Bros. The Associated Press reports that WB has inked a deal to make Sesame Street games. The games will star the well-known Sesame Street crew, including the likes of Big Bird and Elmo. No word has been revealed yet on actual titles or even release windows. But, the publisher is keen on using motion controls, which makes the games good candidates for the Wii, 360’s Natal, and Sony’s motion device coming later this year. “That makes it very easy and is developmentally appropriate for preschoolers, as opposed to dealing with a very complex controller,” said Sesame Workshop distribution VP Terry Fitzpatrick. “We also think that kind of technology will make it incredibly fun for parents with a preschooler to be engaged around a gaming activity together.”

The games are most likely to be targeted at an E rating from the ESRB, or even the underutilized E/C (Early Childhood) rating. E/C games are usually relegated to child-specific consoles like Leapster, but a respected franchise like Sesame Street might just let us see polished, child-friendly games appearing on the major consoles.

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Fans will have to wait just a little bit longer to finally get their hands on a new Splinter Cell game. Previously slated for February 2010, the latest in the series has been pushed back along with R.U.S.E.

Announced way back in 2007, Splinter Cell: Conviction was originally meant to debut that holiday season. Instead, it was pushed back into 2008, then fell off the radar completely while the dev team sought to retool the project. It finally reemerged at E3 2009, and has now been delayed twice more.

The new game will prominently feature cooperative multiplayer, with a separate campaign being developed around the mode. It will also feature a new multiplayer mode titled Deniable Ops.

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When Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill was first announced, many people were so shocked by the provision that would let Mandelson or his successor change copyright law at will, with no Parliamentary approval, that they started focusing on that, rather than the expected problem with the bill, like the fact that it could allow people to be kicked offline without a conviction. There has been a lot of pushback from some politicians in the UK and various amendments proposed to fix the bill. And now it looks like the gov’t has agreed to make some changes to the infamous Section 17 provision.

Of course, the concessions appear to be rather minor, and my more cynical view is that they knew they were going to do this all along. The idea is simple. Introduce one section that’s even more ridiculous and outrageous than the sections you really want passed, and then let all the complaints and press coverage focus on that more ridiculous section. Then, after people get all worked up about it, “concede” just a little bit, and notice that most people no longer have the energy to fight about the other provisions.

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In a revealing interview for the upcoming Jan. 25 issue of In Touch Weekly, former GOP presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol open up about the experience of raising their toddler sons together.

Bristol gave birth to her son Tripp in December 2008. Since splititng from the boy’s father, Playgirl beefcake Levi Johnston, Bristol has taken up her mother’s abstinence only campaign.

“I’m not going to have sex until I’m married…I can guarantee it,” the teen mom says.
“Tripp is the love of my life — I couldn’t ask for a better baby, but the reality is I’m 19 years old and I have a 1-year-old. I wish I could be in my 30s with a baby, and not be 20. Just having him so young — I have to work, and I have to provide, because I’m a single mom.”

Bristol did not discuss her on-going custody battle with Johnston.

Sarah made her debut as a commentator for the FOX News Channel on last night’s O’Reilly Factor. She tells In Touch that raising her special needs son Trig, who has Down syndrome, has made her a more patient mother.

“He’s made me more patient and compassionate, and more focused on priorities that really matter.”

The Palin on In Touch hits newsstands this Friday.

When Allegra Fullerton got married last November, her niece was the flower girl. Like most her niece was a bit awkward going down the aisle, but Allegra’s sister stood in the wings and encouraged her on. What a sweet robot.

Allegra’s sister Laurel is “into robots”, we’re told, and decided to built the flower-blowing bot for her sister’s wedding to Andy Fischer. From the pictures it looks like the bot was a hit.

The Flower Girl even took a turn on the dancefloor.

I spoke to Allegra just moments ago. She explained why she had a robot in her wedding:

I have always, always loved robots and have a collection of books, toys, and now an actual robot! How can you compete with a robot crusing down the aisle spitting out flowers on the ground? I wanted my wedding to have a playful feel and pay tribute to my upbringing (Dad and sister are both engineers) and really give a San Francisco feel to the event.

My sister built the robot and has been building robots since she was in high school. The ah ha moment for having a robot flower girl was one sunny afternoon at brunch with my fiance. I had a vision, thankfully he shared it and after a chat with my sister (who was a Mechanical Engineer Grad Student at Stanford at the time) she said she would make it happen and we went from there.

Update! Engineering Sister Laurel writes in with details of the build:

WeddingBot (or so I call it) was built for my sister, Allegra, since she didn’t know any young children to act as flower child or ring bearer. I had recently finished building a water-squirting remote-controlled duck boat for a class (details at: http://www.stanford.edu/~laurelf/duck/ ) so she asked me to make her a remote-control robot that would spew flowers.

WeddingBot was mostly designed and built during my internship at Pocobor ( http://www.pocobor.com/ ) a small mechatronics consulting company in San Francisco. When I wasn’t working on projects for them they were happy to let me to use their software and tools to design the circuit boards and program the bot.

The chassis of WeddingBot was pretty simple, two boxes from Daiso, some wooden columns, and a motor kit with wheels. A large computer fan with plastic ducting was used to blow flowers out of the top. The bot was powered by RC car batteries (purchased at a hobby shop) and had a circuit board I designed for translating wireless commands from the controller (sent via an xBee Pro) into motor/fan responses.

The controller was based on an old Microsoft Sidewinder joystick I’ve had since middle school. I took it apart and connected the button and stick position outputs to another circuit board to translate the joystick inputs into wireless commands the robot could understand.

Both the joystick and robot circuit boards had microcontrollers that I programmed in C.

Driving WeddingBot was pretty straightforward. The amount the stick was tilted forward or back determined the overall speed and the left/right position determined how much it would veer left or right at that speed. Holding the trigger button would turn on the fan so that flowers would launch out. The back button would switch left/right turn commands to make driving the robot towards you more intuitive (since your left and the robot’s left are opposite in that situation). I added an extra red button that could be used to re-center the joystick if the default position somehow became skewed.

Revenge, an Indiana based small carmaker, has revealed the Verde supercar concept at the North American International Auto Saloon. The company intends to build 3,000 units of the car in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana in the next four years.

The prototype was built by Roush Performance, a well known Ford tuner. It uses carbon fiber flesh for its body and aluminium bones for its chassis. Customers will be able to opt for one of the three available hearts: GM’s LS9 638HP supercharged V8 (if it sound… (read more)

The UFC is steaming toward its debut on Versus with a very solid co-main event combination. Brandon Vera and Jon Jones meet at light heavyweight and UFC.com announced heavyweights Junior Dos Santos and Gabriel Gonzaga will square off. Also featured are John Howard-Anthony Johnson and Eliot Marshall-Eliot Matyushenko. The March 21 card is going to be one of the first events at the newly renovated The Odeum in Broomfield, Colo. 

This is wonderful but there’s still one huge issue to resolve, DirectTV’s snubbing of Versus. That’s a huge deal in a city like Las Vegas where most bars and restaurants use DirectTV and love holding UFC viewing parties. That’s a lot of eyes to ignore. There’s already considerable outrage in Sin City because the Mountain West Conference was dumb enough to place some of its games on Versus, meaning the city’s only real team, UNLV men’s basketball, is unavailable on television several times each season at those same meeting places.

SI.com Josh Gross tweeted earlier Wednesday that he’s hearing the DirectTV-Versus situation will be resolved by March. If you’re an MMA fan, you’d better hope that’s true. Versus is slated for lots of fights in 2010:

"Currently our deal (with Versus) is seven fights," WEC’s Peter Dropick told MMAJunkie.  "That doesn’t mean we can’t do more, but we’re guaranteeing them seven fights, which is, we felt in our discussions with Versus, a good number. The UFC has two events on Versus, as well, so they’re going to be carrying nine fight cards within our family."

Tickets for UFC on Versus 1 go on sale Saturday. Dos Santos (pictured on the left) and Gonzaga were originally scheduled to fight at UFC 108.  

From Russia’s Freezelight comes one of the most beautiful uses of long exposure I’ve ever seen (that is, aside from all of your slow shutter shooting challenge submissions). It’s honestly just wow.

All it took was a Canon 5D, about 300 photos, and I’m guessing loads of patience to put this incredible work together. The follow-up, below, features everything I look for in a piece of art: a ghost, a giant chicken, and slow shutter flower blooming out of nothing.

[Vimeo via Random Good Stuff]

Found under: android, windows mobile, blackberry, symbian, powermat, wireless charging, powerpack, ces 2010,

Powermat rocked the world when it released its innovative wireless charging gadgets in 2009. It managed to sell over 700000 units soon after the release of its Powermat wireless charger. Users simply have to attach wireless charging detectors with their devices and they could easily charge them without any hassle. It is compatible with many electronic devices such as cellphones Smartphones digital cameras bluetooth headsets digital cameras digital readers gaming systems. It also supp

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