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BEIJING — China’s utilities will be required to buy all the power produced by wind farms and other renewable sources under a new law meant to promote the industry and reduce heavy reliance on coal. Legislators approved the measure Saturday as an …

The Malaysian Prime Minister has said that the World Future Energy Summit will play a significant role, alongside Copenhagen, in accelerating the uptake of renewable, the future of the energy sector. He will be one of the speakers the Plenary Welcome …

The Federal Reserve, not surprisingly, figures in a number of non-fiction accounts of the financial crisis. Now comes the fiction: Union Atlantic, a first novel by short-story writer Adam Haslett, 39, to be published in late January, that revolves around a bank that figures it is “too big too fail.”

Set outside Boston, home of a huge bank called Union Atlantic, the plot features — among other things — the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, widower Henry Graves, and his increasingly crazy sister.  After some badly conceived trades put the survival of Union Atlantic at risk, its CEO comes face to face with Graves (even though a Boston bank ordinarily would be the province of the Boston Fed).

“Let me start by saying,” Graves tells the banker, “that if you or your board is under the impression that Union Atlantic is to big to fail, you’re mistaken. There’s no question here of a bailout. If you go under, the markets will take a substantial hit, but with enough liquidity in the system we can cut you loose, I hope you understand that.”

“This, of course, was a bluff,” Haslett writes, in a first novel that the publisher says was finished during the failure of Lehman Brothers last fall. “Henry had already begun receiving calls from the Treasury Department.”

As in the 1995 Bruce Willis movie, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, the New York Fed’s underground gold vaults make an appearance in the novel, this time as an improbable — though accurately described — backdrop to a conversation between Graves and a whistleblower from the bank. The New York Fed president, though, doesn’t figure in the book’s sex scenes.

Raghuram Rajan, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has built a reputation for prescience. Back in 2005, at a gathering to honor then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, he presented a paper asserting that the financial developments of the past couple decades could lead to disaster. It was an unpopular position that garnered harsh reviews at the time. Now people listen more attentively to what he has to say.

Mr. Rajan, who served as the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2003 to 2006, spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the implications of the U.S.’s dismal economic performance in the 2000s — how it has affected perceptions of the U.S. model of capitalism, and how that model might change as a result.

Has the decade of the 2000s — with the downfall of Enron, the bursting of the Internet bubble and the Great Panic — discredited the U.S. model of capitalism?

The rhetoric has changed considerably. People don’t say that the U.S. is the place to emulate any more. The U.S. used to be pretty good at giving lectures in the past, so now of course other countries are taking the chance to thumb their nose at them.

Some people are concluding that capitalism doesn’t work. The problem is that they don’t have anything reasonable to replace it with. To say that we needed more regulation is not to say that markets don’t work.

You travel around the world advising governments and central banks, many of which have aspired to the U.S. model. How has their attitude changed?

People in other countries are taking this crisis as the opportunity to do something about the threat that American capitalism posed to their cozy existence. The insider economy is gaining ground, with its national champions and various forms of protectionism.

I’ll give you an example. I was in India, chairing a committee on financial-sector reforms. One of our proposals was that we should consider reducing the dominance of national banks in the system. The response was “actually, now we’re ahead of the curve, look how the U.S. has nationalized its banks.”

How do you expect the U.S. model of capitalism to change as a result of the crisis? Can it regain its credibility?

Given the other models that we’ve tried in the past, this one seems to work pretty well. It’s sort of like democracy — the greatest good to the greatest number of people.

The question is how you get the benefits without the excess volatility that’s now in the system. I think that’s what we will tackle over the years. We are going to question whether we need a better safety net, we are going to question whether finance should be as risky as it has been.

We may well want to choose more safety and less risk, but we should go into it with open eyes. We can’t have the dynamism and at the same time expect a lot more security.

Can we know if the tradeoff of which you speak — less dynamism in return for more security — will work? Does the field of economics have any way of forecasting the outcome?

The truth is nobody knows. We’re fiddling around with so many things. You want to keep enough incentive to take risk to get the dynamism, but in practice you’re typically going to make mistakes. This is really the history of how we regulate. Each time the pendulum swings, we get some stuff that we later realize is too much and other stuff that we think is absolutely necessary in a modern economy.

Having earned an unprecedented edge on the automotive market this year, China extended its offensive into the railway sector and set a new speed record for long-distance passenger trains over the weekend. Simply put, the trip between Guangzhou, capital of southern Guangdong province and the city of Wuhan, which normally took 11 hours, can now be done in less than three.

The train which managed the feat is part of a new long-distance passenger train service. Called Harmony express,… (read more)

Eco Factor: PV module manufacturing facility to harvest solar energy for power.

Vipiemme Solar has announced that the company’s new manufacturing facility will be powered by renewable energy. The manufacturing site will produce photovoltaic cells, PV modules, solar panels and tracking equipment. Dubbed the Photovoltaic Shed, the facility will harvest clean energy using roof-mounted solar panels.

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Picasa hasn’t been able to take on Flickr’s coolness factor, which it managed to retain to a certain degree even after being acquired by Yahoo, but Google’s photo sharing service has it’s own strengths and what it lacks in charm it makes up in smartness. Most recently, developers have taken advantage of the performance improvements in the online front-end to serve better quality images with no penalty when it comes to loading times.

“A helpful feature of Picasa Web Albums is that when you view photos, they’re automatically resized to fit your browser. We always display the largest-size photo that will fit inside your browser window, up to 1600 pixels if you have a nice big display,” Thomas Kang & Jon Wray, software engineers at Google wrote.

“From our extensive testing, we found that adding a little bit of sharpening can make a subtle but noticeable improvement in the visual quality of resized photos in Picasa Web Albums. So we recently added some logic to the server processing code that adds the appropriate amount of sharpening when necessary, before sending it out to the browser,” tgey added.

In order to enable Picasa to serve the appropriate size image for the browser window, Google stores a few smaller copies of the original image which is usually capped at 1600 pixels. Picasa then determines which of the store… (read more)

Paul Krugman was on ABC’s The Week on Sunday declaring a “reasonably high chance” of a double dip coming next year.

Actually, he doesn’t sound quite as gloomy as you might guess. Yes, he describes the entire recovery so far as being driven by government spending and inventory rebalancing, but the odds of a double dip he does place at lower than 50/50, so that’s good. Obviously he wants much more spending. (via HuffPo)

(Ignore the weird intro to the video below)

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See Also:

• JPMorgan: Short The Dollar, Buy AAA CMBS, And Go Long Emerging Market Credit In 2010
• Stiglitz: The U.S. Will Crash Again Unless We Pass Even More Stimulus
• Risk Of Double-Dip Recession Is Rising, Says Krugman

Michael Schumacher’s return to the series might be a major marketing success for Bernie Ecclestone and his Formula One championship, but the German’s decision doesn’t seem to change a whole lot of the bookmakers’ options for the 2010 campaign.

Although many argue that Schumacher could indeed return to his winning ways inside the championship that he left at the end of 2006, the majority of the betting companies are not so convinced the German ace could upset the odds next year. read more)

Suzuki’s long-time partner in India, Maruti, will introduce its new R III concept next month at Auto Expo 2010. The car is based on a stretched Suzuki SX4 platform, insideline.com wrote, and will come in the form of an MPV with three rows of seats. Still, the production version of the car will undergo several modifications and rumors are pointing to a monocoque chassis.

The engine lineup will include several units optimized for reduced fuel consumption and emissions, with displace… (read more)

Eco Factor: Concept system to harvest solar energy.

Researchers opine that harvesting 40 minutes of sunlight falling on the entire planet can power the world for about a year. However, till date only 1% of that energy is harvested and converted into renewable electricity. Industrial designers have taken up the task to develop systems that can harvest solar energy in a better way, thereby leading to renewable power plants that are more efficient.

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Another high speed accident involving a Ferrari ended up tragically. One person was killed and three others were injured as the supercar got out of control, jumped a median on the Pacific Coast Highway and smashed into a flatbed truck.

According to the Newport Beach Police Department, the accident happened around 5:15 pm, Thursday night, on Pacific Coast Highway between Bayshore Drive and Jamboree Road.

Though there is no official statement about the reason the Ferr… (read more)

Ladies should start gearing up for the Vagabond Chopper Company’s 2010 Chicks Rule & Boys Drool Tour, an on-the-road display dedicated to women motorcycle riders, promoting women who ride and wrench on their own bikes. The 44-foot trailer will stop in all major biker events in 2010 and will offer a mix of on-site how-to seminars, fashion shows, book signings and special guest appearances.

The tour officially kicked off during the 2009 Toys in the Sun Run with featured guests the M… (read more)

Now that the group teams’ launch in Formula One will officially not happen in Valencia, each outfit will try to spend as little money as possible when showing their 2010 challenger to the media next year. Most of the championship’s big guns are scheduled to release their cars in late January, and Mercedes GP don’t make any exception from that rule.

According to German Sunday newspaper Bild am Sonntag, the launch of the 2010 version of the BGP 001 will not happen at Brackley, where… (read more)

With an overall increase in sales in 2009 of 67 percent (this while the whole hybrid industry has decreased by 11 percent), Ford’s hybrid Fusion has set a new record for the company, managing to find itself 31,000 new owners by the end of November.

Hybrid customers increasingly are considering Ford, George Pipas, Ford sales analyst said. And we are seeing a growing number of conquest sales, many of them from customers coming from import brands, mostly Toyota and Honda.
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Everyone is becoming more and more interested in geolocation and for good reason. Besides the hype that surrounds most new technologies, geolocation has a lot of applications and is set to transform the way we use the web in a profound manner. Twitter, which is getting its fair share of hype on its own, is betting big on location and has already released a Geotagging API to enable tweets to have location data attached. Now it’s stepping up its game with the acquisition of Mixer Labs, makers of the GeoAPI which will be integrated with Twitter’s own APIs.

“[W]e’re excited to announce a major new step into the location-aware future. Twitter has acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI,” Twitter cofounder Biz Stone wrote. “The Mixer Labs crew has been working on harnessing the power of local information for a couple years and just recently launched GeoAPI, a comprehensive service for helping developers build geolocation-aware applications. As of today, they’re part of Twitter and will be working to combine the contextual relevance of location to tweets.”

The acquisition was more of a talent hire, though the technology Mixer Labs developed also played a big role. The plan is to implement the GeoAPI directly into Twitter’s own location APIs to speed up the company’s efforts in this area. Mixer La… (read more)

Eco Factor: Prototype device to harvest renewable energy.

Researchers at the Cornell University have created an energy-harvesting tree that uses the flittering of leaves to produce electricity. Dubbed the “Piezo-tree”, the system carries synthetic leaves that are connected to a piezoelectric stem.

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Took some time off for the holidays, did you? Well, things haven’t changed much since you’ve been gone. The world is still afraid of terrorists and Apple’s still rumored to be working on a tablet. Regarding the latter, two rumors have coalesced this morning from component suppliers. First, Taiwan’s Economic Daily is reporting via the Wall Street Journal that Cheng Uei Precision has landed “connector” orders for a “new flat-panel Apple Tablet PC” expected to begin shipping in Q3. Then DigiTimes piles on with its claims that Innolux (not WinTek) will be the initial supplier of 10-inch glass “touch panels” for Apple’s new tablet. DigiTimes then muddles things by claiming that the tablet will begin mass shipments (presumably to consumers) in March or April based on its analysis of shipping schedules from Apple’s upstream component suppliers. One thing’s for sure: if Apple does ever announce an iSlate or whatever they decide to call it, you won’t be using it during the last hour of your flight into the US.

Apple tablet terrorized by component rumors originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mazda is definitely planning to launch the RX-7 in the near future but sources are now indicating that the revived model will actually take the place of the RX-8. If we go the rumor way, the RX-7 will most likely arrive in early 2011 and, once it will be released, the Japanese parent carmaker will discontinue the RX-8, a more expensive model that returned only moderate sales.

Insideline.com writes that the future RX-7 will rely on a recently-revealed Renesis 16X rotary engine fitt… (read more)