policy and technology - conflict or synergy?

UCTV | A highlight of this year's Energy Summit was the Town-Hall Meeting where audience members engaged in a dialogue with energy experts Randy Komisar, Arun Majumdar and Michael McQuade who touched mainly on consumer behavior, energy investment strategies, future energy outlook, and broadly on social responsibility of energy efficiency.

technology, politics, and the economics of reduced energy consumption

UCTV | Lynn Scarlett, former Deputy Secretary of the Interior, argues that investing in nature's capital is a smart twenty-first century energy policy. Arun Majumdar, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, explores how regulation and technology can work together to improve energy consumption. He also looks at some of the new technologies that may become large-scale solutions.

science for energy efficient production and use

UCTV | Raymond Orbach, former Under Secretary for Science, United States Department of Energy, argues that the three major energy challenges in the US are energy security, environmental sustainability, and economic impact and that a unique opportunity has emerged to change the world using a new ability to alter materials at the atomic scale like never before possible.

suncatcher

in the muck

The Scientist | Duckweed first appeared in satellite images of Venezuela in 2004 as a mysterious swirl of green on the surface of Lake Marcaibo, doubling in size with each passing day. Marcaibo is one of South America’s largest bodies of water, but with brackish water and few nutrients, it had never harbored this rapid-growing aquatic plant. Local scientists speculated that heavy rains washed sewage and nutrients into the lake along with duckweed colonies from neighboring ponds. By June, they estimated that the world’s smallest flowering plant covered 18 percent of the lake’s surface before it began receding.

The invasion could have been an ecological disaster, but for Rutgers geneticist Randall Kerstetter, it was a sign of hope. In the taxonomic showdown over the ideal organism for producing biofuel, Kerstetter is putting his mental energy into duckweed. “Duckweed is the fastest growing plant,” he says. “If you’re interested in biofuels, you’re interested in biomass.”

tiny tubers

The Scientist | When Ros Gleadow opened the airlock to the greenhouse at The Australian National University, she stepped into the atmosphere of the future. The air was thick with carbon dioxide—700 parts per million, to be precise—which matches the concentration predicted 90 years from now. While evaluating the responses of crops to the altered atmosphere in the summer of 2008, she found that the cotton, sorghum, soybean and cassava plants she’d planted 9 months earlier grew higher, a little woodier, and with more stems and smaller leaves than normal—all of which she’d expected. But when she dug the cassavas out of their pots, the tubers, which usually grow as large as yams, looked like stunted fingers.

Her cassavas of the future had produced 80 percent less food. “It came completely unexpectedly because plants normally grow bigger under higher CO2,” says Gleadow, a plant physiologist at Monash University in Melbourne. Her immediate thought went to the millions of people living in the tropics, where cassava is the third largest source of dietary carbohydrates. “If the yield decreases, there’s going to be a lot of hungry people.”

That wasn’t the only problem. The cassava plants themselves had become poisonous. Like 60 percent of all our staple crops, cassava produces chemicals called cyanogenic glycosides to deter grazing animals, which, when chewed, release cyanide gas. In small quantities, the cyanide tastes like bitter cherries, enough to ward off animals. But the high-CO2 cassavas produced three times the cyanide of today’s plant. (The poison largely shows up in the leaves, which most people avoid, although some in African countries eat the leaves as a protein supplement.) Gleadow hypothesizes that her cassavas may have poisoned themselves, meaning the extra cyanide shrank the tubers (Plant Biology, published online August 6, 2009).

Until recently, modelers saw CO2’s effect on plant life as the silver lining of climate change. They thought increases in the gas would act as fertilizer, making crops grow bigger and more lush. After all, CO2 is one of the main components of photosynthesis. In the late 1980s, experimenters projected as much as 30 percent increases by 2050 in yield for staples like wheat and soy. But recent experiments under open-air conditions showed half that rate of growth (Science, 312: 1918–21, 2006).

buffett buys bnsf...,

Washington Post | The biggest name in investing is making what he calls an "all-in wager" on the U.S. economy - $34 billion to own a railroad that hauls everything from corn to cars across the country.

The acquisition of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the nation's second-largest railroad, would be the biggest ever for Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway investment company.

It's a natural fit for the Oracle of Omaha, a city with a special place in railroad history. It was the starting point for the westward push of the transcontinental railroad. Today, Omaha is the headquarters of Union Pacific, and BNSF trains rumble through every day.

In a statement, Buffett, whose investing decisions are carefully scrutinized by the world of finance, voiced confidence in the railroad industry.

"Most important of all, however, it's an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States. I love these bets," he said Tuesday.

inside lsd - tonight

National Geographic | LSDs inventor Albert Hofmann called it "medicine for the soul." The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers. Outlawed in 1966, LSD became a street drug and developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius, or a descent into madness. Now science is taking a fresh look at LSD, including the first human trials in over 35 years. Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this "trippy" drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future. Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease? To find out, Explorer puts LSD under the microscope.

foxes and chicken coops

HuffPo | There have been a few financial insiders who've raised an eyebrow over Storch's hire. Zero Hedge pointed to a big flaw in Storch's background "...at least the SEC could have hired someone with actual market/broker experience. Based on his record, Mr. Storch is not even a licensed (Series 7/63) broker."

The Atlantic points to some real concerns about his level of experience: "I'm not sure what's scarier, that this guy worked at an investment bank that many believe has questionable ethics and too cozy a Washington connection, or that he's just 29. His 'great deal of background' must be those seven long years since college ended."

For those who've lamented the various links between Goldman Sachs and the financial regulatory system, this certainly isn't good news.

Bloomberg reports that the Securities Exchange Commission has named Adam Storch, a former Goldman exec, as its enforcement division's first chief operating officer. Storch is actually just 29 years old and previously worked in Goldman's business intelligence unit.

Here's Bloomberg:

"The COO, who started Oct. 13, has "a great deal of background" in technology and managing processes and the pace of work, Robert Khuzami, head of enforcement, said yesterday in Washington. Storch, who worked since 2004 in a unit at Goldman Sachs that reviewed contracts and transactions for signs of fraud, will be charged with making the unit more efficient. Storch, reached by telephone at the SEC, declined to comment."

According to what appears to be his LinkedIn profile, Storch spent his undergraduate years at the State University Of New York At Buffalo, and earned an MBA from New York University's Stern School Of Business. Other experience -- besides Goldman -- includes working as a Senior Analyst at Deloitte and Touche.

smooth criminals

Neurological Correlates | New journal volume on “Biosocial Criminality” and two reports selected: One, because psychopaths use murder more as an instrumentality than as an expression of emotion, they don’t tell anyone about their crimes, and, moreover, therefore, are brought up on lesser offenses and get out earlier (my interpretation). Two, psychopaths can see vulnerability in others by the way they walk. Fist tap Dale.

militarism and extremism

teach your teachers well....,

NYTimes | ARNE DUNCAN, the secretary of education, recently called for sweeping changes to the way we select and train teachers. He’s right. If we really want good schools, we need to create a critical mass of great teachers. And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of teaching.

Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren’t working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones preparing to become teachers.

So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray. If education was a good enough topic for Plato, John Dewey and William James, it should be good enough for 21st-century college professors.

These new teacher programs should be selective, requiring a 3.5 undergraduate grade point average and an intensive application process. But they should also be free of charge, and admission should include a stipend for the first three years of teaching in a public school.

schools are where stimulus saved jobs

NYTimes | The best symbol of the $787 billion federal stimulus program turns out not to be a construction worker in a hard hat, but rather a classroom teacher saved from a layoff.

On Friday, the Obama administration released the most detailed information yet on the jobs created by the stimulus. Of the 640,239 jobs recipients claimed to have created or saved so far, officials said, more than half — 325,000 — were in education. Most were teachers’ jobs that states said were saved when stimulus money averted a need for layoffs.

Although the stimulus was initially sold in large part as a public works program, only about 80,000 of the jobs that were claimed Friday were in construction.

Of course, counting jobs that were saved can be a squishier proposition than counting jobs that were created. Teachers have been laid off in some areas — and budget officials say that there would have been more layoffs without the stimulus money — but it is difficult to say with certainty how many teachers would have been laid off without that money.

Indiana, for example, reported saving or creating 13,232 education jobs with its stimulus money, but Cris Johnston, the director of the government efficiency division of the state budget office, said that it was difficult to say whether the state would have actually lost those jobs without the money.

homelessness rises, redefining living conditions for schoolchildren

Chicago Tribune | Maria Maior's son is a football-playing, skateboard-riding, Xbox-loving kid whose home reveals all the trappings of domesticity: a cushy sofa, big-screen TV, a framed poster of Brian Urlacher -- one of the 12-year-old's favorite football players. On most evenings, two big dogs curl up on the carpeting.

The scene could be lifted from any suburban subdivision -- except that it's located not in a den, but in a storage unit.

The boy moved into the 10-foot-by-25-foot bunker about two months ago with his mom and her fiance, after a long run of bad luck and the loss of both of their jobs. His mother didn't not want his name used for this article. "As long as I have my parents, I'm fine with this," Maior's son said of the accommodations. "It's really not that bad."

School district officials said the boy is one of a record number of area students living in motels, campgrounds, shelters, cars and, yes, storage facilities.

According to recently released data, McHenry County's homeless enrollment increased by 125 percent from the 2007-08 school year to the 2008-09 school year -- the biggest hike in the six-county metropolitan area. Schools in Kane (85 percent), Will (61 percent), DuPage (53 percent), Lake (44 percent) and suburban Cook (24 percent) counties also posted their largest increases, reflecting the surge in foreclosures and unemployment. Early reports indicate that the trend has continued this fall, with numbers spiraling even higher

appeasement not.....,

NYTimes | I continued to be conflicted — believing that when it comes to salutes (and one or two other matters), presidents deserved to be cut some slack, but also feeling a little uneasy about the whole thing.

My ambivalence came to an end last week, when I saw a videotape of the president’s midnight trip to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where he had participated, very early that morning, in the “dignified transfer” of 15 Army soldiers and three Drug Enforcement Administration agents killed that week in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama stood ramrod straight and saluted as six soldiers carried the coffin bearing the body of Sgt. Dale Griffin of Indiana off a C-17 transport aircraft and into a waiting van. His salute, it struck me, was impeccable in every way.

warsocialism's full spectrum redux...,

Seems like it may be time to do a memory refresh on the institutional expanse and behemoth totality of what Pres. Obama and SecDef Gates are wrestling with. It took me longer than I thought it would to find instances of the Joint Vision 2020 Report and its predecessor Joint Vision 2010. Though getting a sweeping strategic interpretation of what these doctrinal realignments portend was fairly easy to do.

commander in chief bidnis....,

Fist tap Submariner

in congress, a call to review internal cybersecurity policies

Washington Post | House leaders on Friday called for an "immediate and comprehensive assessment" of congressional cybersecurity policies, a day after an embarrassing data breach that led to the disclosure of details of confidential ethics investigations.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said they had asked the chief administrative officer of the House to report back to them on the policies and procedures for handling sensitive data as a result of the breach. The inadvertent disclosure of a House ethics committee document, obtained by The Washington Post, summarized the status of investigations into lawmakers' activities on subjects such as influence peddling and defense lobbying.

"We are working diligently to provide the highest level of data security for the House in order to ensure that the operations of House offices are secure from unauthorized access," Pelosi and Boehner said in a statement.

The breach angered lawmakers who were the subject of the previously undisclosed investigations, and it raised questions about the security of other sensitive documents.

cracking the whip...,

Washington Post | House ethics investigators have been scrutinizing the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, according to a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July.

7 on defense panel scrutinized

Sanchez sisters eyed by House ethics panel for alleged collusion

Rep. Shuler's land swap deal eyed by ethics committee

The report appears to have been inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network, and it was provided to The Washington Post by a source not connected to the congressional investigations. The committee said Thursday night that the document was released by a low-level staffer.

The ethics committee is one of the most secretive panels in Congress, and its members and staff members sign oaths not to disclose any activities related to its past or present investigations. Watchdog groups have accused the committee of not actively pursuing inquiries; the newly disclosed document indicates the panel is conducting far more investigations than it had revealed.

Shortly after 6 p.m. Thursday, the committee chairman, Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), interrupted a series of House votes to alert lawmakers about the breach. She cautioned that some of the panel's activities are preliminary and not a conclusive sign of inappropriate behavior.

the big don bottleneck...,