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A high LDL cholesterol level in combination with a low HDL cholesterol level significantly increases your risk of heart disease, the leading killer of men and women. Learn more about trans fat and how to avoid it.

This unbelievable New York Times article from that fateful day said the move would make for “a new era on Wall Street in which commercial banks, securities houses and insurers will find it easier and cheaper to enter one another’s businesses.” We all know how that turned out.

The article is a cornucopia of embarrassment, prescience, and irony. As a colleague of mine said, “You can see them taking the wheels off.” And they’re thrilled about it.

Larry Summers, who all now know as the leader of Obama’s super-serious economic nerd squad was, back in 1999, just another crusader for bank emancipation:

”Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,” Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ”This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”

Remember, the “handful of dissenters” of today might be trying to save your 401k:

“The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation’s financial system. The original idea behind Glass-Steagall was that separation between bankers and brokers would reduce the potential conflicts of interest that were thought to have contributed to the speculative stock frenzy before the Depression.”

“The opponents of the measure gloomily predicted that by unshackling banks and enabling them to move more freely into new kinds of financial activities, the new law could lead to an economic crisis down the road when the marketplace is no longer growing briskly.”

”’I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930’s is true in 2010,’ said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota.”

Bob Kerrey was very wrong:

”’The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown,’ said Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska.”

And everyone else was wrong too. Only eight Senators voted against repealing Glass-Steagall:

“One Republican Senator, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, voted against the legislation. He was joined by seven Democrats: Barbara Boxer of California, Richard H. Bryan of Nevada, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, Mr. Dorgan and Mr. Wellstone.”

And what was the media doing, by and large? Warning us about the impending financial catastrophe, of course. From Y2K.

Read the whole Times piece here.

Posted by Andrew Prices for Good.is

Jonathan Jarvis’s two-part infographic (a static adaptation of his video about the credit crisis) is a “clear, concise explanation of what happens inside the magic box that is a collateralized debt obligation and the fallout we all feel when the contents go bad.”

Jonathan Jarvis : Part 1

Jonathan Jarvis : Part 2

Karen Ong: Lays out the global implications of the bust in the American real estate market

Source: Good.is

As any globe will reveal, there’s no shortage of water on Earth. Unfortunately, over 97 percent of it is too salty for us humans to drink, and only a tiny fraction of what remains is in the rivers, lakes, and groundwater that we’re able to easily access.

In much of the world, these freshwater supplies are growing scarce, and competition for these resources promises to be one of the hot-button geopolitical challenges of the next 50 years and beyond. As climate change worsens droughts, accelerates desertification, and whittles away glaciers (the water towers providing life to so much of the world), it’s no wonder that some experts are looking towards that enormous pool of salty water for a drink.

It’s not a novel idea. Nearly 50 years ago President John F. Kennedy noted, “If we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate, get fresh water from salt water, that it would be in the long-range interests of humanity which would really dwarf any other scientific accomplishment.”

About 2,300 years before Kennedy said that, Aristotle was already experimenting with the idea. Since then, desalination—or the process of removing salts from ocean or brackish water—has been proven possible, and employed in some form for ages. Around 200 AD, sailors boiled seawater and captured the salt-free evaporation when they ran out of drinking water supplies. This “thermal desalination” process can be scaled, but the costs are, for most, prohibitively high; most of the larger-scaled projects that took root were in the oil-rich and water-poor Middle East.

In the past couple of decades, though, a more promising, scalable solution has surfaced—reverse osmosis. Bear with me as I revisit high school chemistry. Take a semi-permeable membrane that water molecules can travel through, but not larger sediments like salt. Put very salty water on one side and less salty water on the other, and water will travel through towards the salty side until the concentrations are even. That’s osmosis. Alternately, apply pressure to the saltier side, and water flows through the membrane, but the salt gets stuck.  That’s reverse osmosis, and the result is fresh water. And that’s how most modern day desalination plants work.

Today, there are over 13,000 desalination plants around the world, with a collective capacity to produce about 14 trillion gallons of drinkable water every day. Sounds like a lot, but it’s only about 0.5 percent of global demand. There are, however, many more in the works, particularly around large coastal cities in areas more vulnerable to drought or desertification. Parched Australia is a global leader, and an increasingly desperate California is getting serious about the technology. One plant planned for the San Diego area, for example, would churn out 50 million gallons per day, a drought-proof freshwater supply for about 300,000 people.

The upfront costs of building the plants are considerable—San Diego’s Poseidon Plant is budgeted at $300 million; Melbourne is fixing to spend $2.9 billion on one that’d be amongst the world’s largest—but after they’re built, the chief expense is the energy it takes to push the seawater through the membranes.

Then there are the environmental costs, which are slowing down the approval processes in regulation-heavy places like California. As ocean water gets sucked into the system, aquatic organisms can get sucked up with it. Then, besides drinking water, there’s the other byproduct of the process—very salty, and often hot, brine, which if released straight back into the ocean can create dead zones, worsening a problem already plaguing many coastal cities.

Both these problems can be addressed, albeit at some added expense. Sucking up seawater from beneath the sandy ocean floor avoids capturing unlucky creatures, and letting the brine mix with ocean water for awhile—as the Poseidon project is promising—before discharging it will prevent the dead zones.

But the chief environmental concern is certainly the energy it takes to run the system. There’s a perverse logic in burning fossil fuels to make up for a shortage of freshwater—essentially worsening the problem you’re trying to solve.

Of course, we can look to the wind and sun to power the desalination process. Offshore wind turbines make a lot of sense for plants that need to be located on the coast. Concentrated solar power could also do the trick. (Here’s a study (pdf) that makes a very strong case for CSP powering desalination.)

The tough reality of the world’s increasingly dire water crisis means that desalination isn’t merely an option, but a necessity. The only sensible way to power these processes—without further contributing to one of the main causes of the freshwater shortages—is to do it without greenhouse gas emissions. Without exception, desalination needs to be coupled with clean energy.

Posted by Ben Jervey for Good.is

In 1922 the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Council approved a motion to send an invitation to Albert Einstein to visit Argentina and give a course of lectures on his theory of relativity. The motion was proposed by Jorge Duclout (1856-1927), who had been educated at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich (ETH). This proposal was the culmination of a series of initiatives of various Argentine intellectuals interested in the theory of relativity. In a very short time Dr. Mauricio Nirenstein (1877-1935), then the university’s administrative secretary, fulfilled all the requirements for the university’s invitation to be endorsed and delivered to the sage in Berlin. The visit took place three years later, in March-April 1925.

The Argentine press received Einstein with great interest and respect; his early exchanges covered a wide range of topics, including international politics and Jewish matters. Naturally, the journalists were more eager to hear from the eminent pacifist than from the incomprehensible physicist. However, after his initial openness with the press, the situation changed and Einstein restricted his public discourse to topics on theoretical physics, avoiding some controversial political, religious, or philosophical matters that he had freely touched upon in earlier interviews.

Immediately after Einstein’s visit, Mauricio Nirenstein published a short paper in which he made some interesting remarks on the visit and the visitor. His paper was presented as a dialogue, a personal conversation in which Einstein outlined his views on the epistemology of the physical sciences. In a footnote, Nirenstein explained that Einstein’s thoughts on epistemology were based on an unpublished text. However, in his reference to Einstein’s text on  epistemology, he indicated that Einstein’s remarks were given in response to a recent newspaper article. He did not mention that Einstein, in fact, had written this text for his opening lecture at the UBA. Consequently, he did not explain why he did not publish it verbatim or in translation.

Einstein’s unpublished piece on the epistemology of physics became known in Argentina as the discurso in´edito and it was rumored that Einstein had left it in the hands of Nirenstein. Six years after the visit, in 1931, an avant-gard literary journal, La Vida Literaria, published a Spanish translation of the in´edito as well as photographs of two
fragments of the manuscript, which serves to test the quality of the Spanish translation and shows that it was addressed to the UBA audience. The note in La Vida Literaria also referred briefly to Einstein’s encounters with the local press and to the impact these meetings may have had on his decision not to use the in´edito as an introduction
to his set of lectures.

The English translation of the in´edito is based on three sources: the Spanish translation of the German text, written by Baldomero San´ın Cano and published in La Vida Literaria, Buenos Aires, 1931, which covers the whole text; photographs of pages 1 and 5 of the manuscript in German in Einstein’s hand, reproduced in the same journal; and transcribed excerpts from Einstein’s manuscript printed in J. A. Stargardt’s catalogs number 615 (1978), 117, and number 683 (2006), 188.

Read complete article >>

Source: Published by Alejandro Gangui, Eduardo L. Ortiz. [link]

Posted in Science News ]]> http://sunilreddym.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/einsteins-unpublished-lecture-on-relativity-theory/feed/ 0 sunilreddym http://sunilreddym.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/plastic-x-ray-imager-could-bring-down-the-cost-of-medical-imaging/ http://sunilreddym.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/plastic-x-ray-imager-could-bring-down-the-cost-of-medical-imaging/#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 07:06:24 +0000 sunilreddym http://sunilreddym.wordpress.com/?p=413 ]]> Researchers at Siemens have discovered a way to print polymer x-ray-sensing panels that work just as well as expensive silicon ones. Using a new printing method, which is similar to the way that cheap plastic solar cells are made, the researchers believe that the approach could bring down the cost of medical imaging systems and be used to make lightweight, flexible imaging panels for procedures such as more comfortable mammograms.

Electrically active polymers hold potential as a cheap alternative to silicon for devices including light sensors, solar cells, and transistors.

Polymers can be processed in less stringent conditions–at room temperature and in the open air. However, their performance for all these applications is as yet unproven, says Thomas Jackson, a professor of electrical engineering at Penn State, who has no ties to Siemens. While polymer-based photodiodes have been shown to work well for solar cells, the value of using polymer materials for imaging hasn’t been clear. The new high-performance Siemens light detectors should change that, however.

The photodiodes, developed by Siemens researchers led by Sandro Tedde and Oliver Hayden, work as well as those made of silicon. The researchers describe the manufacturing technique used to make them in the March issue of the journal Nano Letters, and presented organic photodiodes designed for x-ray detection at a meeting of the Materials Research Society. Tedde says that the detectors are stable for at least six years.

The Siemens researchers make their photodiodes by spraying water-based solutions containing two kinds of polymers through a metal mask onto a glass substrate. They put down, first, several layers of a polymer with low conductivity, then several layers of a polymer with high conductivity.

The use of two different polymers is crucial. When a photon hits the polymer photodiode, it excites an electron, leaving a positive “hole” behind; to read the resulting electrical signal, the diode has to carry the electron away from the hole. The interface between the two layers of polymers helps this separation to occur: the low-conductivity polymer carries the positive holes, while the other carries the electron to an electrical contact where it can be read.

The spray-coating method works well over large areas. Normally, these polymers are spread out across the substrate by spinning or using a small scraping blade. But these techniques don’t work well over large areas, and x-ray imaging requires large panels because x-rays can’t be focused using conventional lenses. “You need the imager to be the same size as the body part you’re trying to image,” says Karim Karim, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo, who was not involved in the Siemens work. Indeed, a significant portion of the cost of today’s systems comes from the large silicon panels used to convert photons into the electrical signals: the larger the silicon panel, the more expensive it is.

“The [new] method lends itself to low-cost manufacturing, even for large-area devices,” says Shawn Williams, vice president of technology at Plextronics, a company that makes conductive polymer inks for solar cells and LEDs.

The Siemens researchers have “looked at a very low-cost deposition technique, and not only can they make it work, but it actually works better than when made other ways,” says Jackson. The spray-coated photodiodes are more efficient than organic photodiodes made using the other techniques. This is because thicker layers can be made without disrupting the nanoscale structure of the polymer interface, which is crucial. The Siemens system has a quantum efficiency of about 75 percent; in other words, for every 100 photons that hit the diode, 75 will be registered. “That’s pretty good,” says Jackson.

Replacing silicon with polymers might have other advantages. The Siemens group has so far been using heavy, brittle glass coated with indium tin oxide as the substrate, but the photodiodes could be printed onto flexible plastic backings, making possible new imagers that are shaped to fit a particular part of the body. “The spray-coating can be performed on pretty much any substrate,” says Tedde.

Lightweight, large-area, flexible x-ray imagers “would be a really nice gadget,” says Richard Lanza, a senior research scientist in nuclear science and engineering at MIT, who develops high-resolution x-ray systems. In the case of mammograms, breasts must be compressed to conform to the flat, rigid imaging panels. Conformable organic photodiodes might make such procedures far more comfortable.

Source: Posted by Katherine Bourzac for Technology Review. [link]

By trawling scientific list-serves, Chinese fish market websites, and local news sources, ecologists think they can use human beings as sensors by mining their communications.

“If we look at coral reefs, for example, the Internet may contain information that describes not only changes in the ecosystem, but also drivers of change, such as global seafood markets,” said Tim Daw, an ecologist at the UK’s University of East Anglia in a press release about his team’s new paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can’t keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It’s more crowd mining than crowd sourcing.

Much of the pioneering work in this type of Internet surveillance has come in the public health field, tracking disease. Google Flu Trends, which uses a cloud of keywords to determine how sick a population is, tracks epidemiological data from the Centers for Disease Control. Less serious projects — like this map of a United Kingdom snowstorm based on Tweets about snow — have also had some success tracking the real world.

These research efforts seem to indicate that people are good sensors, but pulling the information from what they post in human-readable formats and transforming it into quantitative models of the world is tough. The Global Public Health Intelligence Network has developed an epidemic warning system that pulls in data from news wires, web sites, and public health mailing lists. The GPHIN, which is probably the most advanced and uses highly variegated information, only picks up on about 40 percent of the 200 to 250 outbreaks that the World Health Organization investigates each year.

Nonetheless, Daw and and his co-authors from the  Stockholm Univeristy Resilience Centre, say traditional ecological monitoring has its problems, too. Humans can make huge changes to ecosystems faster than the standard methods of data collection can keep up.

“The challenge is that existing monitoring systems are not at all in tune with the speed of social, economical and ecological changes,” the researchers write on their blog.

By looking at human data, not just fisheries and ecological readings, they think they’ll be able to detect ecosystem tipping points  before they happen.

“Web crawlers can collect information on the drivers of ecosystem change, rather than the resultant ecological responses,” they write. “For example, if rapidly emerging markets for high value species are known to be socio-economic drivers which lead to overexploitation and collapse of a fishery, web crawlers can be designed to collect information on rapid changes in prices, landings or investments.”

But right now, their plans remain theoretical, and while scraping data seems easy enough, turning it into knowledge is another story. John Brownstein, a Harvard bioinformaticist and co-founder of HealthMap, which does for disease what Daw wants to do for ecology, said that applying the framework to ecology could work.

“There’s no reason it can’t be done,” Brownstein said. “The only difference is that this is more difficult. The media and other sources are sensitive and fine-tuned to things like human disease. The threshold for the reporting of a mysterious disease is different from the threshold for an ecological phenomenon.”

In other words, while reporters (or Tweeters) will include individual-level death data in human stories, massive die-offs or flora changes could very well go unnoticed and probably unquantified.

And even with disease data, there are serious signal-to-noise challenges. In a paper that Brownstein co-authored last week, he showed that monitoring search terms for disease indicators could have tipped officials off to a deadly outbreak of listeriosis in Canada. But spotting emergent diseases instead of ones that have already caused major damage is a more challenging proposition.

“It’s so tough to figure out why people search for specific information,” he said.

Source: Posted by Alexis Madrigal for Wired. [link]

Getting a business loan in this economy can be more difficult than landing a reservation at French Laundry in Napa, California. Now try selling the loan officer on an open source hardware project where the blueprints will be given away.

That’s why the hardware hacking community is turning inwards to fund its ideas. Two open source hardware enthusiasts, Justin Huynh and Matt Stack, have started the Open Source Hardware Bank to fund hardware projects such as the microcontroller board pictured above.

The fledgling bank is funding only open source hardware projects using capital raised from other hardware geeks. It’s like a community of Facebook friends borrowing and lending among themselves — a peer-to-peer bank.

“This speaks to the rise of the do-it-yourselfer, someone who is not just a consumer but also a producer, inventor and investor,” says Huynh. “But someone also ought to be thinking about the money problem when it comes to open source hardware and we are doing just that.”

The open source concept has traditionally been applied to software, but open source hardware is rapidly gaining ground. A fast-growing community of inventors is publishing the specs for a wide range of hardware, from CPUs and graphic cards to MP3 players and even a laptop. The idea is to let anyone take the designs, build on them, and profit from the work of the group — while contributing enhancements back to the community at large.

But open source hardware requires more financial investment than open source software. It isn’t as easy as downloading a few open source programs on to your existing computer, explains Stack. “With open source hardware you don’t get a finished product until you have put in some money,” he says. For instance, there’s the cost of the printed circuit boards, the solder and the components.

“To build open source software you just need to set up a project on Sourceforge,” says Huynh. “But if you get open source hardware wrong, it burns a hole in the wallet.”

The Open Source Hardware Bank, which isn’t yet fully up and running as a federally regulated lending institution, allows those interested in open source hardware to make investments in specific projects, then (hopefully) reap returns ranging from 5 percent to 15 percent from the successful sale of the projects. For the creators, the bank offers funding that could bring down the costs of their project and give them the stimulus to try out new ideas.

“The way the bank works is the more you build, the cheaper it gets,” says Stack, who in the true open source spirit first laid out the idea on his blog.

So far nearly 70 people have signed up as lenders for the bank. Huynh and Stack are managing the process through a Excel spreadsheet. They soon hope to bring it online through the Open Source Hardware Bank website that lists some of the initial projects that have been funded.

Lenders are offered returns based on a rolling six-month average so dud projects will be offset by sales of profitable ones. It takes just a few deals to strike it big, Huynh and Stack say, and because it is a community that is not just passionate but also knowledgeable, better projects are likely to get funded.

The promise of returns is enough to get former investment banker Andrew de Montille excited.

“I put money in the bank not because I consider it as a charitable investment,” says de Montille. “Rather, I am very confident that some of the projects will do well enough to be profitable to the investors.”

De Montille won’t disclose how much money he’s pumped into the bank but says it is “somewhere in the five digits.” And the returns the bank offers is more than he can find anywhere else in this economy, he says.

“It can be a market-leading investment at this point,” says de Montille. “Here the loans are being backed up by the actual product, rather than the credit profile of someone.”

The bank borrows a page from the playbook of peer-to-peer lending sites such as Prosper and Zopa. Before the credit crunch squelched their dreams, the two sites offered borrowers and lenders a way to connect with each other instead of going to banks or other traditional credit institutions.

“There weren’t people really speculating and profiteering off that model,” says Huynh. “It was more about the community getting together and helping.”

Huynh and Stack hope to bring a similar spirit to the Open Source Hardware Bank.

“Groups of people that have strong shared interest are really the perfect place for peer-to-peer financing to work,” says Scott Pitts, former managing director of Zopa U.S. “As a group they are not out to make a billion dollars, they just want to fund their passion and do it in a sustainable way.”

Huynh and Stack met at an event in New York and found a mutual interest in open source hardware. Huynh, a pharmaceutical consultant by day, is no open source hardware obsessive. But he has tinkered with open source electronics enough to realize that there’s a need for more community-funded projects.

Finding the money to chase pet projects is a challenge for hardware geeks. The Open Source Hardware Bank hopes to help alleviate two main financial problems for DIYers: throwaway costs that result from repeated revisions to physical hardware during the design process, and the inability to take advantage of volume discounts for raw materials.

For every project that comes to the bank, the community will provide funds to build twice as many units as there are potential buyers. The move would double the number of pieces created and could reduce per-unit costs by around 10 percent to 30 percent.

A promising idea it may be, but in this case the geeks are likely to face serious opposition from the financial regulators, says Paul Kedrosky, angel investor and a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, which focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation. The Open Source Hardware Bank founders don’t have to flip the pages of history too much to see the fate of peer-to-peer lending ideas in the United States, points out Kedrosky.

Last year, major community lending startup Prosper was forced to shut down by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for not registering with regulators.

“If I put money into a project and am offered some kind of return on a system-wide basis, that requires issuing a security,” says Kedrosky. “Which means the open source hardware guys will have to go through the same kind of securities registration as Prosper was forced to.”

Zopa’s Pitts agrees that the Open Source Hardware Bank needs to figure out how to navigate through the financial rules of the U.S. market. “These guys do not have a regulatory strategy and they need one,” he says.

Huynh and Stack say they are still trying to develop the idea and it is still far from its final shape. On Wall Street, the blood bath of the banks is likely to continue. But for the Open Source Hardware Bank, the doors have just opened for business, they say.

Pitts says they could make it work. “They have done a good job of articulating their goals and objectives so far,” he says. “What they need to do is to figure out a way to make it work.“

Source: Originally posted in Antipastohw.blogspot. [link] Reprinted in Wired. [link]

Top Photo: Illuminato microprocessor that was partly funded by a group of open source hardware enthusiasts.
Side Photo: Open Source Hardware Bank Logo includes a wreath of resistors that are not completely connected, with 16 stars etched in hexadecimal to denote the number of initial investors in the bank. The little circuit in the middle is meant to evoke the back of a printed circuit board.
Photos: Justin Huynh/Matt Stack