Huang Yongyu
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Aunt Midge Isn't Dying

[ed. This makes my blood boil.  Take a service designed to provide pain relief, compassion and dignity for dying people and their families, and turn it into a for-profit scam with all manner of quota goals, incentives and conflicts of interest for ripping off Medicare and double-dipping on family payments. There appears to be no limit to corporate greed.]

Janet Stubbs was grateful when the nursing home recommended hospice care for her aunt Midge. Although Stubbs knew her aunt wasn’t dying, the offer of free, Medicare-paid hospice visits from a nurse and chaplain, plus an extra weekly bath, was too good to pass up.

Stubbs didn’t know that her aunt, Doris Midge Appling, was admitted to Hospice Care of Kansas during the company’s “Summer Sizzle” promotion drive, which paid employees as much as $100 a head for referrals, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Stubbs also said she had no clue that the nursing home doctor who referred her aunt for hospice moonlighted as medical director for the hospice company.

“It doesn’t seem right,” said Stubbs, who had Appling’s power of attorney to make medical decisions. “What incentive did the doctor have to put my aunt on hospice? How much was she being paid?”

Harden Healthcare LLC, the hospice’s current owner, said medical directors received no incentive pay. Appling’s doctor, Donna Ewy, didn’t return four calls seeking comment.

Hospice care, once chiefly a charitable cause, has become a growth industry, with $14 billion in revenues, 1,800 for-profit providers and a base of Medicare-covered patients that doubled to 1.1 million from 2000 to 2009.

Compensation based on enrollment numbers, pay to nursing- home doctors who double as hospice medical directors, and gifts to the nursing facilities have helped fuel the boom, according to an examination of 1,000 pages of court documents and interviews with more than 45 current and former hospice employees, patients and family members.

by Peter Waldman, Bloomerg |  Read more:

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Niihau, Forbidden Island USA

If you’ve ever visited the Hawaiian islands, you may already know that one of them, Niihau, west of Kauai, is off-limits to outsiders. Here’s the story of how that came to be, and what life on the island is like today.

In 1863 Eliza McHutchison Sinclair, the wealthy 63-year-old widow of a Scottish sea captain, set sail with her children and grandchildren from New Zealand for Vancouver Island off the southwest coast of Canada. There she hoped to buy a ranch large enough to support the dozen family members who were traveling with her, but after arriving in Canada, she decided the country was too rough for a ranch to be successful. Someone suggested she try her luck in the kingdom of Hawaii, 2,400 miles west of North America in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On September 17, 1863, she and her family sailed into Honolulu harbor, and quickly became friends with King Kamehameha IV.

The Sinclairs toured the islands looking for suitable ranch property. They turned down an opportunity to buy much of what is now downtown Honolulu and Waikiki beach, and they passed on a chance to buy much of the land in and around Pearl Harbor. “After some months of looking,” Eliza’s daughter Anne recalled years later, “we gave up and decided to leave for California. When King Kamehameha heard of this he told us that if we would stay in Hawaii he would sell us a whole island.”

SALE PENDING

The island was Niihau (pronounced NEE-ee-HAH-oo), a 72-square-mile island 18 miles off the southwest coast of Kauai. Population: about three hundred natives. Anne’s brothers, Francis and James Sinclair, had a look and liked what they saw. They offered King Kamehameha $6,000 in gold; the King countered with $10,000 (about $1.5 million in today’s money). Sold! Kameha­meha IV died before the sale could be completed, but his successor, King Kamehameha V, honored the deal. In 1864 the Sinclairs ponied up about 68 pounds of gold, and Niihau has been the family’s private property ever since.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

History (including Hawaiian history) is filled with examples of indigenous peoples being cheated out of their land by unscrupulous outsiders, but this may be a case where the natives pulled one over on the foreigners. When the Sinclair brothers first laid eyes on Niihau, the island was lush and green, seemingly the perfect place to set up a ranch. What Kamehameha apparently did not tell them was that the island was coming off of two years of unusually wet weather. Normally it was semi-arid, almost a desert. Niihau sits in the “rain shadow” of Kauai and receives just 25 inches of rain a year, compared to more than 450 inches on the wettest parts of Kauai. Droughts on Niihau are so severe that it was common for the Niihauans to abandon their island for years on end until the rains returned. If they didn’t leave, they starved.

Indeed, the only reason the island was available for sale—and the reason Kamehameha was so eager to unload it—was because it was so barren. After the Great Mahele (“division”) of 1848, when the monarchy made land available for purchase by native Hawaiians for the first time, the Niihauans had tried to buy the island themselves. They’d hoped to pay for it with crops and animals raised on the island, but the land wasn’t productive enough for them to do it, not even when the price of the land was just a few pennies an acre. They ended up having to lease the island from the King instead, at an even lower price. By the time the Sinclairs sailed into Honolulu harbor in September 1863, the Niihauans had fallen so far behind on even these meager payments that Kamehameha IV was ready to sell the island to someone else.

HEDGING HER BETS

After the sale went through, the Sinclairs built a large house on the west coast of Niihau and set up their ranch. But the dry weather returned, and it became evident that the operation might never be successful. Luckily, Eliza Sinclair still had plenty of gold left, and in the 1870s she bought 21,000 acres of land on Kauai that the family developed into a sugarcane plantation. It, too, remains in the family to this day. (In 1902 Eliza’s grandson bought the island of Lanai at a property auction, making the family sole owners of two of the eight inhabited Hawaiian Islands…but only for a time. They sold Lanai to the Hawaiian Pineapple Company—now part of Dole—in 1922.)

by Miss Cellania, Bathroom Reader, Neatorama |  Read more:
Image credit: Polihale at en.wikipedia

Cressida Campbell
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An Angler, by Tarsila do Amaral, Mid-1920s
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The Gulf War: Were There Any Heroes in the BP Oil Disaster?

[ed. I helped direct the Exxon Valdez cleanup and know many of the scientists, responders and Coast Guard officials mentioned in this article.  While I disagree with one assertion (that high pressure washing on Prince William Sound beaches did more harm than good) this account does a pretty good job of capturing the chaos, distractions, competing interests, and power struggles that typically fuel a large oil spill response.]

It has become conventional wisdom that the BP-funded response to the spill was a chaotic and mismanaged affair, driven by corporate avarice, lacking in urgency, and at times willfully negligent of the problem’s scope—the idea being that any organization that had caused such a catastrophe, and that was so clearly unprepared for it, could not in good faith clean up the scene of the disaster. The evidence for this is much like the imagery of heavy oiling: vivid and convincing upon first consideration, but also fragmentary, anecdotal. At the peak of the cleanup effort, forty-seven thousand people were fighting the oil, a community equivalent in size to Annapolis, or the workforce of G.M.—as one federal scientist called it, “a company built in the middle of the night.” In just half a year, the response expended nearly sixty million man-hours, roughly nine times what it took to build the Empire State Building. After the well ruptured, BP accepted help from competing oil companies, and hired the world’s leading oil-pollution specialists to run key operations. The logistical demands on the effort, which spanned the entire Gulf coast—a region of varied geography and political culture—were immense. President Obama was not exaggerating when he announced in June, “This is the largest response to an environmental disaster of this kind in the history of our country.”  (...)

The old saying has it that oil and water don’t mix, but every day the world’s oceans absorb colossal amounts of oil. When hydrocarbons flow into the sea—whether from spills, or leaky ships, or natural seeps—experts call them “petroleum input.” The world’s total petroleum input is thought to be about three hundred and eighty million gallons per year—a quantity similar to the catastrophic Gulf War spill—with a fifth of it happening in American waters. Much of the input off the United States comes from natural seeps. Some of the largest of those are in the Gulf of Mexico, which is thought to absorb more than fifty million gallons of oil annually.

Approximately twenty thousand oil spills are reported in America every year. Most of them are small and do not attract much attention; only a tiny fraction cost more than a million dollars to clean up. An economy based on oil must be prepared to deal with large amounts of pollution, and over many decades this country has evolved a way to respond to spills. “There is no plan,” one politician took to saying as the response progressed last summer. But there was a plan. Its origins dated back to the first major industrial oil spill at sea: the collision of a tanker called the Torrey Canyon against Pollard Rock, off the coast of England, in 1967.

When the Torrey Canyon ran aground, its broken hull released thirty-seven million gallons of Kuwaiti crude into the water. Oil poured forth in heavy slabs: one drifted toward France; another coated two hundred miles of shoreline in western Cornwall. Twenty-five thousand birds died, and local communities and the British government fought to contain the mess. People on beaches tried in vain to soak up the oil with straw, or they used bulldozers and pumps to recover the oozing petroleum. From the other side of the Channel, the French government dumped three thousand tons of chalk containing stearic acid into the oil, hoping it would sink or disperse. Eventually, the Royal Navy bombed the tanker with a mixture of napalm, sodium chlorate, and aviation fuel, in an effort to incinerate the oil. This, too, was largely ineffective.

The American government watched the incident with alarm, and the following year Congress created the first National Contingency Plan—a blueprint for dealing with a similar catastrophe. A few years later, the Coast Guard set up three oil-spill strike teams in different parts of the country. But when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, in Prince William Sound, in 1989, this evolving system of spill response was put to a tremendous test, and in many ways it failed. Though the Exxon Valdez spill is only the world’s fifty-seventh largest, it was ecologically devastating. The rocky, remote Alaska shoreline was difficult to clean, and the subarctic weather made it impossible to work in winter. On a number of occasions, the response’s methods, such as the use of high-powered jets to blast crude off rocks and beaches, did more damage to the environment than the oil did—but public outrage often demanded action, even if scientists advised against it. Eleven thousand people gathered in Prince William Sound to assist in the effort, and they fell into arguments over basic decisions. Vice-Admiral Clyde Robbins, who led the federal spill response, struggled to get Exxon and government authorities to set aside their mutual distrust and collaborate. “It made it difficult to move ahead on anything,” he told me. “I didn’t really have authority.”

The problems that the Coast Guard faced in Alaska were not entirely about the oil. They were also about emergency response and public perception. “All oil spills are emotional events,” Ann Hayward-Walker, a responder who had worked on the Exxon Valdez incident, told me one evening in Houma. It is possible to fight a forest fire and not be distracted by how the calamity was caused, and whether the cause taints the integrity of the people who deal with it. But oil spills are saturated in blame and political confusion—and opportunity. There is a sense that they are not accidents but accidents waiting to happen, and thus acts of greed. As a result, oil-soaked birds and fish come to symbolize a reviled industry’s heedless behavior. Every year, as many as four hundred thousand birds are killed in America by electricity-generating wind turbines, but they do not make the cover of Time. Incremental ecological damage, even if it is severe, does not easily cause outrage.

by Raffi Khatchadourian, New Yorker |  Read more:
Photograph by Daniel Beltrá.

Black Friday: Beware the Retail Hype

If you opened a newspaper or flipped on a TV last weekend, you were deluged with statements hyperventilating about holiday retail sales. Declarations that this was the best Black Friday in years, and it bodes well for the holiday season.

Savvy investors have learned to take these over-the-top declarations with a grain of salt. If you have paid attention in the past, the reality is far different from the spin: No Virginia, surveys of our gift-shopping intentions do not reveal our actual purchases. We humans are bad at forecasting the future and, as individuals, we are especially poor at predicting our own economic behavior. Marketers and trade groups, well aware of this, exploit that knowledge.

Let’s take a closer look at the annual hype that kicks off the season I like to call “Shopmas.” The actual data are much more revealing about the state of the consumer, the retail sector and the overall economy than the holiday hype.

We begin with a quick review of the retail sector in 2011: Sales improved versus 2010 by 3 to 4 percent. We use year-over-year comparisons because of the highly seasonal nature of retail sales. In 2010, sales were fairly soft, in part because much of the nation experienced severe weather. In the business, we call those “easy comps” — a low comparable data point that should be easy to beat.

Based on the first 10 months of the year, holiday shopping in 2011 should see similar improvements. Consistent with the year-over-year retail numbers, expect sales gains of 3 to 4 percent. Even so, these numbers come with caveats.

Prices in some products have risen — in some cases, substantially. The three most noteworthy are gasoline (up 15 percent), food (5 percent) and cotton (a whopping 230 percent).

The price pressures on these — all consumer staples — are reflected in the total retail sales data. When we look at total sales, we get a sense of how much the nation is spending — but, because of inflation, not how many goods people bought. Based on that data, we can conclude that a decent amount of the total dollar gains in retail sales are not improvements, but rather price inflation.

by Barry Ritholtz, Washington Post |  Read more:

Kodak's Long Fade to Black

Kodak Brownie and Instamatic cameras were once staples of family vacations and holidays — remember the "open me first" Christmas ad campaigns? But it may not be long before a generation of Americans grows up without ever having laid hands on a Kodak product. That's a huge comedown for a brand that was once as globally familiar as Coca-Cola.

It's hard to think of a company whose onetime dominance of a market has been so thoroughly obliterated by new technology. Family snapshots? They're almost exclusively digital now, and only a tiny fraction ever get printed on paper.

Eastman Kodak engineers invented the digital camera in 1975; but now that you can point and click with a cheap cellphone, even the stand-alone digital camera is becoming an endangered species on the consumer electronics veld. The last spool of yellow-boxed Kodachrome rolled out the door of a Mexican factory in 2009. Paul Simon composed his hymn to Kodachrome in 1973, but his camera of choice, according to the lyrics, was a Nikon.

It's not uncommon for great companies to be humbled by what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called the forces of "creative destruction." Technology, especially digital technology, has been the most potent whirlwind sweeping away old markets and old strategies for many decades. Changing economics and global competition have reduced behemoths of the past, such as General Motors, into mice of the present.

Kodak's decline is of a different order from GM's. The latter still manufactures a product with a huge market demand; it just got sloppy and inefficient at turning out its cars and trucks. That's why the federal government, not to mention GM's unions and other stakeholders, thought a dramatic restructuring might put it back on its feet. (That it was a central player in an industry employing hundreds of thousands of Americans was part of the calculus too.)

Kodak, however, markets a process technology; and as the chemistry of film has yielded to digital electronics, consumer demand for Kodak's traditional products has evaporated. A similar transition afflicts newspapers, book publishers, movie studios, broadcasters and record labels today, but the issues for those industries are different yet.

Their business models are under pressure because they're dependent on outdated distribution technologies; but their core products (information, entertainment) are still very much in demand.

So Kodak has faced a tougher challenge than automakers or content producers. Still, it has met the challenge ham-handedly. This is characteristic of companies that have enjoyed what one might think of as success on a tragic scale.

by Michael Hiltzick, LA Times |  Read more:
Photo: Gary Wiepert, Reuters

How Doctors Die

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.

How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.

by Ken Murray, Zocalo Public Square |  Read more:
*Photo courtesy of patrick.ward04.

Liz Brizzi
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The Revolution in Photography

When a set of online teasers for a new camera called the Lytro appeared earlier this year, you could have been forgiven for seeing the invention as just another gimmick. The camera’s attention-grabbing feature is a kind of after-the-fact autofocus: with a click, any blurry portion in a picture can be snapped into sharpness—another step in the march of idiot-proof photography.

In fact, such image correction is merely a side effect of what is genuinely different about the technology. The Lytro, scheduled to reach buyers early next year, creates a wholly new kind of visual object, one that both exemplifies and exploits the way images are consumed in the digital era.

The underlying technique is called “light-field photography.” A traditional camera, of course, captures light reflected off its subject through a lens and onto a flat surface. Proper focus is important to ensure that the image you get is the precise slice of visual reality you want. But “computational photography,” pioneered by Marc Levoy of Stanford University and others, takes a different approach, essentially using hundreds of cameras to capture all the visual information in a scene and processing the results into a many-layered digital object. One of Levoy’s former students, Ren Ng, added the twist that resulted in the Lytro: instead of using multiple cameras, he integrated hundreds of micro lenses into a single device.

The upshot is a photograph that’s less a slice of visual information than a cube, from which you can choose whichever layer would make the most pleasing two-dimensional image for printing and framing. But you can also leave the picture as it is—a three-dimensional capture suitable for digital display or distribution—and let others do the fiddling. Rather than a definitive, static image, a light-field visual object is intrinsically interactive.

In the pictorial examples the Lytro company has released online, this flexibility comes across as a fun novelty: you can focus on the Empire State Building in the distance, or the raindrop-splattered window in the foreground. But the implications are more profound. “It’s fair to say that this technology is a game changer,” says Richard Koci Hernandez, a photographer and assistant professor of new media at the University of California at Berkeley. The company gave Hernandez a Lytro prototype to beta test, and he argues that it represents as important a breakthrough as auto-focus itself, or even the great shift to digital photography.

Imagine, he suggests, a photojournalist covering a presidential speech whose audience includes a clutch of protesters. Using a traditional camera, he says, “I could easily set my controls so that what’s in focus is just the president, with the background blurred. Or I could do the opposite, and focus on the protesters.” A Lytro capture, by contrast, will include both focal points, and many others. Distribute that image, he continues, and “the viewer can choose—I don’t want to sound professorial—but can choose the truth.”

by Rob Walker, The Atlantic |  Read more: 
Graphic: Bryan Christie

Noela Mills, “Forest-Vines Reaching”, acrylic on paper
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Battlefield Main Street

[ed. Lots of links in this article to support the author's thesis that police forces across the country are becoming more reactive and militarized.  This might have something to do with it: Pentagon's 1033 program gave away over $500 million of leftover military gear to law enforcement agencies in 2011.]

In February of last year, video surfaced of a marijuana raid in Columbia, Mo. During the raid on Jonathan Whitworth and his family, police took down the door with a battering ram, then within seconds shot and killed one of Whitworth's dogs and wounded the other. They didn't find enough pot in the house to charge Whitworth with even a misdemeanor. (He was, however, charged with misdemeanor possession of drug paraphernalia when police found a pipe.) The disturbing video went viral in May 2010, triggering outrage around the world. On Fox News, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer and Bill O'Reilly cautioned not to judge the entire drug war by the video, which they characterized as an isolated incident.

In fact, very little about the raid that was isolated or unusual. For the most part, it was carried out the same way drug warrants are served some 150 times per day in the United States. The battering ram, the execution of Whitworth's dog, the fact that police weren't aware Whitworth's 7-year-old child was in the home before they riddled the place with bullets, the fact that they found only a small amount of pot, likely for personal use -- all are common in drug raids. The only thing unusual was that the raid was recorded by police, then released to the public after an open records request by the Columbia Daily Tribune. It was as if much of the country was seeing for the first time the violence with which the drug war is actually fought. And they didn't like what they saw.

That video came to mind with the outrage and public debate over the now-infamous pepper-spraying of Occupy protesters at the University of California-Davis protest earlier this month. The incident was just one of a number of high-profile uses of force amid crackdowns on Occupy protesters across the country, including one in Oakland in which the skull of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen was fractured by a tear gas canister, and in New York, where NYPD Officer Anthony Bologna pepper-sprayed protesters who had been penned in by police fencing.

But America's police departments have been moving toward more aggressive, force-first, militaristic tactics and their accompanying mindset for 30 years. It's just that, with the exception of protests at the occasional free trade or World Bank summit, the tactics haven't generally been used on mostly white, mostly college-educated kids armed with cellphone cameras and a media platform.

Police militarization is now an ingrained part of American culture. SWAT teams are featured in countless cop reality shows, and wrong-door raids are the subject of "The Simpsons" bits and search engine commercials. Tough-on-crime sheriffs now sport tanks and hardware more equipped for battle in a war zone than policing city streets. Seemingly benign agencies such as state alcohol control boards and the federal Department of Education can now enforce laws and regulations not with fines and clipboards, but with volatile raids by paramilitary police teams.

by Radley Balko, Huffington Post |  Read more:
Photo: Stephen Brashear/Getty via:

Hubert Sumlin 1931–2011

Hubert Sumlin, the guitarist whose slashing solos and innovative ideas galvanized the blues of Howlin’ Wolf and inspired rock guitar players like Jimmy Page, Robbie Robertson and Eric Clapton, died on Sunday in Wayne, N.J. He was 80.

Mr. Sumlin began appearing on Howlin’ Wolf’s recordings in 1953, first as a rhythm guitarist and then, beginning in 1955, on lead guitar. Mr. Sumlin’s eerie guitar counterpart to Howlin’ Wolf’s unearthly moaning on the 1956 hit “Smokestack Lightnin’ ” has lately been featured in a television commercial for Viagra. He also played lead on “Back Door Man,” “Spoonful” and “The Red Rooster,” all written and arranged by the Chicago blues trailblazer Willie Dixon.

“Dixon’s often astute novelty lyrics and shrewd arrangements were topped off by Sumlin’s imaginative, angular, taut attack, frequent glisses, maniacally wide vibrato and percussive chords, all drawn with an exaggerated brush,” the producer Dick Shurman observed of Mr. Sumlin’s relentlessly inventive playing in his liner notes to a 1991 boxed set of Howlin’ Wolf’s work for Chess Records.

“Back Door Man,” “Spoonful” and “The Red Rooster” were later made even more famous in versions released, respectively, by the Doors, Cream and the Rolling Stones. All three originally appeared on Howlin’ Wolf’s 1962 LP “Howlin’ Wolf,” which the critic Greil Marcus called “the finest of all Chicago blues albums,” largely because of Mr. Sumlin’s contribution.

Though at times tempestuous, Mr. Sumlin’s partnership with Howlin’ Wolf lasted until the singer’s death in 1976. Mr. Sumlin’s intuitive, empathetic accompaniment typically spurred his mentor to unpredictable and frenzied heights.

by Bill Friskics-Warren, NY Times |  Read more:

An Evolution Toward a Programmable Universe

[ed. NY Times special on the Future of Computing.]

Over the next 10 years, the physical world will become ever more overlaid with devices for sending and receiving information.

Already billions of processors are embedded in our smartphones, cars, appliances and buildings and the environment. These sensors can send out streams of data about their surroundings, and more and more it is anonymously transmitted to remote data centers — the “clouds” of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple.

From these vast clouds, the companies can power apps that are “spatially aware.” For instance, Google Maps now draws on data in the cloud to sample the location and movement of cellphones in cars, producing a real-time picture of traffic congestion.

Smart electric grids are measuring our homes’ use of power; active people are tracking their heart rates; and hundreds of millions of us are uploading geo-tagged data to Flickr, Yelp, Facebook and Google Plus. As we look 10 years ahead, the fastest supercomputer (the “exascale” machine) will be composed of one billion processors, and the clouds will most likely grow to this scale as well, creating a distributed planetary computer of enormous power.

Such computational power, co-located with the gigantic storage that holds the data from all the incoming data streams, will enable faster-than-real-time simulations of many aspects of our physical world. As Mike Liebhold and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future have discussed, computing will have evolved from merely sensing local information to analyzing it to being able to control it. In this evolution, the world gradually becomes programmable.

by Larry Smarr, NY Times |  Read more:
Graphic: John Hersey

China’s Dam Frenzy

China’s frenzied dam-building hit a wall recently in Burma (Myanmar), where the government’s bold decision to halt a controversial Chinese-led dam project helped to ease the path to the first visit by a US secretary of state to that country in more than a half-century.

The now-stalled $3.6 billion Myitsone Dam, located at the headwaters of Burma’s largest river, the Irrawaddy, was designed to pump electricity exclusively into China’s power grid, despite the fact that Burma suffers daily power outages. The State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of China’s State Council hailed Myitsone as a model overseas project serving Chinese interests. The Burmese decision thus shocked China’s government, which had begun treating Burma as a reliable client state (one where it still has significant interests, including the ongoing construction of a multibillion-dollar oil and natural-gas pipeline).

Despite that setback, China remains the world’s biggest dam builder at home and abroad. Indeed, no country in history has built more dams than China, which boasts more dams than the rest of the world combined.

Before the Communists came to power in 1949, China had only 22 dams of any significant size. Now the country has more than half of the world’s roughly 50,000 large dams, defined as having a height of at least 15 meters, or a storage capacity of more than three million cubic meters. Thus, China has completed, on average, at least one large dam per day since 1949. If dams of all sizes are counted, China’s total surpasses 85,000.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, China’s dams had the capacity to store 562.4 cubic kilometers of water in 2005, or 20% of the country’s total renewable water resources. Since then, China has built scores of new dams, including the world’s largest: the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

by Brahma Chellany, Project Syndicate |  Read more:

Homage to Raoul Dufy, by © Isy Ochoa, 2006
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