Sunday, November 14, 2010
Watch Jennifer chat about the book on San Diego Living (airdate: September 16, 2010):
Watch Jennifer chat about the book on San Diego Living (airdate: September 16, 2010):
Calculus diary
Jennifer Ouellette was an English major who long “avoided all math,” as she put it. Today, the science writer and author of The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse recalled asking her math teacher what every student wants to know: why does math matter in every day life? “He gave the usual stock answers,” she said. “But when you start to see where calculus is in the real world, that’s when you start to see where it’s useful.” Ouellette dropped by Zocalo’s offices to chat with Swati Pandey about how calculus can help you win in Vegas, anticipate the next dip or turn of a roller coaster, and why we should all aim for mathematical literacy to give us a richer view of the world around us.
Jennifer Ouellette: Matchmaker for Hollywood and science
Scientists: Don't ask what Hollywood can do for you, ask what you can do for Hollywood!
Jennifer Ouellette is the Director of The Science & Entertainment Exchange, and a popular science writer. She also writes for her blog - Cocktail Party Physics.
She spoke with The Plainspoken Scientist about how scientists can best help Hollywood.
Dr. James Kakalios!
University of Minnesota physicist and Watchmen consultant, Dr. James Kakalios, recently won an Emmy award for his video Science of Watchmen. Read more about the story behind Jim's experience working with the Exchange and the producers of Watchmen over at The X-Changes Files blog.
issues Explained by Cartoon Characters
QE2 Explained by Cartoon Characters
The FED is laundering money
Friday, November 12, 2010
EPIC KOREAN AUTO WORKERS STRIKE
EPIC KOREAN AUTO WORKERS STRIKE
TRNN Replay: Young Ho Lee tells the story of the 77-day occupation and fight against lay-offs
Thursday, November 11, 2010
swinglet CAM by senseFly
The swinglet CAM ( http://sensefly.com/products/swinglet... ) is an easy-to-use flying camera weighing a mere 500 grams. It is completely autonomous so that no piloting skills are required to operate it. After a few seconds of self-check and GPS signal acquisition, it can been thrown in the air and will automatically take aerial pictures according to a programmable flight plan. Once its mission is completed, it will get back home and land automatically. For more information, have a look at http://sensefly.com
Academic Excellence in 140 Characters
This is a video created by one of my students to summarize the research we conducted on the effects of Twitter on student engagement and grades. The journal article summarizing the study and our findings will be available online at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journa...
Abstract
Despite the widespread use of social media by students and its increased use by instructors, very little empirical evidence is available concerning the impact of social media use on student learning and engagement. This paper describes our semester-long experimental study to deter-mine if using Twitter -- the microblogging and social networking platform most amenable to ongoing, public dialogue -- for educationally relevant purposes can impact college student engagement and grades. A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities. This study provides experimental evidence that Twitter can be used as an educational tool to help engage students and to mobilize faculty into a more active and participatory role.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Coro Health
Coro Health’s technology adapts to the resident and can deliver content anywhere throughout a facility. The system provides customizable audio hardware for all levels of patient needs including speakers, pillow speakers, headphones and adjustable volume control, and can play content according to a pre-determined schedule or on-demand as needed for therapeutic purposes.
Automated updates keep the media current and appealing, while caregivers can easily adjust content, times and delivery location (individual or group areas), or provide feedback directly to a resident’s therapist to make modifications as needs and situations change. Prescriptions are developed by a team of board-certified music therapists and music and media designers with content tailored to an individual’s schedule, needs and preferences, in conjunction with their existing plan of care.
Believe It Or Not: Plug In America’s Electric Vehicle Hype Campaign
Believe It Or Not: Plug In America’s Electric Vehicle Hype Campaign
Here comes another spoof on the Mac vs. PC ad campaign, this one promoting electric vehicles over combustion engines. Plug In America, an advocacy organization that wants to reduce the United States’ dependence on petroleum, created the electric vehicle hype spots and calls them public service announcements.
Here comes another spoof on the Mac vs. PC ad campaign, this one promoting electric vehicles over combustion engines. Plug In America, an advocacy organization that wants to reduce the United States’ dependence on petroleum, created the electric vehicle hype spots and calls them public service announcements.
The Women's Conference 2010TWC-Tue-Conversation: When Women Lead
Watch live streaming video from twc2010 at livestream.com
The Women's Conference 2010
The Women's Conference 2010
The Nation's Premier Forum for Women October 24-26, 2010
The Nation's Premier Forum for Women October 24-26, 2010
Watch live streaming video from twc2010 at livestream.com
1960's BTF Film
British Transport Films was an organisation set up in 1949 to make documentary films on the general subject of British transport. Its work included internal training films, travelogues (extolling the virtues of places that could be visited via the British transport system - mostly by rail), and "industrial films" (as they were called) promoting the progress of Britain's railway network.
It was headed by Edgar Anstey until 1974, and from then until its demise by John W. Shepherd. Initially it made films mostly for the British Transport Commission, but after that organisation was broken up in 1963 the majority of its films were for the British Railways Board. However it also made films for London Transport, the British Waterways Board, the travel company Thomas Cook and the coach company Thomas Tilling.
A new "social" browser: RockMelt
RockMelt is a new browser, made for people who live on social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Here's the interview I had Friday with the founders.
A new "social" browser: RockMelt
Yves Smith - interviewed
Yves Smith - "Why Are We Rewarding Failure?"
US author Yves Smith spoke with RT about the cover-ups that went on leading up to and during the economic crisis, the real secrets of the crooks on Wall Street, and the doom and gloom of the future of America's economy. Yves Smith of nakedcapitalism.com and author of "Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism" told RT that there seems to be a big disconnect between sentiment in Washington and New York and the rest of the country. "Something like over 60% of the policy makers in Washington think the country is on the right track. Over 70% in America as a whole think it is on the wrong track," she said.
Yves Smith: Naked Capitalism, Sterling and Econned
Creator of the Naked Capitalism blog and author of Econned Yves Smith tells
Robert Miller why economists bear much of the blame for the credit crisis
and why the UK would be better off if sterling were devalued.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Pennsylvania to Become 'Gasland'?
Pennsylvania to Become 'Gasland'?
Pennsylvanians set to take on gov't, industry, and Karl Rove over one of world's largest gas deposits
On the day after the midterm elections, the outline of Pennsylvania's next battleground was clearly drawn. Pittsburgh hosted the largest conference of companies interested in the massive Marcellus Shale gas deposit, thought to hold enough gas to power the entire US for anywhere from two to 30 years. Drilling communities around the country report serious environmental and public health concerns. Pittsburgh itself already has gas development surrounding it, and hundreds marched to the conference to show their objection. We spoke to Josh Fox, maker of the documentary 'Gasland' and opponent of drilling in his rural Pennsylvania community. We also spoke to Leslie Haines, editor-in-chief of Oil & Gas Investor magazine.
Produced by Jesse Freeston and Malak Behrouznami.
Transcript
JESSE FREESTON, PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jesse Freeston at the Pennsylvania State Capitol building in Harrisburg. This building is going to have a new occupant, after Republican Tom Corbett won the governor race by 10 percentage points.
TOM CORBETT, GOVERNOR-ELECT FOR PENNSYLVANIA: It's now time to come together, to tell the rest of the world—to tell the rest of the world Pennsylvania is open for business.
FREESTON: And that business is natural gas. Pennsylvania's race was unique in that it was fought primarily over the question of what to do with the massive Marcellus Shale natural gas deposit. Corbett ran on the platform that the industry needs to be opened immediately and without taxation.
CORBETT: We are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas if we develop it and develop it now.
FREESTON: If current estimates are correct, then the Saudi Arabia example may not be far off. Predictions are putting the amount of shale gas in the Marcellus in the trillions of cubic feet. Said another way, these estimates suggest that the entire energy needs of the United States could be met from anywhere from 2 to 30 years by the Marcellus Shale gas alone, with potential revenues reaching into the trillions of dollars, and all of this right in the middle of some of the world's most energy-hungry cities. On the day after the midterm elections, Pittsburgh played host to the year's largest conference of companies looking to develop the Marcellus Shale. It was organized by Hart Energy Publishing. The Real News to spoke to Leslie Haines, editor-in-chief of their flagship publication, Oil and Gas Investor.
LESLIE HAINES, EDITOR IN CHIEF, OIL AND GAS INVESTOR: The USGS geological survey is now saying this could be the second largest natural gas field in the world. Only larger ones are in the Middle East or in Russia. So it's extremely exciting for the US oil and gas industry, but it's going to be important for the consumer, too, because natural gas burns way cleaner than coal or oil. We have 100 years' supply.
FREESTON: The conference featured hundreds of the world's leading extraction companies, like Halliburton and Shell. The keynote speaker was Karl Rove, former senior adviser to President George W. Bush.
UNIDENTIFIED: This is the official Karl Rove welcoming committee.
FREESTON: Hundreds of people marched to the conference center to show their opposition to the drilling, based on its effects on the environment and human health. The process for getting the gas is known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking for short. It involves drilling anywhere from 3 to 11,000 feet below the earth's surface, setting off explosives, then pumping millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals until the pressure fractures the shale rock below, releasing the gas into the well.
JOSH FOX, FILMMAKER: We're going to leave a message for the next governor. I have his phone number. Do you want to leave him a message?
FREESTON: Firing up the crowd was filmmaker Josh Fox, a Pennsylvanian native who turned down a lucrative deal to lease his mineral rights for drilling. He then went on to make the documentary Gasland, which won the 2010 Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Fox's film documents the effects of fracking on families across the United States, where the process is already taking place.
UNIDENTIFIED: Rhonda got really sick with extreme neuropathy and is in a lot of pain [snip] through spinal taps and everything to try to find a cause.
UNIDENTIFIED: It just seems like in the last year and a half I'm never healthy. And I've always been healthy.
UNIDENTIFIED: I won't drink it. When Cabot [Oil & Gas Corp.] and them came in to get the water and they were telling me it was okay to drink, I said, well, here, go ahead and drink it, and they wouldn't drink it.
~~~
UNIDENTIFIED: His hair's falling out.
UNIDENTIFIED: Yeah. And he's losing weight.
~~~
UNIDENTIFIED: Hello?
UNIDENTIFIED: Hi. How are you? This is Josh Fox, and I'm with citizens from the city of Pittsburgh. We'd like to leave a message for Tom Corbett. We'd like to say, we are going to ban hydraulic fracturing in the city of Pittsburgh and we are going to ban it in Pennsylvania.
~~~
FREESTON: On the other side of the state, in Harrisburg, organizers with No Fracking PA set up a lemonade stand offering passersby free lemonade made with tap water from the town of Dimock, where fracking has already begun.
BEN KETCHUM, ORGANIZER, NO FRACKING WAY PA: There was the Bush-Cheney energy task force that gathered the industry together to decide what America's energy policy was going to be over the next decade or so, and in that policy was written in an exemption now known as the Halliburton loophole, which exempts frack drilling operations from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Superfund law. And that's really given the industry the go-ahead to be able to decimate these areas.
FREESTON: Exempt from these regulations, fracking companies aren't required to reveal to regulators the chemicals they're using. But tap water in communities like Dimock have been found to contain chemicals like benzene and toluene, which are believed to cause cancer, brain damage, and other ailments. Haines says that no connection has been proven between drilling and contamination.
HAINES: The fracturing of the wells to create the flow of gas up to the surface, we've been doing that as an industry for 60 years. Over 1 million wells in the US have been fracked with no incidents, no proven contamination of drinking water.
FOX: The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection just ordered a $12 million pipeline to replace water for citizens of Dimock whose water had been contaminated by gas drills. They proved that. They have proven that that gas is from Cabot Oil & Gas. And so the industry will continue to come out and say there's not a single proven case and we didn't do anything wrong, but this is in contradiction to the science.
RON GULLA, PENNSYLVANIA FARMER OPPOSED TO FRACKING: I see the kids that have rashes, the kids that are having diarrhea, the kids that are throwing up. I've seen the cattle that have died. I've seen all this. It's heartbreaking. And they want to deny it. You cannot be exempt from clean air, clean water, safe drinking water, the right to know, and the Superfund act and be a benign process. No one knew that when we signed leases. We signed them in '02. Everything got passed in '05. They were preparing themselves.
FOX: Without the exemptions, they would be out of business. They cannot do this without passing along the costs to you, to the taxpayers—your health-care bills, in water bills, in cleanup bills.
FREESTON: In his keynote address to the drilling conference, Karl Rove stressed that Republican electoral victories would assure that regulation won't get in the way of the industry's development. Water regulations like the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act came into being in the early 1970s during a period of high environmental activism and outrage around the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire in Cleveland. Today in some natural gas communities exempt from this regulation, the water is on fire once again.
~~~
UNIDENTIFIED: Whoa! Jesus Christ.
FOX: Don't drink this water.
~~~
FOX: There's one clip that's famous, but we have several instances of that going on in the film. It's something that I heard about all across the nation. People were watching the film and then looking around and saying, oh, we've got gas wells in our neighborhood. Lo and behold, they can light their water on fire. And they're living with those emissions coming out of their sinks.
FREESTON: Fox's film has been the central education tool for opponents of drilling in Pennsylvania, with public screenings taking place around the state, screenings that drew the attention of Pennsylvania Homeland Security.
FOX: Let me just ask, first of all, is anybody here from Homeland Security?
FREESTON: According to an internal document leaked to the press, the Pennsylvania government was monitoring drilling opponents, antiwar groups, people opposing deportation of migrant workers, and other activist organizations. The document included a report on when and where Gasland was being screened. Outgoing Democratic governor and fracking supporter Ed Rendell said he had been unaware of the program and would not renew the $125,000 intelligence contract. Since then, further documents have shown that Homeland Security was actively recruiting a network of spies and sharing all reports of the list of 731 contacts, including numerous private corporations. Pennsylvania Homeland Security chief James Powers emailed the report to private gas drilling companies themselves, writing, quote, "We want to continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies." Powers has since resigned.
FOX: Even though the story has kind of left the media, don't forget that it's people like you who came out to see Gasland, who came to protest, who were labeled terrorists, environmental extremists prone to criminal activity.
FREESTON: A key theme of Fox's film is the abandonment that victims of gas drilling experience when they have no government institution to turn to for help.
~~~
UNIDENTIFIED: —weeks, they contacted Mike by phone and said, we've tested your water; there's nothing wrong with your water.
UNIDENTIFIED: With this?
UNIDENTIFIED: With this.
~~~
UNIDENTIFIED: No one should ever have to go through what I went through, and call them crying, begging for help, and be told no. And that's where the system is broken.
FREESTON: Proponents say natural gas is a clean path to energy independence. The most visible voice has been billionaire T. Boone Pickens. The former oil company executive has been gathering powerful allies, from Avatar director James Cameron to CNN founder Ted Turner, the largest private landowner in the United States.
T. BOONE PICKENS, FOUNDER, PICKENSPLAN.COM: You've got to go all-American and get off the oil you're buying from the enemy.
FOX: This is not what T. Boone Pickens says, America's energy independence; this is more dependence on T. Boone Pickens.
FREESTON: Fox says that it's a question of priorities.
FOX: We want to spend $700 billion on the transition to natural gas, which over the last 50 years, $350 billion for power plants, $350 billion for pipelines that they're going to [inaudible] main through everybody's front yard. Do you want that? Or should we start working on clean, renewable energy right now that will last forever?
FREESTON: Pro-drilling Republicans have the governorship and control of both the federal and Pennsylvania houses. A few Democrats have sponsored a law to bring fracking under existing regulations, but during his post-election press conference, President Obama twice highlighted natural gas drilling as a point of unity with the Republicans.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: So let's find those areas where we can agree. We've got, I think, broad agreement that we've got terrific natural gas resources in this country. Are we doing everything we can to develop those?
FREESTON: With little political representation, opponents of drilling in Pennsylvania are facing slim chances of stopping the gas rush through the legislative process.
FOX: Because this is going to be very, very difficult. You need to get ready to do this quite a bit. You need to also probably get ready to do civil disobedience.
FREESTON: The amount of drilling permits and leases in Pennsylvania are exploding as we speak, and it appears that the boom is just around the corner. Join us for part two on The Real News Network as we explore the economics of the Marcellus Shale boom.
End of Transcript
Banks to Cash-In Again on New Fed Plan
← BACK
November 9, 2010
Banks to Cash-In Again on New Fed Plan
Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith: Fed's $600 B cash injection may do no more than increase banker profits
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay, and we're coming to you today from the PERI institute in Amherst, Massachusetts. And now joining us to talk about the $600 billion Fed move and what does it mean to the economy and to all of us is Yves Smith. Yves is the creator of the influential financial blog Naked Capitalism, author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism. Thanks for joining us.
YVES SMITH, BLOGGER AND AUTHOR: Thanks so much. My pleasure to be here.
JAY: So let's see if I have this right. The Fed's going to take $600 billion and buy government bonds that are owned by the big banks, except they're not just going to buy them from the banks; they're going to let other people buy them from the banks and then sell them to the Fed and make money on that. I mean, the whole thing seems rather bizarre. The critics are saying that this move, as many other moves at the Fed, seem to have absolute benefit for the big banks and relative to dubious benefit to the economy. So what's your take?
SMITH: I would agree with that. What we've had, the Fed has been engaged in two efforts, only one of which has been somewhat successful. They've been trying on the QT to shore up the balance sheets of the banks. They had explicit programs during the crisis. You remember they had an alphabet soup of different rescue programs. And their second effort has been to have very low interest rates, in the hopes that bank would go out and lend in order to stimulate the economy, but also just to make a big spread between the low lending cost, the low borrowing cost, and what they were lending it on.
JAY: They're getting money at zero.
SMITH: They're getting money at zero, exactly. Now, what's in fact turned out is that the banks have gone and instead have basically bought a lot of Treasuries. A significant amount of what they have done is, instead of lending, exactly, just go and purchase Treasuries. And even on that they've gotten a very big yield between, again, a zero cost to funding, or very close to zero cost of funding, and what they get on the Treasuries.
JAY: So they're getting zero money here.
SMITH: Right.
JAY: They go and buy T-bills.
SMITH: Exactly.
JAY: And they're earning interest on the T-bills.
SMITH: And they earn an interest.
JAY: So one arm of public money is financing them to earn money from another arm.
SMITH: Exactly. Exactly.
JAY: It's a good business, but you need a lot of money to get into that business, don't you?
SMITH: You need a lot of money to get into that business, exactly. And the whole point is that the banks have a lot of losses they haven't yet recognized in the crisis, so this is a way to basically—without having any bills go through Congress that would be very unpopular, to recapitalize the biggest banks, which are the weakest. Now, then the Fed has another set of stories that it tells, and I honestly think that [Ben] Bernanke actually believes his PR. He has stories like this in various papers, but he said it in a more straightforward fashion in an op-ed in The Washington Post the day after the $600 billion so-called quantitative easing program was announced. First thing he said, this program has worked so far, which is absolutely untrue. The Fed did a first round of quantitative easing, and obviously we're still at 10 percent—.
JAY: Okay. For everybody that hasn't heard this yet, quantitative easing, if I understand it correctly, is increase the money supply, except I don't want to say that, and they keep coming up with these cockamamie—.
SMITH: It's specifically that they go out and do it by buying Treasury bonds, and they do it—the argument is they are doing it to lower yields, not just on short-term money, but to lower it on, you know, 10-year money, 30-year money that the Treasury borrows out. So the idea is if we lower—the theory is that if we lower rates on the lowest-risk assets, which are Treasury bonds, therefore it will lower rates on all the other assets, like mortgage bonds, and it will make equities a more attractive purchase. Basically, to put it another way, the notion is that by making Treasuries so unattractive to own, by making the interest you could earn on them so low, that investors will have to go out and buy riskier assets.
JAY: In other words, get back in the stock market.
SMITH: Get back into the stock market or get back into real estate, like a bubble.
JAY: So let's create a stock market bubble—
SMITH: Exactly.
JAY: —to supposedly get the economy running.
SMITH: And that's the whole problem with this logic is the first time any central bank went on this program was Japan in the bubble era. Japan had a problem then that they had a very big export sector and very little in the way of domestic consumption, and they were getting a lot of pressure, particularly from the US, because it was such a mercantilist policy and it was taking so many jobs from a lot of other countries, but particularly, you know, the US. And Japan is de facto a military protectorate, so we do have a little leverage over Japan, unlike, you know, the situation we have now with China. So the Japanese went to engage in a similar program at very low interest rates to try to stimulate consumption, and the notion was, we're going to pump up asset prices, we're going to pump up real estate and stock market prices, and everybody will feel richer and they'll spend more. Well, of course, all that they got out of that was a bubble and a 20-year bust. So this program has no history of success.
JAY: And a lot of furious retired people.
SMITH: Yes. Yes.
JAY: Which is a lot of what drove this election last Tuesday is anyone that hopes to live on interest income is furious right now.
SMITH: Exactly.
JAY: More than furious. They're getting poor.
SMITH: Exactly. So if we have the first part, which is it didn't work in Japan, then we tried it when the economy was weak—you know, it was a different fact set then in Japan. [inaudible] when the economy is weak. QE1, there was one study done by a California academic who said that—Jim Hamilton, who said that for—.
JAY: QE1—quantitative easing one.
SMITH: Quantitative easing one. Right.
JAY: Not the the vote.
SMITH: Not the vote. Yes, exactly. QE1, quantitative easing one, because the Fed had an earlier program where they bought something like $300 billion worth of Treasury bonds and slightly over $1 billion of mortgage-backed securities, and he found that they only lowered long-term interest rates by 17 basis points. So that's 0.17—17 hundredths of a percent. So for all the money they spent, it had only a very small impact on interest rates and obviously no impact on the economy. You know, it was Einstein who said, defined insanity as repeating the same behavior and expecting different results.
JAY: Okay. I'm a great believer that Bernanke and anyone that succeeded on Wall Street is not insane. So if the objective they're claiming it is is—ain't going to work, it means there is an objective that is going to work. So let's back up a second. A whack of cash is now being put back into the hands of the big banks, they're still making the spread on T-bills, and now they are selling off the T-bills. Why? Isn't one of the reasons is they're taking the cash now and they're going to Brazil and they're going to other places where they can earn even bigger spreads on their zero percent money?
SMITH: That's correct. But that's the big concern is that, you know, there's a big pushback [from] a lot of the other banks and policymakers in other countries, because they say all this is going to do is stimulate inflation, that we're going to have resumption—another finance term—of what is called the carry trade, which happened in Japan when, after Japan's bubble era, they had a protracted period of very low interest rates. And what other investors would do is they would borrow in yen because the borrowing rate was very low, and then they would go buy assets in other currencies. And that—because—and when you do that, you actually wind up selling the yen, because if you're going to—again, if you borrow in yen and you're going to, say, invest in the New Zealand stock market, you have to sell your yen to buy New Zealand dollars. So the act of selling the yen makes the yen go down. So the the low interest rates and then the falling currency go together in this sort of carry trade. And the big risk is that [inaudible] something's going to change and the yen goes up relative to the New Zealand dollar. You lose more on the currency than you saved on the interest rate. There is a risk in that trade.
JAY: So let me ask you a question. Is the reality of what's happening here—forget all the rhetoric coming from the Fed and other places. It wasn't that we were, a year and a half, two years ago, looking into the abyss. The finance system and the global economy was hanging on by fingernails, dangling. And what they've been able to do now is cover up the fact that we're kind of still hanging, the finance system is still dangling, because there's so much bad, toxic stuff that's being hidden on the balance sheets of the big banks. So what the Fed's really trying to do is bail out the big banks before this all explodes again and everybody finds out the financial system has no clothes.
SMITH: Right. That's correct. But I also actually think that the Fed does believe to a degree the story they tell about quantitative easing, which I find, you know, that it will somehow stimulate the economy [inaudible]
JAY: But how? 'Cause the banks are already sitting on $1 trillion they won't loan. So now they'll have $2 trillion to sit on [inaudible]
SMITH: Well, they believe that—no, I think that I—I tell you, I have to say that I think they believe it for different reasons, and everybody they talk to is in Washington and in New York, and those two economies are doing relatively well, so that they are getting feedback—they don't go out in the real economy. They're getting too much feedback from the wrong people.
JAY: Or is it just about how do we create another bubble and to hell with what's going on on Main Street?
SMITH: Well, it could very well be that also. But the second thing is, when you're talking about sort of the hanging on, the sort of the image that I use is what happened is we had the equivalent of a 500 pound man (which is our bloated financial sector) that's already diabetic that then had a heart attack and went to an intensive care. And normally what you would take with the 500 pound diabetic man who had a heart attack is give him the quadruple bypass, you know, get him to lose weight, and as soon as he's lost enough weight that he could exercise, go out and exercise. What we've instead done is put him in the hospital, he's getting meds, and he's ordering in from his gourmet restaurant, and his friends are bringing him bonbons when they visit, and so now he's actually gained 50 pounds.
JAY: So he's getting burgers and cherry pie intravenously.
SMITH: Right. Right. That's correct. So, you know, we haven't solved anything, and if anything the problem's gotten worse, because the big banks that were too big to fail actually got more concentrated, because players like, you know, Bear Stearns were merged into the big banks, so the big banks got bigger.
JAY: So is part of this that if they don't hide just how fragile and weak the banking system really still is, the market's going to crash, there is no chance of getting their bubble going, and back to panic city?
SMITH: Right. Exactly. And the other thing that the regulators are doing, and the Fed is included, is something they call (again to use another technical term) regulatory forbearance. The banks are still carrying a lot of bad assets. You know, for example, they're carrying a lot of second mortgages. And with housing down 25 to 45 percent, if you foreclose on the house, all that money is going to go to a first mortgage. There's going to be nothing left for the second mortgages. They really should be written down quite a lot. And yet the banks, the four biggest banks, which are the ones that are most at risk, are still carrying them on their books at values of hundreds of billions of dollars, just writing down the second mortgages alone, which show these banks to be very weak. But they're not being required to do that.
JAY: So if you understand this dynamic, I'm saying, and I'm sure people on both sides of the Fed and Goldmans and all the—if you're on the inside of Wall Street, you know all of this. So what you're doing is creating the bubble, because you know when to get out.
SMITH: Exactly.
JAY: You'll get out, the bubble will burst, and there'll be another whack of people losing their pension funds and whatever.
SMITH: Except the funny bit is that they're all telling themselves this. I mean, I even heard some of my investor friends were saying that they had—were basically—everybody, at least the investor types, and you presume the Wall Street types are thinking this way also, that the Fed's creating a bubble, we're going to ride the bubble, everybody's all in. And the problem is this was the same mentality people had in early 2007. You could tell it was going to end badly, and everybody thought that, oh, we'll just ride it and we'll be able to get out on time, we'll be able to save our hides. Even the professionals couldn't. That's why we had a crisis, that what happens in a crisis is suddenly the number of trades and the volume of trades you can do collapses and they can't exit. They think they can exit in time, and the reality is the exit shrinks and only a very few people get through.
JAY: They're going to get their bonuses, and too-big-to-fail is still too big to fail, so it doesn't matter what the finance reform legislation was. We know it didn't solve too-big-to-fail and they'll come back again. So why not? What's to lose, except the rest of the society has a lot to lose?
SMITH: Well, the one thing that might happen this time if we have a crash sooner rather than later is people [are] already profoundly angry with the banks. And if we have a crisis of some type in, I would say, the next 6 to 18 months, there's going to have to be a pound of flesh for another round of bailouts. It's not going to be acceptable for there to be another round of bailouts without at least the management of major firms being fired. I mean, there will have to be some price to pay.
JAY: And that will rip the Republican Party apart, because how do the Tea Party sign on to another bailout? And we know old-line Republicans will be there. I mean, Bush always was.
SMITH: Right. Right.
JAY: Okay. Segment two, we'll come back, and we're going to talk about what should be done, because the way it's going don't look good.
SMITH: Right.
JAY: Thanks for joining us on The Real News Network. And come back for part two.
End of Transcript
The Turkey Votes for Thanksgiving
Banks to Cash-In Again on New Fed Plan Pt.2 with Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith
The Story of Electronics and why
Help us spread the word about The Story of Electronics and why “designed for the dump” is toxic for people and the planet.
Monday, November 08, 2010
Firefox Extension BlackSheep Detects And Protects You From Firesheep
Eric Butler’s Firefox browser extension Firesheep took the Internet cafe world by storm a couple weeks ago when we and others wrote about the controversial plugin that compromises your social networking connection data. While many people have come up with solutions that involve forcing sites to use HTTPS, Zscaler Security has just released a countermeasure called BlackSheep, which actually detects when Firesheep is hijacking your session.
Firesheep accesses your Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and other logins through cookies — Blacksheep subverts this by tricking Firesheep with a fake login cookie and alerting the user when Firesheep is detected, displaying the IP address of the person using it (see below), and warning the user to log off.
BlackSheep is currently the only available solution that attempts to pit Firesheep against itself. “BlackSheep leverages much of the Firesheep code, but the twist is that rather than being used to hijack sessions, it instead detects when a session is being hijacked and alerts the user,” says BlackSheep developer Julien Sobrier.
And because BlackSheep and Firesheep use much of the same code, you can’t run them both in the same Firefox session. But why would you want to do that?
Evernote for Android takes a huge leap forward with Version 2.0
We’re really psyched to see the tremendous growth of the Android platform. We love the capabilities available in the new OS, as well as the variety of great new hardware–phones, tablets, netbooks, and more.
But the thing that gets us the most excited is Evernote 2.0 for Android, available now from the Android Market. This is the biggest leap in functionality we’ve ever had on any platform in a single release. As always, Evernote for Android lets you take notes, snap photos, record audio, and access all of your existing Evernote data, but it now does all of those things and more better than ever before. Here’s why…
See Socialtext in action in just 5 minutes
See Socialtext in action in just 5 minutes
Product Demo
See how your organization could use Socialtext to keep people and teams synchronized, engaged and informed, and to move quickly to take advantage of new opportunities.
See Socialtext Signals in Action
PRODUCT DEMO, 2:30 MINUTES
See Socialtext Groups in action in just 3 minutes
PRODUCT DEMO, 3:00 MINUTES
See SocialCalc in action in just 3 minutes
PRODUCT DEMO, 3:00 MINUTES
See Socialtext Dashboard in action in just 4 minutes
PRODUCT DEMO, 4:00 MINUTES
Wiki Workspaces
Socialtext Workspace is an easy-to-use enterprise wiki that reduces by 1/3 the time your staff spends searching for information and people every day, and speeds up cycle times in every function across the organization.
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How often do you ask yourself, “Where was it I saw that? Who sent it? When did they send it? What was the file called?” When we use e-mail and attached documents to get our work done, topics get fragmented across many places. According to IDC, employees spend up to 25% of their day looking for information. The process of getting work done involves a series of conversations – asking questions and gathering ideas and feedback. Instead of fragmenting a topic across different places, you need a single go-to place for each topic. And your conversations need to be released from the constraints of a document paradigm, so with each interaction you get the full context of the who, what and why.
Collaborate seamlessly
With Socialtext Workspace, people do their work on group-editable web pages that are visible to authorized others. With a go-to place for each topic, people can collaborate and build on each others’ ideas all in one organized place. Topics are no longer fragmented across different conversation streams and documents. Instead of writing onto a word document or drafting an e-mail, you simply write your content onto a shared web page, using simple WYSIWYG just like you do in the other applications you use on a daily basis.
When you create an e-mail, you can even have the contents of the e-mail posted to a workspace. All you have to do is include the e-mail address of the workspace in the address bar of the e-mail you’re composing. You can even create a new wiki page automatically by putting the new page name in the subject of your e-mail. This way your e-mail gets recorded in a place that is searchable, findable, linkable and persistent, where others can add their input and see each others’ contributions all in one place. This is an easy way to groom teams off of reply-all e-mail madness.
Get the power of rich context
Since Socialtext workspace pages support text, rich text, embedded images, video, and attachments, your conversations are no longer limited to a single media format. You can link to or include not only all relevant conversations from Socialtext workspaces, but also any relevant content and data from enterprise systems and the web. In addition, the Socialtext workspace pages let you see who made each contribution, so you always have the context of the people behind the content. This gives you the surround sound that context provides, for each conversation.
Socialtext 4.0 Video
See Socialtext 4.0 in action in this short demo video.
Let's take for example a presentation that today would be sent around in e-mail and stored on various desktops and shared drives. On a Socialtext workspace page, this presentation could be surrounded by text that explains when and how to use it, an embedded video that shows someone else giving it, a link to a page with speaking points, an attached .PDF customer story and explanatory text about why the customer story is effective as a leave-behind for this particular presentation, an attached NDA form with a note to help you remember to get it signed and who to give it to, links to other resources, and more. You have the full context of the who, what, when, where and why as you work with others to accomplish your goals.
Know what’s going on, always
With automated feeds and configurable alerts, you have easy ways to stay up to date. Socialtext automatically keeps track of the pages you’ve shown interest in, and keeps you apprised of changes made to those pages in an activity feed. You can also opt to be notified of changes made within any workspace you belong to, on a timeline you choose. You can specify pages you want to “watch,” and be alerted whenever their content changes. You can choose to follow colleagues, and see their activities in an activity feed. And of course, at any time you can click to a workspace view that shows recent changes.
Every user can customize their own personal home page and monitor what's most important to them at a glance using widgets and activity feeds. Another dynamic, flexible way to keep in touch is through Socialtext Desktop, which shows activity streams of the people you follow and pages you’ve edited. You can also see the microblogging streams of your colleagues on both your dashboard and Socialtext Desktop. The configurable pop-up notification that comes with Socialtext Desktop alerts you to new Signals, Socialtext’s 140-character social messages.
With these automated mechanisms, new insights and ideas spread quickly and broadly, eliminating lag time and allowing the organization to move faster and adapt quickly to change. With everyone working openly, you learn about conversations that can be valuable to doing your job more effectively, completed work that you need to do your job or can re-purpose, and people you may want to add to your social network. With knowledge sharing now a byproduct of getting work done, you automatically get what you need to inform your decisions and increase your effectiveness.
MOBILE FEATURES
Collaborate on the go
If you are mobile, you’re likely on the front lines with customers and prospects, and you need to continue to get updates and fast answers from colleagues. Socialtext automatically detects when you are using your mobile browser and serves up an optimized mobile interface into the full collaboration platform. You get all the powerful microblogging, social networking, browsing, activity streams and notification features of Socialtext, on the go.
Work offline
When you are mobile, in some cases access from a mobile device will meet your need. But at other times you may need to do work that is more involved than can be reasonably done on a handheld device, such as update a manual. With Socialtext Workspace you can also work offline. You can download a pages while you have web access, edit them while offline, then synchronize changes back to the server when you come back online.
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Features & CapabilitiesDeployment OptionsServicesPlatformPackages & PricingResources
Socialtext Desktop
Socialtext Desktop is a dynamic desktop application for using Socialtext. It is built on Adobe AIR technology which delivers a rich internet application that works across all desktop platforms – Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
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Socialtext Desktop shows you the Signals (140-character social messages) posted by your colleagues. You can choose to see the microblogging stream for colleagues you follow, or for everyone in your company who uses Socialtext. You also use Socialtext Desktop to post your own Signals. Signals give you a great way to quickly share with a broad group.
Socialtext Desktop also shows you the activity streams for the people you follow and the pages you’ve edited. The configurable pop-up notification that comes with Socialtext Desktop alerts you to new Signals and keeps you apprised of what people are working on.
Desktop Video
See Socialtext Desktop in action in this short demo video.
You can monitor the same activity streams (page edits, blog posts, comments, profile changes, Signals) and also post Signals from Socialtext Dashboard. Socialtext Desktop simply gives you an additional dynamic way to stay informed and in touch.
Socialtext Desktop is free for Socialtext users. It requires that you are running Socialtext release 3.3 or greater, with Socialtext People enabled. If you don’t already have Socialtext up and running, you can sign up for a free 30-day free trial.
To download Socialtext Desktop, just enter your email in the box to the right.
Socialtext Desktop in Action
PRODUCT DEMO, 4:00 MINUTES
Socialtext Mobile
If you are mobile, you’re likely on the front lines with customers and prospects, and you need to get updates and fast answers from colleagues just like you do when in the office. Socialtext comes with a mobile interface that lets you continue to stay connected and updated while on the go.
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With Socialtext Mobile, the Socialtext platform is available to you anytime, anywhere. You can stay involved in microblogging conversations, stay apprised of what’s going on via activity streams, get to the workspace content you need, access co-worker profiles, and more.
Socialtext Mobile automatically detects when you log in from a mobile phone and serves up an optimized mobile interface. It lets you continue to work in Socialtext all the powerful ways you do while in the office:
Socialtext Mobile Video
See Socialtext Mobile in action in this short demo video.
Participate in private and secure microblogging conversations via Socialtext Signals.
Stay up-to-date on what others are working on and sharing via activity streams.
Click to look up a colleague’s profile, and click to communicate with him or her.
Collaborate on content that is automatically shared with others via workspace pages.
Socialtext Mobile is platform independent, providing support for a variety of mobile devices. It currently supports Blackberry, iPhone and Android devices. Socialtext Mobile comes free as part of Socialtext.
See Socialtext Mobile in action in just 4 minutes
PRODUCT DEMO, 4:00 MINUTES
Integration
Socialtext Connect lets you surface critical events from enterprise applications and inject them into the Socialtext collaboration platform, where employees from across your organization collaborate and take action. People can see those events in the Socialtext application streams they monitor and, where authorized, send updates to the enterprise systems from Socialtext.
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The New Social Layer
Until now, critical information, events and processes have been locked in enterprise applications and only accessible to the people who use the particular application. By integrating enterprise applications with our social software, the Socialtext collaboration platform now creates an important new technology layer in the enterprise architecture – the social layer – which spans departments, geographies and systems.
Socialtext Connect works with both on-premise and cloud-based enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP and document management systems.
Standards-based
It also integrates with and leverages the fast innovation taking place in web-based consumer applications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. Socialtext Connect adheres to established and emerging web standards, including Twitter Annotations and Google OpenSocial. Socialtext also plans to support the activitystrea.ms standard.
Three core components of Socialtext Connect
Connectors. A Connector serves as a bridge between an enterprise application and Socialtext. Connectors use Socialtext's ReST API, and can be built to connect any application to Socialtext. Connectors can be built by IT developers, system integrators, and third-party developers. Socialtext has a pre-built Connector to Microsoft SharePoint and a pre-built Connector to Salesforce.com.
A Connector can be hosted in the cloud, as a plug-in to Socialtext's hosted service or appliance, or on the enterprise application itself.
Signals Annotations. A Signals microblogging message can be enhanced with a rich presentation of metadata from the enterprise system, such as a chart, image, graph or video. These Signals Annotations enrich the value of application streams. Signals Annotations are built to the emerging Twitter Annotations standard, and will evolve with that standard.
App Bots. An App Bot is a bi-directional software agent that listens for specialized events or information from an enterprise system, a web application or Socialtext, and writes to these applications.
App Bots can be built with different levels of sophistication, including:
App Bot that provides a simple alert. For example, when the sales forecast is changed downward by a specified % in Salesforce.com, an App Bot posts a short message to a specified group microblogging channel in Socialtext. Or when a document is changed in the Sales Tools library in Microsoft SharePoint, an App Bot posts a short message on the Sales Group microblogging channel in Socialtext.
App Bot with a mashup of rich media from multiple sources. For example, when inventory falls below a certain threshold in an ERP system, an App Bot posts a short message, along with an associated Annotation with a map that overlays from the ERP system the locations of the nearest depots that have unallocated stock of the missing item, along with the stock level.
App Bot that is interactive. For example, an App Bot that monitors Twitter for messages from a particular customer, posts a short message alerting Socialtext subscribers to that Tweet, and allows the user to post a message back to Twitter.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
“The Chris Matthews Show.”Should Pelosi stay or go?
Chris Matthews hosts “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” Monday through Friday on MSNBC. Matthews is also the host of the syndicated weekly news program “The Chris Matthews Show.”
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Friday, November 05, 2010
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Interview of Mark Zuckerberg
Interview of Mark Zuckerberg and Erick Tseng of Facebook with Techcrunch and Financial Times. Awesome long interview. cc @parislemon
Barton Seaver: Sustainable seafood? Let's get smart
About this talk
Chef Barton Seaver presents a modern dilemma: Seafood is one of our healthier protein options, but overfishing is desperately harming our oceans. He suggests a simple way to keep fish on the dinner table that includes every mom's favorite adage -- "Eat your vegetables!"
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