TheScientist | A little over one year ago, my team at the J. Craig Venter Institute announced the construction of the first cell completely controlled by a synthetic genome. After 8 years of work on DNA synthesis, assembly, and error correction, and on new ways to transplant and boot up chromosomes, we succeeded in creating a cell that used only a chemically synthesized chromosome to code for all aspects of the cellular phenotype.
DNA is the software of the cell, and our studies have shown that when we change the software we change the species. Because it is based on the digitized DNA sequence, the design of synthetic genomes provides a true interface between the computer and biological life. While genome design will dominate the future, the field has been limited to a few gene changes as a part of pathway design and to the engineering of novel biological circuits, such as oscillators, that can be used to construct semisynthetic biological machines.
One major limitation is the cost—in both money and time—associated with genome modification. For example, it required over a decade of work and reportedly more than $100 million for the team at DuPont to make a dozen or so modifications to the E. coli genome so that it would convert glucose into propanediol to make “renewably sourced” fibers. And while some clever techniques for codon modification in E. coli have emerged recently from the laboratory of George Church, these are a long way from genomes designed and constructed to perform unique metabolic activities.
The tools and techniques developed by my team to assemble a completely synthetic bacterial genome, while relatively efficient (we built the entire 1.1-million-base-pair synthetic genome in less than one month), are also still quite expensive ($0.30 per base pair) due to the current cost of oligonucleotide synthesis. Fortunately, this work has helped create a demand for rapid, accurate, cheap DNA synthesis, which has led to some very novel approaches that could help reduce these costs. Over the past 23 years, the cost of DNA sequencing has dropped 8 orders of magnitude. Similar improvements with DNA synthesis await technological breakthroughs that are tantalizingly close.
TheScientist | In the late 1990s, a handful of physicists and engineers began to take a greater interest in biology. The Human Genome Project was spitting out more and more gene sequences—blueprints for the protein building blocks of the cell—generating a flood of new information about the molecular machinery of life. Trouble was, there were not enough biologists doing the job of figuring out how all these genes and proteins worked together to create a living, breathing organism.
It was around this time that Boston University bioengineer James Collins saw his chance to inject a little engineering know-how into the study of biology. There were two ways to go about it, he figured—either disassemble cells or build them. “A burgeoning young engineer [is] either the kind of kid who takes stuff apart to try to figure out how it works, or [he’s] the kid who puts stuff together,” Collins says. Though both approaches seemed promising, there simply wasn’t enough known about the structures or functions of the genes and their protein products to infer how all the parts worked together by taking a cell apart, piece by piece.
“Reverse engineering seems to be too challenging,” Collins recalls musing to his then grad student Tim Gardner. “But can we do forward engineering? Can we take parts from cells and put them together in circuits, just as an electrical engineer might?”
The answer was yes. After two years of tweaking various characteristics of transcriptional repressors in E. coli, the team succeeded in constructing biology’s first synthetic toggle switch—two repressor genes controlled by two promoters that caused their respective repressors to be expressed by default. The repressors were designed to inactivate each other, however, such that the two genes would never be fully expressed at the same time. The addition of a stimulus, such as a chemical pulse to suppress one gene long enough for the other to come on, allowed the system to flip from one stable state (gene A on, gene B off) to its other stable state (A off, B on).
The results were published in 2000, alongside a paper from physicist Stanislas Leibler’s lab at Princeton University, which had undertaken a similar, but independent, project. Much like Collins with Gardner, Leibler teamed up with his graduate student Michael Elowitz to build an oscillator, which, like Collins’s toggle switches, used transcriptional repressors in E. coli. The Princeton team engineered three genes to inhibit each other in a cyclical manner, rock-paper-scissors style, with each gene repressing the next when a threshold concentration of its gene product had been reached. The result was the periodic expression of all three genes—monitored by the periodic glow of green fluorescent protein (GFP), whose expression was linked to another copy of a promoter controlling one of the three repressors.
The two publications are now widely cited as the seminal papers of synthetic biology, though neither paper received much publicity at the time. “[We were] kind of a ragtag group of engineers and physicists who were essentially amateurs in molecular biology,” Collins says. But in the last decade, many trained molecular and cell biologists have turned to syn bio, designing synthetic circuits built from biological components and branching out from the transcriptional regulation tools of Leibler, now at Rockefeller University, and Collins to add translation and post-translation components.
news.com.au | PEOPLE should embrace the sort of anarchism typified by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Noam Chomsky says.
The American commentator, philosopher and activist was being interviewed in front of a packed theatre at the Sydney Opera House today when he was asked his thoughts on Prime Minister Julia Gillard's comments that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's motivations were "sort of anarchic".
Professor Chomsky said if anarchy meant questioning authority and demanding the truth, then everyone should be anarchic.
"In that sense I think everyone should be an anarchist," he said, in response to heavy applause from the audience.
Anarchism should not be viewed in a negative light, Prof Chomsky said.
"It's not the conception of anarchism as people running wild and breaking windows.
"In our age we have to overcome the barriers introduced by the ranks of capitalism and corporate capitalism and I think there is some sense in that, at the core of the anarchist tradition ... is to ask and raise questions about authority, hierarchy and domination.
"And if it cannot justify itself, then it should be dismantled. That's the core principle of anarchism."
His comments came after Britain's High Court in London upheld a ruling that Assange should be sent to face questioning by Swedish authorities over claims of sexual assault against two women.
Prof Chomsky is to receive the 2012 Sydney Peace Prize at a ceremony later this evening.
WaPo | We’ve all been there. The boardrooms with flip charts at the front of the room and candy on the table. The all-hands emergency meetings to come up with ideas to fix the latest mess. And of course, the off-sites in drab hotel ballrooms that are supposed to somehow spark creativity.
Such efforts at brainstorming are well intended, of course. The problem? They rarely work. While leaders hang onto the idea that bringing together a big group of people will produce truly innovative ideas, it’s rare that actually happens.
Evidence has long shown that getting a group of people to think individually about solutions, and then combining their ideas, can be more productive than getting them to think as a group. Some people are afraid of introducing radical ideas in front of a group and don’t speak up; in other cases, the group is either too small or too big to be effective.
But according to a recently published study, the real problem might be that participants’ get stuck on each others’ ideas. On Monday, the British Psychological Society highlighted a recent study by Nicholas Kohn and Steven Smith, two researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington and Texas A&M University. They asked undergraduate students to contribute ideas for improving Texas A&M, both individually and in collective groups. They shared the ideas on a computer, either in small chat groups or alone, but combined together after the fact. As expected, the “nominal” groups, or those made up of individual ideas that were later pulled together, outperformed the real chat groups, both with the number of ideas and the diversity of them.
Kohn and Smith believed the cause might be because of “cognitive fixation,” or the concept that, when exposed to group members’ ideas, people focused on those and blocked other types of ideas from taking hold. They experimented with this by manipulating the number of ideas participants saw in their chat windows, with some getting a few cues and others getting more. Their hypothesis was right: When exposed to many cues, the undergrads offered up less creative, diverse ideas. The numbers improved when the students were given a five-minute break during the exercise.
As with all such studies, there’s plenty of pretty obvious common sense to this research. But it’s a helpful reminder of how unhelpful it can be when managers dump people in a room together, thinking it will result in creative big ideas. Somehow, a belief in the power of group brainstorming sessions persists, despite evidence that it doesn’t work. Great minds can come up with their own ideas, but sometimes the problem is they think too much alike.
PhysOrg |Most human populations are the product of a series of range expansions having occurred since modern humans left Africa some 50,000 years ago to colonize the rest of the world, but how have these processes influenced today's population diversity? An international research team led by Damian Labuda at the University of Montreal, Hélène Vézina from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (UQAC) and by Laurent Excoffier from the University of Bern and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics have studied the effects of rapid territorial and demographic expansions on recent human evolution.
Using genealogies including more than one million individuals in a recently colonized region of Quebec, they show that pioneer individuals on the edge of the colonization wave had a selective advantage, such that their genes are now predominantly found in the population. Similar processes are likely to have occurred in other regions of the world, so that this study suggests that range expansions played a key role in human evolution. The results of their study are published today in the prestigious journal Science.
The exact mechanisms of population expansions are difficult to study as they extend over many generations and hundreds or thousands of years. The expansion of humans into the Charlevoix Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area of Quebec offered researchers a unique opportunity to study a range expansion in real time, thanks to the availability of deep and complete genealogies reconstructed from parish registers. The descending genealogies of all couples who married in these regions between 1686 and 1960 were reconstructed thanks to the BALSAC database managed by Hélène Vézina. The analysis of this huge genealogy including more than one million individuals shows that the genes present in today's population were mostly transmitted by ancestors who were living on or close to the wave front of the expansion.
"We knew that the migration of species into new areas promoted the spread of rare mutations through a phenomenon known as 'gene surfing', but now we find that selection at the wave front can make this surfing much more efficient. There is thus a long-term evolutionary success of people living on the edge", Excoffier said. Women on the wave front had a selective advantage "We find that families who are at the forefront of a range expansion into new territories had a greater reproductive success.", Labuda explained. Women on the front of the expansion indeed married about one year earlier than women in the range core and had 15% more children and even 20% more married children. The higher fertility on the wave front is compatible with an increase in resource abundance and lowered competition among individuals to access these resources. "People could indeed marry younger as more farm land was available on the wave front than in the core, where good lands were mostly already occupied", says Excoffier.
Human curiosity, also an inherited trait from past range expansions?
Some human traits others than those the team has measured may have also evolved during range expansions. More specifically, if there are some traits favoring dispersal and colonization, it is highly likely that they have also evolved during past range expansions. In other words, human curiosity and the desire to look over the next mountain or hilltop might be one of these inherited traits. "It is exciting to see how a study on a regional population of Quebec can bring insights on human processes that have been going on for thousands of years. The BALSAC genealogical database is a powerful tool for social and genetic research and this study is a very nice demonstration of its possibilities", Vézina said.
PsychologyToday | For as long as human animals have pondered how we might differ from nonhuman animals (hereafter animals for convenience) many ideas have come and gone. For example, it's been postulated that humans are created in the image of God and are the only rational beings. People vary in their opinions on whether we are the only animals who are created in the image of God and of course it's not a claim that can be proven or disproven. However, ample research has shown that animals are rational beings and that they also share with us many other traits that were once thought to be uniquely human, including manufacturing and using tools, having culture, having a sense of self, using complex systems of communication, producing art, and having rich and deep emotional lives and knowing right from wrong. Two traits that seem to separate us from other animals are we're the only animals who cook food and no other animals are as destructive and evil.
Now, it's been suggested that perhaps mental time travel and having a theory of mind are two uniquely human ways of thinking that separate us from other animals. This idea is put forth in a book called The Recursive Mind by Michael Corballis. Corballis argues that recursion is a uniquely human trait. In an excellent review of Corballis's book, anthropologist Barbara J. King makes many of his arguments palatable to a lay audience. So for example, she writes, "it's a unique human trick to communicate by embedding structures within other structures, as when one noun phrase in a sentence is made to contain another. An example of such linguistic recursion is furnished by Corballis. The non-recursive sentences 'Jane loves John'' and 'Jane flies aeroplanes' may be combined to produce the recursive sentence 'Jane, who flies aeroplanes, loves John'. Less interested in language than the mind itself, Corballis states flatly that recursion is 'the primary characteristic that distinguishes the human mind from that of other animals'".
Mental time travel and theory of mind are recursive ways of thinking. King goes on to write, "During mental time travel, an experience that we've had in the past or that we imagine for ourselves in the future is 'inserted into [our] present consciousness'. Similarly, in theory of mind, we insert what we believe to be someone else's state of mind into our own."
So, how do Corballis's ideas hold up given what we know about the behavior and cognitive capacities of animals?
Reuters | Catholic Ireland's stunning decision to close its embassy to the Vatican is a huge blow to the Holy See's prestige and may be followed by other countries which feel the missions are too expensive, diplomatic sources said on Friday.
The closure brought relations between Ireland and the Vatican, once ironclad allies, to an all-time low following the row earlier this year over the Irish Church's handling of sex abuse cases and accusations that the Vatican had encouraged secrecy.
Ireland will now be the only major country of ancient Catholic tradition without an embassy to the Vatican.
"This is really bad for the Vatican because Ireland is the first big Catholic country to do this and because of what Catholicism means in Irish history," said a Vatican diplomatic source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
He said Ireland informed the Vatican shortly before the announcement was made on Thursday night.
Dublin's foreign ministry said the embassy was being closed because "it yields no economic return" and that relations would be continued with an ambassador in Dublin.
The source said the Vatican was "extremely irritated" by the wording equating diplomatic missions with economic return, particularly as the Vatican sees its diplomatic role as promoting human values.
Diplomats said the Irish move might sway others to follow suit to save money because double diplomatic presences in Rome are expensive.
It was the latest crack in relations that had been seen as rock solid until a few years ago.
PBS | At the height of the Great Depression, more than a quarter million teenagers were living on the road in America, many criss-crossing the country by illegally hopping freight trains. This film tells the story of ten of these teenage hobos -- from the reasons they left home to what they experienced -- all within the context of depression-era America.
AP | he jobs crisis has left so many people out of work for so long that most of America's unemployed are no longer receiving unemployment benefits.
Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent - a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America's 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.
Congress is expected to decide by year's end whether to continue providing emergency unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks in the hardest-hit states. If the emergency benefits expire, the proportion of the unemployed receiving aid would fall further.
The ranks of the poor would also rise. The Census Bureau says unemployment benefits kept 3.2 million people from slipping into poverty last year. It defines poverty as annual income below $22,314 for a family of four.
Yet for a growing share of the unemployed, a vote in Congress to extend the benefits to 99 weeks is irrelevant. They've had no job for more than 99 weeks. They're no longer eligible for benefits.
Their options include food stamps or other social programs. Nearly 46 million people received food stamps in August, a record total. That figure could grow as more people lose unemployment benefits.
So could the government's disability rolls. Applications for the disability insurance program have jumped about 50 percent since 2007.
"There's going to be increased hardship," said Wayne Vroman, an economist at the Urban Institute.
The number of unemployed has been roughly stable this year. Yet the number receiving benefits has plunged 30 percent.
Government unemployment benefits weren't designed to sustain people for long stretches without work. They usually don't have to. In the recoveries from the previous three recessions, the longest average duration of unemployment was 21 weeks, in July 1983.
By contrast, in the wake of the Great Recession, the figure reached 41 weeks in September. That's the longest on records dating to 1948. The figure is now 39 weeks.
"It was a good safety net for a shorter recession," said Carl Van Horn, an economist at Rutgers University. It assumes "the economy will experience short interruptions and then go back to normal."
Weekly unemployment checks average about $300 nationwide. If the extended benefits aren't renewed, growth could slow by up to a half-percentage point next year, economists say.
AP |Tempers are snapping as fast as the snow-laden branches that brought down power wires across the Northeast last weekend, with close to 300,000 Connecticut customers still in the dark and the state's biggest utility warning them not to threaten or harass repair crews.
Angry residents left without heat as temperatures drop to near freezing overnight have been lashing out at Connecticut Light & Power: accosting repair crews, making profane criticisms online and suing. In Simsbury, a hard-hit suburban town of about 25,000 residents, National Guard troops deployed to clear debris have been providing security outside a utility office building.
At a shelter at Simsbury High School, resident Stacy Niezabitowski, 53, said Friday she would love to yell at someone from Connecticut Light & Power but hadn't seen any of its workers.
"Everybody is looking for someplace to vent - not a scapegoat, just someplace to vent your anger so somebody will listen and do something," said Niezabitowski, who was having lunch at the shelter with her 21-year-old daughter. "Nobody is doing anything."
The October nor'easter knocked out power to more than 3 million homes and business across the Northeast, including 830,000 in Connecticut, where outages now exceed those of all other states combined. Connecticut Light & Power has blamed the extent of the devastation partly on overgrown trees in the state, where it says some homeowners and municipalities have resisted the pruning of limbs for reasons including aesthetics.
The company called the snowstorm and resulting power outages "an historic event" and said it was focused on getting almost all power back on by Sunday night.
For some residents still dealing with outages, no excuse is acceptable.
In Avon, a Farmington Valley town where 85 percent of customers were still without power on Friday, town manager Brandon Robertson said he faulted CL&P for an "absolutely unacceptable and completely avoidable" situation. He said the high school that is being used as an emergency shelter was still running on a generator. Although public works crews had cleared most of the town roads, he said, more than 25 still were blocked as they waited for CL&P crews to clear power lines.
"Our residents are angry. We're angry," he said. "It's just really shocking."
oftwominds | There is no way that printing money or standard "austerity" measures can overcome the structural friction crippling economies such as Greece and Italy--or those of the U.S., the rest of the E.U. and China.
If we set aside the absurdist headlines about various "rescues" of insolvent governments, we might focus instead on a larger question: how much of the Greek and Italian economies is useless friction? How much of the U.S. economy is useless friction? How about economies like China and India that are rife with corruption at every level?
The question matters because friction will seize up a machine once the energy devoted to overcoming it drops below a critical threshold. It seems painfully obvious that Europe is about to reach that threshold, the U.S. is getting close and China is teetering on the precipice. Once those three seize up, then the rest of the world will follow.
Behind all the headlines of rescues, bailouts, austerity packages and all the rest of the propaganda spewed out by eurocrats and their media lackeys, let's ask the question no one dares ask: what if the entire European Union bureaucracy is nothing but friction? If so, then the E.U. isn't the "savior" of the Eurozone economies, it is the cause of their systemic ills.
Let's explore the analogy of friction a bit.
Friction is the resistance between moving parts that cause a bicycle in motion to come to a stop once you stop pedaling. If you flatten the bike’s tires, increasing the resistance between the rubber and the road, that increase in friction causes the bike to slow far more quickly than a bicycle with inflated tires. Increase the friction enough, and you can barely push the bike forward.
Though friction cannot be eliminated entirely, it can be reduced to the point that very modest amounts of energy create substantial results. Alternatively, friction can increase to the point that the energy input required to maintain output rises far beyond the value of the output. At that juncture, the system freezes up. The returns are so marginal that they no longer justify the energy and expense needed to maintain the machine.
A bicycle with wheels that barely turn will be tossed aside when the rider realizes he can go faster by walking -- and with much less effort.
How Much of the US Economy is Friction?
Economies have friction, too. When the friction increases to the point that much of the economy’s energy and surplus are being consumed in overcoming systemic friction, then the system will eventually freeze up and be abandoned.
How much of the U.S. and other global economies is friction? It is a difficult question, as we’ve grown so accustomed to our way of doing things that we tend to assume that the present system is the most efficient one possible. If it is visibly inefficient, that we assume it serves a social need so vital that its maintenance overrides the high costs of maintaining the system.
Much of our faith is based on the belief that because we live in a market economy, the efficiencies intrinsic to a market economy -- such as customers gravitating toward the goods and services that offer the lowest costs and highest benefits -- are being effectively captured by the US economy.
But this is mostly wishful thinking, the net result of ceaseless self-promotion by the Status Quo that benefits from the enormous friction that is, in fact, grinding down the US economy. In actuality, market forces influence very little of the US economy, and what they do influence is a series of carefully limited false choices constructed by non-market forces and the immense powers of marketing.
DailyMail | A Catholic Church child safety co-ordinator who was in charge of investigating sexual abuse allegations was jailed for 12 months today for internet peadophile offences.
Christopher Jarvis, 49, a married father-of-four, investigated historic claims of child abuse, interviewing the victims when they were adults.
He was responsible for child protection at 120 churches and parish community groups for nine years.
He also, as a member of the Devon and Cornwall Multi-Agency Safeguarding Team, had access to police and social services information about victims of child abuse.
As a result of the conviction and sentencing, the Roman Catholic Church has ordered a review of child protection across the South West of England.
According to The Times, the Bishop of Plymouth, the Right Rev Christopher Budd, has asked the NSPCC to carry out the inquiry into child protection arrangements in Devon, Cornwall and Dorset.
The revelations that the church hired a peadophile in a key child protection role will add to the controversy surrounding the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales over its handling of sexual abuse.
At the time of his arrest in March this year, Jarvis was leading an investigation into an historic sex abuse allegation at Buckfast Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Devon.
He was arrested after uploading images of pre-pubescent boys on to the Ning social networking website.
Police officers who traced him to his home in Plymouth, Devon, found more than 4,000 child porn images, mainly of boys aged 10 to 12, on his church-supplied computer and a memory stick when they raided the house in Penrose Road.
The court heard that 4,389 images were found on the laptop and memory stick.
The majority, 3,721, were at Level One, the lowest level for abusive images.
But there were 120 at Level Four, which includes scenes of child rape, and 12 at Level Five, which can include scenes of torture and sadism.
Jarvis, who the court heard claimed he was abused as a child, was sentenced at the city's crown court after admitted 12 counts of making, possessing and distributing indecent images at a previous magistrates' court hearing.
Business Insider | As the events that led to Oakland protester Scott Olsen's head injury continue to unfold and investigations begin, we thought it important to offer some perspective.
This comment is from a former Marine with special operations in crowd control.
He points out that shooting canisters such as those that likely hit Scott Olsen is prohibited under rules of engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regardless of any political position on the Occupy protests, these are some Interesting insights:
Before gas goes into a crowd shield bearers have to be making no progress moving a crowd or crowd must be assaulting the line. Not with sticks and stones but a no bullshit assault. 3 warnings must be given to the crowd in a manner they can hear that force is about to be used. Shield bearers take a knee and CS gas is released in grenade form first to fog out your lines because you have gas masks. You then kick the canisters along in front of your lines. Projectile gas is not used except for longer ranged engagement or trying to steer the crowd ( by steering a crowd I mean firing gas to block a street off ). You also have shotguns with beanbags and various less than lethal rounds for your launchers. These are the rules for a WARZONE!!
How did a cop who is supposed to have training on his weapon system accidentally SHOOT someone in the head with a 40mm gas canister? Simple. He was aiming at him.
I'll be the first to admit a 40mm round is tricky to aim if you are inexperienced but anyone can tell the difference between aiming at head level and going for range.
The person that pulled that trigger has no business being a cop. He sent that round out with the intention of doing some serious damage to the protestors. I don't care what the protestors were doing. I never broke my rules of engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan. So I can't imagine what a protester in the states did to deserve a headshot with a 40mm. He's damn lucky to be alive and that cop knows he was using lethal force against a protester he is supposed to be protecting.
Additionally: Jesse Davis mentions "The methods prohibited in war, and actions after the fact are also against war zone policy." Check out his infographic here.
Specifically these two transcribed directly from US Army Law of War/Law of Armed Conflict training.
The Military manual states:
…have a duty to collect and care for the wounded. Prioritize treatment according to injuries. Make NO treatment distinction based on nationality. All soldiers, enemy or friendly, must be treated the same.
Second, the officer threw a flash-bang directly into a group of people trying to carry him away for medical treatment. Here's the Military guidance on that decision: Medical Personnel Considered out of combat if they exclusively engaged in medical duties. (GWS, art. 24.) Doctors, surgeons, nurses, chemists, stretcher-bearers, medics, corpsman, and orderlies, etc..., who are “exclusively engaged” in the direct care of the wounded and sick.
NYTimes | On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can’t tell you how people dressed for this year’s party, but I can tell you about last year’s.
That’s because a former employee of Steven J. Baum recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against.
When we spoke later, she added that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set. “There is this really cavalier attitude,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their homes.” Nor does the firm try to help people get mortgage modifications; the pressure, always, is to foreclose. I told her I wanted to post the photos on The Times’s Web site so that readers could see them. She agreed, but asked to remain anonymous because she said she fears retaliation.
Let me describe a few of the photos. In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.
A second picture shows a coffin with a picture of a woman whose eyes have been cut out. A sign on the coffin reads: “Rest in Peace. Crazy Susie.” The reference is to Susan Chana Lask, a lawyer who had filed a class-action suit against Steven J. Baum — and had posted a YouTube video denouncing the firm’s foreclosure practices. “She was a thorn in their side,” said my source.
A third photograph shows a corner of Baum’s office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Another shows a sign that reads, “Baum Estates” — needless to say, it’s also full of foreclosed houses. Most of the other pictures show either mock homeless camps or mock foreclosure signs — or both. My source told me that not every Baum department used the party to make fun of the troubled homeowners they made their living suing. But some clearly did. The adjective she’d used when she sent them to me — “appalling” — struck me as exactly right.
Nature | US intelligence agency aims to forecast unrest by reading the runes of social media. It is every government's dream: a system that can predict future events such as riots, political upheavals and the outbreak of wars. Last week, a collection of academics and private businesses was scrambling to meet the deadline for proposals for research aiming to do just that.
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a research arm of the US intelligence community, is sponsoring the work under the Open Source Indicators (OSI) programme. The three-year project, with an unspecified budget, is designed to gather digital data from a range of sources, from traffic webcams to television to Twitter. The goal, according to IARPA, is to provide the intelligence community with predictions of social and political events that can "beat the news".
Initially, the OSI project will focus on Latin America, which has abundant publicly available data and offers a convenient test bed for researchers' models. Those models will build on strategies that have already shown promise for predicting disease outbreaks and consumer behaviour, and which are becoming increasingly popular with US national security agencies (see Nature 471, 566–568; 2011).
Indeed, the OSI project is one of many being sponsored by the US national security community, which seeks to meld mathematics, computer science and economics with the social sciences, creating a new field of social and political forecasting that has often been compared to Isaac Asimov's concept of 'psychohistory'.
At the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, computer scientist Peter Gloor has been working with colleagues to build models that can predict consumer behaviour, such as ticket sales for Hollywood films, using a range of online sources including social media. "We're up to 90% accuracy" for predicting box-office returns, says Gloor, who is part of a team applying for OSI funding.
MichaelHudson | AMY GOODMAN: And what does it mean if Papandreou is out?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It could mean a number of things. Either it means that other members of his party—the finance minister, who is against the referendum—will come in and not hold a referendum at all, and try to keep Greece on the austerity plan, or there will be a fall in the government, a no-confidence vote, and people will presumably vote for the Conservative Party, which is very much like the Republican Party in the United States.
The reason there have been all of these demonstrations is the same reason that the Occupy Wall Street movement is in New York and the rest of the United States. The frustration is not only at the financial overhead, the debt overhead; it’s at the political fact that there is no choice. Both the Conservative Party and the Socialist Party in Greece, just like the Republicans and Democrats here, are both taking the side of the banks. So people don’t even have a chance to express a democratic alternative to essentially being ground down by debt peonage and letting the economy polarize even further between creditors and debtors.
AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of President Obama being there, and what this means—the meeting of the G20, what is happening in Greece—for the United States?
MICHAEL HUDSON: He’s making the threat that Europe has to cut its own throat in order to save the United States hedge funds and banks from taking a loss on the Greek bonds that they’ve insured. One of the reasons that people have been willing to buy Greek bonds is they bought credit insurance. And the European banks, mostly—maybe not Barclays or Deutsche Bank, but most banks—are not willing to write credit insurance, because everybody at the Böckler Foundation conference here in Berlin, every single economist says there is no conceivable way in which Greece can pay its debts. But the American hedge funds and bankers have come in and said, “We’ll write a guarantee.” Then they lean on President Obama and Tim Geithner to tell the Europeans: “You have to make Greece pay, so that we win the bets that we’ve made, because if we lose the bets, then we go under and the stock market crashes, and a lot of people can’t collect on their money market funds.” So this is just naked brute force that Mr. Obama is doing. He’s basically telling Europe, “Don’t go the democratic route. Support Wall Street.”
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Hudson, economist, president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, distinguished research professor of economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, author of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.
We’re going to go to break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about a related issue. What happened with MF Holdings? How is related to Greece and to the United States? Its head, Jon Corzine, was both a senator and governor from New Jersey. Stay with us.
–
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Michael Hudson, the economist, back in to relate what we’re seeing with MF Global to what’s happening in Greece and in Europe right now. Michael?
MICHAEL HUDSON: I was discussing that earlier this morning with a German investment banker, and their belief is that, so far on Wall Street, Wall Street’s been able to have the attorney general they want, Eric Holder, who has refused to prosecute any financial crime on Wall Street at all, as my colleague Bill Black has pointed out. But now, the investment banker told me, it’s very much like The Godfather. Even the Mafia once in awhile has to get rid of one of its own members and sacrifice its own members for the common good. And the European told me that in Europe, it’s really a no-no to use customer funds for your own—to gamble with that at all, that this is so criminal that if there is no criminal prosecution of Corzine, if it turns out that he did take the money, then that is going to lead the European capital markets to withdraw their money from the American capital markets, because the whole — the whole of Wall Street would turn out to be gangsters, without any prosecution, without any rule of law at all.
So, this is the moment of decision.
Is Mr. Holder going to continue to refuse to prosecute any financial criminal and saying, “Crime is us,” or is he finally going to do—enforce the rule of law on America? Nobody knows over here.
AMY GOODMAN: William Cohan, your response?
WILLIAM COHAN: Well, I think Professor Hudson is a little extreme in comparing Wall Street to the Mafia and gangsters.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I didn’t compare it. That was the Wall — that was the German banker.
AMY GOODMAN: And Michael Hudson, we just got this word, breaking news, that the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, is expected to offer his resignation within the next half-hour of this broadcast, sources in Athens have just told the BBC. Your response?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think the issue is—
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve got five seconds.
MICHAEL HUDSON: —what the man just said: what kind of capitalism are we going to have? Will it be industrial capitalism—
Democracy Now | AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to Oakland to find out about this first general strike since 1946. But first, from the economy in Europe, we turn now to a major banking scandal here in the United States. On Monday, the commodities and derivatives brokerage house MF Global Holdings filed one of the largest bankruptcies in American corporate history, with almost $40 billion in liabilities. It’s the largest failure on Wall Street since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
The chair and the chief executive officer of MF Global Holdings is Jon Corzine, the former New Jersey governor, U.S. senator. Corzine is also the former CEO of Goldman Sachs.
MF Global is also the biggest U.S. casualty so far of the European debt crisis. MF Global filed for bankruptcy in part because of risky bets on debt issued by Italy, Portugal and Spain. MF Global shocked markets last week after disclosing a $191 million quarterly loss. This saw its shares fall by two-thirds and its credit rating cut exponentially. The firm had made big bets on sovereign bonds issued by European countries, but the unsteady future of the eurozone meant investors downgraded the firm’s prospects.
Yesterday, regulators noted MF Global did not separate its customers’ money from its own funds, although required to do so by law. They also said the firm may have transferred hundreds of millions of dollars in customer funds to avoid detection by authorities. In a Bloomberg article called "Others Pay Price for Corzine’s Risky Revenge," journalist William Cohan writes, "More than three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the financial crisis, we don’t have in place anything close to necessary regulations to try to prevent companies like MF Global from exploding."
So we’re going to William Cohan right now. He lives right here in New York City. He’s in our studio, contributing editor to Vanity Fair, author of several books, including Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World.
William Cohan, welcome to Democracy Now!
WILLIAM COHAN: Thank you, Amy. Nice to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: The significance of this bankruptcy?
WILLIAM COHAN: Well, I mean, it’s extraordinary—that’s the thing—because it didn’t have to happen. You have a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, albeit he left in 1999, and between now and then he was a senator from New Jersey and a governor from New Jersey, as you pointed out. He hadn’t done, himself, a trade since 1986, so he was somewhat removed. But this was all about his own psychological need for redemption, to get back what he lost by getting canned from Goldman Sachs in 1999, his desire to be a major player again on Wall Street. He decided to swing for the fences, make a huge bet on these European bonds, which, by the way, may turn out to be correct. We don’t know yet, because as you were saying in your previous reports, you know, this is all in flux. However, the markets, once they heard about the size of the bet—and Corzine should have known better, because he’s lived through 2008—once they heard about the size of the bets, they realized that this is essentially a house of cards, and they had lost total confidence in his leadership and his ability to pay their debts when they became due.
AMY GOODMAN: The FBI is now investigating?
WILLIAM COHAN: The FBI is investigating because, you know, one of the no-nos on Wall Street is using your customers’ funds for your own corporate needs. Those are supposed to be segregated. It’s unclear still—I mean, let’s not jump to too many conclusions here. They’re investigating it. It’s unclear. It could be bad accounting. It could be bad reconciliation of those accounts. But at the moment, it’s looking like funds are missing and that they were used—customer funds were used to try to shore up their own internal problems.
AMY GOODMAN: You interviewed Jon Corzine in MF Global, right?
WILLIAM COHAN: Yes, at his offices. He had one—he took over the old offices, and then he moved them to new offices, to Park Avenue Plaza on East 52nd Street, which is a, you know, sort of notorious Wall Street building. And basically, his whole strategy—he was very clear—
AMY GOODMAN: You mean, Occupy encampment is in the wrong place?
WILLIAM COHAN: Well, I would say yes. That’s a whole 'nother subject, but yes. Wall Street is in midtown, not downtown anymore. But Corzine was—we were talking about Goldman Sachs, obviously, in the course of my book, but he was very clear about what he was going to do at MF Global. He was going to take basically a sleepy, backwater—basically a clearing operation and really juice it in terms of risk taking. And this was all a plan. I mean, he, in his—he was brought into MF Global by another former Goldman Sachs senior partner, a guy by the name of Chris Flowers, who is now a private equity—a successful private equity investor, who had been a colleague of Jon Corzine's at Goldman when Corzine was the CEO. This fellow, Flowers, owns about a 10 percent stake in MF Global. He’s one of its biggest investors. And so, he thought bringing Corzine in would, again, help change the strategy, juice the strategy, and encourage the firm to take more risk.
AMY GOODMAN: And what’s Corzine’s relationship with Goldman right now?
WILLIAM COHAN: Well, he’s just an ex-senior partner who, you know, benefited to the tune of something like $300 or $400 million in Goldman Sachs stock when Goldman went public in 1999.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the $700 million that are missing?
WILLIAM COHAN: Well, that number seems to be shifting all the time. But again, that’s the customer accounts. In other words, if I was doing business with MF Global, and I now wanted to get my money out, they’re telling me, "Oh, either your account is blocked, or we can’t get that to you. We don’t know where that money is." Well, that is a major no-no on Wall Street, and probably criminal if it’s found out that they intentionally did this to cover their own losses on these investments that they made in these bonds.
AthensNews | Tuesday's changes in top roles of the country's military had been scheduled since early October, were not extraordinary and were based on objective criteria, the defence minister said on Wednesday, responding to intense opposition party criticism.
Opposition parties had reacted with outrage to the sacking of the country's military chiefs, calling it a bid to stack the armed forces with party loyalists before a possible government collapse over the country's debt crisis.
Speaking to an Athens radio station, Panos Beglitis said that the army, navy and air force chiefs of staff and the chief of the general staff had completed their term in their individual posts and were thus replaced.
He also underlined that the procedure could have taken place in August but was postponed as a result of the crisis in the southeastern Mediterranean, referring to Turkey's threats against Cyprus over the latter's decision to begin drilling for hydrocarbons.
Beglitis accused opposition parties of hypocrisy and petty party politicking.
He also pointed out that the outgoing military leadership was appointed in August 2009 by the previous New Democracy government, just before the Octover 4 general elections, in what he said was a move unprecedented in the country’s postwar history.
In a surprise move, on Tuesday evening the defence minister replaced the country’s top brass. An extraordinary meeting of the Government Council of Foreign Affairs and Defence (Kysea), which comprises the prime minister and other key cabinet members, accepted Defence Minister Panos Beglitis' proposal that the following changes be made to army, navy and air force and the general staff:
* General Ioannis Giagkos, chief of the Greek National Defence General Staff, to be replaced by Lieutenant General Michalis Kostarakos
* Lieutenant General Fragkos Fragkoulis, chief of the Greek Army General Staff, to be replaced by lieutenant general Konstantinos Zazias
* Lieutenant General Vasilios Klokozas, chief of the Greek Air Force, to be replaced by air marshal Antonis Tsantirakis
* Vice-Admiral Dimitrios Elefsiniotis, chief of the Greek Navy General Staff, to be replaced by Rear-Admiral Kosmas Christidis
Governments have exerted tight control over the armed forces since the collapse of the junta in 1974. Army chiefs are often selected on the basis of party loyalty as part of a deeply-entrenched system of political patronage.
The move to replace the military chiefs may have also been hastened by a Greek protest at austerity measures that halted a major national parade last week.
The annual military parade in the northern city of Thessaloniki is one of the most symbolic events in Greece's political calendar and it was the first time it had been cancelled.
Opposition reactions
The decison drew strong reaction from opposition parties. Main opposition New Democracy (ND) defence spokesman Margaritis Tzimas spoke of "an undemocratic act which is directed against national interest", adding that "at the time when the Pasok government is collapsing, it is proceeding with ... changes in the leadership of the country's armed forces". He said that his party would not accept the decisions.
The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) called on the minister and the government to give clear explanations to the people on why they replaced the armed forces leadership under these conditions.
The Popular Orthodox Rally (Laos) termed the appointments "politically indecent and morally unacceptable" and added that "a few hours before the government's fall, the leadership of the armed forces has been broken up in its entirety."
Lastly, a Radical Left Coalition (Syriza) official said it was unacceptable for the defence minister to decide on such an important issue at a time when the government is facing collapse.
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