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Topics - Amianthus

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1
3DHS / Where's Mikey?
« on: October 11, 2010, 08:33:14 AM »
I need him to explain to me how jailing Liu Xiaobo by the Chinese government is a good thing...

2
3DHS / Fidel Castro: Cuban Communism Not Working
« on: September 09, 2010, 11:01:22 AM »
HAVANA, Sept. 9, 2010
Rare Criticism of Government from Cuba's Revolutionary Leader Comes as Island Nation Begins its Reform.

(AP)  Cuba's communist economic model has come in for criticism from an unlikely source: Fidel Castro.

The revolutionary leader told a visiting American journalist and a U.S.-Cuba policy expert that the island's state-dominated system is in need of change, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has taken pains to steer clear of local issues since illness forced him to step down as president four years ago.

The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel's brother Raul, the country's president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba's 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked Castro if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.

The Cuban government had no immediate comment on Goldberg's account.

Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations who accompanied Goldberg on the trip, confirmed the Cuban leader's comment, which he made at a private lunch last week.

She told The Associated Press she took the remark to be in line with Raul Castro's call for gradual but widespread reform.

"It sounded consistent with the general consensus in the country now, up to and including his brother's position," Sweig said.

In general, she said she found the 84-year-old Castro to be "relaxed, witty, conversational and quite accessible."

"He has a new lease on life, and he is taking advantage of it," Sweig said.

Castro stepped down temporarily in July 2006 due to a serious illness that nearly killed him.

He resigned permanently two years later, but remains head of the Communist Party. After staying almost entirely out of the spotlight for four years, he re-emerged in July and now speaks frequently about international affairs. He has been warning for weeks of the threat of a nuclear war over Iran.

But the ex-president has said very little about Cuba and its politics, perhaps to limit the perception he is stepping on his brother's toes.

Goldberg, who traveled to Cuba at Castro's invitation last week to discuss a recent Atlantic article he wrote about Iran's nuclear program, also reported on Tuesday that Castro questioned his own actions during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, including his recommendation to Soviet leaders that they use nuclear weapons against the United States.

Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba has clung to its communist system.

The state controls well over 90 percent of the economy, paying workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free health care and education, and nearly free transportation and housing. At least a portion of every citizen's food needs are sold to them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices.

Cuba says much of its suffering is caused by the 48-year-old U.S. trade embargo. The economy has also been slammed by the global economic downturn, a drop in nickel prices and the fallout from three devastating hurricanes that hit in quick succession in 2008. Corruption and inefficiency have exacerbated problems.

As president, Raul Castro has instituted a series of limited economic reforms, and has warned Cubans that they need to start working harder and expecting less from the government. But the president has also made it clear he has no desire to depart from Cuba's socialist system or embrace capitalism.

Fidel Castro's interview with Goldberg is the only one he has given to an American journalist since he left office.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/09/world/main6848632.shtml

3
3DHS / What Minneapolis Has That Pittsburgh Wants
« on: August 20, 2010, 11:48:08 AM »
Elaine Labalme
Wednesday, August 18, 2010

A mill city on the banks of a rushing river morphs into one of the most prosperous cities in the U.S. at the dawn of the 20th century.  Globalization brings about a shift in the 1960s and 70s and the city reinvents itself as a hub of technology, commerce and culture.  Sound familiar?  This is Minneapolis, whose lumber and flour mills once hugged the mighty Mississippi.  The erstwhile flyover city has become a destination in its own right and any city, including our own, can learn from what they've done.

It all starts downtown, where the urban renewal of the 60s literally paved the way for the Nicollet Mall, a grand boulevard of wide sidewalks and the outdoor cafes that spill onto them.  The streets are clean and people stride purposely throughout the district day and night.

Highrises both old and new lord over the city center and the adaptive reuse of older buildings is most striking in hotels like the W at the Foshay, a sexpot of a hostelry where deals are cut in butter-leather chairs in a dimly lit lobby.


Restaurants are also part of the mix and hipsters are quick to visit Hell's Kitchen, where Dante's Inferno is a happy place and the caramel roll a butter fest as big as George Foreman's fist.  James Beard Award-nominated chef Isaac Becker gets into the act at 112 Eatery, where his signature burger is slathered with a hunk of brie.  A man, a plan and some action and Liberty Avenue could similarly be the pulse of Pittsburgh.

Bikers are also all over the downtown district, and I don't mean Hell's Angels.  Thanks to Nice Ride Minnesota, a bike share program where anyone can access a low-fee ride, commuting is becoming a clean, green affair and residents are getting healthier, which is why Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota has jumped onto the bandwagon.


Launched in June with 65 stations and 350 bikes, there are now over 700 shiny green cruisers rolling through town and Mayor R.T. Rybak is on one of them several times a day (hello, Luke!).  "The bike share program is opening up downtown to many commuters," says Bill Dossett, executive director of Nice Ride.  "This speaks to a pace of life and experience that people want.  While it's an important small piece of a bigger package of alternative transportation models, it's primarily an economic development tool for the neighborhoods."  Similar programs have been hugely successful in Paris and Barcelona and Denver and Washington, D.C. are also on board.

Equally visible throughout Minneapolis is an ethnically and socially diverse population.  The city welcomed Hmong refugees from Laos in the 1980s once they were granted refugee status by the U.S., attracting them with an appealing mix of jobs, housing and good schools.  Somali refugees in the 1990s were attracted to the relative safety of Minneapolis compared to their homeland and today, both groups count over 60,000 residents in their new home.

A vibrant Latino community can be found along Lake Street in south Minneapolis and this rich stew "is an asset, not a negative," says Ahmed Muhumud of the Neighborhood and Community Relations Department of the City of Minneapolis.  "It's an investment that enriches all of us."  The city's LGBT community is the fourth largest in the U.S. at 12.5% of residents.  Minnesota passed a non-discrimination law in 1993 and was the first state to include gender identity in its law.  As a result, Minneapolis became a hub of activism and equality and "the entire city is gay-friendly," says Monica Meyer, executive director of OutFront Minnesota.


An embarrassment of riches can be found at the Walker Art Center, one of the premier modern art museums in the country.  The legacy of lumber baron T.B. Walker, the museum is now spread over two ample wings, the newest a striking aluminum mesh cube by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron.


"We're off the beaten path," says Karen Gysin of the Walker's Midwestern location, "so we needed cultural institutions to attract high-level people to our many Fortune 500 companies."  The focus at the Walker is on contemporary art married to a multi-disciplinary approach (performing arts, film/video) yet it's the permanent collection that elicits wows.  Face it, how can you not like a museum that fills a cavernous room with colorful hammocks and loops a Jimi Hendrix soundtrack as backdrop?

The Walker is part of a larger "Minneapolis arts explosion" that has world-class architects redefining many of the city's cultural institutions.  Frank Gehry's bold flourishes now grace the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota while Argentine architect Cesar Pelli has designed a Central Library that is awash in etched glass and anything but bookish.


At the esteemed Guthrie Theater, French architect Jean Nouvel has dropped a blue glass cube on the shores of the Mississippi River and the regional theater company stages 25 productions a year while inspiring one of the largest fringe festivals in the region.  Art on a smaller scale can be found at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, where "Spoonbridge and Cherry" is the whimsy of Claes Oldenburg and his wife and collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen.  An oversized spoon cradling a bright red cherry, the sculpture has become an icon of the Minneapolis skyline in much the same way "Cloud's Gate" ("the bean") has captured the fancy of Chicagoans.  There's something to be said for searing a city's identity on the collective consciousness...submissions, anyone?


Minneapolitans' finest hour, however, may come in the dead of winter since the city has a plan for snow emergencies.  That's right, a plan.  "Our plan is more about solving a parking problem, not a plowing problem," says Mike Kennedy, director of Transportation Maintenance and Repair for the City of Minneapolis.

Enacted forty years ago and updated in the mid-80s, the plan calls for the orderly movement of parked cars for any snow event in excess of four inches.  No parking is allowed on either side of the street on primary routes on the first day of a snow emergency; the second day prohibits parking on the even side of non-emergency routes and the ban shifts to the odd side of the street on day three.  The program is enforced with aggressive tagging and towing and, as a result, 90% compliance is achieved.  "The public demands that we tow violators," says Kennedy, who's quick to point out that it's not about towing cars but about plowing streets.  "You've got to have a plan in an urban core ? a plan to move cars."  Alas, the parking chair has met its match.

Sign up to receive Pop City weekly. And see Pop City's new sister publication, The Line, in Minneapolis.

New Girl In Town Elaine Labalme loves to borrow ideas, jewelry and recipes, in that order, and wants to know how you feel about Philadelphia.  Email her here.

Photographs courtesy Bill Kelley

http://www.popcitymedia.com/features/mpls081810.aspx

4
3DHS / Meaningful quote from an academic regarding race
« on: July 30, 2010, 05:26:18 PM »
"Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one?s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness."

Mary Frances Berry  Professor of American Social Thought and History, U. Penn.
http://www.politico.com/arena/perm/Mary_Frances_Berry_91E3D9D5-C40D-440C-9D48-1C50CBC60C87.html

5
3DHS / Secret Jails Used To Enforce China's 'Hidden Rules'
« on: July 30, 2010, 10:16:30 AM »

A man walks through a Beijing building formerly used as a secret detention center in 2009. In these "black jails," Chinese citizens are held, forcibly restrained and sometimes beaten to prevent them from lodging formal complaints with the central government.

Heard on Morning Edition

July 29, 2010 - DON GONYEA, host:

China's legal system is a mix of new laws and old customs. As recently as a generation ago, the country didn't even have trial lawyers of a criminal code. But there are many instances in which the laws put on the books in recent years don't have much effect, and society runs according to a completely different set of unwritten rules. Some Chinese call these hidden rules.

In the first of two reports, NPR's Anthony Kuhn looks at how some hidden rules are enforced through a system of so-called black jails.

ANTHONY KUHN: Just a couple minutes' walk from one of Beijing's busiest downtown intersections, there's a small hotel run by the government of South China's Guangxi Province. Provincial officials occasionally use the hotel to secretly detain people who've come to the capital to complain about local government abuses. They're kept under a sort of house arrest until they can be shipped home.

I've been tipped off by a human rights activist that a woman named Liu Xinyu is in just such a jam. She's come to Beijing to complain that her ancestral home was bulldozed by a developer without paying her a fair price.

Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)

Unidentified Woman: (Foreign language spoken)

KUHN: I find Ms. Liu in the hall outside her hotel room. Next to her are two sullen and bewildered-looking young women who Liu says were hired to guard her. We ignore them and go into Ms. Liu's room to talk.

Ms. LIU XINYU: (Through translator) I was brought here by people sent by the provincial government to stop me from petitioning. I haven't exactly been detained here, but I'm not free, and they won't let me leave.

KUHN: We decide to see what happens if she tries. The answer comes soon enough as we make our way to the door.

Unidentified Man #2: (Foreign language spoken)

KUHN: You'd best leave this matter to us, a middle-aged official in the hallway objects. He dodges my microphone and refuses to answer questions. China is different, he insists. We have our regulations here.

(Soundbite of honking horn)

KUHN: We make it to the street, heading for a drug store, with the official trailing not far behind. Liu eventually returns to the hotel, clinging to hope that the government will help her.

Ms. Liu's hotel is a minimum-security facility. There are other makeshift detention facilities in places like rented farmyards and guesthouses that are better guarded.

China has denied the existence of black jails to the U.N. Human Rights Commission. But almost any petitioner can show you one. Chinese law gives citizens the right to petition their government to redress their grievances. But petitioners say the government treats them like outlaws. And they say police are often complicit in the black jails' operation.

Zhao Fusheng, who is from Sichuan Province, says he was detained in his provincial government's liaison office when he came to Beijing to file a petition. He says it was impossible to tell that it was a black jail from the outside.

Mr. ZHAO FUSHENG: (Through translator) Once the provincial liaison officials get a hold of you, they put you in their basement. Above the basement is a storefront. A door in the storefront opens, they throw you inside, and you're behind a layer of guards. If you disobey, they beat you.

KUHN: Zhao says black jails have become a kind of cottage industry in Beijing.

Mr. ZHAO: (Through translator) The provincial liaison offices pay the black jail operators the equivalent of $36 per detainee per day. Of that, about 15 goes to hire a guard, another 15 for food, and the rest for accommodations.

KUHN: Joshua Rosenzweig is the Hong Kong-based research manager for a human rights group called the Dui Hua Foundation. He says that while the central government wants citizens to inform on corrupt officials, it also expects local officials to maintain order and to keep petitioners out of the capital.

Mr. JOSHUA ROSENZWEIG (Research Manager, Dui Hua Foundation): If you have petitioners from your area flocking to Beijing, it's a sign that you're not doing your job very well at the local level. And therefore, as a local official, you're going to do everything you can to stop those people from making you look bad.

KUHN: Many local governments also maintain informal detention centers.

Petitioner Jin Hanyan, from central Hubei Province, says she accused her county's Communist Party secretary of corruption. For this, she says, she was sent to a so-called study class in an abandoned tobacco factory. Of course, she says, no studying actually went on in there.

Ms. JIN HANYAN: (Through translator) In the morning, they'd yell to wake us up. They'd make us do calisthenics and pull weeds. If you didn't obey, they'd beat you to within an inch of your life and withhold medical treatment if you got sick. They said the county party secretary told them it was not illegal to beat us to death.

KUHN: Beijing-based journalist Wu Si is the author of the 2002 book "Hidden Rules." Government censors banned the book, but society now widely uses the term Wu coined to describe the way things really work in China. Wu says that the black jails are an expression of these hidden rules.

Mr. WU SI (Author, "Hidden Rules"): (Through translator) There have been many of these kinds of places, both in China's history and in the present day. They're an expression of officials' power to legally harm citizens. I call them gray jails. They're neither formal jails nor something that is entirely illegal. They're an oddity that exists in a sort of gray area.

KUHN: Wu says this is the hidden rule that makes all the others stick. Officials have the power to punish citizens more or less at will, either for challenging their authority or just to extort money out of them.

China is certainly not the only society with hidden rules, but China's are especially elaborate. They're also in glaring conflict with the country's laws and with the Confucian virtues that centuries of Chinese governments have espoused.

Mr. WU: (Through translator) The formal rules used to say that county officials should act like people's parents. In fact, they act like masters and lord it over the common people. Those beneath them must show deference, kowtow before them, and offer them all sorts of goods and favors.

KUHN: A few days after I talked to her, I got word that local human rights activists had liberated petitioner Liu Xinyu from her hotel room. So I went to see her again.

(Soundbite of traffic)

KUHN: She stands outside the hotel room and reflects on her experience. She says she now sees her former captors as pathetic.

Ms. LIU: (Through translator) If the local government would just try to resolve our problems for us, then we wouldn't have to petition the higher authorities. There was a time when we trusted the government to resolve our problems. But they didn't respond with sincerity.

KUHN: The Dui Hua Foundation's Joshua Rosenzweig points out that local officials could strike at the root of the problem by resolving petitioners' problems. But unfortunately that's not the way the hidden rules work, and for that reason, the officials just devote their energies to silencing the petitioners.

Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Beijing.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128825986

6
3DHS / Joke I got in the mail today
« on: July 23, 2010, 11:05:22 AM »
Politically Correct Football

The Politically Correct National Football League would like to announce its name changes and schedules for the coming season:

The Washington Native Americans will host the New York Very Tall People on opening day.

Other key games include the Dallas Western-Style Laborers hosting the St. Louis Uninvited Guests, and the Minnesota Plundering Norsemen taking on the Green Bay Meat Industry Workers.

In Week 2, there are several key matchups, highlighted by the showdown between the San Francisco Precious Metal Enthusiasts and the New Orleans Pretty Good People. The Atlanta Birds of Prey will play host to the Philadelphia Birds of Prey, while the Seattle Birds of Prey will visit the Phoenix Male Finches.

The Monday night game will pit the Miami Pelagic Percoid Food Fishes against the Denver Untamed Beasts of Burden. The Cincinnati Large Bangladeshi Carnivorous Mammals will travel to Tampa Bay for a clash with the West Indies Freebooters later in Week 9. And the Detroit Large Carnivorous Cats will play the Chicago Securities-Traders-in-a-Declining-Market. Week 9 also features the Indianapolis Young Male Horses at the New England Zealous Lovers of Country.

7
3DHS / Triple-slit experiment confirms reality is quantum
« on: July 22, 2010, 04:14:25 PM »
19:00 22 July 2010 by David Shiga

It is one of the all-time greatest physics experiments: such a classic that it's taken a century to go one better.

In the double-slit experiment of 1908, a photon fired at a pair of slits passed through both simultaneously and interfered with itself. This surprising effect provided one of the first clues to the weird world of quantum mechanics.

Now precise measurements have been made on a version with three slits - and they again confirm the predictions of quantum mechanics.

Why are we still testing such predictions? It is not just tilting at windmills: physicists have long struggled to unite quantum mechanics with general relativity, which describes gravity, and some believe quantum mechanics will need tweaking to make this work.

Those tweaks, some physicists have argued, might include altering a quantum dictum called Born's rule. It predicts that interference patterns from three or more slits is equivalent to combining the effects of several double-slit experiments.

But although it is easy to add a third slit to the double-slit experiment, it has been more challenging to do it in a way that allows the precise measurements needed to check the validity of quantum mechanics.

"The experiment is much harder than it might seem," says James Franson of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who was not involved in the study. "The slightest misalignment of the slits might produce errors."

Urbasi Sinha of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and colleagues managed to do it by carving into a metal coating on a glass plate to make three equally spaced transparent slits, 30 micrometres wide and 100 micrometres apart. Then they used a laser to fire photons one at a time at the plate and recorded the pattern of light on the other side.

The result was a wavy interference pattern that matched the predictions of Born's rule to within the experiment's error margin of 1 per cent.

Franson says it is important to check for deviations from what theory predicts, even though the results were unsurprising in this case. "People tend to take things for granted, but physics is an experimental science and we should test these things," he says.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1190545

Original Article

8
Culture Vultures / News from Lake Wobegone
« on: July 21, 2010, 01:57:15 PM »
This was posted on a Twin Cities oriented FB page today:

"#64: Standing in LBJ's cemented footprints at Minnehaha Falls. Gazing out over the falls we realized that we will never personally pass momentous civil rights legislation, we will never command America's military, and -- most lamentable of all -- Secret Service agents will never refer to us as 'Bullnuts.'"

9
3DHS / Guess she's an expert on the subject matter...
« on: July 19, 2010, 12:52:10 PM »
Woman charged with killing husband is lobbyist
By Rhonda Cook and Ty Tagami

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A 45-year-old woman, charged with ending a domestic dispute by killing her 26-year-old husband of five days, is a registered lobbyist for a group fighting domestic violence.

Arelisha Bridges was ordered held without bond in the Fulton County Jail. She is scheduled for a preliminary hearing later this month on charges of felony murder, murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.

Officials said Bridges claimed she was unemployed. But records show she is a lobbyist for an organization called the National Declaration for Domestic Violence Order; its Web site says the group is pushing legislation to create a database of those convicted of sex crimes or domestic abuse.

Usually an accused felon will appear at a preliminary hearing a day later, but Bridges' hearing was within hours of the shooting death of Anthony Rankins. Officials said the court appearance was moved up because of the unusual circumstances around the crime.

Witnesses told police that Bridges was wearing a nightgown and a shower cap as she argued with Rankins on the sidewalk on North Avenue near West Peachtree Street around 10:45 p.m. Monday.

And moments later, witnesses said, they heard shots. They said she then "calmly walked away."

A MARTA police officer stopped her as she was getting into her car, perhaps to return to her home nearby on Centennial Olympic Park Drive.

According to Atlanta police, Bridges told investigators that she and Rankins had been dating for a few months and were just married on Feb. 24.

Bridges' group isn't among the prominent domestic violence lobbying groups in Georgia, said Kirsten Rambo, the executive director of the Georgia Commission on Family Violence.

"This is the first I've heard about that organization," Rambo said. "I certainly couldn't say if they were legitimate or not," she said, adding, "It's certainly a new name to me."

Bridges has filed sparse lobbying expenses, according to State Ethics Commission records. So far this year, she's reported spending $20 -- for parking while lobbying for the abuse database.

-- Staff writer Mike Morris contributed to this article.

Original Article

10
3DHS / American Dream Is Elusive for New Generation
« on: July 08, 2010, 03:44:58 PM »
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: July 6, 2010

GRAFTON, Mass. - After breakfast, his parents left for their jobs, and Scott Nicholson, alone in the house in this comfortable suburb west of Boston, went to his laptop in the living room. He had placed it on a small table that his mother had used for a vase of flowers until her unemployed son found himself reluctantly stuck at home.

The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean's award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a resume and cover letter - four or five a week, week after week.

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder.

"The conversation I'm going to have with my parents now that I've turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job," he said.

He was braced for the conversation with his father in particular. While Scott Nicholson viewed the Hanover job as likely to stunt his career, David Nicholson, 57, accustomed to better times and easier mobility, viewed it as an opportunity. Once in the door, the father has insisted to his son, opportunities will present themselves - as they did in the father's rise over 35 years to general manager of a manufacturing company.

"You maneuvered and you did not worry what the maneuvering would lead to," the father said. "You knew it would lead to something good."

Complicating the generational divide, Scott's grandfather, William S. Nicholson, a World War II veteran and a retired stock broker, has watched what he described as America's once mighty economic engine losing its pre-eminence in a global economy. The grandfather has encouraged his unemployed grandson to go abroad - to "Go West," so to speak.

"I view what is happening to Scott with dismay," said the grandfather, who has concluded, in part from reading The Economist, that Europe has surpassed America in offering opportunity for an ambitious young man. "We hate to think that Scott will have to leave," the grandfather said, "but he will."

The grandfather's injunction startled the grandson. But as the weeks pass, Scott Nicholson, handsome as a Marine officer in a recruiting poster, has gradually realized that his career will not roll out in the Greater Boston area - or anywhere in America - with the easy inevitability that his father and grandfather recall, and that Scott thought would be his lot, too, when he finished college in 2008.

"I don't think I fully understood the severity of the situation I had graduated into," he said, speaking in effect for an age group - the so-called millennials, 18 to 29 - whose unemployment rate of nearly 14 percent approaches the levels of that group in the Great Depression. And then he veered into the optimism that, polls show, is persistently, perhaps perversely, characteristic of millennials today. "I am absolutely certain that my job hunt will eventually pay off," he said.

For young adults, the prospects in the workplace, even for the college-educated, have rarely been so bleak. Apart from the 14 percent who are unemployed and seeking work, as Scott Nicholson is, 23 percent are not even seeking a job, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The total, 37 percent, is the highest in more than three decades and a rate reminiscent of the 1930s.

The college-educated among these young adults are better off. But nearly 17 percent are either unemployed or not seeking work, a record level (although some are in graduate school). The unemployment rate for college-educated young adults, 5.5 percent, is nearly double what it was on the eve of the Great Recession, in 2007, and the highest level - by almost two percentage points - since the bureau started to keep records in 1994 for those with at least four years of college.

Yet surveys show that the majority of the nation's millennials remain confident, as Scott Nicholson is, that they will have satisfactory careers. They have a lot going for them.

"They are better educated than previous generations and they were raised by baby boomers who lavished a lot of attention on their children," said Andrew Kohut, the Pew Research Center's director. That helps to explain their persistent optimism, even as they struggle to succeed.

So far, Scott Nicholson is a stranger to the triumphal stories that his father and grandfather tell of their working lives. They said it was connections more than perseverance that got them started - the father in 1976 when a friend who had just opened a factory hired him, and the grandfather in 1946 through an Army buddy whose father-in-law owned a brokerage firm in nearby Worcester and needed another stock broker.

From these accidental starts, careers unfolded and lasted. David Nicholson, now the general manager of a company that makes tools, is still in manufacturing. William Nicholson spent the next 48 years, until his retirement, as a stock broker. "Scott has got to find somebody who knows someone," the grandfather said, "someone who can get him to the head of the line."

While Scott has tried to make that happen, he has come under pressure from his parents to compromise: to take, if not the Hanover job, then one like it. "I am beginning to realize that refusal is going to have repercussions," he said. "My parents are subtly pointing out that beyond room and board, they are also paying other expenses for me, like my cellphone charges and the premiums on a life insurance policy."

Scott Nicholson also has connections, of course, but no one in his network of family and friends has been able to steer him into marketing or finance or management training or any career-oriented opening at a big corporation, his goal. The jobs are simply not there.

The Millennials' Inheritance

The Great Depression damaged the self-confidence of the young, and that is beginning to happen now, according to pollsters, sociologists and economists. Young men in particular lost a sense of direction, Glen H. Elder Jr., a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, found in his study, "Children of the Great Depression." In some cases they were forced into work they did not want - the issue for Scott Nicholson.

Military service in World War II, along with the G.I. Bill and a booming economy, restored well-being; by the 1970s, when Mr. Elder did his retrospective study, the hardships of the Depression were more a memory than an open sore. "They came out of the war with purpose in their lives, and by age 40 most of them were doing well," he said, speaking of his study in a recent interview.

The outlook this time is not so clear. Starved for jobs at adequate pay, the millennials tend to seek refuge in college and in the military and to put off marriage and child-bearing. Those who are working often stay with the jobs they have rather than jump to better paying but less secure ones, as young people seeking advancement normally do. And they are increasingly willing to forgo raises, or to settle for small ones.

"They are definitely more risk-averse," said Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at the Yale School of Management, "and more likely to fall behind."

In a recent study, she found that those who graduated from college during the severe early '80s recession earned up to 30 percent less in their first three years than new graduates who landed their first jobs in a strong economy. Even 15 years later, their annual pay was 8 to 10 percent less.

Many hard-pressed millennials are falling back on their parents, as Scott Nicholson has. While he has no college debt (his grandparents paid all his tuition and board) many others do, and that helps force them back home.

In 2008, the first year of the recession, the percentage of the population living in households in which at least two generations were present rose nearly a percentage point, to 16 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. The high point, 24.7 percent, came in 1940, as the Depression ended, and the low point, 12 percent, in 1980.

Striving for Independence

"Going it alone," "earning enough to be self-supporting" - these are awkward concepts for Scott Nicholson and his friends. Of the 20 college classmates with whom he keeps up, 12 are working, but only half are in jobs they "really like." Three are entering law school this fall after frustrating experiences in the work force, "and five are looking for work just as I am," he said.

Like most of his classmates, Scott tries to get by on a shoestring and manages to earn enough in odd jobs to pay some expenses.

The jobs are catch as catch can. He and a friend recently put up a white wooden fence for a neighbor, embedding the posts in cement, a day's work that brought Scott $125. He mows lawns and gardens for half a dozen clients in Grafton, some of them family friends. And he is an active volunteer firefighter.

"As frustrated as I get now, and I never intended to live at home, I'm in a good situation in a lot of ways," Scott said. "I have very little overhead and no debt, and it is because I have no debt that I have any sort of flexibility to look for work. Otherwise, I would have to have a job, some kind of full-time job."

That millennials as a group are optimistic is partly because many are, as Mr. Kohut put it, the children of doting baby boomers - among them David Nicholson and his wife, Susan, 56, an executive at a company that owns movie theaters.

The Nicholsons, whose combined annual income is north of $175,000, have lavished attention on their three sons. Currently that attention is directed mainly at sustaining the self-confidence of their middle son.

"No one on either side of the family has ever gone through this," Mrs. Nicholson said, "and I guess I'm impatient. I know he is educated and has a great work ethic and wants to start contributing, and I don't know what to do."

Her oldest, David Jr., 26, did land a good job. Graduating from Middlebury College in 2006, he joined a Boston insurance company, specializing in reinsurance, nearly three years ago, before the recession.

"I'm fortunate to be at a company where there is some security," he said, adding that he supports Scott in his determination to hold out for the right job. "Once you start working, you get caught up in the work and you have bills to pay, and you lose sight of what you really want," the brother said.

He is earning $75,000 - a sum beyond Scott's reach today, but not his expectations. "I worked hard through high school to get myself into the college I did," Scott said, "and then I worked hard through college to graduate with the grades and degree that I did to position myself for a solid job." (He majored in political science and minored in history.)

It was in pursuit of a solid job that Scott applied to Hanover International's management training program. Turned down for that, he was called back to interview for the lesser position in the claims department.

"I'm sitting with the manager, and he asked me how I had gotten interested in insurance. I mentioned Dave's job in reinsurance, and the manager's response was, ?Oh, that is about 15 steps above the position you are interviewing for,' " Scott said, his eyes widening and his voice emotional.

Scott acknowledges that he is competitive with his brothers, particularly David, more than they are with him. The youngest, Bradley, 22, has a year to go at the University of Vermont. His parents and grandparents pay his way, just as they did for his brothers in their college years.

In the Old Days

Going to college wasn't an issue for grandfather Nicholson, or so he says. With World War II approaching, he entered the Army not long after finishing high school and, in the fighting in Italy, a battlefield commission raised him overnight from enlisted man to first lieutenant. That was "the equivalent of a college education," as he now puts it, in an age when college on a stockbroker's r?sum? "counted for something, but not a lot."

He spent most of his career in a rising market, putting customers into stocks that paid good dividends, and growing wealthy on real estate investments made years ago, when Grafton was still semi-rural. The brokerage firm that employed him changed hands more than once, but he continued to work out of the same office in Worcester.

When his son David graduated from Babson College in 1976, manufacturing in America was in an early phase of its long decline, and Worcester was still a center for the production of sandpaper, emery stones and other abrasives.

He joined one of those companies - owned by the family of his friend - and he has stayed in manufacturing, particularly at companies that make hand tools. Early on, he and his wife bought the home in which they raised their sons, a white colonial dating from the early 1800s, like many houses on North Street, where the grandparents also live, a few doors away.

David Nicholson's longest stretch was at the Stanley Works, and when he left, seeking promotion, a friend at the Endeavor Tool Company hired him as that company's general manager, his present job.

In better times, Scott's father might have given his son work at Endeavor, but the father is laying off workers, and a job in manufacturing, in Scott's eyes, would be a defeat.

"If you talk to 20 people," Scott said, "you'll find only one in manufacturing and everyone else in finance or something else."

The Plan

Scott Nicholson almost sidestepped the recession. His plan was to become a Marine Corps second lieutenant. He had spent the summer after his freshman year in "platoon leader" training. Last fall he passed the physical for officer training, and was told to report on Jan. 16.

If all had gone well, he would have emerged in 10 weeks as a second lieutenant, committed to a four-year enlistment. "I could have made a career out of the Marines," Scott said, "and if I had come out in four years, I would have been incredibly prepared for the workplace."

It was not to be. In early January, a Marine Corps doctor noticed that he had suffered from childhood asthma. He was washed out. "They finally told me I could reapply if I wanted to," Scott said. "But the sheen was gone."

So he struggles to get a foothold in the civilian work force. His brother in Boston lost his roommate, and early last month Scott moved into the empty bedroom, with his parents paying Scott's share of the $2,000-a-month rent until the lease expires on Aug. 31.

And if Scott does not have a job by then? "I'll do something temporary; I won't go back home," Scott said. "I'll be a bartender or get work through a temp agency. I hope I don't find myself in that position."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/business/economy/07generation.htm?_r=1

11
3DHS / Happy Birthday Jane Finch
« on: June 26, 2010, 08:24:03 AM »
Where ever you happen to be! Hopefully you'll be acquiring a new pair of leather boots...

12
3DHS / Chimpanzees kill to win new territory
« on: June 21, 2010, 01:39:53 PM »
A bloody 10-year dispute in the Ugandan jungle ended in mid-2009 with the victors seizing territory held by the vanquished. The episode represents the first solid evidence that chimpanzees kill their rivals to acquire land, and could help explain the evolutionary origins of some aspects of belligerent as well as cooperative behaviour in humans.

John Mitani, a primatologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his team have observed the Ngogo chimpanzee troop in Uganda's Kibale National Park for over a decade. Between 1999 and 2009, they witnessed 18 lethal attacks led by Ngogo males on another, smaller group of chimps. They also found indirect evidence of another three lethal attacks, making the Ngogo troop one of the most violent groups of chimpanzees so far studied.

With more than 150 individuals, the troop is two or three times as large as other well-studied groups. Superiority in numbers allows it to patrol its territory's hinterlands, where members are likely to encounter smaller, neighbouring troops. "Attacks are made when there's more of us than them," says Mitani.

In mid-2009, his team noticed that the Ngogo chimps had finally seized part of the home range of their rivals, so increasing the size of their territory by 6.4 square kilometres, or 22 per cent. Where only adult males on patrol had previously visited this area, now the team saw them "going in there with females and children and acting and shouting like they would if they were in the middle of their territory", Mitani says. The Ngogo chimps were probably drawn by food: black mulberry trees had begun fruiting in the area around the time of the takeover.

The territorial gain is likely to bring about other advantages. Chimps belonging to troops with large home ranges tend to weigh more than those with less land and their females tend to have more offspring. What's more, territorial gains could draw in females from neighbouring troops, offering more mating opportunities to the males.

Similar changes have been seen in human hunter-gatherer communities, but Mitani cautions against drawing too many parallels between our own battles and those of chimps. Humans go to war for a variety of reasons ranging from disputes over resources to religion, and such conflicts can often be settled by negotiation. "We might be comparing apples and oranges," he says.

In fact, rather than explaining the evolutionary origins of war, chimpanzee disputes could help explain the evolution of human cooperation. Samuel Bowles at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico has used evolutionary models and archaeological evidence to argue that altruism emerged in humans as a result of violent conflicts between groups of people who were willing to die for their comrades and more selfish, individualistic populations ? with the altruistic warriors winning out.

Likewise, says Mitani, the Ngogo chimps worked as tightly knit coalitions to kill their opponents, with benefits for the victorious troop.

"There's definitely an interesting relationship between cooperation and competition in both chimpanzees and in humans," says Michael Wilson, a primatologist at the University of Minnesota in St Paul, who was not involved in the study.

Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.04.021

Original Article

13
They installed one of the kiosks right in front of my current office.

Minneapolis? bike-sharing program launches with high enthusiasm. But is it preaching to the choir?


Mayor R. T. Rybak rides alongside Patrick Geraghty, CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, at today's Nice Ride Minnesota launch.

Gregory J. Scott

It was a light drizzle and a chorus of trilling bike bells for this afternoon's launch of Nice Ride Minnesota, the city's brand new bike-sharing program, which allows users to rent public bikes for short jaunts through town. According to officials, by the end of the day, the program's 65 kiosks will be activated, stocked with 700 bikes and ready for use. Nice Ride is currently the largest bike-sharing program in the nation. It will grow to 1,000 bikes in 75 kiosks by the end of summer.

Just before noon, over 100 cyclists gathered at the Central Library for a free test drive of the beefy, bright green bikes, which had arrived in late May from a manufacturer in Montreal. Nice Ride uses Montreal's BIXI system of bikes and kiosks, widely regarded to be the best bike-sharing technology in the world. After signing a waiver and donning a helmet, riders each grabbed a bike and got into position on Nicollet Mall.

After a few brief remarks from Nice Ride executive director Bill Dossett - mostly urging participants to observe traffic laws, especially stopping at red lights - riders clicked their grip shifts into third gear and commenced a slow, rolling parade down Nicollet Mall.

Thumbs quickly found the bike bells on the left handlebars. The parade soon had a soundtrack of sporadic, cheerful rings, eliciting bemused smiles from the farmers' market stalls lining the boulevard.

As riders coasted toward Peavey Plaza, many oohed and ahhed over the bikes' features, commenting on the well-padded seats and the friction free hubs. One said it was the smoothest ride he'd had in months.

But such comments revealed a nagging demographic problem, one that may become an issue for Nice Ride down the road - these were people who knew bikes, who owned bikes and who, for the most part, already relied on their two-wheelers for their daily commutes. Why would they pay for a public bike when they're already using their own?

Matt, a Downtown worker who commutes on his bike "three or four times a week" from his home in St. Paul, said he loved the idea of bike-sharing.

"The more bikes we have on the street, the better and safer it is for me as a cyclist," he said.

But when asked if he would sign up for a subscription, he balked. "I'll probably wait to sign-up," he said. "I want to see how it goes. It might not be super practical for me."

But he added, "I don't think I'm in the target market for this."

Enthusiasm amongst the cycling community for Nice Ride is high. But the need is not. For Nice Ride to be successfull, the program will have to convince the cycling-reluctant, as well.

Dossett noted this conundrum. "The challenge of bike share is the people that are the most evangelical about what you're doing are not your target market," he said. "My target market is not hardcore bike commuters."

Of course, given that today's parade was an insider biking event, based on personal invitations, the demographic was skewed. But the issue is still something that Nice Ride will be paying close attention to.

"Any time you launch something that's never been done before, you do your market research, and you hope you're right," Dossett continued. "It's still a wait-and-see. We expect there to be a period where you got the true believers and then an education period for everyone else to figure it out."

Jennifer Munt, president of Transit for Livable Communities, pointed to herself as the model user. At a ribbon cutting ceremony at Peavey Plaza, she said, "Today, this lady who hasn't got on a bike in 10 years just rode nine blocks."

There was a lot of back-patting over Minneapolis' recent besting of rival Portland in Bicycling Magazine's ranking of best cities for cycling.

"In Minneapolis, Portland is just a street," said Mayor R. T. Rybak, still donning his bike helmet. "They'll never be number one again."

Rybak said that, in recent years, questions about a possible bike-sharing system in Minneapolis had been "the emails sent to me the most."

Now that it's here, he said it's up to residents to take advantage: "Let's use this thing."

Original Article

14
3DHS / SPELL CHECQUER
« on: June 10, 2010, 11:55:41 AM »
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

15
3DHS / The American Power Act: A Climate Dud
« on: May 14, 2010, 02:43:36 PM »
by Chip Knappenberger
May 12, 2010

Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman have just unveiled their latest/greatest attempt to reign in U. S. greenhouse gas emissions. Their one time collaborator Lindsey Graham indicated that he did not consider the bill a climate bill because "[t]here is no bipartisan support for a cap-and-trade bill based on global warming." But make no mistake. This is a climate bill at heart, and thus the Kerry-Lieberman bill sections labeled "Title II. Global Warming Pollution Reduction."

So apparently someone thinks the bill will have an impact on global warming. But those someones are wrong. The bill will have no meaningful impact of the future course of global warming.

That is, unless the rest of the world - primarily the developing nations - decide to play along.

In fact, the United States and the rest of the developed countries have little role to play in the future course of global warming except as developers of new energy technologies and/or as guinea pigs of making do with less fossil fuels.

Our attempts at domestic emissions savings will have only minimal direct climate impact, but instead they will serve as an example for the developing world of what, or what not, to do. So if Kerry and Lieberman were interested in directly tackling the climate change issue, they would be working with China's National People's Congress to draft legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not the U. S. Senate.

But, everyone already knows this, as we demonstrated the non-impact of U.S. emissions reduction efforts in Part I and Part II of our analysis of last summer's Waxman-Markey offering. And as far as the global warming goes, Kerry-Lieberman's The American Power Act of 2010 is similar to Waxman-Markey's American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

Kerry-Lieberman's domestic greenhouse gas emissions reduction schedule is 17% below 2005 emissions levels by 2020, 42% below by 2030, and 83% below by 2050. Compare that to Waxman-Markey's 20% reduction in emissions (below 2005 levels) by 2020, 42% by 2030, and 83% by 2050. Except for a bit of relaxation of near term targets, the bills' long-term intentions are identical.

The impact of this slight emissions difference on the resulting future global temperature savings is not manifest until the third digit past the decimal point - in other words, thousandths of degrees C. Climatologically, in other words, the bills are identical.

As in our prior analyses, we use the same techniques employing a climate model simulator to derive global temperature (and sea level) projections from the greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. We use the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) "business-as-usual" scenario (A1B) as the baseline, and then modify it to take into account the Kerry-Lieberman emissions targets for the U.S.

Figure 1 compares the global temperature projections from the business-as-usual (BAU) scenario with the Kerry-Lieberman adjustments. The BAU scenario produces a temperature rise (over the 1990 global average temperature) of 1.584 degree C by the year 2050 and 2.959 degree C by 2100. The Kerry-Lieberman adjustments produce a temperature rise of 1.541 degree C by 2050 and 2.848 degree C by 2100.

Figure 1. Projected global temperature rise from the IPCC's business-as-usual (A1B) scenario (black curve) and the Kerry-Lieberman emissions scenario (red curve).

The global temperature "savings" of the Kerry-Lieberman bill is astoundingly small - 0.043 degree C (0.077 degree F) by 2050 and 0.111 degree C (0.200 degree F) by 2100. In other words, by century's end, reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% will only result in global temperatures being one-fifth of one degree Fahrenheit less than they would otherwise be. That is a scientifically meaningless reduction.

Figure 2 shows that the impacts on future sea level rise projections are equally insignificant. Instead of a projected sea level rise of 15.1cm by 2050, the Kerry-Lieberman bill produces a rise of 14.9cm. By 2100, the BAU projected rise is 37.1cm and the Kerry-Lieberman rise is 36.0cm. A century's end sea level rise savings of 1.1cm, or 0.43 inches. Too small to be of consequence.

Figure 2. Projected global sea level rise from the IPCC's business-as-usual (A1B) scenario (black curve) and the Kerry-Lieberman emissions scenario (red curve).

As I mentioned previously, the real impact of the Kerry-Lieberman bill only emerges if it is applied to the rest of the world, and in particular the world's developing nations.

Figure 3 shows the global temperature projections from the BAU scenario, along with the successive adherence to the Kerry-Lieberman emissions schedule by the U.S., the OECD90 countries (industrialized countries including the U.S., Western Europe, Australia and Japan), and the entire world. Basically, unless the developing world comes on board, the world's future temperature pathway will be largely unchanged.

Figure 3. Projected global temperature rise from the IPCC's business-as-usual (A1B) scenario (black curve) and the Kerry-Lieberman emissions scenario as applied to the U.S. (red curve), the OECD90 countries (magenta curve), and the entire world (blue curve).

Granted, all my numbers may change a bit if different assumptions are made about the baseline scenario, the particulars of international cooperation, or the various parameters of the climate model simulator (for example, I used a climate sensitivity of 3.0 degree C). But the bottom line will remain the same - climatologically, the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act, in and of itself, is a meaningless bill. To make it effective, it must involve the world's developing counties.

Original Article

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