China's Giant Step Into Nanotech

by Tom Mackenzie

Seated inside one of China's most advanced science laboratories, two PhD students dressed from head to toe in protective white suits listen intently to Mariah Carey's pop classic Hero. It is not the song, but the millimetre-thin, transparent strip making the sound that captures their attention - a nano-speaker they hope will revolutionise where, and how, we listen to music.

"This is cutting edge," says Professor Shoushan Fan, director of the nanotechnology lab at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University. Without a cone, magnet or amplifier, the speaker, which looks little more than a slim film of see-through plastic, can be used to transform almost any surface into an auditorium. It is made from nanocarbon tubes which, when heated, make the air around them vibrate, producing the sound. "The speaker's bendy and flexible," says Fan. "You could stick it to the back window of your car and play music from there."

Mega investment

Fan's nano-speaker is just the tip of the iceberg in China's sweeping nanotech programme, which has the potential to transform its export-based economy and nearly every aspect of our lives, from food and clothes to medicine and the military.

Nanotechnology - the manipulation of matter on an atomic scale to develop new materials - is an industry predicted to be worth nearly £1.5tn pounds by 2012, and China is determined to corner the biggest chunk of the market.

China now produces more papers on nanotech than any other nation. Nanotech plants have sprung up in cities from Beijing in the north to Shenzhen in the south, working on products including exhaust-absorbing tarmac and carbon nanotube-coated clothes that can monitor health. Last month, researchers from Nanjing University and colleagues from New York University unveiled a two-armed nanorobot that can alter genetic code. It enables the creation of new DNA structures, and could be turned into a factory for assembling the building blocks of new materials.

"There's no end of areas in which nanotech is already being used," says Wilsdon. "It's the product of targeted investment for the development and refinement of novel nanomaterials. And the reason the Chinese focus on that area is because it's closer to the market."

Read more:

Risk On

Do the Fed, computer trading, and a few hedge funds rule the market? That might explain why it's lost its mind.

by Bethany McLean

After the madness of last week and the rollercoaster at the beginning of this week, the stock market recovered from its Aug. 10 rout to bounce 423 points on Aug. 11. It was the fourth day in a row in which the index moved by more than 400 points, which has never happened before in history. As I write this, stock prices are leveling off, but the big swings may not be over. Has the market gone mad? Actually, yes.

In theory, the stock market is supposed to reflect the prospects for the economy—the earnings potential of the stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But there's more than one reason to believe that what's going on now has little to do with any rational view of the future, and a lot to do with the market itself. "Dip your toes into any risk asset right now and understand that you are not entering into anything remotely resembling a normal market environment," wrote David Rosenberg, the well-respected former Merrill Lynch analyst who is now the chief economist at Canadian firm Gluskin Sheff, in his recent newsletter. "Dysfunctional is more like it."

The first factor to consider is that the huge rebound in stocks and in all sorts of risk assets from the spring of 2009 until May of this year wasn't necessarily driven by a belief that better times were coming. It was driven by a belief that investors had to buy riskier assets given the Fed's determination to hold interest rates near zero. Because investors can't get a return in "safe" assets—indeed, a small return will get chewed up by inflation—they are driven to riskier assets. As more investors pile in, everyone is driven further out along the risk curve.

This is what traders call "risk on." What they mean is that you'll be rewarded for buying risk, regardless of reality. The Fed's second round of quantitative easing ("QE2"), in which it bought $600 billion of Treasuries in order to keep interest rates low, encouraged this investment strategy. "We had a nice two-year rally in risk assets and something close to an economic recovery, but as we had warned, it was built on sticks and straw, not bricks," wrote Rosenberg. "This isn't much different than the financial engineering in the 2002-07 cycle that gave off the appearance of prosperity."

You can think of the Fed's medicine as a painkiller. It allows everyone to pretend that bad stuff isn't happening, until something shatters the illusion and the comfortable numbness abruptly gives way to panic. There's massive selling. Then the Fed reassures everyone that its toolbox isn't empty just yet—witness the big upturn on Aug. 9 after the Fed said it would likely hold rates near zero until mid-2013 (a worthless prediction if inflation surges)—and the market soars. Risk on!

Read more:

Strolling along the Seashore, 1909
Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida
via:

Trent Gudmundsen  - Summertime

via:

Peggy Crombie, Still Life With Fish
via:

via:

The Great Splintering

by Umair Hague

There are many kinds of looting. There's looting your local superstore — and then there's, as Nobel Laureates Akerlof and Romer discussed in a paper now famous among geeks, there's looting a bank, a financial system, a corporation...or an entire economy. (Their paper might be crudely summed up in the pithy line: "The best way to rob a bank is to own one.") The bedrock of an enlightened social contract is, crudely, that rent-seeking is punished, and creating enduring, lasting, shared wealth is rewarded and that those who seek to profit by extraction are chastened rather than lauded. Today's world of bailouts, golden parachutes, sky-high financial-sector salaries — while middle incomes stagnate — seems to be exactly the reverse. Perhaps, then, our societies have reached a natural turning point of built-in self-limitation; and this self-limitation is causing a perfect storm to converge.

An enlightened social contract is not built on subsidies or "handouts" — whether to the impoverished, or to the pitiable welfare junkies formerly known as "the markets." It's built on a calculus of harm and benefit not just accepted by a plurality of its citizens (versus a tiny Chalet-owning, caviar-gobbling minority at the top) — and also a calculus that can be said to meaningful in the sense that it results in real human prosperity. Without such a bargain to set incentives and coordinate economic activity, even the mightiest, proudest societies will find themselves as bent old men on an endless plateau, searching for a lick of shelter as the typhoon bears down.

For much of the previous economic boom, the bargain on offer in modern Britain could have been abbreviated something like: "Want not merely to get rich — but to get richest, fastest? Then loot, plunder, and enjoy the rewards of conquest." (Consider the eye-popping bonuses for bankers just after the economy went into meltdown.) It was a recipe not for prosperity, but for fragmentation and decline; less a social contract than a sociopathic compact. And though the rioters are guilty of much — and that deserves nothing less than the iron fist of the law — I wonder if, perhaps, the crime inside their crime wasn't perversely, insidiously following the hideous logic of this sociopathic compact through to the fatal end.

Call it the logic of opulence: a paradigm of plenitude centred on more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier, now. Its glittering, unattainable fever dream seems to have driven the rioters mad. As one told the Guardian, "Why are you going to miss the opportunity to get free stuff that's worth loads of money?" Indeed: why, given a poisonous compact tattooed into the deeper calculus of everyday culture, not? Hence, as many have pointed out, the mob hasn't exactly been looting bookshops, but the stuff of faux-luxe, mass-designer plenitude: plasma TVs, fast fashion, video games. The vision they seemed to be pursuing, as if their long-denied birthright, is less one of sign-waving activism, fighting against deep-seated social injustice, and more one of raiding a consumerist Disneyland to which they've long been glumly denied a ticket.

Read more:

Would You LIke a Smile With That?

by Stephanie Clifford

Pret a Manger, the veddy British chain, has gained a foothold in our McWorld of burgers and fries, where you can fun-size this, combo that and, let’s face it, sort of expect sullen service.

Next to, say, McDonald’s, Pret a Manger amounts to a fleck of relish, if that. Last year, Pret posted sales of £327.5 million, or about $534 million at current exchange rates. The take at McDonald’s: $24 billion. But Pret a Manger — the name means “ready to eat” in French — is slowly expanding in New York and other American cities with its own brand of grab-and-go food and, more significantly, a fresh approach to fast-food service. Pret feels almost nothing like an American chain. At a Starbucks in Midtown, you can wait 10 minutes for your latte during the morning rush. At Pret, the goal is to serve customers within 60 seconds. At some fast-food outlets in the city, cashiers might fling your cheeseburger across the counter, Frisbee-style. At Pret, they compliment your earrings.

What makes Pret a Manger a compelling business case study is its approach to customer service and to training and motivating its staff. Yes, Pret happens to make sandwiches — but the lessons are worth knowing, whatever your line of work.

Many businesses have trouble getting longtime employees to work well and, in particular, to work well together. But Pret has managed to build productive, friendly crews out of relatively low-paid, transient employees. And its workers seem pretty happy about it. Its annual work force turnover rate is about 60 percent — low for the fast-food industry, where the rate is normally 300 to 400 percent.

At the request of Sunday Business, Francis Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, reviewed some of the management practices of Pret a Manger. He liked what he saw.

“A lot of people think about these jobs as almost hopeless when it comes to motivating the employees who work there, and it’s kind of sad, and I also think it’s incorrect,” Professor Flynn said. “My sense is there’s a really holistic approach, a comprehensive approach, to development.”

Pret is succeeding with just such an out-of-the-box approach. So far this year, the sales in its 34 American stores — in New York, Chicago and Washington — have increased 40 percent from the same period last year. The company’s total profits, with its approximately 225 British shops contributing the most by far, rose about 37 percent, to £46 million ($75 million) in 2010. Pret plans to expand further in the United States, and in — yipes! — Paris, where it plans to open two shops this year.

How does Pret a Manger do it? To find out, I went to London to learn about the company’s approach to training and teamwork, as well as how to make a proper Pret sandwich. When I landed, I grabbed a coffee at a Pret shop across my from hotel and watched a thin, shaggy-haired employee pick up garbage and sweep the floor. He was skipping as he worked.

This, I thought, was going to be interesting.

Read more:

Friday Book Club - I Know This Much is True

by Karen Karbo

In this follow-up novel to Wally Lamb's Oprah- sanctioned best seller, ''She's Come Undone,'' everyone is bereft, in realms both seen and unseen. Characters have lost love, faith and hope, not to mention hands, legs, thumbs, even lips.

Lamb's narrator, Dominick Birdsey, has lost his mother, his wife, his infant daughter, his career. His identical twin brother, the gentle Thomas, has lost his mind. A paranoid schizophrenic with the usual obsessive interest in alien life-forms, Communism, God and government conspiracy, Thomas goes into the public library one morning during the early rumblings of Desert Storm and cuts off his hand in a biblically inspired protest against the impending war.

What follows is the 40-year-old Dominick's meltdown. In his struggle to do right by Thomas, the brother he loves, resents and envies in equal measure, he is forced to face not just his own demons but the entire cavalcade of nightmares that have bedeviled the Birdsey clan. After Dominick decides on Thomas's behalf not to have his hand reattached -- '' 'I'll just rip it off again,' my brother warned. 'Do you think a few stitches are going to keep me from doing what I have to do? I have a pact with the Lord God Almighty' '' -- Thomas is transferred from the state hospital to a maximum-security forensic institute that ''houses most of the front-page boys: the vet from Mystic who mistook his family for the Vietcong, the kid at Wesleyan who brought his .22-caliber semiautomatic to class.''

Meanwhile, Dominick has been trying to put other parts of his unhappy past to rest -- by getting over his divorce from Dessa, the woman he still loves, and sorting things out with Joy, his current live-in girlfriend, a perky, twice-divorced 25-year-old who works at the local health club and whose life is a mess, even by Dominick's liberal standards.

Happily, this isn't the half of it. Also running through the story is Dominick's quest to get a translation of the memoir written by his Sicilian grandfather (and namesake) as a present for his dying mother. The memoir is lost, then found, then eventually shared with the reader in its entirety.

Lamb takes a great risk here. The bombastic, self-aggrandizing ''History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man From Humble Beginnings'' begins two-thirds of the way through a novel that is already full to bursting with calamitous activity, appearing just when Dominick has hit bottom. It's a tribute to Lamb's considerable gifts that we wind up feeling sorry for this obnoxious patriarch, even as we loathe him.

''I Know This Much Is True'' is big and somewhat blowzy -- there should be an enforceable limit to how many psychotherapy sessions can be included in one novel -- but it never grapples with anything less than life's biggest questions. How do you live with unresolved issues that die with the dead? How do you deal with an abusive parent who, nevertheless, was always there for you? Being touched by an angel is not an option.

Lamb clearly aims to be a modern-day Dostoyevsky with a pop sensibility. In his view, it's not just the present that's the pits, that gives you nightmares and ruins your chances for happiness, it's also the ghosts of dysfunctional family members and your nonrelationship with a mocking, sadistic God, whom you still turn to in times of trouble -- which is all the time.

About the death of his 3-week-old daughter, Dominick says: ''Life didn't have to make sense, I'd concluded: that was the big joke. Get it? You could have a brother who stuck metal clips in his hair to deflect enemy signals from Cuba, and a biological father who, in 33 years, had never shown his face, and a baby dead in her bassinet . . . and none of it meant a . . . thing. Life was a whoopee cushion, a chair yanked away just as you were having a seat. What was that old Army song? We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.''

Luckily for lovers of the novel, so is Wally Lamb.

via:

Moral Hypocrisy, and How to Avoid It

by Dan Jones

At the beginning of 2005, Ted Haggard’s stock was high and rising. Time magazine had just included him on a ‘Top 25’ chart of influential Evangelical Christian pastors in America. He had the ear of not only a huge public following, but also President Bush and his advisors. You could easily have thought God was on his side.

But it wasn’t to last. By the end of the following year, his value on the Evangelical market had plummeted. The fatal bombshell hit at the start of November 2006. During a live radio interview, Mike Jones, a 49-year-old fitness fanatic who formerly worked as a masseur and escort, revealed a hidden — and deeply hypocritical — side to Haggard. Jones reported that for the previous three years, and until just three months earlier, he and Haggard had hooked up on a monthly basis to get high on crystal meth and have sex. Haggard paid for both.

For such a prominent Evangelical, one so publicly opposed to gay rights and so vocal in preaching the virtues of clean, family living, this is about a bad as PR can get. It beats a bit of gambling or garden-variety adultery hands down. Haggard, naturally, denied the charges at first, but later capitulated. He soon stepped down as pastor of New Life Church (the megachurch he founded in Colorado Springs 32 years earlier), resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and dropped out of the limelight. In 2007, Haggard and his family relocated to Phoenix to begin the ‘restoration process’.

Now I know Schadenfreude isn’t the noblest sentiment to nurture or admit to, but I confess that I sometimes find it irresistible. Moralistic blowhards exposed for indulging in the supposed sins that they castigate and denounce other people for succumbing to; that usually does it for me. (Obviously I feel bad for his family; and, if I think about it, Haggard too, who must be a fairly conflicted soul.)

Moral hypocrisy isn’t usually so spectacular. Yet even in its more mundane manifestations — the friend who claims to care about the environment but makes a needless 15-minute drive to the supermarket — it’s still pretty annoying. Double standards generally are.

In recent years psychologists have begun to probe our capacity for moral hypocrisy, and the factors which influence whether we hold ourselves and others to comparable moral standards. Moral hypocrisy can be studied in the lab in a number of ways. One is to have people judge the fairness of their own actions, and to compare that with how they judge seeing someone else perform the very same action. The discrepancy between the two judgments is a measure of moral hypocrisy.

Pearl Jam

[ed.  I prefer the Mother Love Bone version with Andrew Wood.  After he died, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament went on to form Pearl Jam and this version of Crown of Thorns is not bad, either. Eddie is great, as always.]

via:

Kurt Cobain
via:

Iraq Foots the Bill for its Own Destruction

by Murtaza Hussain, Salon

When considering the premise of reparation being paid for the Iraq War it would be natural to assume that the party to whom such payments would be made would be the Iraqi civilian population, the ordinary people who suffered the brunt of the devastation from the fighting. Fought on the false pretence of capturing Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the war resulted in massive indiscriminate suffering for Iraqi civilians which continues to this day. Estimates of the number of dead and wounded range from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, and additional millions of refugees remain been forcibly separated from their homes, livelihoods and families. Billions of dollars in reparations are indeed being paid for the Iraq War, but not to Iraqis who lost loved ones or property as a result of the conflict, and who, despite their nation’s oil wealth, are still suffering the effects of an utterly destroyed economy. "Reparations payments" are being made by Iraq to Americans and others for the suffering which those parties experienced as a result of the past two decades of conflict with Iraq.

In addition to making hundreds of millions of dollars in reparation payments to the United States, Iraq has been paying similarly huge sums to corporations whose business suffered as a result of the actions of Saddam Hussein. While millions of ordinary Iraqis continue to lack even reliable access to drinking water, their free and representative government has been paying damages to corporations such as Pepsi, Philip Morris and Sheraton; ostensibly for the terrible hardships their shareholders endured due to the disruption in the business environment resulting from the Gulf War. When viewed against the backdrop of massive privatization of Iraqi natural resources, the image that takes shape is that of corporate pillaging of a destroyed country made possible by military force.

Read more:

via:

Gallows

[ed.  Seems pretty relevant given recent events.  Read The Great Splintering.]

Smartphones of the Future

by Ginny Miles

As you're reading this article, developers, engineers, and product designers are working on the next great mobile technology. The mobile world is rapidly changing: Smartphones have gone from portable messaging and email devices to streaming-video machines that surf the Web at blazing speed and have cameras that rival point-and-shoots (and they also happen to make calls). What will smartphones look like in five years? Or ten? What sort of amazing things will they be able to do?

Of course, we have no way to predict exactly how cell phones will evolve (unless some sort of magical crystal ball comes along), but looking at today’s trends and tracking what the geniuses at MIT and other academic institutions are up to can give us a pretty good idea of what’s to come.

Read more:

'Huge' Results Raise Hope for Cancer Breakthrough

by Eryn Brown, LA Times

In a potential breakthrough in cancer research, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have genetically engineered patients' T cells — a type of white blood cell — to attack cancer cells in advanced cases of a common type of leukemia.

Two of the three patients who received doses of the designer T cells in a clinical trial have remained cancer-free for more than a year, the researchers said.

Experts not connected with the trial said the feat was important because it suggested that T cells could be tweaked to kill a range of cancers, including ones of the blood, breast and colon.

"This is a huge accomplishment — huge," said Dr. Lee M. Nadler, dean for clinical and translational research at Harvard Medical School, who discovered the molecule on cancer cells that the Pennsylvania team's engineered T cells target.

Findings of the trial were reported Wednesday in two journals.

To build the cancer-attacking cells, the researchers modified a virus to carry instructions for making a molecule that binds with leukemia cells and directs T cells to kill them. Then they drew blood from three patients who suffered from chronic lymphocytic leukemia and infected their T cells with the virus.

When they infused the blood back into the patients, the engineered T cells successfully eradicated cancer cells, multiplied to more than 1,000 times in number and survived for months. They even produced dormant "memory" T cells that might spring back to life if the cancer was to return.

"We knew [the therapy] could be very potent," said Dr. David Porter, director of the blood and marrow transplantation program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and a coauthor of both papers, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine. "But I don't think we expected it to be this dramatic on this go-around."

Read more:

 

Ryan Kapp, Skokie Night, silkscreen on archival paper; 24 x 20", edition of 125

via:

Damien Rice